I hear Georgie clear his throat. “Moon here and I are going to see that you go to the clink, Rose,” he states boldly. “How about them rotten fucking apples?”
Good old Georgie. Pain or no pain, he says it like it is.
Rose laughs, runs open hands over his white gown. “You’re in no position to be making threats. My friends from back in the former USSR are ready to give you a very, very good spanking whenever I give the order. Your faces will be so swollen and unrecognizable your own mother will pass by you on the street. If you had mothers, I suppose.”
The whole if-we-had-mothers dialogue thing tickles the funny bones of goons at the door. They laugh out loud like Devil Brows Rose is Jay Leno. I feel like a prisoner caught up inside a Bond flick. One of the shitty ones, post-Connery.
“As for Lola,” Rose adds, “she cannot help the absolute love she bears for her child. When Peter revealed himself to her some weeks ago, something inside her was freed.” He pauses, lowers his hands, stares up at the post-and-beam ceiling. “And something else was revealed to her, as well.”
“Don’t keep us in suspense Rose,” I smile. “Me and Georgie, we’re already dead. Am I right?”
“You won’t like it, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, eyes peering down at the floor. “Especially considering your romantic involvement with my daughter.”
I picture myself floating over my body. I once more see my dead body lying in the hospital bed, Lola standing over me. Then I see a young man enter. Some Young Guy who pats her ass while I’m lying dead in the bed. Is that what Rose is talking about? Is that why it will hurt me? The revelation that Lola is seeing someone else?
Movement from beside me.
I turn.
Over my shoulder I see Georgie drop out of his chair. He drops onto his knees. His face turns bed-sheet white, blue eyes bulging, long gray-white hair hanging like a veil. He starts to heave all over the floor. His body, trembling and convulsing.
“Someone grab a spoon or a butter knife!” I shout. “Something to open his jaws, stop him from swallowing his tongue, or biting it off!”
“Theo!” Rose barks, “please do something about that vile mess on the floor.”
Theo the goon walks out of the room, and quickly comes back in with a green towel. He steps over to where Georgie is now foaming at the mouth. He bends at the knees, sets the towel onto the small puddle of bile.
“Mr. Rose, my partner is very sick. He needs medical care. You have to allow your doctor to treat him.”
“That doctor is in the middle of experimental spinal cord surgery!” he snaps. “It is not possible.”
“Then you have to allow me to take him to a hospital.”
Now Rose just laughs. “Really, Mr. Moonlight. Lola has described you as being far more intelligent than that.”
It feels strange knowing that my sig other has been talking to this insane man about me.
Georgie is down on his side, curled up in a fetal position.
Theo is down on one knee, trying his best to wipe up the bile, his own face having gone pale, looking like he’s about to join Georgie in getting sick. But when Georgie reaches into his side pocket, pulls out his stun gun, slams it into Theo’s neck. The thug chokes and trembles as the electric shock waves neutralize him, sending him face first down into a puddle of fresh, warm DNA. Courtesy of my big bro, and award-winning method actor, Georgie Phillips.
Chapter 51
I shoot up, grab Rose by the neck, put a choke hold on him, forearm against Adam’s apple. He’s taller than me, but far weaker. All skin and bones to which a small round pot belly is attached. The physical makeup of your average paranoid shut-in. He feels like a tall bird in my arm.
The remaining goon draws his piece.
I make like I’m fisting a pistol with my free hand, poke at my forehead with extended index finger.
“Plant your bead asshole,” I insist. “A little above and between the eyes. That’s your target. But before your bullet enters my brainpan to join the other one that’s in there, I’m gonna snap your boss’s neck.”
I expect Rose to be trembling in my arms. But he’s still and silent. Almost like he wants his neck to be snapped. Crap, maybe he does.
“Shoot, Ivan,” he demands in a soft, low tone. “Shoot him, and if need be, shoot him through me.”
Ivan…
“Ivan?” I repeat. “You serious? Ivan and Theo. Holy crap this is better than TV.”
“Fucker’s got a death wish,” Georgie says, standing, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You pull that trigger, Ivan, I will kill you. Just so you know, I got ya covered like a Minute Man missile.”
Ivan the Russian goon holds his aim on me. I’m staring down the barrel of a 9mm. A situation that sadly, I am all too familiar with.
“Separate,” Georgie says.
I begin to drag Rose to one side of the room, and Georgie goes to the other, closing his distance between him and Ivan with each step.
Ivan becomes confused, now shifting his aim from Georgie to me, and back to Georgie.
“Do! Not! Move!” he shouts, accent thick, voice wavering, verging on panic.
“Shoot us!” Rose screams.
The gun back on me. The whole thing feels like a fucked-up version of Russian roulette.
Georgie dives, the stun gun held out before him like the tip of a spear.
Ivan’s automatic explodes.
Rose goes limp in my arms.
Ivan drops, dead-weight, to the floor.
“Get his gun!” I shout.
Georgie snatches it up. How he’s able to make himself sick and then move so fast and do it all through waves of full-body pain is beyond me. Survival instinct retained from the jungles of Vietnam, maybe, where he was held captive for more than a year by the Viet Cong before making his escape.
I lay the dead-weight Rose down on the floor.
He’s been hit in the lower neck, maybe a half-inch away from his carotid artery. The bullet must have taken a nosedive into his lungs because it never exited into me.
“Fuck!” Georgie spits. “Now what?”
Rose is mumbling something. Something about Lola.
“Lola,” he’s saying. “My…little…girl…Lola. I’m. So. So. Sorry.”
The door opens. A man walks in, followed by Lola. I’ve never met the man before. But I feel like I already know him. And I do know him, in a way. The man from my out-of-body experience. The man who came to Lola when I died for five minutes.
He’s Some Young Guy.
Chapter 52
Lola, dressed in white smock, sweat-stained white mask hanging down on her chest, the matching white cap still sitting on her head, runs to her injured father. She kneels down over him, takes hold of his hand. She’s weeping.
“Get a doctor!” she screams. “One of the surgeons!”
But no one’s listening.
The two goons, Ivan and Theo, who’ve been stung with Georgie’s stun gun, are still laid out on the floor, even though both of them have regained enough strength to prop themselves up onto one elbow apiece. But by all indications, the angry Russian bear has been zapped out of them. I can only imagine their regret in not having patted us down before leading us into this room.
Georgie has the 9mm gripped in his right hand and he’s shifting his eyes from me to Lola and Some Young Guy, who stands a few steps inside the doorway. Some Young Guy is the lead man before an entourage of men and women all wearing navy blue windbreakers, the letters FBI emblazoned upon them in big gold letters.
Entering close behind them, a team of blue-uniformed APD officers, Detective Clyne out in front of them. Clyne and I make eye contact. He nods, his face white and withdrawn, like he hasn’t slept in days or been far away from the bottle. Probably both.
I nod back.
Standing beside him is his driver, big Officer Mike.
Mike also purses his lips and nods. Friendly this time, as opposed
to the hospital where he flipped me off. I guess my willingness to put myself into the shit all for the cause of right over wrong makes me much more likeable in his eyes. But I’m not so sure if I’m willing to place myself in the shit, so to speak, so much as I possess an uncanny knack for getting myself into shit. A head-case who’s no stranger to shit or train wrecks.
Some Young Guy makes his way to Lola, kneels down beside her. “You need to get back to Peter, Lo,” he says. He puts his fingers to Rose’s jugular, then looks up at his people. “Not getting a pulse. Need EMTs. Those docs in there can’t do this. Call it in now!”
“Already on it, Chief,” informs a small woman, who has a cell phone clutched in one hand, her service automatic in the other. As she holsters her weapon, she shoots me a look and a warm smile.
“Thanks,” she offers. “For all your help. Any idea how long we’ve been after Rose and his grandson?”
I turn back to Some Young Guy. He stands up from Rose and takes Lola in his arms. He’s her man now, and it makes my stomach drop down around my ankles.
Clyne and his men and the FBI special agents spread out. They remove themselves from the doorway as a team of EMTs burst through and go to work on Rose.
Lola spots me then.
She looks at me while still clutched in the arms of Some Young Guy.
“Oh Richard,” she whispers. “You have no idea, do you?”
“No,” I swallow. “You’re wrong. I’ve known for days. When I died, I floated over my body. And I saw you and him, together. I couldn’t see his face. But I know it was him.”
Lola bears so much sadness in her smile it pains me to look at her.
Standing there with the FBI cuffing the goons, reading them their rights; with sirens blaring outside the building; with God only knows what going on outside that plastic-enclosed operating room; with Rose clinging to life or already dead; with my brain fucked up and my heart breaking, my significant other, Lola, has no other choice but to smile.
Some Young Guy turns to me, approaches. He holds out the hand that isn’t holding a hand cannon. “I’m Special Agent Christian Barter. I’m Peter Czech’s biological father.”
I feel the floor go soft. I’m not going to pass out, but I’m having trouble keeping my balance, nonetheless. So, what am I supposed to think? Barter sires Lola’s kid back when they were teens and goes on to a life of law enforcement? That he just happens to be assigned to Rose’s case? Or maybe he pushed to be assigned to it, knowing who Rose was and what he was all about—a devil-browed man who made Lola give up her only child. Whatever Barter’s role, and how he came to accept it, he’s no longer Some Young Guy to me. He’s got these wide blue eyes, a mustache, and a goatee sprinkled with gray hairs. He isn’t all that young even. But he has a young way about him. Even an optimistic way, despite the circumstances.
“My son is being operated on in the next room.” Glancing at Lola over his shoulder. “Our son. And right now, with Rose in custody, our son is our priority.”
Lola goes to him, takes hold of his hand. “We should go back in.”
I watch my girlfriend walk toward the door with the man who fathered her son. Biologically speaking. I can’t help but wonder if their bond is one of rekindled love or simply the mutual concern for a son. I choose the latter, but my heart tells me it’s the former.
Before they reach the open door, I stop them. “Barter!”
He stops, turns, Lola’s hand tightly held in his.
“Are you going to arrest your own son?”
His smile dissolves then, his youthful look of optimism disappearing.
He nods. “If he lives.”
Chapter 53
Do you know what it’s like living every minute like it’s your last?
It’s not as surreal as you might expect. I’m not afraid. I’m not sad. I’m not paranoid. I grew up surrounded by death as if it were as ordinary as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You grow up like that, you learn to accept mortality as a normal course in life’s grand feast of events. Not something to be ignored or feared. And I live my life like it could end at any minute, that bullet frag shifting inside my brain causing total paralysis and stroke and eventually death.
But I also live my life like I’m going to live forever.
It’s not all that different from the way we all live. Because who knows how long we’ve got? How many times have we heard the story about the man who crossed the road and got hit by a bus? Or the woman who walked into the corner bodega for a Diet Coke and was shot by the guy holding up the store? Or the family that impulsively hopped a flight to Buffalo on a cold winter’s night, only for the ill-fated flight to take an unexpected plunge? Or even the middle-aged man who sat down on a calm Sunday afternoon to read a newspaper, fell asleep, and never woke up?
Death happens to all of us. It’s always chasing us, and just because you got a better shot at having it happen to you sooner than later doesn’t make it right for you to skip out on life. And as for me, I want to spend that life in search of the truth, regardless of whether I do right or wrong in the process. As a P.I., it’s what I do. As a human being, it’s what I obsess about.
In this case, I do right.
As Rose’s goons are carted away by the APD-accompanied FBI personnel and the near-dead Harvey Rose is rushed to the Albany Medical Center for emergency surgery, I stand beside Georgie, while Barter and Lola stand by their son, whose own surgery is nearly completed.
I could leave the building, my job done, my contract with Czech null and void, my girlfriend lost to the arms of another. But something’s keeping me there.
Back to Lola.
It’s the way I feel about her; the way my gut feels about her. I haven’t confronted her about her conducting an affair these past few days. Not because I’m angry or hurt, but because I’m afraid that if I utter even a single word about it, I’ll lose her forever. As the surgeons step away from the table, speak something softly in Portuguese to Lola and Barter, that’s precisely what I realize.
The surgeons never do lay their hands upon Peter Czech again.
They abandon the table, shaking their heads in disgust, ripping their sweat-soaked masks from their faces. It’s the cue then for the half-dozen FBI personnel still hanging around inside the loft to flash their badges at them, explain that they are to be questioned.
My eyes lock on Lola and Barter as they approach their son.
I see Lola take hold of his limp hand. I hear her begin to weep, and then I see Special Agent Barter begin to cry. He wraps his long arm around Lola’s shoulder. She’s trembling in his arms. Maybe they don’t exist as real family, but at the same time, they are family.
Blood family.
The surgeons are allowed to take their white smocks off, and to wash in a makeshift sink that’s been set up in a corner beside several fifty-gallon blue medical waste bins. They aren’t being arrested or charged as far as I can tell, but they and their cameraman are about to be rounded up and hauled downtown for questioning.
Out the corner of my eye, Detective Clyne is chomping at the bit in the far corner of the loft space, hands stuffed inside the pockets of his trench coat, his eyes shifting from the makeshift surgery to me and back to the surgery again.
I make my way quietly to one of the surgeons. He’s a tall, thin man, and his brow is still beaded with sweat.
“Do you speak English?”
He nods.
“The young man you were operating on.” I swallow. “How did he die?”
He nods once more, bites his bottom lip, eyes peering at the floor. “Massive coronary. He bore the heart of an alcoholic, despite his tender age. If we had been operating inside a true medical center, he might have lived. But we were not prepared for something like that. Not inside a warehouse. Not with portable equipment.” His voice may be heavily accented, but you can’t mistake the tone of utter defeat and disappointment sprinkled with fear.
The same, small female FBI
agent who thanked me before approaches us, takes hold of the surgeon’s arm. “That’s all for now, Mr. Moonlight,” she says. “I’m going to have to ask you and your partner to exit the building along with us. Considering your involvement in this case, I will ask that you follow us to FBI headquarters. Or you can ride with us now.”
“I can give you a lift,” a man says from behind me. It’s Clyne. Not far behind him, his ever-loyal Officer Mike.
I tell them both that I’ll take care of carting Georgie and me downtown. “We’ll be right behind you,” I assure them.
The agent looks at me, into my eyes. I can tell she’s questioning her own judgment by trusting me. She shifts her gaze to Clyne as if to get his blessing.
“He’s OK,” Clyne says with a nod.
Over his shoulder, I see Officer Mike nod in agreement. Funny how things can change so rapidly.
“Don’t worry,” I add. “I want to see this thing through as much as you guys do.”
“OK then,” the special agent says. “See you in a few.”
I make my way back over to the operating theater. Lola is still desperately clutching onto her son, and Barter is still clutching to the both of them. You can’t help hearing the sobs coming through the heavy plastic. For a brief second, I think about going to her. But then I think better of it.
That’s when I turn and head for a freight elevator that will take me down. But I’m not entirely sure how much further down I can possibly go.
Chapter 54
Georgie and I drive to the FBI headquarters as promised. But not without first making a pit stop at Georgie’s townhouse, where we retrieve a much-needed medicinal joint for him and four Advil for me.
The FBI office is in downtown Albany, on lower Broadway, not far from the alley where I took my first beating from Rose’s Obama-masked Russian support staff. We’re hustled into a glass-walled room that contains that same dark-haired FBI woman, whose name, it turns out, is Lombardi, and Detective Clyne. They’ve been working with Peter Czech for more than a year, she explains. They were going to arrest him for treason unless he agreed to give them Rose. But in the meantime, he wanted the use of his legs again. That was the deal. If Rose would put up the money, the FBI would agree to allow him the operation.
Moonlight Rises Page 15
