Blue Moonlight

by Zandri, Vincent

  “Nice touch, sweetie,” Zumbo adds. “Need more of that ‘ma’am’ stuff ’round here. Fact, we need more mams ’round here, period.” He finishes with a wink at Crockett, who pretends to ignore the gesture.

  “You should be aware, Mr. Moonlight,” she goes on, “that you were the last man in the US to have any direct contact with Clyne prior to his sudden disappearance. We also know that you personally handed him the flash drive in question when it was your solemn duty and obligation as a former officer of the law to produce it for federal authorities. Namely, Agent Christian Barter. We further know that you withheld information about the illegal handoff that would have aided both local and federal law enforcement, leading us to believe, Mr. Moonlight—”

  “That you are totally fucked.” Zumbo, laughing so hard he’s about to fall out of his chair.

  But he’s right. I’m fucked. And they know it. We sit in a silence so pregnant you can practically feel the baby kicking.

  Until I raise up my head and say, “Ummm, would it help if I said I was sorry?”

  I close my eyes, cringe, and brace myself because I know what’s coming. Another slap. Against my left shoulder. Harder this time, the Super Bowl ring indenting itself into my flesh. When I open my eyes I’m down on the floor on my side, my cuffed hands hanging above my head from where the cuff chain is attached to the underside of the metal table.

  “You been Zumped, sweetie!”

  Fucking Zumbo.

  He helps me back up and pats me on the back like I’m a teammate he’s just crushed all in the name of good sportsmanship. I run my fingers over abraded wrists and pray that, at this point, my hands don’t simply fall off.

  “OK,” I say, “so what is it you want from me, Crockett, besides a death certificate?”

  She pulls the top photo off the stack, sets it onto the table. Using her manicured index finger like a pointer, she points to the man seated in the middle. “Recognize the person in this shot, Moonlight?”

  This man is also dressed in black. He’s taller than Clyne, clean-shaven, with trimmed dirty blond hair that’s streaked with gray. In the picture he’s seated in between Clyne and someone else I recognize. The someone else I recognize is wearing a black leather jacket. Her long black hair is lush and parted over her right eye. She’s wearing white plastic Jackie O sunglasses, tight white jeans, and long, knee-high boots. She’s my ex-girlfriend, Lola. The man to her left is Barter, her new boyfriend and the man who fathered the child she gave up for adoption at birth in the mid-1980s when they were both only sixteen years old. A child named Peter Czech, who became a nuclear engineer and a spy for the Russian government. A man paralyzed from the waist down who originally owned the flash drive in question prior to his untimely death.

  Crockett begins going through the stack of photos. They are all the same. Shots of Lola, Barter, and Clyne sitting at a table at a café somewhere. Looks like Europe.

  “Those other people look familiar to you too, Moonlight?”

  “It’s Lola Ross,” I say and exhale, “and a colleague of yours. Agent Christian Barter. I’m assuming you know Barter through agency circles, Agent Crockett?”

  “Former FBI agent,” she stresses. “And yes, I’ve met former Agent Barter, on numerous occasions during my occasional trips up to the Albany field office, Moonlight.”

  I’d sit back in my chair and sigh if the chain length would allow it. But it won’t.

  “What do you want from me?” I repeat.

  What do you want so badly you’re willing to kidnap me, hit me, chain me up, Taser me, and nearly shoot me while in midflight thirty thousand feet above the solid fucking ground in order to get it?

  Crockett turns to the mirror like it’s alive and breathing.

  “What do you think?” she says aloud.

  “Tell him now,” says a tinny PA voice.

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most fucked-over one of us all?

  Richard “Dick” Moonlight. That’s who.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Moonlight,” Crockett says, “so I’m just gonna say it: we require your services in a matter of extreme national security.”

  “Maybe you should call James Bond.”

  I brace myself, fully expecting to be Zumped. But it doesn’t come.

  “We want you to locate Clyne and Barter for us, Mr. Moonlight. And more importantly, we want you to locate the flash drive, and then forward us the information we need in order to seize and detain them both, in cooperation with our friends at Interpol.”

  “See?” Zumbo says. “Easy-peasy.” He’s munching on his third doughnut since we started.

  “Easy-peasy,” I repeat. “And where am I supposed to locate them?”

  She comes close to the table, leans down into it. She places an extended index finger on the photo closest to me. “Recognize any of these buildings in the foreground and background, Moonlight?”

  I take a good look at the picture.

  Cobbled street. Cobbled square, to be more precise. A big white-and-black marble building in the background. To the right, a café. People walking, dressed in stylish jackets and sweaters, carrying plastic designer shopping bags of one kind or another. Fashionable women in short skirts and colorful tights. Men dressed in black mostly, wearing sunglasses, scarves wrapped around their necks.

  “Florence, Italy,” I say, looking up.

  “Been there?”

  “Couple of times. Once as a boy, not long after my mother died. Later, right out of college.”

  “Our records indicate as much. Which is also why we’re talking now.”

  My eyes go wide. Enlighten me, please.

  “We have a bit of a proposal for you, Moonlight.”

  A proposal. I’m cuffed and shackled to a metal table that must weigh half a ton and she’s talking about a proposal.

  “Do tell, Ms. Agent.” Closing my eyes, waiting for the slap…that never comes. Zump must be getting bored with me. Or he’s undergoing a sugar crash to go with that concussion.

  “Clyne’s a simple APD dick. His connections reach about as far as the Hudson River on one side and the state capitol on the other. Or translated another way, he can’t begin to sell the flash drive on his own. Not to the right peeps, anyway. He’s small potatoes. Therefore, we believe that Clyne approached Barter in order to open up his world to potential buyers. As an FBI agent, Barter would have unlimited connections not just in the States but all over the world. We believe that Barter agreed to whatever deal Clyne offered him, and that he is now attempting to facilitate the sale of the flash drive to one or more of these, let’s call them, more worldly connections. Agenting the sale, if you will. A sale that could run in the hundreds of millions of euros or dollars. All cash transactions aside, once that flash drive is sold and out of their hands, there’s no telling where it will land. But if it lands in the hands of a terrorist organization, the free world could be at serious risk.”

  “But I’m just a hack private eye with a bullet in his brain and a habit of forgetting things.”

  “We know from our research that your ex-girlfriend, Dr. Ross, and Barter are no longer the content peas in a pod they seemed to be while sharing in their mutual grief for their dead son, Peter Czech. We believe they are very much at odds with one another, especially in light of Barter’s newfound hobby of facilitating the sale of rogue nuclear weapons and decades of nuclear secrets to the highest bidder.”

  I feel my blood beginning to simmer, my head beginning to buzz from adrenaline. Lola’s in trouble. Could be that she’s been in trouble for a while now, and I was just too blind to see it. I have no idea when she started seeing Barter again, how many weeks and months she spent in my bed while also seeing the FBI agent on the side. No idea when they started sleeping together on a regular basis. All I know is that for the few minutes we were all in one another’s presence immediately following the death of their son, Peter, Lola and Barter seemed to be in love. They shared the biological bond of a son they nev
er got the chance to see grow up, much less get to know as a young adult. They shared only in the grief of watching him die. And now, in the wake of that death and the horrible emotional riptide that’s swept through their bodies, souls, and brains, they’ve both fled the country. Barter has willingly stripped himself of everything he ever committed himself to as a lawman. Or so it seems. Such is the power of a traumatic event like losing a son you never knew. Or fuck, what the hell do I know, maybe he’s been a rotten son of a bitch all along.

  “Lola’s being held against her will, isn’t she?”

  “It’s certainly possible.”

  “Which is it?” I demand. “Yes or no?”

  Agent Crockett breathes in, then out. “No, in that we’ve spotted her making her way about the city on her own, shopping, eating, walking, drinking coffee at the open-air cafés.”

  “But…”

  “But yes, in that we feel that if she were to attempt to leave Florence on her own, Barter and Clyne would go after her.”

  “So where do I come in?”

  “Lola loves you, or loved you anyway. She will trust you with the location of the flash drive.”

  “You want me to use Lola.”

  “Yes, but we also want you to protect her from Barter and everything he has become capable of since the death of his son. In the end, you will have done both her and your country a great service.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “We prosecute you for terrorizing flight 7106 from Albany to New York, for one. Second, we prosecute you for having assisted not only in the withholding of evidence crucial to national security, but also in handing it over to a man intent on betraying the United States of America.”

  “Clyne was a real cop at the time,” I plead.

  “Tell it to that lawyer you keep threatening us with, sweetie,” Zumbo interjects.

  “Third,” Crockett says, “we have your IRS pipe bomb letter. That terroristic act alone can send you away for a good, long time.”

  I pull on my cuffs. I feel the sting in my wrist. On one hand I would love nothing more than to try to win Lola’s heart back. On the other, I could get myself and her killed while trying to do it. I might be a head case, but I’m smart enough to realize just how dangerous that little flash drive could be in the wrong hands. Without giving them the benefit of hearing it, I’m on the FBI’s side, regardless of their methods of convincing me to join their cause.

  “When, ah, would I be leaving for this little trip back to Florence?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  I nod. That soon… “Think you might unlock me now, seeing as I’m sort of working with you?”

  She tosses Zumbo a nod.

  He reaches over, unlocks both the shackles and the cuffs, which he sets onto the table. “Sorry about that, Moonlight,” he offers. “Standard operating procedure.”

  “I’ll add it to my legal list of grievances.” I stand. “Do I get to make a request?”

  “Doesn’t mean we have to honor it,” Crockett assures. “But ask away anyway.”

  I clear my throat. “In the event that I’m able to retrieve the flash drive for you, can you perhaps see to it that my IRS tax bill with Mrs. Doris E. Walsh is taken care of in full?”

  Crockett shifts her big brown eyes to the one-way glass as if she can see right through it. Nodding but frowning, she says, “Done. That is, if you produce the flash drive for us.”

  “What about my clothes, and luggage, a computer, a phone?”

  She holds up her hand. We got it covered.

  “Agent Zumbo here is happy to take you shopping for all the above, plus new clothes.” She smiles. For the first time since we entered the interview room. She also does something that catches me slightly off guard. She gently takes hold of my right hand and runs her fingers over the abrasions on my wrist, like she’s trying to heal them. “It’s Florence. You’ll of course want to look dashing, to say the least. Someone that any woman, perhaps even Lola, will fall head over heels for.”

  “Dashing,” I repeat, feeling the heat coming off her fingers and onto my scrapes and scratches. In my head I’m seeing her rebuking Air Marshal Kevin when he tried to cop a feel on the plane. I’m hearing her words about their affair being over and his having left the FBI because of it. He referred to her as turbulent. A storm-driven woman. I might be irreparably in love with Lola, but standing there in the interview room, I can’t help but think that Crockett is my type of woman. A black widow kind of woman, capable not only of breaking hearts, but rendering them into so much mush.

  Moonlight the hopeless.

  “Agent Zumbo will accompany you from here,” she adds, “while you still have the bulk of the afternoon.”

  She releases my wrist. I almost offer up my other wrist, but I figure it’s better to cut and run while I have the opportunity.

  Zumbo slides back his chair, gets up, and together we head toward the door. But before we get there, I turn back around.

  “Oh, by the way, Agent Crockett,” I say. “I really, really hate to fly. I thought you would have figured that one out by now.”

  Another smile. She’s good at this smiling stuff, it turns out.

  “We have,” she says, reaching into her bag and pulling out a small orange pharmaceutical bottle. “Valium.” She tosses me the bottle.

  I grab it out of midair, stuff it into my jacket pocket. “Wow, drugs, money, and a free trip to sunny Italy.”

  “Must be your lucky day, sweetie,” Zumbo says, before slapping me on the ass.

  The FBI’s mission to get their precious flash drive back begins right away. Turns out Zumbo isn’t just one hell of a former Giant fullback; he’s also a giant shopper. He drags me all over the city. Drags me to Bergdorf’s, Macy’s, Abercrombie and Fitch, the Gap, for pants, shirts, running shoes, running clothes, sunglasses, two new bathing suits, luggage, and even a new black leather jacket that cost the FBI more than a thousand bucks.

  He also brings me to a stylist named, get this: Bruno. Bruno trims my facial hair to just a small, neat shadow, and the hair on my head to barely a growth above the scarred skin. I look so good, the black-bearded Bruno can’t take his eyes off of me.

  Along the way we stop at just about every street corner hotdog vendor for “a snack and a rest.” Man, can Zumbo eat. But all that walking on concrete is not kind to his bad knees. The lump on his forehead is not as swollen as it was this morning. And all symptoms of the temporary psychosis that led him to pulling his service piece on me in midflight seem to have abated. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to turn my back on him anytime soon.

  Later in the day he books me a suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, upping my bill with the feds by an entire grand. Add to that a bottle of fine red wine, a six-pack of Peroni beer (to get into the Italian spirit), a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights, some cooked brie, and a platter of cold jumbo shrimp, and I’m really beginning to like my new job as a deputized FBI agent, even if I haven’t been officially sworn in as anything other than a citizen who either retrieves a very dangerous flash drive or faces prison time himself.

  Zumbo leaves me to my lonesome after reminding me that I’m being watched at all times. But I figure I’m still allowed to take in a run along the East River. Fact is, maintaining my daily exercise routine is a priority and is strictly enforced by my general practitioner, who is always concerned about my circulation. That bullet fragment lodged inside my brain not only runs the risk of shifting one day, causing instant paralysis or death, but a blood clot can also form around it should my circulation not be operating at peak performance. And peak performance means constant exercise.

  I run south toward downtown until I come to the giant stone stanchions that support the Williamsburg Bridge, where I about-face and head back to the hotel. I pop the top on a Peroni beer, take it with me into the shower, and despite the surreal nature of my newfound lifestyle, try to think realistically about the job that lies ahead. Mostly I try to recall Clyne and what I really know about h
im.

  Detective Clyne first visited me in the hospital barely a day after I died a clinical death and underwent an out-of-body experience that told me my significant other, Lola, was seeing another man. From where my soul floated above the hospital bed, I saw Lola and this new man. Saw them practically making out over my dead body. Turns out that new man was really her old high school love, Christian Barter.

  But as for Clyne, I recall a sort of dumpy-in-the-gut, sad-looking man who bore the scars of a recent separation from his wife after she’d taken off with her personal trainer. I pegged him right away as a heavy drinker who knew what it meant to medicate himself night in and night out in order to sleep, but more importantly, to forget and to eliminate his dreams. He had sad, deep brown eyes, a high forehead, and on occasion he would reveal a smile that told me he’d known happiness and, now that he didn’t have it anymore, he missed it terribly.

  He took a liking to me and helped me out by offering me protection from a gang of Russian mobsters disguised in President Obama masks who were bent on torturing me in the hopes of finding the flash drive, or what they mistranslated as a “fleshy box.”

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that Clyne had other plans.

  He wanted the flash drive for himself.

  He was determined to get it, and to use it to start a new life somewhere else in a new country. It was his intention to flip the bird on the world—the world he’d built with his cheating wife and the cops—by going rogue. Problem is, the flash drive he took off with was said to contain not only information concerning the location of millions in unmarked euros and dollars stored in numerous Swiss accounts; it also revealed both the locations of misplaced Soviet-era nuclear warheads and sensitive US nuclear secrets that would be worth hundreds of millions to interested buyers. Not the Russians, necessarily, but the Iranians perhaps, maybe the North Koreans, and even the Pakistanis. Or maybe some unknown terrorist group who would like to get their hands on the information and use it to blow something up, like, say, New York City or Los Angeles.

  So long as Clyne has that flash drive he’s considered one of the most wanted men in the world. Now so is my girlfriend’s new “old” squeeze, Agent Barter. Or so my new FBI friends tell me. I wonder if that technically makes Lola wanted also. Whatever the case, I’ve been trusted with infiltrating this new threesome, and with ultimately finding the flash drive.