Blue Moonlight

by Zandri, Vincent

  “That’s the important thing,” Crockett softly speaks. “That you lived. And you’ve done good things, Mr. Moonlight. You’ve saved lives.”

  I glance at the body bags.

  “And killed Lola in the process,” I whisper.

  “Lola made her own decisions,” Crockett says. “She alone chose to go with Barter. No one made her go with him. She made the decision to enter into his life, not you. Lola would still be alive if not for her decisions, Mr. Moonlight. You have to believe that or it will weigh on you forever.”

  I smoke silently.

  “Doesn’t make me feel any better about anything,” I offer after a beat.

  “If you felt good about anything today,” she says, “I’d say you weren’t the least bit human.”

  I toss my still-lit cigarette out the window, watch as it sparks against the pavement. “We done here?” I say.

  She nods.

  I open the door, slip my left leg out.

  “Oh, there is one more thing,” Crockett calls out. She holds out her left hand, palm up.

  I know what she wants even before she says the words. But I want to hear it from her mouth anyway.

  “The flash drive,” she says. “You do have it, don’t you?”

  For the briefest of moments I consider revealing the presence of two identical flash drives on my person. But what the hell, I’ll give her one of them and see what happens. Who knows, perhaps one of them is a decoy and the other is the real deal. I have a fifty-fifty chance of walking away with the moneymaker.

  Lola’s dead now.

  What the hell have I got to lose that hasn’t already been ripped away from my chest cavity?

  I reach into my coat, hand her one of the two plastic-bagged flash drives.

  “Thanks,” she says and nods. “You’ve done your country proud.”

  “Wow,” I say. “I have major chills.”

  I step out onto the pavement and walk the walk of the damned.

  Later that day I’m checked over by a doctor at the Kingston Medical Center emergency room and given a relatively clean bill of health, if you call numerous lacerations, bruises, sprains, the re-opened cut on my left pinky finger, and yet another slight concussion clean or healthy. Of course, there’s nothing that could be done to repair my broken heart.

  From the hospital, Crockett and I board a chopper to Albany, where we reconvene over coffee inside a basement interview room that contains a table and some chairs. Crockett’s personal laptop is sitting out on the table and it’s booted up to a Firefox Google page. Set beside the laptop is the flash drive I handed over to her. It’s still protected inside its plastic baggy.

  While someone behind the one-way glass films the proceedings, Crockett debriefs me on the events that took place in Florence and how I was able to secure the flash drive from Barter’s apartment. When I’m done I ask her the obvious overriding question: Where are Barter and Clyne now?

  “In custody of the Italian government. Interpol and the FBI are finally in full cooperative contact. But they are having their turn at the two suspects first before they are extradited to the US.”

  “And the Russians?”

  “Far as we can tell, they’re all dead.”

  “Far as you can tell,” I repeat. “There will be more. There always are.”

  “No word about Iranians, either. No Internet chatter coming from terrorist factions or splinter groups. My guess is Barter and Clyne were about to sell to a private investor.”

  “What about the flash drive? Anyone think of plugging it into a computer, take a look at the information it holds and why so many people had to die for it, including myself almost a year ago? Including Lola today?”

  “You came back to life,” Crockett says. “Moonlight rises, remember?”

  “Annoying habit of mine. Can’t say the same for Lola, can I?”

  I stare into the agent’s eyes. Eyes I looked into when I made love to her less than a week ago. The emotion I saw in those eyes is now replaced with anxiety.

  She picks up the plastic baggy, unzips it, pulls out the flash drive. Her hand trembles slightly when she plugs it into the port. The place goes silent while we wait for the information to appear. Only no information appears. Rather, information shows up, all right, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the information the FBI has been expecting. Instead of the locations of rogue nuclear warhead sites, the flash drive stores only a single black-and-white photograph.

  I recognize it as the shadow of a man who was seared into a concrete sidewalk when he was suddenly vaporized by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima back in August of 1945.

  I’ve seen the picture many times before. On TV. In school. On the computer. In museums. In back issues of Time magazine and National Geographic. One of those images you can never quite comprehend, the record of a blast so violent it actually evaporates a human being, leaving only his shadow burned into the pavement.

  No matter how many times Crockett plays with the drive, no matter how many times she reinstalls it or reboots her computer, the drive produces only the same thing.

  The man’s shadowy remains.

  I make out the sound of collective laughter coming through the glass.

  “Cut the chatter!” Crockett shouts. Then to me. “You said you were sure this was the true flash drive.”

  I shake my head. “I told you I had a flash drive. I had no way of knowing if it was the one you were after. I could only go on what Lola was telling me.”

  She pulls the flash drive out of the computer, stuffs it into her pants pocket.

  “You can go, Moonlight,” she says, sounding hollow. “Stay in town for a while until this thing is sorted out. We might need you for additional questioning.”

  “Sure thing,” I say. “No travel plans at present. Only funeral plans.”

  I head for the door.

  “You need a ride,” she adds as I place my hand onto the knob, “someone can drive you home.”

  “Not necessary,” I say. “I’ll walk. It’s not far. ’Sides, I want to stop off for a quick drink, maybe catch some of that special Thursday night Giants game on the NFL Network.”

  I look at her and I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing: Zumbo…the Zump. No doubt the big man is being held inside a holding tank in the Albany County Jail, his career with the feds as dead as his football career. As fucked up and crippled as his knees.

  That’s when something flashes in my brain like a lightbulb. Tapping my forehead with my fisted hand, I say, “Oh, and I almost forgot. There’s that little matter of forgiving my IRS debt to Mrs. Doris E. Walsh’s boss.”

  Crockett casually waves her right hand in the air like she’s swatting away a common housefly. “Forgiven,” she says. “But no more terroristic letters, OK?”

  “Roger that, chief.” I open the door. “I’ll be seeing you, Crockett.”

  But she doesn’t answer me, because we both know that seeing one another again is an impossibility. She just slaps her laptop closed and sits down hard in her chair. I can’t imagine her frustration, but I’m sure it must be profound.

  I walk out of the interview room, closing the door gently behind me.

  Outside the FBI satellite office, I hook a right onto Broadway. Indian summer is officially history. The late fall air has turned cold and crisp, the stars clearly visible in a cloudless night sky. Football weather, my dad used to call it.

  I pull a cigarette from the pack in my pocket, fire it up. In the distance, colorful flashing neon announcing “Bar” and “Grill” beckons me to dark, lonely interiors, but I keep walking. I smoke and every so often I choke up at the thought of a lifeless Lola lying on the highway pavement, and the narrow streak of blood that ran down from her left eye and over her lips. I think about how, in the end, the bitter earth can be so cold.

  I choke up, but I refuse to shed any more tears for a woman who no longer loved me so much as she loved another. Inevitably, my love for her wasn’t enough to save her life.
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  As I walk deeper into the city, I sense I will never love truly again. Not like I loved her anyway.

  Love giveth and love taketh away, and when it’s all said and done, we’re no further ahead than we were when it all began with a glance and a friendly smile over a backyard picket fence all those years ago. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re richer for the experience. Or perhaps we’re just numb to our own lies and hopeless wishes. Lola’s certainly numb.

  Lola is dead.

  But as the song says, life goes on. All it takes is to move one foot in front of the other. So then, that’s what I do. I move one foot in front of the other and I smoke my cigarette, and when I come to the storm sewer grate that eventually empties out into the nearby Hudson River, I reach into my leather coat and pull out the second plastic baggy.

  I pull out the second flash drive, hold it in my hand.

  Had Lola been aware of the phony flash drive? Had she concocted some kind of silly plan to keep the real one for herself? Did she plan on keeping the drive as a fuck-you to the men in her life who had loved her and wronged her? Maybe selling it to the highest bidder on her own so that she could live a life free of worry? Free of Albany and all its ghosts?

  No. That wouldn’t be like the Lola I once knew and loved.

  But then, perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

  God works in mysterious ways, so they say. But then, so do the lust for money and the incomprehensible craving for love.

  I think of the phony flash drive that produced the picture of that poor man who was vaporized on that sunny day so long ago in Japan. The picture suggests that the flash drive in my possession is the real deal. The fortune maker, and potentially, the mass murderer. But why should I care now that I’m alone and without love? All it would take to sell the thing off is a few well-placed phone calls. I’d cash a big check and, as they say, move on with my life. Somewhere south of the border. Or what the hell, maybe I’d head back to Florence for a while.

  In my hand, I support a few ounces of plastic that contain the weight of the world. I drop it to the pavement, crush it with my booted heel, and kick the crushed remnants into the sewer with my boot tip. Pulling the collar up on my leather coat, I light another cigarette and head for the bars.

  Alone.

  The New York Giants kick off in just ten minutes.

  Who knows, this might be our year to finally go all the way.

  The End

  Photograph by Laura Roth, 2012

  Vincent Zandri is the best-selling author of The Innocent, Godchild, The Remains, Moonlight Falls, The Concrete Pearl, Scream Catcher, Moonlight Rises, and the forthcoming Murder by Moonlight. He received his MFA in writing from Vermont College, and his work has been translated into several languages. An adventurer, foreign correspondent, and freelance photojournalist for RT, GlobalSpec, and IBTimes, among others, Zandri lives in New York.