Full Moonlight: A Roman Dalton Yarn

  Full Moonlight

  Vincent Zandri

  Full Moonlight

  by

  Vincent Zandri

  Based on characters created by Paul D. Brazill

  Published by Blackwitch Press

  All material herein contained © Vincent Zandri 2013. All rights reserved.

  Converted to Kindle by Craig Douglas at www.Gritfiction.com.

  Cover and Blackwitch Press logo by Marcin Drzewiecki

  Full Moon

  In the last part of the night when the night is an ink spilled into water and things have not yet made it back…

  —Christian Barter

  Prologue:

  Man’s flat-lining.

  Heart’s not responding to all the crazy shit the EMTs have been throwing at him for going on ten minutes now. Man’s shirt has been torn open, his trouser belt unbuckled, jeans unbuttoned, unzipped, naked chest exposed to the cold, dark, overcast October elements inside the ancient Albany Rural Cemetery.

  The team of EMTs are aghast. They’ve never encountered something like this before.

  Man’s arrested heart isn’t the only problem here. Not by a long shot. Man’s skin’s been shredded, as though ripped open by claws. His face looks like so much hamburger, the crest of his nose split open so wide, if it were not for the blood, you would see right down into his brains. His left eye has been torn out, the eyeball now resting on his right cheek by a strand of purple muscle tissue that throbs like an electric wire still connected to a high voltage current. His shaved scalp is scraped to the bone, and the small, dime-sized scar located beside his right earlobe has also been ripped right down its center, making scar tissue out of scar tissue.

  Man’s lost a lot of blood.

  Pints of the stuff.

  So much blood that moving him right now would be like slamming the lid closed, nailing the coffin shut. EMT team’s got no choice but to try an on-site transfusion with the O Positive blood supply they keep on hand for just such an emergency. But then, they’ve never faced just such an emergency. Not like this. This is nothing they’ve ever witnessed before. They’ve come across dog bites, snake bites, even bites from horses on the few farms scattered across what remains of Albany County’s countryside.

  But nothing like this.

  This is a mauling like no other.

  A mauling that’s occurred in Albany’s oldest cemetery at or around eleven thirty at night under what would have been a full moon. A blue moon. That is, had the weather cooperated. It’s a miracle anyone even found the body in the cloud-covered darkness and the rain. But then, as luck would have it, the cemetery’s caretaker suffers from an incurable insomnia. What’s a cemetery caretaker do when he can’t sleep at night? He walks the cemetery, searching for ghosts. Instead, he discovers the body of a P.I. who’s been torn to shreds.

  Crew is reverentially down on its knees, working hard on the man’s torn open chest. But it’s no use. They’re not getting a pulse. He’s bleeding out so fast, the transfusions can’t keep up.

  Head EMT leans up straight, wipes blood onto the blue pants that cover his thighs. He’s not sure if the beads of water dripping off his face are sweat or rain water. When it pours over his lips, he realizes it’s both. He angles his wrist to get a view of his watch face, thumbs the little button that lights the face up in a blue, iridescent glow. He makes out the time at 11:59 and 40 seconds.

  “Let’s call it people,” he says with an exasperated sigh.

  The others remove their hands from the now dead man, lean back on their heels, the disappointment painting their faces like the blood that smears their hands.

  “Who the fuck could have done this to him?” the second man says.

  “It had to be an animal of some kind,” says the third and final medical tech. A woman. “A big dog or something.”

  “Not even a dog could do this,” says Head EMT. “It would have to be as big and strong as a fucking raptor. And they been dead for eons.”

  “Since the Jurassic,” says Second Man, trying for a smile. “I got Jurassic Park on the Blue Ray.”

  “Can it,” says the woman, standing, going for a fresh body bag stored in the back of the van. “What’s the official time?”

  Head EMT stands, only now feeling the soreness in his knees. He looks at his watch once more.

  “Let’s make it easy, Kelly, and call it at midnight. Kind of poetic after all.”

  “Agreed, Steve,” says the woman, pulling out a bag, tossing it to the grass-covered floor. “You agree, Ted?”

  Ted pulls a wallet from the back pocket of the dead man. Pulls out a laminated ID of some kind, holds it up to the light of the black mini Maglite LED he’s now got jammed between his teeth like a cigar.

  “Whatever,” he mumbles. Then, “Moonlight. Poor guy’s name was Moonlight. And he was a private detective. Can you believe it? That’s hot shit.”

  “Sure, what’s so hard to believe?” says Steve, staring down at his watch one last time.

  The shift occurs then. The kind of atmospheric shift that can be both seen and felt inside your body. A shift in the weather. The rains stops. And the clouds open up, like Christ Himself is about to make a surprise appearance from the heavens.

  “Midnight on the dime,” says Steve.

  “Got it,” says Kelly, recording the data on the electronic form on the laptop computer.

  Then comes a cough. Followed by a cry. Followed by another cough, and the spitting up of blood. The chest on the body of the dead man heaves. Limbs tremble. He suddenly sits up straight, like his backbone was made not of bone but of heavy springs. His mouth now wide open, he issues a howling scream, loud and piercing enough to crack the enamel on a man’s teeth.

  Ted lunges back, the Maglite falling out of his mouth.

  “What the fuck!” he screams.

  Kelly begins to cry and weep. She wants to scream but can’t work up the necessary air.

  Steve stands, stone stiff, heart racing.

  “My God,” he says. “It’s a miracle. A. Fucking. Miracle.”

  “Fucking Lazarus,” cries Ted.

  The man’s blood is disappearing, as if a ghost were wiping him clean. His shredded skin and flesh are disappearing. The wounds that scarred his head are now healed. Only his shredded clothing remains as proof of his having been mauled. He picks himself up from off the ground, stands, wide-eyed and disbelieving.

  “Hey, where’d you guys come from?” he smiles.

  Moonlight lives.

  ***

  “Let me get this shit straight in my head,” says Captain Nick Miller of the APD. “You were hired as a more-or-less security guard to oversee the Albany Rural Cemetery at night.”

  We’re sitting in his cramped, square-shaped office. Seated on the small couch set beside my wood fold-out chair is Sam Baker, the groundskeeper of the cemetery in question. He’s a guy about my age, only big in the gut and in possession of a right arm that’s not only smaller and shorter than the left, but that more or less dangles off of his shoulder, sort of like an elephant’s trunk.

  “We been seeing some strange occurrences in the cemetery as of late,” Baker breaks in. “Dead deer that were living in the woods beside the place. A mutilated dog. Some turkeys so fucked up all that’s left over is the feathers.”

  “So you hired Moonlight here to keep an eye on the place during the night-time hours,” Miller says, brushing back his cropped, gray-blond hair, loosening the ball knot on his necktie, leaning as far back in his swivel chair as the spring will allow.

  Baker laughs.

  “Couldn’t get anyone else to do it,” he says.

  Miller shoots me a look.

  “Th
ought you were supposed to be Spenser for Hire?” he says with a grin.

  “Hey,” I say, making like a pistol with index finger and thumb, pointing it at the dime-sized scar beside my right temple where once upon a time, a fragment from a .22 caliber hollow-point entered my brain and never left. “You have any idea how hard it is for a head-case to find work these days, Miller? And don’t call me Spenser. Spenser’s a pussy. I prefer Jim Rockford.”

  Miller locks his fingers together, brings his joined hands around his head, uses them for a headrest.

  “I’m aware of your accident, Moonlight.”

  “Suicide attempt,” I correct. “It’s ok. I’m at peace with it now. I even get around in my dad’s old Moonlight Funeral Home hearse just to prove that death and I have become good pals.”

  “Speaking of dying,” he says, “tell me what happened tonight so I can get back home, maybe get a couple hours of sleep and a quickie with the wife before they want me back here.”

  I tell him everything the EMTs told me on the drive to the hospital, where I was discharged with a couple of small bruises, a pulled groin, and some suspicious looking bite marks on my lower neck, not far from my heart.

  “You don’t look like a guy whose neck, face and chest were torn wide open. In fact, you look kind of healthy. Even for you, Moonlight. “

  “That’s what they told me. They have no reason to lie. They said I flat-lined. But I think they were high.”

  Miller shoots Caretaker Baker a look like, What’s you’re take?

  “Don’t look at me, Detective?” he says, scratching an itch on his dangling mini hand with his good normal-sized hand. “I was sound sleep. I been working that cemetery for twenty years and full moons still creep me out. Especially so close to Halloween. But I can say this: if you could have seen the condition some of those attacked animals were in, then you wouldn’t find it hard to believe what might have happened to Moonlight here.”

  “Believe what didn’t happen, you mean,” Miller says. “Couldn’t have happened, given Mr. Moonlight’s present condition.” The veteran detective sits up, slaps his desk with the palms of his hand. “Ok, I’m gonna give the EMTs a call and get their take. In the meantime, I can’t tell you what to do Moonlight, but I would think twice about this whole graveyard shift thing you got going with Sammy here.”

  Baker stands, his dead arm dangling like a pendulum.

  “Hey, don’t leave me alone in that place during a month of blue moons. There’s a wild beast out there or something.”

  “Look it Sam, if Moonlight still wants the job, I’ll send over a squad car once an hour to check on things for as long as the moons last. Good with you Moonlight?”

  I nod my head without even thinking about it. I need the money after all.

  “Sam,” Miller says, “you can go.” Then at me. “Moonlight, you stay behind for a sec.”

  ***

  When the door is shut, Miller comes around his desk.

  “Do me a favor Moonlight,” he says. “Take your shirt off.”

  “I’m not that kind of guy, Miller,” I say, tossing the top cop a wink. “I usually wait until the second date to get naked.”

  “Cut the bullshit. I’m tired. Just do as I say, please.”

  He grabs his desk lamp, turns it around, aims the bright bulb at my bare chest. He pulls one of the two wood fold-out chairs towards him, sits down on it so that his eyes are level with my upper body. He starts examining me like he’s my doctor and I’m the patient.

  “See anything you like?” I say.

  “Stop holding in your gut and shut up.”

  “Don’t need to hold in my gut. I’m in the best shape of my life, even if I can die at any minute.”

  “Just don’t do it here. Turn.”

  I turn.

  “Some evidence of deep scratches or wounds. But the wounds are healed. Completely. And some bite marks. That thing, whatever it was, did it bite you?”

  “Told you. I don’t remember. And from what the EMTs said, yes, that thing, whatever it was, bit me up pretty good. So they say.”

  “If what they say is true, you are one remarkable healer.”

  “Maybe it didn’t happen at all.”

  “It was late and rainy and dark and windy,” he says. “Plus it all happened or didn’t happen inside a cemetery that’s known for its ghosts and strange occurrences.”

  “That explains it,” I say. “The supernatural did it. Or maybe aliens. Then they zapped me with the forget-all-about-it laser after I was healed.”

  “Put your shirt back on,” he says. “And go home.”

  He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I grab my shirt…what’s left of it… toss it on, start buttoning it up. There’s some blood stains on it which we can both plainly see and it’s torn pretty much to shreds. But neither one of us dares come up with an explanation.

  “You really gonna make an appearance tonight?”

  “Yup,” he says. “I’m not sure I like what’s going on. It all doesn’t add up. Your skin is relatively fine, but look at your clothes.”

  I finish with the last button, even though it’s silly to be buttoning up a shirt that’s as ripped up as mine. That’s when I notice Millers eyes are glaring at me. Or, not at my face exactly. More like at my sternum. He reaches out, grabs something. A hair. A long, black and white hair. He pulls it away slowly, carefully, like he’s trying not to snap it in half. He holds it up to the light.

  “This belong to you, Moonlight?”

  I pat the top of my scalp.

  “No hair, remember?”

  “Think I’ll hang onto this for bit.”

  “Tell you what,” I say. “You can have it.”

  I go for the door, open it.

  “See you tonight,” I say.

  “Get some new clothes,” he says. “And then bag the ones that are hanging off of you and give them back to me. They’re evidence.”

  “You really think there’s something to this beast in the cemetery thing?”

  “Tell you what? You rather I don’t show up tonight and leave you out there by your lonesome?”

  I shake my head.

  “See you tonight,” I say.

  “Bring your gun,” he says. “And plenty of bullets.”

  ***

  The sun is just starting to come up by the time I make it home to my riverfront loft. I’m dead tired. No, scratch that. More than dead tired. I’m experiencing an exhaustion like I’ve never felt before. My veins feel like rubber bands stretched to the snapping point. And the sun. It’s coming up red/orange on a beautiful mid-fall morning, and I can’t stand to look at it.

  Despite my exhaustion, my stomach feels like a bottomless pit.

  I head into the loft, make my way for the fridge. I grab a carton of old milk, down the entire quart while standing there with the fridge door open. I can’t get the curdled milk down my throat fast enough, the cold, thick, sour liquid filling my mouth and belly, running down the sides of my face.

  When I’m done, I toss the carton to the wood floor.

  I can smell the meat before I see it.

  A boneless sirloin for two I bought three days ago from the supermarket butcher that’s still wrapped in its brown butcher paper. I don’t need to see it to know where it’s hiding behind a carton of orange juice and a Tupperware container filled with old pasta. Before I have to think about it, I lunge for the meat, tear open the blood-soaked paper and, like the sour milk before it, consume the meat right where I’m standing.

  Blood spills all over my chest and smears onto my lips and face as I chew through the cold meat. The rich bloody taste and spongy texture not only makes me feel warm and satisfied, it makes me feel slightly aroused.

  By the time I’m finished eating, I can feel my erection pressing up against my pants. And my ears have pricked up. I hear something. A panting. A heart beating. Wiping my bloody hands onto ratty, torn pants, I go to the back door, unlock it, head outside.

  The sun is fully up b
y now and its brightness burns my eyes. I sense something in the area. A dog. Definitely another dog. I don’t see it, but I smell it. I run towards the river. Sprinting, lunging, jumping. My heart pounding in my chest, and my mouth salivating, that hard-on feeling like it’s going to burst out of my pants.

  When I see the dog strolling along the river bank, I sniff the air and know right away that it’s a female. My head fills with adrenalin and I let off a howl that echoes across the river all the way to Troy. I sprint for the dog who by now is running away from me as fast as she can. But the German Shepherd is too slow, and I catch up to her, knocking her to the gravel. I sniff her and she barks, and then I position myself behind her and drop to my knees.

  That’s when I feel the explosion against the side of my head and the lights go out.

  ***

  “Are you drunk, my good fellow?” asks the man, the fat end of the long walking stick that’s gripped in his hand brushing against his lower shin.

  “No,” I say, my head throbbing.

  “You happen to kill somebody?” he adds. “You are most definitely covered in blood.”

  “That was my breakfast,” I say. “And it wasn’t human, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  As soon as my eyes focus I get a better look at the man. He’s dressed not much better than I am. Rather, his clothing is old. Outdated old. Woolen pants, lace-up boots, a button-down with no collar. Or, a priest-like collar, I should say. And the clothes are a bit torn, moth-eaten and wrinkled. Like he’s been sleeping in them. Sleeping in them for a long time. Ages.

  “If you were to ask me, mister,” he says, “you were contemplating carnal relations with that dog. A barnyard offense that would warrant thirty lashes at the public stocks.”