Moonlight Rises Page 18

  Chase Baker and the Seventh Seal

  Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds

  Chase Baker and the Viking’s Secret (with Ben Sobieck)

  Chase Baker and the Humanzees from Hell (with Ben Sobieck)

  Chase Baker and the Apocalypse Bomb (with Ben Sobieck)

  Chase Baker and the Lost Ark of God

  The Young Chase Baker Series

  Young Chase Baker and the Cross of the Last Crusade

  Young Chase Baker and the Mummy’s Curse

  The Sam Savage Sky Marshal Action/Adventure Series

  Dead Heading (novella)

  The Empire Runaway (novella)

  Tunnel Rats

  The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy

  The Remains

  The Ashes

  The Tanya Teal Corporate Wars Chronicles

  Primary Termination

  The Handyman Episodic Erotic Noir Series

  Season I

  Lust and Letters (novella)

  Naked Heat (novella)

  Savage Sins (novella)

  Season II

  Savage Submission (novella)

  Savage Blonde (novella)

  Savage Women (novella)

  Nonfiction

  Pieces of Mind

  The Hybrid Author Mindset

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview from Moonlight Falls, the first Dick Moonlight PI thriller by Vincent Zandri.

  Click here for a complete catalog of titles available from Down & Out Books and its divisions and imprints.

  Prologue

  Man’s life is flashing before his eyes. He’s a little amazed because it’s happening just like it does in a sappy movie. You know, when they run real fast through some homespun super-eight film starting with your birth, moving on to toddler’s first step, then first day at kindergarten, first communion, first school yard ass kicking, first day at high school, first prom, first Gulf War, first marriage, firstborn son, first affair, first divorce…

  So why’s the life flashing by?

  Man’s about to execute himself.

  He sits alone at the kitchen table inside what used to be his childhood home, pistol barrel pressed up tight against his head, only a half-inch or so behind the right earlobe. Thumb on the hammer, index finger wrapped around the trigger, hand trembling, eyes closed, big tears falling.

  On the bright side of things, it’s a beautiful sunny day.

  Outside the kitchen window, wispy clouds float by like giant ghosts in a heavenly blue sky. Bluebirds chirp happily from the junipers that line the perimeter of the north Albany property. The cool wind blows, shaking the leaves on the trees. The fall air is cool, crisp and clean. “Football weather” his mortician dad used to call it back when he was a happy-go-lucky kid.

  On the not so bright side, a bullet is about to enter his brainpan. But then, as much as the man wants to call it quits, enter the spirit world, he’s not entirely insensitive. He’s thought things through. While he might have used his service-issued 9mm to do the job, he’s decided instead to go with a more lightweight .22—his backup piece. To some people, a pistol is a pistol. But to the man, nothing could be further from the truth. Because had he chose to “eat his piece” by pressing the barrel of the 9mm up against his mouth’s soft upper palate, he’d guarantee himself an instant death.

  A good death, just like the Indians say.

  Problem is, that “good death” would leave one hell of a spatter mess behind for some poor soul to clean up after his soul has left the building. So instead of choosing the safe “good death,” he’s opted for the more thoughtful no-mess, easy-clean-up kind of suicide—the assassin’s death. Because only a professional killer with a steady hand knows that a .22 caliber bullet ain’t got a chance in hell of exiting the skull once it’s made jelly filling of your brains. In theory.

  Outside the window, the wind picks up.

  The chimes that hang from the eaves make a haunting, jingly ghost music.

  The super-eight memories inside his head have ceased. His life story—the entire thirty-six-year affair from birth to this very moment of truth have officially flashed before his eyes.

  Roll credits…

  Man swallows a lump, thumbs back the hammer. The mechanical action reverberates inside his skull. There’s no stopping him; no penetrating the resolve of the already dead. He’s happy with himself for the first time in he can’t remember how long. So happy, his entire body weight seems to empty itself from out the bottoms of his feet. That’s when a red robin perches itself on the brick ledge just outside the picture window. Just a small scarlet-feathered robin that’s beating its wings and staring into the house with its black eyes.

  “You don’t even know you’re alive,” the man whispers to the bird.

  He plants a smile on his face a split second before he pulls the trigger.

  Four Years Later

  Albany, New York

  140 miles northeast of New York City

  I’m escorted into a four-walled basement room by two suited agents—one tall, slim and bearded, the other shorter, stockier, clean shaven. The space we occupy contains a one-way mirror which I know from experience hides a tripod-mounted video camera, a sound man and several FBI agents, the identities of whom are concealed. There’s no furniture in the room, other than a long metal table and four metal chairs. No wallpaper, no soft lamp light, no piped-in music. Just harsh white overhead light, concrete and the stench of body odor and industrial disinfectant.

  As I enter the room for the first time, the tall agent tells me to take a seat at the table.

  “We appreciate your cooperation,” the stocky agent jumps in.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection in the mirror.

  I guess you can say I’m of medium height. Not tall, not short. Not too badly put together for having reached the big four-zero thanks to the cross-training routine my G.P. put me on not long after my hospital release. Nowadays, my head is Mike Stipe shaved. There’s a small button-sized scar behind my right earlobe in the place where the fragment of .22 caliber hollow-point penetrated the skull. I wear a black leather jacket over black jeans and lace-up combat boots left over from my military service during the first Gulf War. My eyeglasses are rectangular and retrofitted from a pair of cheap sunglasses I picked up at a Penn Station kiosk. They make my stubble- covered face seem slightly wider than it really is. So people have told me.

  Having been led to my chair, I am then asked to focus my gaze directly onto the mirror so that the video man or woman stationed on the opposite side of the glass can adjust the shooting angle and focus.

  “Please say something,” requests the short, stocky agent to my left while removing his suit jacket, setting it over the back of an empty chair.

  “There once was a cop from Nantucket,” I say in the interest of breaking the ice.

  But no one laughs.

  “You get that?” the taller agent barks out to no one in particular.

  “Okay to go,” comes a tinny, hidden speaker voice. “You gonna finish that poem, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “Knock it off,” Stocky Agent orders. Then turns back to me. “Before we get started, can we get you a coffee? A cappuccino? You can get one right out of the new machine upstairs.”

  “Mind if I burn one?”

  Tall Bearded Agent purses his lips, cocks his head in the direction of a plastic No Smoking placard bolted to the wall.

  Stocky Agent makes a sour face, shakes his head, rolls up the sleeves on his thick arms. He reaches across the heavy wood table, grabs an ashtray, and clunks it down in front of me as if it were a bedpan.

  Tall bearded agent nods.

  “The rule doesn’t apply down here,” he says. Then, in this deep affected voice, he adds, “Let’s get started, Mr. Moonlight. You already know the routine. For now, we just want to get to the bottom of the who, what, where and how of this train wreck.”

 
“You forgot the why,” I say, firing up a Marlboro Light. “You need to know the why to establish an entire familiarity with any given case. Says so in the standard operating procedural manual.”

  Stocky Agent does a double take, smiles. Like he knows I’m fucking with him.

  “Don’t be a dick, Dick,” he says.

  I guess it’s important not to take life too seriously. He laughs. I laugh. We all laugh. Ice officially broken. I exhale some smoke through a narrow, satisfied grin, sit back in my chair, nod.

  They’re right, of course. I know the drill. I know it’s the truth they’re after. The truth and almost nothing but the truth. But what they also want is my perspective—my take on the entire Scarlet Montana affair, from soup to peanuts. They want me to leave nothing out. I’ll start with my on-again/off-again love affair with my boss’s wife. Maybe from there I’ll move on to the dead bodies, my cut-up hands, the Saratoga Springs Russians, the Psychic Fair, the heroin, the illegal organ harvesting operation, the exhumations, the attempts on my life, the lies, deceptions and fuck-overs galore.

  As a former full time Albany detective, I know that nobody sees the same thing through the same set of eyeballs. What’s important to one person might appear insignificant or useless to another. What those federal agents want right now inside the basement interview room is my most reliable version of the truth—an accurate, objective truth that separates fact from fantasy.

  Theoretically speaking.

  “Ask away,” I say, just as the buzzing starts up in the core of my head.

  “Just start at the beginning,” Stocky Agent requests. “We’ve got all night.”

  That’s when the trouble starts.

  Sitting up straight, I feel my right arm beginning to go numb on me. So numb I drop the lit cigarette onto the table. The inside of my head chimes like a belfry. Stocky Agent is staring at me from across the table with these wide bug eyes like my skull and brains are about to pull a JFK all over him.

  But then, just as soon as it all starts, the chiming and the paralysis subsides.

  With a trembling hand, I manage to pick up the partially smoked cigarette, exhale a very resigned, now smokeless breath and stamp the cancer stick out.

  “Everything you wanna know,” I whisper. “You want me to tell you everything.”

  “Everything you remember,” Tall Agent smiles. “If that’s at all possible.”

  Stocky Agent pulls a stick of gum from a pack in his pants pocket, carefully unwraps the tin foil and folds the gum before stuffing it into his mouth.

  Juicy Fruit. I can smell it from all the way across the table.

  By all indicators, it’s going to be a long night.

  “I think I’ll take that cappuccino after all,” I say. “In fact, make it double.”

  For the first time since entering the basement interview room, I feel the muscles in my face constricting. I know without looking that my expression has turned into something miles away from shiny happy. I’ve become dead serious.

  1

  One Month Earlier

  It all began with a choice.

  Rather, not a choice, but a really bad decision—the decision to stay with Scarlet Montana for more than her allotted forty minutes. It was the last thing either one of us needed, but the first thing we wanted.

  Or I wanted, anyway.

  In my right mind, I’d spend an hour tops on her massage, collect my forty bucks, make a swift exit. I swear on my dad’s cremated remains that’s exactly the way I planned it on my way over through the rain. It’s the reason I didn’t take the collapsible table with me; the reason I didn’t bring my oil belt, opting instead to shove a small plastic bottle into my gym shorts pocket.

  Get in quick, get out even quicker.

  Just enough time for a spur-of-the-moment massage, while yours truly kneeled over the spot where she lay on her belly on the living room floor, only a white bath towel covering her heart-shaped bottom. In a purely professional, if not clinical, manner I’d allow my well-oiled hands to do what they had recently been trained (and nearly licensed) to do. At the same time, I’d act as a kind of psychiatrist—a well-trusted sounding board to this thirty-eight-year-old woman who could no longer stand the sight of her life partner, Jake, the man who had given up any possibility of a happy marriage for the title of Chief Detective with the Albany P.D.—a position bestowed upon him not long after my head injury prompted a mandated medical leave from the force.

  Now, instead of a wife, he had a second in command (my former A.P.D. partner, Mitchell Cain); instead of kids, he had the South Pearl Street precinct full of upwardly mobile young cops; instead of a cozy suburban home life, he had his late evenings, early mornings and more frequent days and nights spent away from home altogether.

  As for the beautiful Scarlet Montana, she might have had yours truly at her beck and call. But then instead of a marriage and a family, she had a huge helping heap of loneliness sprinkled with despair.

  Maybe I should have stayed put, ignored Scarlet’s phone call. Maybe I should have stayed true to my significant other, Lola, the brown-haired, brown-eyed lovely who was slowly but surely becoming my legit love interest. Maybe I should have listened more closely to my built-in shit detector and not dropped everything to answer the call.

  My brain…it couldn’t always be trusted to make the right choice.

  Braving a violent thunderstorm, I made the mile-long trek to her house on foot in less than twelve minutes. This had to be just around nine o’clock.

  Why?

  Because I’d been right in the middle of my incline presses when I took the call. Jogging through the downpour across the lawns and suburban driveways in gym shorts, tennis shoes and gray t-shirt, I must have looked like the most insane neighborhood night-crawler you ever saw.

  But what’s for certain is that this time, my intentions were good.

  Click here to learn more about Moonlight Falls by Vincent Zandri.

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview from Midnight Lullaby, the first Henry Malone thriller by James D.F. Hannah.

  Click here for a complete catalog of titles available from Down & Out Books and its divisions and imprints.

  Chapter 1

  Christmas was coming. The plastic holly and fake trees had been side-by-side with the Halloween decorations since September, and Brenda Lee had been rockin’ around the Christmas tree so long store cashiers were on suicide watch. By now the holiday loomed at every corner, like a schoolyard bully demanding your lunch money. Everything on TV had Christmas trees and styrofoam snow and lessons about the power of love, followed by ads for a Tom Cruise flick where he ran places and blew shit up.

  I’d gone to Walmart to buy the groceries I’d throw away next week once they went bad. My knee let me get as far as the cereal aisle before the pain kicked in. I thought I could make it, at least until I couldn’t, and I abandoned my cart in the coffee aisle, grabbing bread, milk, and half-and-half and leaving the rest. I gritted my teeth through the check-out and pushed back tears once I got to my car.

  Pain burned like splinters of phosphorous through my knee. I lugged around twenty pounds more than my six-foot-one frame could handle, and my tendency toward gravy-heavy breakfasts at Tudor’s didn’t help.

  I sat in the parking lot for a long time, hoping shit would stop hurting, knowing it wouldn’t, and finally conceded defeat, swallowing a handful of painkillers from my supply in the glove compartment, washing it down with the milk and driving home.

  A radio station had gone to an all-Christmas playlist, and thirty percent of it was the Dan Fogelberg song about him meeting an ex at the grocery store. They were day-drinking a six-pack in their car as I pulled my Aztek into my driveway. I didn’t recognize the Ford F-350 already there.

  The guy on the front porch was fortyish, heavy around the middle, wearing a “Coal Keeps the Lights On” baseball cap and a Carhartt coat. He scratched at a graying Fu Manchu mustache. His
skin had the permanent discoloration it gets after a decade of pulling coal, and the black dust shoves so deep into your pores there’s no getting it out.

  “You Henry Malone?” he said as I mounted the short set of stairs onto the porch.

  “I am,” I said.

  He extended a hand. I took it. “I’m Mitch Fisher. How you doing?”

  “I’m grand,” I said. When he realized I didn’t intend to shake his hand, it drew it back and shoved it back into his jacket pocket. “You didn’t hear a dog bark on the porch, did you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said as I unlocked the front door and walked in, flipping on the lights behind me. Mitch Fisher followed right behind. “Yeah, go ahead and let yourself on in.”

  In the living room, one hundred twenty pounds of Bullmastiff stretched out across the couch, snoring as “Armageddon” flickered on the forty-three-inch flat-screen. If the end of the world wouldn’t rouse Izzy, no reason to expect a truck in the driveway would do the job either.

  “Hell of a watchdog,” I said in her direction. An ear twitched, and she pushed her face into the cushions.

  I made my way to the kitchen and put away the groceries. Fisher stood at the kitchen doorway, watching me like an admonished child at a parent.

  “You’re limping,” he said.

  “I am. My knee hurts.”

  “I mean, you’re limping pretty bad.”

  “It hurts pretty bad.”

  “You might ought to get that looked at.”

  “Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll jump right on it.” I peered into the refrigerator. “You want something to drink? I got beer, milk, and half-and-half, if that’s your thing.”

  “I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one,” he said.

  I wanted to point out I’d specifically mentioned the beer, which more than implied I indeed had beer, but instead I handed him a bottle of Bud Light and took a diet Coke out for myself. He twisted the lid off of his bottle and took a long drink, then said, “You not having one?”