Blue Moonlight (24 page)

After we get through customs and immigration, I call Agent Crockett for a pickup.

“Let me get this straight,” she says, noticeable shock in her voice. “You’re in the United States, and you have the flash drive on your person. You say Barter and Clyne have been picked up by local police outside Florence. You’re sure it’s the right flash drive.”

“They were picked up by the local cops, yes,” I confirm, knowing that I have two identical flash drives stored inside my coat pocket. “I have
a
flash drive. Lola tells me it’s the right one. I have only faith to go on.”

“And Dr. Ross is with you.”

“Affirmative. Why hasn’t Interpol alerted you about Barter and Clyne?”

“Could be they don’t want to alert me yet,” she explains. “Welcome to the world of unshared intelligence.”

Cloak and dagger…

Then she adds, “Stay put. I’m sending Zumbo out to get you. Don’t talk to anyone, and try to avoid crowded areas. Maybe it will be best to grab a drink or something in a quiet airport bar, since it will take him the better part of an hour to get through traffic and to JFK. You have money, I take it?”

“Yes,” I say. “We have money.”

“Keep your phone handy. Zumbo will call when he’s close.”

“Roger that.”

She hangs up.

I turn to Lola. She brushes back her long hair. We’re both still wearing the same clothes from a couple of days ago. She looks beautiful, but I can see the exhaustion in her eyes and, I think, something else too.

Regret.

She might not be saying anything about it. But my built-in shit detector is picking up the vibes loud and clear enough. Or what the hell, maybe I’m just imagining things. It’s been a long night. A long couple of days. Christ, it’s been a hell of a long year.

“My contact suggests we have a drink together.”

She works up a grin. “Sedation,” Lola says with a resolve that borders on outright depression. “Sounds perfect.”

Per my orders from above, we search for a nice quiet bar to while away the minutes until the Zump arrives.

We take a corner table in the back.

I order a beer. Lola orders a pinot noir.

We sit in heavy silence until the drinks come. When they do, I take a long pull on the beer and Lola carefully sips the pinot.

“I’m sure you’ve been spoiled with Tuscan wines,” I comment. It’s supposed to be an icebreaker.

She cocks her head, exhales. “Let’s get this over with,” she says.

I nod. “OK. Why’d you do it, Lo? Why’d you go with him? Why’d you go back to Barter, knowing what he was capable of?”

“That’s just the point,” she says. “I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what he might be capable of.”

“Trust,” I say. “You trusted him.”

She slowly works up a nod. “Yes. I guess you could say I found something about him to trust while I…”

Her thought trails off, but I get her meaning well enough.

“A trust you couldn’t find in me.”

She turns away, looks at the faux brick wall of the airport pub. “Something like that,” she goes on. “I never knew what to expect from you. Just which Richard Moonlight I was going to
get. The one who loved me, or the one who would sleep with another woman and then blame the bullet in his head for it.”

“It happened once, Lo. And we weren’t exactly a tight couple at the time.”

“But we weren’t
not
tight, either.”

There’s no arguing with her, because she’s right, of course. I had no business sleeping with Scarlet Montana, the wife of my former boss at the Albany Police Department. I had no right, because even though Lola and I weren’t exactly committed at the time, most of my nights were still spent sleeping with her in my bed, even if we didn’t allow ourselves to have sex. The whole thing with Scarlet was brought on by my acting as her best friend and confidant for a very brief period when we’d get together in the early evenings when her abusive husband, my former boss at the APD, was still at work. Back when I was still recovering from my botched suicide, searching for a new direction in my new life separate from the cops and my then newly divorced wife, Lynn. My sleeping with Scarlet was inevitable, but it was still a mistake since, technically speaking, I was with Lola and Scarlet was married.

A big, beautiful mistake.

But one that I’ll regret for the rest of my days.

“But you felt you could trust Barter, even though you didn’t know him, other than as teenagers who made a baby you gave up some twenty-five years ago.”

She sips her wine again. I drink some more beer.

“Despite what you might think now, what I had with Christian in high school was not a flighty, immature, one-night stand. I loved him and he loved me. Yes, we were young, but he was my first real love and had things not gone horribly wrong, I might have spent my life with him.”

I see the tears build in her eyes. I know how desperately she wanted to leave Florence and the danger she was mixed up in there. But I also sense that deep down inside, Florence wasn’t all bad.

And then it dawns on me.

“You miss him, don’t you?” I ask, the air leaving my lungs. “You fucking miss him? Even now? Even after everything that’s happened? Jesus, Lo, you’re killing me here.”

She looks up at me. Looks me in my eyes as a single tear falls down her cheek. “I can’t help it,” she whispers.

“Even after he steals a flash drive holding secrets that could obliterate millions of souls and tries to sell it to the highest bidder.”

She begins to cry. “I’m so sorry, Richard.”

My phone vibrates inside my pocket, right beside my breaking heart.

I press the phone to my ear.

It’s Zumbo. “Welcome back, sweetie,” he says. “You’ve done your country a great service.”

“Cut the bullshit, Zump. I’m tired. Where are you?”

He tells me he’s double-parked outside the Delta check-in counter at the pickup area. He wants me to hurry before a real cop comes along and tickets him.

“Just volunteer an autograph,” I say.

“You kidding?” he says. “I used up the autograph thing with NYPD a long time ago.”

“We’ll be there in three minutes. Sit tight.”

“Right on, sweetie.”

I thumb End.

Lola and I emerge through the sliding glass doors out onto the sidewalk of the busy airport pickup area. Zumbo is there just like he said he would be, standing outside the passenger-side door that belongs to a black four-door sedan with tinted windows that just screams
COP!

He’s wearing that same loud Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt over a pair of baggy blue jeans, even though it can’t be much over forty degrees outside, and cloudy. It’s unbuttoned halfway
down his tight beer belly so that the butt of his automatic is exposed. As usual, he’s sporting a four-day salt-and-pepper facial growth, not to mention a serious case of bed head.

“You’ve never looked prettier, Zump.”

“Let me get your luggage,” he says with a smile. “Oh, you don’t have any. Silly me.”

He opens the back door for Lola.

“You must be the infamous Lola,” he says as she gets in, and he quickly closes the door behind her. Then, opening the front door for me, he says, “Brains before beauty.”

I slip on in.

The door closes behind me and the cold steel of a pistol barrel presses up against the back of my head.

“Did I tell you ‘Welcome home’ yet, sweetie?” Zumbo says as he pulls the sedan out onto the airport road.

I’m trying to get a look at who exactly has the gun pressed to my head. But my angle in the front passenger seat won’t allow it.

“You OK, Lo?” I ask.

“For someone staring down a pistol barrel,” she says. “I thought these were supposed to be your friends.”

“Shut up your faces,” says a man behind me. “Both of you.”

I recognize the voice. It’s low and gravelly. It’s angry. It’s in pain because of a shot-away kneecap. It’s Russian-accented. It’s Boris. He must have made it back to the States on an earlier flight. Out the corner of my eye I catch sight of another man, who’s dressed in black leather like Boris. He’s seated up against the far door, and he holds an automatic on me while Boris drags Lola over his lap and stuffs her between the two of them in the backseat. Boris returns his gun barrel to the back of my head, and his pal trains his on Lola.

“We all set back there?” Zumbo pipes up, beaming into the rearview. “Everybody warm and cozy?”

“Nice friends you got there, Zump,” I say. “How much they paying you to sell out?”

“More than you can imagine, buddy,” he answers. “More than my NFL pension, anyway.”

Zumbo is happy as hell. He’s even humming a song while tapping out the beat onto the steering wheel as he pulls out onto the Van Wyck Expressway in the direction of Manhattan. I know the song. It’s Buster Poindexter. “Hot, Hot, Hot.” Fuck. Now I’m gonna have the song in my head the whole ride long.

“What about Agent Crockett?” I ask. “She in on this shit too?”

“Normally I’d tell you to mind your own beeswax,” Zump says in between verses of “Hot, Hot, Hot.” “But since you and the missus back there don’t have a whole lot longer to live, I might as well tell you that cute little Agent Crockett is not, I repeat,
not
a part of my most excellent relationship with my Russian friends here.” He pauses to tap out some more
“Hot, hot, hot”s.
“You see, sweetie, one more mouth to feed would simply cut into my cut. I need to maximize my monetary potential instead of simply giving away the farm.” Winks at me. “’Sides, I don’t think she’d be into it anyway. Crockett is a Goody Two-Shoes.”

“You don’t say,” I say, picturing the few short hours I spent in bed with her. “Congratulations.”

He turns to me with one of his all-teeth smiles, slaps me so hard on the thigh it feels like a compound fracture. “Hey thanks, Moonlight,” he bellows. “You know, I like you. Under different circumstances we might have been pretty good pals. Or more, even.”

Or
more
, even?

“I just want you to be clear on what’s happening here. You and the missus are buying the farm in the interest of security
and my overall plan. You realize, of course, that it’s strictly business.”

“I understand, Zump. No harm done. Shoe could easily be on the other foot.”

He slaps me again. A backhand to the sternum. It rattles my rib cage
and
my fillings. “You see that, Boris?” he barks into the rearview mirror. “Now that’s some fuckin’ A-1 Americana class for you, my commie Ruskie bro.
That’s
how you go out. Not screaming like a girl to some crippled asshole like yourself to spare your pathetic little life. But with real dignity. Real, made-in-America pride.”

I feel the pistol pressed harder against my head. “Do not call me Boris,” says Boris to Zumbo. “This motherfucker,” he says, cracking the muzzle against my skull, “he calls me Boris when he shoots off my kneecap. Boris is not my name,
da
?”

“Hey, Boris,” Zump says. “Tell it to somebody who gives a shit. Far as I’m concerned, Reagan should’ve nuked your entire beet-eating outhouse of a country when he had the chance.”

I feel Boris’s hot breath on my neck. He flicks my earlobe with the barrel and leans forward.

“First I shoot both your kneecaps off,” he whispers into my ear. “Then I rape your woman…while you watch,
da
? Then after I have shot cum inside her pussy and blown her pretty brains all over the ground, I’m going stick pistol into your mouth. When I am ready, I will make you pull trigger. From what I hear, you already know how to shoot self in head,
da
?”