Blue Moonlight (28 page)

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.

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.