Moonlight Falls (8 page)

He had no choice but to close his eyes, wish the vision away.

He did it. He closed his eyes.

Then, slowly opening them, he apprehensively peered back at the crucified image. He saw that Jesus had returned. He also saw that the ghost devil was gone, disappeared.

He breathed a short sigh of relief before the tears finally erupted.

16

DAWN, ON THE EASTERN edge of the horizon.

Quietly I slipped in bed beside Lola, spooned into her, felt her smooth warm skin against my own. I ran my hand down her long black hair, leaned into her. Maybe we weren’t lovers, or girlfriend and boyfriend. But we had something between us, Lola and me. A trust, a bond. She’d been there for me—for my head—ever since the accident in ‘99. Now I loved her like a wife, and I believe she loved me the same way. What we didn’t have together was a relationship that included sex. Abstinence, or so Lola claimed, was the one thing that would make our friendship last forever.

Our special friendship.

Of course, I couldn’t agree with her more. But with those big brown eyes, long brown hair and long, shapely body, it wasn’t exactly difficult abstaining from sex, it was damn near impossible. Exactly the opposite problem I’d encountered immediately following my accident. The bullet frag inside my head had somehow lodged itself against a bundle of nerves that caused total impotence—perpetual limp, flaccid, half-staff impotence. Sure, I tried everything from Viagra to implants but nothing could stop the dreaded sag. And after a year of this, shall we say, non-action, it didn’t really surprise me in the least that my wife of nine years had decided to bid me a fond farewell. ‘Course, what did come as a surprise was when, after another two years had passed, she hooked up with Mitch Cain and married him. Not weeks after their wedding day the frag decided to shift its position once more and from that point on, the flag resumed flying at full staff.

Lola rolled over, smiled.

“I was worried,” she said. “You didn’t return my phone calls.”

“Jake and Cain called me in.”

“Did you eat?”

“I think so.”

“Why did they call you in?”

I told her why.

When I was through it was almost full light out. Some of the gray-filtered daylight leaked in around the drawn blinds.

Like I said, Lola and I were just best friends. But sometimes friend-to-friend honesty can still be a real bitch.

You see, she didn’t offer up anything in response to my night with Scarlet—before her death
and
after. No opinion about my apparent lack of control; my decision to do the wrong thing by once more sleeping with someone as vulnerable as Scarlet.

Nothing.

But then, on the other hand altogether, it’s not like she up and walked out on me.

In typical Lola fashion, she just rolled back over onto her side, faced the opposite direction.

“How stupid am I?” I said, hoping that I wouldn’t get an answer.

Silently, Lola got out of bed, went downstairs to make the coffee.

That stupid
, I told myself.

17

IN MY NEW DREAM I see her.

She is as real to me as she was last night.

Flesh and blood and that soft red hair.

She comes to me where I’m lying in my bed. She is fully naked, but no longer cut up or scared. She bends over, kisses me gently on the lips.

She says, “I’m happy now. I don’t need to be rescued.”

She turns, disappears …

But then the vision shifts to an old dream.

I’m back inside my kitchen. There’s a thunderstorm going full bore outside the big picture window. There’s a glass of whiskey set out on the table, the open bottle beside it. Set in between the bottle and the drinking glass are six .22 caliber bullets. But I only need one.

I open the revolver cylinder, slide the single bullet inside.

I raise the gun up to my head, press the barrel against my right temple, cock back the hammer. I feel my body trembling, the tears running from my eyes, down my face, dripping off my chin. I begin to squeeze the trigger. But that’s when I see the face of my boy. The pistol slips, drops from out of my hand at the exact moment, the hammer comes down …

When I woke, I thought I heard the rain.

But I was mistaken. The shower was running.

Short, sharp rivulets against the old glass-enclosed shower stall in the bathroom off the master bedroom. I looked at the empty space that once contained Lola. Now just a dented pillow and a rumpled sheet.

Is there anything lonelier?

I sunk down further in the bed, closed my eyes, tried like hell to empty my brain. Tried to allow sleep to take over once more.

The shower, it wasn’t as good as the rain—didn’t quite have that same sedative effect.

But for now, it would have to do.

18

IT WAS NEARLY MID-AFTERNOON by the time I woke up.

I needed my sleep. Doctor’s orders.

I needed my exercise too. Also doctor’s orders.

The long distance running and the weight lifting (squats, bench press, dead lifts) would have to wait till that night however. Half the day was already gone.

I was feeling more awake by the time I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around my waist, sat down at my writing desk, stared at the blank sheet of paper rolled into my dad’s old, Olympia Wilhelmshaven portable typewriter.

A few minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen, washing down a vitamin and an anti-inflammatory with cold orange juice. I mixed my protein shake while sipping on a cup of hot coffee.

Decaf—per doctor’s orders.

A few minutes later, after downing my shake, I opened the front door to retrieve what had been the morning paper. Maybe the sky was still terribly overcast, but it was impossible not to see him. The white-skinned man standing at the foot of my driveway. A whiter-than-white-skinned man dressed in tan slacks and a white button down shirt. He wore sunglasses and a hat, as if to protect him from the sun on a rainy, cloudy day. He looked directly at me from across the lawn and smiled.

There was a Blue Toyota Landcruiser parked behind him, the engine still running.

I bent over in my towel, feeling the chill in the overcast afternoon air, and picked up the paper. Not knowing what else to do, I smiled back at him.

Then he did something that took me by surprise.

He lifted his right hand, made like a knife with extended index finger, ran it across his neck. From where he stood at the foot of the driveway, I could actually hear him laughing.

I didn’t waste a second. I ran back inside, tossed the paper onto the stone vestibule floor.

Up in the bedroom I found my loaded Browning High Power 9 mm in the drawer of the nightstand.

By the time I made it back outside, the Albino man was already in his car speeding down Hope Lane. Hope is shaped like a horseshoe. I knew there was a chance I might intercept the son of a bitch as he exited the opposite east side.

But I was dressed in a bath towel, no shoes. I had to hold the towel tight around my waist while I ran along the main road, Browning out front, all the time the wet gravel cutting into my heels and soles.

In the end, I wasn’t even close.

By the time I’d even made it half way to the other leg of the horse shoe, the Toyota was already making its way east.

I stopped, sucked in a deep breath and passed out.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I noticed was that the blue Toyota was pulled up alongside the road. The second thing I noticed was that the Albino man was standing directly over me. Actually, he was in the act of kneeling, maybe to get a closer look at my face. The one thing I remember was trying to raise up the Browning, aim it at him. But my right arm was dead.

He went down on one knee, this white-skinned man who wore dark, aviator sunglasses even in the rain. A man with whiter than white hair, red lips and tongue. Kneeling there, he coughed up a wad of phlegm, spit it out onto the narrow strip of gravel-covered shoulder.

When I worked up the strength to talk, I asked him who the hell he was, and why he was standing outside my house.

But he just raised an extended index finger, pressed it to pursed lips.

“Shhh,” he smiled. “Don’t try to talk, yes.”

He spoke English but with a heavy foreign accent.

From where I lay, I could see that his button-down shirt was unbuttoned at the bottom, exposing a protruding white belly. I guess he noticed me noticing him, or his pale underbelly anyway. Because his face suddenly went stone stiff. Reaching down, he picked up my Browning. My hand lifted up along with it. When he let go, the whole thing just slapped back down to the ground.

A car went by and then another. The second one slowed down a little as it passed, but then sped up again. The Albino man stood up, brushed off his knees, and without another word got back in his car and burned rubber.

What in God’s name was going on? Who the hell was the Albino man? Maybe some creep I helped put away a long time ago. You never know in my business. Sad fact of the matter was this: criminals were paroled. You couldn’t fight the system. But then, I think I would have remembered somebody that white; somebody that creepy. Maybe he was a hatchet man hired by Cain or Jake to keep me in order. But that didn’t make any sense either. Jake controlled a hundred hatchet men in the form of the S.P.D.

One thing was for sure: I was going to start packing my Browning again.

I had been pretty bad about it since my accident. Carrying it only when absolutely necessary, especially in light of my permit being revoked. Even the cops wouldn’t allow a man in my condition to carry a loaded firearm.

On the record, that is.

Off the record, they
insisted
that I carry it. Still, I felt better sometimes without it. I don’t know why I should feel better, especially when my line of work involved the occasional shoot-or-be-shot. I suppose it all had to do with the death thing. Rather, the proximity of death. As for me, I might have felt healthier than an ox, but for every minute of every day I could see, taste and smell my death as if it were being hastily prepared for me in the very next room.

There was a bullet in my head. Actually, just a fragment of a .22 caliber slug barely half a centimeter wide by the same distance long.

The doctors had assured me of this: one day the fragment was going to shift and leave me, for all intents and purposes, brain dead. It would be the day that Divine fell for good. That was the reality of it all; my reality.

Lifting myself up off the ground, I breathed in deep and felt the life return to my right arm. I about-faced, began the march back home.

For now anyway, Dick Divine lives.

19

BACK INSIDE MY KITCHEN I popped a second anti-inflammatory and a couple of Advils. Then I poured myself a coffee at an hour of the day when I might have been having my first beer. First I pushed away the mail that had been piling up for some days now. Overdue bills, circulars, catalogues, credit card applications, a notification for a local Gilda’s Club meeting. I spread the paper onto the counter between the sink and the telephone, searched for a headline.

I didn’t find one. The one I wanted, that is.

Big surprise, right?

What I did find as I freshened my coffee was a small quarter column that appeared just below the police blotter on page three of local section B, immediately above the five day weather outlook (rain for the duration). A little sidebar piece penned by crime reporter Brendan Lyons that described what looked to be an apparent suicide by S.P.D. Captain Jake Montana’s wife, Scarlet. The Captain discovered the deceased early this morning, said the piece.

I drank some coffee, sighed out loud inside the empty kitchen.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but feel cheated by the lack of attention and accuracy given to the matter. But like I already pointed out, I wasn’t the least bit surprised by it either. What’s more, I knew that the story’s lack of accuracy or prominent placement had nothing to do with Mr. Lyons, but almost certainly with the editorial staff who, no doubt, took their orders from much higher service sidearm-toting authorities in and around Stormville proper.

Didn’t matter how much dough the publisher was worth; how much political pull he had. Freedom of the press was subjective in these matters.

The article went on to state how the thirty-eight year old Montana was pronounced dead on the scene as the result of self-inflicted lacerations. No mention that the lacerating weapon in question had not been recovered, as if there were no mystery to the fact that a dead woman is pretty much incapable of hiding the knife she’s used to kill herself with.

The piece closed by quoting the officer in charge of what looked to be—you guessed it—an “open-and-shut investigation,” Senior Detective Mitchell Cain.

“What a tragic loss Scarlet Montana means not only to the Captain,” he eulogized, “but also to the entire S.P.D. family of law enforcement personnel.”

So that was it then.

No mention of my investigation.

No mention of suspicious circumstances.

No mention of a potentially whitewashed crime scene or that not a soul other than a few select cops had laid eyes on Jake in the past twelve hours.

Nothing.

Other than what they wanted you to know.

I folded up the newspaper, set it down on the kitchen table next to the Browning 9 mm.

I turned my attention to the answering machine set beside the coffee pot and the little Scarlet numeral “3” that blinked on and off inside the small, square-shaped electronic readout.

Raising the machine’s volume, I hit the PLAY button.

The digital recorder beeped, then spat out the first message.

Just another friendly collection agency under employ of my lawyer, of all people, threatening legal action if I didn’t begin taking action on my divorce debt.