Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) (11 page)

CHAPTER 31

SO WHAT DO YOU do when you discover that your lover’s sister is directly involved with the men who have been trying to kill and torture you? Correction: Russian men who have actually killed you already once before and who’ve tortured you. Technically speaking.

You ask for an explanation is what you do.

Which is precisely what I do as we pile into Lola’s cramped, square-shaped academic office.

I stand by the closed door, my back pressed up stiff against the solid wood slab. Lola takes her chair behind her desk, as if she’s about to conduct a meeting with her colleagues. Claudia sits down in the one available chair left over, and Georgie sits on the metal desk, one foot hanging off of it, the other planted firmly on the carpeted floor.

Outside the door, you can still make out the squeals of the monkeys, something I never seem to notice as much when I visit Lola during the school day when the building is full of students and profs.

Before a word is spoken, Lola grips the .9 mm, unlocks her bottom desk drawer, opens it, dumps it inside, closes the drawer back up, relocks it.

“Let’s hear it, Lo,” I say, after a strained beat. “Come to Jesus.”

She exhales a long breath, places both hands over her face, and runs them slowly down her cheeks as if removing some sort of invisible mask.

“Don’t say a word, Lola!” Claudia spits. “You know the deal.”

Lola’s head springs up.

“Don’t you ever try and tell me what to do,” she hisses without raising her voice. “Maybe we share the same father, but my world is entirely different from yours. You don’t have to play by my rules, but I sure as hell don’t have to play by yours, either.”

“So what’s going on then, Lola?” Georgie chimes in, crossing wiry arms over his bandaged chest. His hands are trembling even more than before. I can tell he’s agitated and trying to hide it. Constant pain will do that to a man. So will pride.

“Claudia is my younger sister,” Lola says. “That much you already know. I’ve never mentioned her, Richard, because we don’t share much in common like other sisters, other than a biological attachment to my father.”

Claudia snorts.

“Got that right,” she laughs.

“But family is family,” Lola goes on, “and recently, our family, has been experiencing some . . . well, let’s call it difficulty.”

“What kind of difficulty?” I press. “And why do you feel like you couldn’t tell me about it? Me, your sig other, of all people.”

“Don’t tell them, Lo,” Claudia insists. “Gonna bite you in the ass. You know how Dad feels about this.”

You know how Dad feels about this . . .
I take that as a less than soft warning. I also recall the speed-dial number logged into her mobile phone: “My Father.” Behind me, the monkeys bang on their metal cages, and screech at the tops of their lungs.

Lola shoots a glance at her sister, then focuses her eyes back on me.

“Someone has come back into our lives unexpectedly,” she explains.

“What kind of someone?” Georgie presses.

“Someone I never thought I’d ever see again for as long as I lived.” Her eyes well up, her voice becomes thick. “Someone I saw only for a brief few moments a long, long, time ago. Someone whom I’ve thought about every day of my life since our separation. But also someone I
never
wanted to see again.”

I shake my head while I watch a teardrop fall down Lola’s left cheek.

“What are you talking about, Lo?” I say, softly.

Claudia bursts out laughing. She says, “Your girlfriend Lola got herself good and knocked up. Back when she was a teeny-bopper.”

I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise to attention.

Claudia sits back in her chair, long blond hair seductively draping her smiling face.

“When I was sixteen,” Lola proceeds, “I got pregnant. Abortion was not an option for me. I had the baby. But since I was a minor at the time, my father insisted I immediately put the child up for adoption upon his birth. He found the adoptive parents himself.”

Georgie locks eyes with me. As always, I know what he’s thinking without having to say it.

“Lola . . . Ross,” I say, my stomach tightening into a knot. “It is Ross, isn’t it? So if it’s not, then what’s your real name?”

Tears falling down both her cheeks now.

“Lola . . . Rose,” she says. “Get it?”

I feel the air escape my lungs. Yeah, I get it . . . .Ross . . . It looks a lot like Rose.

“And your baby’s name?”

“Peter,” she says. “His name is Peter Czech.”

CHAPTER 32

THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES in my life when I suspected that someone close to me was not being open about something. What comes to mind more than any other memory is when I first suspected my wife, Lynn, of cheating on me. There are the subtle hints. You’ve heard them all before. The coming home late after work. The strange smells on her skin and on her clothes. The distant watery stare in her eyes when she got up the courage to look me in the face. The calls and the hang-ups. The “Caller Unknown” when I checked the caller ID. The sudden end of our sex life together. The distancing, the hatred-filled stares coming at you from across the dinner table on those few nights a month we still couldn’t avoid having dinner together. Or, she couldn’t anyway.

A drinking buddy of mine once said that there are two kinds of fucking that occur in a marriage. In the beginning you fuck everywhere. In the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the dining room table. But later on, when the honeymoon is long over, a different kind of fucking occurs. Whenever you pass by your wife in the hallway she cuts into you with a heart-of-ice glare and quietly barks, “Fuck! You!”

That’s how it was for Lynn and me not so long ago, but not for Lola and me. Lola was distant from the start. Loving, caring, in tune with me, but still distant. Her need for space and secrecy took some serious getting used to. But after a few years of this, I knew what to expect from her and what not to expect. What I do know is this: despite her independent nature, I somehow trust her with my life. At least I thought I did.

And now, as I stand inside her university office, I realize, there is very
little
I know about the woman who more often than not, shares my bed. I think about the woman I saw when I was dead . . . the woman who was embracing another man. And I know I’m about to hear the truth, and that I
need
to hear it.

But I’m not sure I
want
to hear it.

Lola begins to explain about a high school boy whom she lost her virginity to. She speaks of getting pregnant and not telling the boy, not wanting to tell him, and being even more afraid of telling her father. He’s the only one she could go to since her mother had long ago passed away. When she finally worked up the nerve to tell him, he never yelled, and he never raised a hand to her. She would have the baby, he told her, and she would put it up for adoption. But before that, she would leave her school while the baby came to term. Then, when all was said and done, he would send her away to a boarding school. Which is precisely the way everything played out.

“Now all these years later,” Lola continues, “I receive an email from a man who calls himself Peter. He found my university email address after having heard I was a clinical psychologist who often wrote papers on the subject of ‘the only child.’” Making quotation marks with the fingers on both her hands. “More specifically, ‘the adopted child as the only child.’ He sounded somewhat knowledgeable about the subject, even if only for an amateur, and we emailed back and forth several times. Until one day he asked me how my father was.”

“You found this strange?” Me, posing the question. “A red flag maybe.”

“It just didn’t sound right to me. An engineer whose hobby was clinical psychology revolving around the only child who also happens to be an adopted child, and he wants to know how my father is.” Pausing, collecting her thoughts while the monkeys down below bang on their cages. “It just felt strange when he wrote that to me. ‘How’s your father?’ I felt like I was living in a fishbowl and he was looking at me. But the truth of the matter is that he had found me.”

“He came to me looking for his
father
,” I chime in. “He said his mother . . . his biological mother . . . was dead. Why would he say that?” I shoot a glance at Georgie. Without speaking we both know that I’ve been had. Czech didn’t hire me to find his old man after all. He hired me for a different reason. Something that most definitely had to do with a secret box that I either don’t recall receiving, or that I never received in the first place.

Lola spills more: “He must have said that his mother . . .
me
. . . was dead out of anger, I guess. For me giving him up even if I was only sixteen. I don’t know. Why do these people even seek out the people who rejected them in the first place?”

“Oh come off it, Lola,” Claudia chimes in. “You didn’t reject Peter. Dad did. Dad made you give him up. It’s what Dad wanted.” Then looking at me with that pouty face. “You see Mr. Moonlight, dad had an agenda.”

Georgie slides off the desk.

“Spill, Claudia, spill.”

Lola sits back in her chair. She gazes at her sister who by now is gazing back at her.

“You gonna do the informing, Lo?” Claudia says. “Or shall I enlighten them?”

“Enlighten us with what?” I say.

Coming through the door, the shrill sound of screaming monkeys.

“About how Lola’s son and our father are traitors and enemies of these great United States of America.”

CHAPTER 33

THE MONKEYS ARE REALLY making a racket.

Louder now, and more violent than when we first entered the academic building. I picture wiry, furry bipedal primates lunging at the cages, fangs exposed, fists banging on leathery chests. They sound like they’re about to escape the cages, climb the stairs, and burst through Lola’s door.

Lola notices it too. She stands.

“Something’s not right,” she says, her brown eyes peeled on her half-sister.

“Dad,” Claudia says. “Those stupid-ass Russians. Could be they got in through the basement windows. Or the vent system. Or maybe the maintenance crew left a door open.”

“They know we’re here.” Then at me. “We’ve got to get out of here, Richard. Go. Now. Go.”

“Where exactly shall we go to, Lola, except out this door?”

She turns. There’s a window behind her desk. The big double-hung window is slightly cracked open already.

“Through there.” Then she says, “Kill the lights.”

She pulls back the curtains, unlatches the window.

“Georgie, you first. Richard, you’re next.”

“You go first,” I insist.

“If my father’s men find you they will kill you. But they won’t do anything to us. We’re protected by blood.”

Protected by blood.

Somehow I understand entirely. I’d do anything for my boy. Take a bullet for him.

Georgie opens the window all the way, climbs out into the darkness, inches his way down to the ground. I follow, put one leg through the open window.

“You’re right behind me, Lo, right?”

I purposely ignore Claudia.

“You’ll feel my breath on the back of your neck,” she promises.

I pull the other leg through, jump, hit the ground beside Georgie. The pain flashes through my torso. I have no choice but to swallow it.

Behind me, no Lola.

The window slams closed.

CHAPTER 34

SO THAT’S IT THEN.

Lola has no intention of coming with us.

Lola
and
Claudia.

Standing in the dark behind the Clinical Psychology lab building with Georgie, I know precisely why. If her father discovers we’re all together, then he’ll have no choice but to punish her. Is it possible that the punishment could be so severe that he might kill his own daughter?

Question is, why would he try and punish her?

For revealing that he’s a traitor? An enemy of the United States of America? What precisely does that mean? What does my client, Peter, have to do with it? Other than being the biological son of Lola, the biological grandson of her dad, Harvey Rose?

One thing is for certain: I have uncovered the truth behind my client Peter Czech: He’s a liar and he’s playing me, Captain Head-Case, for the fool. He’s also Lola’s biological son.

I love Lola.

I’ll say it again, I love Lola Ross (or is it Rose?), and even if she is conducting an affair on me, I’m going to protect her and defend her. Because that’s what bleeding hearts and head-cases like me do. That means getting to the bottom of just what Czech and Rose are doing, and how it constitutes their being traitors. It also will explain the importance of a certain box, and why Rose’s men are willing to kill, maim, and torture for it.

I glance over my shoulder at Georgie.

“Well old man, ready to make a run for it?”

“What the fuck,” Georgie says.

“That’s what I say, Georgie: What the fuck?!”

Together, we run away into the black night.

Away from Monkeyland.

CHAPTER 35

WE MAKE IT BACK to Georgie’s place just before the dawn. We’re safe here, or so I try and convince myself. Rose doesn’t know who Georgie is or where he lives. Neither does Czech, or Claudia. And Lola would never divulge the old pathologist’s address to her under any circumstance. At least, that’s what I’m betting on, and it’s probably a good bet. Georgie’s got no credit cards, no telephone, no forwarding address. His mother used to own the house, still owns it on paper, and she’s long dead. In terms of tangible ID, Georgie might as well be just as dead.

Since both our cells are history along with our respective arsenal of two .9 mms and the .22 revolver I strap to my ankle in case of emergencies, I call Czech via a
Skype
account from Georgie’s computer. But all I get when his answering machine picks up is a loud humming sound. The service won’t allow me to leave a message, as though it’s full or not working right. I try his mobile, and I get something even more unsettling: “The caller you have reached is either disconnected or out of service.”

The Peter Czech I know as a client thus far lives by his Blackberry. In a small way, the freedom of modern communications is a direct extension to legs that no longer work. For him not to be connected means that he’s paralyzed in yet another way.

I grab two beers from Georgie’s fridge and hand him one. We settle ourselves in the living room, the curtains on the windows closed, the lights off, the rising sun that filters into the room through the thin drapes casting a red-orange hew on the floor-to-ceiling stacks of vinyl record albums and posters from the 1960s, including a big one of Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon framed upside down.

I sit down hard on the end of the couch, pop three Advil I stole from Georgie’s medicine cabinet, and wash them down with a deep drink of beer.

“OK,” I say, wiping foam from my mouth with the back of my hand. “So here’s the deal. My client is not who he says he is. He’s not looking for his father. Nobody knows who his father is or cares to know. That leaves his mother, whom he most definitely knows and by all indicators, loves. That mother just happens to be my current significant other.”

“Don’t forget Claudia,” Georgie says from his perch at the window, where he’s keeping a watch on the city street outside while rolling a much needed breakfast doobie. With his now trembling hands, it isn’t the easiest of operations.

“I haven’t forgotten Claudia, the nurse who greeted me when I was resurrected just a few days ago. She just happens to be the younger sister of said sig other. Imagine the coincidence.”

Georgie lights the joint, sucks in a big lung-inflating hit. Then he exhales. The room fills with the good smell of medicinal buds. It’s as close as I come to smoking it.

“That same younger sister,” I go on, “is partially responsible for kidnapping us both, but claims to have been able to convince the Russian jerks who killed me once already to spare our lives.”

“She also zapped me a hundred times with a Conair blow dryer,” Georgie adds. “I haven’t forgotten about that shit.”

“Forget about that, Georgie. The bitch wasn’t working, remember? I believe her when she says it was either that or castration.” Taking a swallow of beer. “Lola revealed something about her father and her son being traitors together. Whatever that means.”

“Means they’re working on something highly illegal in the eyes of the good old U-S-of-A. They’re selling secrets probably to the Russians.” He licks the duck-tail end of the joint to seal it. “What the hell else could it mean, Moon?”

Something dawns on me then.

“Czech is an engineer at Knolls Atomic. Rose is your average accountant who used to work for the same feds who used to oversee the Knolls program.”

“You told me Lola described him as an entrepreneur.”

I head back over to Georgie’s laptop, take it with me back to the couch. Since there’s no way in hell the security personnel that guard the grounds of the Knoll’s atomic plant are going to grant us clearance allowing us through the gates, I decide to take the next best approach. Once again, Google.

I type in “Knolls atomic plant.”

Turns out, the secure nuclear facility maintains a flashy website, complete with the operation’s “Mission,” which is none other than providing, and I quote,
“superior nuclear propulsion systems for U.S. Naval ships by designing the world's most technologically advanced, safe and reliable reactor plants and systems, supporting the operating fleet of nuclear ships and training the sailors who operate them.”
End quote.

The nuke joint’s vision?

Again quoting
, “…to increase our value to the Naval Reactors Program by enabling everyone to rapidly and effectively support our nuclear fleet. We see ourselves continuing to provide the advanced technology needed beyond the VIRGINIA class and the innovation needed to take us to the next generation of reactor design. We will do all of this in a physical and peopled environment we are proud of.”
Unquote.

All this propaganda is followed up with slogans that seem lifted from right out of the old USSR Cold War Bible. Slogans like, “Teamwork . . . We Work Better Together!” And, “Loose Lips Will Sink Ships: Be a Patriot! Report all Suspicious Activities to Your Supervisor!”

The rest of the website is all about employment opportunities and military links. There are happy-at-work-in-the-nuke-lab photos of lab geeks, and full-color action shots of our Navy’s submarines diving, or crashing up through the ocean’s surface like big mechanical blue whales.

It’s all very important-looking and it’s all tantalizingly apparent that the secrets harbored behind the electrified fences of the Knolls atomic power plant might indeed be of considerable value to our old Russian friends. And apparently Rose recognized that value so clearly he was blinded by the big bad bright lights and the dollar signs which would surely follow.

I kill the link, turn back to my big brother.

“How much does your average accountant pencil pusher make per year, Georgie?”

He smokes a little more of his medicinal joint, cocks his head in thought.

“Good accountants can pull down one hundred large per year. Even working for the feds. Especially if he moonlights during tax season.”

“Good money for your basic average garden variety Joe. But not for somebody willing to do anything for all the riches in the world.”

“Even if it means selling off your only grandchild . . . Your daughter’s only child.”

“I wonder what kind of pad Rose lives in, and why he’s so difficult to locate on the public meter? Be interesting to find out.”

“We know he can afford to hire a small army of Russian tough guys to rough people up.”

“And he’s also willing to kill to protect what’s his.”

“Like that missing box for instance.”

I close the laptop lid, stand up, down the rest of my beer.

“We need to do some fieldwork, Georgie. We need the contents of that box or container or whatever the hell it is.”

“What kind of container, Moon?”

“I’m banking that we’ll know it when we see it.”

He looks at me.

“We get a hold of it, we hold all the cards.”

“We hold all the cards we have the leverage we need to find out just what Czech and Rose are up to, how they might be traitors, and the identity of the bastards who killed me in order to keep it a secret.”

“And more importantly, Moon?”

“I’m listening.”

“You get to find out how deep your girlfriend is involved in all this crap, and if she really is cheating on you.”

“Oh yeah,” I swallow. “There’s that.”