Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) (14 page)

CHAPTER 44

LOLA LIVES IN AN apartment in North Albany that belongs to a much larger complex called Dutch Village. A series of three- and four-storied Dutch revival brick buildings constructed during World War II that look more like the dormitories for an Ivy League university than an apartment complex. I have a key to her place on my small key ring. I let us in the front door to the building, head down the steps to her bottom floor terrace apartment.

Her door is wide open.

Like my built-in shit detector has already warned, the place is trashed, no stone left unturned; no decoration, furniture piece, or eating implement not shattered or broken. As if a smashed antique ladder-back chair was going to suddenly reveal the contents of some secret box.

Fucking Russians.

Automatics out and poised for battle, Georgie and I already know that danger no longer lurks in the five-room apartment. That the danger has come, trashed the joint, and fled.

Empty-handed.

I know that if Rose is desperate enough to kidnap his own daughter, the mother of the son he sold off for profit, then her life might be as good as dead.

“You feel the need to search the place?” Georgie begs.

I lower my weapon, thumb scratching the safety.

“Negative!” I head out the door. Then, “I say let’s just cut to the chase.”

We rush back out to the Beetle. I open the driver’s side door, push the pistol barrel up against the Russian’s temple. He starts to heave and kick. Georgie goes for his stun gun.

“No!” I shout.

I cock back the pistol hammer, just so the goon can hear how close he is to blood and pain and panic. Then I reach down with my free hand, tear the duct tape off his mouth.

He spits foamy saliva and mucous.

I slap him with the barrel. On the right ear lobe where it hurts the most.

“Mother . . .
fucker
!” he barks. Russian accent.

I slap him again because I can.

“Keep moving like that, Boris, and I’ll shoot you. Call me names again, and I’ll shoot you. If you don’t tell me where Rose is keeping Lola Ross, I will shoot you. Do we have an understanding, Boris?”

“Go to devil, little man!” He’s grinding his teeth, feet kicking at the interior sidewall, making the whole ride rock ’n roll.

“It’s
go to hell
, Boris. That could be your name right? Boris? It’s a possibility with you being Russian and all?”

I press the bad-ass end of the pistol barrel tight against his left knee.

“Boris, I need you to hold still for just one moment.”

He obeys.

I pop one off.

An explosion. Instantly followed by bone and blood spatter and one former Soviet kneecap that’s all but evaporated. All except a little piece of pink tendon that’s hanging outside skin and torn trousers.

The goon doesn’t scream. He just makes a yelp like a dog and then he starts sobbing. I didn’t think Russian goons cried.

“Lola Ross. Her Location. Give it to me now, or head back to the motherland in a wheelchair just like Peter Czech’s.”

He keeps on sobbing. I aim for the other knee, pull back on the hammer.

“Rose, he is dead, yes!?” he cries.

“How can he be dead?”

“He is dead dog. He does not
existing
anymore.”

I push the black barrel against his new wound. He yelps again, begs for me to stop. I pull back.

“Tell me he’s not really dead. Tell me, Boris.”

“Nyet! Not really dead, yes?”

“Which is it Boris?”

“His heart. It beats. His eyes. They see. His lungs. They breathe the air. But officially speaking, he is very, very, very fucking dead.”

That explains the county record. It lists a one Harvey Rose as dead. How he pulled that one off, I’ll never know. But then money talks. Russian money. Mob money. Or maybe Russian government money. Putin money.

“Where does the dead Rose actually live?”

More crying, more yelping.

I tap the wound with the barrel.

He screams.

Outside the car Georgie stands his ground, surveying the surrounding parking lot for cops or interested bystanders. Thus far we’re in the clear. This won’t take much longer in any case. No matter which way things turn out for this Russian goon.

“Mister Rose . . . he lives in the Montgomery Ward building, yes? Down in the North Albany. How you call it?
Men-Yands-Land
.”

“That old abandoned white elephant at the bottom of the North Albany hill,” I say. “It’s Menands . . . The Village of Menands, founded in 1874 by Louis Menands who was born in Paris and immigrated to Albany in his thirties in search of freedom and the American dream. You got that, Boris? He didn’t immigrate to Russia. He came
here
to the good old U-S-of-fuckin’-A. And nobody lives in the Montgomery Ward building. It’s a rat-infested ruin. Been abandoned for years, bro.”

“That’s because it is locked up tighter than gulag. Believe it. He lives there, yes? Up in white tower.”

“The tower. And that’s where we’ll find Lola?”

“Da.”

“She’s alive?”

“She’s his fucking daughter, man. Mister Rose, he does not kill his fucking own daughter.”

“Not yet,” Georgie snorts from outside the Beetle. “But he did order her apartment trashed.”

I make like I’m about to pistol whap the knee wound again.

“She is alive, alive, alive! Rose, he is convinced she could be person hiding something and he, poppa . . . he wants it back, yes?”

“The box. Rose wants the box.”

He looks up at me, eyes slanty, forehead scrunched and furrowed in pain.

“What . . . fucking . . . box?”

Aiming for the second knee.

“I am serious man here, dude. I am on soil that is foreign, dude. What . . . fucking . . . box is it you speak of?”

“The box you guys are convinced Peter Czech handed over to me while I was still in the hospital. The one you and those other Russian porno-meat, Obama-masked-wearing monsters killed me for.”

“Not one ever mention
box
to me.”

“So I’m hearing things, Boris?”

That’s when the injured, crying thug does something completely out of character for some poor bastard with his right knee freshly shot off. He begins to laugh. Despite the pain and the blood. Despite the fact that if and when he ever walks a straight line again he will display a permanent limp.

“Not box!” he spits, choking on his laughs, even though what’s left of his knee is hanging down on his shin. “Not box, not box. But
flash
box. What you call a flash drive or
zeeepy-zip-zip
drive.”

I pull the gun away.

I’ll be dipped.

I heard wrong. Those synthesizers the Russian Obamas pressed up against their throats distorted the words they pronounced. No wonder I have no recollection of a box or a shoebox or a big cardboard kind of box. What they’re after are computer files and no doubt they must have been stored on some flash or zip drive that has to belong to Peter Czech.

Makes sense.

A flash drive is a small, little, rectangular box-like device after all. These Russian goons were literally lost in translation when they were torturing me for a “
fleshy
or
zippy
box.”

“Tape him up again, Georgie,” I say.

My big brother immediately goes to work on it.

I hop in the shotgun seat, pistol still aimed at the goon.

“Montgomery Ward building, Georgie. Boris is going to lead us directly to Harvey Rose. The dead one who’s alive and holding my girl.”

“It’s full light still,” he points out.

“Head to Moonlight’s first,” I agree. “Drive around back and pull up beside the dumpster. We’ll hold up there until nightfall.”

“It’s almost ten in the morning,” Georgie points out. “I could use a cold one right about now.”

CHAPTER 45

I CLOSE UP MOONLIGHTS soon as we get inside, lock the doors after sending my senior-in-college bartender home with a full day’s pay stuffed inside his jean’s pocket. No one’s busying himself with drinking his way through a fine fall morning other than Uncle Leo anyway. For his troubles, I send the Korean War Vet home with a large to-go cup full of rum and coke.

Free of charge.

Georgie and I take turns looking in on Boris who, by now, is passing in and out of consciousness. Georgie’s worried that he’ll bleed out all over the rehabbed Beetle before he can become of use, so he decides to suture him up as best he can using the small sewing needle and biodegradable thread from the First Aid kit mounted to the bar back. He also gives the goon a bottle of water.

Sitting back down at the same table where I first sat down with a wheelchair-bound Peter Czech, I crack open a beer a piece for us, while Georgie pulls the much-needed half-smoked medicinal joint from the pocket on his leather, and fires it up.

Breathing in the pot, he sits back, exhales, much like a cigar-smoking, brandy-snifting aficionado would do.

“Is it possible to make any kind of sense out of this mess, Georgie?” I pose.

“It ain’t all that hard, little bro. It’s simple greed that’s ruling the day. Go figure.”

I look down at my watch.

“I’m all ears, and we have four hours to kill.”

He inhales some of the pot, holds it inside his lungs, like the process helps him to think. And it does.

“Well,” he exhales after a time, “let’s take a good look at the players. First up, Peter Czech. He’s the nuclear engineer son of a bitch who got you into this mess. He comes here looking for you to find his father. Tells you his mother is dead, leads you to believe that his grandfather is actually his father. Should be a simple enough operation for you ‘cause all you gotta do is look up his name on the computer. But when nothing comes up that makes sense, you understand why the guy hired you in the first place. There’s more than one Harvey Rose in Albany, one or two of them CPAs even, but not the one you want. The one who’s listed as dead by Albany County it turns out, is the
live
one you want.”

“Yeah, turns out that in fact, our Rose doesn’t exist anymore,” I interject, finishing with a swig of beer. “Officially speaking.”

“Precisely,” Georgie agrees. “Rose is supposed to be dead and buried and forgotten. But instead, he’s just allowed himself to disappear from humankind, choosing instead to hole himself up in an abandoned fortress. In the meantime, there’s three or four big assholes in Obama masks hiding their true Ruskie voices with electronic cancer boxes who want you to stay away from Czech bad enough they practically beat you to death.”

“They
did
beat me to death. I died, remember?”

“Just getting to that. You died and experienced a supposed out-of-body experience—”

“—Not supposed.”

Rolling his baby blue eyes.

“And let’s not forget your very
real
out-of-body experience. Happy?”

“Yup, the subplot to this train wreck.”

“During the O.B.E. you see your longtime girlfriend Lola standing by your deathbed along with some young man whom you cannot identify. But what you do recognize is how she’s practically making out with Some Young Guy over your still-warm body. Is the vision real? Or is it just a figment of a dying and already bullet-damaged brain?”

We both drink some beer while Georgie finishes up his joint, pockets what’s left of the roach.

“So what happens next: The Obamas pay you another visit, this time in the hospital where you’re recuperating from your wounds. They fuck with your staples using a scalpel and torture your ass. They want to know where a certain box is.”

“But it isn’t a real box they’re looking for. In the traditional Anglo-Saxon sense of the cardboard box, that is.”

“No, it isn’t. That’s because you misunderstood them due to those synthesizers and their whacked up translation of ‘flash drive.’”

“Can you blame me?”

I drink some more beer. It tastes good and it’s calming me down. But I know I have to limit myself to only one or two. Reflexes ain’t what they used to be. And I’m finding it harder and harder these days to stay alive. But then I’m finding it just as hard to die too.

“By then you know you have to split the hospital or the Obamas will come back and kill you if necessary in order to find that flash drive. You and Lola come to me. We stake out Czech’s place and get caught in the act, by guess who, the Obamas. We get tortured with an unplugged Conair blow dryer of all things, by the same woman who was your nurse in Albany Med, who also just happens to be the little sister of your significant other. You following me here?”

“Yeah, I’ve been with you the whole way. I lived it, remember?”

“We find out Rose and Czech actually are closer than your client led you to believe and in fact, are the 21
^st
century version of the Rosenbergs.” He makes quotation marks with the fingers on both his hands when he says,
Rosenbergs
.

“Bottom line,” I say. “In your humble pathological opinion.”

“Bottom line?” he says, stealing a quick sip of beer. “Czech has been an employee of the Knolls atomic plant since he first got out of engineering school. Rose purposely organized a sale to Russian foster parents.”

I feel the tingle in my stomach. It tells me I know where Georgie is going with this before he gets there.

“Rose is a spy, and has been one since the Cold War. He’s been using his biological grandson to sell secrets to the Russians.”

My big brother smiles, drinks some more beer.

“Rose must have been selling secrets for decades,” he goes on. “He was a federal government accountant assigned to audit the Knolls atomic books. Dude must know precisely what a nuke reactor costs, where to get one, and exactly what stores sell them. And it ain’t Amazon-dot-com or Lowes.

“So here’s what I’m thinking: When his daughter got pregnant, he used it to his advantage. What a hell of a way to expand the operation. Acquire a grandson, bring him up essentially Russian in an American world. Hope to hell he’s got talent for engineering, and hope to hell he can work his way into the nuke plant where it so happens his adoptive father works, and which his secret grandfather has been monitoring for ages on behalf of the Feds. It’s of course a risk all the way around. But what does Rose have to lose? Not a thing. He’s already got a foothold in the Russian spy business. He’s looking for longevity; a continuation program to keep the family business growing and thriving.

“It might have been a no-brainer for Czech. That is, so long as old man Rose was paying him and his foster parents the whole time. Or maybe Czech had no choice but to toe the red line, or face something dreadful. Like his own death or the death of his adoptive parents.”

“Czech told me his biological mother died of cancer,” I interject. “But he also told me both his foster parents died in an automobile accident.”

“Look into it further,” insists Georgie, “and I can bet that car wreck was more than just an accident. Could be that Czech wanted out. Especially after his own accident and resulting paralysis. But Rose wouldn’t let him get out. And he proved how serious he was by killing the foster mother and father, made it look like an accident.”

We both chew on that one for a while.

“So why now?” I chime in after a beat. “Why does Czech come to me with some crazy story about finding his father who’s really his grandfather?”

“Like I said, he wants to expose Rose for who he is.”

“But in doing so he’ll expose himself.”

“Risk he’s willing to take.”

“Why?”

Georgie, shrugging narrow shoulders.

“Maybe he wants to protect Lola, his mother. Maybe he wants to protect his surviving biological father. Maybe he wants something else from Rose and he’s willing to expose him in order to get at it.”

We both look at one another. Despite the rundown of factual events, and some pretty good guesses, we’re empty of real answers. But . . .

“We just might find out in a few hours just what Czech wants from his partner and grandfather,” I suggest.

“I suspect we will, Moon. And let’s hope that Lola is no worse the wear for her son’s newfound cause.”

“A mother’s love for her son. It supersedes everything. Even federal and state law.”

“And good old common sense.”

My stomach drops at the thought of Lola being harmed and also at the thought of her having a son and a father like Rose and never revealing it to me. Then there’s the question of her being disloyal to me. It’s all too much to handle in one sitting. I drink down my beer, grab another from the cooler behind the bar.

Standing, Georgie drinks down the rest of his beer, sets the empty on the table.

“Gonna check on our injured Boris,” he informs. “He is a guest in our country after all.”

“Sorry about the blood all over your Beetle.”

“Don’t worry. Got friends who can clean that stuff up.” He smiles. “Gonna cost you though.”

“Put it on my tab,” I insist.

“Getting to be a huge tab,” he says, walking out the back door.