Blue Moonlight (23 page)

When we’re finally away from the station, Lola exhales in relief. “My God,” she whispers. “We did it. We got away from them.”

I squeeze her hand to reassure her. To let her know that I still love her. No matter what.

The car door slides open then, and Barter steps on through.

No time to hide.

I manage to draw my automatic just a split second before Barter, get the jump on him as Clyne steps into the car behind him. Pistol poised before me, I slide out of my seat, stand foursquare in the narrow aisle.

The black man seated four rows up from me is wearing headphones. His eyes go wide when he sees the gun. The middle-aged woman seated in the row behind him, only a few feet away from where Barter is standing, gets a look at my gun and screams.

Barter’s wearing a waist-length black leather coat not unlike my own. He assumes a sly smile, starts sliding his shooting hand into its interior.

“Don’t,” I say, voice low, as even-keeled as possible. Then, focusing my eyes on both the black man and the woman seated behind him. “Go.
Vi.
Go. Leave!” They don’t wait for me to ask a second time. They stand and exit the car without their bags, squeezing past Barter and Clyne as they do it.

The four of us are alone in the car. Beneath us the train sways along the tracks as it works up toward high-speed. Outside the window, quick visual snippets of the lush, lamp-lit Tuscan countryside. You can’t see them in the dark, but I
know that beyond the light are rolling green hills and pastoral landscapes filled with vineyards and fields of olive and fig trees ripe for the picking. You can see why people spend big bucks to spend time here. It’s peaceful, serene, and as far removed from death as one place can possibly get on this earth. Except for me and Lola and the men facing my black gun barrel at the other end of the car, that is.

I thumb back the hammer on the automatic.

“Hands,” I say. “The ceiling…both of you.”

Reaching into my pocket with my free hand, I hand Lola the .22 revolver. It’s not loaded, but they don’t know that. “Hold this on Clyne’s big fat face while I relieve them of their guns,” I say.

I can’t see her face, but somehow, I feel Lola smiling. “Happy to help out,” she says.

I work my way up the aisle until I’m so close to Barter that I can smell the rain drying on his leather. I reach into his coat and pull out his automatic. Then I belt him over the head with it. He drops down into the empty seat directly beside him.

I take Clyne’s weapon from him.

“There’s no need to hit me,” Clyne interjects. “I’ll behave.”

I give his suggestion some serious consideration and decide not to whack him.

“I believe you fucking will behave, Clyne,” I agree, storing both of the weapons in my coat pocket.

“You have my flash drive,” he adds. “I’d like it back.”

“Not a chance.”

“What can you possibly gain by having it?”

“Maybe I want the chance to sell it.”

He smiles. “Not you, Moonlight,” he says. “I pegged you for a bleeding heart right off the bat. You make a lot of wrong
choices and decisions, but you wouldn’t ever purposely do something wrong. Not something that would perhaps upset your position with God.”

“You believe in heaven and hell, Clyne?”

He nods.

“Really,” I say. “Interesting. So do I. I know firsthand what heaven looks like because I’ve been there.”

He taps his temple in the spot where my botched suicide’s scar protrudes from my skull. “Seems to me you’ve been to hell too,” he says, that smile growing wider.

I picture myself seated at my kitchen table, a pistol barrel pressed up against my temple.

“Hell is where you find it,” I say.

“Ain’t that the truth,” he says.

Commotion.

Coming from the opposite end of the car, in the space between the engine and the car where the toilet and additional storage is located.

“It’s the ticket taker,” Lola says.

I’m thinking, the ticket taker must have been inside the engine with the conductor. They are still called conductors, right? My gun still planted on Clyne, I quickly shoot a glance over my right shoulder toward the other end of the car. The uniformed man is standing inside the space, talking with someone on his radio. I know it’s only a second or two before he enters the car and asks for our tickets.

I pocket my weapon along with the other two guns and tell Clyne to sit down beside his partner. “Just pretend he’s asleep,” I tell him.

“Sure thing, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, not without a sly smile. “A man knows when he’s beaten.”

“Funny, Clyne,” I say, backing to the other end of the car, next to Lola. I take her hand. “Forgot how funny you are. But I also know you don’t want to go to Italian prison. That ticket taker recognizes you, you’re done.”

“Why not just tell the ticket taker who I am and be done with it?”

“Maybe I will,” I fib, pulling Lola with me back up the car to them, slipping with her into the two seats one row up and across from theirs, keeping my pistol aimed at them at all times via the right-hand pocket on my leather jacket. “Just sit still and maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

The door slides open.

“
Billeto,
” says the small, mustached man to Lola and me.

I see Barter stir, coming to. There’s a fresh pinky-finger-sized gash in his forehead.

I hand the tickets to the ticket taker. He checks to make sure they’re validated and pokes holes in them with his hole puncher.

I turn to Lola.

“Get up,” I say.

She does. I take hold of her hand and pull her back out into the aisle. We hustle rudely past the ticket taker, as he now hovers over Clyne and Barter. He issues a grunt like,
Fucking American tourists
.

I slap the wall-mounted door opener behind him. When it slides open, we slip out of the car and begin barreling our way car to car, to the opposite end of the high-speed train.

“Why didn’t you tell the ticket man?” Lola says from behind me as we switch cars. “This could be all over right now.”

I’m listening to Lola’s words, but I’m also looking out for the two people I chased out of the car. The black man and old woman who either are too frightened to alert authorities or have by now done so and it’s only matter of time until this thing is all blown to hell.

“The little man carries a ticket punch, not a hand cannon, Lo. What’s he gonna do, arrest them? Hold them at bay with the ticket punch? Take them into custody for us? Besides, you really wanna open up that can of worms?”

“Beats risking our lives.”

“Say ticket guy calls in the Italian lancers, we give those two jerks up. We risk not only giving up the flash drive, but the both of us will be detained for who knows how long. It’s not my business to have them arrested. My business is the flash drive and you. That’s where it ends.”

We keep moving through the brightly lit cars in the center of the train, keeping an eye out all the time for the passengers who fled, or the police or railroad security they might’ve beckoned. Then I feel the train slowing down. We’re making our first stop along the route.

“Let’s move to the coupling,” I say to Lola.

She follows me through the sliding door to the cramped space between cars. There’s no one else standing there. Peering through the glass doors, I see passengers getting off at the stop. Locals mostly, going home from work in Florence. But then I catch sight of two people being forced off the train by two uniformed men. They are railroad security. Ticket man’s cavalry!

It’s Barter and Clyne, and they are illuminated in a wide arc of sodium lamplight. Railroad security have their weapons drawn. No doubt they patted down the two amigos for weapons, but they wouldn’t have found any since I’m carrying them in my coat pocket. I also realize it’s possible that if the two people I chased out of the car earlier have alerted security about me and my gun, Clyne and Barter are likely taking the rap for it now. Maybe they witnessed only one man with a gun, but that doesn’t mean that man didn’t have an accomplice traveling with him.

Peering out the window at Barter and Clyne.

They’re both arguing with the security guards, and one more man who has joined them. It’s the little mustached ticket taker. He’s holding up their two paper stubs. I don’t need to hear what they’re arguing about to know that they’re being kicked off the train for not having validated their tickets and possibly for being suspected of brandishing a weapon or weapons.

Barter is holding a hankie to his head where I pistol-whipped it.

Clyne is trying not to look obvious as he scans the windows of the train cars for Lola and me. When a police car pulls up with its rooftop lights going outside the station and two
polizia
emerge and approach the two wanted men, I feel my body
become lighter than air. My theories on why the two amigos have been kicked off the train are both right and wrong.

“They’re being arrested,” Lola observes. “All the time we’ve spent here. All this waiting. All this misery and risk. And it’s not having validated tickets that gets them.”

“Not paying attention to the little details,” I say. “It’ll get you every time. But that’s not why they’re being arrested.”

“Confusion fills my head,” she says.

“Not having validated tickets got them noticed by the ticket taker, but that’s when their faces gave them away.”

She nods, smiles. “He recognized them, didn’t he?”

I nod.

“Interpol must have sent out alerts ages ago to be on the lookout for the two men and possibly even for you, which means that if that ticket taker and security get back on the train, I want you hiding your face for the rest of the journey.”

She grabs hold of my hand, squeezes, like she’s trying to tell me I can count on her.

The train starts moving again.

Slowly we make our way to where Barter and Clyne are being handcuffed by the police officers. As we pass, I catch both their sets of wide, angry eyes. I see Barter’s narrow gash, swelled and stained with fresh blood. Smile painted on my face, I pull one of the two plastic baggies containing a flash drive from the coat pocket that doesn’t house the weapons, waving it at them as we pass.

Arrivederci
and fuck you too.

Lola and I land at JFK International later the next afternoon after managing to grab the last two available seats on a Delta flight leaving Pisa in the late morning. We slept almost the entire way, not saying much of anything to one another, mostly not wanting to confront the subject of “us” while crossing over the Atlantic.

Funny, but not once throughout the mostly bumpy flight was I concerned about crashing and burning. It was as if the presence of Lola back in my life, even if only a physical presence, seemed to suck the fear right out of me. Or maybe my sudden mastery over my fear of flying had more to do with being out of range of the numerous criminals who wanted to see me dead. They say flying is safer than crossing the street. Statistically speaking. But then, people do die while crossing the street. Even a quiet neighborhood street. It’s just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As Lola and I flew through a crystal-blue sky over an ocean of snow-white clouds, I knew that we were both two people caught up in love at the wrong time. That wrongness nearly cost us our lives.