Moonlight Falls (23 page)

I took a step back.

“By all means,” I offered.

She put in her card, punched in her number.

After a second or two, the machine spit out three fresh twenties. The kid made it look easy.

She retrieved the card and her cash, turned, issued the counter boy an obligatory flirty glance, then exited the store. I could hear the bass bottom booming from her car stereo when she pulled out in a red Dodge Dart that more than likely rolled off the assembly line a good year or two before her birth.

“See,” the kid said. “Machine works good.”

Smart kid.
Speak the English very well.

I decided to give the plastic one more shot.

Same humiliating turndown.

Fuck it
, I said to myself. I pulled out my Amex, popped it in, hit the buttons that would authorize a two-hundred-dollar cash advance.

But the result?

Another turndown.

I tried again and again, was turned down again and again.

By now, the kid behind the counter was growing suspicious.

I could tell because he pulled off his headphones, pushed aside his magazine. He was just staring at me.

He said, “Listen, man, machine just doesn’t like you.”

I turned to him.

“Maybe I should go blond,” I said. “Grow some boobs, get myself a thong.”

It was a joke. The deadpan kid didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.

I glanced at my watch.

Ten minutes till nine. Already I was running way too late.

Oh, well,
I told myself as I departed the Mobile,
Lyons is buying again.

54

THE UNDERCOVER COP SPOKE into her invisible, chest-mounted transmitter.

“Target is in sight, team leader.” With carry-on bag in hand, she moved like just another hurried passenger through the crowded airport terminal. “Awaiting your orders.”

“Sit tight,” answered team-leader Cain. “Wait until target reaches the designated gate. No one is to make a move until that time. Clear?”

“Crystal, team leader.”

“No need to be tenacious formal, Linda. We’re in Stormville. Not TV land.”

“Just trying to do my job, TL.”

“You go with that, girl. Over and out, soldier.”

“Roger and out.”

Setting the carry-on onto a bench, she sat down, set her eyes on the terminal doors. Her heart was beating a-mile-a-New York-minute, just like it did on Friday nights when she curled up to
CSI Miami
.

According to her orders, she awaited the target’s entrance with a vengeance.

55

JUST LIKE THE LAST time, I parked the Mercedes funeral coach in the short-term parking garage across the street from the main terminal building. I unstrapped my shoulder holster, slid it out from under my jacket, stuffed it and the Browning it housed into the glove box.

With the autopsy and Tox report tucked under my left arm, I jogged across the four-lane, one-way access road that spanned the entire half-moon-shaped perimeter of the brick and glass structure. Once across the road I moved on past the nervous couples and families pulling luggage from the trunks of yellow taxis that pulled up along the curb, the even more nervous security guards looking on with a kind of tentative suspicion.

Maybe I was in a hurry, but the whole world seemed to be moving in slow motion.

Everyone but me.

The electronic glass doors split open allowing me access to the wide-open terminal.

I glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the huge multi-television monitor that was broadcasting a panoramic scene of Niagara Falls. New York State tourist propaganda. I shot past the travelers lined up around the adjustable ropes set just a few feet beyond the U.S. Air counter and the very good looking men and women dressed in identical polyester suits who occupied the ticket booths and fed the baggage conveyor belts.

Everyone turned to look at me. The eyes of what appeared to be a thousand people looked me up and down as though only minutes before someone or something had directed them
not
to look at me at all. Tell somebody not to look at someone or something, you can bet it’ll be the first thing they do.

I felt naked, exposed. Enough to make my skin tingle; make it feel like it was about to crawl off my flesh and bones.

I approached the information counter.

My new friend Bea was doing the night shift.

I didn’t have to say word. This time, she just handed me a ticket pouch, as though she had been waiting for me this whole time. Maybe she had. She was wearing her reading glasses even though she wasn’t reading anything. She pulled them off after handing over the ticket.

When I tried to thank her for the ticket, she just lowered her head, peered down at her desk top.

I headed for the escalator.

The escalator seemed to move too slowly.

When I began to feel the badly timed pangs of dizziness setting in, I bounded the metal treads two at a time, until I reached the mezzanine. No choice but to fight it.

Here’s what else I remember: how odd it was that they were all staring at me, not even bothering to hide their eyes. The uniformed men and women stationed at the metal detectors and x-ray conveyor belt units. At first, I just chalked it all up to the new security measures. But there was no denying how exceptionally jumpy they all seemed. I was the only one on line. Which meant that all six of them converged upon me as soon as I emptied my pockets of the car keys and spare change, dropped it all into a plastic basket before passing through the doorway-like detector. But it was a useless effort considering the problem was my head.

The buzzer went off, naturally.

Three men, three women, all of them in their early to mid-thirties. They wore dark blue uniform pants and white short-sleeved shirts. It was like a scene out of
Dumb and Dumber
the way they fell over one another just to make room for this one heavyset woman who gripped a hand-held metal detector. She approached me with the paddle, as if it were a hatchet. She bent over and ran it from the tips of my toes to my face without a problem. But it wasn’t until she waved it over my head that the buzzer exploded again.

“I have this problem,” I said over half a laugh.

A nervous laugh.

Maybe they were staring at me. But not a single one of them would look me in the eye. Not even the puffy-faced woman doing the electronic detecting. As fast as they had jumped all over me—as fast as they discovered the metal in my head—they dispersed just as quickly, pressing their backs up against their detecting machines as if they’d rehearsed it that way.

Maybe it was me or the way my brain perceived things, but the long rectangular corridor that housed every “B” gate from 1 to 15 appeared unusually quiet. Unusually sedate.

Even for small city airport.

Even for nine at night.

There were the occasional pockets of people moving about here and there—people walking past me in both directions along the carpeted floor. But all of them made a point of keeping to the opposite side of the corridor, their shoulders practically pressed up against the walls, not a single one of them attempting so much as a sideways glance in my direction.

I didn’t panic.

What was the point of panic anyway?

It didn’t take the keenest intuition in the world to sense that something was going on. My built-in shit detector told me it was so.

When I picked out Brendan Lyons standing there at the entryway to the Gate B Bar, shoulder to shoulder with Mitch Cain, I knew for sure that I had walked straight into the hornet’s nest. Instinct told me I should about-face as quickly as my feet would allow, select a direct line of retreat which, in this case, was the emergency exit stairwell directly behind me. But the move would be impossible because it took only another second for them to surround me—the plainclothes F.B.I. and uniformed cops who seemed to emerge from out of the woodwork.

They came at me from behind the reception booths and portable counters; came at me in their windbreakers with F.B.I. printed on the back in big yellow letters, handguns aimed at my head. They sprung at me from out of the men’s and ladies’ rooms. They came at me from out behind the Gate B Bar itself.

The entire airport was under siege for one reason only: my apprehension.

Cain had his 9 mm Smith & Wesson drawn. But rather than aim it at some vital portion of my body, he allowed the short barrel to bob against the side of his right knee while he approached me casual as all hell—slate-gray eyes peering into mine, the lips on his hollow cheeks forming just a semblance of a smile that shouted,
I got you now, old partner.

Behind Cain, Lyons just stood there, both his hands stuffed into his pants pockets, not looking at me but averting his eyes, aiming them down at his shoes.

Then from behind, a cop ordered me to hold my hands up high overhead where he could see them.

“Do it now!” he shouted.

A voice I recognized plain enough.

Officer Nicky Joy.

What choice did I have but to raise them slowly, innocently? I hadn’t done anything wrong to deserve all this attention. I raised them carefully so that I didn’t frighten anybody into triggering a dozen rounds into my chest and back, just because it appeared that I might be going for a gun. Which I most definitely was not!

He ordered me to drop down to my knees.

The barrel of Cain’s pistol: I never saw it when I started going down and he whacked me across the head with it, put me down on my face like a rabid dog.

When I came to maybe a couple seconds later, I found myself flat on my stomach.

My wrists were cuffed tight behind my back, the crown of my skull pulsed with pain. My right arm went stone stiff; the digits on my hand, dead.

“You saw him reach for a weapon,” Cain insisted. “Did you not see the suspect reaching for a weapon, Officer Joy?”

Cain’s words sounded distant and hollow, as if they were being spoken through a tube.

It was the same when Joy started telling me to stand, while holding tightly to cuffed wrists behind my back.

“Sure thing, Detective,” Joy said. But his tone lacked conviction. “The suspect appeared to be going for a gun.”

I couldn’t speak.

My skull, my brain, every capillary and vein that ran through it, every single solitary hair that grew from every pore in my skin … how it all throbbed.

Cain in the lead, Joy began escorting me back out past the scanners and the guards who had inspected me, towards the escalators.

“Mr. Richard Divine, you have the right to remain silent,” Cain recited. “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney …”

He went on and on anyway, repeating the words I knew by heart, pushing me while I tried to maintain my balance. Reaching the top of the escalator, a barrage of photographers’ flashes and video spotlights slapped my face, stung my retinas. There was a sea of media crowded along the first floor where all the travelers should have been. But even under the circumstances, I reasoned that they had been ordered to evacuate the premises. Terrorist paranoia. Still, someone had to have tipped off the media for all these reporters to converge at once.

I had been caught up in a sting, plain and simple.

Lyons had been the bait and I was the sorry-ass fish that bought into it hook, line and fucking sinker. By the looks of things, my built-in shit detector was on the fritz along with the rest of my head.

Christ, would I ever learn?

As we stepped onto the escalator, I couldn’t help but view the wall of television monitors to my direct right. That’s when I saw my handcuffed image being escorted down the mobile staircase, Live and Johnny-On-the-Spot!

“I know my rights,” I said to Cain. “I’m an officer of the law.”

“W
ere
an officer,” he said. “Until you sold your soul.”

- - -

The stocky detective stands over me, slams his fist against the table with such force that even his silent partner standing off to the side jumps a mile. He grabs me by the jacket collar, yanks me up into his face.

“You expect me to believe you had no idea about the body parts operation until the day they nabbed your ass at the airport?”

He lets me go.

I fall back into my chair.

“You want me to believe that until Tuesday, May 6, you never once put two and two together? Even after rubber-stamping all those case synopses?”

I shake my head, reach into my chest pocket with a trembling hand for another smoke, pop it into my mouth, fire it up.

“I told you, man, my head,” exhaling the white smoke. “Sometimes my judgment’s not what it should be. My choices get confused. It’s why they won’t let me carry a gun—officially. It’s why they won’t give me my son. Goddamned choices.”

“What choices, Richard?”

“The choice not to ask questions when Cain told me to look the other way; the choice to take his money and run; the choice to keep coming back to the trough for more work when I could have told them to go to hell; the choice to sleep with Scarlet.”

“Yet when Scarlet Montana is found cut up in her own bed, you choose to take the moral stand. It doesn’t add up. Why break the pattern?”

“She deserved more. She was important.”

“So then you can tell the difference, can’t you, Divine?”

“What difference?”

“Between what’s right, what’s wrong.”

“I guess I never looked at it that way.”

Stocky agent takes a step back, stuffs his hands into his pockets, pulls them out again, sets them on his hips.

“You know what I think, Divine?” he says, eyes glancing at his silent partner. “I don’t think you’re nearly the head case you make yourself out to be. Or maybe it’s you who’s playing the head games after all. Maybe you’re the one with something to hide. After all, you were the last to be with her.”

“Jake Montana was the last to be with her.”