Moonlight Falls (35 page)

This sort of electric buzz was overcoming it. As if my brain had been somehow plugged into an outlet. The music, it was just getting started.

“Far as I’m concerned, Divine,” Cain said, “you’re just a one-man wrecking crew. No regard for the sanctity of human life whatsoever.”

“I have this problem with my head,” I said.

“You’re on a death march. Which is why, consciously or not, you went on a killing spree. You couldn’t stand watching all these people around you having a life.”

In my head, the buzz getting louder and louder, the symphony warming up, the crescendo noise ringing in my ears. At the same time, the cacophony was somehow alleviating the pain on the back of my head where Cain had nailed me with the pistol.

Not an electric buzz, but an adrenaline buzz.

I gazed up at him, where he sat on the counter, smoking, his tongue shooting in and out of his mouth snake-like while he talked, the smoke clouding above his head. I took a second look at his black jacket, black pants, black sneakers, and the small Velcro holster wrapped around his right ankle and the .22 revolver it carried. I looked at that black wool skullcap. Not a skullcap at all. A black ski mask.

He went on, “Picture a man standing inside a sixth floor room of an abandoned hotel. At his feet lie the remains of two innocent men, one of them a rookie cop.”

There it was, I thought. He’d somehow discovered Joy’s and the Albino man’s bodies between the time I’d last spoken with him on the cell phone and the time it took him to arrive at the condo. Maybe he’d known all about what went down at the Wellington? Maybe he was fucking with my head? I mean, how was he so sure that I’d even show up here? Lyons … Lyons had to have spilled his guts.

“I know what you’re thinking, old partner,” he continued. “That I’m a liar. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Because in the end, how can you tell what’s real, or just a figment of your imagination? After all, you haven’t been acting in your right mind. You’ve got a bullet in your brain. You’ve been accused of Murder One, with a second count to follow. You attacked those guards transporting you to jail. You were in a terrible fall that landed you in the river. Your powers of recall may be warped because you’re not in complete control of your faculties. Fuck, Divine, for all you know, this whole thing is an illusion.”

The 9 mm back in my right hand, six rounds left over. It was so heavy, I couldn’t begin to lift it off the floor. Was the temporary paralysis an illusion like Cain said?

In front of me, my former partner’s face—the face of a man I once trusted with my life for nearly ten years; a face my son
still
trusted.

“Let’s go further back,” he said. “Picture this same man fucking Scarlet Montana in her bed. Then when it was over, after shoving a whole bunch of drugs and booze down her throat, he runs a blade across her neck in a way that would strongly suggest suicide. Because after all, Scarlet was an unhappy woman. Less than a day later, the man comes up on Jake Montana from behind, cracks the big guy’s skull with a pistol barrel, leaves him lying on the kitchen floor to burn up with the house he torches in order to destroy evidence that will nail him as a calculated murderer.”

My head, vibrating like a gong; my breath coming and going in little short spurts.

But it was then I saw it standing just outside the glass sliding doors.

The solitary figure—the silhouette.

“Picture this same head case sneaking around the back of Nicky Joy’s condominium, slipping into the kitchen by way of the sliding glass doors, pumping two rounds into Lyons’ head.”

I knew then that he must have swapped pistols with me. We carried identical 9 mm Smith & Wessons. He must have cleaned his prints, switched the pieces when I was out cold. He must have made the switch. I was sure of it. Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind all the time. But I knew he made the switch. I didn’t have to see it happen to know it was true.

“Picture the man putting a round into George Robb’s chest just as he entered the dark kitchen. I mean, the poor bastard—the poor innocent pathologist you dragged into this mess.
Your
mess. He must have had no idea what hit him in the dark when you tried to silence him.”

Framed inside the sliding door I could see the figure as he stepped forward. This squat bulldog of a man.

Cain slid down off the counter, approached me, reached down, pulled the 9 mm from my hand.

“So what happens now?” he said. “Do I call in my people, take a chance on having you arrested once more? Do we arrange for a trial, give you the chance to escape again?”

He aimed the pistol not at my face, but at the right-hand side of my head. At my temple. In the same place he got me the first time.

I looked at the floor, saw his ankle and the .22 revolver holstered around it. It might as well have been a mile away from me.

Cain backed up, let out a small laugh as the glass slider slowly opened behind him. In stepped a man, quiet as all hell, Cain not having the slightest clue.

He said, “In the end, I’ll swear that I found you like this. I’ll surmise that you’d gotten tired of all the killing, all the running. In the end you realized how very sick you were. In more ways than one. You were going to die anyway, so why not cheat fate of its one final act?”

He placed the pistol barrel behind my ear, pressed it up against my button-sized scar.

“Come on, Divine, you’ve been here before. You know the routine.”

But as I closed my eyes, I heard it, clear as day.

Dr. Miner’s voice.

“Mitchell Cain,” he said. “Put down the gun.”

That’s when my old partner pulled the pistol back away from my head. He straightened up, looked at Miner, my dad’s buddy standing there in a black rain slicker, baggy khakis, work boots and a round-brimmed fisherman’s hat pulled down tight over a full head of curly white hair. He was sopping wet from head to toe. In his right hand, an old black-plated revolver, like the kind cops used to carry before there was color T.V. He was aiming it at Cain.

“Don’t do this,” Miner said.

Cain turned the 9 mm on the doctor, aimed for his face.

“You have got to be kidding me, old man,” he said.

“Who you calling old?” Miner said, maybe a split second before the blast.

- - -

“Jake Montana and Mitchell Cain decided they had you right where they wanted you—desperate and short of cash.” Stocky agent, pontificating. “They pulled you back in as a part-timer, asked you politely to rubberstamp a few of their open-and-shut cases. They told you the force was understaffed and you believed them. You were a cop. Now they needed you again. But you were different somehow. The bullet fragment had changed you, made you more naive, let’s say. You had difficulty telling the difference between right and wrong sometimes. You already fucked up one major arrest, gotten yourself busted down to forced medical leave. Which made you the perfect candidate for Cain’s operation. But even after willingly completing false document after false document, you make matters worse by getting in bed with the Police Captain’s wife.”

“It all seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” I say.

“You realize what I can do now?” the agent says, eyes peering not at me but at his silent partner. “I can book you on multiple counts of conspiracy to falsify police reports, plus multiple counts in the complicity to commit the illegal harvesting and sale of organs and body parts. Not to mention fraud and grand larceny. Then there’s all those murders, all that carnage. People connected directly to you.”

I pull the pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket, set them on the table.

“Let me guess,” I say. “You’ll book me unless I give you something else.”

“You want your only child to know that his father is going to spend eternity in hell? Or would you rather he learned his lesson, repented, did the right thing for a change?”

“You want me to finish the story, is that it?”

Stocky agent leans up, gets right in my face. Nose tip to nose tip.

He says, “You and Dr. Miner fled the scene at Joy’s condo. Stormville was still looking at you as an escaped murderer. What’d you do next?”

“Well, I did exactly what I should have done when I collected the bodies of evidence in the first place. I turned myself in.” Sliding a smoke from the pack. “But before all that, Miner insisted that we get our story straight, before we threw ourselves at the mercy of the court.”

“I thought Miner already had his story straight?”

“Like everybody else, he changed his mind. He refined his theory about Scarlet’s death based upon some new evidence. Only instead of going from suicide to murder, he switched from murder to something completely different.”

“The plot heats up.”

“The plot swelters.”

87

AS SOON AS THE single round hit him, Cain fell backwards, what was left of his head smacking against the bloody linoleum. The .38 caliber bullet had pierced his right eye. It told me he was already on his way to hell before he hit the floor.

I was still sitting on the floor not three feet away from him, back pressed up the refrigerator door when Dr. Miner handed me the revolver. He bent down, checked Lyons’ pulse, shook his head almost sadly. But when he came to George, he looked up at me with those piercing blue eyes.

It was a good look.

He said, “This one’s still alive.”

He then pulled a white hanky from his back pocket, wrapped it around his hand. He picked up the phone, dialed 911, told the dispatcher to hurry with an ambulance. Then he gave them the address. He hung up without giving them his name.

Next he grabbed the .38 back out of my hand and stuffed it into his pants pocket. Then he did something both strange and grotesque. Careful to step over the bodies and the blood, he reached down, stuck his fingers into the palm-sized section of Cain’s blown away skullcap. He dug around the brains for what seemed like a full minute until he stood up with what he wanted.

From where I was seated I could see it in his hand—a blunted cylindrical lump of .38 caliber slug. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. With that hanky once more wrapped around his hand, he pulled the 9 mm from Cain’s death grip and blew another round into the eye socket entry wound where the .38 had pierced it minutes before. The deed done, he replaced the piece back into Cain’s hand, only this time positioning the pistol barrel towards the dead man’s face, the right-hand thumb pressed against the trigger.

I sat there staring at him for a minute—the man who became my ex-wife’s husband, the stepfather to my kid.

Miner asked me if I was okay.

It was impossible to answer.

He stood there beside me for a beat, maybe two. He said nothing at first. Until he offered me his hand, told me it was time to get the hell out of there.

“How’s the gout, old man?” I asked as he wrenched my broken body up off the floor.

“Not nearly as bad as your headache,” he said. “And you just saw what happened to the last jerk who called me
old man
.”

This time I laughed despite the pain.

By the time we made it back out the sliding glass doors, we could already hear the sirens.

88

THE TEMPORARY PARALYSIS IN my right arm was just that.

Still, it required a maximum effort to follow Miner in his blue Volvo to a 7-Eleven located about a half mile up the road. Pulling into the lot, he parked it behind the dumpster. After grabbing a crowbar from out of his trunk, he told me to scoot over while he took the wheel of the El Camino—gout be damned. Six cop cars, a fire engine and an E.M.S. van blew by the store. They appeared to have no clue about us.

So we hoped.

Knowing that the dry ice might not be enough to keep the Montana bodies from decomposing beyond the point of viable physical evidence (Ryan was
sealed
in his casket), Miner bought up a whole lot of ice and packed the bodies well. To my surprise, he also bought up a handful of Snickers candy bars. We then drove across town to the banks of the Hudson River where he got out, hobbled over to the concrete dike wall and tossed the .38 revolver into the drink. From there we proceeded to the last place I thought we’d ever go.

My house on Hope Lane.

With a crowbar in hand, Miner led me around to the back door off the kitchen, where he pried off the lock-box the cops had installed some days before. He then jimmied the door lock and we were in.

In a word, the place was a wreck. The cops had ransacked it. Not a single drawer hadn’t been pulled out of the kitchen counters and overturned—spoons, knives and broken plates strewn about the floor. It was the same story with every room in the house. Just what the fuck could they have been looking for, I had no idea.

Ordering me to sit down, Miner packed a plastic sandwich bag with ice, told me to keep it pressed against the back of my head.

“Where do you keep your painkillers?” he asked.

“Codeine?” I said.

“Codeine will put you to sleep, son. Advil or aspirin.”

I told him he could find a bottle of what he was looking for in the cabinet above the lazy Susan, directly beside the prescription codeine.

He set the Advil on the table along with a glass of water. I swallowed two tablets while he went back out to his car, came back in with an old black leather bag. The same kind of leather bag doctors used to carry with them when they still made house calls. Opening it, he pulled out a blood pressure kit and another instrument that he said would measure my blood sugar levels.

“I thought you were a toxicologist?” I said.

He said, “I’m an M.D. first. Any more questions?”

I didn’t dare.

His examination completed, he put the stuff back into the leather bag. Stepping away from the table, he opened the refrigerator.

“Just what I thought,” he said.

I turned, gazed into the empty fridge. Well, not empty exactly. There was some beer in there, and some French’s mustard.

He asked, “When was the last time you ate a proper meal?”

I looked Norman in the eye.

I said, “I’m gonna plead the Fifth on that.”