Blue Moonlight (27 page)

When I come to, there’s sunlight shining on my face and the smell of acrid smoke filling my nostrils from a tire that’s on fire not far from my head. I slowly come to realize that the Bronco has been split in two, as if a giant hand had picked the vehicle up and torn it in half like a white business envelope instead of two tons of metal, glass, and plastic.

I see that Boris is still strapped into his seat, the steering wheel impaled into his chest. His eyes are wide open. Staring down all eternity. Staring into the seventh level of violent hell.

I drag myself from the wreckage and crawl along the road the few feet to where the back half of the Bronco is located. Beyond it, Lola is lying on the road, having been ejected from what’s left of the back portion. She’s not moving. She’s staring straight up at the bright sky, a trickle of blood running down her right cheek from out of her left eye.

I crawl toward her, trying to say her name. But I’m not able to make any words. My throat feels as if it’s on fire, my lungs filled with concrete. At last I’m able to reach out and touch her left foot—but that’s when a hand grabs my jacket collar and yanks me onto my back.

Mr. Personality is looking down on me.

There’s a small laceration in the center of his forehead. Or maybe a hole, since a combination of blood and clear fluid is leaking from it. I squint to get a good look and decide that if I could stick my index finger inside it, I would touch his brains. He doesn’t seem the least bit affected by the injury when he raises up his gloved fist, brings it down hard onto my mouth. He rears back and punches me again, the back of my head slapping against the pavement. I’m seeing flashes of blackness, and I sense I’m going to pass out again if I don’t try to move myself.

When he cocks back his fist for another punch, I suck in a blood-tinged breath and roll out from under him. His fist slams the ground, causing him to shriek. I find a piece of metal, some shattered length of tough rod, lying a few feet from me. I snatch it up and jam it into the side of his neck. He stops screaming then. For a moment he goes perfectly still, like the rod sticking out of his neck isn’t hurting him but empowering him all the more. Reaching into his leather jacket, he pulls out a knife handle and thumbs the switch that produces a blade.

“Moonlight dies now,
da
?”

He says it like he’s offering me a hot cup of coffee.

Raising up the blade with both hands gripped around the hilt, he’s about to thrust it into my heart when the little hole in his forehead expands and explodes, taking the back of his cranial cap along with it.

Mr. Personality falls dead on top of me.

I don’t stop to ponder the mystery of his spontaneously exploding head. I push his deadweight body off me and go to Lola.

By now I’m aware of the sirens and the uniformed police surrounding the site of the crash. But I don’t care about that. I need to get to Lola.

I manage to get up on my hands and knees. I go to her.

She’s still lying on her back. She hasn’t moved an inch since I first laid eyes on her after the crash a few moments ago.

“Lola,” I say, kneeling over her. “Lo, can you hear me?”

But she’s not responding.

I place my left cheek over her mouth and I don’t feel warm air coming from her lungs. She’s not breathing.

I straighten up my back, press the heels of both palms against her sternum, press down hard. I do this two or three times, until I reposition my face over hers and lock onto her mouth, forcing air into her lungs. Then I move back to her sternum, which I begin to punch as hard as I can, trying to shock the heart. Trying to make it alive again. Trying to bring Lola back.

Until I hear a voice from behind me say, “She’s gone, Mr. Moonlight. I’m so very sorry.”

I stop punching, and I feel the tears fill my eyes. The tears cloud Lola’s face. They run into my mouth. I want to speak to her, say something, but I can’t say anything. I can’t make the words to tell her how much I love her and how sorry I am for everything.

A hand on my shoulder.

“Take a moment, Richard,” says the soft voice of Agent Crockett.

I feel the air leave my lungs and my throat constrict. I feel my heart pounding in my chest, and it takes on an unbearably heavy weight.

Leaning into Lola, I close both her brown eyes with a trembling hand, then kiss both lids. I place my lips to her face and I taste the blood that stains it. Then I press my mouth against hers. For what will be the last time on this earth, I embrace her lips with a kiss.

A cold breath escapes my lungs. I wipe away my tears with the back of my hand. I force myself onto my knees, and then onto my feet. I steal one last glance at Lola. At her body. At her face. At her memory. Turning away from my one true love, I begin to make my way toward the sounds of sirens and the vision of flashing lights.

I feel nothing.

I’m sitting in the backseat of Agent Crockett’s ride. She’s in the front passenger seat, her entire body shivering like she’s freezing to death in sunny, seventy-plus-degree weather. Indian summer. I’m smoking a cigarette while she sips from a cup of hot tea to which she’s added a shot of brandy from an emergency fifth she stores in the glove box of the big black suburban. From what she’s told me, it comes in handy when she has to discharge her weapon at a live human being, like she did when she fatally shot Mr. Personality.

“How many people have you killed?” I ask her after a time.

“Including our Russian friend?” she answers. “Three. And each of the other two gave me the shakes for hours afterward. So we’ll just sit, if you don’t mind.”

I stare out the window onto the scene. The crushed Bronco, the three bodies covered with rubber sheets, the disabled semi. Its blue-jeaned operator is being interviewed by both the cops and a guy in a suit who arrived on the scene in a car with the word
“
Progressive
”
painted on the side panel.

“I’ve killed more than I can count,” I say after a pregnant beat. “At the time, I thought they deserved it. But I’m not so sure anymore.”

“If they were going to kill you first, you had no choice.”

I nod, smoke. “Maybe,” I say, exhaling a stream of blue smoke. “I nearly killed myself once, and I’m still here. I let myself live.”

I follow up with a laugh. But there’s nothing funny in this. I believe in heaven and I believe in a hell. I’ve seen myself in hell in my dreams and I just can’t shake the image.

“That’s the important thing,” Crockett softly speaks. “That you lived. And you’ve done good things, Mr. Moonlight. You’ve saved lives.”

I glance at the body bags.

“And killed Lola in the process,” I whisper.

“Lola made her own decisions,” Crockett says. “She alone chose to go with Barter. No one made her go with him. She made the decision to enter into his life, not you. Lola would still be alive if not for her decisions, Mr. Moonlight. You have to believe that or it will weigh on you forever.”

I smoke silently.

“Doesn’t make me feel any better about anything,” I offer after a beat.

“If you felt good about anything today,” she says, “I’d say you weren’t the least bit human.”

I toss my still-lit cigarette out the window, watch as it sparks against the pavement. “We done here?” I say.

She nods.

I open the door, slip my left leg out.

“Oh, there is one more thing,” Crockett calls out. She holds out her left hand, palm up.

I know what she wants even before she says the words. But I want to hear it from her mouth anyway.

“The flash drive,” she says. “You do have it, don’t you?”

For the briefest of moments I consider revealing the presence of two identical flash drives on my person. But what the hell, I’ll give her one of them and see what happens. Who knows, perhaps one of them is a decoy and the other is the real deal. I have a fifty-fifty chance of walking away with the moneymaker.

Lola’s dead now.

What the hell have I got to lose that hasn’t already been ripped away from my chest cavity?

I reach into my coat, hand her one of the two plastic-bagged flash drives.

“Thanks,” she says and nods. “You’ve done your country proud.”

“Wow,” I say. “I have major chills.”

I step out onto the pavement and walk the walk of the damned.

Later that day I’m checked over by a doctor at the Kingston Medical Center emergency room and given a relatively clean bill of health, if you call numerous lacerations, bruises, sprains, the re-opened cut on my left pinky finger, and yet another slight concussion clean or healthy. Of course, there’s nothing that could be done to repair my broken heart.

From the hospital, Crockett and I board a chopper to Albany, where we reconvene over coffee inside a basement interview room that contains a table and some chairs. Crockett’s personal laptop is sitting out on the table and it’s booted up to a Firefox Google page. Set beside the laptop is the flash drive I handed over to her. It’s still protected inside its plastic baggy.

While someone behind the one-way glass films the proceedings, Crockett debriefs me on the events that took place in Florence and how I was able to secure the flash drive from Barter’s apartment. When I’m done I ask her the obvious overriding question: Where are Barter and Clyne now?

“In custody of the Italian government. Interpol and the FBI are finally in full cooperative contact. But they are having their turn at the two suspects first before they are extradited to the US.”

“And the Russians?”

“Far as we can tell, they’re all dead.”

“Far as you can tell,” I repeat. “There will be more. There always are.”

“No word about Iranians, either. No Internet chatter coming from terrorist factions or splinter groups. My guess is Barter and Clyne were about to sell to a private investor.”

“What about the flash drive? Anyone think of plugging it into a computer, take a look at the information it holds and why so many people had to die for it, including myself almost a year ago? Including Lola today?”

“You came back to life,” Crockett says. “Moonlight rises, remember?”

“Annoying habit of mine. Can’t say the same for Lola, can I?”

I stare into the agent’s eyes. Eyes I looked into when I made love to her less than a week ago. The emotion I saw in those eyes is now replaced with anxiety.

She picks up the plastic baggy, unzips it, pulls out the flash drive. Her hand trembles slightly when she plugs it into the port. The place goes silent while we wait for the information to appear. Only no information appears. Rather, information shows up, all right, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the information the FBI has been expecting. Instead of the locations of rogue nuclear warhead sites, the flash drive stores only a single black-and-white photograph.

I recognize it as the shadow of a man who was seared into a concrete sidewalk when he was suddenly vaporized by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima back in August of 1945.

I’ve seen the picture many times before. On TV. In school. On the computer. In museums. In back issues of
Time
magazine and
National Geographic
. One of those images you can never quite comprehend, the record of a blast so violent it actually
evaporates a human being, leaving only his shadow burned into the pavement.

No matter how many times Crockett plays with the drive, no matter how many times she reinstalls it or reboots her computer, the drive produces only the same thing.

The man’s shadowy remains.

I make out the sound of collective laughter coming through the glass.

“Cut the chatter!” Crockett shouts. Then to me. “You said you were sure this was the true flash drive.”

I shake my head. “I told you I had
a
flash drive. I had no way of knowing if it was the one you were after. I could only go on what Lola was telling me.”

She pulls the flash drive out of the computer, stuffs it into her pants pocket.

“You can go, Moonlight,” she says, sounding hollow. “Stay in town for a while until this thing is sorted out. We might need you for additional questioning.”

“Sure thing,” I say. “No travel plans at present. Only funeral plans.”