Free Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) by Vincent Zandri Page A

gets here.

CHAPTER 14

    BY EIGHT O’CLOCK THE pain in my side is beginning to subside. On that stupid one-to-ten pain scale the docs make you refer to, the sting is now reduced to a more comfortable six or seven. The beers are helping. Which is why I decide to grab another cold one from the fridge. I pop the cap, take a swig. My cell vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket.
    Text. From Lola.
    She asks me how I’m feeling. I thumb a message back to her telling her I’m fine. Never better. It’s a lie of course. I’m dizzy, in pain, still bleeding, and drinking like a fish. I ask her if she wants me to come over.
    “Now’s not a good time,” she texts.
    She’s never said that to me before.
    I picture her lying naked in bed with Some Young Guy, tickling one another’s feet under the covers with their big toes. I picture him doing all those things to her that I used to do, and it makes my stomach cramp up and throb with more pain than the gash in my side. On a scale of one to ten, the pain is an eleven.
    I don’t text her back after that.
    I just drink.
    Drink and ache and cry, inside and out.

CHAPTER 15

    I SIT FOR A while thinking things out.
    I start from the start, from the moment Czech first met me at my bar in his wheelchair a few days ago. Moonlight FYI: Whenever anyone hires me for something, I can’t help but wonder why? Why hire a guy with half a bullet in his brain and a penchant for forgetting things, when you can hire a perfectly normal person?
    Maybe I just come cheap. Maybe that’s what it comes down to: price. These are tough times after all. Four bucks a gallon for gas, three bucks for a loaf of bread, most of a twenty dollar bill for a six pack of brew and a single pack of Marlboros. Tough times even for nuclear engineers.
    I take a sip of beer, sit back, and think about all that I have to go on. First things first: I have a handicapped guy who wants me to find his long-lost biological father. I’ve got a three-decade-old photograph of said father standing beside a pair of adoptive parents named Czech who originally migrated from the then USSR, only to settle in Albany to start a new life for themselves. That new life afforded Papa Czech employment as an engineer at the Knolls nuclear power plant. It would eventually include his son’s employment as well. And as for an added connection, the son’s biological father belongs to a team of accountants who oversaw the plant on behalf of the federal government.
    Not six degrees of separation. But only three.
    Speaking of the biological father: He’s tall, and bears eyebrows so thick and long they curl up at the end, making him look a lot like a cartoon devil. After thirty years I picture the eyebrows having turned gray and perhaps having even grown out all the more.
    The point is, if Harvey Rose still exists, he will not be hard to spot. Unless he trims his brows regularly.
    And since the business address of a one Harvey Rose exists in the Google business listings, there’s nothing preventing me from driving over to his office and knocking on the door. Problem is, Peter Czech has already told me that if finding his old man was as easy as going online, he wouldn’t need me in the first place.
    Am I to assume then that the Rose I’ve just discovered at work on State Street is not Czech’s father? Maybe. But it still won’t hurt to check out the office location. Pays to be thorough. Or maybe Czech’s gut instinct is all wrong and Rose is in fact the dead guy listed in the Albany County Hall of Records.
    All things considered, Czech’s father-finding project should not be all that difficult if all I have to do is some digging around. I’ll eventually find the man if he’s alive. And I’ll find him if he’s dead. Problem is, I’ve got three Obama-masked men dressed in black who’ve threatened to kill me if I keep on looking for Czech’s biological father. Now they not only want to kill me, but they want the contents of some box Czech apparently