Here is a preview from Moonlight Kills, the seventh Dick Moonlight PI thriller by Vincent Zandri.
Chapter 1
Fat Elvis and I discover the decapitated head under the floorboards of a newly installed, twenty-first century, modern appliance-equipped, eat-in kitchen. The floorboards…and they are expensive floorboards…belong to a vinyl-sided raised ranch nestled inside a brand spanking new housing development that was once the home to a postcard perfect Christmas tree farm. The head belongs to a woman. A woman of maybe forty. Blonde hair (natural, far as I can tell), blue eyes that gaze up at us, her pretty mouth slightly ajar, her pink tongue sticking out slightly from between two thick, if not sultry lips.
Her sudden appearance comes as a complete surprise. Elvis is so shocked at the sudden sight of the head, he rears back fast, falls onto his fat ass, and pukes the half pint of Jack he consumed on the way out here.
“Jesus, let’s get the hell out of here,” he insists in his native Okie accent.
Here’s what I do instead: I pull up more of the floor boards and widen the opening around the head. What’s interesting here is not only the head, but also the concrete floor slab under the kitchen. Must be the architect decided to go with only a partial basement, which I’m not entirely sure is legal in Upstate New York where it can snow as early as late October. Or hell, maybe the contractor decided to skimp on the construction in order to save cash. Whatever the case, I’m sure the future owners of this house would not appreciate a cut off head buried under their kitchen floor. I mean, the kitchen of all places.
Sure, the head is a shock to the system, but it doesn’t make me sick like it does Elvis. This isn’t the first decapitated head I’ve seen and it sure as hell isn’t the first dead body. I have to go all the way back to my childhood and the fucked-up bodies my dad would agree to embalm for a special price. Beheadings, limbless torsos, or maybe just an arm or a leg.
“What’s the point of embalming just an arm?” I recall asking my black suited dad.
He’d respond with something like, “Well son, that’s not for us to decide. Grief, she is a strange thing. She is the price we pay for loving someone with all our hearts.”
The dead bodies didn’t stop there, because then I went on to the first Gulf War. Trust me when I say there’s no better place on earth for separating a head from its torso than the modern-day battlefield. After my wartime experience was over, it came time to join the police force where once again, a headless torso or two would occasionally show up. After I was fired from the cops for reasons I won’t go into here, I began life as a private investigator, and once again, a mutilated body, while not an everyday occurrence, wasn’t a total stranger either.
I guess you could say that from day one, my life has been a steady stream of one violently murdered human being after another. Still, my guitar gently weeps, or so the Beatles used to sing.
I stack the floorboards carefully onto the pile we’ve already started. Then, taking a knee over the head, I do what has to be done. Inhaling a deep breath, I grab hold of it by its thick blonde hair and pull it out of the opening. Elvis is so distraught at the head being dangled in the air by my hands that he rolls over onto his side, assumes fetal position, and stuffs his thumb in his mouth.
“Love me, tender,” he starts to sing in an authentic Elvis impersonator voice that sounds kind of weird because of the aforementioned thumb. “Love me true…Never let me go.” Because of the thumb, it sounds more like “Wuv me tender…”
It’s really nothing to worry about. This is what he does at times of extreme duress. Morphing into Fat Elvis is his way of coping with the harsh realities of life and death.
“Calm down, Elvis,” I say, carrying the head to the kitchen counter and setting it onto the expensive Italian marble top. “It’s just a head and by the looks of things, it’s already bled out.”
“Yeah just a head that belonged to a pretty young lady,” he spits in his Oklahoma drawl. “Somebody murdered her. We’s a gotta get out of here, Moonlight, ’fore we’re next.” He jumps up. “We gotta go to the police.” He pronounces police like it’s two words, Po-leece.
I reach around, grab hold of the sleeve on his Levi’s jeans jacket.
“Hold on,” I say. “I’m guessing whoever did this is long gone and has no intention of coming back. And second, I’m not so sure going to the cops right away is a very good idea considering we’re presently engaged in an illegal activity.”
The truth of the matter is this: Elvis and I are broke. More than broke. I’d managed to nab a DWI one early evening less than a week ago after spending the afternoon bellied up to Lanies Bar, drowning my sorrows out on a way too much Jamie and Budweiser Beer.
How did the bartender put it? “You want me to call you an Uber, Mr. Moonlight?”
But I just looked across the bar at him like he had two heads. “I drive dretter when I’m bunk,” I said. “Or, you know what the hell I mean.”
I paid my bill leaving a far too generous tip because I didn’t want to wait around for the change. That’s when the bartender would have snatched my keys right off the bar. Instead, I grabbed them up and headed out the door to my vehicle. Now that dad’s pride and joy 1978 Cadillac hearse was dead and gone, I’d purchased myself a third-hand, cloth-topped, Jeep Wrangler. It needed some body work, but the engine was in great shape. What wasn’t in great shape was me, and I was all over the road. If not for the Jeep, which was topless that night, and the cold air slapping my face, I might have passed out altogether.
When I noticed the cop car right on my tail and the flashers lighting up my rearview mirror, I knew I was screwed. Correction, beyond screwed.
“Pull over,” the cop barked, his loud, tinny voice booming over the vehicular public address system.
I did as I was told. But then I did something I wasn’t told. Something stupid, even for me.
I ran.
What the hell was I thinking? What good could come from running away from the law? Would running away make my imminent arrest simply go away? Of course not. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head, sometimes it can’t be trusted. When I get stressed, I tend to do the wrong thing. And get this, I was so drunk I couldn’t stand much less run. Of course the cop caught up with me and I fought him off even when he told me I was only making matters worse. That’s when I decided to belt him in the nose.
Again, real bad decision.
“How much worse is that, Officer?” I said. I believe I pronounced Officer like Ossifer, but what the hell did it matter by then?
All I recall is a baton swung across the back of my skull, my five-foot-nine-inch, one- hundred-eighty-five-pound body shoved down on somebody’s front lawn, and my wrists being cuffed behind my back.
Then, like judgement day, the world around me went black.
When I woke up in the tank, my sometimes APD boss was standing outside the cell bars. He was shaking his head, issuing me the same look my father would give me when he insisted on seeing my report card.
“What the hell were you thinking, Moonlight?” Chief Homicide Detective Nick Miller posed.
He was dressed impeccably in his blue blazer, charcoal wool trousers, blue button-down and red and blue-striped rep tie. His long face was clean shaven and his white hair buzzcut short like a Marine, only cooler than a Marine. More like Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge.
As for me, I was wearing my old worn leather coat, a pair Levis that hadn’t seen a washing machine in a couple weeks, a pair of black combat boots, and a black t-shirt that still had sawdust on it from Elvis’s and my little deconstruction project inside the new North Albany housing development. Unlike Miller, my once thick head of hair was mostly a fond memory, but the many scars that road-mapped my skull gave me character. Or so I liked to think. And so what if my face hadn’t seen a razor in a few days?
I was in the tank, not church.
“I’ve been having a bad couple days,” I said. “I needed to drown my sorrows.”
“You remember how it happened?”
“You remember who you’re talking to, Miller?” I said. “I have this little problem with my head. There’s a little piece of twenty-two cal lodged beside my cerebral cortex. Botched suicide attempt if you’ll recall. In times of stress—”
“—The little bullet pressing up against your cerebral cortex can cause you to pass out and suffer temporary short-term amnesia or even death,” he says bobbing his head like a bobble-head doll. “At the very least it causes you to make the wrong decisions. I’ve heard it a hundred-thousand times before, Moon. We all have.”
“It’s the truth!”
“But bullet in the brain, or no bullet in the brain, punching a cop in the nose?” he went on. “You just lost whatever work you had with a department. What are you going to do for cash now that you gotta pay the fine for a DWI?”
“Beg, borrow, or steal?” I said, picturing my now deep-in-the-red bank account.
Just then the guard sergeant came into the picture. He unlocked the cell.
“You’re free to go, Moonlight,” he said, a disgusted look on his middle-aged face. “You’ve got friends in high places for such a low life.”
“Sticks and stones, Sergeant,” I said, stepping out of the cell.
“You sure about posting bail for this guy, Detective?” the sergeant asked Miller.
Miller nodded, but then cocked his head over his shoulder like he wasn’t sure how to answer the question.
“Let’s just go, Moonlight,” he said.
We left and I never looked back. Not even once. Sure, I was happy to be out of jail, but once I sat myself in the passenger seat of Miller’s cruiser, I was reminded of why I got so drunk in the first place. I saw her face in my head and all I wanted was for it to go away.
Miller got in, fired up the cruiser’s big engine.
“Lola,” he said.
“How’d you guess?”
“Because you always fall apart around her. How is she? Her condition improve at all?”
In my head, I’m seeing Lola, the long brown-haired former clinical psychologist who died a clinical death on the highway between New York City and Albany, but who survived with a brain injury worse than my own. While my problem is an occasional lapse of short-term memory, her long-term memory seems to be gone for good. I’m still hopelessly in love with her, even if she doesn’t know who the hell I am.
“She still doesn’t recognize me, Miller,” I said, feeling the now all too familiar pit in my stomach. “Physically she looks better than ever, but her memory is just not there.”
Miller drove for a bit.
“If she doesn’t know who you are…if she has no idea about your past…then who does she think you are?”
“A nobody,” I said. “Just some jerk who comes around now and again with flowers and some candy.”
“She doesn’t know you still love her?” he asked.
“Miller,” I said, “she doesn’t know what the fuck love is.”
That was five days ago. Since that time, I needed to come up with a constructive way to make some much needed cash. After consulting with my sidekick, Roland Hills aka Fat Elvis Presley, we came up with the idea of stealing the floorboards out of the new houses being constructed in North Albany and then reselling them on e-Bay.
Easy Peasy.
Okay, full disclosure: Elvis came up with the idea after reading a short story by a long dead writer about a couple of down and out drunks who steal all the copper wiring in a house to sell for booze money. I think the dead author’s name was Ray Carver? Or was it Denis Johnson?
In any case, stealing isn’t exactly the right word for it, since the Italian contractor building the homes was not only a known shyster, but word on the street was that she and her husband shafted the farmer whose family owned the land for generations, stating that it was contaminated with chemical fertilizer and therefore practically worthless.
The farmer, fearing a lawsuit from a whole bunch of people who bought his Christmas trees, ate the fruits and vegetables from his gardens, plus freshly butchered chicken and pork products, sold out for pennies on the dollar. So when Elvis suggested we give the contractor a taste of his own medicine we jumped at the chance. What we didn’t expect to find however was a perfectly good head that belonged to a perfectly good female torso.
But then again, who does?
Back to the here and now.
Elvis and I lock eyes on the head, like at any moment, she’s about to speak to us. Her mouth is slightly ajar and aside from a little bit of blood spatter on her neck, you wouldn’t have a clue that this head has been violently detached from its body.
“Jeeze, Moon,” Elvis says after a time, “I think we got no choice but to go to the cops. I mean, we can’t just go off and investigate this on our own. We’ll end up in prison right beside the animals who did this. Or worse, our heads will end up under some newly laid kitchen floor.”
I have to admit, Elvis is right. He’s not always right, but when he’s right he’s right and right now, he’s right. I pull out my smartphone. The screen is badly cracked. It looks like a spider web. But at least it still works. I look up Detective Miller’s number. Naturally, I have it on speed-dial since I work for him and the APD as an independent contractor. Correction, used to work for him. I press the little green phone icon, put the smartphone to my ear and wait.
“What is it now, Moon?” he says in the place of a kind-hearted hello. “You lose your Jeep keys? You’d lose your head it wasn’t attached.”
“Funny you should say that,” I say.
That’s when I explain about the head we found under the floorboards.
Click here to learn more about Moonlight Kills by Vincent Zandri.