Moonlight runs, p.1
Moonlight Runs, page 1
MOONLIGHT RUNS
A Dick Moonlight P.I. Thriller
Vincent Zandri
PRAISE FOR BOOKS BY VINCENT ZANDRI
“Sensational…masterful…brilliant.” —New York Post
“[A] chilling tale of obsessive love from Thriller Award—winner Zandri (Moonlight Weeps)…Riveting.” —Publishers Weekly
“…Oh, what a story it is…Riveting…A terrific old school thriller.” —Booklist, starred review
“Zandri does a fantastic job with this story. Not only does he scare the reader, but the horror show he presents also scares the man who is the definition of the word ‘tough.’” —Suspense Magazine
“I very highly recommend this book…It’s a great crime drama that is full of action and intense suspense, along with some great twists…Vincent Zandri has become a huge name and just keeps pouring out one best seller after another.” —Life in Review
“(The Innocent) is a thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.” —The Times-Union (Albany)
“The action never wanes.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting.” —Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years
“Tough, stylish, heartbreaking.” —Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Broken and The Cartel
“A tightly crafted, smart, disturbing, elegantly crafted complex thriller…I dare you to start it and not keep reading.” —MJ Rose, New York Times bestselling author of Halo Effect and Closure
“A classic slice of raw pulp noir…” —William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob
Copyright © 2023 by Vincent Zandri
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Zach McCain
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Moonlight Runs
About the Author
Books by the Author
Preview from Fortune’s Favor by Thomas Locke and Jyoti Guptara
Preview from Chance Harbour by Colin Campbell
Preview from A Detailed Man by David Swinson
For Mary, the cop.
“Like I was ever normal. Like I was ever any different from how I am now.
A cure won’t make me better. It’ll just make me more like a regular son of a bitch.”
—Charlie Houston
In the beginning…
You have no idea how long you’ve been running. An hour. A day. A week. A lifetime. You’re dizzy and your brains are scrambled from back-to-back concussions. One thing you’re certain of, it’s winter in the heart of the concrete city. Cold as fuck. And yet your entire body is covered in sweat under your gray sweats and black watch cap. Your breathing is shallow, your heart pounding against your sternum, your hot blood speeding through your veins, your damaged brain bleeding and swelling to the point of seeping out your nostrils.
You’ve got good reason to be worried about your fragile head. As you sprint down the middle of a dark, empty, downtown Broadway, a heavy-duty trash hauler rapidly coming up on you from behind, you are fully aware that if the little piece of .22 caliber bullet that’s presently lodged inside your gray matter directly beside the cerebral cortex should shift, you will fall into a coma at best, or drop dead at worst.
But then, maybe you have it all bass ackwards. Maybe the best thing that can happen to you right now is to drop dead. You can’t outrun the garbage truck any more than you can hide from the man who not only wants to kill you but torture you first; see you suffer terrible pain and anguish before finally burying you in the Albany County Rapp Road Landfill along with tons and tons of rotting trash.
Still, you run, hoping against hope that you will somehow evade the monster of a truck coming up on your ass like a hungry steel dragon about to snatch its prey with its sharp fangs. But when you trip over a manhole cover and land hard on your chest and face, you know it’s all over. The fat lady, she has sung her final stanza.
The truck pulls up and comes to a stop only inches away from the rubber bottoms of your running shoes. You hear the spitting noise of its airbrakes and the feel the trembling of its giant engine. You smell the exhaust and the filth that comes from its load of raw garbage and trash. You want to get up, and run away, but you don’t have an ounce of strength left in your body. You’ve been running for far too long.
Doors open and you make out the sound of heavy soles slapping the pavement. No one is speaking. They don’t need to speak. They already know what they have to do. You feel one man grab your ankles while another man comes around front and shoves his arms under your underarms. Together they pick you up and begin carrying your around to the side of the idling trash hauler. You do your best to squirm out of their tight grip, but it’s all wasted energy.
And then it happens. They toss you through the opening. It’s the big gaping, metal mouth that eats up all that putrid garbage. When one of the men hits a switch that engages the garbage truck’s compacting mechanism, you feel yourself moving sideways and into the inner bowels of the rancid mechanical beast. You feel the garbage burying you, consuming you, stealing your breath away, triggering your gag reflex. You want to scream and cry, but you are unable to make a sound while everything around you goes black.
Two doors slam closed, and the truck once more resumes its forward movement. If you only you could have escaped the garbagemen. If you only you could have somehow hidden yourself in some dark alley. But there was no escaping the inevitable, so what’s the use in even rehashing it all.
As your consciousness begins to wane, you whisper a silent prayer.
Oh God, get me out of here…
And as your life fades, you wish for only one thing. You wish for more life.
Instead, Moonlight is about to die.
1
Four Days Earlier
The last thing a man should ever do is mess around in another man’s sandbox. Okay, I’ll stop it with the metaphorical bullshit and come clean. I’ll just come out and say it, straight no chaser. The woman I’ve been seeing as of late (no, it’s not the long, dark-haired ex-love of my life, Lola), is a cop.
But if that’s not bad enough, she’s a top cop in the narcotics unit of the Albany Police Department. And what’s even worse is said lady cop is married to one of the most successful waste disposal CEOs operating on the country’s northeast corridor. Why my lady friend cop even bothers having a job is beyond me since she’s got to be worth at least ten or fifteen million bucks.
Anyway, the point here is that just because a woman is attractive, smart, and brave, is no reason to be sharing a bed with her if she’s still married. After all, that’s the kind of thing that can get your legs broken in Albany. But then, I’ve never been known to make the right choices. In fact, all too often I make the dumbass choice.
You see, I have this thing with my head. I tried to shoot myself once upon a time. But at the very last second…just milliseconds really…before I pulled the trigger, I pictured the face of my then toddler son, and I chickened out. But that didn’t stop the gun from going off, the .22 caliber shooting range-quality bullet ricocheting off my skull, and splintering. That’s when a tiny fragment breached my skull and brain matter. Ever since then, I’ve been living one day at a time since, technically speaking, I could die at any moment.
But which one of us isn’t immune to dying at any moment? But I’m getting ahead of my skis here, and I don’t ski.
The short of it, is that I got into a long conversation one early evening with APD Detective Mary Fuscilli who was working on her computer while drinking a Stella draft at DeeDee’s Bar. I’d known her for quite some time from a distance since I spend more than my fair share of time at the APD Central Avenue precinct whenever homicide detective, Nick Miller, calls me in a job that the APD can’t handle due to understaffing, the crazy defunding movement, or is too hot for them to handle in terms of public relations. This is Albany after all, home of the Democratic cop hating machine.
She was maybe five feet four inches, with a body honed from daily three-mile runs, plus weight room and boxing workouts. Her hair was shoulder length, brown, and parted smartly on the side. When she wore her round horn-rimmed readers, she gave off an air of college professorial wisdom. In fact, she just happened to be an adjunct college professor, teaching classes on crime and punishment at the University at Albany. Her eyes were green and alluring and her manner of wardrobe screamed of New York City sophistication as opposed to Albany soccer mom post-preppy.
I offered to buy her a beer that night and she quietly accepted. It turned out she knew who I was too, and we spoke about policing the country’s present lawlessness and the horrible political power-hungry games that led up to it. But I was only half listening while the bad part of me…the part that always seems to make the bad choices…was lusting after her. And I’m sure she knew it too.
We met a few more times after that, and not once during our meetings did she ever mention her husband. Until one late afternoon, late last winter when she finally agreed to meet me at my riverside first floor loft. She entered the place, set her leather bag on the table near the door. I poured her a cold Stella, and I felt my heart go all aflutter as she approached me.
She was wearing a short skirt and leather boots under a thick brown leather coat, along with a bone-colored blouse that was unbuttoned enough to show off her perfect breasts. She was also wearing her round, tortoise shell reading glasses which I found super sexy.
I handed her the beer and she sipped it while standing just inches away from me in the kitchen area of the loft, the still, mostly frozen Hudson River (it was going on mid-March) visible just outside the big industrial style picture window. Her beautiful eyes spoke volumes and to be honest, my built-in shit detector was already speaking to me, telling me not to go through with this. But it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the voice coming from my other head. The voice that told me to ravage this woman as soon as possible.
She said, “As you already know, I’m married.”
I stole a deep drink of my beer, set it down on the wood block counter.
“The best ones always are,” I said. “Of course, I know you’re married. The big rock on your wedding finger sort of gives it away. Plus, you were never a total stranger to me. But you’ve never brought him up before. So why now?”
She sipped more beer, inhaled and exhaled like she was trying to work up a bit of courage.
“I just thought I should tell you that even though I’m very attracted to you, I still love my husband. It’s just that…”
Her thought trailed off while she shifted her eyes from me to the big window.
“It’s just that what, Mary?” I asked.
“We haven’t been close in a long time,” she said. “Years really.”
That’s when I understood entirely why she was standing inside my kitchen drinking a beer.
Truth is, I half expected her to end whatever it was we had started. And being that we hadn’t been together in the physical sense, it wouldn’t be all that hard a loss. We would stay friends, I guess. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.
But something happened then. We didn’t agree to just stay friends. Instead, she placed her beer on the counter directly beside mine, and she kissed me. We kissed for a long time and then I took her hand, and I brought her to my bed. We made love then like we invented it, and it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I got the feeling it was for Mary too.
When we were exhausted, we sat up against the bed board and drank our beers.
“So that just happened,” Mary said.
We both had a little giggle over that one.
“So, Fuscilli,” I said. “That’s your married name?”
“My maiden name is Ryan,” she said. “I’m not Italian. But my daughter is.”
I asked her about her daughter. Mary said her name was Patricia and that she was a young adult now who lived and worked in Buffalo. Not much else to say nor did I pry. Of course, I wanted to ask her more about her husband and why they hadn’t been all that intimate as of late. But my gut told me it wasn’t the time. Nor was it my business.
As if to prove my point, Mary glanced at her wristwatch then and issued an emphatic, “Jeeze, I’ve got to go, Richard.”
“So soon?” I said, feeling a wave of disappointment wash over me.
She slid off the bed and started dressing.
“A business dinner at Prime Steakhouse with my husband,” she said, sort of under her breath, like she didn’t want to tell me where she was going but felt as though she owed me an explanation. “I hate these dinners. The men get drunk, and I get stuck trying to make conversation with some rich suburban soccer mom who just assumes I must be a dyke deep down inside if I’m a cop.”
“But the wife of a waste management tycoon has got to do what a wife of a waste management tycoon has got to,” I said, drinking some beer.
I watched her slide into her black panties and put on her matching bra.
“Something like that,” she said.
I waited until she was dressed and finger combing her hair.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
“I’ll be at DeeDee’s Bar tomorrow for happy hour,” she said.
“I mean will I see you here?” I said. “You know, in my luxurious water-front condo.”
She turned to me and smiled sadly.
“I want to,” she said. “Let’s take it day by day, Richard.”
I felt my stomach sink a little. But then, in full disclosure I knew what we were doing was wrong and maybe I should have been looking on the bright side. If this ended today, right this very second, I would consider myself lucky enough to have made love to a beauty like Mary. But I’d gone through life not being a homewrecker and I wasn’t about to start now.
Leaning into me, she kissed me on my mouth like she meant it.
“I smell myself on you,” she said, not without a sly grin.
“I smell you on me too,” I said. “I might not shower for days.”
“Gross,” she said. Then, grabbing her bag off the table near the door. “I’ll text you.”
I remembered a time not too long ago when people said, I’ll call you.
“Great,” I said, as she opened the steel door and let herself out.
When the door slammed closed, I felt my old friend loneliness return.
2
For a long time, I just sat there staring at the wall. Of all people to get involved with. A married woman whose husband was one of the biggest waste disposal professionals on the planet. Big Tony Fuscilli. Who knew what he was capable of, if and when he found out about us. He had the money to do anything he wanted, like hire a crack sniper to take me out.
Slipping out of bed, I put my jeans, boots, and black t-shirt back on, then went into the bathroom and washed up. When I was through, I made my way back into the kitchen area, opened the fridge, cracked a can of beer, and set it down on the wood block counter. Booting up my laptop, I waited for the Google search screen to appear. When it did, I typed in the words Fuscilli Waste Management. As expected, the company’s website occupied the top spot.
It was a professional job as far as I could see with colorful overhead panoramic pictures of the operation that must have been taken with the use of a drone. It consisted of a massive metal-sided building-slash-warehouse. Standing outside the front facade of the building where the offices were housed, was the entire Fuscilli Waste Management team. There must have been about 50 employees.
The big, severely beer gutted and thickly salt and pepper-haired man who stood at the fore must have been Big Tony Fuscilli himself. He was dressed in a loose, untucked, short sleeve button down, baggy trousers, and black shoes. He also wore a gold bracelet on one wrist and what looked to be an expensive wristwatch on the other. Even from the height the picture was snapped at, I could see that it was a big watch befitting of a big man who owned a big ass company.
Several large, blue trash haulers that bore the words “Fuscilli Waste Management” printed on the side panels were parked in the lot directly in front of Big Tony. They were clean as a whistle. Not like the crap-stained ones I would see navigating the suburban roads and byways almost on a daily basis.
I clicked on the “About Us” section. Again, as expected, a close-up photo of Big Tony occupied the top spot along with his bio. It said he’d come from poor parents who, as children, emigrated to America from Sicily during the Depression. He attended Catholic grade school and then made his way to Albany High where he was the center for the varsity football team. Instead of going to college, he decided to buy a third-hand pickup truck which he used for collecting people’s junk. He called the company, Tony the Junk Man.
