Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) by Vincent Zandri Read Free Book Online Page B

Hill all summer, the year of our Lord 19 and 53! The great Gregory Peck made a terrific motion picture about it.”
    I gave Czech a look like, Don’t mind him, still living in the past. But he raised up his glass anyway.
    “To the war,” he toasted. “And all things fair and not fair.”
    “To the war!” Uncle Leo shouted. “To Gregory Peck and to General MacArthur. If only we’d let him nuke those commie bastards when we had the chance!”
    “Yah,” I said, tipping my beer bottle. “The war. MacArthur. Nuclear proliferation.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Uncle Leo that Gregory Peck was a lifelong pacifist.
    Taking a deep drink I shifted my eyes back to Czech and saw that his hands were shaking again as he filled out my retainer check. For the first time then, I realized he was not everything he was cracked up to be.

    “So you decided to take the case,” Lola says, as she pulls up outside of Georgie Phillips’s townhouse, killing the engine. “For money or out of curiosity?”
    “A little of both,” I say, pressing that blood-soaked towel even tighter against my side. “Even if I am convinced the guy is dead . . . Long dead. If he isn’t the Harvey Rose listed as alive, I have no doubt he’s the dead guy. It’s just that the poor Mr. Czech needs to be convinced of it. I hate to take his money just to hand him bad news but if he wants to pay me, well then . . .”
    “You cashed his check?”
    “Cleared the next day.”
    Lola looks upset. Not upset over my ditching the hospital. But over something else. Like I’ve touched a nerve with the Czech story. Only I can’t imagine how.
    “You don’t think I should have taken the gig or his money, Lo?”
    She pulls the key from the starter.
    “It’s just that you have the bar now. You make OK money. Or, you’re starting to make OK money anyway. Why do you need to do PI work?” She peers down at her lap. “It’s dangerous, Richard.”
    So that’s it then. The danger element. Guns and bad guys. Three toughies in Obama masks holding synthesizers to their throats, kicking the living snot out of me, leaving me for dead inside a back alley. Next time I’ll be waiting for them along with my two good buddies, Smith and Wesson. I want to tell her this. But I know I can’t.
    “We have to go in,” I say, “before I bleed to death.”
    Lola smiles, runs her hand over my nearly bald scalp.
    “No one can kill you, Richard,” she says, “except yourself.”
    She gets out, starts up the walk towards Georgie’s front door. While she walks I can’t help but notice her perfect, valentine-shaped ass. Just the sight of it takes my breath away. Then I picture Some Young Guy’s hand cupping it.
    The remembered sight of that makes my blood boil.
    What blood I have left over, that is.

CHAPTER 8

    BACK WHEN I WAS a boy in catholic grade school, the nuns used to conduct air raid drills once a month. It was the time of Red Scares and mutually-assured nuclear destruction. And it scared the living daylights out of me.
    The war against communist aggression in Vietnam was winding down, but that didn’t prevent the major news networks from broadcasting video footage of our GIs being blown to smithereens on a daily basis. Films of napalm-spewing jets scorching the green jungle and along with it, the Cong. Full color video feeds of whole villages being torched; video of little girls running down the road, the clothing burned off their backs. Walter Cronkite telling the world the war is lost. President Johnson wailing, “Once we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the American people!”
    We were fighting there in order to stop the spread of communism but losing badly. Because after all, we were fighting the war with one hand tied behind our backs, and the entire USA hippie contingent screaming about revolution and ending the madness.
    “Give peace a chance or die!”
    But that still didn’t stop the nuns in my school from convincing us that not only were the