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

partners gave me in that downtown back alley. I guess that explains how the Obamas were able to sneak into my hospital room. She no doubt arranged it.
    “My head,” she says, her words slurred. “You hit me over the head with that gun. You head-case, son of a bitch.”
    “You’ve got reason to complain,” I say. “You tortured my friend with a Conair hair dryer. And you had a gun pointed at me first before I walloped you with it. Makes us even.”
    She’s still on her knees, but she’s trying to get up.
    “That hair dryer was meant to put more fright into you two idiots than actual electricity. It’s U.L. tested and safety certified for scatter-brained teeny boppers.”
    “Oh, my bad,” I say. “I take it all back. I definitely do owe you an apology. You were just doing your job; doing what was expected of you. How’s this for I’m sorry?” I raise my right leg, press my boot heel against her forehead, shove her back down onto the street.
    Georgie comes up on me from behind. He draws back his right leg like he wants to add insult to injury by kicking her in the face.
    “Not while she’s down, Georgie. She’s as good as dead anyway.”
    I keep the pistol on her. It’s dark. But the halogen lamp-lit airport casts enough luminescence for me to still make out her face.
    “You really work inside the hospital?”
    “No”
    “Then how come nobody saw through your act?”
    And what an act it was. I seemed to recall tears streaming down her face after I was revived.
    “It’s not an act. I’m a registered nurse.”
    She’s claiming legitimacy. Maybe that explains the tears.
    “You’re a registered nurse who volunteered herself for the job at AMC just because some Albany PI with a bad brain was ambulanced there after your Obama friends tried to kill him.”
    “Nurses work for a lot of different hospitals, Moonlight. The hospitals don’t employ us. Agencies do. I’m employed by the Ferguson Nursing Agency in Manhattan, believe it or not. The staff at the Albany Medical Center just assumed I was a fill-in for somebody for the day. They’re always understaffed.”
    “OK then, who do you work for when you’re not nursing? Are they political, religious, or criminal? And why did they want me dead?”
    “They don’t want you dead,” she explains with a shake of her head.
    “What is it they want then?”
    She looks up at me, her face not so pretty anymore, her long blond hair pulled back tight and hidden under the wool cap, her once pert breasts somehow pressed flat under her black turtleneck sweater.
    “Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Moonlight?”
    “Leave Peter Czech alone, and hand over a box. Size, make, and shape unknown.”
    She reaches up over her head with both hands. I thumb back the trigger on the automatic.
    “Take it easy,” she says. “I’m just letting my hair down.”
    She pulls away the rubber band and her thick blond hair falls down against her shoulders. She reaches up into her sweater, unclasps something, comes back out with an Ace bandage, her sweater immediately filling out with her breasts.
    “Oh my,” she says, “I’ve been feeling so confined.”
    She issues me the sweetest pout you ever did see, while lifting herself onto one foot and then the other. Quite suddenly she has her looks back, and along with them, some leverage.
    As she slowly rises up, her face gravitates towards my face, her lips looking all the more full, red, and luscious all the time. And her blue eyes, veiled with that blond hair, look good enough to swim in.
    “Easy does it, Moon,” I hear Georgie remark. “This little tart did a slam dance on your head inside a back alley.”
    “That wasn’t me,” she shoots back. “I had nothing to do with those goons. I wasn’t even there.”
    “You’re just hired as a torture expert,” Georgie adds.
    “I wasn’t torturing you,” she says. “I never even had a hold of the hair dryer. And even if it worked, a standard shock from rubbing your feet on the carpet