Moonlight Sonata

Prologue

Prologue

YOU’RE DROWNING.

The entirety of your fragile head plunged deep down into the

watery business end of a porcelain toilet inside the men’s room of Ralph’s

Tavern in Albany. The water is cold and tastes vaguely of rust and urine as it

enters your mouth. You’re on your knees, hands pressed flat against a

piss-stained floor, the cold hard steel of a pistol barrel pressed against your

spine, a bear claw of a hand shoving your head deeper into the toilet with each

thrust.

“Who sent thee?” the poet barks.

Pulling you back out by the collar on your black leather

coat, you spit out the rancid water and make a desperate attempt to inhale a

dose of fresh restroom air. You want to be cooperative, being this man is your

client, whether he knows it or not. You truly want to answer his query. But,

instead, you’re choking, gagging, and vomiting putrid toilet water.

“Who sent thee, scoundrel?”

The pistol barrel is jammed so tight into your back you feel

like it’s about to burst through skin and bone and enter into your stomach. You

hear a fist banging on the men’s room door. Somebody shouting to open up.

Somebody who’s got to drop “a big f*****g deuce.” But the poet doesn’t care.

He’s locked the door. Dead-bolted it secure. He’s shot one man already, legend

has it. What difference does it make if he shoots you, too? The poet is

desperate. He’s on the run. He’s drunk and wired on cocaine. Enough Bolivian

marching powder to fire up a power line.

You hear the barrel c**k. You feel the mechanical action of

the pistol click on a vertebra. In a second or two, you’ll hear the blast and

you’ll see your bullet-shredded pink stomach lining spatter against the toilet

and graffiti-covered plaster wall—the work-in-progress canvas for the drunk and

the damned.

“One more time. Who sent thee?”

You open your mouth once more, try to spit out the words.

It’s like tearing the skin away from the back of your throat. But you form a

single word.

“Agent,” you whisper. Then, “Your. f*****g. Agent.”

“Liar,” the poet shouts, thrusting your head back into the

toilet, but immediately pulling it back out, your face and head dripping like

an overused toilet brush. “You are nothing but a scoundrel and a liar and I

will have my revenge upon thee.”

The pistol barrel shifts from your spine to the back of your

skull. In your brain, you picture the poet. His thick, white, Ernest Hemingway Old

Man and the Sea beard, his full head of salt and pepper hair cut close to

the scalp. You see his short, bulldog build, and his many-times-broken pug

nose. You see his ratty khaki safari jacket, its pockets jammed with notebooks,

scraps of paper with story-lines and poems, pens, pencils, unsmoked joints,

cash, candy bars, and who knows what the hell else. The poet is years older

than you, but bears the strength, power, and build of a rhino. A drunk,

coked-up rhino.

“No wait!” You spit. “Wait. Please. f*****g wait, Mr. Walls.

I can explain.”

More pounding on the door. More words. Someone about to crap

his pants if you don’t open up.

“My agent might be a heartless, soulless cunt who would sell

out her own aging mother to make a ten-spot,” Walls speaks in his deep,

throaty, formal poetry reading voice. “After all, that’s why I’ve signed on

with her. But she would never stoop so low as to send a private detective in

search of me. You, sir, are a liar and scoundrel.”

“You don’t know me.”

A slap upside your head with Walls’s bear claw hand. It

makes your head ring.

“Cease thy banter, rogue.”

The barrel is pressed harder against your skull. Now you see

brain matter, blood, and bits of bone spattered against the wall. With any luck

it will cover up the hand-scribbled erect c**k and the phone number written

below with the words, “I give great head. Call me.”

More pounding on the door. More shouts.

“She cares about you, Mr. Walls,” you spit. “She needs you

back at your writing desk. You’re all she’s got. She needs you. You need you.

You need to be writing. It’s my job to bring you back home.”

Silence fills the bathroom, like the pause after a carefully

recited stanza at a college sponsored literary reading.

“Liar,” the bearded poet whispers, “turn to me.”

You don’t turn to him so much as he forces you up by your

coat collar. Forces you up enough for you to shift from your knees to your ass.

“Open up,” Walls spits. “Take thee into your mouth.”

You open your mouth, your eyes shifting from the black

barrel to the poet’s round, red, bearded face. You feel the barrel slide

inside, it’s cold metal flattening your tongue and scraping the roof of your

mouth.

“Swallow until you see the colors of the moon,” recites the

poet from one of his most famous works. “Swallow until you lose your mind and

your soul. Swallow for love. Swallow for me. Swallow your death.”

You close your eyes, and wait for the hammer to come down

and for the world to turn black. You’ve died before, so why should this time be

any different? We all owe God a life. That’s what Shakespeare said. And you,

Richard Moonlight, part-time private eye, part-time dad, part-time lover,

part-time scribbler of words, full-time head-case . . . you are long overdue.

But the hammer doesn’t come down. Something else happens

instead.

The pistol barrel slides back out of your mouth as the poet

rises up, filling the stall with his four-by-four body. He doesn’t shoot you,

but he doesn’t leave you in peace, either.

“This is where me and thee take our leave,” he speaks. “One

from the other.”

When he raises up the pistol barrel, you know what’s coming.

You close your eyes and wait for the collision of steel against bone.

“Be advised, Mr. Moonlight, that Roger Walls will never see

the inside of a prison cell again. Do we have an understanding?”

“Duly noted,” you utter through clenched teeth. “But you

haven’t done anything wrong.”

The high-pitched sound of your own scared-like-a-girl voice

is the last thing you remember before the men’s room turns black.