Shoot the Moon Read online

  CRAG BANYON: WHEN THE MOON IS HIGH, SO IS HE

  Find a missing book. What could be easier? Not so easy when the book is the sacred Gypsy bible and the P.I. hired to track it down is Crag Banyon, for whom "luck" is a four-letter word spelled B-A-D.

  The case turns out to be a real page turner, with more thrills, chills and spills than a midnight trip to the men's room of Banyon's favorite watering hole. And closing time has never been so deadly, now that a mysterious four-legged figure has set its sights on one particular hapless investigator whose knack for figuring out plot twists and polishing off cocktails has gotten him banned from every church book club in the tri-city area.

  Why are the latest murderous rampages to terrorize the town exquisitely timed to fall between the rising and setting of the moon, and what does it all have to do with a leggy Gypsy dame, a gaggle of Gypsy hags, their AWOL Gypsy king, and the musty misplaced manuscript that holds all their tribe's deepest, darkest secrets? That's for Crag Banyon to find out, assuming he doesn't lose interest or get slaughtered before either the last page or the check clears.

  RATES COMMENSURATE

  Shoot the Moon

  A Crag Banyon Mystery

  By

  James Mullaney

  Copyright © 2015 by James Mullaney

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from James Mullaney.

  Cover art © 2015 Micah Birchfield All Rights Reserved

  Micah's Web Site:gentlemanbeggar.wordpress.com

  Editing and Formatting by Donna Courtois and Dale Barkman

  Email Dale: [email protected]

  To Dr. Gisela Velez, a rara avis physician whose ear bones are actually connected to her brain bone

  About the use of the word "Gypsies" in this book. It was going for a time to be lowercase -- gypsies -- and refer to all itinerant thieves who drive from town to town scamming old ladies of their bingo pennies. But for the joke to work in Banyon's world I needed the wagons and the tambourines and the Universal horror movie clichés. To use little G "gypsy" or to change the word entirely (which I very nearly did) just to preemptively appease politically correct namby-pambies would have scrubbed out the Lon Chaney fun. So, screw it. It's satire. In the immortal words of Sgt. Hulka, "Lighten up, Francis."

  And if you think I'm insensitive, you're probably right. Get a load of how I treated the Irish in the one with the leprechaun. I've still got members of my bog-stomping clan pelting me with empty whiskey bottles over that one.

  --Jim Mullaney

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  CHAPTER 1

  For the previous eight days the swollen gray clouds had parked themselves above the city like a depressing cumulonimbus Winnebago stuck in an airborne traffic jam.

  There hadn’t been much in the way of heavy rain. Mostly, it was precipitation of the endlessly mocking variety, like a drunk heckler in the front row who won’t shut up even after he’s chased the lady comedian off the stage in tears to take up real estate. It was a prolonged weather pattern of the distinctly half-assed sort, where the clouds lazily spit feeble but steady drizzle onto grimy rooftops, determinedly drenching the already sopped and drooping makeshift newspaper umbrellas everybody was holding over their heads as they dashed from their cars to the door of the nearest liquor store.

  A week’s crummy weather does nothing to ameliorate the misery of a city where the cab drivers’ middle fingers don’t even take Ramadan off. Picture a couple million restless denizens of the worst dump town you know. Now stick them all in the same huge, poorly-lit car wash for over a week. Then fire continuous, pathetic spurts of dirty water into the windows of the family DeSoto through plastic McDonald’s straws. Everything gets damp, nothing gets clean, and all you get out of the experience is moist dirt, a trailing oil slick, and the kids screaming from the back seat at the exponentially increasing veins popping up on the back of your neck.

  As I ducked under the ragged awning in front of the Albanian pizza joint on the corner of Lexington Street and Tender Vittles Boulevard, I was acutely aware of the fact that every damp bastard who hustled by might decide to murder me for the hell of it and blame the weather. But only if I didn’t kill them back first.

  The awning was pretty faded, but I could see by the shreds that hung down in front of my nose the faint memory of black, yellow, orange and aquamarine stripes. I had a little time to think -- dancing as I was around the hundreds of raindrops that were finding their way through the many holes in the rotten, old canvas in a concerted effort to dampen both my mood and my trench coat -- and I figured as I sidestepped with the grace of goddamn Gene Kelly that the awning was probably decorated with the colors of the Albanian flag. On the other hand, they might have just been a random collection of clashing Kmart colors since I, like the rest of the human race that isn’t Albanian, don’t give two shits about Albania, Albanians, or the unfurled banner under which their jingoistic Albanian asses march off to war.

  “As a pacifist, by which I mean coward, I would not follow this or any other pizza parlor awning into battle,” I confided in my companion who was, like me, riding out the feeble storm beneath the crummy, weather-beaten canopy.

  I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer since I had, frankly, thought he was pretty much dead when I first sought out our shared refuge from the rain. This had proved to be an error on my part, as evidenced in the wake of thirty seconds of utter silence by a great, sucking gasp and subsequent coughing spasm that was followed by a chaotically intermittent rising and falling of the copy of the Gazette that was his makeshift blanket. A massive, mucus-launching sneeze shifted the sports section and I realized the bum in question was Wino Ray, a geezer tippler who wasn’t ordinarily known to haunt the alleys and doorways in this part of town.

  I, like Wino Ray, whiled away an abundance of inebriated hours in my own lifelong dedication to avoiding doing something meaningful with my meaningless life. According to the old-timers at the gin mill bars over which I regularly slouched, old rummy Ray with his bravura sleep apnea was only in his fifth decade of trying to nap away seven-plus decades of severe liver toxicity. The poor bastard was too chronically loaded to appreciate simple math. To wit: he’d given his liver a two decade head start, and so, arithmetically speaking, there weren’t enough comas in the world for the siestas to ever catch up with the cirrhosis.

  The front section of that day’s paper constituted the lower half of Wino Ray’s scandal-sheet
blanket, and once I’d determined that there hadn’t been any venomous bodily fluids transferred from pants to print, I swiped the old bum’s improvised bedspread. Wino Ray scarcely noticed the petty theft, rolling his nose over against the wall and wheezing blissful, two-hundred proof gasps against the ancient sandstone, which I was unsure was up to weathering the blistering oral assault.

  MASS BLADE ATTACK!

  The headline screamed so loudly from the front page that I considered suing the overly enthusiastic typesetter for my budding case of tinnitus.

  It turned out the blades in question were of the Kentucky Bluegrass variety. Somebody had entered the grounds of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral the previous night and vandalized the patch of gated grass which constituted the old, mostly unused church cemetery. Every last blade of grass had been ripped up and the ground was stomped to mud. According to the paper, the cops were trying to question some of the resident ghosts and a recently reanimated zombie deacon, but weren’t having any luck.

  I wasn’t surprised. Zombies are notoriously tightlipped -- at least the ones whose lips haven’t fallen off -- and they’ve got shit for brains. (They also have, given the principal ingredient of their diet, brains for shit.) Zombies are worthless under cross-examination. When I was a cop I never once saw a zombie who didn’t fall apart in a witness box, and by Friday afternoon every week the janitors at the Harry Anderson Central Court Building downtown are invariably using push brooms to stuff a pile of arms, legs and torsos in the Dumpster out back that prove it. Goddamn living dead.

  Ghosts are almost as bad. Either they’re rattling chains in your face and making all the furniture bounce, or they’re moaning about lost loves. It takes finesse to be able to question a ghost, and when I read who the cop was who’d been charged with the awesome task of solving the great mystery of the St. Regent’s cemetery grass caper, I knew all hope of getting to the root of the missing lawn was lost.

  “‘Detective Daniel Jenkins has vowed to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of the church vandals,’” I read aloud to my unconscious alcoholic companion. “God has forsaken St. Regent’s, Wino Ray, if its only hope for justice is a cop who as a rookie accidentally dropped his gun in the back seat of an eighty year old woman’s Rambler during a routine traffic stop and then arrested her for illegal possession of a firearm. That’s a true story, Wino Ray, which never made the front page of the Gazette, possibly to avoid the mass panic and societal collapse that would assuredly ensue if the populace were to discover the truth about the thin blue line of morons who splash around in the deep end of that tar pit of stupidity and incompetence that is our greater metropolitan police force.”

  The St. Regent’s cemetery story was continued on page seven. I didn’t follow it to what I was certain was a thrilling conclusion.

  I was a little annoyed that the archbishop hadn’t called me in for the job. I picked up work from the diocese from time to time, mostly retrieving powerful religious relics from local apocalyptic cults attempting to bring about the End of Days. You know the kind of scut work. Boring as hell, yeah, but it pays the bills. I figured the church had decided to go the taxpayer-funded route this time around, since a missing lawn wouldn’t bring on the liability issues that would rain down on the bishop’s mitre if one of St. Jerome’s toe knuckles that he’d failed to keep under lock and key successfully brought on Judgment Day. And, truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have taken the case. There were some jobs too low even for me, and crawling around in my Sears slacks in some Agent Oranged graveyard digging for clues on missing turf was high on that low list.

  In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I’m a P.I. Don’t worry if you didn’t guess. You probably aren’t possessed with my astounding powers of deduction.

  There wasn’t much else of interest in the paper. Somebody had swiped Snappy’s Diner, a greasy spoon with the greasiest spoons, forks and knives in the tri-city area. The grubby little restaurant was a local ptomaine institution, and someone had hooked up the old converted train car and driven away with the joint, rotten hamburger, moldy American cheese, warm knockoff generic cola machines, and all. According to the Gazette the owner, Waldo “Snappy” Schmidt, was heartbroken, which seemed fitting given all the work Snappy’s had thrown to local cardiologists over the years.

  The drizzle that had been tapping a damp finger against the awning over my head suddenly decided to drift off and pester some poor, hitherto dry sap who was slouching up the other side of the street, and I took the brief moment between storms to bid malodorous Wino Ray a fond adieu. I kept the old rumpot’s paper as a memento of our brief time together and hustled up the sidewalk.

  Three blocks down the street, a bus exploded.

  It was a pretty terrific blast, even from a distance. A great orange plume capped by a rising black dome of soot rose above the buildings. Windows in adjacent office buildings shattered, and flaming metal bus parts rained down all over Lexington.

  You could always spot the tourists these days. They were the ones running in panic or excitedly taking pictures of the burning wreckage as the bus rolled to a slow stop and gently bent the traffic light pole on the corner of Pico. We residents of the city were currently and for the foreseeable future inured to the occasional odd bus explosion.

  Some maniac had wired up all the buses in town to blow up if they dropped below 55 miles per hour, all for some crazy ransom demand. The daily detonations had made the papers early on, but had slowly been crowded off the front page by more vitally important stories, like the annual flower show announcement at the Mafia Trade Center or missing cemetery grass tragedies.

  For a time, way back before the buses became the object of his incendiary affection, the bomber was blowing up hearses, but that turned out not to garner all that much attention since that was fifty-percent pointless. He’d moved on to cabs, but there’s nobody who lives in a city who doesn’t want that herd to be thinned, especially at rush hour. The buses had finally caught the city’s attention, and an irate populace with sore feet and lazy asses had demanded the cops do something. Amazingly, the boys in blue managed to track down the bastard behind the bombings. Unfortunately, when they went to pick him up they had to do so with police department-issued tweezers.

  According to forensics, the bomber had mistaken a cake of C-4 for a stick of butter and his Monte Cristo sandwich had taken out half the neighborhood.

  The buses were rigged with some kind of switch that only the dead guy understood, and so they were all evacuated, put on robot autopilot, and left to cruise around town until their fuel ran out. Since most of them were recently purchased atomic super-buses from Japan, the power was expected to run down in about ten thousand years.

  I generally take public transportation, but it’s impossible to catch a bus that doesn’t drop below 55 while wearing a pair of shopworn Florsheims. Plus I already have it planned that my last seat on this mortal plane will be a bar stool from which my future, elderly ass will happily keel over, and not an exploding slab of hard plastic decorated on the underside with a hundred Bazooka Joe stalactites.

  I have a car, but I usually misplace it, most often when I really need it. Also, I’d deliberately lost the keys down a storm drain several months ago in order to teach it a lesson for not keeping enough gas in its tank.

  Trains are good but they only get you so far, which was why I was stuck hoofing it to work, dodging raindrops and the occasional detonating city bus.

  The towering edifice which housed the world headquarters of Banyon Investigations, Inc. was cleverly disguised to the outside world as a shitty little office building on the bad side of the moderately unsavory section of town.

  The downstairs fish market was open for business but, since there were no actual customers, there was no actual business being conducted on the premises. The front door was open wide for the nonexistent flood of patrons, but with no ingress taking place it was ajar solely to facilitated the egress of the stink of a thousand rotting flounder into a neig
hborhood that was already under no illusions that it would ever play host to the Tournament of Roses Parade. I cut a wide swath around the dead breath of the finned damned and shook the rain from my trench coat as I entered the downstairs hallway.

  I could see through the little window that my mailbox was empty, which meant that my insubordinate office staff had cracked under the strain and harvested the stack of bills that had been bulging for a week therein. I had given strict orders to leave the mail untouched, as I was testing a postal theory wherein subject A., in this case my mailman, would finally realize the futility of his repeated attempts to get subject B. (me) to accept it as my own and would eventually reclaim my unpaid bills, thereupon subject A. would distribute them equitably to individuals who might give a rat’s ass about paying them.

  I did my best to strengthen my resolve on the elevator ride upstairs.

  My lack of resolve is legendary, which is why I’ve never resolved to quit boozing, gambling or living a generally dissolute and, hopefully, short-ish life. Still, I figured I had to make an appearance at my office at least once every few months for staff morale and to make sure it was still where I left it, and I’d resolved today was the day.

  As soon as the elevator doors closed, I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to keep my index finger, which was clearly smarter than the rest of me, from pressing the ground floor button. The whole way up to my third floor offices, I had to fight like hell to not ride back down to the first floor and, like Wino Ray whose paper I was still hauling around under my arm, find a nice cozy alley on the other side of town where I could curl up for a few blissful weeks of inebriated R & R.

  Instead of letting my finger make my decisions for me, I made the terrible mistake of trusting my untrustworthy brain, and so I found myself moments later trudging off the elevator and down to the door marked “Banyon Investigations, Inc.”