Shoot the Moon

  To my best friend, my biggest fan, my harshest critic, my wife, and my lover - all of whom just happen to be named Sandy.

  So long ago that it now seems part of a former life, I was an agent for what was then known as the Bureau of Narcotics of the United States Treasury Department and is now called the Drug Enforcement Administration. I thank my fellow agents for unwittingly contributing some of the incidents, much of the color, and even several of the characters found in these pages. I thank my agent Bob Diforio; my editor, Ruth Cavin and her assistant, Carrie McGinnis; and my early manuscript readers, among them my three children, Wendy, Ron, and Tracy; and my sister Tillie, who promises to finish it soon.

  The flat tire is simply the last straw.

  Goodman has known from the moment he woke up that it was definitely going to be one of those days.

  To begin with, the alarm clock in the motel room hadn’t gone off when it was supposed to. He realized later that the reason it hadn’t gone off was that he’d somehow managed to set it for 7:15 p.m. instead of 7:15 a.m. How was he supposed to know it could tell the difference? But by then he’d overslept, of course, and it was already after eight.

  So he’d quickly jumped into the shower, shivering in the cold water before the hot had a chance to come up, nicked himself twice while shaving, gotten into his car, and raced the twelve miles to the Fort Lauderdale Industrial Arts Building. Even as he’d made the turn out of the motel parking lot onto A1A, the squeal from his front right tire had warned him it needed air. He’d cursed himself for not taking the car the Avis agent had wanted to give him in the first place, or even the several he’d been offered as an upgrade for an additional $10 a day.

  He’d thought about stopping to fill the tire up, but there simply hadn’t been time. The days when you could pull into a gas station and spend fifteen seconds adding air to a tire were long gone. Nowadays, you had to find a station with a machine that ate quarters. And Goodman had already been running too late to bother getting change and dealing with that. Besides, it was a rental car. If he ruined the tire, he ruined the tire; it would be someone else’s problem.

  He’d gotten lost twice trying to find the address, and when he’d finally located it, he’d had to spend another five minutes looking for a parking place. He’d settled for the tail end of a spot already taken by one of those subcompact jobs. Still, the back of his car had protruded a good two feet into the crosswalk. He’d left it anyway, playing the odds and figuring a ticket couldn’t run more than $10, anyway. Not like New York, where the going rate was $55.

  He’d finally arrived for the interview a good thirty-five minutes late, already out of breath and sweating through his shirt. The thing that really upset him was that he was by habit always absurdly early for everything. And now this. They’d made him wait another half hour, just to get even with him, he figured. “They” were Mr. Stone and Mr. Baldwin, or Balder, or something like that. Between the two of them, they hadn’t smiled once.

  Predictably, the interview itself had been a disaster. No, they hadn’t received the resume he’d mailed them from New York a week earlier. Yes, they were looking for an accountant, but they really wanted a CPA, and the fact that Goodman wasn’t certified seemed to disqualify him immediately, even though their ad had made no mention of the requirement. And while they seemed to believe that there was really nothing unusual in his wanting to relocate following the death of his wife, they kept eyeing him with a vague look of suspicion, as though there might be more to that story than he was telling them. Did they think he’d murdered his wife? Was that it?

  When, after what seemed like barely a polite amount of time, they’d stood and announced that they’d be in touch, he’d been almost relieved at the dismissal.

  Back downstairs, the ticket on his windshield had hardly been a shock: By that time, he’d all but expected it. He’d pocketed it without reading it; it wasn’t until later that he’d noticed it would set him back $35.

  He’d driven around until he’d found a diner. Again, the squeal of his tire as he pulled in reminded him that he’d need to do something about it. But it could wait. At the time he’d picked up the car, he’d been proud of himself for insisting that he wasn’t going to take the dark green Toyota Camry they’d had reserved for him. Dark colors were okay for New York. In Florida, it seemed most of the cars were white - which was smart: White reflected the heat better, so you didn’t have to run the air conditioning as much. Less air conditioning meant better mileage. And with gas getting expensive again, better mileage meant saving a buck or two. So he’d asserted himself to the woman at the counter, and she’d checked the computer until she located a pale pink one, which was the closest she could find. It was being held for somebody, but when she checked, she saw the party hadn’t showed up, so she finally agreed to let Goodman have it. He remembers wondering at the time who would’ve reserved a pale pink car. Maybe a starlet, he figured. Or an Elvis wanna-be.

  Now it’s turned out that it’s not so hot anyway, with the temperature barely reaching seventy. Dark green would have been just fine after all. So all Goodman really ended up getting for his trouble was a bad tire.

  At a corner booth, he counts his money. Including the change in his pocket, $108.11. Two $50 traveler’s checks. A Visa card that’s flirting dangerously with the limit. A Mobil card issued by his last company - which might or might not be usable for a few more days. All told, enough to get back to New York if he leaves right now. If he decides instead to hang around a few more days, trying some of the “Help Wanted” ads and not landing anything, he’ll end up being stuck here without enough cash to make it back home. That could be a problem, particularly because back home is where his daughter, Kelly, is. It had been Goodman’s hope to land the job, get started at it, and find a place to stay - all before sending for Kelly. In the meantime, she’s been staying with her grandmother, trying to get over the death of her mother. No simple task for a six-year-old, he knows.

  Surprisingly, he finds that the eggs are okay and the bacon’s actually crisp, and for a moment Goodman dares to think that this might be an omen of some kind - that his luck might finally be changing.

  He should know better.

  But, for all his faults, Michael Goodman has always been a person who sees the glass as half-full, even on those occasions when it would clearly appear to an impartial observer to be almost totally empty. So, lingering over his second cup of coffee at the diner, Goodman now takes no small satisfaction over the fact that the coffee is steaming hot, while at the same time ignoring that it’s watery and all but tasteless.

  Those who know Michael Goodman tend to overlook his slightly bookish appearance, exaggerated by his steel-rimmed glasses and plastic pocket protector with its assortment of plastic pens and sharpened pencils. His repertoire of nervous tics and quirky mannerisms is easily forgiven. Goodman has no real friends to speak of in the true sense of the word - the closest he could list if called upon to do so would be the three buddies from his navy days with whom he gets together Sunday evenings. But then again, he certainly has no enemies, either. By most accounts, he’s considered a pleasant enough fellow to be around, particularly if there are cards to be played, a ball game to be watched, or some other distraction to help pass the time. If one happened to be both charitable and Jewish, one might be tempted to refer to Michael Goodman as a mensch, which pretty much translates into a regular, decent, dependable guy - a man; but Goodman’s also overheard the word schlemiel whispered behind his back more than once, and he knows it, too, occasionally applies: For the consensus seems to be that in the game of life, for better or for worse, Michael Goodman is a permanent resident of the losing column.

  Still he lingers over his second cup of coffee - long enough to let
it cool, long enough for him to pull out a road map and figure the best way to pick up the interstate, and long enough for him to recover just a bit from the series of setbacks that has plagued his morning and much of his recent life. And while he continues to linger inside the diner, figuring and recovering and doing his best to refill himself with hope, just outside the diner, his front right tire continues to empty itself of air.

  And yet, when he emerges from the diner into the sunlight of the parking lot, to discover the tire nearly flat, Goodman characteristically manages to blame himself for not having taken care of the tire earlier. Not consciously, perhaps, but just as surely in terms of his reaction to the sight. Forgetting his cavalier attitude of earlier this same morning - that since it was a rental car, it was someone else’s problem - he now permits himself but a single sigh before taking off his sport jacket, tossing it onto the front seat, and proceeding to go about the business of changing the tire.

  The truth is, changing a tire is something Goodman kind of likes doing, much like mowing a lawn or emptying a dishwasher. There’s an orderliness to it, a rhythm that you can actually get into, if you allow yourself.

  A thousand miles away, Russell Bradford wakes up in the South Bronx tenement apartment he shares with his mother, his grandmother - whom everyone calls Nana - his two brothers, and his sister.

  It isn’t the noise that wakes Russell, though there’s plenty of that. It isn’t the cold air finding its way through the ancient window frames and up between the warped floorboards. It isn’t an alarm clock, either: With no job, and no school to got to since he dropped out, Russell has no need of an alarm to wake him.

  No, it’s something much more basic, more urgent, than any of those things that wakes Russell Bradford this morning. Russell Bradford is sick. Which means it’s time for him to go out.

  Because it’s one of those cars where they hide the spare tire at the bottom of the trunk, Goodman first has to take his suitcase and garment bag out and place them on the pavement. Then he lifts the partition that separates the trunk and the spare-tire compartment. He’s pleased to see that they’ve given him a full-sized tire, not one of those polyspares you can use for only fifty miles and have to drive slowly on. He notices it’s bolted down by a big wing nut. He loosens the wing nut a bit, then gives it a good flick with one finger. It spins pleasingly as it works its way almost to the top of the threaded rod. He gives it another turn and a half, and it comes off.

  Goodman leans over the spare, grasps it with both hands, and lifts, and is immediately seized with a sudden stabbing pain in his lower back. He lets go of the tire and tries to straighten up, but the damage is done.

  Michael Goodman is no stranger to lower-back pain. He’s been throwing his back out for half his life, ever since he was in the navy, in his early twenties. He’s been to half a dozen doctors, who’ve given him half a dozen opinions: a herniated disk, a degenerating sacroiliac, a pinched nerve, an asymmetrical spine, weak stomach muscles, and flat feet. Goodman himself has decided it has something to do with mental stress. He notices that when things are going well, his back leaves him pretty much alone. When he’s broke and between jobs and can’t pay his bills, it’s sure to go out on him. It’s been doing that a lot lately.

  He takes a couple of deep breaths and tries to straighten up again, hoping he hasn’t hurt himself too badly. When he was younger, the pain would often be gone by the next morning; if not, it might last a day or two at most. Now that he’s reached forty, each episode seems to last longer than the one before it. Sometimes it’s close to a month before he’s fully recovered.

  Goodman returns to the spare tire, determined not to be defeated by it. He’s certain it must still be bolted down, so immovable was it when he first tried to lift it. But he can’t find anything else that’s holding it down. So he lifts one edge. It’s heavy, but it moves a bit.

  He continues to lift one side of the tire until he gets it to a vertical position in its well. Then, using both hands, he rolls it toward himself, up and onto the lower lip of the trunk. Then he nudges it a little farther, letting gravity do the rest. He poises his hand to catch it on the first bounce and dribble it to a standstill, the way one might control a basketball. But for the second time, the tire surprises him. It barely bounces at all; instead, it makes a thudding noise and falls over on its side.

  He bends down painfully and pushes his hand against the sidewall, expecting it to give: It figures that they’d have given him a flat for a spare. But the sidewall is hard to the touch - if anything, it feels overinflated.

  He stands the tire up again and begins to roll it around to the right front of the car. But it doesn’t even roll properly - it seems somehow out of balance. He stoops down and, bracing himself carefully to avoid further damage to his back, he lifts it. It is absurdly heavy.

  It occurs to him to let some air out the tire in order to lighten it. (It won’t be until much later that he’ll remember that air doesn’t weigh anything, except in a vacuum. But right now, in his pain and frustration, the idea somehow makes sense to him.) So he takes a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, fits the metal opening in the tip of it over the valve stem of the tire, and pushes it slightly to one side. There is the expected hissing noise, but it lasts only a second or two.

  He pushes sideways against the valve stem again. Nothing. He feels the tire again; it’s softer, but only slightly. Yet, for some reason, no more air will come out.

  Russell Bradford slips into a pair of worn jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. He puts on his Nikes, not bothering with socks, and a denim jacket. From under his pillow, he retrieves a crumpled $20 bill. It’s all the money he has.

  “Wheah you gon widdout breakfass?” his grandmother asks him as he walks by her.

  “Out,” Russell says.

  Goodman stares at the spare tire. Slowly, it dawns on him: The tire is defective; it won’t hold air. Only they’ve been too cheap to replace it. Instead, they’ve filled it with sand or something to make it look normal, figuring nobody ever bothers to change a tire on a rental car, they just call the company to come out with another tire.

  But Michael Goodman is stubborn. Instead of being like everyone else and calling the toll-free “Help” number for Avis, he goes back to the trunk of the car. There, nestled in with the jack, he finds what’s he’s looking for: the jack handle, rounded and hollow at one end to remove lug nuts, but flattened like the end of a crowbar at the other.

  Back at the spare tire, he uses the crowbar end to try to pry the sidewall away from the wheel. There’s some adhesive stuff he has to break through, but he manages; after all, there’s no air pressure left in the tire to fight him.

  He runs the crowbar end of the jack handle around the wheel, separating the tire from it completely. Then he pushes them apart far enough so that he can look inside. At first, he can’t see anything but darkness, so he turns the opening around to face the sunlight. Now, as he peers inside, he can see something blue.

  Keeping the opening as wide as he can with the jack handle, he uses his other hand to reach inside. He feels something smooth that he’s unable to get a grip on. But by running his hand over its surface, he comes to what feels like a corner, which he’s able to grasp in his fingers and pull partway out of the opening.

  It turns out to be some sort of a blue plastic wrap. He pinches it, trying to break it to see what’s inside. But it’s either heavy-duty plastic or several layers thick, and it takes him a minute to make a tear in it. When he finally succeeds, a white powder trickles out.

  Russell Bradford walks toward 140th Street. He’s in a hurry, but he can’t walk too fast because of the cramps in his midsection. In spite of the fact that it’s 40 degrees out, Russell’s dark skin glistens with sweat.

  At sixteen, Russell looks as though he could be going to school this morning, or on his way to work, or running some errand for his mother or grandmother. But he’s doing none of those things. As he walks, clutching his $20 bill tightly in his fist inside
the pocket of his jeans, Russell Bradford has only one thing on his mind, one goal in all of life.

  Russell Bradford is going to cop.

  Michael Goodman has never before seen real narcotics. He’s tried marijuana twice in his life, even inhaled. It made him cough a lot before putting him to sleep. But Goodman has seen movies, and he’s not stupid. Without knowing precisely what the white powder is that has trickled out of the blue plastic, and without having the slightest idea how much of it there is inside the spare tire, he knows he’s stumbled upon something serious.

  His first thought is that his discovery could get him arrested. That thought alone makes him uncomfortable, until it’s replaced by his second thought. It’s the second thought - that this stuff could just as likely get him killed - that prompts him to act.

  He looks around. Spots a pay phone less than 100 feet away. Walks directly to it. Lifts the receiver. Hears a dial tone. Punches in 911. It rings twice before he hears a recorded voice.

  “We’re sorry, all available operators are busy. Please stay on the line. Your call will be answered by the next available operator. If your call is not a true emergency, please hang up now and dial the seven-digit number of the agency you would like to reach.”

  Goodman stays on the line as instructed. Every thirty seconds or so, the recorded voice comes back to assure him that calls will be answered in the order they have been placed. It reminds him to hang up now if it’s not a true emergency. That gets Goodman to thinking: Is his call a true emergency? True emergencies are heart attacks, fires, people in distress. He imagines that his call may prevent such a true emergency call from getting through in time to save someone’s life. He wonders if, when they finally answer his call, they’ll be angry at him for not having hung up and dialed the seven-digit number of the proper agency. But, not sure what the proper agency even is, he stays on the phone.

  Five minutes go by like this. Ten. The phone is in the sun. Sweat runs down Goodman’s neck and forehead. His shirt sticks to his back. His eyes burn. Standing in one place causes his back to hurt even more than before. He changes positions so that he faces away from the car.