Downhill Moonlight

Brand-New Fiction

For members only, the brand-new Dick Moonlight PI novel, unedited, raw, and in-you-face!!!

1

Moonlight Faceplants

North Creek, New York

The Dead of Winter

Present Day

I blame fucking Chief APD Homicide Detective Nick Miller. It wasn’t my bright idea to slap on a pair of skis and tumble down a mountainside when I could have been doing something much more productive and much less painful. I’m a city boy after all. 

WTF.

But Fat 1977 Elvis was elated with our new assignment. He insisted that we make a mini-ski-cation out of it. We could drive to the Adirondack Mountains not only to look into what was being called an accidental downhill skiing death of a local Albany crooner by the name of Sonny Day whom Elvis knew personally, but we could get in a couple of days of skiing which, when translated, meant hanging out in the lodge bar and hitting on lonely middle-aged women who looked good in tight ski pants.

“Plus, maybe I can get a gig at the bar, Moonlight,” Elvis said. “Who don’t like Elvis?”

“Me,” I might have answered, but when it came to the King and Fat Elvis’s infatuation with him, it was best to keep your trap shut. But I’m getting ahead of my skis here (pun entirely intended).

Mere hours later we were up at dark-thirty. We made the drive in my Jeep from Albany, up past Lake George through the majestic Adirondack Mountains to a New York State-owned and operated resort called, get this, Gore Mountain. If that didn’t sound like the title of a winter-season horror movie, I don’t know what else would have.

Instead of just heading up the lift in our everyday work boots to meet up with the State Police, Elvis insisted we rent skis. Just like that, we found ourselves on a ski lift heading up to the mountaintop. I didn’t have any proper ski clothing, so I had no choice but to wear my black leather coat, Levis jeans, and a black skull cap for a ski hat. My aviator sunglasses helped block the glare from the sun on the snow. 

Elvis decided to do some advertising while he was on the mountain, so he wore his Fat Elvis costume of Evil Knievel white bell-bottomed jumper, blue cape tied at the neck, pro-wrestling belt, and thick metal-framed sunglasses, over his long Johns. Naturally, he wore gloves, but he didn’t wear a hat, preferring instead to coif his thick, black-dyed hair into a six-inch thick ducktail attached to two pork chop sideburns.