Shoot the Moonlight Out

by William Boyle

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

A haunting crime story about the broken characters inhabiting yesterday's Brooklyn, this is the new novel from modern master of neo-noir William Boyle.
An explosive crime drama, Shoot the Moonlight Out evokes a mystical Brooklyn where the sidewalks are cracked, where Virgin Mary statues tilt in fenced front yards, and where smudges of moonlight reflect in puddles even on the blackest nights.
Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighborhood wrongs through acts of violence. A simple mission to strong-arm a Bay Ridge con man, Max Berry, leads him to cross paths with a tragedy that hits close to home.
Fast forward five years: June 2001. The summer before New York City and the world changed for good. Charlie French is a low-level gangster-wannabe trying to make a name for himself. When he stumbles onto a bowling alley locker stuffed with a bag full of cash, he brings it to his only pal, Max Berry, for safekeeping while he cleans up the mess surrounding it. Bobby Santovasco--with no real future mapped out and the big sin of his past shining brightly in his rearview mirror--has taken a job working as an errand boy for Max Berry. On a recruiting run for Max's Ponzi scheme, Bobby meets Francesca Clarke, born in the neighborhood but an outsider nonetheless. They hit it off. Bobby gets the idea to knock off Max's safe so he and Francesca can escape Brooklyn forever. Little does he know what Charlie French has stashed there.
Meanwhile, Bobby's former stepsister, Lily Murphy, is back home in the neighborhood after college, teaching a writing class in the basement of St. Mary's church. She's also being stalked by her college boyfriend. One of her students is Jack Cornacchia. When she opens up to him about her stalker, Jack decides to take matters into his own hands.
A riveting portrait of lives crashing together at the turn of the century, Shoot the Moonlight Out is tragic and tender and funny and strange. A sense of loss is palpable--what has been lost and what will be lost--and Boyle's characters face down old ghosts with grim determination, as ripples of consequence radiate in dangerous directions.
"William Boyle's Shoot the Moonlight Out is his best yet, an operatic ode to passion and grief, reckless youth and radical forgiveness, and most of all the pangs and beauty of parental love, unswerving and irreplaceable. Sprawling yet intimate, epic yet full of the lived-in humor of the great Sidney Lumet or Richard Price, it hums hard in your heart long after the final page." MEGAN ABBOTT

Release date: November 2, 2021

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Jack Cornacchia grew up in this house on Bay Thirty-Eighth Street, and he knows he’ll die here one day. He’s sitting on the ramshackle front porch with a can of cold beer. It’s early afternoon. He’s off work today. He’s a customer field representative for Con Ed, goes around knocking on doors, led down to basements and cellars to read gas and electric meters. He never really got what the difference between a basement and a cellar is. Some people say one, some the other. He says basement mostly. He guesses there’s a distinction, but he doesn’t know or care to look it up. He could. He has a dictionary around. He likes not knowing. Either way, his job allows him to see the private lives of people, to see them in all their loneliness. It’s very personal.

His father was a mechanic. His mother worked at Woolworth’s before he was born and then stopped to raise him. He was their only child. They bought this house the year they were married for ten grand, a lot of money then. It’s a two-story house with a sloping roof, four bedrooms, a wide front porch, and a pine tree out front they brought back from their honeymoon upstate. Jack went to St. Mary Mother of Jesus on Eighty-Fourth Street for grade school. Next door to the school is the church, where he was baptized and confirmed and attended mass every Saturday night with his parents until he was sixteen and made up his mind that mass was no longer for him. He believed and still believes in God but in his own way. High school was Our Lady of the Narrows on Shore Road in Bay Ridge. All boys. He hated it. He didn’t go to college. For a while he bounced around from shit job to shit job. Considered taking the civil service test. Thought about maybe being a postal worker. Finally, his father scored him the job with Con Ed through a guy he knew from the garage, Connected Benny.

At twenty-one, Jack met Janey at a coffee shop on Avenue U. He’d dated a few girls. Nothing too serious. He’d broken his cherry unceremoniously at seventeen in the back of a borrowed car with Mary Concetta Stallone. He’d dated Dyana Petrillo for a few months—that was the most serious things had ever been up to that point. He learned the ropes in the sack with her. She was a good teacher. Gentle with him. Experienced. Of course, that experience wrecked him. He got jealous and called her a puttana, and it was over. He learned how not to be with girls from that. He learned to leave the past in the past. With Janey, things were different right away. He was cool and collected. It was love at first sight. That brown hair. Those soft brown eyes. She looked like a saint mixed with a movie star. She hadn’t had any serious boyfriends because her family was religious as hell, so there was not much of a past to excavate out of envy. For a Catholic boy, she was the dream. They got married six months after meeting, against the wishes of her parents. His folks were overjoyed. Jack and Janey moved in with them. Amelia was born the next year, in March 1978. They were so happy. Janey was a perfect mother. Mom and Dad became Nonna and Nonno. Amelia was their sweet girl. A decade passed. Things were better than he’d ever thought they could be.

Then the bottom fell out. Little by little at first. His mother tripped on the way home from shopping at one of the fruit stalls on Eighty-Sixth Street. Her trusty old cart slipped out of her grasp and she toppled hard to the sidewalk, busting her hip. He looks back and thinks of that as the inciting event, the moment when things started going sideways. While she was in the hospital getting better, his old man developed a bad hacking cough that quickly turned into something worse. When he finally went to the doctor, the diagnosis was pneumonia. They were both laid up for a while, incapacitated, but they got better. Then Janey got sick. Cancer. She battled for three years and lost. She was so frail at the end. Thank God his parents were there to help with Amelia, to give her some sense of normalcy. They took her to shows in the city, made birthdays and Christmases special. Janey’s parents had remained out of the picture, and they didn’t return—not even after Jack called to let them know how bad it was—to make amends with their only daughter. Jack knew Janey was a goner before she was gone. It was just a feeling he had. Things had turned rotten. Everything had gone too good for too long. It was bound to break down.

Janey died on September 13, 1992. Days didn’t get much worse than that. Amelia lost her happy glow. Her school suggested therapy. They clung to each other. They depended on his parents for everything. He and Amelia wouldn’t have made it out of that time alive if not for Nonna and Nonno, Mom and Dad to him, lifesavers, life-givers. The next two years were tough. A whir of sad days. Amelia started high school at Fontbonne Hall Academy in Bay Ridge, where Janey had wanted her to go. Jack worked his routes. His parents started going to Atlantic City one day a week for a break. They loved it. They were comped meals. They went and came back on the same day via a bus on Bay Parkway. They never stayed over, even though they probably could’ve been comped rooms too. The Golden Nugget was their joint. Mom liked slots. Dad preferred blackjack. On one of their return trips, his mother took a spill getting off the bus and broke her other hip. They rushed her to the hospital, and she died in surgery. His father died of heartache three months later. They were both buried at a cemetery on Long Island they’d never visited—his father had scored a good deal on graves there many years before. The cemetery wasn’t far without traffic, but it was rare not to hit traffic going to the Island and the hassle of getting there kept him and Amelia from frequent visits.

When his folks died, the world really started feeling like a cruel joke to Jack. That decade of good days had merely been a preamble to this decade of death and destruction. He and Amelia struggled on. They clung to each other even harder. The house was empty and sad. It took Jack months to deal with everything he needed to deal with. His father had put Jack’s name on the deed to the house, thank Christ, but he needed to update it to include Amelia. He knew he needed a will and a health-care proxy. He had everything his parents had left behind to go through—bank accounts, safe-deposit boxes, insurance policies, crates of stuff. He had to transfer all the bills to his name.

The house is run-down these days. Needs a new roof. The railing on the porch is rotting. The front steps need to be redone. Rogue squirrels have busted two windows in the attic. The oil tank in the basement is fifty years old, and Jack’s always worried it’s going to blow up. The linoleum in the kitchen is cracked and peeling from the edges. The bathroom sink makes loud clanging noises. The upstairs and downstairs showers have good water pressure, but the grout is full of mold and the drains are clogged. There’s a spot on the floor in the upstairs bathroom where water is somehow leaking through and bubbling the ceiling in the dining room below. The ceiling in the bedroom’s in rough shape too.

Amelia’s eighteen now. She just graduated from Fontbonne. It hadn’t been cheap. She’s going to Fordham in the fall. She wants to be a writer. She took a creative writing class her senior year and loved it. She’s been getting guidebooks, trying her hand at stories and even starting work on a novel. High school is tough under any circumstances—figuring out who she is, who she might want to be—but add tragedy to the mix and it was a million times more brutal. Amelia has had enough tragedy to last her a lifetime. Jack hopes more than anything that she can have a peaceful and happy existence from here on out. He’ll do everything he can to keep trouble from her door, and he hopes she’s smart enough to steer clear of trouble. She is. She’s a bright kid. Good head on her shoulders. He’s only forty, but he hopes he lives to see her marry someone nice and have a kid or couple of kids, write that novel, do all the things she dreams of doing. She keeps a map of the world on her wall, and she sticks pins into the places she wants to visit. Italy, Jamaica, Brazil, Hollywood. So many places she wants to see. He doesn’t want to tell her she can’t do it all, might not even do any of it. What’s the point? Let her dream.

Jack hasn’t been with anyone since Janey, hasn’t dragged any girlfriends or stepmoms into the picture, but he does have a secret life. Something he can’t tell his daughter about. Won’t ever tell her about. It’s given him some purpose—other than just being a dad—these past few years.

It started one day at the Wrong Number, the dive where he sometimes hangs out. He was drinking heavily right after Janey died. Starting early on his days off while Amelia was at school. His buddy Frankie Modica, who he’d gone to St. Mary’s and Our Lady of the Narrows with, asked him to hurt the priest who’d molested his son. His son was ten. The priest was at Most Precious Blood. To no one’s surprise, the diocese was protecting him. Word was that soon they’d move him to a parish in Western New York, Buffalo maybe, where no one knew of his crimes. His name was Father Pat. Frankie said he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, he didn’t have the chops, but he knew Jack was tough. He could give him some money, not much in the end, maybe a grand.

“What are you asking me?” Jack said.

“To hurt him,” Frankie said. “You don’t have to kill him. Just hurt him. I want to see the guy pay. Right now all he’s being is protected.”

Jack thought about it. He wasn’t violent by nature but he was definitely capable of violence when necessary. He’d been in bar fights where honor was on the line. He thought about a bad guy like this Father Pat getting away with what he’d done. He was sick to his stomach over the fact that someone like that kept right on living in the world when Janey didn’t get that chance, when she got ripped away. He’d learned that much was true in life. Bad people often lived easier and better than good people. They endured, while good people dropped like flies. He figured what the hell. He could pour his anger and sadness into it. He got the address where the priest was hiding.

Since time was a concern—they weren’t sure when Father Pat was being moved—he went there the next night with a baseball bat, wearing a ski mask, and beat the bad priest within an inch of his life. He was surprised how easy it was. He went to this cold place in his head where it didn’t even feel like he was doing what he was doing. He’d seen movies about detached hitmen and that’s what he felt like. All business. In and out. He split when it was over, left Father Pat bleeding and moaning on the floor. The bastard hadn’t even protested. He probably figured he had it coming to him.

Frankie said he was a saint. Jack wanted to refuse the money—he wanted to say he’d done it on principle—but he figured he could put it away for Amelia’s future. Start the college fund he’d always meant to start. Make sure he’d set her up in case something happened to him too. He put the cash in a safe-deposit box at his bank.

What he hadn’t expected was that word would spread. People started coming to him with their problems, telling him about somebody who’d wronged them, stolen from them, hurt somebody close to them. There’d been fifteen jobs. The fifth one was when he started bringing a gun he bought out of Slim Helen’s trunk on Avenue X. He keeps it wrapped in a cloth in the basement, tucked in a nook in the open ceiling over the oil burner, the bullets in a nearby cookie tin. On his seventh job he used the gun, killed a guy who’d raped a girl from the parish. He’d proceeded with the same cold detachment. It was a few months after his parents died, and he found it to be cathartic. The rapist didn’t even look afraid. He seemed thankful. Jack was taking poison out of the world. Now he has enough in the bank to help Amelia make a good life for herself. Somewhere down the road, he figures he’ll stop. What if Amelia gets married and has a kid and he has to hold that kid, be a grandpa, and know in his heart that he’s hurting and killing people on the side? Sure, they’re bad people, but that’s still a lot of blood on his hands. Plus, he’s getting worried that Amelia’s going to find out. There’s a network of secrets that’s been built and maintained, but it only goes so far. All it takes is one violation of trust, one person saying something to a cousin who can