When the moon was full

This is a story about a series of murders that happen in the main city of my Universe only when the moon is full.

This was a rewrite of a story I wrote many years ago when I was young on a 486 Compaq computer and is now and forever trapped on a floppy disk with.

Roger Ramos decided to have a quick smoke while reviewing the crime scene before examining the body. A busboy had found the corpse in a dumpster. At the same time, he was taking the trash out at the end of a long shift. After he vomited his half-eaten entitled cheap employee meal from one of the most luxurious restaurants on Serrano’s oceanfront, he cleaned himself up. Then, he used the payphone in the alleyway to call the police. It was late 1974, and there was a series of gruesome murders that only occurred when the moon was full. 

In reality, Roger was waiting to seize his moment with the body after the detectives left and before the medical examiner arrived. It was daylight, so it was harder for him to hide from his former colleagues, unlike at midnight smoking at the end of the spooky alleyway that ran behind all the elegant restaurants on the oceanfront. A lowly private eye could go unnoticed, but not so much in summer, adding the hottest part of the day, on top of the hundreds of weekend holidaymakers that made the short flight to the island from America and the crowds that had gathered to see the body. Roger made his move as the detectives he would prefer not to name or cross paths with had finished with the body. The detectives started walking to the other end of the alleyway to face the press at the end of the caution tape.

He made his move as they reached the cordoned-off end of the alleyway to handle the reporter’s questions. Roger was wearing a fancier olive green suit than you would expect from a private eye that had seen better days. He wore a black hat with a white band around it with a king of clubs sitting in it. No raincoat, it was too hot, and Roger wasn’t a walking cliche. He flicked his cigarette butt into a puddle and sneaked out from behind a dumpster he had been hiding behind. Roger pulled his hat down to cover his eyes from the sun. Then he skulked slowly to the corpse in the middle of the alley, halfway between where Roger had started and where the flamboyant detectives were seeking fame with the local journalists. He lifted the sheet and went to work as he reached the body.

As with all previous victims he had examined, half of the head was missing. His theory was that the killer chopped off part of the face with an axe. Then, they put it in a sack and took it with them as a souvenir. There was dirt and blood under the poor guy’s fingernails as if he had given some fight before his soul checked out of its mortal hotel. The faceless man was a sailor wearing a full-dress Navy blue uniform. Roger noticed the detectives were getting restless, twitching, and nearly looking his way. Then, he saw something glistening under the dumpster the busboy had thrown up in earlier. He replaced the sheet with his right hand and picked it up with his flick knife in his left hand. The seaman’s dog tags were dangling on a gold chain at the end of his blade. 

“Alfredo Alberto”, Roger read out loud and quickly ducked behind the dumpster as his former friends from the force started moving in his direction. He pocketed the dog tags and used his knife to shimmy the locked kitchen door where the busboy worked. Making his way through the abandoned kitchen and out to the front of the empty restaurant, a dead body wasn’t good for business, and they were closed. Next, he pried open a side window and exited as if he was never there.

*

**

The following day, Roger had woken up in his bathtub naked with a worse headache than he had the last time. He had found himself in the same predicament after a heavy night of drinking. His muscles ached as if he had been in another fight or had fallen from a great height. Slowly and painfully, Roger lifted his entire body with his arms on the sides of the bath and swung his legs over the tub’s edge. He sat on the edge of his bathtub and grabbed his packet of cigarettes and lighter from the top of the bath. Roger had struggled a lot with memory loss over the last few months. He took a draw on his smoke, lit it, and tried to remember anything he could from the night before. His mind was blank. As he sat on the side of the bath in pain and confusion, the doorbell constantly rang, followed by a gentle ladylike thud on the glass part of his front door. 

Roger jumped up and limped as fast as he could to his bedroom across the hall from the bathroom. He grabbed a shirt and trousers, quickly got dressed and scampered down the hallway to the front door. It was an old client, Mercedes Munoz, and she had hired Roger a few months ago, the day before the first full moon murder. 

*

**

July 13th 1974,

Serrano

Three months earlier, Roger had woken up naked, sleeping in a dumpster, after being found by two beat cops investigating his snoring. He was now wrapped in a blanket, receiving the most extensive dressing down of his career from his Captain. Sitting across from his superior in his office, he tried to think how he had gotten into that dumpster and where his clothes were. All Roger could remember was that evening he had gone to question a suspect, and they had fled. He pursued them out the window and injured himself. Jumping between fire escapes, he continued chasing them across the Serrano skyline. Then his memory went blank, nothing but darkness after stalking his prey and being woken up by a poking nightstick. Around this time, his blackouts and headaches were getting a lot worse. Captain Ceolin was over the memory loss and his best detective waking up naked and embarrassing the department all over his city. I guess Roger caught him on a bad day; instead of losing a week’s pay, this time, he was suspended without pay till Ceolin could figure out what to do with him.

During the next week, he put a card in the window of the local shop and the newspaper advertising himself as a private detective and hoping to make some easy money while he waited for the call to return to active duty. A more extraordinary case than finding a lost cat arrived across his desk. He jumped as a long buzz on the doorbell woke him from his afternoon nap, and Mercedes Munoz entered his life. Roger opened his front door and immediately witnessed a vision of beauty.

“What brings Sophia Loren to my doorstep during an electrical storm?” He asked, confused why one of Hollywood’s greatest and most beloved was standing in front of his fleapit apartment. 

“No, no, I get that a lot she said. I am not even Italian! I look a lot like her. My name is Mercedes Munoz. I am looking for Roger, the private eye that lives here?” The beautiful Latin lady dressed in a red summer dress that the rain had soaked right through and was holding her shoes asked.

Roger walked away and returned with a raincoat. He handed it to her, turned his back and said: “The bathroom is at the end of the hall. Sorry, this raincoat is all I have. Please clean up and get dry.” 

Mercedes found her way to Roger’s office from the bathroom, clean and dry and dressed in the raincoat Roger had given her. She had hung her dress up in Roger’s bathroom to dry. Roger was sitting at his desk smoking a cigarette while waiting for his first client to get comfortable enough to meet with him. She still looked beautiful wearing his raincoat. Mercedes entered the office and directly sat at the seat in front of the small desk. The room was tiny and only had room for a little more than Roger’s old wooden desk and a chair on either side. A phone, typewriter, and ashtray overflowing with cigarette ash were on the desk.

“My Mario is missing!” she screamed with a demeanour unbecoming someone of her beauty and grace. Mario was her husband and a missing person whom she wanted to hire Roger to find. Roger knew who Mario Munoz was. He was a low-level gangster with a reputation for thinking he was more important than he was. Mario also carried an enormous hand cannon, a .44 Magnum. Mercedes hysterically explained that he had been missing for 48 hours. The police had dismissed her as he was a person of interest in many cases on the wrong side of the law. They would not waste resources on a man who wouldn’t think twice about killing one of their own. Roger handed her a handkerchief, and once she started to dab her eyes, he offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.

“I will take the case... I know a few places where Mario hangs out and does business.” Roger said in a concerned tone.

“Thank you, Mr Ramos... here are one hundred and fifty dollars to retain your services, and I can pay your expenses and a hundred and fifty a day until he is found.” She said, slowly sobbing in a ladylike manner.

*

**

Roger followed Four Finger Frederico to the Kitty Kat Klub, Serrano’s only gentleman’s club, the following night. Roger had asked around in a few bars Mario frequented, and one name that kept coming up as the last person seen with Mario was Federico. Roger sat in a quiet booth away from the stage and the dancers but close enough to hear and see what Federico was up to. Due to his size and mammoth frame, it was hard work for Roger to be discrete. He was 6’5” and had an impressive upper body with no fat, just muscles bursting out of his shirt, and his legs were just as incredible. He was dressed more relaxed for this stakeout. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, khaki trousers, and boat shoes with no socks to let his vast feet breathe.

Federico was saying goodnight to his friends and heading towards the exit. Roger waited a few minutes and followed. He walked to the end of York Street. Then he caught a glimpse of Federico walking down a dark alleyway and cautiously pursued him. The alleyway passed through Glasgow Boulevard. After a few more streets, they reached a warehouse, and Federico entered, leaving the side door ajar. Roger walked through the door after giving him enough time to move through the warehouse. The door banged shut behind him as he got five or six steps onto the shop floor. The door was now locked from the outside, and Roger had no idea how it had closed and locked him inside with Four Finger Federico and god knows who else. The warehouse was completely dark except for a light coming from a small office at the end of the mezzanine. Roger climbed the ladder at the far end of the warehouse. The stairs were too far away and would cause too much noise, and the ladder sat right below the office. 

Roger reached the top of the ladder and slowly opened the office door. Four Finger Federico was sitting waiting for him and smoking a cigar at the large oak desk in front of the old rusty filing cabinets in the small office. There was a wall of windows with closed blinds where the door opened and one welcoming empty chair. Roger sat down and accepted the cigar he was offered. 

As he lit it, Federico spoke in a soft, husky tone. He also had a strong Italian accent. “I understand that you are looking for my associate Mario and have been asking about me all over town?”

“I have been hired by his wife to find him... do you know where he is?” Roger asked as he waited for Federico, who was pouring two glasses of whisky. 

Roger drank it all in one big gulp, and Federico asked him the same question. “Do you know where Mario is? He vanished yesterday from the place I had been letting him sleep while we did some business together.”

As Roger started to feel a little groggy, Federico moved behind him. He felt a breeze coming towards him as Federico swung a baseball bat at his head. Roger reacted and elbowed him, full force, sending him flying through the air and colliding with and breaking the window behind him. Gravity had its say next as his back met the warehouse’s concrete floor below. Roger jumped through the window, following his aggressor. He was rolling around the floor, groaning in pain. Roger slid down the sides of the ladder like a fireman to check he was okay. A massive brawl ensued. Roger was still dizzy from the drugged drink he had been given. He was still able to give it his all. He threw Federico to the other side of the warehouse in an attempt to stop the onslaught of punches from both sides that were not going to back down. 

The next thing he knew, he was naked on the cold warehouse floor, and Bright Branigan threw a bucket of water over him and said, “I swear you get bigger every time I see you... stop going to the gym and eating so much.”

“Where is Federico?” Roger said, dazed and confused.

“He has vanished... We found the body of a Mario Munoz with half its head missing down the street as well.”

As before, Roger was sitting in a chair, freezing, wearing only a blanket. This time, not in his Captain’s office. He was in a cold warehouse on his tip toes cause of the chill from the concrete floor. Both Captain Ceolin and Bright Branigan, the lead detective in Mario’s murder, were pacing around his chair, interrogating him. They didn’t have much to go on from what he could gather, and Federico was the main suspect. Roger had beaten him up and forced him into hiding, which they were not happy about.

They found him some clothes that would fit and let him go, and after all the shouting, they were not in the least concerned with two of Serrano’s most wanted being out of action. Roger was exhausted. He stumbled through his door and found the first letter he would receive from Sam Snowflake. It was typed on a typewriter with no stamp. It had been slid under his door.  

Sam introduced himself as a concerned citizen who was a neighbour of Four Finger Frederico and was worried about the goings on in the last week. He heard Roger had been asking around about Mario Munoz’s location. Mario and Federico were looking to branch out on their own, and higher-ranking members of their crime organisation had found out and were not happy about it. Mario was in hiding because of this, and Federico had been the one keeping him safe. Last night, Sam had seen an enormous gentleman who looked to be of Icelandic origin hanging around outside Federico’s house.

“That has to be Hanz Hammer?” Roger stopped reading and shouted out loud to himself. 

Sam finished the letter by saying he would let Roger know if he had any further information detrimental to his case.

He dug out his file on Hanz Hammer, someone he could never catch when he was a detective. Roger had always suspected Hanz of being a serial killer. Who liked to use various kinds of Hammers on his victims. The file had notes and photographs of Serrano’s waterfront. Roger had followed Hanz zig-zagging through the cargo sheds and offices, but Hanz always disappeared. Roger was going to get some sleep after the last few chaotic days. Then, he would take a more detailed look around the area where he lost track of Hanz each time he followed him. Roger had a long relaxing bath followed by a triple whisky, then slept for four straight days. He only realised this when he got up that his legs felt like jelly, and he looked down the hall and saw 4 day’s worth of newspapers crammed under his door.

So nobody wondered or checked if I was dead, even the newspaper kid? Roger thought as he laughed to himself after seeing the papers piled up. 

Roger had woken up hungrier than he had ever been. He got dressed quickly, putting on a brown leather jacket, a Hawaiian shirt, dark blue chinos and tan-coloured boat shoes with no socks. Then Roger made his way to the diner below his apartment and ordered one of everything on the breakfast menu. The restaurant goers watched in awe as the table in Roger’s small booth was piled up with an all-day breakfast fry-up, grilled meats, pancakes, pies, many different incarnations of cooked eggs and all of today’s specials. Roger gave the patrons breakfast and a show as he quickly gobbled down the lot, then drank a whole pot of coffee out of the pot, not a mug. Before he finally lit a cigarette and smoked it in only one long drag. Roger threw down a wad of cash to pay the bill and exited out the side door. Then he flagged down a cab and headed for the waterfront.   

Roger found his way to the area where Hanz would vanish when he tracked him as a detective, and he stood on the wooden jetty and listened. There were a lot of cigarette butts scattered around the jetty which had no boats anchored to it, so there seemed to be no reason to smoke there. Until he heard the thud of the sea hitting metal repeatedly. Then he peaked over the edge of the wooden dock and saw a steel door with a locking wheel on it. Roger spun the wheel, and the door opened, revealing a ladder to a secret room below.       

As he descended into darkness, seawater drenched Roger at irregular intervals as he cautiously stepped onto each run of the ladder. After the final run, his foot pushed down against a pressure pad, and lights illuminated the entire bunker. The water was sucked out by pressurised holes in the walls. The doorway below the ladder he stepped through had a hairdryer effect, and his clothes and hair were dry when he found his way into the central area of the bunker. Where he found more kinds of hammers than anyone could ever imagine. 

Roger looked around the open-plan room made entirely of metal that he had entered, which housed the hammers. On either side of the room were large magnetic panels covering both walls, holding various pairs of giant hammers. It looked like a very advanced armoury of a submarine that contained no other kinds of weapons. Beyond the armoury was another open doorway leading to the final room in the bunker, which housed a bench with some handwritten notepads sitting on top of them. There was a notepad with names and addresses. On the list were Mario and Four Finger Frederico, as well as many pages of other names, all crossed out with a line of a red pen. The only name not crossed out was the last one in the notepad. The address written next to the name was only a couple of streets away from the bunker.

“Could this be his next victim?” Roger shouted to himself, and his words echoed through the entire bunker and back into the small room where he was holding the notepad.

He made his way back through the bunker, stopping in the middle of the armoury and noticed that the most prominent magnetic panel was missing a hammer.

Was that always missing... Or has someone been here while I was in the backroom? Roger thought to himself as he scanned the room and looked to see if anyone else was there. 

He was totally alone. He reached the second doorway, climbed the ladder, and turned the wheel to open the hatch. Then, he pulled himself up through icey waves and locked the steel door behind him. Roger then made his way to the address he had seen on the pad. It was three streets away, and he had made it there in record time. Roger was looking through a skylight on top of the house at the end of Quaker Road. Through the glass, he saw a giant blonde man dressed in a bright red tartan suit and peak cap dragging a massive sledgehammer behind him over the tiled floor below. Roger wasn’t a minuscule man but still felt miniaturised when looking at the monster through the skylight. The glass started to crack around Roger’s feet, and he had no time to move before he realised he was hurtling towards Hanz on the ground below. 

The next thing he remembered was waking up naked, dangling by his foot from a fire escape. A few streets away, he had been woken up by loud police sirens in the distance. Roger managed to avoid falling again and climbed up the fire escape onto the roof. He had found a large cloak and watched the police cars heading to the same building he had fallen into earlier. 

Roger’s memory loss was getting worse. He was remembering less and less from the previous evenings when he found himself cold and naked the following morning. He thought heading away from the screaming blue lights would be more advantageous than heading towards them. Because he could not remember anything that had happened at that house after the skylight cracked.      

Roger headed home, and as he opened the door, he found a second letter from Sam under the doormat. Sam told him that he knew that Roger had been having issues remembering. But he wasn’t responsible for anything that happened to the enormous Icelantic gentleman at the house he went to. Sam had been watching from a distance and went on to explain that the person who fled the scene before the police arrived was very short in height and looked European. The person had fled towards the mountains in the direction of the glass tower apartments deep in the Serrano countryside.

“That can only be Jonathan Jenga... he lives in those apartments” Jenga was a French arms dealer”, Roger said out loud as he went through the same process as before, dug out the file on Jonathan Jenga, then had a long relaxing bath, followed by a triple whisky, and then slept for days.  

*

**

September 11th 1974,

Translucent Towers, Serrano.

Flower Foster wasn’t a victim of the full moon murders. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a witness to the murder or an acquaintance of Jonathan Jenga. Her head was found at the scene. This change in the habit of the killer was too chaotic for her to have been a victim. As such, she was collateral damage and should have lived that night as she wasn’t part of the killer’s plan.

Roger was woken again by sirens heading past him on the country road. He had woken up naked, this time inside the old wooden servant’s garage at the Mayor’s mansion. Earlier that day, he remembered making the long drive to Translucent Towers in his yellow Ford Pinto. Then, riding the massive glass elevator that was made entirely of black glass so it concealed whoever was inside. Roger had avoided the escalator that revolved around the monstrous cylindrical eleven-story greenhouse. He reached the eighth floor and looked for a way to sneak into Jenga’s apartment. Everything was like a goldfish bowl, so staying hidden took a lot of work. The last thing he remembered was hearing screaming before waking up in a pile of straw. He rolled over and saw his yellow Ford Pinto parked in the garage. The driver’s door was bent out of shape and no longer fully closed. The car was in good enough shape to drive slowly out of the old wooden horse shed/garage, down the private driveway, and down the mountain to the city and his fleepit apartment.

The murders continued as frequently as Roger woke up, naked all over the city, until the murder of Alfredo Alberto and the following day when Mercedes, out of the blue, woke Roger naked in his bathtub. 

Mercedes had handed him a poster and said, “Bright Branigan was found dead last night in his apartment, and I found this poster on a memory recall study at the University.”

“I think he was here last night interrogating me, or it could have been a dream... Dr Victor Von Vagner’s memory recall study at the University of Serrano,” Roger picked up his phone and dialled the number on the poster. “Hello, is this Dr Vagner?... “Yes, I wanted to volunteer for this memory study... tomorrow, yes, I can come tomorrow...” Roger hung up the phone on his desk. 

“What do you mean you think Branigan was here? He is dead now, a victim of the killer,” Mercedes hysterically shouted towards Roger and held the sides of her face.

“Roger said. I don’t know what to say. I have partial memories of an argument about dog tags I found, interfering with crime scenes, and asking why I was at every crime scene or there the night before the murders.” Roger handed Mercedes dozens of letters from Sam.

“Wait, the killer was writing to you, or is this guy setting you up?” Mercedes skimmed the letters and said, “You should lie low till tomorrow... here are the keys to Mario’s safehouse.” She handed him a set of keys and stormed off, leaving him alone.

*

**

The next day at the University, Roger was sitting in a dentist’s chair and had been restrained there. Across from him sat a man in a white coat resembling a Viking. Dr Victor Von Vagner was of average height, had a beard, and undercut mullet. His beard and hair were both blonde, and he was extremely pale. He looked very muscular for a doctor or a scientist. He was filling a syringe with a bright purple liquid and injected it into Roger’s arm, and Roger then blacked out.

*

**

Roger was looking down at his typewriter in his office. He pulled out a freshly typed letter and read it. “Hi Roger, this will be my final letter, it is Sam here. I have been taking control of your mind and body for some time, and you have been entirely unaware. I am going to now take complete control of your human body and your mind, and I will leave you trapped in a small fragment of your mind alone with your thoughts, knowing that you could have stopped me at any time.” Roger looked up, and in the mirror, he saw an albino werewolf and the wolf spoke to him with a strong English Accent. “Thank you for being an impeccable host.”

Roger’s mind went black, and then he saw black-and-white memories of him as a wolf chasing people over buildings and jumping through a skylight onto Hanz. Chopping a screaming Flower Foster’s head off with his claws. Crashing through Bright Branigan’s apartment window and devouring him. Many more memories played repeatedly as Sam Snowflake woke up in the University, began his human life, walked out of the University and disappeared forever.