Bullets of Rain (30 page)

    It was probably very simple. Luther was delirious. Luther was gay. Luther was flashing back to his combat ladylove. What difference did it make, as he died?

    Art tilted Luther's chin up and kissed him as gently as he could. He caught Luther's final exhale into his own mouth. Dead man's breath. He was still holding his friend's hand when it no longer mattered.

    Blitz was growling. The sound, ominously constant, gradually trickled through to Art's perception. Art blotted his forehead with his biceps. He felt a dot of Luther's blood on his lower lip. The stench of blood all around was palpable, sickening.

    
This is no time to be jealous, you dumb hairbag.
Art tried to invent something reassuring and only a dry click issued from his throat. What was the command in German?

    The dog came for Art at a charge, launching off the floor. All Art saw was a crowd of onrushing teeth.

    His eyeblink of hesitation almost cost him his face. He caught Blitz on his forearm and felt the teeth nest deeply into his flesh. They teakettled backward into the kitchen.

    No command in any language could deactivate Blitz.

    The dog was all over Art like a gang of muggers, fast enough to score high marks on any K-9 test. Peculiar and interesting, yes, but not when Art was the attack dummy. He clopped Blitz on the snout hard enough to break the clamp of his jaws and get his chewed arm free. He tried to grab the dog by the ears. Blitz feinted and snapped, practically rabid, and tore another furrow along the heel of his master's right hand. There were no guns around; hell, there weren't even any blunt objects.

    Art slung the dog around and fell back, putting both feet against Blitz's chest, the place where he most liked to be rubbed, in another life. He kicked and Blitz somersaulted backward into the garage through the still-open door. He banged against the grille of the Jeep, scrabbling for equilibrium, paws already accelerating on the concrete floor for another charge. Art slammed the door on Blitz's nose. The dog yelped and withdrew, leaving brackets of Art's blood on the frame as the door seated with a declarative click.

    He slumped against the counter, leaning heavily on his thighs, panting. "Damn it, dammit!" His own fucking dog.

    Reason kept his head from subdividing on the spot, like an amoeba. Luther had fed Blitz jerky. Luther had dissected the mystery pill on the living-room table. Blitz had sampled the powder, which no doubt had retained the tang of Luther's jerky-greased lingers. Blitz had Hyded out and become the perfect attack canine, payback for his shortcomings as a wannabe cop.

    "You guys sure make a lot of noise," said Suzanne, causing Art's heart to nearly catapult from his throat. Someone pulled the ejector-seat ring on his rib cage.

    "Jesus Christ, Suzanne, buck!"

    She was holding the votive candle and wearing an old, thick UCSB sweatshirt with fabric pills on the shoulders. "Jesus Christ, yourself! You're all bloody. Is the war over? Did you win?"

    Blitz was frothing and thudding against the door.

    "It's bad," Art said, his lungs still trying to find air.
How did you boil the evening's events down to a one-liner?
Ad hell broke loose.
Shit happened. My life changed fiorever and ever
.

    "Don't walk out here." He gestured feebly. "Broken glass."

    "Oh, I found shoes, I figured that.'' She pointed. Somewhere in the closet she'd unearthed Lorelle's old canvas deck shoes.

    "Don't come out anyway."

    "Don't be stupid, I mean, look at you."

    The anger rose in him unbidden. He was pressed rudely against the fabric of his own sanity and could hear rips and tears widening.

    There was a corpse in the foyer, Luther was gone, and the air reeked of madness and death. The house was punctured, pierced, trashed, nearly powerless. His dog had gone insane.

    "Suzanne, go back into the bedroom," he said, gutturally, eyes squeezed shut. He was on the verge of losing it, flipping out. Plus, he was hurt and bleeding. Now was not the time to try walking Suzanne's tightrope. "Do it now."

    "You need help. Look at you.''

    True enough. But he did not think she would be eager to help him stack bodies in the garage. A persistent burn had settled into the corners of Art's eyes, damage that hurt when he blinked, and felt caustic, as though solvent had been rubbed into the tender flesh there. The candle in Suzanne's hand stung his eyes.

    "What's wrong with the dog?'' Blitz was barking, ragged and wild, behind the closed door two feet away.

    Hot acid jetted into Art's throat from his stomach. He swallowed it back down, thirsty and depleted. "He got hurt. He's a little crazy. I had to lock him out."

    "Come on in here and lie down, just for a moment. You look like death.''

    "Can't." It felt like the wall was the only thing holding him up as he spoke. The starch was leaching out of his bones.

    "You've got to. Please?" She was still looking him up and down with the candle, assessing his damage.

    "Can't." Disharmony furrowed his brow. "Got to-why?"

    "I don't know," she said, turning the hand that held the candle to show him she was wearing her diver's watch, the one that it was so important to her not to lose track of earlier. "Because it's almost nine?"

    That didn't make any sense.

    "Come on," she said. "Don't make me force you."

    That made even less sense. He looked at her, nude from the waist down, abused and hanging on like a castaway.

    She smiled, face pulling up oddly on one side due to her shiner. Her other hand came into the small circle of light to reveal his own Beretta, semiauto, from the open gun safe, hammer back. "Daddy had guns," she said. The muzzle idled in his direction, not exactly a threat, not yet. "I made sure I grabbed this when all the commotion started."

    "Put that away," he said, just annoyed. "Give it to me."

    She shook her head, backing up a step in case he wanted to try a grab. "I said, it's nearly nine, so it's time for you to. Sit. Down."

    He should have smacked away the pistol with the heel of his hand and grabbed Suzanne by the throat, but he had already missed the moment. They had Luther between them and she was stepping back from the tide of blood oozing toward her feet. The fine hairs on the back of Art's neck scared up. The rattler in his chest was looped into a defensive fallback position above his lungs, cornered, its weight making breathing a chore. He felt too depleted, as though a dump vent on his will had been tripped. Blitz was still schizzing out, oblivious to his own doggie damage. A nasty slipstream of wet, cold air was keening from another opening, somewhere yet unmanned, and seeking passage through the destroyed kitchen door, thence to chase back out into the night and return again. It was like the output of a big commercial freezer. He was cut and bitten, bleeding and beaten, and he could not summon his hand to strike.

    Sometime during the calamitous events in the living room, she had calmly strolled to the safe, withdrawn the pistol, and thought, yeah, this'll do. Then she waited, through gunfire and violence, destruction and death, maybe flinching a little if a shot was fired out where she could not monitor the action, but with a frightening detachment, no more afraid than if she had been tapping her foot for a pizza delivery.

    He pushed off from the counter.

    ''Easy," she said, the gun now pointed at him, its threat now definitely meant for him. She pointed out features of the Beretta.

    "See? Safety off. Hammer cocked. Round in the chamber. The bullet will come out here. I know how to use this thing; don't think I don't."

    He tried to give her his calmest, most paternal manner… in order to fox her, snatch the gun, and maybe beat the shit out of her on general principles. "Suzanne, I know it's been a little nuts, but please don't point that at me." He combined the succor with his move forward, lying his ass off. "I have to turn the lights back on. This is no time for this."

    She quickly placed the candle on a bureau near the door and used both hands to grip the gun. "Stay right there."

    The snake was abuzz, calculating strike reach, brimming with venom and gushing new energy into his beleaguered body. He had to nail her now, before she got farther back, toward the bedroom.

    "Ah, my favorite party favor." It was Price's voice, near the foyer.

    Art tried to come around the dividing wall from the kitchen in a surprise move, but the fat prongs of a Viper stun baton caught him hard in the left tit. The hit was textbook, and Art began to dance.

    

    

    Once, Art had a dream in which he knew he was going to die. In the dream, he booked a lot of flights and did a sort of tour around the country, dropping in and thanking people for things they had done. He wore a good suit and was extremely pleasant. Some of the people he contacted were people he had not seen for years; decades, even. Ex-lovers, old friends, colleagues, enough of them for him to develop a lead line in his head: Once, you did me a kindness, or once, I did you a wrong. Whether it was unearned or frivolous or just unthinking, I wanted to say I've never forgotten. And know that I've always been grateful; or know that I've always been sorry. Some were shaded with regret, like a woman to whom he had been unaccountably cruel, because someone better had come along. Others boiled down to things and events which, taken baldly, were essentially quite simple-a friend who had gone way out on a limb on his behalf, for no reason or recompense apart from being a friend, because that's what friends were really for (as he had explained, patiently, to Art), or another who stayed on call when Art's emotions threatened to spiral into despair. Behind Art, in the past, was a network of unrelated people who had unselfishly helped him to perceive little glimpses of light as he groped through the dark room of his life. In his travels back along his own timeline, he made sure to be pleasant and caring, and did not lumber his sometimes surprised targets with any of his own baggage. He needed to acknowledge them. He shook hands, clasped shoulders, dispensed hugs, and dwelt on his own kindnesses or transgressions only insofar as they related to evening the score with those on his list. He wanted to bring the chart of his existence back to double zero, true north; to "square the box," as they said in his trade, and bring all spiritual debts to the equilateral. Equations and formulae were a kind of poetry he could now appreciate, and arriving at this ethos had run up a karmic tab that he was determined to settle. He found the people from his past happy to see him, even if they had not thought of him in years. Most of them said, how sweet, or you didn't have to do that, or that was a long time ago, and I'm not that person anymore. By and large they were people who had otherwise become peripheral: A hotelier who had defied company policy to ensure his comfort. A lover who had loved him without any agenda whatsoever. A reviewer who had quietly championed his work. A waiter who always had a smile for him, and automatically whipped up his to-go coffee without a word of reminder. A woman who, quite against cliche, had lent her mobile phone and moral support to his car breakdown on a remote back road. People he did not know at all who had given up airline seats, or thrown in to help with an overload of boxes at some shipping dock, or fixed his persnickety computer with a bemused shake of the head and no charge. Art never forgot them, and needed them to know that. And with each person he saw, he felt a vast relief and release, cumulating to a buoyancy that lifted him to meet the universe. He felt the chains of the past drop away as old guilts were expunged and old debts repaid. In sum, he had not been as rotten a fucker as he thought himself daily. He maxed his plastic and murdered his accounts, and doled the money out freely, in person. He made time for those who had given him theirs. He returned love. And he did not elicit their sympathy, nor did he reveal anything about his impending demise.

    And he suddenly realized what a grandiose, hollow gesture it all was. He was biasing the curve. He wanted all these people to note how swell he was after he had died. It was selfish and manipulative, naked in its intent. He had done everything in his life this way, and he hated it, but he could not stop.

    Lorelle was not in the dream. Neither was Derek, or any of his new buddies from the party downbeach.

    In the dream, Art kept on boarding the flights and making the whistle-stops. His people list was long and amorphous. He enjoyed the enclosed microcosm of travel. He kept going, because he realized that when he had finally made enough reparations, his plane would simply crash and that would be the end. Provided one could ever make enough reparations. no, she could even be touching me and there's no danger of getting zapped. It's called shock-back. Not like the movies. Voices. Everything was black.

    

    

    "It converts all your blood sugar into lactic acid in, like, a microsecond. You literally don't have any energy to make your muscles do anything, and the signals are all scrambled."

    "How powerful is that thing?" Female voice, not Suzanne.

    "Six hundred fifty thousand volts."

    "Holy shit. That's Frankenstein time." Different female voice, still not Suzanne.

    Price, talking: "Not really. It's kind of interesting. Voltage doesn't kill you. Amperage does. One amp will kill you. You take twenty-five thousand volts every time you shuffle your feet across a carpet and feel static."

    "That blood sugar stuff doesn't make any sense. I mean, you don't knock someone out by lowering their blood sugar…" That was Suzanne, meaning Michelle-Price's lady-was probably one of the others. "Do you?"