Firefly Rain (5 page)

I slid into the driver’s seat, the leather steering wheel grip cool under my fingers. “That-a-baby,” I told the car. “You’re gonna run a little bit today. Let’s see how fast we can get to town.” Grinning, I put the key in the ignition and turned it.

Nothing happened.

“Son of a bitch,” I swore, and tried it again. The engine coughed but failed to turn over. A third try, and it didn’t give so much as a click.

I sat there a minute, then tried it one more time.

Nothing. After a minute, the battery just plain gave out, like someone had stuck a knife in its back. The lights dimmed, the indicators keeled over, and that car sat there like very expensive roadkill.

I swore, then got out. Too late I heard the keys jangle in the ignition as I slammed the car door shut. A quick tug on the handle told me that it was in fact locked, and that I was out of luck. So I swore some more, kicked the car door—gently, on account of the paint job—and sat myself down against the front tire.

“Goddamn,” I said, and then a few stronger things, and tried to figure out what to do next.

Angry with myself, I pulled the cell phone from my pocket. There was one person in town I figured I could call for help,
though I was sure he wouldn’t exactly want to hear from me. Still, I figured, he couldn’t begrudge me his assistance on this one. It might cost me dear in pride to make the call, but that was the sort of payment Carl seemed to like taking.

Pride, however, was something I was divesting myself of more or less freely. With just a small wince, I dialed Carl’s number. It rang twice before Carl picked it up.

“So what do you want now?” he asked without preamble when he picked up the phone.

“Carl, I need some help,” I said, and I got a cackle for an answer.

“Of course you do. All alone out there at that great big place and you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m surprised it took you this long t’call me.”

I felt myself growing angry and swallowed it back as best as I could. Let Carl have his fun; I needed his help, and that was worth a little ribbing. It wasn’t like I didn’t deserve it, either. This time, at least.

“It’s not like that,” I said slowly. “My car won’t start and I’m out of groceries. I was wondering if you could recommend a good garage, maybe, or come out here to give me a lift into town.”

“I’ll bring you something t’eat,” he said, and he hung up.

“That’s not what I—,” I started to say, but he was already gone. I stared at the phone. It blinked a blank screen at me, then went dark. The connection was gone, and so was Carl.

“That know-it-all son of a bitch,” I said with sudden anger, and I threw the damn phone off into the tall grass like I was tossing Carl out with it. It spun high and caught the light before arcing down behind the green and hitting with a quiet thump.

“Fat lot of good that did you,” I told myself, hoisting myself to my feet. A quick brush of my backside scared up a lot of dust, and
I looked around, as if Carl might already be coming up the road.

He can’t get here that fast, dumbass
, I told myself,
and you might want to go find that cell phone fast, before it rains or something
. But it felt good to just leave it there in the tall grass. It was something I’d done, after all, instead of having done unto me. I could go find the damn thing later. I’d call from the phone in the house and listen for the ring in the yard. I’d find it fast and easy. But I’d do it later, because right now I was just plain pissed off.

Pissed off, I hiked myself onto the porch and sat myself down. And pissed off, I waited for Carl.

Like the devil himself, Carl showed up when the sky was turning red just above the horizon. Tall, angular, and weathered, he hopped out of his truck and grabbed a sack of groceries from the front seat. “Can I help?” I asked him, but he ignored me, marching right in my porch door and putting the bag down on the kitchen table.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked, placing myself between Carl and the door. This way, I figured, he’d have to speak to me, if only to ask me to get out of the way. He stopped and stared at me in disbelief.

“Nothing,” he finally said. “You owe me nothing.” He put a curious emphasis on the word
me.
“I’m just keeping a promise, that’s all.”

“What are you talking about?” I took a step back to block
the doorway with my body. “We have a contract, and you didn’t promise me anything.”

Carl shook his head. “Contract’s over with you back in town, but you’re right. I didn’t promise you a damn thing. That don’t mean I didn’t make a promise to someone else.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You’ve got enough there to keep you for a while. I’ll be back with more in a few days.”

“I’m hoping my car will be fixed before then, so you won’t have to do that, Carl,” I said sharply. “I don’t intend to rely on your help.”

He grinned at me, his lips thin and set tight against his face. “You can intend anything you damn well please. I just figure I’ll save you the embarrassment of another phone call by telling you I’ll be by presently. Don’t eat it all at once, y’hear?” And with that, he brushed past me and out of the house.

I stood there and watched him go. He drove off quickly, his truck raising a trail of dust behind it as he sped off down the road, back to town. Meanwhile, my car, the car I’d been so proud of in Boston, just sat there, immobile and useless. It looked ugly and out of place, and I suddenly felt the same way.

“Well,
do
something,” I said to the lump of machinery sitting there, more out of frustration than anything else. It didn’t respond, not that I’d expected it to. I stared at it a moment longer, then went inside to see what Carl had brought me.

It was obvious, I saw after I unpacked the sack of groceries Carl had provided, that he didn’t think much of me. There was no beer in that bag. That much had been obvious when he’d set it down on the counter without the reassuring clank or clunk that you get from bottles or cans. Instead, there was a gallon of milk and, tucked in next to it, a squeeze bottle of Bosco.

I felt my cheeks get hot with embarrassment. Milk and chocolate syrup? I slammed the Bosco down on the counter and ripped open the icebox door. It swung open hard enough to bounce back and catch my arm on the elbow as I tried to shove the milk in. The pain nearly made me drop it, which would have been a disaster. I could only imagine calling Carl again to explain that I’d spilled the milk he’d brought me, and could he please fetch me some more? I’d be able to hear his laughter without the phone, and so would have half the county. The thought was unbearable.

Moving with considerably more caution, I put the milk on the top shelf and the Bosco on the bottom. No sense leaving the two of them together to get any ideas, after all.

I turned my attention to the rest of the bag, the contents of which proved considerably less inflammatory. There were a few packages of Oscar Mayer cold cuts, a loaf of bread, some eggs (which sat miraculously uncrushed down at the bottom), and a few other essentials. A tin of instant lemonade mix was the heaviest thing in there, sandwiched between a fat stick of butter and some sausages. Some cans of beans and a couple of thin, tough-looking steaks wrapped in butcher paper rounded the whole thing out.

In my head, I added the whole thing up and gave a low whistle. It wasn’t exactly gourmet fare, but it still had to have cost Carl a pretty penny. And he said he’d be coming back in a few days with more.

It didn’t add up. Or, more to the point, it did add up, and it would keep adding up. I had paid Carl nicely to keep the house in good repair, but not to keep me fat and fed. And as for that promise he’d mentioned, well, the less I thought about that particular statement, the happier I was. Sighing, I washed out my empties and put them in the paper sack, then put it next to the trash can. I’d recycled in Boston. Here, I was just getting them out of the way.

Morning came slowly after another sleepless night, and the car was no longer where I’d left it.

I found myself standing out in front of the house, too angry to speak. The car was gone. Sure, I’d been five kinds of fool to have left the keys in the ignition, but that car hadn’t been capable of moving under its own power, keys or no.

And now it was gone. Somehow, some way, someone had come in the middle of the night and taken it out of my driveway without so much as a whisper or a rattle. Hell, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought there’d never been a car there in the first place. The empty spot beside the house looked… well, it looked like it was supposed to be empty, not that it made me any more pleased that my car was gone.

And it had happened here.

Here, where I got laughed at for locking my car door. Here, where the front doors weren’t locked except when there was a door-to-door salesman in the vicinity. Here, where this sort of thing was not ever supposed to goddamn happen.

I’d never had my car stolen in Boston, that was for damn sure.

Taking deep breaths, I walked over to where the car had been and stared at the ground. There was nothing of what I was looking for—no heavy tracks that spoke of a tow truck’s presence, no broken glass from a smashed-in window, not even any footprints that weren’t my own. What might have been the Audi’s tracks leading back to the road were so faint that I wasn’t sure they were there at all, and walking their line back and forth a few times didn’t make me any surer.

“This is just plain stupid,” I told myself and went back into the house to call the police. The officer I eventually talked to was polite but not terribly helpful when I finally got him on the line, but he promised to send someone around to take a look at things soonish. Meanwhile, if I didn’t mind, if I could write up a statement on my own, it would make things awfully convenient.

“Of course, Officer,” I heard myself saying, much to my own surprise. “Is there anything else I can do to help?”

“Thank you, Mr. Logan,” he said, “but I think that’ll do it. We’ll let you know when someone’s on their way. Have a nice day.”

“You, too,” I said, and hung up even as my jaw dropped. “Good God,” I said to no one in particular, “even when I was growing up, the police weren’t
that
fucking Mayberry.” I checked to make sure that I had in fact cut the connection, then added a few more choice curses about goddamn gooder hick cops who wouldn’t know how to do an investigation if it bit them on the collective, fat, Krispy Kreme–loving ass.

As a matter of fact, I got so warmed to my subject matter that I barely heard the noise outside over my ranting. For a second I couldn’t place it, but as I shut myself up to listen, what it was became clear.

Wheels on dirt on gravel, that’s what it was, and as I walked to the window I saw Carl’s battered old pickup pulling in off the road. I ran outside, arms waving to stop him, but he either ignored me or just plain didn’t see me. He lurched to a halt right where my car had been, then swung his long legs out of the cab and came striding around the front of the truck.

“You son of a bitch!” I yelled, even before he reached me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Delivering your mail,” he said calmly. He thrust a fat envelope at me. “I took the liberty of cashing the check those insurance people sent you. The folks at the bank remember your mother fondly.”

My jaw dropped and my mind went blank, but my hand reached out and took the envelope. Without thinking, I stuffed it in a pocket.

“You could say thank you,” Carl grunted, then turned away. “Sorry to hear about your car,” he added, striding off.

He hadn’t taken more than two steps before I tackled him. He went down hard, his hands barely out in time to break his fall.

“How the hell did you know about my car?” I howled in his ear. “I just called that in five minutes ago.”

Easy as a duck shrugging off water, he threw me off his back. I landed awkwardly, a
whoof
of air shooting out of my lungs, and scrambled back. Carl looked at me over his shoulder, and he had blood in his eye. He looked grim as death, and in that moment I knew, sure as Christmas, that he could kill me if he wanted to.