Penelope Hanover steps from her bungalow beyond the main complex and breathes in the chilly April air. Three miles distant, backlit by an overblown moon, the boulder-strewn Alamillo Escarpment, with its volcanic chimneys and sharp pinnacles, rolls for twenty miles toward the Nevada border.

Once used as a hideout by outlaws, more people have ventured into the Escarpment than have returned. An old wagon trail accommodates a car for a short distance, but it’s not recorded on any map. Treasure hunters unearth Spanish coins, arrowheads, pottery and broken wagon wheels… even the occasional human bone. For Penny, who’s always lived in the city, Saguaro is a great adventure.

Ignoring warnings about tarantulas and scorpions, Penny walks down the moon-silvered path beneath a sky of cartwheeling constellations. It’s a lovely night to spread her wings and enjoy her newfound freedom.

Penelope’s mother didn’t want her working with delinquents, especially since she’d been offered a respectable teaching position close to home. “Why bother with bad girls who will only end up in Tehachapi in a year or two?” she’d said, Tehachapi being the Correctional Institution for Women. But, getting out from beneath her mother’s oppressive thumb was the whole point of moving this far from home.

Last year she’d moved from the family home into her first apartment, but when she caught Mom inspecting her sheets for evidence of male guests, it was the last straw. She had nothing to hide, but she was tired of being scrutinized like a bug under glass.

Penny hears conversation coming from the bungalow of the girl from payable/receivables and wonders who she’s talking with at this hour. Her name is Hedy and although she’s brilliant with numbers, she’s cool and aloof, like she thinks she’s better than everyone else. Penny and the other teachers on the staff, who were once welcoming to the outsider, have given up trying to befriend her.

Curious as a cat she creeps to the open window. She stands on tiptoe and sees Hedy sitting at what appears to be a short wave radio, something Penny has only seen in news reels from the Great War. A man’s voice breaks through the incessant static… “Lebens born…Bundesrepublik Deuchland…Geheimer Staatspolizei…Blut…Reinheit…Mangel,” each word as hard and heavy as a wooden shoe. Hedy replies in the same guttural tongue.

When Hedy shifts in her chair, Penny drops to a crouch below the window sill. She hears the names of three young inmates who’d gone missing from Saguaro: Patty Gregson, Velma Becker, Sarah Levin. The man on the shortwave says: “Gut, gut, gut!”

Penny’s back cramps. She adjusts her position and a rock crunches beneath her heel. The conversation inside the room terminates abruptly. A chair scrapes across the floor and Penny’s heart jolts in her chest. She jumps to her feet and makes a reckless dash for her bungalow …crunch…crunch…crunch… locks herself inside and leans breathlessly against the closed door, her knees trembling so bad they barely support her weight. She listens until she’s certain she hasn’t been followed, then giggles nervously like a pickpocket who’s made a clean getaway.

She can’t believe she’s done such a stupid, childish thing. Her mother always said that eavesdroppers deserve what they hear, but Penny isn’t sure what she’d heard or what it means. Late into the night she lay awake wondering why the man on the other end of the short wave thinks there’s something gut…gut…gut…about three missing girls. Although they were different ages and attended different classes, it was assumed the girls ran off together. Sarah, a quiet studious girl, had been a student in Penny’s English class, but she didn’t know the other two, had never heard their names until they’d vanished.

Saguaro Correctional lies in the Mohave Desert in southeastern California and takes its name from the giant candelabra cacti that abound in the area. No high walls or barbed wire surround the premises because the desert itself is more effective than steel bars. Its daytime temperatures often exceed 120 degrees and drop to near-freezing at night. Even if an inmate escaped, where would they go? There’s no town for fifty miles in any direction…no food…no water… no gas…only rattlesnakes, coyotes and black, ragged-winged vultures.

A car would be the likely means of escape, but none had gone missing the night the girls vanished. There’s a lightly traveled highway on the far horizon that flies straight as an arrow across the state line, but even if they reached it, who’d pick up three girls in institutional uniforms, unless of course, they were up to no good?

The following morning Penny pins her lacy cameo broach to the collar of her white blouse and slips her garnet class ring on what will one day be her wedding ring finger. She goes straight to the library and pulls out the German/English dictionary, not ready to dismiss the events of the previous night without further investigation. The Great War is behind them, but in its wake is a xenophobic uneasiness that’s hard to shake.

Sleep has washed away the long complicated words she’s tried so hard to remember. As she runs a finger down a list of foreign words a shadow falls over her shoulder. Wouldn’t you know? It’s Hedy, the number-cruncher. She tries to appear composed, but there’s nothing she can do about the flush that colors her cheeks.

“So, you will be teaching German?” says Hedy. “Better you should stick with English, no?” Hedy has worked hard to lose her accent, to keep from pronouncing w’s like v’s, but her syntax gives her away.

Hedy smiles and walks away, but it’s not a friendly smile. Despite her embarrassment at being found out, Penny stubbornly flips through the pages of the book, recalling a few of the shorter words she’d heard.

Blut. Reinheit. Mangel.

Blood. Purity. Defect.

Taken out of context, the words are meaningless. Disappointed, she slaps the book shut, returns it to the shelf and goes upstairs to teach her English class.

CHAPTER 1

SANTA PAULINA, CALIFORNIA

NOVEMBER 1936

I slip from beneath the covers and put a pot of coffee on the hotplate, leaving Angel asleep with her hair wisping over her eyes. We live in 210, a corner room with bath that overlooks Cork Street in the Little Ireland section of Santa Paulina, California. The street is named after a county in Ireland, not the bottle stopper, but in this neighborhood it goes both ways. My name is Jack Dunning. I’ve been two years with S.P.P.D as well as working security here at the Rexford Hotel for my old war buddy, Hank Featherstone.

Wind rattles the window and the furnace clanks from the bowels of the building. The marquee on the movie theater across the street is dark and black clouds gather along the northern horizon. I watch Angel sleep, her hair still honey-dipped from the summer sun. She’s pretty, I mean glow-in-the-dark pretty, like a candle flame in a gold glass bottle. She’s also young, young enough to get me busted in jurisdictions where law enforcement has nothing better to do than count on their fingers.

Me? I’m not young, well not
that
young. I guess you could say I’m in my late prime, reasonably fit, with a steady gun hand. I’m not as fast on my feet as I used to be, but I still have a fist that can crack a cinderblock. I have an even temperament both at home and on the job and although I don’t look for trouble, it sometimes tracks me down. I was fifteen years with Boston P.D. but I couldn’t keep the cork in the bottle back then. They allowed me to resign just short of being canned. My family wrote me off as a lost cause, so I hopped a Greyhound and came west. I still drink, but I keep it down to a mild roar and I’m never drunk on the job.

Angel stirs and opens her eyes, long-lashed eyes, blue as rain. She’s my reason for getting up in the morning and staying out of the bars at night. As a cop I can be a tough son-of-a-gun, trained in the school of hard knocks on the broken streets of Southie, but when I’m with Angel, I go soft in the knees and hard below the belt. She muffles a yawn and looks toward the window.

“It’s awfully dark out there. You think the storm will hit today?” she says.

“The weatherman says today, maybe tomorrow. I’m going to jump in the shower while the coffee’s perking.”

“First come here,” she says, moving the covers aside with a sleepy smile, a lock of hair tumbling over one eye. She’s all peaches and cream, her thighs silky and smooth. “I’m perking too,” she says in a whisper.

When I’m committed to a woman I’m in all the way, no games, no playing hard to get. I light two Lucky’s and carry them to the bed. The sheets carry Angel’s warmth and the scent of her dime store perfume. She takes a cigarette from my fingers, but sets it smoking in the ashtray on the bed stand. There’s something she wants more than a cigarette.

I take a long drag, blow the smoke to the side and set my cigarette next to hers. She reaches out and I lower myself on my elbows. I kiss her and bury my face in her hair. It tickles and she laughs. Angel is beautiful inside and out. She’s also a girl with a past. Yes,
that
kind of past. You’d never know it. She’s sweet and fresh as the day she was born. You’ll get the whole story sooner or later…or not. I may not have the whole story myself.

I’ve been hooked on Angel since I got off the Greyhound in the midnight rain with one suitcase, a gun and a few bucks in my pocket. I ducked out of the wind into the Blue Rose Dance Hall, a fancy euphemism for dime-a-dance joint. The room was so full of cigarette smoke you’d swear the building was on fire. Just my kind of place. A mirror ball on the ceiling threw silver darts of light around the room and men wearing everything from zoot suits, to sailor suits, to patched overalls, drank bootleg booze from flasks in the dark corners of the room.

I handed all my dance tickets to the girl in the blue silk dress, the only one in the room who’d forgotten the heavy make-up and penciled beauty marks, the one who looked frightened and too young to be out after dark. She said her name was Angel Dahl, but I took it for Doll, and that’s the way I still think of her. My Angel Doll. Her hair smelled like roses that night, her mouth like the pink lipstick kiss on a love letter. I folded her in my arms with her head beneath my chin and we danced long and slow to Stormy Weather and a jazz rendition of The Shadow Waltz.

The lights flickered on and off at the end of the last dance. Angel had a little-girl-lost look that got to me, so I walked her through the rain to the Rexford. She had a rented room at the end of the hall, but she spent the night in mine. Later, when we lay smoking in bed, she asked me if I was married. Most men my age are unless they’re total screw-ups.

“She’s divorcing me,” I said. “She’s back on the east coast where my replacement sleeps on my side of the bed.”

“Did you cheat on her?” she asks. She says it casually, without judgment.

“Only with Jack Daniels.”

She touched my cheek with her fingertips, a sad smile on her face.

“I’ve never been with anyone like this before,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I took a drag on my Lucky and watched the purple smoke rise from the tip of my cigarette. The colored lights from the movie marquee cast pink and purple reflections on the ceiling of the room. I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“Giving myself because I want to.” She said it matter-of-factly, but there was an infinite sadness in her eyes. “Everything’s been taken from me, ever since I was thirteen, ever since my parents died. Axel Teague runs the vice in this town and he runs me too.” A tear balanced on her eyelid and she tried to brush it away before I noticed. “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m just letting you know how it is.”

I whispered in her hair. “No one’s going to run you after tonight. How about we make this the first time for both of us, the only time that counts.” I pulled her close and felt her fear melt away in my arms. We’ve been together ever since.

A flicker of dry lightning plays on the far horizon and brings me back to the moment. I hear the coffee perking, the early traffic on the street. Angel looks up at me, her face softly feline…a little more than kitten…a little less than cat. I feel her warm breath on my neck. She loops a slender ankle over my lower back. I know how to make her purr.

* * * *

I ride to the lobby in the elevator with a few rental aps. Out of six, I’ve rejected one, the guy who was kicked out of the flophouse by the railroad tracks for rolling derelicts who were more blitzed than he was.

The Rexford, which consists of three floors above the lobby, twenty rooms per floor, isn’t the Ritz, but it’s clean and well-run and keeps Hank in gambling chips and Cuban cigars. With a few exceptions we cater to single blue-collar men, boxers from the gym, pensioners who fought in the Great War, a few elderly couples and a handful of Mexicans and Dust Bowl refugees who work at the cannery and packing house.

Some of the tenants have misdemeanor warrants in other jurisdictions, or a skeleton or two they’d like to keep from leaping out of the closet, but as long as they pay their rent and don’t cause a ruckus they’re welcome. For the most part they’re a decent bunch, everyone struggling through the Depression, looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.

The lobby looks like a million lobbies in a million towns…reception desk…oak woodwork…polished hardwood floors. There’s a cigarette machine inside the front door, a magazine stand out front and Kelly Green Cabs at the curb.

The lounge by the front window has comfortable leather couches and chairs on a carpet with the requisite number of cigarette burns. Potted palms fan out at the foot of support pillars and sand buckets bristle with cigarette butts and dead matches. Men are waking up over coffee, cigarettes and newspapers, the radio tuned low to the weather report.

Hank looks up from behind the desk, his bifocals low on his nose, pink scalp showing through his thinning hair. Hank was born in Little Ireland and lived most of his life out of Duffy’s Gym, first as welterweight, then as trainer and sometime manager. When the hotel went into foreclosure five years back, he picked it up for back taxes and quit the fight game for good.

“Morning, Hank.”

“Morning Jack. The weatherman says this could be the big one.”

“Could be.”

“Volunteers are out patching the levy.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

Hank holds up a whiskey bottle. “Eye opener?”

“Better not.” I put the aps on the desk in front of him. “This one’s a rotten apple. The rest look okay.” He’s about to say something when the desk phone rings and he picks up. He listens, then covers the mouthpiece.

“It’s Jim Tunney,” he says. “That rookie, just got hired on, is sprawled on the highway with his patrol car off to the side. Jim says, if you want to ride shotgun, you’ve got five minutes to get to the station.”

“Thanks Hank. Tell him I’m on my way.”

* * * *

After Jack leaves, Angel sits contentedly in the easy chair, sipping a second cup of coffee with her feet tucked beneath her. On the street below the window a derelict hunches into the collar of his coat and a newspaper flies apart in the wind. Angel leans back and closes her eyes. She can still taste Jack’s nicotine kisses and feel where his rough cheek rubbed the sensitive skin of her throat.

Before her parents died in a typhoid epidemic, she’d lived in a modest house in Banning, where her father worked as a mining engineer for a drilling company. She got good grades and took ballet lessons in a little white tutu. The day after her parent’s funeral, a man posing as a distant relative showed up at her door. His name was Axel Teague. Angel was thirteen, just a kid. It never occurred to her to ask for credentials or question his veracity.

By the time she was missed, she was hundreds of miles away in Santa Paulina. By then, she knew Teague’s plan for her future, which differed greatly from the one she and her parents had aspired to. An escape attempt ended in a concussion and broken arm. Teague said he’d kill her if she tried to escape again.

Angel is happy at the Rexford with Jack. They belong together, two complex people with complicated histories. She can’t imagine being with anyone else…ever. The last cigarette in the pack is broken. As she tries piecing it together, there’s a knock at the door and she crumbles the tobacco into the ashtray.

“Come on in, Albie,” she says, tightening the sash of her robe and setting her coffee cup on the table next to the chair.

“Mornin’ Miss Angel.”

“Morning, Albie.”

Albie delivers the Santa Paulina Morning Sun, three cents a copy, a nickel on Sunday. He’s an enterprising little squirt with an engaging personality and ready smile. He’s smaller than most ten year olds, wears saggy overalls and a red cap with the bill turned sideways. He gives Angel the paper. She hands him an extra dime to bring her cigarettes from the machine.

Albie is the closest thing the hotel has to room service. He can hustle up almost anything you need…a magazine…cigarettes…complimentary coffee from the lobby or take-out from the Memory Lights Café. He can steam a suit, press a shirt, shine shoes…anything except run numbers for Toots McGee out of the back room of the Tammany Hall Bar, although the offer is still on the table.

Albie’s father, Jake Sherman, is head of the hotel janitorial and housekeeping staff. On Saturday nights he blows a mean sax at Smokey’s Barbecue Pit by the river. There was once a Mrs. Sherman, but she left town with a fancy-man in a sharkskin suit and an ace of diamonds in his hatband.

Jake and Albie live in the furnace room, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. They have cots in an alcove beneath the ductwork, a bathroom and shower at one end of the basement and a communal laundry with clotheslines stretched across the ceiling. It’s warm in winter, cool in summer and it’s free. Those poor folks in the Hooverville on River Road would give anything to have it so good.

Albie returns with cigarettes and Angel gives him a nickel tip to jingle in his pocket with the rest of his morning take.

“Thank you, Miss Angel.”

“You must be rich as Rockefeller,” she says, leaning down to straighten the collar of his shirt.

“I got fifteen dollars in my coffee can.”

“That’s a lot of money, Albie. Be sure you keep it in a safe place.”

“Mr. Reese in 320 says if I loan him ten dollars, he’ll give me twelve when his ship comes in.”

“Don’t you listen to that man, Albie. Mr. Reese’s ship went to the bottom in ’29. He gets any wise ideas about your money, he’ll have Jack to deal with.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Jake wants me to bring all them flashlights up from the basement in case we lose power. You think it’s really going to get that bad?”

“Better to be safe than sorry. Run along now so I can get dressed.”

* * * *

Around noon Angel goes downstairs wearing a beige raincoat and carrying her blue umbrella. In the lounge, men sit around the radio drinking their morning coffee, ashes growing long on their cigarettes as they lean close to the speaker.

Cantor Nemschoff, with his long white beard, is looking more solemn than usual. “Shhh! Just listen,” he says, when Angel approaches. She takes a seat beside him. The voice on the radio belongs to Nathaniel Forsythe, the anchor of the daily news editorial, Up To Date:

“In July, construction commenced on the Sachsenhousen Concentration Camp at Oranienburg, near Berlin. By September 23
rd
, it housed 1000 inmates labeled enemies of the state, ordinary citizens incarcerated without due process: Gypsies, Jews, 7
th
Day Adventists, Catholics, intellectuals, the mentally and physically defective and anyone who questions Nazi authority. Pogroms and mass exterminations are reported in outlying Polish and Russian communities.

“On October 1
st
, criminal court judges in Berlin took mandatory oaths of allegiance to Hitler. Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels has banned film criticism, allowing the Nazi-controlled German film industry to pursue its blatantly anti-Semitic rants.

“We’re out of time for today, but tune in tomorrow for continuing coverage of the growing Nazi threat to the civilized world. Until then, I am Nathaniel Forsythe reporting.”

The room is suddenly a-murmur with voices, some listeners buying into every word, other thinking something so outlandish couldn’t possibly be true.

“Don’t you have a brother in Berlin?” says Angel, turning to the Cantor.

BOOK: Midnight Rain: A Detective Jack Dunning Novel

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