Red rain 2.0

Red Rain

A book by Michael Crow

Version : 2.0

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More praise for
Red Rain
by Michael Crow

"Red Rain
is an exciting story, written in neon and punctuated with bursts of automatic-weapon fire: it manages to be horrific

and highly literate all at once___For all of Ewing's bloody

past, his unsentimental, often funny first-person narrative voice made me a fan.... Crazy or not, Ewing is an honest man, a formidable cop, and a fascinating invention. I look forward to his further adventures." —
The Washington Post

"With
Red Rain,
Michael Crow brews up a firestorm of a novel—where the blood doesn't rain, it pours. Think attitude; then think again. Crow writes the kind of hard-knock prose that thrusts you into the action and won't let go. Five decades of war have come home to roost in the sleepy American suburbs, and Luther Ewing, a street cop who lost his conscience and part of his skull fighting the good fight, has given peace its last chance. It's time for a wet and wicked ride—one you won't want to miss."

—Douglas E. Winter, author of
Run

"Michael Crow, in
Red Rain,
joins [Michael] Connelly (and Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy) in exploring the bleakest outer limits of crime.... Everything moves bloodily, with a hard-edged anger... to a conclusion in which one fears for the innocent and the guilty alike." —
The Boston Sunday Globe

"Luther is a satisfying enigmatic hero, much like Hawk in the Spenser series. He has a moral center, but exactly where it is and when he will pay attention to it seem up for grabs. Crow is the pen name of an acclaimed literary novelist; he's soon to be an acclaimed crime-fiction writer, too."
—
Booklist

"Raw-edged, Ramboesque crime drama. ... The action moves in steady, violent bursts, interwoven with moments of tense reflection and preparation as the hunt progresses. It's a strong beginning to what is apparently envisioned as a series. Through vivid first-person narration, Ewing emerges as ... a complex brooder, scarred by his past, emotionally distant—but exactly the kind of man for those nasty jobs no one else is willing to do."
—
Publishers Weekly

"Crow has come up with a winner.... Shooter is a real, dangerously flawed character who takes the definition of anti-hero in a new direction. Crow does an excellent job of surrounding him with supporting characters who are almost—almost—as interesting as he is without stealing the show away from him. [Crow's] knowledge of munitions is excellent as well—he gets it right just about every time."

—Bookreporter.com

"The first in a ... series of crime novels about Luther Ewing, a cop-on-the-edge, designed to make all others look like
The Simpsons'
Chief Wiggum... raw, breathless pulp momentum ... a Mike Hammer for sex-and-gun fetishists ... his outrageous amorality is one of the book's primary strengths. Daring itself to ever-greater heights ...
Red Rain
makes an appeal to the worst human instincts and comes out the better for it."
—
The Onion

"A taut, gun-happy thriller.... [The] driven Ewing qualifies as a force of nature."
—
Baltimore City Paper

"A tense, gritty book. Luther Ewing is one of a kind, and Crow skillfully surrounds him with memorable secondary characters who add depth and reality to a graphic and violent tale."
—
Library Journal

"This is Michael Crow's first crime thriller and it is simply sensational. The protagonist is an anti-hero who believes justice and the law are not always compatible and is not afraid of being a maverick to make sure the scales tip towards justice.
Red Rain
starts out at supersonic speed and just keeps moving faster towards the shocking finale."

—
Books 'n'Bytes

"Where the book really shines ... is in the abundant action sequences. Such scenes are choreographic and narrated with the kind of precision and immediacy most writers would kill to be able to achieve. Crow
will
elevate your heart rate and make your palms sweat. Finally, the denouement of this novel is nothing short of spectacular ... [and] memorable.
Red Rain
is an exciting and highly readable novel."

—
Mystery News

1

The wiper blades screech in protest through each jittery arc, trailing an oily smear on the windshield across my line of sight. Blurred, starry brake lights flash on in pairs, flash off, flash on, red glare richoceting off the rain-slick black asphalt. My eyes ache. It's a sour, clammy late August morning. Sullen smoke-gray clouds hang so low they're muffling the tops of office buildings and hotels. And we're trapped in a miles-long traffic crawl on York Road. Bad coffee from Teddy's Gyro Shop is already eating a hole in my stomach lining. The little cardboard pine tree Ice Box has hung from the rearview mirror is losing its fight against residual odors of pizza, KFC chicken, fries, Big Macs and all the rest of the nasty, hasty meals others who've cruised in this Crown Victoria have wolfed down on their shifts.

"I got two words for you, Ewing," Ice Box says, both hands white-knuckled on the wheel like an eighty-year-old with glaucoma who knows he shouldn't be driving on the clearest, sunniest day of the year, let alone in a downpour like this. "Just two words: Shut the fuck up!"

I stick my fingers in that lousy coffee and flick a few drops in his general direction.

"My best suit! Shit, man!" Ice Box squeals, taking both hands off the wheel to swipe at the wet spots, almost rear-ending a Ford Explorer.

"You call those Kmart overalls a suit? Anyway, doesn't
your wife spray everything you own with Scotchgard, being familiar with your eating style?"

"I'm going to sit on your skinny bones one day and crack you open like a crab!" Ice Box is close to a giggle.

"Anything but that, IB, anything. I most sincerely regret all my impetuous gestures."

"How long, O Lord, how long?" Ice Box sighs. "What'd I ever do so wrong in life that got me stuck with this spook beside me, can you tell me that? Can anyone tell me that? I think about this a lot and I never get no answers."

Poor Ice Box. He's been stuck with me for almost two years now, ever since I came on as a detective with the Baltimore County Police Department. He didn't have a choice. Neither did I, really. It wasn't a job I much wanted or a place I specially picked, but my options, let's say, were few to none at the time.

But it's okay with me and Ice Box. Never like it was with my homies on the Alpha team in Iraq. Couldn't expect that sort of brotherhood anywhere out in the world. Only once, in a time, a place, a situation where if you aren't ultralight, somebody dies. Afterward, you have to settle for what you get. I got lucky. Ice Box made my cut. I made his too, though I still don't know what his exact parameters are. We trust each other on the job, we see each other off-duty as friends, he has me over to his house for holiday dinners and so forth. But we've yet to go up against anything truly hard together, and that's the only way you ever really find out what you need to know.

I'd just been asking him—idle teasing to get my mind off my stomach and my eyes and stir some life into a dead, dull day—if he's going to name the twins his wife is carrying something original like Cholesterol and Iodine instead of more traditional choices, like Tawana and Tasheba. "Just two words...." IB's an unlikely tenor, almost always near the top of his range.

And that's a smile. The man's a white guy the approximate size and shape of a Sub-Zero. Not all pumped up, cut
and buffed like the steroid freaks I see every day in the Department workout room. Just huge, solid as a sandbag. He looks like a fat man, but nothing ever jiggles or shakes when he moves, and he can move. Yes he can. You don't want to be in the way when the Ice Box moves.

I know exactly what to make of him, at certain levels. Joseph Cutrone, raised in "Bawlmer, Merlin," calls the ball-team the "Oreos," says we work for the "PO-leese." Runs out of the tough Highlandtown neighborhood where he'd spent his boyhood to the County just as soon as he's making enough money to do it. Like lots of white guys in his situation. The professionals, the dual-income couples, the young yuppies, they've already been out here for a generation or two. Their parents or grandparents fled the city to the first modest developments in the early '50s. The kids grow up, go away to college, come back and do better than their parents ever dreamed of, move farther out to grander houses on more land. The old folks die or retire to Florida, leaving behind places people like Ice Box can afford. Still safe, still easy, still good ground to raise kids. Total suburbia these days, the dry a half-deserted war zone except for a few surrounded outposts, and showplaces like the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards, where all the money that could've gone to housing and schools got spent on a stadium and an aquarium. Only in the County's far north, near the Pennsylvania line, do the farms and neat, small towns survive. And it's just dumb, unimportant redneck crime out there: brawls in roadhouses, semitough family disputes, a few burglaries, cockfights and dogfights, once in a while an armed robbery. Only gunfire usually comes from hunters who down too much peach brandy against the cold, miss their deer, start blowing holes in traffic signs with their Savage and Winchester 30-06s. Working out their frustrations the way they do in rural areas.

I don't know anything about all this when I first come on. Learn as I go. Learn the place, learn the people. It's a skill. Ice Box, smart as he is, still doesn't know any more about me than I give him, and he knows more than anybody else
in the Department, except Annie. I like to think this is very deliberate on my part, something necessary, deliberately planned. Yet more and more lately I don't feel certain even I know the truth about myself. Seems I've had a couple of lives, each lived by a different person.

Poppa, or Gunny to everybody including me as a kid, was in the Crotch, a marine lifer, central casting's perfect choice for a scary spade top sergeant if they couldn't book James Earl Jones for the part. Two tours in the Nam, then moving around between Camp Lejeune, Quantico, Parris Island, embassy security in Hong Kong, Belgrade, Bonn. Some Fleet time, a little visit to Grenada too. Momma's Vietnamese. It pleases me to think she wasn't just another Saigon bargirl. It pleases her to claim she's part of an old Cochin China family, well bred and once well off, with illicit but far from scandalous aristocratic French connections. She drops French phrases into her conversations. It could be just a good act.

I never need an act. People's eyes go all puzzled when they check me out and try to classify me. I don't look like an African American. I don't look true Asiatic. My eyes are brown flecked with gold, my skin's sort of like copper left unpolished just a bit too long, I've got straight black hair, thick and glossy like Momma's. But my nose must have come from some rogue French gene in Momma's blood. It's narrow but big, high-bridged and long. Maybe her story's true. People generally make me for Native American. Or Mexican, Colombian, Nicaraguan, some sort of south-of-the border mestizo. But
they never feel sure.

I get off on that. In the military I'm sly, get it going without actually saying so that I'm a full-blood Comanche. Oh man, the dudes dig that. They get
intensely
into the concept. They believe I have the powers—a man who moves and leaves no sign, a ghost rider who smells the presence of the enemy, a quick and silent throat slitter who fades to invisibility after the kill.

It's easy not to disabuse them of these notions, since
Gunny's idea of playing with little Luther never involved bats and balls, but some toned-down version of bootcamp and a lot of jungle stuff he'd learned in Nam. Training. Stalking squirrels in the Carolina boonies with a .22 rifle at eight, nailing rabbits with a .22 semi-auto pistol at ten, my first buck with a .243 Remington Model 7 at twelve. Full-auto action with an Ml6 at fourteen.

I go army at eighteen instead of the corps, which pisses Gunny off until he understands my motive. Too many Marines would know I was my father's son, maybe cut me some slack. He's proud when I make Special Forces, where they just dig the hell out of their Comanche. "You ever get combat, Luther, make it real for 'em. Scalp your first KIA. You'll start a legend," Gunny says laughing, when I visit on leave after training and before assignment to my team.

He's only half-joking.

I do worse. Little more than two years on, hair past my shoulders, warpaint instead of camo grease on my face and the teams getting high on it, I go insane in a crappy stucco house just outside Kuwait City and kill my military career. I want to be a lifer like Gunny, but I screw that right then, right there. "I can't take it anymore!" Ice Box shouts, jolting me out of bad memory. He jumps the curb, guns around a mom waiting patiently at a red light in her Audi Quattro station wagon —silver, what else?—hangs a hard right and slams down over the curb onto Ridgely Road. I catch a glimpse of a tennis-tanned face, mouth open in a perfect O, and a dozing toddler well strapped into a safety seat behind her. Ice Box is up to almost 60 when he laughs, slows down to the 35 limit. We're passing through a '50s development, little tract houses all variations of the same Cape Cod theme on little quarter-acre lots where the fragile saplings and hedging the original residents planted so hopefully have burgeoned and prospered until they've almost overgrown the homes. We pass a Presbyterian church on a little knoll likewise sheltered, and Ridgely Junior High School down a slope opposite. The three ball fields and the track below
look like a swamp today. Then Ice Box goes left on Pots Spring Road, and we're flanked by custom homes, ranches and split-levels and colonial revivals from the '60s maybe, on two or three acres, a couple of vehicles in each curving asphalt driveway, Grand Cherokees and Land Cruisers for the soccer moms, fast little Acuras and Miatas and entry-level BMWs for their older kids. The shrubs are trimmed to scale, the lawns as manicured as golf greens.

"Their fuckin' kids never mowed a blade or clipped a hedge," Ice Box mutters.

"Professional job, you think?" I smile. "Good police-work, IB."

"I got just two words to say to you, just two words...."

"One. Turn," I say, and he does, heading us north on Du-laney Valley Road, newer and grander houses on much bigger properties on our left now, and to the right a great looming forest of rain-blackened pines planted in perfectly symmetrical rows in the 1930s to protect the watershed of Loch Raven Reservoir.

"They didn't think ahead," I say.

"Who?"

"The idiots who planted the pines."

"Say what?"

"They forgot trees grow," I say. The forest is now so damned dense, the trunks now two to three feet in diameter and the needle-carpeted alleys so narrowed you'd have to snake your way through on your belly. Can't see any water at all. I know it's down there, within half a mile or so, dark and deep, a long, sinuous lake that follows an old stream valley's twists and turns, only the streambed's now a hundred feet or more underwater.

As we move farther out, wipers still screeching, massive waves of fog begin a slow tumble out from the woods and break over us, obscuring the road. Ice Box switches on the headlights. One's burned out, so he flicks to high beam. Fat drops of rain are smacking down harder and faster, sheeting on the unwaxed hood of the Crown Vic. The greasy streaks
on the windshield worsen the glare bouncing back at us off the fog.

"Put the lights back on low," I say.

"Who, my man, is driving this vehicle? Is it the mighty Ice Box, or some squirrel they call Five-O?"

That's what I get for that Chlorophyll and Mercurochrome crack or whatever I'd said about his twins' names. He's punched my button. What can I do but laugh? Enough time's passed to laugh.

Just two weeks with the Department, under suspicion because I'd come in as a detective on orders from higher than anyone could see, on a nod-and-name basis with Ice Box and a colder version of that with the narc boss, Lieutenant Dugal, who likes to pick his own people, not have them dumped on him. A nothing night in the squadroom, me well outside the conversation as usual, when Dugal comes in and says, "Showtime."

"Good to go, LT," I say. Damned stupid reflex. Yeah, it's around I'm ex-army, but I know from day one that doesn't go down too well with these guys, any more than the fact that I'm there at all.

"Good, Ewing? Go where, Ewing? These men are geared up and you're not. Why is that, Ewing?"

Because none of you dickheads said anything about a mission, I think. "Making it happen now, sir," I say, sprinting off to the locker room. I put on a Kevlar vest, pull a black turtleneck on over it, open my lockbox and shoulder bolster a most nonregulation weapon, slip into a black leather jacket. The rest: black Levis and black Chuck Taylor hightops, the white rubber edges blackened with a Sharpie. Then I run out to the parking lot.

There's a mean snickering when I scramble into the waiting van with Ice Box, two pumped dudes I don't even know and the LT, all of them wearing jeans or khakis and navy windbreakers with
police
stenciled on the backs with white reflective paint. "Christ, Ewing, you think this is some kind of
commando shit? Get your police coat," the LT snaps. The two unknowns are smirking, Ice Box's broad face is blank. Then Dugal looks at his watch. "Fuck it. We can't waste the time."

It seems there's enough of it to do the traffic crawl ten miles or so up York Road to Cockeysville, a warren of town houses, condos and apartments on what Ice Box says used to be all farmland. And then get lost for a while, driving slowly around crescents and circles. The LT's doing a slow burn on the driver, whose name turns out to be "Taggert You Fuck" in Dugal-speak. Finally we pull up behind a four-story brick condo and stop beside a Dumpster that hasn't been emptied for too long. Otherwise, the place looks pretty good, well maintained, solid citizens inside judging from the years and makes of the cars in the parking lot. Then we're through the unlocked steel service door and climbing the steel-railed service stairway, like the one in my apartment building, which I realize now isn't too far away. No need for Maglites. The stairwell's bright with floods in steel cages.