Red rain 2.0 (20 page)

"Chill on that, IB," I say. "Down-to-business time. You read anything into her being so quick to finger Jimmy?"

"Yeah. It raises some questions, doesn't it? Like maybe he's a badder actor than we thought?"

"My take exactly."

"Which means, you realize, he's walking a much more dangerous line than we set him up to walk."

"That occurs to me too."

"More protection?"

"What more can we do? We kept him in the holding cell for eight hours after Buzz Cut walked on bail. Then we had him walk out with his lawyer, just in case there were any eyes out there watching. As far as Buzz Cut and his bosses are concerned, Jimmy's busted bad as Buzz Cut."

"I don't know, just don't know. This shit is getting way too complicated for me." IB sighs. "It was simpler in the old days. Everybody snorting lines of coke in the bathrooms. Easy busts. Now the kids drop Ecstasy before they go into the clubs. Nobody's carrying anything. You send a plain-clothes or two into a club now and draw a zero. Just a lot of spaced-out kids dancing. All into some kind of mental cyberspace. Wonder what it feels like? Like being stoned on grass, do you think?"

"I hear it's more like LSD, minus the hallucinations. And no bad trips."

"This makes me feel old, Luther." IB sighs again. "Very old."

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Friday night, sheet lightning flashing and thunder cracking the sky beyond the hills to the north. I pick up Helen and we go downtown to one of the movie theaters that feature foreign films.
Burnt by the Sun
is playing. We'd both seen it when it first got released in the States, but Helen loved it and I wanted mainly to brush up on my Russian.

I dug the story. It was believable, except for the young guy killing himself at the end. He was much too hard, much too cold, much too much a survivor to do that. Shit, it was just one more betrayal. Why get juked by that, when betrayal's your trade? But Helen's in tears after the aging colonel makes love to his young wife for the last time, then leaves her and his adorable little daughter behind the gate of their dacha to drive away with the secret police.

"So sad," she says when we're driving out to my place afterward. "Really cracks my heart."

"Just what the filmmaker hoped would happen. You're his ideal audience."

"Oh, it didn't touch you? Where's your heart?"

"In the present. Who cares what happened in Stalin's time?"

"Are you saying the past isn't worth grieving over?"

"Yeah, basically."

"Liar."

"What's hard to believe about that? What's done is done. You just move on."

"You don't know that you talk in your sleep?" Helen says. "You really don't?"

"I never talk in my sleep."

"Yeah, then who was Mikla, and why do I know that name? What was she to you and what happened that makes you whimper over her some nights?"

"You must have dreamed that yourself." I feel suddenly very, very shaky. "Is that even a name? Doesn't sound like a ■ame."

"You say it often enough in your sleep. You say it like she

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was someone very close and you've got loads of grief about her."

"No way."

"Oh, maybe she's your imaginary friend, then. And sometimes you dream about her. Except you're a little mature to have imaginary friends, don't you think?"

"I still think it's you that's dreaming," I say. Gotta get out of this somehow. Can't let it go any further. So I take a step so ruthless it makes my stomach flip.

"I'll tell you what I grieve over, what I might be dreaming about for a while," I say, and give her a semisanitized but still graphic version of what I saw in that house on Thirty-fourth Street.

"Oh my God, Luther," she says. She looks stricken. "I saw that on TV. Only the cameras didn't get inside the house."

"The fucking vultures tried hard enough, even though they knew damn well the gory stuff would never air. The station news directors censor the hell out of bang-bang. Don't want to upset the viewers with too much reality."

"Those poor, poor kids. Why did they have to shoot the kids? Why would anyone do that?" is about all that Helen can manage. She doesn't really want an answer, so I don't give her one. We ride in silence the rest of the way.

Inside my apartment, Helen fusses around in her purse and then holds a palm before me. On it are two Ecstasy tabs.

"Not you too," I say. "Where'd you get that?"

"You're the narc, you ought to know." She smiles. "Luther, it's everywhere. Don't go all stern about it. The pills you take, the dope you've smoked and the coke you've snorted . .. and don't dare deny
that.
Maybe you've narrowed it down to some pills now, but sometime when you were younger I
know
you did your share of smoke and coke."

"The pills are prescription, for a medical condition."

"So you say, and so what? Lighten up a little, babe. Take

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one of these with me. I need you to. World's looking a bit too nasty for me just now."

We drop the Ecstasy, put Sinead Lohan on the sound system, cuddle up on the sofa. It's my first time. I keep waiting for something to kick in. Nothing does. Helen goes so soft and dreamy, so peaceful, that I wish I could be where she is. Nothing, though. Yet I find I can't be bothered to get up and change the tunes when Sinead's finished, but just let the tape loop again and again.

When Helen, who's been stroking and nuzzling me, murmurs "Who's Mikla, Luther? What happened to her?" I say, "She was a girl not much older than you, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she got shot."

It feels like Helen's warm arms are enfolding my soul when I begin to weep.

16

My brain still feels like it's cradled in velvet when I hit my cubicle the next morning. Though I'm late, it seems too early. The sky's lowering, dark and dense, and what light there is dim, diffuse, a sickly gray tinged with yellow. The office fluorescents barely cut the gloom.

Ice Box looks wasted, as if he'd been on a bad drunk last night. But he says, "Man, you look very weird, especially around the eyes. You get any sleep, Luther?"

"I was about to ask you that."

"I didn't. Not much anyway. Had a bad scare. MJ shakes me awake around two, says the babies are coming. So I'm up quick, you know, putting clothes on, ready to rush her to the hospital."

"Bad scare? What's wrong with you, IB? You should be joyous. So did it happen? No, wait, that's stupid. You'd be at the hospital, not here, if you were a new dad."

"Nothing happened. Except two more times MJ did the same fucking thing, and I get dressed, and then she says false alarm. Hard on the nerves, Luther. I didn't get a wink. I mean, let's get it over with. I'm ready."

"Guess God and MJ aren't quite ready." I laugh. "And neither of them are about to time things just to please you."

"Go ahead and laugh. It ain't funny. I can't fuckin' wait 'til it's your turn, Five-O. Jittery as you tend to be in your

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normal state, you're gonna go berserk in a situation like this. Then I'll be doing the laughing."

"My turn? You'll be drooling in some nursing home, with your kids too scared to bring their kids over to see their crazy granddad, before it's my turn."

"Oh we'll see about that. You might have an accident with one of your little lovers one of these nights, and actually have the integrity to do the right thing."

"I'll have the integrity to see she has the safest abortion money can buy, my treat," I say. "Anything beyond that, forget it. I make my rules of engagement very, very clear at the start."

"That is truly fucked up. Do you have any awareness at all how warped you are?" Ice Box laughs, but he cuts it short, a really odd expression crossing his face. "Luther, I think whatever you got must be contagious. Otherwise, why am I here talking to you on a fucking Saturday morning when it's not our shift?"

"What?"

"It's Saturday, Five-O. Sometimes we work Saturdays and sometimes we don't, you idiot. This is not—repeat, not—a duty Saturday."

"But we're here. Right?"

"Exactly. Jesus, what did you do to your head last night? I've got an excuse for confusion, but I'd love to know what explains your crazed state of mind. No, scratch that. I don't want to know. It's probably something I'll find offensive. Or illegal."

"Uh, maybe we'd better talk deal here, IB. Let's quietly slip out, separately so we create as little disturbance as possible, and forget we had this conversation. In fact, this encounter does not exist, nor did it ever exist. Agreed?"

Ice Box nods. "I'll go first," he says, and moves off. Before he's taken two steps he turns. "MJ says why don't you come to dinner tomorrow night?"

"Little late for dinner parties, isn't it? After last night and all?"

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"I'm doing the cooking. Baked ziti, salad, garlic bread. Nothing fancy. MJ says nothing's going to happen for at least a week now."

"How's she know that?"

"Hell if I know. She just says she knows."

"Well, right. Love to come," I say. IB takes another step, then turns his face back to me.

"Oh, MJ says bring your girl. Not that Hannah, the real one you claim you got. Says she's tired of seeing your ugly face solo."

"I'll make it happen," I say, but regret the words instantly. "Around seven?"

IB nods and leaves the squad room.

I sit for what seems a long while staring at my phone. Images of my night start to jostle and shove for attention. I remember the weeping, Helen's embrace. God, the girl's wise beyond her years, I'm thinking. She understood completely, didn't judge, offered comfort. Even Annie couldn't have handled me better. I could live with that kind of woman....

I could live with Helen, we could have a real life, fuck the age and class difference. I care for her more than I cared for anyone else I've ever been with....

Then I snap back. Dangerous shit, that Ecstasy, I decide. I call Annie. "I'm up on an eight-foot stepladder scraping paint off crown moldings with a small propane torch and a table knife. I'll call you back when I'm done," her recorded voice says after the fifth ring. Damn.

I drive out to Loch Raven, make my way down through the piney woods. I hate it, hate the dark monotony of the trees, the spooky whishing of millions of needles stroked by the wind. But I want to see this Hollow Point. It isn't much; a little cove with a pebble beach flanked by tall rock out-croppings. I scale the one on the right. It's an easy climb, but at the end I'm almost ten meters above the water, the rock's sheared away so cleanly it might have been quarried, except there's no drill marks in the stone. I can see up and down the reservoir for maybe a mile, the water a steely gray and the

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distant peninsulas looking deep, dull black in the storm light.

I squat on the granite for maybe thirty minutes, maybe an hour, waiting for rain, waiting for thunder, a little exercise in not remembering, a little drill in putting feelings down so deep inside it's as if they never existed. Used to do this before combat—if there was time. "You gotta get your head cold and clear," Gunny used to tell me when I was young. "You don't want to be having to think. You want to let your training, your instincts take over completely. You want it like you as a person don't exist. You make yourself a machine, with faster relexes and faster responses than any man could have. Thoughts, emotions, they just slow you down, make you a target. Always go in cold and clear and empty, you wanna win and live to tell about it."

Except there's nothing much to tell, afterward. You're so cold and clear and slick everything slides off you—the sounds, the sights, just exactly what you did. All you know after is there are dead people around you, it's gone all quiet again, and you're still standing and breathing. All you check is who else on your team's still standing and breathing. That's the only victory.

I slip down off the rock and up through the forest like I'm a ghost, and get the TT back to my apartment on autopilot, not a thought in my head. When I park and slip out of the car, I get drenched to the skin by a downpour I'd never noticed before I can make the ten-meter dash into the building lobby.

Maybe you got trouble with rules of engagement of every variety, I think to myself. But you're number one at disengagement, for sure.

I drop a tab to help keep it that way, call Helen. She'll be over by eight tonight. And Sunday dinner with IB and MJ is fine by her. I call Annie. She's still up her ladder with the propane torch. Or wants everybody to think she is.

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"So, Luther. How come, for the first time ever, you're taking me public?" Helen asks when we're driving to IB's house.

"MJ told Ice Box to tell me to bring my girl. Said she's tired of my ugly face solo. So ... orders."

"MJ's about to have twins, right? Her hormones are running amok. She's got a thing about you, Luther. She wants to see if you've really got a girl, or if you're a gay boy."

"That's truly whacked. You're talking about my partner's wife, for God's sake, who happens to be the most centered, self-secure person I know."