Red rain 2.0 (3 page)

Hard to doubt twenty-six perfectly consistent stories.

"Wake up, Ewing, and start entertaining me," Ice Box ays, "or you too busy having wet dreams about some mere action somewhere?" Another damned button, a bad one, but he doesn't know. He's hit it by accident. "There's the Congo, nan. Hear they're hiring there again after all these years."

"Got just two words for you, IB." I laugh, but it feels like leather bands are tightening around my skull. I've got the ·hakes coming on. I need my medication but don't want to get
there.

We're coming up on the first bridge over the reservoir. IB is steering with one hand and using the other to wipe the inside of the windshield because the defroster's dead. The pine forest is towering over both sides of the road. I clear a patch on my side window with my shirt sleeve and stare out. Rows of trees slipping by, like pages of a book you're riffling
through from back to front. Everything blackened, dripping, branches sagging low down. Then, just an eye-blink, something so pale against the black it almost glows.

"Hey, brake it, IB," I say, twisting my head to try to keep whatever that was in sight, but losing it. "Saw something weird in the trees back a bit."

"Saw your own ghost, is all."

"No bullshit, man! Stop it and back up a hundred meters. I saw something."

"Rule one, always humor paranoids, for they just may be right," Ice Box mutters as he brakes, bounces the Crown Vic over the curb into the grassy strip between the road and the forest. He starts backing up. "Can't see," he complains, "rear window's all fogged."

I roll down mine and stick my head out. "Ease right a bit, okay, a little more. Now straight."

For what seems a long time I don't see anything but forest ghostly in the fog and begin to think Ice Box is right, about my own ghost. Then it's there, a pale spectral thing, down low against a trunk.

I'm out of the car and running before Ice Box stops. The verge hasn't been mowed in a long time and within ten strides my jeans are sopping up to my thighs. I hear Ice Box thudding along behind me. I reach the tree. And there, curled in the fetal position, is a naked little girl, can't be more than twelve or thirteen, blue-lipped, barely formed nipples puckered tight, flesh everywhere goose-bumped. Quick scan— no blood, no obvious marks or wounds.

"Dead?" I hear Ice Box call, voice strangely hollow in the fog, seeming to come from no particular direction.

I'm kneeling and taking her cold, cold hand in mine, finger searching urgently for a pulse in her thin, blue-veined wrist. I find it. It's shallow and much too fast. Suddenly her eyes open on me. I look deep into them. And I know she's not seeing me at all, but some image in her mind that sends tremors rippling down her poor frail body.

"Not yet," I say.

I’ve seen things nobody should have to. Never blinked. But I turn away from this girl's eyes. I stare at the pines until they're a blur. I lay the forefinger that searched for her pulse against the side of my skull, under my long hair. It fits perfectly, length and depth, into the dent there. Into the damage that demands four tabs of Klonopin every day to keep my brain from meltdown.

Ice Box, who can move, takes forever to slog back through the high grass and begin wrapping her in a silvery space blanket. "Called it in," he says.

I know he's fast, know it's only been moments. I know it’s only for me time's gone all skewed and slow.

Then he's holding her hand. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph. It's okay, hon. You're safe. You're all right. You're safe, hon." "Going hunting," I say and slip into the woods, casting round in broadening circles like Gunny's old setter. The droopping boughs force me to my hands and knees, shower me with chilly drops of water whenever my back brushes one. I go slow, careful as I can. Hyperalert for any sign at all-scrap of cloth, faint dent of a shoe print, broken twigs. All I find is slight smudges where the pine needles on the forest floor have been brushed lightly out of their natural pattern. I follow this a bit, keeping well to the side. The smudges are heading up from the reservoir. Somebody very
light's been crawling. Nobody's walked this way. I back out exactly the way I came in.

When I emerge from the trees, the scene's lit up like a rock conceit, the fog and low clouds reflecting and intensifying the revolving lights of two cruisers and an ambulance. The crime scene team has stretched its yellow-tape perimeter, and guys with empty plastic bags are systematically quartering the area. The EMS guys are hovering over the girl. I see Ice Box on the road by an unmarked talking to Detective Lieutenant Mason, head of the sex crimes unit.

"Yo, Ewing," she beckons me over. "When you've finished contaminating my scene, you want to share your insights? IB doesn't have any."

"Hey Annie," I say when I get to the road.

"So—bad date? Little girl out with some jerk too old for her, he fucks her, freaks, dumps her?"

"No."

"No?"

"When we got here, all the grass was standing tall. Me and Ice Box flattened two paths, see?" I point to the trails IB and I left from the Crown Vic. "Your herd trampled all the rest. No way anybody dragged or carried her from the road."

"Give me more," Annie says.

"She came up out of the woods. Alone. Crawling. Saw some signs in the needles. No footprints."

"That'd explain the little scratches on her forearms, belly and thighs," Annie says.

"Okay, so you tell me. How'd she get way down there in the woods?"

"Boat. Somebody dumps her from a boat."

"You know this part of the reservoir? What's down there?"

"Place called Hollow Point," Annie says. "Weird little cove with a pebble beach tucked in between two stone cliffs. You'd miss it if you didn't know it was there. From the water."

"Maybe somebody ought to go down there and poke around."

"Somebody's down there now, Luther," Annie says with a grin.

"Gee, happy I could be so much help," I say. Ice Box is shifting from foot to foot

"So we done here, Loot? Luther and me, we got places to go, people to see."

"Hey," Annie says, holding up both hands. 'Tar from me to keep you from important engagements."

Ice Box heads off toward the Crown Vic. I hang for a moment. "One thing, Annie. Not your average mall rat. She's been well looked after."

"Instinct? Or evidence?"

"Her nails. Beautifully manicured. Buffed, polished and clear-coated, just like you get yours done every week. And the hair. Even soaked, a great cut. Like those $125 salon jobs you favor."

"You
notice
details like that, do you, Luther? You got a thing for female maintenance?"

"I appreciate it, Annie, that's all," I smile.

"Later, Luther?"

"Sure."

Ice Box is silent for a while. Just drives. Over the bridge, men off Dulaney Valley Road and up into the rolling hills toward | Jacksonville. We tear free of the last angering wisps of fog. The rain's eased too, and there's lots of action in the sky, storm clouds swirling and twisting, glimpses of blue from time to time. He kills the lights, sets the wipers on intermittent and somehow they aren't screeching anymore. "Just when you think it's a nothing day," IB begins. Can't tell you how much I hate shit like this. Poor little thing. What kinda world we living in, Luther?" "Somebody's mistake?" "Or worse. You know, I got shot once, when I was a uniform.

"Didn't know."

'"Well, I did. And in the back of my mind ever since I've had the very weird notion I died on the operating table. And everything since then is some kind of afterlife—same people, same places, but all of it kinked, all of it just a little bit off."

"So you think you're in hell?"

"Nah, don't try to ID it. Something's just different now."

"You ever see things nobody else seems to see? Ever know in advance something's going to happen?"

"Nah, I only feel a little light-headed once in a while, and get bad heartburn."

"That's just your wife's cooking. You had me thinking for a minute you were into some very heavy-duty mystical shit."

"Just two words...."

We're past Madonna and out on a two-lane country blacktop that rides the crests and troughs of the hills. Big pastures everywhere, maybe a mile between mailboxes at the heads of long drives that swing far from the road toward mansions, barns and stables. "Horse country," IB says. "Not exactly Kentucky, but some great thoroughbreds raised and trained out here."

He pulls into a drive flanked by two tall brick pillars with a wrought-iron double gate open between. There's a double row of yellow poplars along the drive, just inside a white post-and-plank fence that looks freshly painted. The drive takes a couple of curves until about two hundred meters out from this three-story red brick place with tall white columns from verandah to roof. There's a barn off to the left that looks brand-new, and a low U of brick, copper-roofed stables with a cobblestone courtyard, and behind all that acres of grass. I see three, maybe four tall, long-legged horses with proud heads gamboling around out there.

"So, your man the caretaker here or what? Shovels the shit out of the stables? His trailer tucked way out of sight, over in the tree line?"

"He takes care of it, yeah. Got some help, though," IB says.

Before we even pull into the gravel circle in front of die house, a tall guy wearing a suede blazer and green moleskin trousers tucked into paddock boots opens the door and comes skipping down the steps toward us, arms spread wide like he can't wait to give someone a hug. I should have noticed infrared security beams at the gate that signaled our entrance. Probably surveillance cameras in the trees along the drive too. You have a place like this, you pay attention to security.

As I climb out, the suede jacket's already got his arms as far around Ice Box as he can, which is only halfway, and they're patting each other. "Joey C, you old cocksucker. Joey man, it's been too long. How's it hangin', amico?" he's saying.

Ice Box is laughing. "Hey, don't muss my suit, Dee Dee. It's been too long 'cause you never call. like all the dick-heads from the old neighborhood who've made it. They don't want to know me no more. Afraid I'll embarrass 'em in front of their new old-money friends or some shit"

Dee Dee plants a big wet kiss on both of IB's cheeks, lets go and studies him. "You're right," he laughs. "I couldn't take you anywhere. You piss in your pants on the long drive or what?"

"That's another story," IB says.

"Joey C, Joey C. listen, I thought it was gonna be you and me only?" He nods in my general direction.

"Just my partner, man. Luther, meet Dee Dee. We grew up on the same block. He parlayed a lot of luck at Pimlico into some shares in a couple of thoroughbreds, then parlayed that into full ownership and all this shit you're seeing."

"Hey Tonto," Dee Dee says. "That some new style, taking a shower in your clothes?"

"No," I say, giving him maybe a 75-watt smile with enough jitter in it to make him think there's a loose connection in my head. "We took an Italian submarine, on account
of the weather. Leaky. You know the kind, goes 'Ping, guinea guinea wop wop wop' on sonar."

Dee Dee laughs. "Like his style, IB. He's okay. Now come on in where it's dry, have a cappuccino with a shot of grappa." He takes Ice Box by the arm and starts leading him up the stone steps. "C'mon, Luther, don't be shy," he calls back to me over his shoulder.

Perfectly polished wide-plank floors, Persian carpets worn and faded enough to be real antiques, lots of heavy mahogany furniture, lots of oil paintings of racehorses on the wall. We sit around a marble table in a half-octagon nook with a view out over the pastures where the horses are playing. There's logs blazing, never mind it's August, in a huge fieldstone fireplace behind us. No complaints from me— I've been shivering a little ever since we left the reservoir and it's great to feel my clothes drying. A dark girl with blue-black hair—I make her Sicilian with lots of Arab genes—comes in with a tray bearing three cups of cappuccino and a strange, stretched glass bottle. "Get the grappa from an
oenoteca
up in Friuli," Dee Dee says. I cover my cup with my hand when he tries to pour a shot. Ice Box doesn't. But it's damned good cappuccino. We sip.

"So Joey, to be honest I'm feeling a little agitato, no? 'Cause this is, what can I say, kind of sensitive?"

"If it's something Luther shouldn't hear, I shouldn't be hearing it either, Dee Dee."

"You cops. You fucking cops!" Dee Dee laughs, drains his cup, lights a cigarette. "This is maybe nothing at all, maybe you drove all this way for squat. But here it is.

"Two weeks ago, the biggest fuckin' Mercedes I've ever seen comes tooling up the drive without no invitation. I'm not worrying because what've I got to worry about? I don't owe a single soul a fuckin' nickel. I'm not mobbed up, as you know. And I got a couple of guys around the place you didn't see and they didn't see.

'These three dudes get out, big bulky guys so blond they
look like they're fucking lifeguards down the Ocean except they're wearing very, very nice suits. Superfine cashmere, italian linen, the best. Good shoes. They're smiling and waving and one dude says, 'Please excuse, Mr. DelVecchio, if we have dropped by at a bad time. We're in the area, we try to call, got a five-grand cellphone, but your line, nyet. If is time is bad, maybe we make an appointment, come back at your convenience.'