Red rain 2.0 (30 page)

"Now, Miss Helen, we get this snapper's attention," Gunny says. He takes sections of eel about six inches long, sticks a bunch of corks in the gullets. "We toss these in the pond, the snapper tries to grab some lunch. No use in shooting when he grabs them, I've tried two dozen times and he's too quick. But after a while, he'll edge himself up on that log to get the big meal. And that's where we get him."

I see the wood around the notch is holed and punky. "Hell, all you ever got is wood."

"Yeah, well, today could be the day."

Helen's laughing. "You guys are crazy."

"Yeah? Watch this." Gunny heaves a piece of eel out into the pond. There's a splash when it hits, but the corks keep it afloat. And damn, a couple of minutes later a big, reptilian head with a gaping, horny beak pops up and snatches the eel.

"Jesus Christ! That looked like some kind of dinosaur or something. Creature from the Black Lagoon!" Helen cries. "It is a monster. You sure it's a turtle? I've never seen any turtle like that thing."

"He's a snapper, sweetheart," Gunny says. "The great-granddaddy of all snappers. Watch again."

He tosses another slab of eel. A few minutes go by. Then a flash of a hideous beak and the eel's gone. I'm getting

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creeped by this thing, but Helen's laughing. "Holy shit! Holy shit!" she says.

"Let's wait for him to get interested in the main course. You want the first shot, Helen?" Gunny says.

"Hell yes," she says.

Gunny drops the clip, checks to make sure the chamber's empty, then moves around behind Helen and gets her and the 16 into shooting position. "Now," he says, "see the ghost ring up close to your eye? Ignore it. See the post at the end of the barrel? Just concentrate on that. Snapper comes up on the log, all you got to do is move a little until the post is on him, then squeeze the trigger. You ever shot before?"

"Sporting clays with my dad. Twelve-gauge Beretta over-and-under. I wasn't very good," Helen says.

"Well, if you've fired a 12-gauge, you'll hardly think this is a gun at all. No kick."

Gunny takes the 16, slips in the clip, pulls the charger, lets it snap. Gives the rifle back to Helen. "It's live now. Do not, please, put your finger on the trigger until you see the turtle. It'll fire if you touch the trigger."

"Gotcha," Helen says, settling in, rifle butt tucked into her shoulder, cheek on the stock.
Like she's done it before.
"When's he going to come?"

"Well..." Gunny says, "that depends. Could be a while. Best to rest your left arm on your knees."

We wait. We wait. The pond's still, water flat as glass. "I can't believe I'm sitting here in some Virginia swamp with an army rifle, trying to shoot a turtle!" Helen says, chuckling. "Spend a lot of time just sitting here like this, do you, Gunny?"

"Fair amount. My goal in life is to waste that snapper. I can't stand him eating all those baby ducks. And this would be a good place to catch panfish, if he wasn't eating them all."

She laughs. "Sure, it's perfectly logical."

I'm not paying much attention anymore. I'm liking the sun warming my face, but my mind's eye is seeing gray,

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gritty city streets more than water, trees, sky and clouds. I'm looking Vassily in the eye. He's looking back. Who's going to see whose soul first? That'll make the difference.

"Holy shit!" Helen hisses. I scan the fallen tree. The biggest, ugliest, scariest snapper I've ever seen is edging himself slowly out of the water and onto the log, just left of the notch where the eel's draped. His head looks as big as a grapefruit. He stretches his neck, and that beak... Jesus.

"Pop his shit," Gunny whispers. Helen squeezes off, drops the 16, jumps up.

"Gawwwd damn!" Gunny shouts. Helen's bullet has taken the snapper near the base of his neck, right where there's a gap between his shell and his belly plate. The thing's jolted hard, but he's so heavy he just slides into the notch instead of being blown back into the water. "Gawwd damn!" Gunny's hustling down to the log and out on it, Ka-Bar knife out just in case. He prods the turtle's neck with the point of his knife. Nothing. "You greased him good!" he shouts. He tries to lift the snapper by the tail with one hand, has a little trouble. The bastard must weigh an unbelievable amount. Gunny's grin is strained as he lugs the thing back toward us.

"You see that, Luther? You see me shoot the monster? Creature from the Black Lagoon. Blam!" Helen's sort of hopping up and down. "That was way cool! Now I know why you guys like guns."

Gunny plops the thing on the ground near us, shakes his arm. "Hoo-ah! Heavy duty. Look what he could do." He levers open the snapper's beak and has no trouble slipping his wrist in.

"Oh man, he could bite your hand off easy," Helen says. "This is unbelievable. Wish I'd brought my camera."

'"We got one at home. If we can carry him that far, we'll take some pictures. Just try picking him up, though."

Helen takes the tail with both hands, pulls hard as she can, and only gets the creature halfway off the ground before she gives up.

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The old man and me drag the thing home, rope him up on a thick oak branch. Momma comes out the door. Her eyes widen. She puts her hand over her mouth. "Get the camera, will you, please?" Gunny calls to her. She does. Then Helen poses next to the slain monster, its shell big enough to cover her from tits to hips, cradling the M16. Gunny goes through a whole twenty-four-frame roll.

"Can't wait to see the pics. I'm going to really gross out all my girlfriends with them," Helen says.

Then we sit in the outdoor chairs. Mom brings us each a beer. Air's cool, but the sun's hot now. Great autumn day. Except that snapper is spooking me. Don't know why, I've killed plenty of snappers, starting when I was a kid with a little .22. Gunny's slit the snapper's throat with his Ka-Bar to bleed it out. There's a slow, steady dripping into the grass.

"So," Helen says, halfway through her beer in two gulps. "Do we eat this thing? Or what?"

"Some
folks eat snapper. Southern folks. Mostly
poor
Southern folks. I personally wouldn't take a single bite if I you put a gun to my head. Eat a thing that ugly? No way, young lady," Gunny says.

"You just going to throw it away, then?" Helen sounds disappointed.

"No. It's your snapper, you made a fine shot. You want to I cat some, be my guest," Gunny says. "Momma knows some turtle recipes."

Helen looks over at the thing, wrinkles her brow a little. “Uh, I think maybe I'll try it some other time, if that's okay."

"Outstanding. Because I know some folks down the road about five miles, nice white folks even if they are rednecks. Don't have much money. They'd be real glad to have that snapper. It'll feed them and their three little kids for four days, easy. I'll run it on down to them in the pickup in a little
bit."

After lunch, Gunny and Helen do that. I sit outside with Momma. She's sipping green tea. "What you up to, Luther?" she asks after a while. "With this young girl?"

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"Not a thing. She's just a girlfriend. Don't you like her?"

"She too young for you. Short time, okay. But she's not in love with you. Girlfriend only. Comes to wife, you take that Annie."

"First, Mom, I don't want a wife. Second, Annie'll never be in love with me."

"Already is. I see that. Just she doesn't know it yet and she never let you know it once she knows it. Unless you show her you in love with her first."

"Oh. beaucoup good advice."

"Why you so cruel, Luther? Your poppa, he talks a little rough sometimes but his heart is always tender. So you don't get it from him. Tell me, why you have this cruelness?"

"I didn't mean to upset you, Momma. Just that you don't really know or understand my life."

"I got feelings I trust, Luther. Bad ones now about something you doing, or going to do. With this girl or not this girl, Annie or not Annie. More likely some bad people, number ten people. Just stop, please. Think. Every time you ever in trouble in your life, it because you not stop to think before you do something. So you promise your mother you think. Or you are a very cruel boy."

"I promise I'm not doing anything wrong to anybody, and yes, I'll stop and think hard before I act on anything, good or bad."

"That's okay, then," she says, patting my arm. "You make your old mother happy if you do that."

In bed that night, Helen's smooth and supersweet. "You delivered," she murmurs, when her lips aren't busy with other things.

"Delivered what?"

"You said it would be fun. Don't think I've ever had so much fun. Except, maybe, what I'm about to have right now."

26

"We fuck them dead, what else?" Vassily's laugh in Moscow had bounced off a satellite and reached me in Tyding's. It keeps looping through my head.

Stuck on desk duty, I start trying to reach out to a lot of old friends—military mainly. It's a slog. All the homies I used to bang with are scattered, some new base or some new place, hard to track down by phone. I keep on it, call after frustrating call. There's some hardware I know I'm going to need, and they're the only ones with access. Got to make this happen. Getting edgier by the hour.

I can't let anyone know what I'm up to, but people won't leave me alone. Even Ice Box gets on my case. "You don't trust me?" he complains first day I'm back on duty. Okay, he's feeling abandoned, a little hurt that he'd been left out of the entire Russian setup except that mad assault on the stables, but I do not need this, not now. "That's why I got no part of the Russian Rattle?"

That's what everybody's calling the bust. They're talking about it too damn much. They got the Dugal point of view. A famous victory. They just don't get it.

"Bullshit," I snap, meaner than I want to be. "Did I or did I not tell you everything in advance, big man? Anyway, I blew the thing. Why is it none of you fuckers can comprehend that missing Vassily means we missed everything?"

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"We'll get him," IB says. Even he won't get it, dammit. So I lie.

"I wanted you in with me, but the only deal I could get Dog to agree to was him and me, just him and me. He had like this obsession. Him and me. Total secrecy until the last minute. Dude's been out in the badlands down there too long. It's made him crazed."

"Well," IB concedes, "guess you had to do what you had to do. But goddamn! The score we made out there. The biggest ever. You should be thinking about that. Instead you're all kinked about old Vaseline. That's whacked, man." I don't even try to explain what's going to come down, hard and fast, on me and Dog. I just grunt, "I know the man, is all."

"Great. Meanwhile, Five-O, it's lonely out there by myself. There's nothing much happening. Never seen so little action."

"That's a good thing, not a bad one, you dumb fuck." "True, true. But it's making me real torpid." I look him up and down, grinning fake but large. "Your natural state, isn't it, IB?"

"Just two words, Luther ..." We both laugh. Annie makes the obligatory drop-by, gives me the CAT scan look, decides all synapses are flashing in an orderly fashion, invites me to Bocca for dinner. I say yes.

She asks the obligatory questions about the Russian deal, and then some more acute ones that could mean trouble, so she gets some slick evasions with }ust enough fact and truth to tell her not to go there. She's wise enough to read that, heed that. She's even easy—though it brings on the very first blush I've ever seen on her face—when I steer talk to that little drunken episode at my place.

"So what's the big deal?" She laughs. "So you saw my tits. Plenty of guys have. Probably you've seen a lot better." "Never! Best pair going." "You are so full of shit, Luther." She giggles. Nearly every day, picking times when there're no train-

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ing sessions on the schedule and I'm getting no callbacks, I go down in the basement and work out with the SIG, the HK, the Eagle. Also a beautiful little Walther PPKS in classic .380ACP, points and shoots like its barrel is my forefinger. I just couldn't resist buying the piece. I've taken to wearing it in a Fobus holster tucked into my pants at the small of my back.

First time McKibbin sees that, he laughs at me. "Planning on a situation where we need to do a New York reload, are we, then?"

"What?"

"Much faster to pull another pistol than drop a clip and slip in a fresh one," he says. "Or so they believe in New York. I've me doubts, but what do I know? Personally, I feel if you haven't solved your problem with the standard seventeen rounds in the Glocks they carry, you must already be dead. Makes reloads moot, wouldn't you say?"

When I'm finished shooting, stripping and cleaning the weapons, and nobody's around but him and me, I say, "SAS. I figured that out a long time ago, you know?"

"Wild imagination you have, lad. Or ye've gone mad." He laughs. "Just a copper walkin' the beat in Belfast. Twenty-five years as a constable, I was."

"Un-huh."

"Just another copper on the beat." He grins.

'Takes more than that to make a shot like you made at the stables."