Red rain 2.0 (37 page)

Shooter's gone.

Out the door into sea-fresh air, deep black shifting to dark gray as the first faint glow of false dawn lightens the far, far line where ocean meets sky.

Luther Ewing returns.

Read on

for a special preview

of 's

new novel

THE BITE

Available from Viking in June 2003

Call it a little love tap from God. Or whoever you figure runs things.

A heavy steel sledgehammer slams into my back, high on the left. I'm seeing matte black asphalt coming up to meet me before I hear the blast. By power factor, a .357 mag, minimum. But the deep boom says .45 hardballer. I can't feel a thing below the neck, just a sharp stinging as my face skids along that asphalt. I'm splayed helpless on my own parking lot, not believing this can be happening. But my face burns, ripped raw, in a spreading puddle of something warm and thick. It's not from the road rash.

Somebody I never saw just popped a cap on Luther Ewing. Something is very, very wrong here. Very, very nasty. Something's flipped. It's supposed to be the other way around.

Now, taken down hard, I'm thinking I'm going to learn the transcendent mystery I've unveiled to maybe a few too many people. And I'm thinking I don't want to learn it, don't want to find out exactly what it's like to have your brains blown out. Do you feel anything at all? Is there this great sudden flash of brilliant white light on impact? You read things like that. But it has to be imagined, because anybody who really knew could never write it, never tell it.

Dead people have serious communication problems.

It'll happen any second now. I'm scared. But I can't

286

An excerpt from THE BITE

move. I hear the shooter take two deliberate steps toward me. The shit is wearing some kind of shoes with very squeaky rubber soles.

Gonna be now. Fuck. I cannot move.

Then I hear a crisp metallic snick. Like he thumbed on the safety lever of a cocked semiauto. My own piss begins to soak my jeans anyway. I hear Squeaky Soles take two deliberate steps back, then squeak quickly off, out of hearing range.

I'm lying there on that asphalt, all wet and messy as the thick warm pool spreads. Some's reached my mouth now, some's seeping into my nose. Maybe I'm not going to learn that great secret after all, not going to find out if you see some blinding bolt of light the instant a bullet splits your skull wide open and blasts splintered bone and gray brain tissue down your face. I'm going to die anyway, though. Just a slow fade, crumpled like a puppet with my strings all cut.

But it's in a nice suburban neighborhood, my parking lot. People who live in the condos around it punch 911 when they hear a gunshot. In the city, nobody calls anybody. They just check to see that none of their kids is lying in a blood pool, taken down by a stray bullet that crashed through a window. Bullets have such perfectly cold indifference; they don't give a damn where they wind up.

I'm about half-here, half-rational, images and thoughts racing randomly, when what must be an EMS wagon wails up and squeals to a stop. My attention is tenuous, slipping in, sliding off. I hear a lot of voices. Sounds like EMS guys, talking their way, and cops, talking another. That's cool. If it's real. It's cool if they're all doing what they usually do. Calmly but quickly taking care of business. Seen it, done it, stood around talking cop talk myself at scenes like this often enough.

There's some kind of sudden jump cut. A piece of time vanishes without a trace. Then, lying on something wet but much softer than grainy asphalt, I do see a brilliant radiance, strobing: surgical greens flickering all around, many hands

An excerpt from THE BITE
287

heaving me off a gurney and onto a table, shifting me around, others sticking me with sharp things. Intravenous tubes dancing, some red, some clear. I'm naked, freezing. Trauma room. A hand puts a mask over my mouth and nose. When the anesthetic kicks in, I'll be sucked into that black hole, the one that's so tight you can't even squeeze in a dream for company.

Couple of nanoseconds, just time for some synapses to flash one last message: No problem, Luther. You've taken this trip before, remember?

Only thing is, you never know if your ticket's round-trip or one-way.

Round-trip this time, as the blackness thins to a wavery gray scrim some unknowable time later.

Or maybe not.

Feels familiar, at least. Feels like a place, a situation I've been in before. Soft plastic tubes up my nostrils, feeding oxygen to my lungs. An intravenous drip in my right arm. Wires patched here and there. A low whir of monitors, a muted beeping. My peripheral catches flashing red pin lights and yellow lines that jag across a ghost-green plasma screen, bump the edge, start fresh again at the opposite side. Over and over and over.

But I don't like what I see at the foot of my bed: a huge monolith, featureless, motionless. Light streaming around the thing from behind, like a full-body halo. No angel, that's for sure, this looming gray monolith, like the thing that kept appearing in that ancient sci-fi movie—what was it,
2001: A Space Odyssey!
Saw the video once. Apes gibbering in terror before a heavy slab, then picking up bones, tossing them high in the air when the monolith hums at them. The humming's a message they don't quite get. They hold the bones this way and that, until one finds a grip that makes his bone a club. The rest see, they find the same grip. They pound the dirt, they shatter some bleached white skulls lying around. Then they know. They go off and beat another bunch of apes to death. Ages of

288
An excerpt from THE BITE

evolution later, men in white astronaut suits, moonwalking in front of the featureless gray slab, hear the same humming, get a message. Send a mission off to Jupiter in a spaceship run by a psychotic supercomputer named Harold or something. The computer talks; it's smarter than men. The computer starts killing astronauts. The last astronaut kills the computer.

It's as broad as it is tall, this thing at the foot of my bed. What's the message going to be? When it hums, what am I going to learn? Can't be about killing. I know most of what there is to know in that particular specialty.

"Hey, Luther? You awake? You hearing me okay?" Very weird, that nasal Baltimorese tenor from a hulk with a halo.

"What!" I hear myself bark.

The monolith laughs. It's high and fast, more like a giggle.

"Luther, you are one damned dumb lucky son of a bitch. Dumb to let yourself get taken down from behind. Lucky as hell the shooter only put an FMJ through the soft place above your collarbone. Just drilled a neat little hole clean through. Well, not so little. But clean through."

I know the voice. The gray scrim wavers away. Then there's this jack, this adrenaline dump, this shocky transition between dreamy sleep and total alert. My right arm automatically reaches for my pistol—pure reflex, muscle memory—but it's not where it should be.

Squelch that. Red pin lights, the cardiac wave on the ghost-green screen, the oxygen tubes. Now somebody's talking to me. Okay. I'm in a hospital and I'm hurt. I look hard at the monolith. Despite the dim room and the heavy backlight from what must be a corridor, the mass shifts, slides into focus. And I'm seeing Ice Box.

"Oh man," I say, all my muscles untensing. "Made it again. Oh man."

"What's that?" IB asks.

"There and back," I say. "The round-trip. Made it again."

"IB, I don't think he's quite ready. I don't think he's lucid yet." It's a woman's voice, off to my right. A soft hand, a woman's hand, takes mine and cradles it, gently squeezes it. It's

An excerpt from THE BITE
289

clearing now. A sledgehammer slamming me from behind. Matte black asphalt coming up to meet me. EMS guys doing what they do. That bright light blinding me.

I don't even try to turn my head. No need to.

"He's right, Annie," I say. "I'm real dumb. And very lucky."

Ice Box and Annie. The best. Detective Sergeant Joseph Cutrone, universally known as IB because he isn't an ecto or a meso or any kind of morph unless they've got a special one for men the size and shape of restaurant-type refrigerators. Detective Lieutenant Annie Mason, head of the sex crimes unit, my personal ideal of the perfect woman—though I keep that deeply secret. We've been as tight as people ever get. They even backed me up on an operation four or five months ago that was so far over the line it would have cost them their careers if it'd ever come out. Lots of people had their suspicions about that op, after it was over. Lots of people wasted lots of time keeping the rumor running. Caged mice, racing around that wire wheel, sure they're going someplace when they're moving fast to nowhere at all.

IB and Annie think they know the truth of it.

But they don't. Nobody does. Except me and a drug tsar called Vassily. So nobody's ever going to know. Vassily has that communication problem.

Now I need to know some things from the living.

"Feel like I got run over by a truck. So can I ask a basic question here?" I say. "What exactly happened to me? Who, what, when, and where?"

"You got shot, Luther," Annie says. "Last night, sometime between 11:15 and 11:20. Sound about right?"

"Yeah. About right. But I need to hear details. Because everything seems a little fuzzy, a little disordered."

"Okay," Annie says. "You park your car in the usual place near your apartment. You lock it. You're walking toward the front entrance and somebody maybe twenty feet directly behind you fires one shot. Must be a total surprise, because you don't start to turn, you don't move to draw down. You just go down."

290

An excerpt from THE BITE

"I can't move. EMS picks me up. Then total blank, until people in greens are working me over. I think."

"You pass out on the way to the hospital," Annie says. "Blood loss, shock. Your heart's going just fine, though. You make it to the ER. The trauma crew gets busy. You're anesthetized."

"And I wake up now," I say. "When's now?"

"It's 6:45 the next morning. Out just a little more than six hours," Annie says.

"Damage assessment?"

"What IB said. You remember what IB told you a minute ago?" Annie says.

"Drilled clean through," I say. "Dumb and lucky."

Then that gray scrim drops down again, stiff and hard this time. I feel my eyes rolling back inside my skull. My body spasms. I'm gone. I'm back in that black hole.

But I don't stay there long. When my eyes open and refocus, a doctor and two nurses are just rushing into my room. They fuss with the drips, check the monitors. I see the doctor give Annie a thumbs-up when he leaves.

"Christ, Ewing. I'm gonna kill you myself, you scare me like that again," Annie says. I turn my head on the pillow and stare at her. She stares back. She's trying to stay cool, but she's wearing that crooked grin. The cutest grin going. Never figured out why it only shows up when she's distressed or really worried.

"Hey Annie, sorry," I say. "Promise I won't get shot anymore. Okay?"

"You think this is funny? You find it all real amusing, do you?" she says.

"Luther's got a really warped sense of humor—you ought to know that by now, Annie," IB pipes up. "The skinny little fuck Likes to walk into bullets and shit like that every once in a while, just to pull our chains. He deliberately passed out just now."

"Sick. And it's contagious," Annie says. "Seems to me it was you that walked into something last time, IB. At least you had enough sense to be wearing a vest when you pulled that stunt."

An excerpt from THE BITE
291

"Now, Annie, I never did that on purpose. It was an accident," IB says.

"Yeah, he was planning to dodge, like the agents in
Matrix"
I say. "You know, bend this way, bend that way, faster than a speeding bullet. Only he got confused, bent the wrong way."

"It's all a movie to you boys, isn't it? Nearly getting killed is just entertainment?" she says.

"No. We need to maintain a certain distance. A certain point of view. That the guns only fire blanks, and the rest is all just special effects," I say.

"You are both seriously disturbed individuals, you know that? No, you obviously don't know that. You don't have a fucking clue. You're trapped in adolescence, the both of you." She's not grinning anymore. There's a hitch in her voice. "Maybe you should give some thought to getting professional help. Maybe you should find a good therapist who could help you grow up. You bastards."

Annie drops my hand, rises from the chair. "I'm glad you're alive, Luther. But you really piss me off," she says, bolting from the room.

"Shit, IB," I say. "Look what you did."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I needed that nice hand-holding I was getting. Then you go and spook her."

"Me?"

"I don't see anybody else in here."

"I got two things to say, birdbones. One, Annie doesn't spook. Two, I didn't get myself capped. Three, I'm not lying in bed tubed up like some drunk plumber mistook me for a bathroom that needed renovation. Four, I believe you did do that little croaking act on purpose. Lastly, you look like dog shit."

"That's two? Count much, IB?"

"Whatever." Ice Box grins. "Once I get started I inspire myself."