Red rain 2.0 (23 page)

I start thinking what I'm going to say to MJ. I start wondering if I've got the balls to go to her and say what's got to be said. I shiver. Time goes nowhere. Then Dugal's sitting next to me.

"Give, Luther."

"Taggert got himself set up. Those dudes were just going to rip off his cash. He wasn't credible, LT."

"Yeah," Dugal murmers. "No drugs. They had no drugs."

"I'm under the car, I don't see much. From what I hear, I figure Taggert is stupid enough to go for his gun, never gets it out of the holster."

"He didn't. Half out," Dugal says.

"So they did him. They might not have done it if he hadn't gone for his piece."

Dugal gives me a kinked look. "A man's dead, Luther."

" 'Cause he made a stupid move. He didn't stay cool."

"So you did them. With this," Dugal says, holding the HK. "Couldn't hear your shots. Now I see why. And why were you under Taggert's car when you should have been back in the stables with Ice Box?"

"It felt like a goatfuck, LT. I had no good field of fire from the stables, saw that as soon as I saw Taggert put his car too close to the edge of the floodlight circle. So I bellied over and slid under. Taggert didn't hear me, didn't know I was there. If I hadn't done that, I never could have capped those dudes."

"Yeah, you dropped the three all right."

A surgeon comes out of the OR and waves Dugal over. They walk off down the corridor, beyond my hearing. They huddle. I'm thinking how in the hell am I going to face MJ. I feel sick to my stomach all of a sudden.

Dugal comes back, face blank. I stand up. I say, "You

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want to tell his wife, LT? Or you want me to go over to his house and do it?"

Duga! suddenly grins. "You're their friend. Why don't you go over and bring her here so she can talk to her man, Five-O?"

"What?"

He shakes his head, he's almost chuckling. "I never used to believe in miracles, but I'm close to changing my opinion. God, 1 am changing my opinion. Ice Box got hit by three bullets not an inch apart right over his heart. But the bullets just exploded on his vest! They just disintegrated! That Kevlar was never meant to stop high-velocity rifle rounds. FMJs should've punched through IB's vest like paper and killed him instantly."

"His face looked real bad when they brought him in. He looked like a dead man who didn't know it yet," I say.

"Good God, Luther! All he's got is about two dozen small cuts on his face from the bullet fragments. They've got most of the metal out already. Surgeon tells me the pieces are smaller than fingernail clippings. They won't even have to stitch most of the cuts. He's just going to look funny for a while, like he had a real bad shaving day, nicked himself a lot. Thank God!"

Yeah, thank the fuck for frangibles, I think. Russian assholes. I should have figured. I shouldn't haye sweated over IB.

"Struck dumb, are you, Luther? Amazed and relieved? Well, shake out of it," Dugal puts his hand on my shoulder, '"and drive that fancy silver bullet of yours like hell and bring his wife back here."

I'm ringing the bell in less than fifteen minutes. I wait a while. It's almost four
a.m.
MJ eyes me through the peephole. I can hear a sharp intake of breath, a muffled "Oh God, don't let this be." I put my arms around her as soon as she opens the door. "Don't say it, Luther. Don't tell me. It isn't true. It can't be true."

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"IB's fine, MJ! He's absolutely fine!"

"Don't lie to me either, you bastard! If he's fine, why isn't he here?" Her legs are shaking.

"He didn't want to scare you. He's got some scratches on his face, he looks like the bogeyman. That's all. I swear it. C'mon, I'll take you to see him right now. Don't get dressed. Just throw a raincoat on."

She does. She's laughing and crying at the same time, and then cursing me and the TT when she has almost as hard a time fitting into it as IB did. "It went bad, didn't it?" she says when we're rolling. "There was shooting, wasn't there?"

"Oh, just a little, MJ," I say. "Nothing serious. I did most of it. Everybody's pissed at me for it."

"You're a lying son of a bitch, Luther, and I love you lots." MJ laughs. "So IB just tripped and fell into a thorn bush or something?"

"Yeah, sort of."

"You lovely lying bastard. I'll get the truth out of IB soon as I see him. I know just how to pull his chain, scaring me like this."

"I bet you do, MJ," I say, grinning.

"You can wipe that off your face, mister. I'll be pulling yours, too. Showing up like a spook in the middle of the night."

Dugal and a doctor take MJ by either elbow and lead her to the private room where they've moved IB. I stick my head in for a peek, see IB's got little white butterfly bandages all over his face, also got a tray in his lap with a half-eaten stack of pancakes and bacon, and a full mouth. The tray goes clattering to the floor when MJ moves to the bed with her arms outstretched. I duck back out. I get a rush. I hear some crying, some laughing, some sort of stem lecture-sounding talk from MJ. Dugal, standing next to me, starts to laugh.

Jolt—the bedside alarm goes off. Ice Box is shouting. A doctor and two nurses dash into the room. One nurse

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hustles out almost immediately, rounds a comer of the corridor, and rolls back into the room with two orderlies pushing a gurney. Dugal grabs my arm. Then the gurney appears with MJ propped up on it. She waves and tosses a smile at us.

"Stick around a little while, you'll get to meet Allison and Sarah, Luther," she calls as they wheel her away.

19

I stand in the shower a long time. Usual drill, but this time doing what a wiggy spook with twenty years in Special Forces once taught me—concentrating on one muscle group, deliberately tightening it, then relaxing it, going on to the next. Toes first, moving up to calf and thigh, same with the other leg. Then groin, abdomen, pecs and lats. Fingers, forearms, biceps, triceps, deltoids. Finally, rotating my neck until that little grinding noise quits, flexing my jaws wide as I can before going slack mouthed. I feel totally loose and limp at the finish. That's supposed to be the point.

But it's an effort then to wash my hair and scrub my skin with the loofah. Dipshit, I think. Got it backward. Wash first in a precise, orderly military fashion,
then
do the muscle thing.

When the steam half-clears, I look at myself in the mirror and feel like I'm looking at a police sketch. Face sort of familiar, but it isn't me—or anyone real. My hair's down to my nipples. Never noticed it'd gotten so long, since I usually keep it in a ponytail. Time for the Comanche to go back to the reservation, I decide. I pad naked out to the kitchen, find some scissors in the knife drawer, pad back to the bathroom, grab a handful of hair, and shear it off a quarter-inch from my scalp. I'm down to the last lock, I look like a marine recruit, the face in the mirror's suddenly me. One more snip.

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Then I punch in Vassily's number. It rings a bunch of times before I hear a groggy
"Da?"

"My friend. Too much vodka last night, eh," I say in Russian.

"Ah, little brother, never too much. But this is not my office hours."

"Sorry, but something funny is all over the news this morning. Three white drug dealers shot and killed a cop last night."

"So?"

"The cops kill all three. They're from Brooklyn, it turns out. Since you said something about little stupids, thought you ought to know. You need any help?"

"Me?" Vassily's alert as hell. "I'm good, good. That changes, I will let you know. But thanks for the call.
Spa-siba,
little brother."

I'm just off when there's pounding on my door. Pulse instantly up fifteen beats per minute, no more, no less. My standard adrenaline reaction, I don't have to finger it to know it. I move fast to the bed, press the number code to open the lockbox duct-taped under the frame, take out the Desert Eagle, flick off the safety. No need to check—it's always loaded. More pounding, louder now.

I put my back against the wall next to the door. "What?" I shout.

"It's Annie! I've been ringing your bell and knocking for ten minutes. I'm about to call for backup and break in. You gone deaf or something?"

I peer through the peephole. It is Annie. Unchain the door then, swing it open, and in she strides.

"Great haircut! But, uh, they do it to you for electroshock therapy or something?" She smiles. I follow her gaze down to the Eagle. She's ignoring the fact that I'm naked, dick swinging in the breeze. " 'Cause it seems like you could use some."

"This?" I decock the Eagle. "Sorry. Dugal took my guns last night."

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"I know what happened last night, Luther." She's still smiling. "I'm wondering why you come to the door with a weapon at all."

"Don't... usually."

"So this is an aberration of some sort?"

"Yeah."

"Impulsive act, like the hair? Which you obviously chopped off yourself, without professional assistance."

"Yeah."

"I guess I know that. Guess that's why I came calling at, what is it now, six forty-five
a.m.?"

"I was just going to ask you about that."

"Don't you think, before we continue here, it'd be polite if you first put your pistol back where it belongs, and cover up the rest of your equipment with a bathrobe or maybe, if it's not too much trouble, some clothes?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah. Be right back." I flee to the bedroom, slam the door behind me.

When I come out in my robe, Annie's made coffee, she's at the table sipping a cup. She pours me one as I sit down.

"Now," she says. "Are you really okay?"

"Hell yes. Why shouldn't I be?"

"Last night."

"That wasn't much."

"It was too much, way too much. The story's all over the Department. I got a call from a friend on nightshift forty-five minutes ago. IB and Tommy wounded, four men dead."

"It happens. It's part of the job."

Annie shakes her head. "You're worrying me a little here, Luther. Okay, I understand you need to stay cool, you want to seem calm, seem chill. But it's just me here. Your friend. You can let it go a little."

"Let what go? I'm fine."

"Luther, you blew away three guys. Yeah, they were bad, they shot back. But you killed three men."

"I'm
supposed
to do that. In a situation."

There's a pleading look in Annie's eyes I don't recall ever

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seeing there before. "Oh Luther, you are wrapped so very, very tight. What did they do to you in the army, to get you this way?"

"They trained me to do my job and walk away when the job was done. Any problem with that? You seem to have
one."

"So humor me. Answer one question."

"Okay."

"Don't you feel anything?"

"Sure. I feel real bad Ice Box got hit, but real good he got off with scratches. I feel pissed I'm assigned to desk duty until those IA assholes finish their investigation."

"Nothing else?"

"Like what?"

"Never mind," Annie sighs, sips her coffee. She just stares at me a while. Then she lays her hand on top of one of mine. I think I see the beginnings of tears at the corners of her eyes. "Poor, poor Luther. Somehow, someway, some people fucked you up bad."

"Okay. I believe I should feel bad 'cause I shot those fucks. All I feel is weird because I don't. So I don't think about it. I've never even dreamed about all the people I've killed. Not once."

"Remember our talk on the way back from your folks' place?" Annie says. "Maybe the military training you got was too good, too effective in erasing the no-kill program. That's what it's designed to do, isn't it? But it usually doesn't work real well, does it?"

"Yeah, it fails. Most guys, if they hit combat, hate it. If they kill—but it's really rare to be sure, everybody all around you is shooting as fast as they can and who knows afterward whose bullet took anybody down?—they don't dig it. A lot get haunted by it."

"But it didn't fail, with you?"

"Appears that way, I guess. I don't know."

"You ever been really crazy in love with a girl?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

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"You'll see. Have you?"

"I guess not."

"You ever cried because a woman dumped you? Because someone you cared about got killed?"

"Can't remember. Don't think so."

"Luther, I know you won't like this idea. But with some help, a really good shrink, maybe an ex-military guy, you could get your feelings back. You could have a life, be able to really love a woman, really love your friends. Really get close to good people."

"No way, Annie. Too late."

"But why, Luther?"

"Because if I really
fell,
I don't think I could bear the weight. Couldn't pretend all I've done never happened. Couldn't live with feeling it. Could you?"