Red rain 2.0 (4 page)

"Fuckin' Russians, talking like they do in James Bond movies. Now I'm curious, 'cause I've heard a few things from some guys downtown about Russians from up in Brighton fuckin' Beach, apparently some New York City a, anyway coming down here and trying to do a little biz in what isn't their territory. They've been told the city's off limits. It's been made clear. They reply, 'Hey, no problem, we like suburbs, okay with you guys? We don't come near city. Maybe we cooperate with the import, we got great import-like you can't believe. You got whole city for distribution and we stay out. You have any trouble with fucking Colombians, fucking Dominicans, fucking blackies, we take care of it for you. Ask around New York, you don't believe.' "'That's what the Russians tell the boys downtown. There's maybe some more talks on the agenda, the mob guys are fed up hassling with spies and nigger gangs who got no rules and no respect for nothin'. They want to step

back, take life a little easier. This is what I hear, anyway. "Now these Russian guys," Dee Dee says as he lights another cigarette, "they start telling me they're investors, very, very liquid, who want to get into the racing biz. I'm thinking money laundry thoughts right away. They're talking crazy prices for pieces of some horses. They want to buy a place like mine, all cash. They say Vinnie the Fish gave them my name, told them I could maybe steer them the right way. Big finder's fee, we don't have to mention that, of course. Very major fee. "Fuck them! I want nothing to do with shit like this at all. I’m thinking I'm gonna kill the Fish with my bare hands first
chance I get. But we're all gentlemen, we have a drink. I tell them I'll ask around, can't promise nothing, but I'll ask. They're fuckin' delighted, grinning like looney tunes. They give me their cell number. It's one of those fuckin' global satellite phones, reach 'em anywhere in the world."

Dee Dee slides a slip of paper across the table. Ice Box palms it. "That's it, Joey Baby. Do any good for you, I'm happy."

"No names?" I ask.

"Who can understand these crazy fucks?" Dee Dee replies. "Two of 'em are calling the other guy Vaseline or something."

I put on my 75-watter with the flicker. Only it isn't deliberate this time. Vassily. Jesus motherfuckin' Christ.

He's got this quirk, IB has, he likes to monologue it when he's mulling ideas, so I stay quiet on the long drive back to Towson. I really do not want to know this shit might be coming down. Can't be Vassily, not the one I knew. Can't be. "The Bonus Packs," IB's muttering. "Russians. Russian mob. Ah it's horseshit. But maybe it ain't. Maybe it is. Why? Why not? ..." and on and on. I can't keep from tossing it all over too.

A tab at the station. I can't miss even one, unless I want to wind up on the floor, flailing and foaming at the mouth. At quitting time I walk over to meet Annie at Flannery's, a pub just off the square where the County Courthouse sits, a proud and well-kept example of nineteenth-century optimism with not a single one of the Towson buildings contemporary to it still standing. Flannery's draws a quiet mix—some lawyers and young government bureaucrats, some business folks from the high-rises down along York Road where the old two-story Victorian shops and the movie theater used to be, some students up from Towson State. No cops. I feel like dogshit when I slip into the corner booth Annie's occupied. Always do when I've skipped lunch and substituted coffee and cigarettes for the day's nourishment.

"Jesus, Luther, you've gotta take better care of yourself," she says, sipping a beer. I order a Coke from the waitress. "That obvious, is it?"

"Well, if I were your doctor I'd lay down an ultimatum. Forget about modern medicine, pal, and go pick out a nice cemetery plot and a decent mortician." She gives me that lopsided grin, the one she has no idea is the cutest thing going. Good-looking woman, Annie. Rangy, athletic, sandy hair, soft blue eyes and just a hint of a pout to her lower lip. She's changed out of the Ann Taylor suit that is her usual work wear—she keeps coveralls in the trunk of her car for the nasty calls—and she's now wearing an Orioles sweatshirt and Levis. Her eyes catch some light refracted from the big mirror behind the bar. We met when I first joined the Department. In fact, she came on to me, and was thinking what luck until she made it clear within the few sentences that it was purely professional interest. She was curious by nature, and I was the oddest thing to cross her path in a while. We got to be buddies. It's best that way, I know, but every once in a while, when the light hits her eyes like it just did, I think it's a damn shame. "Hey, Luther, none of that now," she laughs, as if she's read my mind, which in a way she probably has. Then she goes serious. "The kid isn't a virgin anymore. Rape for sure, unless she picked the roughest, crudest asshole she could find to be her first lover."

"That sucks," I say. "Jesus, when she looked in my eyes when I found her..."

"You wanted to kill the guy that put her there," Annie frowns. "I know your reflexes by now, Luther. Anyway, the girl doesn't even seem to know she was raped. Claims she doesn't remember a thing."

She studies me for a minute. "You well in control? ‘Cause if you're not, this'll wait 'til another time." "What'll wait?"

"The extra-shitty part." Annie's still scanning me in a |way that's making me a little edgier than I like. Most cops
don't trust Annie. They don't because she's too smart for them. She's got this weird double-major B.S. in biology and criminology from the University of Maryland at College Park, and an M.S. in psychology from there too. She's very young for her rank and they think she's a snitch for the Department psychologist. Also, she isn't a dyke. The muscle-heads would've felt a lot easier around her if she'd been a dyke. Most of the males—and a hell of a lot of the female cops, too—like to keep their distance with Annie. They can't find any clearly labeled box to put her in, and that always makes cops uneasy.

"I'm cool," I say, having held her eyes through the scan. I'm not, really, since about seventy percent of my mind is going through hoops over Dee Dee's Vaseline. But the thirty on Annie's deal is on strong and tight.

"It goes like this. I track down her parents, both lawyers. Both 'in conference.' I leave messages. I hang around the hospital. Our guys do all they have to, the hospital does all it has to, the kid's ready to go home.

"The father takes an hour to make the callback. He's real curt when I tell him what's up. He sounds fucking annoyed. They don't exactly break speed records getting to the hospital, either. Then they take a quick look at their daughter, sort of pat her hands and say they're glad she's fine. Then I take them outside the room.

"They tell me, like it's an imposition they have to talk to me at all, that when she didn't come home at eight last night, they assumed she was sleeping over at a girlfriend's, and when she wasn't around when they left for work, they assumed she'd gone to school straight from the girlfriend's.

"Now I'm losing it big-time," Annie goes on. " 'You never
phoned
her friend's parents to find out if she was there? You never thought to phone them in the morning? It never occurred to you to try the police?'

"The bitch gets all huffy and says, 'We're not under interrogation here. We're taking Emma home, now.' So the orderlies wheel her out in a hospital gown and robe, a nurse
tells them they'll have to return the stuff. 'Where are her clothes?' the bitch snaps. I say, 'Didn't you hear a word I said? Your daughter was found completely nude, brutally raped, half-dead of exposure, in the woods near Loch Raven Reservoir.' And she says, 'If we had a decent police force in this county nothing like this would be allowed to happen. You'll be hearing from us!'"

"And you go?" I say. It's getting very overcrowded in my head.

" 'No way, honey. You're going to be paid a visit by me
personally in a squad car with lights and sirens going, and by the county social welfare people. I'm filing a report naming you as unfit parents whose child needs to be removed
from your custody for her own safety. I'll have a court order with me, count on it.' "

"Jesus Christ," I mutter. "Scumbags like that aren't fit to…”

"Whoa, Luther. Just let it go, before you make me sorry I told you. I had to tell somebody, had to vent. Don't make it a mistake for me to' ve picked you."

And remembering how she'd never made confession a mistake for me, I let it go.

3

1
glide into Annie's office early next morning before the shift changeover. She's staring at what looks like a forensic report on her computer screen, hair still wet and rubber-banded into a ponytail. It's at least two minutes before she notices I'm there. Or lets me know she's noticed.

"Hey, Five-O," she says cheerfully, hitting the
save
and
store
keys so the screen goes that wavery gray. "Sony I laid all that on you last night. Didn't lose any sleep over it, did you?"

"Nah." I say. Double lie—the girl, and also a Russian I once knew but can't tell anyone about, not even Annie.

"Well," she says, facing me now, "check this. There's three messages on the machine when I get in today. All from the father. He's saying he and his wife were simply in total shock last night, they'd said a lot of things they realized were totally inappropriate, they're of course absolutely willing and eager to cooperate with my investigation. And I quote, 'This doesn't have to get into the newspapers, does it?'"

She's laughing before I am. "So which way did you go on them?"

"No way," Annie says. "I'm not calling the fuck back. He and his wife can shit bullets for a while."

I'm grinning but not saying anything.

"What's your read, Luther?"

"No case."

"Hey, we got the perp nailed. They checked her out with a colposcope. Then a Wood's lamp. Positive DNA ID."

"I'm not up to date on the tech, Annie."

"Oh, right. A colposcope's a magnifying lens medical examiners attach to a video camera, to check for tiny fibers and stuff. The Wood's gives the victim's body a purplish blue glow. Drops or smudges from the perp's body fluids— skin oil, sweat, semen—show up under it. They swab, get DNA markers."

"Like I said, no case."

"What do you mean?"

"You gotta have a face, a name before you can pull somebody in and match the DNA. She give you that?"

"Uh, no. Not yet."

"So, zip. She may've been stoned, picked up someone, asked him to take her someplace ..."

"She's only thirteen!"

"C'mon, Annie. Things like this have gone down with kids even younger. Maybe she was so whacked she decided to lose that virginity. Get back at her lousy parents that way
or
something."

Annie's frowning now. "Yeah, and she's the only one
who
can tell us how it went."

"When you asked her last night?"

"Said she couldn't remember anything after she walked out of Woodleigh Mall around seven-thirty. Shit," Annie snaps, "I gotta check again with toxicology, see if drugs are nvolved here."

"What for? Won't get you a face or a name."

Annie goes bad on me, which she only does when she's really upset. "Yeah, Luther, thanks for your ideas," she says curtly. "Now maybe you better get on with cleaning up the drug traffic. Got a pretty full agenda today."

Her last two words only echo off the walls, because I'm already gone. I know she'll come around all sorry after she
finishes sticking it to the kid's parents and gets on the real problem. Way she is. It's why I love her.

There's a blue Post-It stuck on my computer screen when I walk into my cubicle. "See me when you get in, D."

No sweat. Dugal's done a 180. I'm one of his best boys now. A born asshole, the LT, always will be an asshole, but far from stupid, and very ambitious. He takes management courses at night in the continuing education department at Towson State, he wants a captaincy bad, a master's degree and one day his own county. Doesn't matter if it's this one or someplace else, just so he's chief of police there. He realized—once he got over being pissed off-—that when your superiors hand you a wild child, a Luther Ewing type, what reflects best on you is taming the bastard, turning him into a great cop.

I made it easy for him. I began the day after that first Ecstasy raid.

That start—I rap on the frame of his open office door, stand at ease until he deigns to notice me. "What do you want, Ewing? You want to complain about something?" He swivels in his chair, beckoning me in.

"No sir. No complaints, sir. I want to apologize for the incident with the unauthorized weapon the other night."

"You do?"

"I failed to fully inform myself, sir. It won't happen again."

"Damn well better not," he says. "What made you think you'd need a piece like that anyway? Our Rugers are more than sufficient... when they're needed. Hell, in ten years I've only had to fire mine twice, both warning shots."

God watches over innocent bystanders, I'm thinking. Those P89s are the cheapest semi-autos Ruger makes. Christ, ever>' rookie patrolman in the New York subways is carrying a good Glock. "I hope I never have to fire either, sir. Not my preferred way of dealing with a situation. Last
resort, correct sir? But there is always a chance you get forced to."

The LT nods. "Yeah, in our business, that's true."