A Fistful of Rain (17 page)

“Hey, gumdrop, if this was a date, you’d have known it. Don’t get up. I can find my way out.”

CHAPTER 23

The ringing phone pulled me free from the nightmare.

Reporters and humiliations, of cameras on me at all the worst times. Flashes capturing me in bed in Montreal, not with a groupie but with a cop, and photographers pursuing me into bathrooms, finding me drunk and naked and lying in my own vomit and blood. Big Technicolor production, cast of thousands, everyone from the funeral, everyone from the press, everyone from the audience. Chapel taking notes on his legal pad, and Joan standing with dead Steven, each looking pained with disappointment. Damien asking me to sign something, even though I wasn’t Van.

So the phone was really a lifesaver, as far as that went.

“Hello?” I said. It came out more as a slurry than a word.

“This is Scanalert operator one-four-seven; is this Miriam Bracca?” The voice was male, and young, and very efficient.

I sat up, felt around for the light. It had started raining again, and there was the sound of it pattering on the roof and running along the edges of the house. “Uh, yeah?”

“We’ve registered an alarm activation at this number.”

“You have?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then thought maybe it was a reporter being cagey. “Why?”

“If you are not able to speak freely, say the word ‘later,’ now.”

“I’m alone. There’s no alarm going off here.”

“May I have your password?”

“My what?”

“I need your password for a system reset.”

“I don’t know. Joan? Mikel? Tailhook? Telecaster?”

“ ‘Telecaster’ is the password. I’m very sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.”

“Wait, that’s it?”

His efficient yap disappeared, and now he sounded slightly exasperated. “If there’s no audible going off there must be a malfunction in the system. We’ll run a diagnostic and send someone out later tomorrow to see if we can’t isolate the problem. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for using Scanalert.”

I rubbed my eyes and listened to the dial tone, then put the receiver back in the cradle and got out of bed. It was cold, and I put on my robe and my slippers. The cable box on the television was reading 3:48.

I went out to the top of the stairs and listened.

Nothing but rain.

The steps creaked when I descended, and I hadn’t noticed how irritating that was until now. It was stupid, too, because that, more than anything else, made me feel nervous. Creaking stairs and rain on the roof, and a phone call in the dead of night. Maybe it had just been some reporter with a clever way of trying to find out if I was sleeping with someone. Hell, maybe it was a reporter who knew Dyke Tracy had paid me a visit, and was hoping she’d stayed. Clearly a chunk of my subconscious had done the same.

The alarm panel was showing red lights when I checked it, armed. The LCD said that we were safely in “Stay” mode, with “all portals secure.”

Not a bad title for a song, maybe. All portals secure. No way in. No way out.

I went back upstairs and found my notebook in the nightstand, wrote, “All Portals Secure!” in it, then underlined it. I left the book out, so that I’d see it in the morning. I probably wouldn’t even remember why I thought the line was so intriguing when I woke up.

I took off my robe and my slippers and got back under the covers, clicking out the light. I listened to the rain overhead, to the layers of sound. One instrument, many notes, I thought.

When I fell asleep, I didn’t have any more nightmares.

The next time the phone woke me it was day. The cable box said it was 10:12 , and the voice on the phone said it was Fred Chapel.

“I heard from Detective Marcus this morning,” Chapel told me. “He informs me that the Portland police are not pursuing you as a suspect in your brother’s murder.”

“Oh, goody,” I said.

“They’re going to want your help. They’ll most likely come by in the next few days for a follow-up interview, to see if they missed anything, and they’ll have questions about the pictures as well as your brother. I’d still prefer it if I were with you should that come to pass, but for now, you’re off the hook.”

I didn’t tell him he was a day late and a dollar short, and that I’d already tried being helpful to the cops, and it hadn’t gone very well.

“Does that mean I can go back to the bottle?” I asked.

He didn’t think it was a joke. “If that’s your thing, go ahead.”

Showered and dressed and with a fresh cup of Peet’s blend in my hand, a cigarette cornered in my mouth, I went to shut off the alarm and get the morning paper. When I opened the door, a FedEx envelope fell inward, onto my bare feet. I picked it up and there wasn’t an address tag on it, just the envelope. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside.

I got the paper, brought it and the envelope back to the table. I pulled the tab and tore it open. The contents refused to dump out when I shook it, and I had to reach in to free them. There were two items, a piece of paper, and a thicker sheet, a little tacky on one side.

It took a moment for me to realize that the tacky sheet was a photograph. I’d never seen one like it. It was eight by ten, and it felt fresh, as if it had just come from some one-hour place. The image was in shades of red, popping out of a black background. People seen in red.

I was looking at my bedroom. I was looking at myself, asleep, in bed.

With a man, standing beside me, and holding a thing that wasn’t as red as I was, or as he was, in his hand. Pointing it at my head.

A man pointing a gun at my head.

I dropped the coffee and the cigarette and the photograph all at once, felt the scald as the liquid splattered from the mug to my leg. The cigarette died with a sizzle in the spill.

The other piece, the paper, was a typed photocopy, with toner streaks across its face. It read:

GO ASK TOMMY WHY I’M HOLDING A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.

I dropped that one, too.

In my chest I could feel my heart beating so savagely and so hard, I imagined bruises rising on my skin.

I had to get out of this house. It wasn’t a safe place, it wasn’t my place, it had become someone else’s. I picked up the photograph and the paper, each of them now stained with spilled coffee, and stuffed them back in the envelope, panicked trying to find my keys and my coat.

And I went.

All portals secure.

Bullshit.

CHAPTER 24

Maybe there’s a lower brain, or a higher one, or something, a part that understands before the conscious kicks in.

Maybe I was just so worked up, I didn’t even realize that I was thinking.

I was racing in the Jeep, and I wasn’t trying to think at all, but I was realizing shit left and right. By the time I’d hit Broadway I understood my nightmare on a whole different level, knew that at least one of the cameras had been literal.

The man with the gun, he was alone, I was sure he was alone, because the angle, it was from the bureau, and that was where he had set the camera holding his fancy film. Working in the dark, without the light, and he had set the auto feature or whatever it was, and gone and posed with his gun and my head, and the camera had snapped, and in my dream last night, that was the noise that had registered.

I was crossing the Broadway bridge, passing people illegally, and I had to brake hard at the curve, where the road turns unexpectedly north-south. I passed the post office, turned west again, heading up Flanders. I ran the lights at Eighteenth and Nineteenth, over the freeway, not even realizing I had done it until the sound of horns penetrated my shell. I didn’t slow down, climbing the hill, and I was sure that was where Tommy would be. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Mikel’s.

Parked on the street, out of the car holding the envelope so tight it hurt, bending the cardboard in my fist, and with my other fist, I pounded on the door. Mikel’s Land Rover was still in its spot, and there was another car in the berth next to it, an older Ford SUV, dingy and dinged. I was trying to remember if I had seen it before when I heard the door open.

I turned, starting to say “Tommy—” and then I didn’t say anything else, because it wasn’t Tommy I was looking at.

The man standing there was about six or seven inches taller than me, wide, but how wide I couldn’t tell, because he was wearing a big black Columbia rain parka, the kind with flaps and pockets and an oversized hood, and it hid a lot of his shape. The hood was up, and in that frozen instant when the door opened and I took it all in, I remember thinking he didn’t have a face inside that hood, that it was just darkness, nothing more.

Both of his hands came up, gloved in black leather, but in one of them was a gun, maybe the same gun from the photograph. I tried to react, to step back and shout and escape, but he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me inside. I fell coming over the threshold, hitting the wall, and I dropped the envelope and brought my hands up to protect my face.

The door slammed, and I felt a hand against my back, felt the palm between my shoulder blades, and the Parka Man shoved me, and I twisted to keep from getting my nose smashed against the wall. He held me upright, pressed against the wall, and he put the gun against my neck. The emptiness in the hood leaned closer, and I saw his eyes and his mouth through narrow holes in the mask.

“You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man said in my ear.

The hand on my back bunched into a fist, taking my coat, and he yanked hard, pulling me off my feet. He was probably twice as heavy as I was, and it seemed like he was twice as strong, and I felt like a straw doll when he forced me down the hall, the gun still biting into my neck. When we reached the entrance to the living room, his fist opened, and he shoved forward, hard, and I staggered, lost my balance, and went sprawling onto the carpet.

Tommy was on the floor in the center of the living room, not quite where Mikel had fallen only four days before. His knees were drawn up to his belly, and his arms were bent behind his back, and his face was bleeding a new stain into the carpet. His mouth and brow looked like a mess of torn skin, and I saw froth at his lips as he struggled to breathe. I saw something white shine in all of that red and pink, a broken tooth or an exposed bone.

Parka Man grabbed my arm, and I was twisted around, and I saw the gun coming up at me again, and he hit me with it. There was a gap, jarring like a bad edit, and then I was on my back, still on the floor, and pain was blossoming from my forehead, making the world tumble, making everything so very much brighter.

The Parka Man leaned down and reached for me again, and I tried to fend him off, screaming and kicking. He shoved his gun against my cheek and his other hand into my throat, forcing my head back down. The barrel of the gun on my skin was sharp and wet. I couldn’t breathe.

“Scream again and I write this off here and now,” Parka Man said softly. His mouth was close to mine, and his breath hit my lips and ran up my nose, and if I’d had the air, I would have gagged. “Scream, I do you both right here.”

I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t even nod. The terror was so complete that it felt like I had no body, that I was just a form of fear, lying on my dead brother’s floor. I tried to make some kind of noise of understanding or assent or surrender, but the flat pressure on my throat grew as Parka Man pushed the barrel of his gun a little harder into my skin, his gloved hand a little harder on my throat. Then both were suddenly gone, and he was backing away. I started coughing, rolled onto my side, trying to stop it, terrified that even that would be too much noise, and I saw Tommy again, and he hadn’t moved.

“Get up,” Parka Man said.

I tried, had turned onto all fours in an attempt to rise, but it still wasn’t quick enough for him. He came back and grabbed me by my hair, and I started to shriek but stopped myself, even though I felt roots tearing. He shoved me at the easy chair by the foot of the couch, and I went into it headfirst, twisting. When I completed the turn, he was standing by Tommy, holding the gun on me.

“Sit. Still.”

I felt blood running from my forehead, catching in my right eyebrow. It felt like it would start dripping into my eye. I didn’t move.

Parka Man backed out of the room, into the entry hall, out of sight. There was a cordless phone on the wall by the stairs to the second floor, where Mikel’s bedroom had been, but before I even thought about going for it, he came back. He was folding the FedEx envelope in both hands, forcing the cardboard to bend down, and as soon as he’d finished he put it in one of the parka pockets, then brought the gun out again from another.

“He’s alive,” Parka Man said, and he used the gun to indicate Tommy. “Remember that. Bad as he looks, he’s alive.”

I could see that Tommy’s hands were cuffed together behind his back.

“You want him to stay that way, you’ll listen to me,” Parka Man said.

The blood that I’d feared would run into my eye turned right, flowing along the ridge of my brow, and I could feel it trickling along my hairline, down my jaw.

Parka Man came closer, holding the gun casually in his hand, pointed down. I waited for him to stop, but he didn’t, kept coming, until he was standing over me in the chair. I stared at his middle, at his parka, at all the shiny metal of his zippers and buttons and clasps.

His free hand came up to my face, and I flinched, but kept silent. I felt a gloved thumb touch my brow, follow the line of blood, wiping it away. I could feel the stitching that surrounded his finger. When he reached the end of the blood trail, he dragged it across my cheek, toward my mouth. He touched my upper lip, pressed, then flicked his finger away.

It felt like something inside me would explode. Somewhere beneath the edge of the parka was his groin, and I thought about kicking, striking out hard.

Then I remembered the gun.

He made a noise, like he was happy with the way things looked, like he was satisfied. He backed away, toward Tommy, and used the toe of a black work boot to roll him onto his belly.

“Didn’t want to have to do it this way,” Parka Man said. “But he was being stubborn. I’d have settled for a hundred thousand, honestly, but he had to get a spine or soul or whatever you friggin’ drunks discover in AA, so now we’re doing it the hard way. So the price goes up, too.”

I stared, confused, terrified, trying to make sense of the words. It was as if he wasn’t really talking to me, more to himself. I told myself he was crazy, but he didn’t sound crazy; he sounded like someone who enjoyed having power, enjoyed using it.

“Straight to the source this time,” the Parka Man said, and his black-toed boot kicked Tommy in the gut. It wasn’t savage, almost absent, and I thought I heard Tommy groan. “No middleman.”

He looked up from where Tommy sprawled, the emptiness inside his hood settling on me.

“A million dollars. Not too much, not for you. You’ve got until noon Friday to get it, in cash. Soon as you have it, you go home, turn on your porch light. Leave it on. I see the light, I know you’re ready, and I’ll tell you where to bring it. I don’t see it on, the next time you see your daddy is when the Detective Division comes and asks you to identify the body. You understand me?”

Tommy made a cracked sound that died in the carpet.

“Yes,” I heard myself say.

Parka Man slid his gun back in his pocket, crouching. He grabbed Tommy with both hands, one on the cuffs, the other on his upper arm, hoisting him to standing. Tommy’s legs seemed like they were hollow, like they were crazy straws beneath his torso, and they bent with his weight, unable to support him.

“Believe me when I say this,” Parka Man told me. “I’ll know if you talk to the cops. I will know if you even whisper to them. If that happens, I’ll kill Tommy, here. I’ll take my time about it. Then I’ll come and kill you, too. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. Who says celebrities are unreasonable, right?”

“Right.”

“You just sit there and catch your breath, think sweet thoughts for a couple minutes after I’m gone. You’re in no hurry. You’ve got until noon on Friday, like I said.”

He grunted, turning Tommy and then hoisting him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. They went down the hall, out of sight, and I heard the front door open. A couple seconds later I heard it close. An engine started outside, and I supposed it was the Parka Man’s SUV, and it sounded like it was coming closer, and then it was moving away, and then it was gone.

The shaking started in my hands. It ran up my arms, it slid into my legs. My stomach went wild. It felt like stage fright, and it felt nothing like that, because this was terror, and it was different.

I was certain I was going to vomit, steeled myself for it, but it didn’t happen. Then the shakes went away, just as they had come, and I thought about getting up, but didn’t. My stomach settled, and I started to feel heavy and strangely euphoric, almost postorgasmic. All of the adrenaline, I guess, leaving me high.

The room had huge windows on the east side, to allow the view of the city. The room had been tidied after Mikel’s death, and the fresh bloodstains on the carpet looked grotesque next to the ones that had refused to come out.

There wasn’t really any doubt, anymore.

It didn’t matter if Tommy was everything he had claimed when he’d come and asked to be my father again. It didn’t matter if he was as sorry as he said, as sad as he seemed. Maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter.

I couldn’t be the reason he died.

He was all I had left.

Outside, I heard a siren coming closer, and I didn’t think it was coming here, and I didn’t know what I would do if it did. The wail climbed, fell, climbed, and then receded, passing by.

I made my way into the bathroom, turned on the light over the sink. There was a gash on my forehead, not very deep, but long. The skin was torn, and in the opening I could see red flesh, still seeping. The blood that the Parka Man had smeared was already dry, tight on my skin. There was some bleeding on my scalp, too, showing through the curls where the Parka Man had torn hair.

I splashed water on my face, and the cut stung, but in its way that made me feel a little better, made me focus a little more.

A million dollars, that was a lot of money, but I had more than that. It couldn’t be that hard to get the cash, and Parka Man had given me most of four days to do it.

I’d get the cash.

Explaining the cut, that would be something else. It looked like I imagined a gash from the edge of a piece of furniture might look, if for example someone had tripped and not caught themselves in time. Something a drunk might not even remember doing to herself if she had gotten really hammered after her brother’s funeral.

I can do this, I told myself. I can do what needs to be done.

I didn’t think I was lying this time.