Right as Rain

  Strange reached for the phone. He called his old friend Lydell Blue and left a message on his machine. He didn’t want to leave the cruiser’s identifying number on Lydell’s tape. He phoned Quinn, got his machine, told him they had work to do the next day, told him where and when he’d pick him up.

  It was going to be an early day. I shouldn’t have drunk so much tonight, thought Strange. I shouldn’t have …

  “Ah, shit.”

  Strange saw a PayDay bar sitting on a piece of paper on the corner of his blotter. He lifted the bar and looked at the paper. Janine had drawn a little red heart on the paper, nothing else. Strange looked away and saw the Redskins figure, the one Lionel had painted for him, staring at him from the back of the desk.

  “You all right, Derek,” said Strange. But his voice was unconvincing, and the words sounded like a goddamn lie.

  Chapter 27

  EDNA Loomis was straddling Ray Boone atop their bed, sliding up and down on his thick, short cock, moving her hips in awkward rhythm to the Alan Jackson tune that was blasting in the room. Her head was bent forward as she whipped her orange—blond, feather—cut hair across his pale chest, shaking her head in time to the music.

  “She’s gone country’ ” sang Edna. “Look at them boots!’ ” Ray chuckled and grabbed one of her tits real good and hard. Edna kind of grunted. He couldn’t tell if it was from pleasure or pain.

  Ray shot off inside her, and right after that she faked like she was coming, too. He almost laughed, watching her shiver and howl, making a sound like a dog did when you went and stepped down on its paw. She must have seen some actress do that on one of her TV shows. Ray didn’t know why she felt the need to fake it; he didn’t care if she came or not.

  Edna got off him and walked across the room. She turned the music down, then lit a Virginia Slims cigarette from that leather pouch of hers. The hand holding the lighter shook some from the speed that was still racing through her body.

  “Turn that music off all the way,” said Ray. “I’m tired of lis—tenin’ to it.”

  Edna clicked off the compact stereo. Ray watched her, and when she caught him looking at her she sucked in her stomach. Aside from those dimples she had all over the tops of her legs, the girl was gettin’ a belly on her, too.

  “Me and Daddy gotta get goin’,” said Ray, sitting up on the edge of the bed. He squeezed the rest of his jiz out and wiped it off on the sheets.

  “You gonna leave me a little somethin’, so I’ll have somethin’ to do while you’re gone?”

  “You just smoked up a mess of that crystal before we fucked, girl.”

  “Bet your daddy’s gonna leave his girlfriend a little somethin’.”

  “Aw, shut up about that,” said Ray.

  Edna stuck her tongue out playfully at Ray, then dragged hard on her cigarette. She wasn’t going to make a fuss over it or nothin’ like that. She still had that key to the room where he kept his stash, out there in the barn.

  EARL Boone zipped up his trousers and looked at the girl stretched out there on his bed. She drew the sheets up to her birdlike shoulders and gazed at him with those funny, sexy, different—colored eyes. He didn’t have no, what did you call that, delusions about her or anything like that. Sure, once he had got her out here in the country and cleaned her up, and kept her showered and smelling nice, she almost looked like any other good—looking young lady you’d see out there on the street. She was just a junkie, he knew, and if she kept up that pace of hers, she wasn’t gonna live too much longer. But damn if she wasn’t the prettiest junkie he’d ever seen.

  “You gonna be all right, honey girl? ’Cause me and my boy, we got to make a trip into the city.”

  “You’ll leave me somethin’, Earl?”

  “Course I will. You know I wouldn’t let you have any pain.”

  Earl finished dressing. He heard that godawful music Edna was playing in Ray’s bedroom down the hall. He hated that new stuff sung by those pretty boys with the department store-bought hats and the tight jeans, wondered why anyone would want to listen to that shit when they could be listenin’ to Cash, Jones, Haggard, or Hank. Just when he thought he couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer, the music ended. He figured his boy was getting himself ready for their last run.

  Earl took a small wax packet of brown heroin from his coat pocket and dropped it on the dresser.

  “Be back in a few hours,” he said.

  Sondra Wilson watched him leave, closing the bedroom door behind him. She tried not to look at the packet on the dresser. She didn’t want to do it up now; she wanted it to last. But then she began to shake a little, thinking of it sitting up there all alone. She thought of her mother and her brother, and began to cry. She wasn’t sure why she was so sad. Everything she wanted was here, ten feet away from where she was lying now.

  She wiped the tears off her face and got out of the bed. She walked naked across the room.

  FROM the bedroom window, Edna Loomis watched Ray and Earl out in the yard, arguing over something, Earl pointing to a row of stumps at the edge of the woods, where Ray had set up empty beer cans. Ray had his gun in his hand, and Edna figured he was getting ready to shoot the cans off the stumps. Ray liked to do that before their runs, said it got him “mentally prepared” to deal with those coloreds down in D.C. Earl didn’t like Ray shooting off that pistol; he didn’t care for all that noise.

  He must have talked Ray out of it, because Ray left, then came out of the barn with his gym bag and loaded the heroin into the space behind the bumper of the car. Edna drained her third Jack and Coke of the afternoon, watching him complete his task.

  She felt kind of funny, clammylike, and her heart was racing really fast.

  You can always be higher, though. Ain’t no question about that.

  She rattled ice in the glass and sucked out the last few drips of mash as Ray and Earl got in the Taurus and drove away.

  Edna got dressed, slipped the barn key into her jeans, and went down the hall, knocking on the door to Earl’s room, where that half—colored junkie, Sondra, spent all her time. She opened the door and went through it when the girl didn’t respond.

  Sondra was naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, using a razor blade to cut out lines of heroin on a glass paperweight. Edna didn’t think she’d ever seen a girl that skinny, not even those New York models she’d seen on TV. She didn’t know what Earl saw in her, but it wasn’t any of her business, and anyway she didn’t care.

  “I’m goin’ for a walk,” said Edna.

  “Okay,” said Sondra, not even raising her head.

  “I feel like takin’ a long one in the woods.”

  “Okay.”

  “Fine.”

  Edna didn’t know why she bothered covering her tracks with this one. She left the room.

  Sondra bent forward and snorted up a thick line of heroin. She snorted the one beside it at once.

  The warmth came almost immediately to the back of her neck. It spread behind her eyes and to the top of her skull. Then it was in her legs and buttocks and traveling like hot, beautiful liquid up her spine and racing through her veins. The edges of the room bled off, and Sondra lay back on the warm bed.

  Sondra remembered that she had been crying moments earlier, but she couldn’t remember why.

  EDNA patted her pockets as she walked into the barn and strode briskly through the saloon area toward the back room. She had her little brass pipe in one front pocket, the key in the other. She had wedged her leather pouch holding her pack of Slims and Bic lighter in the ass pocket of her jeans.

  Edna used her key in the lock of the steel—fortified door, opened the door, and flicked on the lights. She closed the door behind her. She went quickly to the shelf mounted over Ray’s homemade lab. She snatched a vial off the shelf and opened its lid. The vial was filled to the top with crystal rocks.

  Edna shoved the entire vial into the pocket of her jeans. Ray wouldn’t be back for some time. She was going to mix a tall drink
and take a walk out in those woods for real. Smoke up those rocks and have a party her own self. She deserved a little treat, the way Ray always left her hangin’ like that, when she was doing her best to service him good.

  Edna heard a door open from the front of the barn. She turned her head and stumbled back, her own reflection in the weight—lifting mirror giving her an awful startle. Looking down at the floor, she saw the carpet remnant beside the weight bench, not completely covering the trapdoor.

  Edna heard boot steps clomping on the barroom floor. She had always been a quick thinker, her friend Johanna told her that all the time. She thought fast and decided. There wasn’t but one thing to do.

  RAY and Earl had only gotten a mile down the interstate when Ray told Earl they had to turn around and go back to the property. “I forgot somethin’,” said Ray.

  “What, that speckled powder?” said Earl.

  “It gives me an edge when I’m dealin’ with those rugheads.”

  “Go on back if you need it,” said Earl, lifting a Busch from the six—pack cooler at his feet. “Me, everything I need, it comes from a bottle or a can.”

  Ray U—turned the Taurus and headed back for the property.

  Earl cracked his window, then rolled it down halfway. “Weather turned yesterday.”

  “It’ll get cold again.”

  “It stays like this, them greasers are gonna get ripe. You best put ’em deep, first chance you get.”

  “Ground’s still too hard, Daddy.”

  “You better get to it, Critter.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Daddy.”

  Ray took a deep breath, wondering if his father would ever stop tellin’ him what to do.

  RAY walked hard across the saloon floor, his fists balled tight. He needed to calm down, but how could he, havin’ to take care of all these people, and his business, and on top of it all having to take a boatload of shit from his old man. He pulled his keys off his belt loop and fitted one to the lock on the back door.

  The lock had already been turned. He reached for the knob. God damn, the door was already open.

  “Edna,” said Ray, shaking his head, because he knew it had to be her had been back here; somehow she’d gotten hold of his key. There wasn’t anyone else stupid enough to test him like that.

  Ray went to the shelf and took down the spansules of crystal meth. He shoved the vial into a pocket of his jeans. He scanned the shelf: That other vial, the one held the ice, was gone. Edna was probably out in the woods, smokin’ it all up at once, greedy bitch that she was. He knew she hadn’t driven anywhere, as the F—150 was still parked in the yard.

  Ray turned at the sound of the car horn. That would be his daddy, just landin’ on it, tellin’ him it was time to go.

  Ray looked around the room. Somethin’ wasn’t right… . Damn, there it was, too, the carpet remnant had been moved off the trapdoor. Must have been moved with all that activity they’d had back here with the Colombians, what with them all floppin’ around and shit. Even so, thought Ray as he moved the carpet aside and lifted the trapdoor, holding his breath against a familiar smell, it doesn’t hurt to check.

  He looked down the wooden ladder that led into the tunnel. The lights were on down there, but that didn’t mean nothin’, they worked off the master switch.

  Earl landed on that horn again.

  “All right!” yelled Ray, though he knew his daddy couldn’t hear him.

  Ray closed the trapdoor, placed the carpet remnant over it, and dragged the weight bench over a few feet. Now the weight bench sat atop the trapdoor.

  Ray shut down the lights before he locked the door from the outside. He took no pleasure in hurting Edna. But he sure was gonna give her some when he came back home.

  EDNA wasn’t scared, not really. Even when Ray had shut the lights down, because she never had been frightened of the dark. She sat on the cold dirt patiently, waiting to make sure Ray had gone away for good, and when she was satisfied, she kind of crawled around some until she found the ladder, and climbed up it to the trapdoor.

  The door wouldn’t budge. Ray had put somethin’ over it. She wasn’t surprised. She went back down the ladder and sat, gave herself some time to think.

  She’d seen enough of the tunnel, when the lights had been on, to know that it went straight back fifty yards or so, then went off hard to the right. It was a narrow open shaft, and she’d have to go through it like a dog, on her hands and knees, but there wasn’t nothin’ tricky about it; it went back and cut right.

  Edna had no doubt that Ray and Earl had rigged some kind of opening at the end of the tunnel, a way for them to escape into the woods from all those imaginary FBI and ATF boys they were always goin’ on about. Even Ray, he wasn’t dumb enough to go through all that trouble of diggin’ a tunnel without providing for a back door.

  There was the smell of expired animal down here. Ray said there was snakes in this tunnel, but she wasn’t afraid of no snakes, either. She’d lost count of all the black snakes she’d killed with a hoe, growin’ up out this way. Maybe there was rats. But rats weren’t nothin’ but overgrown mice. Somethin had cacked down here, that was for certain, maybe one of those barn cats that were always hanging around. She knew that smell.

  Anyway, if she lost her bearings or something, crawling around down here, she could use the disposable lighter she had in her pocket. She was glad she had brought it with her. And the drugs.

  Edna had an awful headache. It seemed to be getting worse. She found the vial of ice and the lighter and the pipe, and she hit the lighter so that she could fill the pipe. A little pickup would motor her out of this place quick and just right.

  She smoked the rocks, coughing furiously on the last hit, and let the flame go out. The buzz started to build. It was a pleasant buzz at first. Then it was violent and it left her shaking. She realized that maybe she had smoked too much. The space felt very close, and for the first time she was frightened, though she wasn’t sure of what. She wanted to get out.

  Edna put everything but the lighter back in her pockets. Her hands were trembling, and she couldn’t do it fast enough. She thumbed the wheel of the lighter, looked ahead, and began to crawl.

  She could hear her own breath as she crawled. She started to hum, thinking it would calm her, but it only scared her, and she stopped and crawled on. Her head pounded and it hurt something fierce. She crawled with sudden velocity and found good purchase on the hard earth.

  “Shit!” she said, as her head hit a wall of dirt.

  I am at the end of the straight shot now, she thought, and she scrabbled, turning right and finding more space. The smell had grown awful, and she gagged, but she crawled on. She was dizzy and she panicked at the thought that she might be running out of air.

  She gagged again at the lousy stench, heard a kind of crunching sound, struggled to draw in breath as she kept on and touched something soft, and crawled over another thing that was cold and hard.

  Edna raised the lighter in front of her and got flame. Two corpses covered in writhing maggots lay before her.

  “Aaah!” screamed Edna. “Oh, God, Ray, God, Ray, God!”

  She turned, the lighter flipping out of her hand.

  Edna fell forward onto her belly. She clawed at the cold earth. But she was too dizzy to move, and it seemed as if a hatchet had cleaved her skull. She vomited into the darkness of the tunnel and lowered her head to the ground, feeling the warmth of her own puke on her face. Her eyes were fixed and glassy, and her tongue slid from her open mouth.

  Chapter 28

  THEY’RE comin’ out,” said Strange looking through the 500—millimeter lens of his AE—1.

  “They weren’t in there long,” said Quinn.

  “Droppin’ off the goods, I expect. Now they’re goin’ to get their money. Couple of Mayberry R.F.D. —lookin’ motherfuckers, too.”

  “The short one’s got high heels on. You see that?”

  “Like I told you, it’s the little ones got somethin??
? to prove. Those the ones you got to keep your eye on.”

  Strange and Quinn sat in a rented Chevy Lumina two blocks west of the Junkyard. They had been there for several hours, and Strange had filled Quinn in on everything he’d learned the day before.

  They watched Ray and Earl Boone leave the garage, cross the street, and head toward the row house where Cherokee Coleman kept his office. Ray and Earl spoke briefly to a couple of unsmiling young men, who led them up the stoop and through a door.

  “Gettin’ the royal escort,” said Quinn. “Wonder how many guns we got out here on this street.”

  “They ain’t nothin’ but kids.”

  “Just as deadly as anyone else. Anyone can pull the trigger of a gun.”

  “They don’t have to be out here, though. They think they do, but they don’t. They watch television, they see what everyone else has, what they’re supposed to have, they want some, too. But how they gonna get it, Terry?”

  “Work for it?”

  “C’mon, man, you’re smarter than that. ’Cause of some accident of birth these kids came into the world in a certain kind of place. Where they were born, and learnin’ from the older kids around them — the only examples they got, most of the time — a lot of these kids, their fate was decided a long time ago.”

  “I’ll give you that. But what would you do about it now?”

  “Two things I would do,” said Strange. “First thing, I’d legalize drugs. Take away what they’re all fightin’ over, ’cause in itself it’s got no meaning anyway. It’s like those MacGuffins they’re always talkin’ about in those Alfred Hitchcock movies—just somethin’ to move the drama along. Legalization, it works in some of those European countries, right? You don’t see this kind of crime over there. The repeal of prohibition, it stopped a lot of this same kind of thing we got goin’ on right here, didn’t it?”