Late Rain (7 page)

The phone started in, and Ben picked up on the second ring. It was an old habit, pure reflex. He knew who was on the other end of the line before a word was spoken just as he knew what the first words would be. The routine never varied.

“Figured you’d probably be up,” Andy Calucci said.

Calucci, his former Homicide partner in Ryland, Ohio. When they’d worked together, Andy had gotten in the habit of calling Ben shortly after midnight when something was bothering him and wouldn’t let him sleep.

“This morning, we got another three inches of snow,” Andy said, “and that’s on top of the two we got Monday. It’s the last week in March, ok, and not that unusual, but still.” He paused, and there was a glassy clink followed by an abrupt cough. A moment later, he continued. “Tonight, I’m watching the Weather Channel, you know, what we’re looking at the next few days, and the anchorwoman, she says South Carolina, you’re unseasonal, no rain and the temperatures running high for the middle of March — short-sleeve weather she called it, an exact quote there — and I get to thinking it’s been a while, you and me talked.”

Ben set down his beer, picked up the remote, and killed the sound on the television.

“That what they call it?” Andy asked.

“What?”

“Short-sleeve weather,” Andy said. “That how they talk down there?”

“No,” Ben said. “At least not what I’ve heard.”

“I didn’t think so,” Andy said. “Short-sleeve weather. I’m betting that’s just some Weather Channel lingo.”

Calucci paused. On the other end of the line, there was a soft, irregular clinking. It was followed by two sharp clicks.

Ben recognized the soundtrack. It too was part of the late-night call routines. Ice cubes bumping against glass, a Seagramsand-Seven kickback. Followed shortly by Andy firing up his Zippo and burning a Kool.

“Phil Varner,” Andy said after a while. “He’s got the pancreatic.” More ice cube and glass action. “Even with the chemo and all the other stuff, we’re talking months here. Basically, the Big Countdown.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said, and he was. Varner showed up each day and did the job, and there was something to be said for that. He may not have cleared as many cases as some of the others in Homicide, but Phil Varner was steady.

Andy Calucci worked on clearing his throat. “So the thing is, Ben, what with Phil V. and the pancreatic, we’re going to be looking at a slot soon.”

Ben went back into the kitchen and got another beer, then hunted down a pen and pushed back his left shirt cuff.

“You still there?” Andy said.

“Look, I appreciate the thought,” Ben said.

“Something to consider is all,” Andy said. “I mean, the opening, it’ll be there, and it’d be good, you back here again.”

“I don’t think,” Ben said slowly, “that’s in the cards right now.”

“Jesus Christ,” Andy said. “No offense, Ben, but Patrol? What exactly you think you’re doing down there?”

When Ben didn’t reply, Andy started ticking off some of the major homicides they’d closed when they’d worked together. “No reason that has to stop,” he added.

“I can think of a couple,” Ben said. “Father Sarko not pressing charges being one.”

“Water under the bridge,” Andy said and fired up the Zippo again.

“A little more than that,” Ben said. “Thanks to you.”

“Yeah, well,” Andy said. “Ok.” He paused, then asked, “You getting out at all down there?”

“What?” Ben said.

Andy sighed. “Look, you know you got the tendency since Diane and all to shut everyone out, go to ground, and not even mean to or notice that’s what you’re doing, and then if you’re not careful, you get jammed up.”

“You’re calling,” Ben said, “because you’re worried I’m going to try to shoot myself or someone else, is that it?”

Ben waited to see if Andy would add an
again
.

“All I’m saying, you’re alone, it’s easy to get jammed.”

“I’m doing ok,” Ben said.

Andy went quiet.

There were bets you made with the world, Ben thought, and those you made with yourself. If you were lucky, they turned out to be the same ones.

If you weren’t, you ended up with your days having dwindled to the half-life of a prayer and a chambered .22 semi-automatic.

“The thing is,” Andy said finally, “you can’t watch your own back. Nobody can. I know you miss her. You can’t help but. Hell, we all do.”

“I’m doing ok,” Ben said again. He crossed the living room and paused before the sliding glass doors leading to the patio, his reflection appearing, then disappearing in the lightning-like stutter of the faulty halogen parking lot light.

“Ok then,” Andy Calucci said. “I hear you. I was just getting worried we might be looking at some serious déjà vu action here.”

“No déjà vu,” Ben said. “I’m doing ok.”

JACK CARSON was at the kitchen window, the early morning sun slow and just starting to snake through the tree lines and over the neighboring rooflines. He was in a brown terrycloth bathrobe and a pair of old slippers. He held a plastic glass covered in cartoon figures. Jack Carson was trying to remember if he’d already drunk what the glass held or if he needed to go on and fill it.

At eye-level to his right, between the sink and refrigerator, was a calendar topped by a glossy colored photograph of a dramatic series of rapids, all dark jutting rocks and white veils of spume, and a heavy salmon suspended like an apostrophe mid-leap above them.

Jack Carson looked at the month and ran his fingers over the days.

“Look, we’ve already covered this ground,” a woman said. “You need to come straight home from school and watch your grandfather.”

On the other side of the kitchen was a brown-haired woman in a starched white shirt and dark blue jeans. She held a compact in her palm and tilted its cover so that the mirror let her follow the path of the make-up she was applying.

Below her, at the kitchen table, was a girl sitting in front of a bowl of cereal. Her hair was ponytailed tight against her scalp. Hanging from the back of her chair was a red and blue bookbag.

“Jennifer’s,” she said, pointing her spoon at the woman. “I was supposed to go over to her place after school. It’s important.”

The brown-haired woman said something about a Mrs. Wood and her having to leave early so that Paige needed to come home right after school.

“It’s not like Jennifer asks just
anyone
over to her house,” the girl said. “Her dad’s a surgeon, and her mother’s beautiful enough to be a model.”

The brown-haired woman said she was sorry and then turned to Jack. “Dad, it’s what, the second, third, time I’ve told you to get dressed, and you’re still in your bathrobe? I laid out clothes.”

“What does it matter?” the girl said. “It’s not like...” Her voice broke off, and she shrugged.

“It matters,” the woman said. “It matters that your grandfather gets dressed every day. It matters that you don’t talk in front of him as if he isn’t here.”

The girl shook her head. “He ruins everything. You know he does, and you’re just pretending not.”

“That’s enough, Paige.” The woman angled the tube of lipstick and went back to work on her mouth. She paused and looked over at Jack. “Dad,
please
, get dressed.”

“If my father were here, he’d just leave all over again,” the girl said.

The woman snapped the compact closed. She was pretty, but had sad eyes. Jack suddenly remembered her name and who she was.

There was a short blast of a horn. “The bus, Paige,” Anne said. The girl grabbed her bookbag and slammed out of the house without a goodbye.

“I’ll find him,” Jack said.

“Who?”

“The one the girl was talking about.” Jack waited, and the name bumped into view. “Raymond.”

“Oh Dad,” Anne said. “We’ve been over this. It’s been over three years. He’s not coming back.”

“He needs to do the right thing,” Jack said.
In Trouble
. That’s how Jack thought of it and then immediately felt ashamed because there was something fundamentally dishonest about the phrase. It was the equivalent of saying
passed
instead of
died
.

In Trouble
. That’s what they called it when Jack was younger. You got a girl in trouble.

Anne walked over and took Jack by the arm and led him through the living room and down a hall. They stopped and turned into a bedroom.

“Claude Rains,” Jack said, pointing at the clothes on the bed. Anne looked over, puzzled.

A set of clothes was laid out on top of the covers. Jack said it looked as if the Invisible Man were taking a nap.

“Please,” Anne said, handing Jack the pants. Then she left, closing the door behind her. After a while, he heard the doorbell and then Anne talking to someone named Mrs. Wood.

Jack unbelted the bathrobe and started to get dressed.

It struck Jack that he lived in a house full of women’s voices.

He got his pants on and his shirt buttoned halfway and then sat on the edge of the bed and hunted down his shoes. He looked out the bedroom window. It overflowed with pale morning light. He picked up his left shoe. He looked at the closed door and listened to the faint voices of the women drifting down the hall.

At that moment, Jack Carson understood what was happening to him. Even if, right then, he could not name the condition, he recognized what it felt like.

It felt like each moment of what he’d once been able to call his life were being reshuffled over and over like a deck of cards.

It was like standing in front of a door, then bending over the lock with a fat wad of keys and trying one by one to fit them and having to start over again and again because all the keys were the same size and shape and color.

It was like a magician who’d lost control of his magic, who knew the moves for each trick but had lost the ability to manipulate the outcome anymore, the tricks tricking him now.

It was like standing behind the wheel of a boat, far out at sea and waiting, against the immensity of the horizon, for the anchor you’d dropped to catch, but knowing through your fingertips on the wheel that it hadn’t, that in the depths below the hull, the anchor drifted and dragged, unable to find purchase.

And it was like standing in the kitchen before an open cabinet, and the item he needed was on the uppermost shelf, and as he stretched for it, his fingertips brushed against but could not grasp what he needed, and he ended up pushing it further back each time he tried, until finally it was out of reach, his fingers grabbing air.

Jack got up from the bed and started looking for his other shoe.

THIS MONTH it was
Initiative
.

Last month it had been
Concern.

Ben Decovic could chart his ten months with the Magnolia Beach Police Department with the appearance of each bumper sticker the state of South Carolina issued for the blue and whites. He’d started out with
Honesty
, rode for thirty days with
Sharing
, and moved on to
Responsibility
and
Duty
and then continued with
Compassion, Integrity, Faith,
and
Sacrifice
.

The black and white bumper stickers bothered him in a way he could not quite put his finger on, the stickers evoking the same type of ambivalence he felt whenever he encountered another of South Carolina’s favorite practices, that of putting
Jesus
on the plates of seemingly every other car or truck on the road. The point of it all seemed either too obvious or opaque to make any real sense.

Ben had been working the three-to-eleven and had an hour to go on his shift. He worked his way through the lots of the strip malls and businesses off Atlantic Avenue, most of them closed or about to.

On his way out of the Walgreens lot, he spotted Carl Adkin climbing out of his patrol car at the 7-11 across the street. Ben waved. Adkin looked over at him for a moment, then nodded, pausing near the front doors and flipping open his cell phone.

The Passion Palace was three blocks farther down the street and Ben’s last stop before returning to headquarters. There was nothing particularly palatial about the Palace. It was flat-roofed with no front windows and constructed of cement blocks spruced up with a paint job that vacillated between lavender and pink under the two hooded mercury lights out front. There was a portable billboard street-side that simply read LIVE GIRLS and MEMBERS ONLY, the latter, Ben knew, taken care of by a twenty dollar bill at the door.

There were two Passion Palaces, the other in North Myrtle Beach, a small but lucrative skin kingdom overseen by Sonny Gramm, who also had controlling interests in a half-dozen adult video stores as well as ownership of a supper club and three restaurants popular with tourists who equated gargantuan buffets of all-you-could-eat deep-fried food with a meal.

One of the bouncers at the Palace, Terry, was standing outside the front door smoking a cigarette. Ben stopped and rolled down his window and asked how things were going.

“Other than the fact that my girlfriend has a major-league yeast infection and Sonny pink-slipped me tonight, the world is a fine and wonderful place, Officer.”

“Gramm cut you loose?”

Terry nodded. “Five years, I’ve been working for him. Then bam, he does this.” Terry lifted his head and blew a stream of smoke over the roof of the blue and white. “He’s doing the same thing at the other places. Cutting back to one bouncer and thinning out the ranks of the waitresses. Then kicking up the hours and duties of the ones who are still around.”

Terry looked over and down at Ben. “Money problems. That’s all he talks about now.” He shook his head. “Used to be a nice guy, Sonnwy. You did your job, you got a decent paycheck, a comp on drinks, he had you out for parties at his place, but the last few months, he’s Scrooged-out large-scale. The whole thing sucks, man.”

“What’s that?” Ben asked, leaning his head out the window.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Terry said.

“That,” Ben said. From the rear of the Palace came a mix of sounds, metal on glass, metal on metal, loud voices.