Greg Rucka - A fistful of rain

TABLE OF CONTENTS

For David Hale Smith
My agent, my advocate, and my dear friend

In a heart there are windows and doors
You can let the light in
You can feel the wind blow
When theres nothing to lose
And nothing to gain
Grab a hold of that fistful of rain

Warren Zevon

PROLOGUE

This is the song I can never write.

There has been rain, and clouds like blood blisters have parted to a startling blue sky. The water, now in puddles in the street and clinging in drops to blades of recently cut grass, shines with the sudden sunlight, creating a glare that hurts the unshielded eye. Late afternoon, and there is a chill, but its not enough to drive the girl and her mother inside, because they are working together in the driveway. There is newspaper spread out over oil-stained concrete, two paring knives, and a black felt-tip marker, used to make the design. The pumpkin has already been lobotomized with a jagged zigzag cut, imperfectly executed by eleven-year-old hands. Seeds and guts are piled in a heap.

The girl, with pumpkin innards sticky on her hands and deep beneath her fingernails, works ferociously, trying to make the perfect face. She imagines the work completed, with a candle burning inside, knows how it should look when everything is done. But her hands frustrate her, refusing to execute the design in her mind, and in her impatience, she makes mistakes.

The mother encourages and cautions, urging the girl to watch what she is doing, to not lose the knife, to not press too hard, to get it right because theres no second chance. The mother separates the pumpkin seeds into a shallow bowl as she speaks, saying that they will toast them later, then sprinkle them with salt. They will make a good snack, she tells her daughter.

The front door opens, and the brother steps out, pulling on his jacket. He ignores his sister and his parent as he passes them, a teenager too old for Halloween now that he is too old to wear a costume. He carries the tension of the home in his shoulders and back, and grunts the barest acknowledgment to his mother when she demands he be home for dinner. The girl doesnt look up from her work, battling with the knife, trying to cut the perfect toothy grin. She hears her mother complain softly about that boy and the trouble he gets into, but the refrain, like so many others in the childs life, has become background noise, and doesnt penetrate.

And so they work, daughter and mother, crafting a face that once was used to ward off spirits, but instead will beckon strangers to their door.

Then there is a new sound, the motor in the garage as the opener grinds to life, and the girl looks from her work over her shoulder, to see her father behind the wheel of the truck. He is waving his hand with a cigarette between his fingers, saying something lost behind the engine, and there is anger on his face. In the cab, beside him, as far as he can be without leaving the confines of Detroit Steel, is her brother, everything about him wishing he was somewhere else. When the girl looks at him, the boy looks away, but not soon enough to hide the water in his eyes.

The mother rises, wiping her fingers on her jeans, telling her daughter to gather her things and to get out of the driveway. Her father has come home, he has had a hard day, she tells her daughter. He is tired.

The girl thinks that every day is a hard day for her father, that every day he is tired when he comes home. But she doesnt speak, because she is feeling something familiar, and when she feels it, she knows its best to stay quiet. Its an ephemeral sensation, less distinct than fear, and she has come to recognize the feeling as her friend, because it speaks of danger. She gathers her pumpkin in both hands, begins to carry it from the driveway to the porch.

She hears her fathers voice above the trucks, louder now, and she almost relaxes. His shouting is another part of the background noise, and the girl who smells autumn and rain and pumpkin knows that were he closer, were she in the truck with him, she would smell beer behind his cigarette. Her mother responds using words that regularly earn her brother detention at school. There is the creak of a door opening and the slam of it shutting again, and her brothers voice joins, but not for long.

The girl is setting the pumpkin on the porch when she hears the pickups engine rise to a roar, as if shouting to drown her mothers curses. She hears the sound of tires spinning freely on wet asphalt, but only for an instant. She hears the stainless steel bowl of pumpkin seeds clatter over concrete as a tire brushes it, and she hears her mothers voice stop, as if pulled from her body and thrown aside.

The engine falls silent.

The girl feels weightless and dizzy, and doesnt remember turning to look at what has happened. She doesnt know if she is running or walking or floating to the entrance of the garage. She cannot hear the sound of her father emerging from the cab of his truck, and she cannot hear the words her brother is shouting at her as he takes her shoulders and tries to turn her away.

Most of all, she cannot hear the sound that her mother is making, caught between wheel and the ground.

When she looks down the length of the driveway, she sees a spread of blood merging with the rainwater in the gutter.

The sunlight vanishes behind a freshly loaded cloud.

It starts to rain again.

CHAPTER 1

The hangover was waiting for me when the plane from Sydney landed in Los Angeles. Which was as it should be, because Id started drinking in the Red Carpet Club, and hadnt stopped until well after the International Dateline.

The looks the flight crew and fellow passengers rifled at me when I got off the plane had me thinking Id been a less-than-model passenger, that Id perhaps done something mortifying, but no one said a word, and I wasnt about to ask. There was no vomit drying on my clothes that I could see, and I still had my pants on right way round, so whatever it was, it couldnt have been that bad.

Certainly it couldnt be any worse than what Id left behind in Australia.

The vise really began tightening at each temple as I was waiting to pass through customs, and it was a bad one mostly because I was still tagging after the drunk pretty closely. The world was dull and dizzying, and maybe that was why I got pulled from the line, but then again, maybe it wasnt. I took it without protest, just the way our manager, Graham Havers, had taught each of us in our little band to take it. Celebrity status has perks, but it also means that theres always someone looking to take you down a peg or ten. Its not as if musiciansor more precisely, musicians who play popular musicare known for living a Seventh-Day Adventist lifestyle.

The search was thorough, and the agents were, too. They asked if I had any contraband, specifically drugs. They asked it repeatedly, trying to trip me up. They had me turn out my pockets. They shook out my jacket. They patted me down. They even tore open my packet of cigarettes, checking each tube of precious nicotine to make certain it was filled with tobacco, nothing more.

When theyd finished with my bags I started to take off my shirt but the supervising agent stopped me, saying, What are you doing?

Isnt this what you want? I asked. I impressed myself by not slurring. I mean, isnt this what, you know, what you want?

His eyes went to flint. No.