Late Rain (8 page)

“I told you, I don’t hear anything,” Terry said. “I think something happened to my ears after I got pink-slipped. They’re not working right tonight.”

Ben called in the disturbance and requested backup. On more than one occasion, some of the patrons of the Palace got a little out of hand near closing. Whatever was going on didn’t sound good. Adkin radioed that he was on the way and to wait for him before proceeding.

The sounds continued, the volume rising and spiking.

Ben took the blue and white toward the rear parking lot.

When he made the corner of the building, he saw Frank, the other bouncer, fly out the back door of the Palace and run toward a knot of people in the southeast corner of the lot, most of them yelling and hooting and scattering at Frank’s approach and the sight of the cruiser.

Then suddenly, Frank wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Ben wasn’t sure if he’d been knocked down or had gotten lost running after some of the hecklers. The source of the noise, however, was now very apparent.

A thin man in a black sleeveless t-shirt was methodically working over Sonny Gramm’s vintage ’68 Mustang with a crowbar. He was wearing a cheap plastic mask, a Halloween Lucifer. The hood of the car looked like a rumpled sheet of aluminum foil. The front windshield, as well as the headlights, was already a memory.

Ben looked around for his backup, hit the siren, and climbed out of the front seat, cutting across the lot at a diagonal and yelling at the guy to put the crowbar down.

It seemed to be a night for hearing problems. The guy ignored Ben and continued pounding the Mustang.

Ben again yelled for the guy to stop. Same results.

He drew his Glock, carefully moving among the parked cars. The guy in the black T-shirt and devil mask was Meth-scrawny and looked to have unlimited reserves of energy. He brought the crowbar down again and again in an unvarying rhythm. The Mustang was well on its way to scrap.

Then three things happened in quick succession.

Ben moved around a blue Taurus and stepped on Frank’s, the bouncer’s, hand. The guy in the black T-shirt suddenly quit with the crowbar action and looked over what was left of the car’s roof and waved. Then Kermit the Frog popped up and punched Ben in the throat.

Ben rolled over and was halfway to his feet when the guy in the Kermit mask hit him again.

As he went down, Ben caught the lower edge of the mask, momentarily pulling it away before it snapped back in place.

Ben lifted his head and then his right arm. The short man in the Kermit mask, however, was already in the middle of his swing, this time bringing a dark object up and over his shoulder and catching Ben’s wrist, knocking the semi-automatic from his hand.

The guy swung again, hard, the object whistling through its trajectory and rattling like a pocketful of loose change when it made contact with Ben’s forearm.

Ben heard himself yell, and then he was on the ground, lightning running the length of his arm and his nerve endings short-circuiting, his fingers instantly going numb.

The guy leaned over and snatched Ben’s Glock. He turned and hollered something to the guy in the black t-shirt and devil mask.

A couple moments later, the two of them took off running.

Ben tried to move his fingers. His arm twitched and jumped.

He had just managed to get to his knees when the backup arrived. He tried to catch their attention, point out the direction the two had taken off in, but there was too much going on.

Lee—Ben couldn’t remember if it was his first or last name— made it over first. Ben gave him the gist, and Lee sprinted back to his patrol car to put in the call to alert other officers about the two men on foot.

Adkin checked on Frank. The EMS people arrived.

Ben put his left arm along the fender of the Taurus and slowly worked to a standing position. Residual pain still ghosted the length of his arm, but nothing seemed to be broken.

At his feet was a large gray athletic sock with a mound of heavy gauge washers spilling from its mouth.

A paramedic examined Ben and said he needed to go back for X-rays, but Ben said it could wait. He asked about the bouncer and was told Frank had a probable concussion and a definite broken jaw. Three patrolmen were working follow-up with witnesses from the crowd who’d been in the lot earlier. Another bagged the sock and washers. Others radioed in, passing on the news that there was no news. The two guys who’d taken off on foot were still on the loose.

Carl Adkin walked over. “You ok, Decovic?”

“What the fuck took you so long?”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me.”

“I got here as soon as I could.” Adkin fired up a cigarette.

“You’re lying. You should have been primary backup. You couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks away. I saw you at the 7-ll off Atlantic.”

Adkin jetted a stream of smoke. “You called. I told you I was on the way. You should have waited.”

Ben tried to remember what he’d overheard about Adkin around the department. Nothing came to mind except a few stray references. Adkin, an all-state cornerback in high school who couldn’t cut it in college. A stint in the Marines. A sour marriage to a high school sweetheart. A couple of kids. Superior ratings on the pistol range. Adkin, raising and selling pitbulls on the side.

“I went in expecting backup,” Ben said. He winced and cradled his throbbing forearm. “You left me hanging. I’m writing this one up.”

Adkin dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “I told you to wait. There was a reason. I need to spell it out for you?” He made a show of incredulously shaking his head.

“Maybe you should.”

“It looks,” Adkin said after a moment, “that you’re a guy bears watching.”

“That works both ways,” Ben said.

“That’s how we’re going to play this?”

Ben nodded.

Adkin smiled.

“Ask anyone. I’m a regular guy.” Adkin walked over to his cruiser and squatted near the right front fender. “Primary backup’s late on the scene,” he said, “all sorts of things could happen to the officer already there. I’d never leave a fellow officer hanging. He’s counting on me, right?”

Adkin took out a pocketknife and slid it into the front tire, then worked it around before folding the blade and standing up.

“Still going to write me up, Decovic?” he asked, walking over. “I told you, the call came in and I’m here as soon as I could. My fault, a tire’s going flat on me? Thing like that, it could happen to anybody.”

“You son of a bitch.” Ben gingerly moved his arm. His nerve endings felt like an overturned anthill.

“A flat, something like that, it happens,” Adkin said. “Couldn’t be helped.”

Behind them in the parking lot, Sonny Gramm, the owner of the Passion Palace, circled his ruined Mustang and bellowed, bringing down God’s curse on them all.

CORRINE TEDROS kept catching red lights. She was on Queensland Avenue, the main east-west artery connecting Route 17 to downtown Magnolia Beach, and no matter how much she adjusted her speed or took the Lexus through lane changes, she ended up beneath a traffic signal stuck on red, her knuckles steadily whitening on the wheel.

Both sides of Queensland were stacked and packed with standard-issue commercial-strip clutter, a free-zone sprawl of fast food chains, car dealerships, minimalls, grocery stores, and outsized department and hardware stores, the clutter steadily thinning the closer you got to downtown where, like so much else in Magnolia Beach, development was still boom or bust.

Magnolia Beach was like something half-birthed. When Corrine had moved there with Buddy, she had liked that quality.
Half-birthed
was protective coloration. She lived in a place that was simultaneously disappearing and emerging, a place where she was known and not known. A place where the future lunched on its own history.

Outside, the ambient light on Queensland pushed back dusk. Corrine cut to the left and passed a blue and white pickup belching exhaust and whose bed was filled with a half-dozen Mexican day laborers in white T-shirts and black caps. The radio held the local news, most of which was underwritten by the sis-boom-bah boosterism of the city’s tourist bureau.

A green Camry with out-of-state plates suddenly pulled into her lane. Corrine hit the brakes. A block later, she caught another red. She listened to a news story about the string of fires that had been appearing around and just inside the city limits. So far they had all been quickly contained, but the Fire Marshall had issued a county-wide burn alert due to the unseasonably high temperatures and critically dry spring. The announcer said there was an ongoing investigation as to the origin of the fires.

Corrine hit the Off button. In the right lane, a man in a dark blue Mercedes convertible pointedly smiled at her. It was seven-thirty.

Buddy and his pals would just be looking at menus, getting ready to order supper.

Supper at the Oyster Emporium followed by a private bachelor party in one of the back rooms at Sonny Gramm’s Passion Palace. The groom-to-be, Danny Demiotos; Buddy his best man.

The bride-to-be, Angie Trankopolous, had not asked Corrine to be part of the wedding party.

Corrine got the point. Stanley Tedros was a pal of Angie’s father and had tugged on a few strings to make sure Corrine was excluded and to make sure she got the subtext, which was Corrine was not Greek and forever would be on the outside.

Permanently, if Stanley Tedros had his way.

The Demiotos-Trankopolous wedding with all its attendant preparations and pre- and post-parties would give Stanley added reinforcements for his assault on Corrine’s place in Buddy’s life and the family.

Buddy was weak. Stanley as much as Corrine understood that.

And how to use it.

Over the last few months, Stanley had intensified his habit of cataloging the number of eligible Greek women that Buddy had overlooked in the Magnolia Beach and surrounding areas—
Real women
, he’d said,
with real beauty
. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Stanley had also launched into a running commentary on any number of local marriages steeped and simmering in long-standing unhappiness or ending like monumental train wrecks, all of which he attributed to the singular folly of a Greek marrying a non-Greek.

So far, Corrine had been able to hold her own, but it hadn’t been easy. She knew nothing was foolproof. Stanley might yet still find a way back to Phoenix, Arizona. That prospect had begun nightly to infect Corrine’s dreams.

She wished Stanley would die. That would solve everything.

But that was a wish that would forever be a wish. A response to Stanley Tedros’ presence in her life that was as puny and ineffectual as her practice of trying to get back at Stanley and his sacrosanct idea of home by buying and changing out furniture that clashed and ruined the atmosphere of the house Stanley had bought Buddy and her in White Pine Manor.

A puny wish that went no further than itself.

Stanley Tedros was eighty-five and looked one-hundred but had the blood pressure, sugar, and cholesterol numbers of a man twenty-five years his junior.

There was a small bottleneck in traffic near the intersection of Danbury and Queensland. Across the street from Corrine a Cinema Fifteen was letting out. Corrine briefly debated pulling in but knew a movie would be nothing more than an avoidance mechanism, a holding action against where she knew she eventually had to go.

She continued down Queensland toward downtown.

Dusk disappeared.

Corrine glanced into the rearview mirror and ran into her mother’s eyes.

Her hands tightened on the wheel.

The urge to run, to simply keep driving, overtook her. She would forget Stanley Tedros and Magnolia Beach and just take off. She’d empty her bank account and leave and then offer to divorce Buddy long-distance and no-fault, Stanley only too happy to pay her off, and then like so many other times in her life, Corrine would start over.

A new name and a clean bankrolled break.

Except.

And it was a big
except,
one which wouldn’t let go of her or, finally, her of it.

In its center was James Restan and his buy-out offer for rights to Julep.

All Corrine had to do was shelve her second thoughts and drive east on Queensland to downtown Magnolia Beach and the ATM at the Maritime Bank and Trust and withdraw the last installment for the front money that would set everything in motion for Stanley’s death.

All she had to do was not be her mother.

Her mother had the looks but never knew what to do with them except try to live in them, and that she had done badly.

Episodes
, that’s what Corrine’s mother had called those times when she simply dropped out of sight and out of their life. She might disappear for an afternoon or a day or weekend. Maybe a week, sometimes a month and change. One day Corrine’s mother was there. Then she wasn’t. When she eventually returned, she always brought Corrine presents—lots of them. And usually had in tow a new boyfriend or husband. It was often difficult to tell the two apart.

There was no pattern to her mother’s episodes. No early warning signs.

Her mother had episodes, and she collected husbands and boyfriends, and then as a makeshift family, they moved around the country. Like the episodes, there was no clear pattern to the moves. Instead, an emotional vertigo and a vague whim that broke down or disappeared before it could become a real promise or plan.

Corrine remembered standing in the bedroom of an apartment in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was July, and she was eleven. Her mother was sitting and facing her vanity mirror and brushing her hair. Corrine was behind her, looking over her mother’s shoulder, and she could still remember the crackle of the static electricity and how it lifted her mother’s hair with each stroke. Corrine remembered too looking into the mirror and meeting her mother’s gaze. Their eyes were interchangeable, exactly the same shape and shade of gray.

I’m scared sometimes
, her mother had said when Corrine had asked about her disappearances. Corrine had waited for her mother explain why or of what, but her mother went no further than that. Later, she took Corrine to the mall and bought her a thin gold bracelet with her initials engraved inside, and then they’d stopped at the food court and each had a chocolate sundae.