In This Rain (45 page)

“That bum, sleeping over there?” Ford pointed to a form sprawled on a bench. “One of Tom’s guys. They got here fast, huh?”

“You sure? He could be just a bum.”

“No one comes back here. They know better.”

He wrapped his arms around his knees and settled in to wait.

Sutton Place

The car rolled to a stop. Ann didn’t know how well Glybenhall could see her through the tinted glass barrier but she didn’t want to take a chance so she didn’t move. Glybenhall turned the car off; then he, too, just sat.

Fighting to keep herself immobile, a dammed-up stream waiting to crash and flood, she found herself seeing not black glass but the bright empty sky. It was her twelfth birthday. Beside her in the wind’s roar stood her father, dressed as she was: flight suit and helmet, parachute with dangling cord. When you jump out of a plane, you die, she thought. Unless your parachute works. Well, okay. Her father, smiling, put out his hand. She clutched it, smiled back, and though he had done this many times and she never before, she jumped first.

Glybenhall pushed his door open and got out into the rain. She heard the electronic click as the locks released. The door was pulled open; rain splashed in.

“Come, Ann.”

She didn’t move.

“Ann, please don’t be childish.”

I’m not childish, you idiot, I’m unconscious. Your associate slammed me on the head, remember?

If she didn’t leave the car, he’d have to reach in to get her. He had a gun; if she allowed herself to be kept at a distance she had no chance. Her only hope, her parachute, was contact.

“Ann!”

When she neither answered nor moved, he leaned in to pull her out.

Heart’s Content

Noah’s Ark. They might as well be on it, Joe thought, sitting beside Corrington, staring through the rain. Below, he could see in patches: a bench, a curve of asphalt. This hill was roughly the same height, twenty feet or so, as the one in his yard. If he were there he’d be looking down on the rudbeckia, free of grapevines since Ann’s visit and reaching for the sun. Or did an early-morning rain blanket them, too, three counties away? It would be quiet there, a deep silence on whose surface the sweeping rain would dance but whose heart it couldn’t penetrate. Unlike here, where, though muffled by rain and distance, the city’s relentless sounds pierced far into the park. Tires, horns, a siren, a radio.

Footsteps.

A figure rounded a turn and stopped under the canopy of an oak. Joe strained to see his face but the high angle confounded his view. “Can you make him out?” he whispered to Corrington.

“No. Oh, hell!”

Another figure from the opposite direction: a thin young man, hunched shoulders, baseball cap.

“A-Dogg!” Corrington whispered. “Oh, Lord!” The young man spoke briefly with the figure under the tree. Then he turned as though searching out something in the fog, and he nodded.

“What’s he— ” Corrington began.

“Yo! Boss man!” A shout exploded and another shape burst from the fog. “This for my brother!”

“Carlo!” Corrington sprang to his feet. “No!” But Carlo’s gun roared. Not once: twice. The first shot threw down the man by the tree. The second came when Carlo spun and yelled, “What the fuck? This some fucking setup?” and it caught Corrington right in the heart.

Sutton Place

Glybenhall yanked Ann from the car. She moaned, stumbled, gasped when the rain swept her. In the hand not clenching her arm, he held a gun. She made herself heavy, gave him something to pull against. When he snapped her forward she dropped her charade, piled all her power onto his momentum, and pounded him in the stomach.

He doubled over, wheezing. She grabbed his slippery wrist, wrenched the gun from him, and stumbled back. Righting herself against the car, she wiped rain from her eyes. And was frozen by the sight of where she was.

Joe’s cabin sat in the downpour, dark and closed, unaware.

She stared; and those moments she lost, they mattered. Glybenhall slammed against her, pinning her to the car. Desperately she twisted as he pressed his weight into her and tried to pull the pistol from her hand.

“Let it go!” he screamed, smashing her hand against the car, again and again. She tried to force her pain-seared fingers to keep gripping but he ripped the gun from her and pounded it into her face.

Sparks and an explosion of pain; Ann found herself on her knees in the mud. Walter stood above her, breathing hard.

“You son of a bitch!” she rasped. “Why here?”

“Use your brain! Think of the confusion! The authorities will spend endless hours working out what happened. Now move away from the car.”

“Joe’s in New York! They’ll know he had nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t give a damn whether Cole’s suspected. I just want to be sure that when your body is found— bloated, bullet-riddled, oh, such an ugly sight— no one will think of me.”

“Like when they found Jen?”

“I had nothing to do with Jennifer, in life or in death.”

“The chain that Blowfish tried to plant— ”

“Ann, I don’t know who or what you’re talking about and I’m much too cold and wet to listen to you any longer. Get up!”

She slugged a handful of mud up into his face. Then she pushed herself up like a sprinter. Run, girl!

The car, and Walter, loomed between her and the road. Slipping on the slick grass, she raced around the house toward the woods.

Even in the pounding rain and roaring wind, the whine of a bullet seemed the loudest noise she’d ever heard.

She tripped and went flying, landing hard on her hip. Spring up: you’re back in high school, running track. Another bullet screamed. Slipping and sliding, she reached the trees. Push through branches, brambles. Not left; that way leads down. In this rain the creek would be swollen, too powerful to cross and too high to follow. Right, then: up the hill, that massive granite boulder with vines trailing down its sides. If she could climb without Glybenhall spotting her, she might be able to make her way back through the woods on the ridge. Sooner or later she’d come to a road, a house.

Scrambling to the hill, she had to stop and rip away a tangling vine. She peered through the trees. Her heart stopped. Glybenhall stood in the center of the lawn. He towered, a nightmare giant.

He’s forty feet away! she told herself desperately. He doesn’t even see you.

She struggled onward, tripping on branches, sinking in puddles. Lightning bleached the sky; thunder crashed, so loud it was like a new sound. She reached the hill, found a foothold, started up. The rock was so slick it could have been oiled, but she clutched branches and vines and pulled herself along. She might have made it to the top if she hadn’t glanced down to check on Walter.

At first she didn’t see him. Then he called her name. She turned her head wildly and found him, a colossus trampling the rudbeckia directly beneath. “Ann!” he shouted again, and fired. His shot shattered rock six inches in front of her. Shards peppered her face. For a moment she thought she was all right, thought she’d kept her grip, but she felt her fingers scrabbling against stone and then she was skidding, sliding, tumbling backwards.

Heart’s Content

The bum on the bench sprang to his feet, firing, and two other men erupted from the fog. Guns drawn, they charged after Carlo down the path.

“Who the fuck’s up there?” Tom Underhill yelled.

“Corrington’s been shot!” Joe shouted back.

The ambulance was fast and the EMTs efficient, scrabbling up the hill with their equipment, but Joe could have told them there was no point. When they reached the granite shelf and crouched beside Corrington, he said nothing, though. Maybe he was wrong.

But he wasn’t. They brought Corrington down the hill with no haste at all.

“Cole?” Underhill was livid. “What the fuck was this?”

“He was worried A-Dogg would show up.” Joe heard his own voice as dull, fog-wrapped.

“He knew about this? You knew?”

“About— you mean, that Carlo was going to shoot this guy?” Joe stared at the cop in disbelief. “Of course not. He was worried about A-Dogg.”

“Goddamn it!” Underhill swung away. Joe could see him fighting for control. They’d been friends, the cop and Corrington, and Joe wanted to help. But help was impossible, as always.

“Do you know,” Underhill asked, voice ragged, “what we have here?”

The question baffled Joe. Two deaths, one a good man, one a crook. What could be simpler? “I don’t understand.”

Underhill grasped his arm, pulled him along the path to the tree and the draped form beneath it. He stepped past the crime-scene tech and lifted the tarp to let Joe see the dead man’s face.

It was Greg Lowry.

Sutton Place

Ann grabbed branches, stone, anything. Pain scorched her arm as she scraped rough bark. Her wet hair covered her face; she rolled and slithered, bounced off a ridge. The thud that stopped her movement knocked her breathless.

Yellow blossoms glowed around her, hunched by the rain. Disoriented, dizzy, she struggled to her feet. The rain was sheeting so hard she couldn’t see, but a bright day came back to her, the day she’d first seen this place and stood next to Joe by these lilies. At the wood’s edge, wasn’t that where they were? She had no air in her lungs but she took off anyway, headed again into the trees.

Bend, Montgomery! Low player wins! Her college basketball coach: she hadn’t thought of him in years, never liked the game, but she dropped down now, stayed low, and it must be true, because Walter didn’t fire. Crouching, she blundered forward. Up hadn’t worked; try down, take your chances with the swollen creek. Any second now you’ll hit the poison-ivy slope. But in one bone-jarring step the ground changed from slippery leaves to hard rock and she knew she’d picked the wrong path. This was the huge flat boulder, the one Joe had warned her against, that overhung the stream. This was a trap and she’d backed herself into it. From here there was no way down.

The shriek of a shot, a dark form in the trees. She dove onto her belly, lay in the soaking moss on the edge of the rock, still and silent, pounded by rain. Well, it worked before. I’m dead, Walter. You did it. Now come see. Slowly, footsteps neared. Panic gripped her when a figure loomed above, so huge; when he leaned over, so close. She wanted to scream, to dive from the rock, but forced herself frozen. She could see the gun in his hand, the water glimmering in his silver hair. He bent close and when he did she seized a tree root below the boulder’s edge and swept her legs around. The rain-soaked moss was slick and slimy. Her flying legs tangled his and he stumbled, teetered, thrashed for something to grab onto. He clutched a sapling’s branch, but he was too big, too heavy. It snapped in his hand. Pitching forward, he skidded over the moss, flailing his arms. For a second nothing moved; even the rain hung in the air. Then Walter Glybenhall dove over the cliff as though he wanted to fly.

Heart’s Content

“I want A-Dogg! Wallace, take some uniforms, find him!” Underhill shouted to another detective. “Bring his ass in!”

“Don’t need to do that,” said a quiet voice, and Joe saw the hunched, skinny kid step from the rain.

Two cops swept out guns. The kid gave a scornful look. “That, neither. I ain’t packin’.” He spread his arms, waiting for the cops to pat him down. Instead, Underhill moved behind him, pulled his arms down and cuffed them. “You’re under arrest as an accessory to murder. You have the right— ”

“Yeah, I know that shit. You could skip it. How’s Mr. Corrington?”

“He’s dead.”

For a moment, nothing moved in the boy’s stony face. Then, “That ain’t true,” he whispered.

“It damn sure is!”

“Oh, fuck.” The stone dissolved, melted into disbelief. And into something else, Joe thought, something that looked piercingly like loneliness. “Oh, man. Oh, no, oh, no.”

“Did you know Carlo was planning this, A-Dogg?”

The boy shook his head. “You mean, that he was gonna shoot this fucker? No, man, he ain’t said nothing about shooting no one.”

“What did he say?”

“Tell me he just want a look at the Boss. Just see his face. He say it cool with him if five-oh take him up.”

“You believed him? You had no idea about this?”

A-Dogg shrugged and looked away.

“Well,” Underhill said harshly, “it happens the man Carlo shot— the man besides Ford Corrington— was a cop.”

“Say what?” The boy snapped his startled eyes back to Underhill.

“You spoke to him. You must have seen he wasn’t the man you were looking for.”

“Oh, shit! Look, man, dig, I don’t know nothing about him being no cop. That’s fucked up. But that’s why I went to talk to him, yo. To make sure.”

“Of what?”

“That it him. The Boss. Maybe he a cop, but he for sure the white dude Kong working for. Carlo tell me, A-Dogg, he say, you gotta get close. Gotta go make sure, tell me is it him. Because Carlo and me, we couldn’t see shit through the rain.”

Heart’s Content

An image Joe couldn’t shake: the creek below his yard, rushing, churning. He didn’t go down there much, and he’d told Ann that. All water was linked, always in motion and always part of something else, of everything else; he stayed in his garden, a finite, bounded place of rooted plants.

And this was why. This was why.

“That son of a bitch.” He heard his own voice. “Lowry. He asked for Ann to be called in. She told him every move, every fact. He kept telling her what not to do because he knew she’d do it. Fucking son of a bitch.”

“That’s a hell of an assumption,” Underhill said.

“You telling me I’m wrong?” Joe pulled out his phone, shook off Underhill’s hand and his “Cole, what do you think you’re— ” but he only got Ann’s voice mail anyway. He told her to call him and clicked off.

“Finished? Can you spare a minute?” Underhill asked caustically. “Because I don’t give a shit about your theories about Lowry or Montgomery, or the man in the fucking moon! What were you and Ford doing up there?”