A Fistful of Rain (27 page)

“I saved you, I protected you! You fucking think I didn’t know who was behind the wheel? You think I didn’t know who was lying, what really happened? I took your father away so you could have a goddamn
life
!”

There was a taste in my mouth, metallic and sharp. The gun in Wagner’s hand was almost vibrating, his face twisting.

People shouting. Movement in my periphery, men and women in blue and in plainclothes, holding guns of their own. Someone was screaming my name.

“You killed my brother,” I said.

“He didn’t give me a choice!” The gun no longer wavered.

A voice told him to drop it, loudly. Another one told me not to move.

“You owed me,” Wagner said, quietly. His eyes danced around, as if seeing the trap for the first time, seeing the teeth of it closing around his life. He brought his eyes back to me.

“You owed me,” he said again.

Then he brought his other hand up, and the cops who had the shot took it, then.

The echo was louder than any audience had ever been as it caromed off the brick all around me.

CHAPTER 39

This is the song I can never write, because I lie the way we all do, because I lie about the obvious, I ignore all the facts in favor of a more comforting fiction. The way Wagner and Brian and Chris Quick did. All of us creating fictions, making reality out of a fistful of rain.

Like Mikel in the pickup truck, and Tommy getting out to raise a fist at my mother for blocking the drive. Mikel not wanting to see that again, not wanting to be helpless one more time. Mikel, in driver’s ed, thinking he knew enough, sliding along the seat and pulling the shift down to drive, looking over his shoulder.

Thinking he was in reverse.

T
he engine falls silent.

The girl feels weightless and dizzy, and doesn’t remember turning to look at what has happened. She doesn’t know if she is running or walking or floating to the entrance of the garage. She cannot hear the sound of her father opening the cab of his pickup, tearing at the handle in grief and rage, and she cannot hear the words her brother is mumbling and crying as he is torn from behind the wheel to sprawl on the glistening grass.

She cannot hear her father cursing and pleading, her brother’s apologies turning him younger than even the girl herself.

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

She whirls away, but when she looks down the length of the driveway, she sees a spread of blood merging with the rainwater in the gutter.

Her father reaches for his boy and girl, but only the boy is rescued in the strength of that arm.

The sunlight vanishes behind a freshly loaded cloud.

It starts to rain again.

When Chapel arrived at the police station he made me go over the whole thing, then made me do it again for Marcus and Hoffman. They didn’t need much from me; they’d already spoken to Tommy. It was Chapel himself who explained where Brian Quick had come from.

“He was in my office when you came by,” my lawyer said. “He’d called, said he had information about the video taken of you, that he was willing to sell it to me for a nominal fee. He pretended he was the middleman, claimed there was raw video stored on some portable hard drives, that he could get hold of them very easily.”

“We found them on Brian’s body,” Hoffman said.

“We’d like them destroyed.”

“They’re evidence.”

“Then as soon as you’re done with them, I want them returned to Miss Bracca.”

“Brian was in your office?” I asked.

“That’s why I kept you waiting,” Chapel said. “Needed to move him to another room. I didn’t want him seeing you. When Joy buzzed me that you were in reception, he must have heard it. I went to find him after you’d run off and he was gone, too. I can only assume he followed you.”

“Or got out ahead of her, followed her then,” Marcus said.

“Possible.”

“Way we’re looking at it now, Brian had a falling-out with his brother. Probably about just what to do with the video. Chris was the tech head. If he had decided to write the whole thing off, all he had to do was delete the drives. We’re thinking Brian killed him to keep that from happening, to keep his brother from destroying his big payday.”

“Then you pulled up,” Hoffman told me. “And Brian recognized the vehicle, thought it was his chance to make that money.”

There was silence in the room for a minute.

“Are you charging her?” Chapel asked them, going back to business.

Marcus chuckled. “We’re thinking of slapping a fine on her, for playing in the Square without a permit.”

“She can go,” Hoffman said. There was no smile. “Her father’s been taken to Legacy Emanuel.”

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Couple cracked ribs, some broken fingers, a lot of soft-tissue damage. He’ll be laid up for a few days. The worst of it is dehydration. Wagner didn’t provide much in the way of bread and water.”

Chapel rose, waited for me to follow him. I didn’t move yet. Instead, I said to Marcus, “I want to thank you.”

“You could have avoided all of this,” Marcus said. “All you had to do was tell us the truth.”

“I was scared Wagner would find out.”

“He probably would have,” Hoffman said. “He still knew people in the department. But we’d have stopped him anyway.”

I nodded, and then all of us, Chapel, Marcus, Hoffman, and myself, went to meet the press.

There were questions, so many questions, and reporters, too many reporters, and they wanted to know all of it, everything that had happened. It took most of an hour for the press conference to run its course, and Chapel had instructed me to stay quiet for the most part, until the end, when I read a statement he’d prepared about how glad I was that my ordeal was finally over, how happy I was that my father was okay, and how sad I was that Mikel was dead.

When I was asked about rejoining the Tailhook tour, Chapel said, “Miss Bracca’s going to be taking some time off to recover from the events of the last two weeks.”

When I was asked about the pictures, Chapel said, “No further questions.”

Saturday morning I went to see Tommy. He was in a room with two other patients, in bed and awake. The bruises on his face were purple and black, and he had stitches on his lip, heavy with dried blood. When he tried to smile at me, the stitches pulled, and he had to stop.

“I’ve been lying here, wondering if you’d come by. Wondering what you’d call me when you did.”

“I was thinking of sticking with Tommy.”

“This guy, Steven, he must have been some guy.”

“He was.”

“I’m glad you had that. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

I pulled up a chair, dropping the magazines I’d brought him on his stomach. He set them aside, turning his head to look at me.

“The detectives, they’ve told you what I said?” Tommy asked.

“I came to hear it from you.”

Tommy felt the edges of his mouth for fresh blood before answering. “Ran into Wagner by accident. He’d known I was out. I’d given Mikel’s number and address for my own when I registered for unemployment. I was at my meeting, I go to an AA meeting up in the northwest, by the synagogue up there, and he was there when I came out one night. He must have followed me from Mikel’s but he didn’t say, he didn’t say much of anything.

“Just that he had done me a favor, and he felt he was owed something for it. That it must be nice having a daughter who was so talented and so pretty and so rich. I told him all that was in spite of me rather than because of me.”

He stopped, looking up at the ceiling. I used the pitcher on the stand to pour him a cup of water. He drank it slowly.

“Go on,” I said.

“He said he wanted money, that he could make things bad for me if I didn’t get it for him. He said, since my daughter is so rich, she can spare some money. Not too much, he told me. Maybe fifty thousand. She’ll hardly miss it.”

“I hardly would have.”

Tommy rolled his head, meeting my eyes. “I told him I didn’t talk to you, I hadn’t talked to you for fifteen years. He said he didn’t care. He said it’d be easy to hurt you, that it wouldn’t take much. Someone famous, he said, it never takes much. Just some smack planted in your house, an anonymous call, that would be all he needed to do. He said he probably didn’t need to plant anything, the media would destroy you.”

“That’s why you came to see me,” I said.

Tommy took another drink of water, then settled against his pillows. When he went on, he picked a spot on the ceiling to speak to, not me.

“I just . . . I told myself I just wanted to see you, with my own eyes. Not on a television, not in a magazine. It went so badly, and you started shouting, you started offering me money, and I had to get out.

“I was so angry. I kept blaming you, kept thinking I should just take the money like Wagner wanted, that it would serve you right . . . and I hated myself for even thinking that. So I did what I always did when I hated myself. Not right away, I had to work myself up to it. But that Friday, I couldn’t find a job . . . and I started drinking. And you know how that goes.”

I did. “Was Mikel there?”

“I went out to buy more beer. When I got back, he was dead.”

“Wagner told you he’d shot him?”

He shut his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “He said he’d come by to see what was taking me so long. Mikel recognized him. Wagner said he attacked him, he laughed about it, said it was funny that my drug-dealer son was more concerned about protecting his family than I was. They fought, and Wagner shot him.”

We both fell silent.

“I had to hate you,” I told him. “Do you understand that? I had to blame you for everything you took away, because I didn’t want to give you the credit for anything I have. But Mikel never would have done time, Tommy. No judge would have sentenced him for a mistake. He was a kid, a scared kid who made a stupid mistake, that’s all. He never meant to hurt anyone.”

“You knew.”

“I remembered.”

Tommy shook his head. “Wagner wasn’t anything. He did us a favor. I wasn’t a good parent, and that wasn’t going to change. A good parent doesn’t beat his wife and doesn’t drink until he passes out and he doesn’t take drugs. A good parent doesn’t pour her bitterness on her children, deny them pleasure because she’s had it denied to her. We were destroying your life.”

“You gave me my life. You gave me my first guitar.”

“A piece of shit Silvertone in a house with a mother who would never let you play it.”

“You’re the one who gave me music, Tommy.”

“That’s not all I gave you.”

That afternoon, I finally went to Joan’s and helped go through Steven’s stuff, and we finally had it out, she finally let all the anger loose. I took it and gave none of it back, because I deserved it, and when Joan was finished we both could finally share the grief each of us had been holding in for so long. We had dinner at Riyadh’s, ate kafta patties and falafel, and I told her about everything that had happened. She held my left hand in hers, examining my fingers.

After dinner I dropped her at her home, then went back to mine, eager to be warm and safe. The million dollars was still in the duffel, and I thought it was stupid as hell to just leave it there, but there wasn’t anything I could do with it until Monday morning, when the bank opened again.

I thought about calling Hoffman, and decided against it.

Instead, I plugged the Tele into the VOX AC-30 and worked on some exercises, trying to speed my fingers along their recovery, and when I was tired and happy, I went up to the kitchen for a smoke and a drink, to celebrate my job well done.

It was Monday afternoon when I came to, lying on the kitchen floor, half-naked and feeling more than half-dead. When I managed to start moving to survey the damage, it shocked me. The kitchen was a mess, and the living room, and the music room.

The Taylor was in fragments on the floor by the foot of the stairs, strings and splinters, neck snapped from body, utterly beyond repair. Marks on the banister and the pads on the floor showed where I’d struck the instrument again and again, battering it apart.

I sat on the bottom step, staring at the corpse, and I tried and tried and tried, and I couldn’t imagine why I would have done such a thing. There was no reason, none at all.

Just seeing that Halloween pumpkin I’d carved with my mother, how I’d shattered it against the door of our house when the police had taken my father away.

Van called me that night, from Glasgow. I was at the sink, a cigarette in my mouth, bottle in my hand, trying to accept the rest of my hangover, and the ring sliced through all of the noise like it was made especially for my suffering. When I answered, I was surprised it was her.

“You have a minute?” Van asked.

I shut off the tap and said, “Sure. How’re you doing?”

“How’re you?”

“Turned a corner,” I told her.

“That’s really good to hear.”

There was a transatlantic pause.

“Clay’s not working out,” Van said.

“I’m surprised.”

“He just doesn’t have what it takes. He’s got chops in the studio, Mim, but you put him onstage, he’s like furniture. If you heard what he was doing to your arrangements, you’d cry.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“No, it’s that bad, Mim, it really is. Graham and I were talking, and Click, too, and we’re supposed to be playing a couple gigs in the Midwest starting Wednesday, then on through the South. We were wondering if maybe you could meet us in Chicago.”

I looked at the row of bottles on my counter.

“I can’t.”

“If you’re angry, if you’re holding a grudge, I can understand why you’d be doing that. But this is about the band, and we can’t keep putting Clay—”

“You were right to send me home, Van.”

“What?”

“I said you were right, and I need to stay here, now. I need to dry out, I need to learn how to stay that way once I get there. I’m hoping that by June I’ll have it mastered. Until then, call Birch, or someone else.”

She gave me more of the transatlantic silence.

“I have to do this,” I told her.

“Good luck,” Van said.

I hung up, went back to dumping the last of my bottles down the drain.

Tuesday morning, I picked up Tommy at the hospital. He was expecting me to take him straight to Mikel’s, but I told him first things first, and drove him over to a shop on Hawthorne that I liked, called Guitar Crazy.

I bought him a used Taylor acoustic.