Red rain 2.0 (8 page)

Should get a new one.

But no trade-in value on either. They're junkers only.

Cruising down York Road in moderate traffic. Nothing but garbage on the radio, static in my head. Do I feel one fucking thing that isn't physical? Am I alive emotionally, or just going through the motions? Basic inventory: Hate? Oh yeah, plenty. Love? No, just lust really. Well-being? Maybe sometimes in the old days with the team, in the old days with Gunny and Momma, sometimes with IB and Mary Jo, sometimes with
Annie. But I always feel like I'm taking and never giving anything back. Joy? Only if you can call the rush of rattling some dude's bones on full-auto that. And you can't call it that and be sane.

Fucking Sundays.

The front desk's manned, there's a couple of uniforms lounging around in the back, joking with a couple of plain-clothes cops. They stop laughing when they see me. I nod and pass through to the detectives' area. One guy's in the Homicide squad room, there's nobody in Sex Crimes, and Narcotics is empty.

I pad in and know instantly that's wrong. No lights on anywhere, but I think I hear the soft tapping of a computer keyboard coming from somewhere among the warren of cubicles. I can't see any heads above the partitions, nobody's murmuring into a phone. Just a little tapping. It stops. Maybe just imagination. But there's a presence I feel. Then I hear the hushed whirr of a laser printer.

I check the room fast but quiet, cubicle by cubicle: Tag-gert You Fuck's, empty; Gus the Greek's, empty; little Petey K.'s, empty; Bimbo the weight freak's, empty; Tommy Weinberg's, empty; IB's, empty.

Mine.

I see the back of a head swiveling between my Mac screen and the HP laser printer. I see my drug dealer profiles coming page by page out of the printer.

"Interesting way to spend a Sunday, Annie," I say. If I've startled her, she's not giving anything away.

"'Hey, Luther," she says, not turning. "Just looking for some possible correlations here with the reservoir girl."

Christ. She's wearing lime-green capri pants. Do they really sense the buttons and push 'em on us when they feel like it? Women, I mean? Too uncanny to dwell on.

"So how'd you get past my security? Password and all," I say.

Now she turns and smiles innocently. "Why, I'm a policewoman. But any half-ass hacker can crack a password. Your file system isn't even coded. No ice around your stuff. No problem."

"Problem one, I don't really expect anyone to come sneaking around my data. Problem two is I don't really
appreciate
it."

"Hey, sorry. I needed a look. I needed to see if any of your dealers might have connections with the drugs that blanked the reservoir girl. Hoping for matches, hoping to show her some mugshots. Maybe jolt her, fill in that memory hole."

"I'd have shown you all I got, Annie. You only had to ask."

"Was going to, the other night when I phoned you late. But you were ... occupied?" She laughs.

1 don't say a word.

"And I was in a hurry. Couldn't wait around all weekend," she says. "So who's the student of the month? That Cate kid again?"

"Gate graduated June before last. It's Helen. Met her last fall. You've heard me speak of her. She's just back from summer vacation, starting her senior year."

"Well, excuse me if I don't keep track of your private pupils. You know, Luther, you skate awfully close to the statutory laws with these kids."

"Helen's twenty. So was Cate when I met her."

"Okay, so you're clear legally. Always puzzles me, though, this thing you have for kids."

"Would you have tolerated being called a kid when you were twenty and earning your degrees?"

"No, not then. I'd have been pissed, claimed I was a woman, not a girl, and if I wanted to sleep down and sleep old it was nobody's business but mine," Annie says. "Now I'm twenty-eight, though, and I know better. I
was
a kid back then. A pretty foolish one at times, too. I got taken advantage of more than once."

"Sleep down, Annie?" There's an edge to my voice I don't like but can't control. "Sleep down and old?"

"I didn't mean it to sound as hard as it does. But ten years is a lot when you're nineteen or twenty. And I never notice any of your students inviting you home to meet Mom and Dad. They're having their delicious little adventure, their faintly illicit fling. Then they graduate and go hack to their real world and you never hear from them again. You never do, do you?"

"That's just the way I want it. No fuss, no mess."

"And no future. Ever think of the future, Luther? With a woman? Maybe live together, have some babies, build a real life?"

"No." Might learn how with you, though, I think.

"Gotcha."

"No, I got you, Annie. Nobody serious since I've known you. No hint of any urges for a union with some guy. maybe having some babies, building a real life. If that's what you mean by 'real.'"

"Career, Luther," she says. That slightly crooked smile again. "Still comes first for a while. Then we'll see. But you don't even have that excuse. I hear Dugal wants to make you detective sergeant, help you start climbing the ladder. You turn him down, refuse to take the exam."

"I like things just as they are. I'm content with my lot."

Annie laughs. "No way, Luther. You haven't had a content day since you lost the army. I
know
you, pal."

"Big mistake, being that sure you understand someone."

"Could be, except that it doesn't matter if I'm wrong in this case, because I'd damned well prefer to be wrong. I care about you, Five-O."

"There it is. Annie goes all slippery and obtuse on me again."

"Ever hear of anomie?"

"No."

"It's a psych term. You got it bad. You got it early and
you kept it. Made you a good soldier, makes you a good cop. But it'll ruin you for living, if you don't bust out of it."

"Explain, professor."

"Gotta split now. Maybe tomorrow night at Flannery's? Unless Gate or Helen or whoever's already booked you?" Annie says, gathering up fifty or sixty sheets of printout, tapping them into a neat stack. She stands up. She's as tall as me, she looks terrific with no makeup, fetching in her jersey T and those capris. "Catch me tomorrow," she says and walks away.

"Have to be Tuesday," I call after her.

"Okay," I hear as she just keeps walking. "Get that semester off to a fast start, Luther.'"

It isn't 'til she's almost out of the squad room that I click on what's gone down. Clever bitch diverted me and walked off with all my files, never gave up the drugs they found in the reservoir girl. Way she is, I think. Gotta love her for it.

Bright idea then.

"Get your butt back here, Annie," I call. "You owe me."

I slip into IB's cubicle and turn on the Mac, wait for the password rectangle to appear. When it does, I type in Ice Box. "Invalid password," the Mac admonishes me. "Try again." The synthetic girl's voice is chilling, gives me the creeps. Too cheerful and too unhuman at the same time. I type in IB; invalid. I try refrigerator; invalid.

"You're not putting yourself in IB's head," Annie says, peering over the partition. "Try, uhhmm, 'chill.' "

I type in "chill," and the screen opens up. I see a folder labeled
contacts
and double-click on it. A page opens up with a long list, seems to be mostly nicknames. I scroll down. There it is: Vaseline. This is a shitty thing to do to IB, I know. But I can't wait on him. I scribble down the cell number on a pad and move to shut down the machine.

"Don't," Annie admonishes me. "If you do, when IB turns it on it'll open just where you are now. Backtrack, closing each file, then click on
shut down,
under the
special
menu at the top."

I do it.

"I'm not even asking why you're breaking into IB's stuff," Annie says.

"Just needed something and he's not here . . . like I wasn't here a few minutes ago."

"No see, no hear. It's unethical and unconscionable, what you just did." She laughs. "If you tell me any more, I'll be an accessory. So shut up."

I get on my Mac, call up the dictionary. Check Annie's word, then go to the Web, checking psychology sites. The search engine's a literal-minded bastard, almost useless. But at last I get an article that looks right. I read it but don't print it.

Then I get a truly whacked notion.

I call Helen, leave a message on her machine that if she can get out, I'll be home around ten-thirty. I leave the station, start driving, pick up a six-pack of Grolsch at a convenience store, and head around the Beltway to Jones Falls Expressway, into the city.

Federal Hill's this old neighborhood with wonderful views of the harbor. First it turned into a gross fucking slum, then it got so bad even the dealers and hookers and the diehard squatters fled. Then, years ago, the first cohort of baby-boom yuppies started urban homesteading. It worked. Some got fed up halfway through—we're talking gutting the places down to the bare brick walls and redoing everything—and sold out. Annie got hers about three-quarters done and planned to do the last quarter herself, since she was mortgaged up to the eyeballs. That was four years ago or so. She's still got an eighth to go. She works on the place every free moment she has.

So I'm not surprised when she answers the doorbell in an athletic bra and cut-off overalls, plaster splashed all over her. She's got a bandana wrapped around her head, like some babushka. I hand her the six-pack and she unhinges the ceramic top of a bottle, guzzles, then takes the pack and
puts it in the fridge. There's a drop cloth on the parlor floor, a tall wooden ladder 'cause the ceiling must be fourteen feet high, and trowel marks in fresh plaster on the ceiling.

"Gotta smooth those out before they dry," she says, climbing up the ladder with a bottle of beer in one hand and a trowel in the other. "So," she says, taking a pretty smooth stroke across the plaster, "thanks for the beer. I needed one. Why'd you bother coming all this way, though, unless you want to rant at me for breaking into your computer?"

"Hey Annie, get fucked, you computer thief," I say.

"That's it?"

"I ranted, didn't I?" It feels awkward, craning your neck to talk to someone eight or ten feet above you. Her skin, and I can see a lot more of it than I ever have before, is shining with sweat.

"You call that a rant?" She laughs. "Shit. Where were you raised? Try something like 'Annie Mason, you're a lowlife bitch, pretending to be my friend and then raping my private stuff. Then having the balls to brush it off as if you had every right to do that. You're a faithless, untrustworthy cunt, and I hope you fall off that ladder and break your fuckin' neck.' That's a decent rant."

"Hey Annie, since you brought up that body part, you know I can see right up the legs of your overalls and you're not wearing any underpants, and how come your pubic hair is a lot darker than the hair on your head?"

She starts giggling, the ladder starts shaking, and she slings a glob of plaster off the trowel down at me. I take the hit on my left foot.

"Sorry 'bout that, Ewing," she says, stepping easily down the ladder, swigging beer as she comes.

"Want a beer? Nah, you don't want a beer," she says when she's down and facing me. "I'll make you some good coffee, right. And then you tell me why you came?"

"Deal."

"So I can assume we're still on friendly terms?" she says as I follow her through the huge, rambling house to the
kitchen. Late-aftemoon sun is slanting through crisp gingham curtains on the windows there. I sit at a red lacquered table that fits into a nook in the window bay. She grinds some beans, starts some water boiling, takes cream out of the fridge and puts it before me, with a mug. A sugar bowl's already sitting on the table.

"What are you doing Labor Day weekend?" I ask when the coffee's in front of me and I've taken a few sips.

"Working here, I guess. Damn if I'm going down to Pom-pano to see my parents."

"Want to come with me to Virginia and meet mine?"

It's the first thing I've ever said that stops Annie cold. She looks at the sweat beading on her green glass beer bottle for a beat too long, then puts her famous scan on my eyes.

"What's this all about, Luther?" she asks at last.

"Maybe anomie. I looked it up. Not too pretty. Thinking maybe you'll see something, notice something. Point it out to me."

"Christ, you're putting me in a very odd place with this."

I just keep meeting her gaze.

"Luther, I'm not a therapist."

"I know. Don't want one. Not yet, anyway."

"So what do you want?"

"Gotta tell you, my father's refused to see me for a bunch of years. I did something he hated. So I want a friend at my side. A little backup if I need it."

Annie reaches across the table and lays a plaster-crusted hand on top of one of mine. No scan now.

"Yeah," she says quickly. "I can do that."

I drop my dime, using the cell, stuck in the traffic crawl on York Road on the way home. The number has a 39 prefix. Italy? Those worldwide cells can have a home number anywhere, so why not Italy? After four rings, I hear it click on.