Stone Rain (2 page)

Of course, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. There were a whole lot of things that led up to this point.

And a whole lot that happened after.

Maybe I should back up a bit.

“I NEED TWENTY BUCKS,”
said Paul, our seventeen-year-old.

Sarah and I were at the kitchen table, the dirty dinner dishes cleared but still sitting next to the sink, waiting to be dealt with. We had poured ourselves some wine. Sarah had brought home a bottle of Beringer and we had filled our glasses to the top when our son popped his head in.

“What for?” Sarah asked after a large slurp of white zinfandel.

“Just stuff,” Paul said. “We might go to the movies or something.”

“A movie isn’t twenty bucks,” I said. “Yet.”

Paul sighed. “Popcorn? You want me to watch a movie without popcorn?”

I looked at Sarah. She said, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep if that happened.”

I said, “Didn’t I give you twenty bucks a couple of days ago?”

Another sigh. “It was
three
days ago.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it was three days ago. Where did that twenty dollars go?”

“Screw it, never mind,” Paul said, and withdrew.

“Hang on a second, pal,” I said, and was starting to get up from my chair when Sarah reached over and grabbed my arm.

“Sit down,” she said. “Let him go.” I settled back into the chair. “Have some more wine.” She topped up my glass. “He’s just being a D.H.” Parental shorthand for dickhead.

“No kidding,” I said. Paul’s in his last year of high school, and he’s a pretty good kid, all things considered. But sometimes, I just wanted to ground him for a month or two, only at someone else’s house.

I sipped my wine.

“Not like that,” Sarah said. “You’re drinking like a girl. Here, watch me.” She tipped back her nearly full glass, polished it off in four swallows. She put the glass back down, said, “Hit me.”

I filled it.

“We need to do this more often,” Sarah said. “It’s been kind of stressful around here lately, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

No kidding. I’d been home only a couple of days, having returned from my father’s fishing camp, where, not to understate it or anything, all hell had broken loose. It was the third time in as many years that I’d found myself in a pickle—now there’s a word for it—for which I had no training, and where I was in way over my head.

I had promised Sarah, and myself, that no more would I allow myself to get sucked into dangerous situations, not that I had wanted it to happen those other times. I wasn’t cut out for it. I was, and am, a writer of so-so science fiction novels, paying the bills writing features for the
Metropolitan
newspaper, where Sarah is, depending on the day, my editor. At a large daily newspaper, you can get chewed out by so many people higher up the food chain than yourself that it’s hard to narrow down the bosses to whom you report to just one person.

“Yeah,” I said, “very stressful. But he doesn’t make it any easier, acting like that. And I swear, he’s hitting me up for ten, twenty bucks every day, it seems. And it’s just entertainment. Renting movies, seeing movies, buying video games. I don’t spend what he does on enter—”

“Drink,” Sarah said.

I obeyed. “Do we have another bottle of this stuff?” I asked. Sarah nodded. “Where’s Angie tonight?”

Angie was in her second year at Mackenzie University, but since the school was in the city, and we lived in that city, she was not in residence.

“Class,” Sarah said. “Evening lecture or something.”

“I hardly ever see her around here. Sometimes I don’t even think she comes home every night.”

“She has a boyfriend,” Sarah said. The comment hung in the air for a while, which gave me time to consider its implications. “And she’s nearly twenty,” Sarah said. “If she boarded at university, if she’d gone clear across the country somewhere, you’d never know when she came home and when she didn’t.”

I finished off my glass, got up, and went to the fridge. “Where’s the other bottle?”

“It’s in there, just look,” Sarah said. “Did I tell you about the foreign editor thing?”

“What foreign editor thing?”

“They posted it. They need a new foreign editor. Garth’s going to the editorial board, where he can write ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that.’”

“Are you sure there’s another bottle?”

“Do I have to come over there myself and embarrass you?”

“Look, I’m either going blind or there’s no wine in here at—hang on, here it is. Okay, so, you want that job?”

“It’s a step up from features editor. More staff, bigger stories, a larger budget to watch over.”

“More headaches.”

“It’s a good step for me. If I ever want Magnuson’s job.” Bertrand Magnuson, the managing editor, who gave every indication that he was barely tolerating me. I’d gotten some big stories since joining the
Metropolitan
, but they’d had a way of falling into my lap. That didn’t count, in Magnuson’s book.

“You want that job?” I asked. “Magnuson’s?”

“Eventually, why not? The paper’s never had a woman managing editor, has it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There’s only one little problem,” Sarah said.

“What’s that?”

“I find it hard keeping all those foreign countries straight. All those -stan places.”

“That could be a problem,” I said, rooting through the drawer for the corkscrew.

“What are you doing?”

“Where’s the fucking corkscrew?”

“It’s here on the table, Sherlock.”

I sat back down, went to work opening the bottle. Sarah said, “You’re going to have to help me. Quiz me on foreign events. I’ve been working with the Metro file so long, I don’t know what’s going on anyplace in the world other than this city.”

“Hitler’s dead,” I said. “And Maggie Thatcher? Not a prime minister anymore. Oh, and there was that guy? The one who walked on the moon? The moon counts as foreign, right?”

“You’ll help me?” She wanted me to be serious for a moment.

“I will help you.”

Sarah watched as I refilled our glasses. Then she asked, “When are you seeing Trixie?”

“We’re having coffee tomorrow,” I said.

“What’s her problem?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know. I called her up after I got back from Dad’s place. You know we’d had this lunch, she was about to tell me something when I got that call that something had happened to my father, so she never got into it. So when I called her after I got back, she said she was in some kind of trouble. She didn’t want to go into it over the phone.”

“What do you think it could be?”

I shrugged. “No idea.”

“I mean, what could she possibly need your help with? What kind of problem could a professional dominatrix have that would require your expertise?” She gave that a moment. “You’re no good at knots.”

“I told you, I don’t know. I must have insights in areas even we don’t know about.”

Sarah held up her wineglass and peered at me, as if she was looking at me through the rose-colored zinfandel. “Why are you friends with her?”

I pursed my lips. “I guess because she helped me out a couple of years back when we got into that trouble in Oakwood. I got to know her before I knew what she really does for a living. I don’t know. We just hit it off, I guess. Does it bother you? That we’re friends?”

“Bother me? I don’t think so. I mean, aside from the fact that she’s stunningly beautiful and knows how to fulfill every man’s deepest, darkest fantasy, I don’t see any reason to feel threatened by her.” She smiled. I started to say something, but she stopped me. “It’s okay. I know you, and I’m not worried about you. I know what we have.”

I smiled softly.

“But I think I understand what it is you like about Trixie,” Sarah said.

“What?”

“She’s dangerous.”

“Come on.”

“No, that’s it, I’m convinced. You’ve lived your whole life being safe, playing it safe, locking the doors at night, always changing the batteries in the smoke detectors, making sure the knives don’t point up in the dishwasher. You know what you’re like.”

I said nothing. My obsessions were well documented.

“But knowing Trixie, this woman with her dark side, who ties men up in her basement and spanks them for money, just knowing a person like this, even if all you do is meet her for coffee once in a while, this is your way of flirting with danger. Makes you feel that you’re not so incredibly conservative.”

“That’s what you think.”

Sarah leaned forward across the kitchen table. “That’s what I know.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” I said to her.

“Really.” She finished off another glass. “You know what I was thinking I’d like to do?”

“No, what were you thinking you’d like to do?”

“I was thinking I would like to take you upstairs and fuck your brains out, that’s what I was thinking I’d like to do.”

I felt a stirring inside me, and cleared my throat. “I think, if that’s what you want to do, you should go right ahead and do it. I would not want to stand in your way.”

“So like, can I have twenty bucks or not?”

Paul had reappeared. We both spun our heads around, and I don’t know about Sarah, but I could feel my brain moving about half a second slower than my cranium.

“Uh,” I said, wondering whether Paul had heard the last part of our conversation, “we vote no.”

Sarah slowly turned her head back to look at me. “When did we have that vote?”

“We’re going to have it right now. All those in favor of giving Paul twenty bucks, raise your hands.” Neither Sarah nor I raised our hands. “It’s settled, then. You have been turned down.”

“Aw, come on. There’s a bunch of us, we’re going to the movies.”

“Have you given any consideration,” Sarah said, speaking slowly so as not to slur her words, “to finding a part-time job someplace, instead of hitting us up for spending money all the time?”

“I second the motion,” I said.

Paul definitely looked pissed. “I thought you guys said I shouldn’t get a job because it would interfere with my homework. That’s what you said. Didn’t you say that?”

“I believe you may be correct,” I said, “but, seeing as how you don’t do any homework now, I can’t see where it would make any particular difference. It just means that instead of going to a movie or playing video games, you’d be making some money.”

“I don’t believe this,” Paul said. “Fuck, what kind of job am I going to get?”

“We look forward to finding out with great anticipation,” I said.

Paul raised his hands in frustration, then let them fall to his side. “I guess I’ll just hang out here then,” he said. “Maybe there’s a game on.”

I glanced at Sarah just as Sarah glanced at me. For Sarah’s recently announced plan to be acted upon, it would be better if we had the house to ourselves.

“Okay,” I said slowly, reaching for my wallet. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you promise that tomorrow you’ll start looking for some sort of part-time job.”

Paul strode across the kitchen, snatched the twenty I was holding up in my hand, and said, “Deal. I’ll be some goddamn sorry-ass burger flipper if that’s what you want.” And he was out the door again in a shot.

I waited for it to swing shut, for the dust to settle, and then said to Sarah, “I’m beginning to think we need to crack down on the kids’ language.”

Sarah shook her head sadly. “That fucking ship has sailed,” she said. “I think you have failed to set a good example.”

She got up from the table, reached out for my hand, and started leading me to the stairs.

“What did they used to call Myanmar?” I asked her.

“Burma,” Sarah replied.

“I think that’s right,” I said.

Sarah, not even waiting until we’d reached the second floor, was unbuttoning her blouse as she scaled the stairs.

“Dangerous,” I said, following her. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

I WAS SETTLING BACK
in at my desk at the
Metropolitan
, having just returned from the cafeteria with a coffee, when I caught a whiff of something unpleasant behind me. That could mean only one of two things. Either one of the photogs had just returned from covering a drowning in the sewers, or our top police reporter was in the vicinity.

Without turning around, I said, “What is it, Dick?” Slowly, I spun my computer chair around to look at him.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked. Dick Colby is not only the paper’s best crime reporter, he’s also its most odiferous. His fellow staffers are unsure whether it’s that he fails to bathe, or to do his laundry, or possibly a combination of the two. He lives alone. I don’t know whether he’s ever been married, but I couldn’t imagine a wife sending him out into the world this way. He’s a gruff, slightly overweight, prematurely graying creature in his late forties, and I didn’t know whether he was aware that most everyone referred to him, behind his back at any rate, as “Cheese Dick.”

“Sixth sense,” I said. I’d taken a deep breath before turning around and was slowly exhaling as I spoke. “You want something?”

“Your notes on the Wickens thing. Phone numbers, stuff like that. I need them.”

This request so took me by surprise that I breathed in suddenly, then coughed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say,
Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up
.

“Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”

Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”

“Told what?”

“Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”

The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh–worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.