A Fistful of Rain Read online

  I looked at the ash forming on the end of my cigarette. She seemed to have paused for a breath, so I took another drink from my glass.

  “According to my theory, you’re trying to get cash together, a lot of it, more than you can get easily by yourself. That’s why you went to see Graham Havers. I thought you were surprised to see us there, but now that I think about it, I think it scared you.

  “Which means you’re coming up on the deadline, either expecting a call shortly, or maybe you’ve even received it, though given how shitfaced you are, I hope not the latter. Whatever, this call has instructions, telling you where to bring the money, where to find your father.

  “Now, speaking personally, I like this theory, and, incidentally, so does my partner. We both like it a hell of a lot more than trying to fit you for a murder we’re not even sure has been committed, and that, if it has, we’re pretty damn certain you did not do. And this theory, it explains a lot of your behavior in such a way as to make it, if not excusable, at least explicable.”

  “That’s a good word,” I said, dropping ash onto the table. I drained my glass and got up, went for a refill. “Explicable.”

  “Any comment?”

  “No.” I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass.

  “No, my theory is crap, or no, you have no comment?”

  “If you have questions you want to ask me—”

  “Talk to your attorney. We’ll be doing that tomorrow. Right now, right here, I want to talk to you.”

  “You are talking to me.”

  “It’s a little one-sided.”

  I got indignant. “I’m participating.”

  “I almost got killed today,” Hoffman said. “Never had someone shoot at me before. But I almost got killed today. My partner, too. You could have died, too.”

  “These things you say, they are all true.” I grinned. “Dyke Tracy.”

  “Goddammit, Mim!” Her cheeks looked flushed. “Being lied to, it’s part of the job. But I have never encountered someone as stupid as you about helping herself. If I’m right, if you tell me that I’m right, I can get the FBI in on this, we can get a wiretap set. This kidnapper calls, we’ll be all over him. But if you keep this up . . . you keep this up, people are going to die.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I didn’t even try to make it sound like I was telling the truth.

  “Why won’t you let me help you?” She was almost pleading. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on? What could this guy have over you that’s keeping you so scared and so silent?”

  “You keep coming over to talk to me at night,” I said. “Even when you’re being Dyke Tracy, you come over here at night. Why is that?”

  “I’m trying to solve your brother’s murder. I’m trying to find your father!”

  I shrugged. “I thought maybe it was because of the thing you have for me.”

  “That ‘thing’ is rapidly disappearing.”

  “Really?” I put my glass on the stove, by the empty bottle, and took a couple steps toward her. She was standing in the corner, where the counter turned, the microwave behind her. The clock read seventeen minutes past eleven. “I mean, really? Because at Van’s party, it seemed like a very serious thing to me.”

  “Knock it off, Miss Bracca.”

  “Oh, Miss Bracca, huh? No thing, but I’m Miss Bracca, now?” I stopped right in front of her, looking up. “I thought you wanted me.”

  The muscles in her jaw flexed as she closed her mouth. I liked her lips, decided to taste them again. When I tried to put my hands on her hips, she caught my wrists, pushing my arms down.

  “C’mon, now you’re just playing hard to get,” I told her.

  Hoffman tried moving me back, to get out of the corner. I let my weight come forward and my arms spread out. She had my arms extended out like I was playing airplane pretty fast, but I just kept falling forward, giggling, and she had to let go of my wrists to catch me when I pitched into her. I tried to get my mouth on a breast, through her shirt, and she shoved me back and then I was upside down, and looking at her ass. That was really funny, especially when my head started banging against it as she took me up the stairs.

  She dumped me on the bed, and I tried to stop laughing and say something more, but then I started to not feel too good, and I had to close my eyes and hold my breath. That seemed to help for an eternity, and then, in the sudden dark, I realized what it was I’d just done, and then it wasn’t just my stomach that felt like it was going to erupt.

  I tried getting up and slipped out of the bed, onto the floor on my side. My shoes were off, and my socks, and my feet were cold. The room was dark, and I realized my eyes were open, and that the lights were off.

  “Tracy?” I called.

  There was no answer.

  I hoisted myself using the side of the bed, lurched for the bathroom. On my way in, I caught sight of the cable box, and the time.

  It was twenty-two minutes past three.

  When I made my way back to bed, it was a quarter to five.

  I buried my head in my pillows, and fell asleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

  In daylight, I spent most of an hour worshipping the Porcelain God and regretting everything, every goddamn thing, I’d ever done, before I could begin to function properly. When I was finished I saw that I was still in my clothes from the night before, and my head was pounding, and I could feel my pulse beating in my thumbs. Undressing took time, and I nearly nodded off again in the shower, and when I realized that, I panicked and fell in the hurry to get out and get dry.

  By the time I was dressed and ready to move, the clock was reading 10:48 A.M. I was heading out the back door when the telephone started ringing.

  I hesitated, trying to figure who it was, and the thought that it was maybe the Parka Man was what finally got me to answer it.

  It was Joan.

  “Mim? I didn’t wake you?”

  “No, I was on my way out, actually.”

  “I can call back. . . .”

  “I’ve only got a couple minutes,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to have heard me. “It’s about Steven, I wanted to talk to you about . . . I was going through his things this morning. I haven’t touched them since he died and I was thinking that I should . . . I was really thinking that tomorrow I should start cleaning things out.”

  I felt the pressure of the clock, the absurdity of having this conversation at this moment. Over the line, I heard voices, not kids but adults, and wondered if she was calling me from school.

  “If you would come over?” Joan asked. “Give me a hand? I’d . . . I think I could use the support.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t.

  Her voice got harder. “It’s not the same as a funeral, and I know he wasn’t Mikel, but I’d think you could find the time if you wanted to.”

  “No, absolutely. I’ll be there.”

  It wasn’t that she heard insincerity; she heard the haste, and took that the wrong way, too.

  “I suppose I’ll see you then. If you remember.”

  She hung up, and I hung up, and felt the wound like an acid burn, lingering.

  But there wasn’t time.

  I had to get to the bank.

  CHAPTER 36

  Catherine Lumley moved to greet me with a big smile and an outstretched hand.

  “Wonderful to see you again, Ms. Bracca.”

  I know it was just the hangover, but it hurt my eyes to look at the smile. “We’ll be going upstairs, to Alex’s office.”

  “Alex?”

  “Rodriguez, your banker.”

  She took me off the floor quickly, through a doorway and up a carpeted flight of steps. “You have something to carry the cash?”

  I patted the strap on my shoulder, for my backpack. “All set.”

  “Wonderful,” Lumley murmured.

  We came into a quiet hallway with doors along both sides, and at the third down
on the right, she stopped and tapped gently, not with her knuckles, but with her lacquered fingernails. I didn’t imagine anyone within could have heard the sound, but there was an answering voice immediately, telling us to come in.

  Alexander Rodriguez was much younger than I expected, only thirty or so, and looking like he took his job very seriously. His tie was navy blue and boring, the knot at his throat so small, I wondered if it was actually a clip-on. He rose from behind his desk as we entered, and came around the corner, leaning forward with a hand outstretched.

  “Miss Bracca, very pleased to finally meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too.”

  “Do you need anything? Water or tea?”

  The hangover was making my mouth grow wool, and my headache was committed, so I nodded, which actually, physically, hurt. “Water.”

  “Cathy?”

  “I’ll be right back,” Lumley told me.

  She went out as Rodriguez motioned me to one of the two chairs in front of his desk. I took the backpack off my shoulder and let it rest against my leg, and Rodriguez went back to his seat, moving some paper. One short stack he slid toward me, with a thick pen.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s the Currency Transaction Report. If you could just review the information, make any notes if something needs to be changed.”

  I looked at the top form, saw the words “Internal Revenue Service,” and got immediately worried. “The IRS?”

  “It’s a formality, part of the way they regulate cash movement,” Rodriguez said. “They’re worried you’re a drug dealer.”

  “No, just a musician.”

  “Same thing to them, maybe.” He smiled, friendly. “It just tells them where the cash is going when it leaves the bank. Very simple in this instance, since you’re both the withdrawer and the recipient.”

  I skimmed, saw that my personal information had been recorded, my full name, where I lived, my Social Security number. Nowhere was there a check box for “using money to pay kidnapper” or anything like that. The form didn’t even need my signature, so I slid it back to Rodriguez, and he added the sheet to the stack on his blotter.

  Lumley came back with a plastic bottle of water, and they both watched me, polite smiles in place, as I opened and drained it. Rodriguez handed me another form, this one a withdrawal request.

  “Just fill it out like you would normally,” he told me.

  While I did so, he got up and opened a filing cabinet in the corner, and was back at the desk when I finished. I signed my name precisely, and he took the request and pulled a card from my file, and I realized he was comparing signatures. When he noticed me watching, he dipped his head apologetically.

  “We have to be thorough.”

  “It’s nice to know you’re taking such good care of my money,” I told him, although the care he was taking was starting to make me nervous.

  But both he and Lumley brightened with the compliment, and I realized just how worried they were about losing my business. Rodriguez tucked the signature card back in my file, replaced the file in the cabinet.

  “If you’ll wait here,” he told me, “we’ll be back with the money. It won’t take more than ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  They left, and I looked at the clock on the desk, then checked it against the watch on my wrist. The clock said it was eighteen minutes past eleven, but my watch said it was only a quarter past. I tried taking some calm breaths, telling myself that I had plenty of time to get back home before the call or whatever it was I was waiting on from the Parka Man. My stomach felt raw, and I wondered if draining the bottle of water had been such a good idea.

  The door opened, and Lumley entered first, carrying a counting machine in both hands. She set it on the edge of the desk, ran the cord to the outlet in the wall. Rodriguez followed her, carrying a canvas sack with printing on the side, the name of an armored transport company.

  “This is going to take another few minutes,” he told me. “We need to make certain of the count.”

  Rodriguez set the bag in his chair and began pulling out stacks of bills, hundreds, one after the other. They were wrapped with paper bands around them, marking denominations of ten thousand dollars. Lumley had switched the counting machine on, and it was humming slightly. He unwrapped the first bundle, and fed it into the hollow on the top of the machine, and the hum grew louder, and the bills began snapping forward. He fed another bundle, and another, and the paper kept flowing, and Lumley gathered the stacks and wrapped them in their bands again, setting them aside.

  It took another fourteen minutes before they were positive they had six hundred thousand dollars in cash. Sixty stacks of hundred-dollar bills, bundled one hundred bills each.

  “All yours,” Rodriguez told me.

  I opened my backpack and began shoveling the money inside. If they thought I was eccentric before, this confirmed it, and they watched, bemused, as I fought to get the last three bundles to fit. The zipper on the backpack stuck as I was trying to run it closed, and I had to muscle it before I could get the bag shut. Then I hoisted it on my arm, felt the weight pull on my shoulder.

  Lumley offered her hand first, murmuring that if I needed anything else, I shouldn’t hesitate to contact her. I told her I wouldn’t, and appreciated all of her help.

  It was Rodriguez who walked me to the door, saying, “You’re going to want to take that someplace safe immediately. It’s an awful lot of money to just be carrying around.”

  “I’ve got it covered,” I told him.

  He gave me his hand. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said.

  Back at home, I switched on the porch light, then went down to the basement and the Fender amp, pulled the duffel bag free, then got the boxes of press packets out of the closet. On the floor, between guitars, I transferred the six hundred thousand in my backpack into the duffel, and it fit with room to spare. I closed the bag and hoisted it, trying to guess how much it weighed now. Definitely more than the Tele, that was for sure. I had to guess it was close to forty pounds.

  The clock in the kitchen was reading three minutes to noon when I came back up, and I saw the empty bottle out where I’d left it the night before. I dropped it in the trash and got the Johnnie Walker out of the pantry, cracking the seal as I went to check the living room window. I pulled some of the heat into my chest, then looked out in time to see the Ford pull up.

  Marcus and Hoffman had followed me to the bank, but when I’d emerged, they hadn’t been in their car, and I’d made it home without them in my shadow. It didn’t take Mozart to figure out what they’d done, that they’d stepped inside and had a brief word with Lumley and maybe even with Rodriguez. I doubted either banker would have given the detectives the exact amount I’d withdrawn, but it didn’t matter. It was just one more piece to support Hoffman’s theory.

  She was at the wheel this time, and I could see her speaking into a radio as I took another drink, feeling the warmth crawl into my limbs. Marcus, beside her, was leaning around, to take a look at the front of my house. I thought about stepping out and offering Hoffman an apology for what I’d done, the way I’d behaved, for all of it, and knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good. The only thing that would make it better would be me getting brave, telling them that it would happen today, that it would all be over soon.

  But I couldn’t, so I took another swallow, surrendering, and all I could think of was how certain the Parka Man had sounded when he told me he would know if I talked to the cops, how he knew people, how I should lie to them. They expected that, he’d said, and Hoffman had echoed him just the night before, already used to my string of lies.

  When I thought about it some more it made me bring the bottle down and backpedal from the window.

  I was crazy, I had to be wrong, but when I took the Quicks away from the equation, put the spying and the cameras and the pictures all to one side and Mikel and Tommy and the kidnapping on the other, it made even mo
re sense. It explained why Tommy had been so worried for me, why he’d tried to warn me after Mikel’s funeral, and why he hadn’t given Hoffman and Marcus anything when he’d been arrested. It explained how Parka Man could get into my house, not once, but twice, how he could deactivate my alarm without me or anyone else knowing.

  Why the Parka Man was doing what he was doing, I had no idea.

  But now I knew who he was, I was certain. If I could find him, if I could find where he had Tommy, then there might be a chance. I had to make a plan, to come up with a plan. All I needed was a little time.

  Then the phone started ringing, and there was no time left.

  CHAPTER 37

  “This is going to be real simple,” the Parka Man said when I answered the phone. “Simple and quick. You want your daddy, I want my money. The sooner we finish, the happier we’ll both be.”

  “I want proof he’s alive,” I said. “I want to hear him tell me he’s all right.”

  “In a moment. Right now, you’re going to listen carefully to the following instructions.”

  It felt like his words were swimming around in my brain, and I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the fear or the still-fresh realization of who he really was. The thought that I would accidentally blurt out his name came over me, and I knew that if I let it slip, Tommy was as good as dead.

  “First thing you do is lose the cops,” he said. “I don’t care how you do it. Once you break the tail, you get on the MAX, you take it out to PDX. Just ride it straight out there, don’t talk to anyone. Get off at the airport, then you take a cab, you go to downtown. You’re getting out at the corner of Northeast Everett and Third. There’s a bar, midway down the block. You go in there. At three o’clock, exactly, you get yourself a drink from the bar.”

  “MAX, airport, Everett and Third, bar, drink. Then what happens?”

  “Be there and find out. And be there without company, or it’s off, and your daddy never sees the light of day again.”