Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “Made a couple of calls. Know that song ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys? I get around, albeit on crutches. A woman put a couple of holes in me.”

  “Sorry to hear about that.”

  “Some other people and I got stuck with a piece of wet work. Supposedly, it was initiated by a little fellow who runs a skin joint for middle-aged titty babies. Supposedly, this little fellow doesn’t want to come up with the money to pay his tab. His name is Nick Dolan. Know who I’m talking about?”

  “I’ve known Nick for thirty-five years. He had a floating casino in New Orleans.”

  Preacher chewed on a hangnail and removed a piece of skin from his tongue. “I got to thinking about this little fellow, the one with the titty-baby joint about halfway between Austin and San Antone. Why would a fellow like that have a bunch of Asian women shot to death?”

  Artie Rooney had crossed one leg over his knee and propped one hand stiffly on the edge of his desk, his stomach swelling over his belt. “You’re talking about that big slaughter down by the border? I’m not up on that, Mr. Collins. To be frank, I’m a little lost here.”

  “I’m not a mister, so don’t call me that again.”

  “I didn’t mean to be impolite or insult you.”

  “What makes you think you have the power to offend me?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You have a hearing problem? Why is it you think you’re so important I care about your opinion of me?”

  Rooney’s eyes drifted to the elevator door.

  “I wouldn’t expect the cav’ry if I were you,” Preacher said.

  Rooney picked up his phone and pushed a button. After a few seconds, he replaced the receiver without speaking into it and leaned back in his chair. He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin on his thumb and forefinger, his pulse beating visibly in his throat. There was a bloodless white rim around the edge of his nostrils, as though he were breathing refrigerated air. “What’d you do with my secretary?”

  “A little Mexican girl across the river said I might have to go to hell. You want me to tell you what I did?”

  “To the girl? You did something to a little girl is what you’re telling me?” Rooney’s hand seemed to flutter at his mouth, then he lowered it to his lap.

  “I think you worked some kind of scam on this Dolan fellow. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but it’s got your shit-prints on it. You owe me a lot of money, Mr. Rooney. If I’m going to hell, if I’m already there, in fact, how much you reckon my soul is worth? Don’t put your hand on that phone again. You owe me a half million dollars.”

  “I owe you what?”

  “I’ve got a gift. I can always tell a coward. I can always tell a liar, too. I think you’re both.”

  “What are you doing? Stay away from me.”

  Out on the beach, a mother up to her hips in the water was scooping her child from a wave, running with it up the incline, her dress ballooning around her, her face filled with panic.

  “Don’t get up. If you get up, that’s going to make it a whole lot worse,” Preacher said.

  “What are you doing with that? For God’s sakes, man.”

  “My soul is going to be in the flames because of you. You invoke God’s name now? Put your hand on the blotter and shut your eyes.”

  “I’ll get you the money.”

  “Right now, in your heart, you believe what you’re saying. But soon as I’m gone, your words will be ashes in the wind. Spread your fingers and press down real hard. Do it. Do it now. Or I’ll rake this across your face and then across your throat.”

  With his eyes tightly shut, Artie Rooney obeyed the man who loomed above him on crutches. Then Preacher Jack Collins laid the edge of his barber’s razor across Rooney’s little finger and mashed down on the back of the razor with both hands.

  7

  NICK HAD HEARD of blackouts but was never quite sure what constituted one. How could somebody walk around doing things and have no memory of his deeds? To Nick, the terms “blackout” and “copout” seemed very similar.

  But after Hugo Cistranos had left Nick’s backyard, telling him he had until three o’clock the next afternoon to sign over 25 percent of his strip joint and restaurant, Nick had gone downstairs to the game room, bolted the door so the children wouldn’t see him, and gotten sloshed to the eyes.

  When he woke in the morning on the floor, sick and trembling and smelling of his own visceral odors, he remembered watching a cartoon show around midnight and fumbling with a deadbolt. Had he been sleepwalking? He stood at the bottom of the stairwell and stared up the stairs. The door was still locked. Thank God neither his wife nor the children had seen him drunk. Nick didn’t believe a father or husband could behave worse than one who was dissolute in front of his wife and children.

  Then he saw his car keys on the Ping-Pong table and began to experience flashes of clarity inside his head, like shards of a mirror recon structing themselves behind his eyes, each one containing an image that grew larger and larger and filled him with terror: Nick driving a car, Nick in a phone booth, Nick talking to an emergency dispatcher, headlights swerving in front of his windshield, car horns blowing angrily.

  Had he gone somewhere to make a 911 call? He went upstairs to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes. His wife and children were gone, and in the silence he could hear the wind rattling the dry fronds of his palm trees against the eaves. From the bathroom window, the sunlight trapped inside his swimming pool wobbled and refracted like the blue-white flame of an acetylene torch. The entire exterior world seemed superheated, sharp-edged, a garden of cactuses and thorn bushes, scented not with flowers but with tar pots and diesel fumes.

  What had he done last night?

  Dropped the dime on Hugo? Dropped the dime on himself?

  He sat at his breakfast table, eating aspirin and vitamin B, washing it down with orange juice straight out of the carton, his forehead oily with perspiration. He went into his office, hoping to find relief in the deep, cool ambience and solitude of his bookshelves and mahogany furniture and the dark drapes on the windows and the carpet that sank an inch under his feet. A bright red digital 11 was blinking on his message machine for his dedicated phone-and-fax line. The first message was from his wife, Esther: “We’re at the mall. I let you sleep. We have to talk. Did you go out in the middle of the night? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  The other messages were from the restaurant and the club:

  “Cheyenne says she’s not going on the pole the same time as Farina. I can’t deal with these bitches, Nick. Are you coming in?”

  “Uncle Charley’s Meats just delivered us seventy pounds of spoiled chicken. That’s the second time this week. They say the problem is ours. They off-loaded on the dock, and we didn’t carry it in. I can’t put it in the box, and it’s smelling up the whole kitchen.”

  “Me again. They were pulling each other’s hair in the dressing room.”

  “The code guy was here. He says we have to put a third sink in. He says he found a dead mouse in the dishwasher drain, too.”

  “Nick, there were a couple of guys in here last night I had trouble with. One guy had navy tats and a beard like a fire alarm. He said he was gonna be working for us. I kicked them out, but they said they’d be back. I thought maybe you needed a heads-up. Who is this asshole?”

  “Hey, it’s me. There’s some flake on top of the toilet tank in the women’s can. I had Rabbit clean the shitters spotless early this morning. Farina was in there ten minutes ago. When she came out, she looked like she’d packed dry ice up her nose. Nick, babysitting crazy whores is not in my curriculum vitae. She wants your home number. You want me to give it to her? I can’t process these kinds of problems.”

  Nick held down the delete button and erased every message on the machine, played and unplayed alike.

  It was seventeen minutes to one o’clock. Hugo’s driver would be at the house at three P.M. to pick up the signed documents that would make Hugo Cistranos his business partner. The 25 percent ownership ceded to Hugo would of course be only the first step in the cannibalization o
f everything Nick owned. Nick sat in the darkness, his ears filled with a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

  He had never confessed to anyone the fear he had felt in the schoolyard in the Ninth Ward. The black kids who took his lunch money from him, who shoved him down on the asphalt, seemed to target him and no one else as though they recognized both difference and weakness in him that they exorcised in themselves by degrading and forcing him to go hungry through the lunch hour and the rest of the afternoon, somehow freeing themselves of their own burden.

  But why Nick? Because he was a Jew? Because his grandfather had adopted an Irish name? Because his parents took him to temple in a neighborhood full of simpletons who would later believe The Passion of the Christ was solid evidence that his people were guilty of deicide?

  Maybe.

  Or maybe they smelled fear on his skin the way a barracuda smells blood issuing from a wounded grouper.

  Fear, the acronym for “fuck everything and run,” he thought sadly. That had been the history of his young life. And still was.

  He punched his wife’s cell phone number into the console on his desk.

  “Nick?” her voice said through the speakerphone.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Still at the mall. We’re about to have lunch.”

  “Drop the kids at the country club and come home. We’ll pick them up later.”

  “What is it? Don’t lie to me, either.”

  “I need to show you where some things are.”

  “What things? What are you talking about?”

  “Come home, Esther.”

  After he hung up, he wondered if his need was as naked as it sounded. He sat in a deep, stuffed leather chair and rested his forehead on his fingertips. It had been raining the night he met Esther twenty-three years ago. She was waiting for the streetcar under the steel colonnade at the corner of Canal and St. Charles Avenue, in front of the Pearl, where she worked as a night cashier after studying all day in the practical nursing program at UNO. There were raindrops in her hair, and in the neon glow of the restaurant’s windows, she made him think of a multicolored star in a constellation.

  “There’s a storm blowing off Lake Pontchartrain. You shouldn’t be out here,” he had said to her.

  “Who are you?” she replied.

  “I’m Nick Dolan. You heard of me?”

  “Yeah, you’re a gangster.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a gambler. I run a cardroom for Didoni Giacano.”

  “That’s what I said. You’re a gangster.”

  “I like ‘white-collar criminal’ better. Will you accept a ride from a white-collar criminal?”

  She had on too much lipstick, and when she twisted her mouth into a button and fixed her eyes speculatively on Nick’s, his heart swelled in a way that made him take a deep breath.

  “I live Uptown, just off Prytania, not far from the movie theater,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought. You are definitely an Uptown lady,” he said. Then he remembered his car was in the shop and he had taken a cab to work. “I don’t exactly have my car with me. I’ll call a cab. Could I borrow a dime? I don’t have any coins.”

  It was 1:26 P.M. when Nick heard Esther pull into the driveway and unlock the front door. “Where are you?” she called.

  “In the office.”

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?” she said.

  “Did you lock the front?”

  “I don’t remember. Did you go somewhere last night? Did you get into some trouble? I looked at the car. There’re no dents in it.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Is that a gun?” she said, her voice rising.

  “I keep it in the desk. Esther, sit down. Please. Just listen to me. Everything we own is in this file case. It’s all alphabetized. We have a half-dozen equity accounts at Vanguard, tax-free stuff at Sit Mutuals, and two offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. All the treasury bonds are short-term. Interest rates are in the dumps right now, but by next year gas prices will drive bonds down and rates up, and there’ll be some good buys out there.”

  “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  He got up from his chair and took both of her hands in his. “Sit down and listen to me like you’ve never listened before. No, no, don’t talk, just listen, Esther.”

  She sat on the big square dark red leather footstool by the leather chair and watched his face. He sat back down, leaning forward, his gaze fixed on her shoes, his hands still clasping hers.

  “I got involved with some evil men,” he said. “Not just lowlifes but guys that got no parameters.”

  “Which guys?”

  “One was a button man for the Giacanos. His name is Hugo Cistranos. He used to work for Artie Rooney. He’s for hire, on the edge of things. Hugo is kind of like a virus. Money has got germs on it. You do business, sometimes you pick up germs.”

  “What’s this guy got to do with the restaurant or the nightclub?”

  “Hugo did something really bad, something I didn’t think even Hugo would do.”

  “What does that have to do with you?” she said, cutting him off, maybe too conveniently, maybe still not wanting to know how many pies Nick had a finger in.

  “I tell you about it, you become a party to it. Hugo says it’s on me. He says I ordered him to do it. He’s trying to blackmail us. He might kill me, Esther.”

  She was breathing faster, as though his words were using up the oxygen in the room. “This man Hugo is claiming he killed somebody on your orders?”

  “More than one.”

  “More than—”

  “I have to deal with it this afternoon, Esther. By three o’clock.”

  “Someone may kill you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “They’ll have to kill me, too.”

  “No, this is the wrong way to think. You have to take the children to the river. Hugo has no reason to hurt you or them. We mustn’t give him any reason to do that.”

  “Why does he want to kill you if he wants to blackmail you?”

  “Because I’m not going to pay him anything.”

  “What else are you planning, Nick?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I see it in your face. That’s why you have the gun.”

  “Go to the river with the children.”

  “They’ll have to walk in my blood to hurt our family. You understand that?” she said.

  AT THREE P.M. sharp, Nick walked out to the curb and waited. His neighborhood was marbled with shadows from the rain clouds that had moved across the sun. A blue Chrysler came around the corner and approached him slowly, the tires clicking with gravel embedded in the treads, like the nails on a feral animal, the driver’s face obscured by a dark green reflection of trees on the windshield. The Chrysler pulled to the curb, and the driver, a man with a wild orange beard, put down the passenger window. “Howdy,” he said.

  “I tried to call Hugo and save you a trip, but he’s not answering his cell,” Nick said. “You got another number for him?”

  “I’m supposed to be picking up some signed contracts,” the driver said, ignoring the question. His teeth were wide-set, his complexion florid, like that of a man with perpetual sunburn, his wrists relaxed on the crosspiece of the steering wheel. He wore shined needle-point boots and a long-sleeve print shirt tucked inside beltless white golf slacks; the hair on his chest grew onto the ironed-back lapels of his shirt. “No signed contracts, huh?”

  “No signed contracts,” Nick said.

  The driver looked into space, then opened his cell phone and dialed a number. “It’s Liam. He wants to talk to you. No, he doesn’t have them. He didn’t say why. He’s standing right here in front of his house. That’s where I am now. Hugo, talk to the guy.”

  The driver leaned over and handed Nick the cell phone through the window, smiling, as though the two of them were friends and had mutual interests. Nick put the cell phone to his ear and walked into his yard between two lime trees bursting with fruit. He could feel the humidity and heat rising from the St. Augustine grass into his face. He could hear a bumblebee buzzing close to h
is head. “I haven’t said no to your offer, but I need a sit-down before I finalize anything.”

  “It’s not an offer, Nicholas. ‘Offer’ is the wrong word.”

  “You used the name of this guy Preacher. He’s the guy who’s supposed to give me cold sweats, right? If he’s a factor, he should be there, too.”

  “Be where?”

  “At the sit-down. I want to meet him.”

  “If you meet Jack Collins, it’ll be about two seconds before you become worm food.”