This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Thomas Holgate
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542005982
ISBN-10: 1542005981
Cover design by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
For Nana. I promised you the next one.
CONTENTS
START READING
In layman’s terms…
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Glioblastoma multiforme: the
most aggressive of the gliomas;
tumors arising from glia or their
precursors within the central
nervous system. These tumors
grow rapidly and commonly
spread to nearby brain tissue.
Occur most often in the cerebral
hemispheres, especially in the
frontal and temporal lobes. A
devastating cancer that almost
always results in death within
fifteen months after diagnosis.
—American Association of Neurological Surgeons
In layman’s terms, it means you’re fucked.
—Dr. F. Michael Brin, Royal Academy of Neurosciences
ONE
“You’re not one of those freaks, are you?”
Candy Darling, also known to her clients as Ecstasy Escorts Girl #73, stopped unbuttoning her shirt right before she revealed any of the huge Celtic cross tattoo that began at her fourth thoracic vertebra and disappeared between her dimples of Venus.
Her name had been chosen by the service. Candy herself had never heard of Andy Warhol, and the only “factory” she knew of was the one from which her deadbeat ex had been laid off six months ago.
“Why would you think that?”
She glanced over her shoulder, eyes eager to please. “To be honest with you, when a client tells me to get undressed but that he doesn’t want to touch me, I start to get worried. But I figure, maybe he’s got some crazy fear of disease. Or some other hang-up. But when he tells me he doesn’t even want me to take off my clothes, that’s when I get real worried.”
He laughed. “I assure you, you have nothing to worry about.”
“So you’re not some asshole?” she asked, wanting him to reassure her.
Detective Paul Czarcik of the Illinois Bureau of Judicial Enforcement considered the question. He didn’t want to lie. The truth was, he had been called far worse by both the cretins he pursued at risk to life and limb and his colleagues in various state and municipal bureaucracies. The consensus was unanimous. Czarcik was an asshole. But not in the way that Ecstasy Escorts Girl #73 meant.
Candy leaned over the 1981 Sony Trinitron sitting on the waist-level dresser. By some electronic miracle it was still working. She closed off her left nostril with her index finger and sniffed up the stray cocaine that had settled on top of the ancient picture-tube. Through her thin, translucent top, Czarcik glimpsed the arms of the Celtic cross stretched across her rib cage as if hugging her from behind. He was glad she wasn’t naked. He hated ink, as the kids called it. Not because he was of a generation that believed tattoos were reserved for felons, marines, and sideshow performers, but for aesthetic reasons. Even the most intricately designed ones were nothing more than cheap body graffiti. To call them art, or even anything approaching art, was an affront to, well, art. And despite this recreational pursuit, and the erudition of his current companion, Czarcik fancied himself a man who could appreciate art. A sophisticate, he would have said, if it didn’t sound so fucking French.
“Listen,” Candy began, “dressed or undressed, you’re still on the clock. So you wanna tell me what you want?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
Candy stared at him, her anger apparent. “Listen to me, mister. I don’t know what your deal is. But here’s my deal. There’s pretty much nothing I won’t let you do to me for the right price. But I’m not telling you shit about me. Not for any amount of money.”
“I understand,” he replied, unfazed. He patted the bed next to him. “Then let’s just watch some TV and smoke some cigarettes.”
Czarcik sat propped up in bed, leaning against the headboard. Candy lay with her head at the foot of the bed, her face in her hands, watching the tube.
America’s Next Top Model was on. Candy’s choice. Czarcik preferred The Twilight Zone marathon, but Candy swore she couldn’t watch a black-and-white TV show, no matter how much—as Czarcik explained to her—its themes still resonated.
“You think I could be on this show?” she asked, pointing to the screen and laughing at the absurdity of the suggestion.
“You’re as pretty as any of them,” Czarcik replied bluntly. “And probably a lot smarter.”
She turned around, hurt in her eyes. “Don’t be mean.”
“I wasn’t. You’re an entrepreneur. Most of these girls couldn’t string two sentences together.”
Candy paused for a moment and then scurried up to the top of the bed, right next to Czarcik. “Promise you won’t laugh?” He crossed his heart. “Well, I actually have a modeling shoot tomorrow. For Château, not Vogue, but still . . .”
“Château, that’s still around?”
“Yeah. Pay is shit. Three hundred bucks a session. But it covers my monthly cell bill, at least.”
“Who buys magazines anymore? Anything you could want to see is only a click away.”
Candy shrugged, as if the answer was self-evident. “Guys your age, mostly. If a dude is over sixty-five and if he can still get it up, chances are he has no idea how to really use a computer. When I make house calls, you wouldn’t believe how many magazine and VHS collections I see.”
Czarcik wasn’t the least bit offended she might believe he was eligible for social security. Although he was on the wrong side of fifty, he knew that were it not for his salt-and-pepper sideburns and whalebone-colored goatee, he could easily pass for ten years younger. A daily regimen of weightlifting and jogging kept his body as toned and tight as it was the day he graduated from the Chicago Police Academy as a fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old. But inside his body, where Father Time was allowed to wreak havoc unencumbered by efforts made in the spirit of vanity, years of hard living had taken their toll. Common sense, on which Czarcik prided himself, would dictate that thirty years of smoking, heavy drinking, and the oc
casional (OK, let’s be honest here, frequent) snort would eventually culminate in one massive coronary. The only question was when. But questions involving his own mortality didn’t much interest Paul Czarcik.
The episode ended. Another hopeful model was sixty minutes closer to her lifelong dream. Candy finished her cigarette and said, “Listen, I know you probably didn’t get your money’s worth, but I have another client.”
“No, no. I enjoyed our time together.”
Candy stood up and adjusted her miniskirt. She smoothed down her blouse. Her outfit was classy trashy, such that the quintessential strict movie dad might say, “Young lady, you don’t think you’re going out in that?”
She picked up the hundred-dollar bills left on the table near the door. She straightened them out and fanned them, poker-player style, for Czarcik to see.
“It’s all there,” he assured her.
“No, it’s . . . it’s way too much.”
Czarcik snubbed out his cigarette in the flimsy tin ashtray lying on the bed next to him. That was one thing he loved about the Wishing Well Motor Lodge. Those cheap ashtrays. It reminded him of the good old soot-covered days when he was still forced to work with a partner and a perpetual cloud of tobacco smoke clung to the station’s fiberboard ceiling tiles. “You earned it.”
Candy held her tongue and pocketed the cash. As much as she wanted to inquire about this unnecessary generosity, she didn’t want to anger him, even if he didn’t seem like the type to give her a flaccid-penis rating on the Ecstasy Escorts website. If she received too many limp-dick icons, that bitch Charlotte would move her profile to a back page and lower her rate. The last time that happened, the only clients she managed to attract were college kids—who never tipped—and junkies banking on the off chance she carried and was in a sharing mood.
Sometimes Candy thought she should have been a shrink. With little prodding, complete strangers would reveal to her the most intimate details of their lives. She had no illusions. Part of it was just the nature of the job; men became strangely forthcoming between a pair of soft young thighs. But the other part was specific to her, not her vocation. She had a face that engendered trust, sometimes to her detriment. Because if Candy had learned anything, it was that men wanted their vulnerability rewarded. When it wasn’t, they usually showed just how mean they could become.
This one was tougher to read, even if she could somehow account for his lack of sexual desire. He wasn’t awkward or nervous as so many of them were. On the contrary, sitting there, cigarette dangling from his lips, he oozed arrogance. She remembered an old movie she had once seen called Risky Business. Not since she’d watched the antics of the movie’s star—with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and megawatt smile—had she seen anyone acting so effortlessly cool.
Czarcik had been reading Candy as well—from the moment he had disengaged the chain and ushered her into the room. Her accent was specific. Appalachia, most likely just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Tennessee state line. She had grown up poor, but not dirt poor, and did not suffer any chronic affliction that would have pointed to her basic nutritional needs not having been met as a child. Although she had had no orthodontic work done (her top canines slightly overlapped her lateral incisors—easy to correct with braces), her cavities had not gone neglected. However, the fillings were silver amalgam, not composite resin, which suggested a free clinic, the only places that continued to use the cheaper, potentially toxic material.
This pervasive habit of Czarcik’s was so ingrained, so instinctual, that when Candy had looked at him for the first time, he found himself wondering about her specific brand of disposable contact lenses. He wasn’t obsessive or compulsive. Not like that caricature of a detective on that stupid fucking show—what was it called? Mook? Monks? He just had one of those brains that was constantly working. Someone attuned to his condition might say this was why he had never married and had few friends. Czarcik himself scoffed at such cheap psychology. He prized self-awareness above all else and would never ascribe his rank misanthropy to a personality quirk. He didn’t particularly care for people and preferred to be left alone. Except, like now, when he wanted company. And for this he was prepared to pay well.
There were some benefits. The traits that made him a pariah in polite society rendered him indispensable to the Bureau of Judicial Enforcement.
He worked most frequently with the Chicago Police Department, and although their high-tech forensic center might have determined that the majority of the West Side’s smack was cut with an unidentified baking sugar, only Czarcik found it strange that low-level dealers wouldn’t just use the cheapest, most common brand available. And only Czarcik was dogged enough to finally track down the particular manufacturer to a family-owned confectionary in Bellagio, Italy, which had exactly one customer in the United States—Buonta & Sons, an authentic Italian grocery store on Grand Avenue, west of the expressway. Buonta was well known for having the best prosciutto this side of the Atlantic. It was less known for being a front for the Argentado family, the closest thing Chicago had to the Corleones. But once the DA initiated an investigation, the whole enterprise collapsed like a house of cards, leading to the biggest organized crime bust since Alphonse Capone had made his home in Cicero.
In recognition of his exemplary service to the public good, Czarcik had received numerous commendations and awards. The district he had been working out of presented him with a framed photo he had taken with the mayor; the mayor mugged for the camera, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face, while his hands smothered Czarcik’s own in a debt of gratitude.
The medals and ribbon bars meant nothing to him, tossed away in the back of a desk drawer. The framed photo, well, its surface was good for cutting coke. But the goodwill he accrued, indispensable. The proverbial “Get Out of Jail Free” card that, eventually, Czarcik assumed he would use quite literally. There had always been whispers about his exploits, but never enough to necessitate an internal investigation. One day, however, his luck would run out. His fatalism all but guaranteed it.
Candy was halfway out the door before shouting a perfunctory thank-you. Czarcik didn’t respond, his attention now focused on the White Sox game being transmitted in glorious low definition. Baseball was the only sport he watched nowadays. He liked its predictable rhythms, its familiar sounds. The dirt, the cowhide, the fresh-cut grass.
Besides, football brought back too many memories of talent squandered. Not to mention broken fingers, which was one of the reasons Czarcik was never as good a shot as he should have been. Hockey players were notoriously tough, but there was just something about grown men in ice skates that he couldn’t get past. Soccer? Come on. He had seen punks on the street take a slug to the torso and go down with less dramatics than those prima donnas in shin guards. And the NBA? He’d liked it in the seventies, when drugs and violence were endemic. Besides, what kind of self-respecting predominately black league would let Steve Nash, a diminutive white point guard, win two consecutive MVPs?
TWO
At the same time that Detective Paul Czarcik was discussing the evolution of pornographic mediums—from magazines to VHS tapes to the internet—with a well-paid and completely dressed escort, almost one thousand miles away, just outside Dallas, in the gated community of Whippoorwill Falls, Judge Jeral Robertson was pulling his Benz into the garage.
Once inside the house, the judge tossed his keys onto the granite countertop in the kitchen. The sound reverberated through his cavernous McMansion.
Judge Robertson lived alone. His wife had left him last year, taking with her the couple’s then-fifteen- and eight-year-old daughters.
After the video had gone viral, everything about his life had changed.
The video had been released on a Monday night. By Tuesday morning, it had been viewed over ten thousand times and generated thousands of page views, as his lawyer had explained. Even in a county, and state, not typically sympathetic to children’s rights, the clip managed to create a stir. But t
hat was the internet for you. Liberals in New York and California could suddenly weigh in on how God-fearing Americans raised their children.
On the night in question, Judge Robertson had come home after a long day on the bench in family court. Child Protective Services had been a pain in the ass, doing their best to block the return of a six-year-old boy to his parents simply because they believed in regular corporal punishment.
Claire had made tuna casserole for dinner, never one of his favorites. And because his daughter Jenny and her younger sister, Emily, were hungry hours ago, it was now cold. No one could blame him for being in a foul mood.
His wife was leaning over the suds-filled sink, latex gloves pulled up to her elbows, working the pan with a scouring brush. “Want me to warm it up for you, honey?” she asked, with her usual cheerful subservience. Judge Robertson grunted and headed upstairs.
In the first bedroom, Emily was playing with a dollhouse she had received the previous Christmas. He smiled to himself, remembering how Claire had suggested that Emmy was probably a little too old for it. “A girl is never too old for a dollhouse,” he’d told her. And it was settled.
“Hi, Daddy,” Emily called out upon hearing his footsteps.
“Princess,” he replied flatly before continuing down the hallway to Jenny’s room.
Judge Robertson opened the door without knocking. Privacy was a privilege, not a right, in the Robertson household. Anything inappropriate for a father to see—meaning anything having to do with the female body—should be taken care of in the bathroom.
Jenny was sitting in her swivel chair, her back to the door, engrossed in something on her computer. Her noise-canceling circumaural headphones—another Christmas gift—muffled her father’s entrance.
By the time Jenny could throw her hands up across the screen, he was behind her. And had seen enough.
Judge Robertson was no technophile, but as a family court judge it was incumbent upon him to be knowledgeable about what kids were up to, since more often than not their pastimes brought nothing but strife to an otherwise happy household. Although he didn’t understand the particulars of different torrent sites, he grasped the overall concept. These websites were used to trade stolen content, mainly copyrighted movies and music, although any digital media could be transferred from user to user.
Rain Will Come Page 1
