Bullets of Rain Read online

  David J. Schow

  Bullets of Rain

  ***

  Widowed architect Arthur Latimer has become a recluse in his own home: a storm-proof fortress that doubles as a shrine to his dead wife. But the outside world beckons in the form of a bizarre party downbeach.

  Now, just as the biggest hurricane ever to hit the Pacific Northwest rolls in with deadly force, Art is subjected to intrusions from his past and invasions from the present. And soon he begins to doubt everything he sees or thinks he already knows. And soon you may too.

  Genre: Psychological thriller.

  ***

  From Publishers Weekly

  Storms raging outdoors and in the mind of the protagonist create a maelstrom of menace in this sinuous psychological thriller by Schow (The Kill Riff, The Shaft). A whopper of a hurricane is barreling up the California coast, and renegade architect Art Latimer is planning to ride it out and test the structural integrity of his self-designed dream home. At the same time, he's struggling to batten down powerful feelings about his wife, Lorelle, whose death two years before sent him into an emotional tailspin. As the storm intensifies, a string of peculiar experiences suggest that the foundations of his reality are wobbling. He finds an old bottle washed up on the beach containing a cryptic message that speaks eerily to him. Then he's visited by a long-lost friend who mysteriously disappears without a trace from the premises. Meanwhile, a wild house party is underway down the beach and host Price, a steely manipulator who employs drugs and humiliation to control his guests, schemes to use the storm as cover for playing sinister mind games with Art. Schow works suspenseful sleight-of-hand with his story elements, skillfully underplaying the significance of clues and deftly managing character viewpoints to direct what the reader sees. His kinetic orchestration of events-action sequences, moments of moving intimacy and the richly symbolic tempest outside-and vivid hardboiled prose push the plot to a thunderclap climax that in less assured hands would seem farfetched but here is a measure of coolly calculated audacity.

  ***

  From Booklist

  Schow is a recognized name in the horror field, credited with coining the term splatterpunk and probably best known for his screenplay of the cult film The Crow. (This may be part of the reason this novel often seems more like a screen treatment than a full-bodied piece of fiction.) Evoking both John Fowles' The Magus and Ed Woods' Glen or Glenda (but leaning heavily toward campy schlock rather than higbrow lit), Schow experiments with the concepts of sexual identity, personality disintegration, and megalomania. A recluse living near the ocean gets mixed up in a confrontation with a bunch of people from a nearby house who have been fed a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. There's also a hurricane brewing. It's all fairly predictable with the exception of a gender switch involving the main character. On the plus side, the writing is generally smooth, the dark-and-stormy-night settings are well crafted, and the characters are interesting if not always believable. Schow doesn't quite make this odd book work, but his considerable following will want to see for themselves.

  ***

  "A jagged nightmare spiked with charm, melancholy, and vicious intelligence."

  -Michael Marshall Smith, author of Only Forward

  "Bullets of Rain is a highly original, boldly conceived psychological thriller observed with the rapt eye and assassin's sting of the artist as fer-de-lance."

  -John Farris, author of The Fury and the Power

  "David Schow's Bullets of Rain is a thriller, a literary metaphor, and one dark speeding bullet of a novel. Edgy, insightful, and fearless, it's a book I couldn't put down."

  -Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of A Fine Dark Line

  "In Bullets of Rain, David J. Schow has given us his boldest, most audacious fiction to date. Here, all of Schow's glittering weapons are sharper than ever before."

  -Peter Straub

  ***

  Scaning & primary formating: pagesofdeath.

  Secondary formating & proofing: pua.

  ***

  for everyone who complained that I'd never do the novel things again, thanks for reading

  THURSDAY

  Art did not care exactly which day it was. Dawn had sneaked up behind his home, vermilion and gorgeous, but he missed it. Specific dates, and chronological time itself, were demoted in importance; irrelevant. Time passed in terms of work, meals, diversions, stacked-up phone messages (mostly unreturned), sunrise, sunset, and airing out Blitz for exercise. Days blurred together, except for that little extra bit on Thursdays, of course.

  He polished off his usual double-sized mug of cappuccino, double strength, as the sun climbed and fought to penetrate the overcast. Then he installed into his metabolism a pint of juice laden with a zillion times the minimum adult daily requirement of vitamin C. This invested him with the will to face his daily assessment in the mirror; shower or not? He gave it a miss. Blitz intruded, sniffed him, and made Art reconsider.

  Blitz was an Alsatian-Dobie mix who had essentially flunked out of police dog school and wandered into Art's stewardship two doggie steps shy of German Shepherd Rescue. His lines were straight and level and fortunately free of the potential for hip dysplasia that often plagued purebreds. He had been taught to respond to a few commands spoken in German, a conceit Art rather enjoyed, since it was colloquial, not the sharp-edged K-9 monosyllables favored by the canine gladiator academies. Blitz decided which commands were obeyed, or ignored, with an endearing sort of canine resolve that probably made perfect sense in dog-logic.

  "Komm her!" Art shouted, down-beach. Blitz duly galloped forth in a scatter of sea-spray and salty sand.

  Thursday's extra adventure was the mail.

  Art's mail was delivered to a Mail Boxes Etc. branch in San Jose. Once a week, the manager, an energetic power cell of a woman named Keiko Nakamura, bundled the catch and next-dayed it to the rural box near the turnoff from the highway to Art's home. The red, white, and blue tearproof package generally arrived heavy with catalogs and junk. Art enjoyed riffling his mail, a week's worth at a time, seeking the small, interesting exceptions like treasure: Mom sometimes sent cards from Louisiana, always expressing the same concern and never forgetting to mention the weather-another anachronistic holdover from a time when people who had nothing to talk about still engaged in written correspondence. It struck Art as quaint; he did not wish to change the way his mother did anything. Sometimes birthday greetings arrived, and they always shocked him, because he had stopped keeping track of his birthdays. As years passed, those annual howdy-doos had dwindled to about five dogged friends and two ex-lovers. He had not received (or solicited) an actual gift in over a decade. Bills, or anything with a cellophane window, went into a separate pile to ignore until Art's once-per-month check-writing sessions. He refused to permit creditors to dominate any more of his time. Trying to stay ahead of the streamlined, mechanized assault of bills was like treading water with a cinderblock tied to each leg, a loser's game. Art tamed his bills by allowing them one evening per month, no more, no matter how urgent they claimed to be. It was a small gesture of defiance, and a pointless one, but it appealed to his sense of control. He occasionally purchased odd or obscure books, trinkets, or toys from online auctions, and when these arrived he always saved them till last, savoring their tiny revelations as though he had not expected to receive them. They did not count as gifts.

  The mailbox was at a five-minute walk from the house. It was fifteen inches tall, all metal, and not mailbox-shaped. Two keys; Art had one; his mail carrier, a civil yet befuddled fellow named Mr. LeBow, was caretaker of the other. There was no flag on the box, and no giveaway nameplate. Art preferred the small delight of opening the hatch, every Thursday, and "discovering" the packet there.

 
The bundle was thin and weightless this week, bound with consumer flotsam by a fat USPO rubber band. A sheet of white paper had been deformed into the back of the mailbox-most likely shoved in through the narrow top slot by some passerby prior to the mail delivery. Art drew it out and flattened it. PARTY, it proclaimed in huge block letters.

  There was a hand-drawn map of the coast road. If the page had been legal-sized, he thought, there would have been enough room to depict the distance to his own home, to scale, and he thought contemptuously that most people needed to learn what a ruler was. The directions indicated the residence a half mile to the south of his own. There was a handwritten notation in the lower left: HOWDY NEIGHBOR! DON'T BE A STRANGER! DROP BY AND SAY HELLO! It was signed Michelle. Some sort of celebration was due to commence at 6 P.M. tonight, and last until ?????

  "Blitz, get your ass back here.'' It was one of the few English phrasings Blitz had doped out; otherwise it was beweg deinen Arch hier ruber. The dog tore himself away from whatever fascinating dead thing he had found to smell, and delivered his dog buns hence, to await the next diversion.

  Art decided to make the short hike to the Spilsbury house, which he knew to be storm-girded, therefore currently tenantless. He could barely see it. A persistent, thick roll of ocean mist was clogging the air. Up above, somewhere, was the sun. The house beyond Spilsbury's, the one pinpointed by the flyer, was not visible, already lost in a ghostly limbo of drifting mist banks. Art was curious as to whether there was also a flyer lodged in Spilsbury's box, even though nobody would be home there until next May.

  If he found one, he intended to crumple it up, too.

  Arthur Latimer had originally constructed his Point Pitt house for his wife, Lorelle. Panoramic ocean frontage based on a design of slanted aluminum beams incorporating a forward-thinking stormwatch durability. Teak decks blended into shatterproof polymer windows, the architecture anticipating a hellacious Pacific blow. The curvature and wind-deflection schema were derived from geodesic domes used in the Arctic, to protect radar and microwave dishes in high winds at more than a hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. It had cost Art a bunch of glass to rethink the windows into their current pyramidal layout, but once he'd nailed it, he won a feature spread in Architectural Digest, plus a couple of trophies.

  His specialty was rethinking space in terms other than square feet. His designs had replaced everything from the Mondrian glass boxes of the 1960s to the forsaken strip malls of the 1980s, and always in an unpredictable way, sometimes incorporating bits and pieces of a place's original layout into its retrofit, the way rich Victorians used to pay to have ''ruins'' constructed on their manicured grounds. Backers became enthusiastic, and began to dole out, big-time.

  Another conquered beast on his trophy wall was a new attack on residential solar power systems. He configured an overlapping disk network that followed the natural arc of the sun phototropically, like a flower, having gotten the inspiration after staring abstractedly at a pile of CDs near his stereo. The idea was nothing new, but his containment frame attracted immediate notice-he blueprinted an innovative way to conceal the array so that it didn't resemble most solar panels, which usually looked like a collapsed dinosaur skeleton on the roof of a house. An energy corporation named Daystar had picked up the RGD tab, and, as a cookie, comped him the hardware for bug testing. The inset steel frame featured eight inches of insulation through which water could be cycled for "smart" heating or cooling, based on a computer-generated weather map of the region. So far the system had outperformed Art's usual specs, which he always biased toward the conservative. He had not yet stress-tested the network's reserve power capacity because he was still awaiting delivery of the storage cells-the "battery" part of the active system. Big enameled gray racks built into the south wall of the garage waited empty, thanks to the usual urban delays and excuses. Art relished the idea of independence from electricity monopolies, which were becoming top-heavy and cost-prohibitive in California with the virulence of a plague. Once the cells were installed, he'd be a tiny bit freer. Soon, but not today.

  Art's latest challenge was to create a commercial "dining complex" for high-end restaurants that looked like something other than a jumped-up food court, which is what it essentially was. The target clientele was people who wanted the same round-robin selection in eateries that they were accustomed to from multiplex theaters-if you're five minutes late for one show, pick another. Round-shouldered from malls, this imaginary demographic nonetheless insisted on completely secure shopping, entertainment, and eating "experiences." They feared crime and sought hermetic enclosure… but without feeling trapped. Their illusion of free will had been shaved down to a choice they could handle-usually which credit card would pay for the meal, since one must always be seen conspicuously advantaging a respectable piece of plastic. Gimmicky Vegas-style and amusement park restaurants had had their day. Consumers were hip to the hollow con of it all, and that meant a new con was required, and the promise of upscale respectability was the best con of all.

  Art had been vetted onto the gig at the urging of Alex Street, a former partner in his old design firm who had talked Art up to the financiers. Another favor owed into the to-do file, Art thought. He scooped up the assignment for an outrageous advance, set his own schedule, and was now holed up in his secluded eyrie, awaiting the coming of miracles, and deploying every conceivable excuse to dodge actually devoting any hard pencil time to the damned thing. The sun rose and set while the army-ant march of checkup phone calls dwindled. Art walked his dog. Blitz loved any excuse for extra dog-fun. The work continued to confound him. What had seemed effortless before became forced and impenetrable, like the abrupt discovery that you have forgotten or misplaced the ability to speak a foreign language you thought you knew. Somehow, an essential capacity had evaporated, erecting a wall between Art and his life's work; lost while he slept, perhaps, or diminished in the demarcation between his married life and the life he had now.

  Lorelle, for anybody who wanted to know, was three years dead. Therefore, the story went, she'd never gotten to see the complete retrofit of the house. Her death had been ugly, pointless, and prolonged-the heartbreaking kind, the kind that disallowed detail to outsiders or prying minds. Art managed his grief but was still frighteningly susceptible to being throttled by it at the weirdest times. Perhaps it would be better for him to swallow the feelings, bury the past, break the connections, and sell the house… but he never made it to that fourth step. It meant picking up the phone and initiating a long and eroding sequence of business events. So far he'd kept from making the first call and setting that engine in motion.

  Two hundred yards to the north was a stone jetty composed of shattered granite, delivered to the location several times a year by a stonemason in San Jose. The guy's truck proclaimed him to be one of the Sons of Chispa Verdugo Villa, the company specialty being grave monuments. Leftovers, bad cuttings, and failed tombstones made up the jetty, which curved far out into deep water, a crooked, pointing finger of rock. At its terminus was a gigantic military microwave dish, its convex ear usually targeted straight up, like a birdbath stopover for rock-sized mythological predators. At different times, Art thought it resembled a huge sundial, which is what he generally called it. It was engirded by hurricane fence, razor wire, posted warnings. He'd never seen any staff or service guys, if there were any. Local scoop had it that a lighthouse had once occupied the spot. That was irresistibly romantic, and Art had sketched it more than once. He loved the idea of its beam circling far above his home, cutting some storm.

  His nearest neighbor was the Spilsbury place, built on the adjacent property sometime in the 1970s, a more classic sort of timbered beach house on stilts and pilings. It sat closer to the highway; Art had given his own place a long and nonlinear driveway on purpose-an S-shaped double switchback that permitted distance and foliage to obscure the road over there… somewhere. The Spilsbury place was boarded up for the winter.

  But that was the party house, hal
f a mile downbeach, give or take. Half a mile was approximately 2,640 feet, or almost nine football fields; half a klick and change, or 160 rods, if you wanted to get totally ridiculous about it. Art didn't know much about the place except that it was slightly more modern that Spilsbury's, with a big show-off glass turret pointed toward the sea. It was usually a shadow in the mist, indistinct even when he peeked, using his telescope, from his own west deck. Lights had recently become visible at night. Somebody was there, right now, broadcasting occasional life signs without detail. No strays had yet wandered as far as the jetty.

  High tide brought the Pacific Ocean swells to within eighty yards of where Art's house was dug in; safe distance, even for stormy times.

  East, behind the house, sufficiently obscured by dunes and brush, was the coast road. San Francisco was an hour to the north. Once per week he could hear the distress siren that still sounded from the fire station in Half Moon Bay, as though air raids by the forces of Hirohito were still imminent. It was an evocative and mournful noise; it put Art in mind of blackouts, and vigilance, and staying prepared.

  The nearest convenience mart, if you could call it that, was a Toot 'N Moo fifteen miles down the highway. It had begun life as a truckstop and featured enough rest rooms for ten people, with showers. The shitty coffee shop had shut down within one fiscal year and Art only stopped there for gas, once he'd quit smoking. The counter was usually manned by a former skate punk named Rocko (according to his handwritten name tag), who mopped up, played a lot of speed metal too loudly, and fed the slushie machine from a large, vile-looking bucket whenever he wasn't zipping around the parking lot on his board. Rocko had been known to shut the store down whenever he had band practice, so operative business hours were a hazy concept at best. There was a sort of smalltown market in Half Moon Bay, but it was only open from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, administered by a couple who otherwise qualified as retirees. Instead of repairing to some bedroom community to play shuffleboard and watch cable, they invested their market with the sort of attention your grandma would devote to vegetable gardens, or quilt making. The market would die as soon as they did. Small, friendly groceries with creaky wooden floors were a last-gasp anachronism from the twentieth century, not destined to persevere.