Bullets of Rain Read online

  Lorelle had adjudged the shotgun particularly ugly, and as a killing device, its sleek lines and matte finish lent it the paradoxical, hideous beauty of a black mamba, it was a Benelli M3 Super 90 Tactical with a polymer pistol grip, a consumer version of the Entry Gun available only to the police and military. It was also one of Art's unpapered weapons, so Art thought it best not to linger on the biggest gun in his collection.

  "They're all loaded, all the time. Who's going to lay siege to us? Do you know something I don't?"

  "I don't have a dozen." Art stands right in front of her as he says this, hands on hips. "I only have five.''

  "Oh,'' she says, broadly. "Never mind, then. Five loaded guns is certainly no cause for alarm." After a beat for timing, she adds, "Did you know there's a law in Arizona that makes it illegal to own more than six dildos?"

  "Loaded or unloaded?" Art does the math. "You know, if you had six, you could hold one between all of your fingers and still have your thumbs free."

  "Fat chance." She gives him a comic little frown. "You wouldn't be able to get it up from jerking off over all your big guns, so you'd need 'em. I bet you a dollar." She brazenly grabs his balls, right through his sweatpants. "Oops. Guess I owe you a buck."

  Art is convinced his wife uses these little debates as foreplay, sort of mental aerobicism to tune the sensory nodes and turn up all the nerve endings, to resharpen the keen edge of physical perception. Within fifteen minutes they are naked and delirious on the carpet. Blitz snorts his disapproval and seeks other adventure while his masters make friction.

  "Hold me tight," she says as their breath runs rapid and healthy perspiration breaks. "Hold me down."

  Art knows this is so she can rock back and raise her legs on thigh muscles that thrum like bass strings. When she orgasms, those legs will scissor him crushingly as she momentarily forgets all about him. He is getting a cramp in his right foot when she climaxes the first time, so he eases back and brings her legs together to hug them against his chest, still hard inside her but not wanting to spoil her aftershocks by continuing to ram around like a clockwork machine.

  Her expression says a car battery has been hardwired to the pleasure centers of her brain. "Whoo, first stage separation," she says breathlessly, meaning her first climax, always the toughest. From here on they'll go off like champagne bubbles, or spinners in a fireworks show. She grabs Art's ass with both hands and pulls. He slides in to the hilt through molten quicksilver; where she was wet before, she is now hotter, slicker, more insistent.

  Art begins thrusting deep and firm, full-length strokes that cause her breasts to jar in an enticing way special to him, and private, because Lorelle has wonderful, natural breasts that only move that way when he is making love to her. He thinks-fragmentedly-that it's all wrong in movie sex, in porn sex, where it's always two lusty predators tearing the shit out of each other in a contest having nothing to do with affection or personal regard. There is no respect in movie sex; the best it can depict is a kind of gladiatorial combat. This isn't that, even though Lorelle is now openmouthed and rollicking like she wants him to bifurcate her.

  She husks in a raw breath, which causes her to cough. When she coughs, her muscles tighten unexpectedly around his cock and he is suddenly shoved into the freefall of orgasm. It shudders through him and he grabs her upper arms so tightly they'll leave bruises by nightfall. He is shaken by the scruff and tries, tries, tries not to make a stupid face when he comes.

  "You made the Wile E. Coyote face again,'' she says, meaning the expression Wile makes when he expects to get blown up or crushed, then doesn't, then does. "Baby, don't go." She feels his penis easing out of her, stunned for the moment, slipping.

  "I gotta get off my knees." He collapses into a sitting position, back against one of the sofas. "Dammit."

  She sees he has rug burns on both knees and rolls to show him a dorsal view. "I did it again, too." She has sustained a nearly identical scuff on the bone ridge below the small of her back.

  "Great, now our war wounds match."

  "It's a mating mark," she says. "Live with it. But I can't stay on the floor. Bed?"

  "Bed, definitely."

  "Good thing we didn't make it up, then. Because you're far from done." She crawls into his arms and he wraps her up.

  "I'm so glad you didn't say I was spent."

  "Sooo… how much does one of those lady guns cost?" she says, with the fakest contrition in the world, and they both start laughing, because they are deeply in love.

  That was the gun story.

  ***

  Remembering the gun story reminded Art of the danger inherent in idealizing his dead wife into someone perfect, a glossy memory that could never be competed with, or equaled. They had blazed through fights, lots of them, none a dealbreaker that could derail their relationship. The fights had been spice, or speedbumps, or one day's ill mood inflicted on a partner. Now Art could blast them all away, boom-boom-boom.

  He racked the huge, underslung action of the Desert Eagle and concentrated on single shots. The kick from the triangular slide was as feisty as that from the high-power ammo. The gun itself was so huge and formidable looking that it turned up in movies a lot as a badguy weapon. Art knew the Desert Eagle could be chambered for.50-caliber rounds-great for home defense if you wanted to destroy an intruder by blasting both halves of his sundered body through a cinderblock wall, and maybe tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

  The tang of gunsmoke hung in the air only long enough to be instantly blown away. Too damn windy. Art gave the shotgun a raincheck. He had planned to make a ham and cheese sandwich and mountaineer out onto the jetty, about halfway to the dish-the Sundial, sunless today-but the ocean had other plans. Spume from incoming waves whitecapped and shot straight up when they crashed against the rock, indicating the violence and speed of their delivery. Art stowed his artillery and looked for Blitz, closer to the beachline, which was sizzling with foam. Blitz disliked the aural shock of gunfire; another reason for his low grades in police dog school.

  Art thought ruefully about the gun story-the rest of the gun story. The punchline. The winning gambit.

  ***

  "Okay," says Lorelle, incapable oh detouring from topic despite the good sex. She extends her fist as though holding an invisible microphone. "Why don't you tell our studio audience what they really want to know, apropos your sick gun fixation?"

  "Which I'd what?"

  "Have you ever actually shot anybody? Like, pointed a gun at another human being and made him or her, ahem, eat lead?"

  "No." Art knows that to hesitate is to raise suspicions. "I have never shot anybody."

  "Aha. So all this you were saying, about defense and logic and realistic options-it's all theoretical, then, since you don't have any experience with what you're talking about?"

  "I don't ever want to have to." Pause. "But I want to be able to, if I have to."

  Their discourse had shriveled and died with that. Bottom line: Art had yet to apply practical experience to his lofty justifications. Easy to become a dead shot when your enemy is a paper target or plastic bottle. He had not lied to cover some past transgression-he was a virgin when it came to shooting people. He had never been burglarized, or assaulted or held up or simply mugged, not once in his entire life.

  And he intended to keep that record as spotless as he could manage, striving not to become the guy who never leaves his house for fear of getting mowed down by a bus, or perhaps struck by a wayward meteorite.

  ***

  There was a bottle jutting out of the wet sand near where Art caught up with Blitz. It was not truant garbage of Art's. It was glass, which flared his temper quick and hot as a strike-anywhere match. Whoever had left this goddamn litter hadn't thought about it breaking, or slicing up his dog's feet.

  It looked like an Old Crow whiskey bottle. There was a message inside. The sea had scoured the exterior of the bottle free of all labels and paste, and it was as blunted and lapidary as driftglass, w
hich meant it had been rafting around in the water for some time. The screw-on cap was edged with rust.

  Art opened the bottle and extracted the single page, vainly trying to get it to uncurl from the stubborn tube into which it had formed. He saw neat handwriting in blue ink on mellow linen paper. The wind made his effort to read useless, nearly comic.

  It might have been a runaway page from a forlorn diary, but it had a legible beginning and end. Moisture blotted out some of the words. It might have been a circumlocutiony confession of suicide. It was a pocket mystery that deserved later thought. Blitz came capering back from his latest thrilling excursion, clearly ready to retreat to the house for the day. He had what looked like a human bone in his mouth.

  "Was ist das derm?" he asked the dog. What have you brought me?

  … are conhused and hurt and angry and lost (the note read), and it pains me to witness your own pain when I heel torn between the things I feel I should do versus the things I know I must do. I don't want sympathy or pity: no one to mourn me. If I were a poet, I'd say beware oh all the ways in which love can become a lie. I truly believe love is the single most difficult human endeavor, and almost no one is prepared to deal with all oh its ramifications. We are all amateurs, and I hailed.

  If you are reading this, and ever see the face of love, try your best not to hall short oh its demanding mark. It is very important that you understand…

  The note appeared to be the middle page of a multipage tract, since there was no salutation and no signature. The page began and terminated in midsentence. The blocky handwriting could have belonged to a woman, or a man. To Art it was particularly confounding. If it was one of a million gag notes thrown into the sea every year by pranksters, why wasn't it better rehearsed, more definitive? If it was for real, had its author really wanted to leave the earth with so few words, whoever he or she had been?

  Epitaphs were always concise.

  Maybe the tombstone pieces of the jetty had depressed him or her, and she'd decided to end it in a grand, spasmodic gesture of self-murder. For some reason, people who killed themselves in the ocean always felt compelled to go in naked. Had she pitched her bottle, divested herself of clothing, and dived in? Had there been more than one note? Was that the reason for its brevity-she'd had to write it ten times, or a hundred?

  It'd be easier to Xerox, in that case, thought Art. I want to make sure everybody reads this little haiku I wrote to my wife, not that they'll be able to figure it out, and I'd like two hundred on gold-enrod and two hundred on astral blue, please.

  The page had inevitably gotten damp during the homeward jaunt, and the ink had blotted. This was handwritten, probably this one time, by someone who very possibly was dead now. A jagged shiver wriggled up the back of his neck and nested in his scalp… not from that conclusion, but from Art's sudden realization that he had already assigned the mystery scribe a default identity as female in his imagination.

  His inner caveman advised he merely needed to get laid. The serpent around his heart sighed, softly and with self-satisfaction, and resumed grinning its evil snaky grin.

  The bone Blitz had salvaged was slender and tapered, less than a foot long, picked clean and bleached by the sea. It looked like one of the two forearm bones, the ones that crisscrossed every time you turned your wrist. Art was not certain; he'd have to look it up. It had arrived on the scene simultaneously with his disinterment of the bottle. Were they related?

  His lunch plans aborted, Art decided to check on the local storm conditions and saw the word hurricane a lot.

  ***

  Hurricanes. What did he know about them? He knew that typhoons and cyclones were both hurricane types that preferred the Pacific Northwest to the California coast. They rarely manifested around here with the severity dealt to tropical islands, the Gulf of Mexico, or most sodden Southern states. He knew they were basically caused by air movements-upward spirals that gathered heat and energy through contact with warm ocean water; the more sea surface water that evaporated, the stronger the storm got. He had a radio in the garage that would pick up the watches and warnings broadcast by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and assumed that if things grew serious, he would listen for tone alerts and await advice, which usually meant evacuation- in which Art was not interested. His outer walls were sixteen inches thick and his shatterproof windows featured louvered metal shutters that dropped down at the touch of a button… or via hand crank, if the power took a dump. He knew one of the United States's most catastrophic hurricanes killed over six thousand people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900, most of the casualties due to what was called "storm surge" coupled with "storm tide" (a wind-and storm-powered adrenalation of the natural tide) that inundated the town in breakers nearly nine feet taller than the highest elevation on the island. That, plus the 140 mph winds, basically kicked Galveston 's butt. The storm was still a record holder, a century later.

  On the internet, Art found out about something called the Saffir-Simpson scale, a severity chart for hurricanes that reminded him of a preview card for a motion picture, with five categories: Minimal, Moderate, Extensive, Extreme, and Catastrophic. Category Five included Hurricane Camille, which had destroyed substantial portions of Louisiana and Missouri in 1969 with "sustained winds" over 155 miles per hour. That was long before Art's mother had moved to New Orleans. There was no category listing Galveston; Art thought "Apocalyptic'' might make a good Number Six.

  The National Weather Service had just upgraded their shortterm watch for the Bay Area and environs south, warning of possible flooding in terms of rainfall inches and throwing up a red flag for high winds. Storm watches specified the possibilities within a thirty-six-hour window. In the time it took Art to check, the report bumped from "watch'' to "warning." That reduced the window to twenty-four hours, and advised that hurricane conditions were to be expected, a general batten-down was nearly mandatory, and the less prepared should start thinking about evacuation.

  This was the condition Art had been waiting for, to stress-test the design of his beach house. If it reacted as blueprinted, the winds would shear away, deflected by the structure. If a ten-foot wave crashed straight down on it from the heavens, the aluminum braces would act as shock absorbers and slough off the impact in a sort of lightning rod effect-most of the force would be detoured straight into the ground. If the polymer windows bowed under pressure, the metal shutters could be dropped. If the "display areas" of the house succumbed, the garage was as secure as a bank vault in a submarine, with backup CB and NOAA radios, gas, fuel, supplies, even waste management and a power generator. Art thought of that concrete bunker as his own little Mars outpost, but it was a fallback, necessary only if his house design did not respond defensively, like a martial arts master who never hits you, yet never lets you land a blow: At its best, the effect would seem to be a confluence of physics and magic, the secret ingredient that pushed all the best designs into the spotlight.

  Dish reception on the big Proton monitor was disrupted by occasional digital frazzing, but nothing critical. The phones were still live and the cable lifeline to the internet displayed no ominous quirks. The power was on; there was still "fire in the wire," as electricians say. Computers did what satellites told them and subtly rearranged the disk network on the roof to snare more power. The barometer was dropping steadily but slowly, like a pearl descending through molasses. Art ran a power supply check on the shutter system and pronounced it sassy. His home was his castle, his literal Bastille.

  Derek's postcard was an excuse for him to lay in some guest stock before the weather worsened. He whistled Blitz to the kitchen. Their mission: Drop the drawbridge and sally forth into the enchanted faerie wood to procure supplies. The Jaguar XLS had been garaged for so long that its last wash-and-polish was membraned in a perfectly even layer of undisturbed dust. He really should have spread the car cover over it. For a steed, Art chose the Jeep-a muscular indulgence fully armed with padded roll bars and high-intensity lights, mor
e equal to inclement turns of nature. Blitz assumed his accustomed sprawl in the suicide seat and Art remote-keyed the garage door shut. It seemed to crush the light from inside, cutting them off life support, leaving them in a world of blue-gray thunderheads.

  They took the coast road, a serpentine limited-access two-lane that fed inland to Highway One via intermittent tentacles. Art quickly gained on a laggard Volkswagen bug-one of the new ones- puttering determinedly south, pinballing in search of the center stripe, which was nearly invisible in the rain now sheeting off the slurry-sealed tarmac. Art flashed, signaled, and blew around it impatiently. There were several hunched silhouettes inside, but the fellow travelers gave no indication of acknowledgment. They dwindled in the rearview and were swallowed by the elements.

  Art passed the turnoff for the party house, spying only a quick impression of lights, parked cars, a little cluster of humanity. Perhaps the bold adventurers in the VW were bound for that good time. If they were headed anywhere else, they'd probably be in trouble before long.

  As he made the turn onto the highway, a big Peterbilt rig monstered past in the northbound lane, road spume billowing from its wheel wells; another Dexedrine-happy road jockey fighting to make San Francisco before the storm cornered him.

  Rocko's primer-gray Charger lurked at the far end of the Toot 'N Moo lot like a cannonless panzer tank waiting in ambush. Four hundred and twenty-seven cubes, glass-packed twin Cherry Bomb mufflers, no trim, and dark blue tinted windows like wraparound sunglasses. It had a leather-sleeved doughnut steering wheel that Rocko had once joked was "in case I have to drive with handcuffs on.'' Art appreciated the jacked Seventies gas guzzler in a sidelong way, as though it was the only aspect of Rocko's odd personality he, as an older guy, was permitted to comprehend.