NEON RAIN
James Lee Burke
(ADULT LANGUAGE ALERT)
The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary. The anti-capital-punishment crowd—priests, nuns in lay clothes, kids from LSU with burning candles cupped in their hands—were praying outside the fence. But another group was there too—a strange combination of frat boys and rednecks—drinking beer from Styrofoam coolers filled with cracked ice; they were singing “Glow, Little Glow Worm,” and holding signs that read THIS BUD IS FOR YOU , MASSINA and JOHNNY, START YOUR OWN SIZZLER FRANCHISE TODAY.
“I’m Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux, New Orleans police department,” I said to one of the guards on the gate. I opened my badge for him.
“Oh yeah, Lieutenant. I got your name on my clipboard. I’ll ride with you up to the Block,” he said, and got in my car. His khaki sleeves were rolled over his sunburned arms, and he had the flat green eyes and heavy facial bones of north Louisiana hill people. He smelled faintly of dried sweat, Red Man, and talcum powder. “I don’t know which bunch bothers me worse. Those religious people act like we’re frying somebody for a traffic citation, and those boys with the signs must not be getting much pussy over at the university. You staying for the whole thing?”
“Nope.”
“Did you nail this guy or something?”
“He was just a low-level button man I used to run in once in a while. I never got him on anything. In fact, I think he screwed up more jobs than he pulled off. Maybe he got into the mob through Affirmative Action.”
The guard didn’t laugh. He looked out the window at the huge, flat expanse of the prison farm, his eyes narrowing whenever we passed a trusty convict walking along the dirt road. The main living area of the prison, a series of two-story, maximum-security dormitories contained within a wire fence and connected by breezeways and exercise yards and collectively called the Block, was as brilliantly lit as cobalt in the rain, and in the distance I could see the surgically perfect fields of sugar cane and sweet potatoes, the crumbling ruins of the nineteenth-century camps silhouetted against the sun’s red afterglow, the willows bent in the breeze along the Mississippi levee, under which many a murdered convict lay buried.
“They still keep the chair in the Red Hat House?” I said.
“You got it. That’s where they knock the fire out their ass. You know how the place come by that name?”
“Yes,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.
“Back before they started putting the mean ones in lock-down in the Block, they worked them down by the river and made them wear striped jumpers and these red-painted straw hats. Then at night they stripped them down, body-searched them, then run them into the Red Hat House and threw their clothes in after them. There wasn’t no screens on the windows, and them mosquitoes would make a Christian out of a man when a baseball bat couldn’t.”
DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART
Dean Koontz
With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant drove through the glistening night, searching for the red door. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the roof of the truck.
Without thunder or lightning, without wind, the storm had come in from the Pacific at the end of a somber February twilight. More than a drizzle but less than a downpour, it sluiced all the energy out of the city. Los Angeles and environs became a metropolis without sharp edges, urgency, or spirit. Buildings blurred into one another, traffic flowed sluggishly, and streets deliquesced into gray mists.
In Santa Monica, with the beaches and the black ocean to his right, Spencer stopped at a traffic light.
Rocky, a mixed breed not quite as large as a Labrador, studied the road ahead with interest. When they were in the truck—a Ford Explorer—Rocky sometimes peered out the side windows at the passing scene, though he was more interested in what lay before them.
Even when he was riding in the cargo area behind the front seats, the mutt rarely glanced out the rear window. He was skittish about watching the scenery recede. Maybe the motion made him dizzy in a way that oncoming scenery did not.
Or perhaps Rocky associated the dwindling highway behind them with the past. He had good reason not to dwell on the past.
So did Spencer.
Waiting for the traffic signal, he raised one hand to his face. He had a habit of meditatively stroking his scar when troubled, as another man might finger a strand of worry beads. The feel of it soothed him, perhaps because it was a reminder that he’d survived the worst terror he would ever know, that life could have no more surprises dark enough to destroy him.
The scar defined Spencer. He was a damaged man.
Pale, slightly glossy, extending from his right ear to his chin, the mark varied between one quarter and one half an inch in width. Extremes of cold and heat bleached it whiter than usual. In wintry air, though the thin ribbon of connective tissue contained no nerve endings, it felt like a hot wire laid on his face. In summer sun, the scar was cold.
The traffic signal changed from red to green.
The dog stretched his furry head forward in anticipation.
Spencer drove slowly southward along the dark coast, both hands on the wheel again. He nervously searched for the red door on the eastern side of the street, among the many shops and restaurants.
Though no longer touching the fault line in his face, he remained conscious of it. He was never unaware that he was branded. If he smiled or frowned, he would feel the scar cinching one half of his countenance. If he laughed, his amusement would be tempered by the tension in that inelastic tissue.
The metronomic windshield wipers timed the rhythm of the rain.
Spencer’s mouth was dry, but the palms of his hands were damp. The tightness in his chest arose as much from anxiety as from the pleasant anticipation of seeing Valerie again.
THE BAD MAN JUBAL ROSE
Gordon Kessler
“Oh, he can help you with the killin’, all right,” the strange old man told Miranda Prentiss as wind blew the rain hard against the painted-over window behind him. He used a pencil, whittled down to near nothing, scrawling on a corner torn from the bar menu. “I see you’re desperate. But you gotta go find the bastard first, and then hope he doesn’t slit your throat in the bargain.” He gazed at her for a long moment. “And don’t think he won’t do it, neither—even to a little ginger-haired girl like you.”
Miranda shifted in her chair and opened her wallet. They sat at a far corner of the dimly lit bar where she could watch the front door and keep an eye on the bartender at the same time. Her words came out meeker than she intended. “Kincaid, is it?” She scanned his craggy face. “Is that your first or last name?”
“Just my name. Don’t matter first nor last.”
After a brief lull in the storm outside, a gust struck the window and caused Miranda to jump. She took a breath. “Well, Kincaid, how much will it cost me?”
“Twenty bucks,” he said, and wiped moisture from his grizzled chin. His fingernails were long and dirt-rimmed, and his hand, weathered and covered in age spots.
Miranda bit her lip as she pulled a twenty out of her purse. She glanced about and then said low, “Twenty dollars to kill three people? That’s all he charges?” She reached over the table to hand it to him.
“Hell, no. He don’t charge nothin’.” The old man snatched the bill from her fingers. “The twenty’s for Pamela—and for me to keep quiet.” He toed the mottled yellow and brown dog at his feet, and the old, rain-soaked canine raised its head. “She needs surgery on a tumor. And how ‘bout another round, if you don’t mind.” He turned the jigger in front of him upside down.
Miranda signaled the bar tender and stood up as Kincaid passed her the scrap of paper.
His eyes narrowed. “You tell anybody?”
Miranda unintentionally averted her gaze. She frowned back, trying to look offended.
“Did you?”
Her frown deepened, and just as she opened her mouth to lie, he said, “Who? Girlfriend?” The old man glanced down at the dog and shook his head. “Knew I shouldn’ta gotten involved. Damn it.” He glared at her and answered himself. “Your boyfriend.”
Miranda’s face burned, but she didn’t reply. As her gaze drifted to the floor, she clenched her jaw. The dog’s leg had a baseball-size lump on it. “Twenty dollars for a veterinarian to cut out a tumor?”
“Wrong again. No vet gonna touch Pamela Anderson. Don’t trust ‘em. Bill over at the secondhand store said he’d slice it off for a burger, fries and a bottle of Cold Duck. He used to cut hair.”
The bartender was making his way around empty tables, headed toward them with a shot glass of whiskey in his hand. Miranda placed a five-dollar bill on her side of the table and began to walk away. Not wanting a long wild goose chase, she turned back and raised the note with the directions on it. “Are you sure I can find him here—this Bad Man?”
Kincaid smiled as a full whiskey glass clacked on the table beside him.
“Oh, yeah … you can find him there—no doubt.” He threw the shot back, winced and licked cracked, purple lips that writhed for a moment like night crawlers on hot pavement. He coughed and then his eyes popped wide. “Just don’t know if he won’t kill ya when you do.” After tonguing the rim of the small glass, he added, “And better call him Jubal Rose. He don’t take kindly to being called bad.”