Red rain 2.0 (19 page)

In the bathroom, a woman sitting on the toilet, naked, rubber tubing wrapped tight on her right bicep and a hypo still stuck in the vein. Three in the face. In one front bedroom, two kids in one bed, coverlet soaked pinkish in the belly area. In the other, a young man fucking a girl, bodies still joined. Three holes in her side, between the hip and the ribs. Three in his, same place. Oozing.

"Some neighbor get pissed off because these people playing music real loud, or what?" I say. I'm not liking what the scene's telling me.

"Watch what you sayin', nigger. Dead kids some joke to you?" Dog snaps.

"I've seen worse. Innocent kids."

"Implyin' these kids
deserved
this shit?"

"No, I didn't mean ..."

"Fuck you didn't. You thinkin' they just nigger brats of drug-dealing slobs, what they get is what it is. Like they had some choice who their mammas and pappas was. Don't be giving me no war stories either, dude. You got no idea how

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bad the parents of the kids you saw wherever the fuck you saw 'em were. Torturers, rapists, stone killers for all you know."

"You're misunderstanding me, Dog. I didn't mean what you seem to be hearing."

"Fuck that, Luther. I didn't call you 'cause I like you. I ain't been liking you much since you held out on me when those two cops got the same face jobs as this crew. You know something. I want it."

"Hey man, I don't know a thing about this shit."

"You lying to me, nigger."

"Take it down a notch, Dog—now," I say sharply.

"Yeah, yeah," Dog nods, but the anger doesn't leave his eyes. "Here's how it is. Crib of the Trey Four Crew, cap-poppin' bangers. You right about the loud music. The neighbors say they hearing a lot of Ice T, stuff like that, 'til about two
a.m.
Then they hearin' nothing. No gunfire, nothing. And they do know the sound of shots 'round here. Start with that."

"Suppressed weapons. You don't need me to tell you."

"No, I do not. But the heads? My guess is the autopsy report's gonna say the same as the two cops."

"Yeah. So what? You got some shooters with the same weapons, is all that means. Maybe it's the start of a trend."

"What fucking weapons, Luther? Check the bodies. Not a single exit wound. Not one bullet hole in a wall or a door. How come nothing went through a head and came out the other side? How is that possible? And why three, always three holes?"

Choice time. Do I gain anything by keeping the Russians to myself? Negative. I'll need Dog. Go deeper. Is it personal with Vassily? Could be, but can't let it be. Unfuck it, Luther. Give.

"I'm thinking 5.45mm, in a short-barreled sub called an AKSU. Three-round bursts. Cartridges loaded with frangible bullets."

"Say what?"

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"Shit, Dog. You use hollow points, Cor-Bons probably, in your pistols because they expand, make bigger wounds, have more stopping power, right? But they've got enough mass still to pass through a man and hole the walls or whatever. You know what happens with a high-velocity rifle bullet, any caliber—small hole in the forehead, the entire back of the skull blown away by the exit. Holes in the walls again. Wet and messy, worse than 9-millie dome shots."

"Right. Keep goin'."

"Frangible bullets disintegrate, man. Very light, very fragile. They just barely penetrate and then explode. No exit wounds."

"Keep on, man."

"Regular NATO 5.56 ain't anything but a super-juiced .22, has a steel penetrator core, 62-grain bullet leaves the barrel at over three thousand feet per second. Major high velocity. Little hole going in, pressure wave cavitation and big hole leaving. These people wouldn't have any heads if it was that. Frangibles, 5.45, loaded subsonic, just go
pffft.
But they mush everything inside. Autopsy these stiffs, their brains or abdomens are gonna look like somebody put 'em in a Cuisinart. Run a really sensitive metal detector over the mush, you'll get a reading. Tiny fragments of copper mixed in with the tissue."

"I follow. Plenty of speed, but the bullet breaks up and stays inside. Why no blood pools?"

"Bleeding's mostly internal. The holes just ooze, unless a major artery very near the surface gets clipped. Then you'd get a real hosing. , man."

"Gimme it all, Luther."

I take Dog back to the steel-doored drug room, we kneel beside one of the bodies. "First, nobody got shot above the eyebrows or anywhere in the cranium. No dome shots with frangibles. They might not get all the way through skull bone before fragmenting, just scoop out a chunk of scalp and chips. Guy might even live. So the first shot goes in the cheek, just above the jaw bone. Notice how the next two are

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slightly higher and angle up toward the right? Means you got a right-handed shooter with the weapon set for three-round bursts, hits rising because of muzzle-climb. You'll see the same left-to-right climb on the belly shots, unless one of the shooters was left-handed. Then the pattern would reverse."

"Why? Tell me the fuck why? Why not just come in with a silenced nine and kill 'em all in the head?"

"Faster, cleaner, much quieter. Just
pjffi, pjffi, pfjft.
No bullets to get dug out of the walls or woodwork for ballistics to examine," I say. "And a style."

"Whose style?"

"Dog, this place," I wave my arm around to indicate the whole house, "was taken out by Russians. Ex-military, probably former Soviet Special Forces. It's their signature. Very, very ugly. Meant to scare the shit out of everyone who hears about it. So when they come callin', folks'U act nice and cooperative."

"Fresh, man. Going postal," Dog says. Funny look in his eyes now, anger gone and something like excitement lighting them up. "Every gangsta in town gonna know about this. They already jumped-up about the dead Crips and Bloods. They think they real bad, but they learning maybe there's dudes much badder movin' into the 'hood."

"Oh, much badder."

"Now I know why you been jivin' me, Luther. You after these fucks. I think you
know
these fucks. Your boss aware you cruisin' out on this?"

Forensics is swarming all over the house now, dusting for prints, scavenging fibers, the usual. The first of the bodies is being bagged and taken out to the meat wagon. "You gonna tell
your
boss what I told you, Dog?"

"Not today. When, depends," Dog says, smiling somewhere in between evil and friendly. "You and me, we together on this? We tight?"

"Could be. But just you. Not your crew."

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"You don't trust your County homies, so you goin' solo, right, Luther?"

"It isn't trust. I just don't think they're up to it."

"My guys are. Russian fuckin' mafia. Shit!"

"You do some crack this morning or what, Dog?" I say. "Seein' what you see here, hearing what I just told you? These aren't spray-and-pray gangstas. These are pros who could take out your whole squad before any one of them could even draw his tool."

"So they take your sorry ass out, too."

"They're never gonna see me coining. If they do, I know everything they know about this particular line of work. Plus some."

"You got the mouth. Ain't seen the moves ... except that one arm breaker."

"Maybe I'll let you watch, things come down that way."

"Shit. So you sayin' it's just you and me? That it, Luther?"

"That's the deal."

Dog raises his fist. I raise mine. We punch knuckles. Deal done.

15

Scut work the rest of the week. The high point is Hannah day. Her lawyer brings her in around ten-thirty one morning. We sit around the table in one of the interrogation rooms, but there's no tension. Ice Box and I aren't working her hard, that's clear even to her attorney, who's alert but relaxed. He looks curiously at the photos of Buzz Cut and the composite sketch of the female dealer we slide in front of his client.

Hannah's playing. She read me from the first moment she saw me. She likes to push the buttons on men. She's wearing a cropped jersey top that molds and cups her buffed little breasts like second skin, her nipples tight and pressing against the thin fabric as soon as she slinks into the room. Just the air conditioning, I know, but she gives me this look that almost seems to say she's making this happen deliberately. She's got a new navel ring, this one with a tiny gold spider dangling from it, her spandex skirt comes barely to mid-thigh, and her bare legs go a long way before they disappear into russet suede ankle boots.

It's all wasted on Ice Box. She might be a fourteen-year-old virgin in a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, the way he speaks to her. Maybe, I think, he's got a switch in his head that he flicks, and that's exactly what he sees before him. Not that she gives a damn. She's the clever one, she knows exactly who to toy with. One day, I think, she'll do this with

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the wrong guy in the wrong place and wind up damaged. What a waste.

My mind is nowhere near to being on my work. I'm falling in ruinous, dangerous love—a little deeper every time she feels my appraising eyes on her, which she never fails to no matter how subtle I try to be about it, and responds with a smile so full of promise it's hard to credit it's only a game. A little playtime.

People have been telling me for years I need professional help. I know they've all been right.

"Never saw this boy in my life," she says when Ice Box asks her about the Buzz Cut pix.

"You're absolutely sure?" IB presses.

"Oh, I'd remember. I always remember, don't I?"

"I wouldn't know, Hannah," IB says evenly.

"I bet Detective Ewing knows," the little bitch smiles. "He knows I'm the girl who remembers everything."

IB glances sharply at me. I shrug denial. He's maybe not buying it.

"How about the girl?" IB asks her. "She look at all familiar to you, Hannah?"

"Girls I remember too. Not this one, though," she says. She's under her lawyer's instructions not to make any mention of drug buying or implicate herself in any drug-related matters. "But someone a little like her. Around the malls and stuff, the clubs. Only the one I'm thinking of has eyes a bit larger, set farther apart. And her upper lip is fuller than her lower. Kind of pouty, you know? Like mine."

"So this sketch is close to someone you've seen, except for the eyes and that lip?" IB says. "Remember anything about that girl? Where you saw her, how frequently, how she dressed? Her car? You ever see her car?"

"A couple of clubs in Towson, where the college students hang," Hannah says. She knows we don't give a shit about her slipping underage into bars for drinks and dancing. "Streamers and, like, that other place that plays a lot of house music, with twin DJs? Shit, what's the name?"

145

"Thought you had this great memory, Hannah. You go to this place a lot, don't remember the name?" IB says, holding her eyes with his. I'm watching her breasts move like live creatures as she shifts and stretches her arms over her head as if that was a mnemonic aid of hers.

"Bodies and faces are my specialty, so maybe I never saw anyone I really got into there," she says coolly. "Give me a sec or two."

"Take your time," I say. Hannah lowers her arms, crosses them under her breasts, a completely unnecessary gesture since she's got my undivided attention.

"Think, think, think." She smiles. "Something techie, sort of sci-fi. Internet-y. Yeah, Ethernet! That's the place. Ethernet."

IB glances at me again. Both clubs were big with Ecstasy users.

"And the car, Hannah?"

"One of those new Bugs. Yeah, a few times I saw her driving a Bug. Took a boy with her, too, but always a different one. Not this jerk," she says, pushing Buzz Cut's photo away from her with one long, bloodred fingernail.

On some instinct I open another file and slide an 8X10 across the table. Hannah takes one quick look and smiles. "Him I know," she says. "I mean, I don't
know
him, but he's around a lot. He's always asking everybody if they want some Ecstasy." She jerks very slightly. Probably her lawyer tapped her knee with his under the table. "I never bought any from him, though," she says. "Lots of people did, but not me."

The photo's of Jimmy Halliday. I get an instant bad vibe on that. Maybe Jimmy's more than we thought.

"Okay, great. You're sure, Hannah? Anything else you can tell us?" IB asks. She shakes her head no.

"So, gentlemen, if that's it we'll be on our way," the girl's lawyer says, standing up. As they're leaving, Hannah sings
a
low line from that Fiona Apple disc: "I been a bad, bad

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girl
..."
which is as far as she gets before her lawyer grips her arm and propels her out the door.

I lean back in my chair. "Life is sweet for certain. But too fucking short. Just imagine how that girl could rock your world, IB."

"You're sicker than shit, Five-O. Drooling over kids. You're gonna get busted by Annie's people one of these days, you ever act on your perverted notions."