After the Rain (2004) Read online

  After the Rain

  Chuck Logan

  * * *

  FOR SLOAN HARRIS

  * * *

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  The young brown guy, the slightly older black guy, and…

  CHAPTER TWO

  He sat in his car, a silly smile on his…

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ace Shuster woke up feeling lucky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She came spinning through the door fast. Ace thought he…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  County Deputy Lyle Vinson had graduated in the same class…

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ace walked around the back and braced himself as he…

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  An hour later they were in another bar and Ace…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The first moment of truth came in Detroit two days…

  CHAPTER NINE

  The rotary phone in the booth at Camp’s Corner still…

  CHAPTER TEN

  Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Broker gave his name and came under the intense scrutiny…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Broker left the sheriff’s office pissed, but also experiencing fits…

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nothing happened the way she expected. She woke after ten…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Broker did not enjoy the smile on Jane’s face, or…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dale Shuster stood in the doorway of Shuster and Sons…

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Aw, God, what an asshole. You all right?” Nina raised…

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  His cameo role completed, Broker limped back to town in…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Joe Reed came down from Winnipeg just before dawn, drove…

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nina woke up alone — not just in Ace’s bed, but…

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “She calls herself Nina Pryce. Red hair, mid-thirties, and she’s…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Broker and Kit watched the blue single-engine Piper Saratoga II…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ace came down the stairs two at a time; edgy,…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “This is Jane.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Nina needed the walk back to the bar to get…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Dale had a few errands. First, he stopped at the…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “This is Jane.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dale ran the tape over and over until the light…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  George Khari, driving north from Grand Forks, was thinking numbers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  They were taking one-hour shifts, perched on top of the…

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  After a tense half hour sneaking around out on the…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Nina jerked awake as her cell phone buzzed on the…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Jane stayed in the car as Nina went to the…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Joe stood at the window talking on his cell to…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Barry Sauer was sitting three miles east of Langdon, parked…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Face into the wave.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Broker stood next to the ambulance, listening to the radio…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Name, rank, serial number.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  It was turning into the kind of hot July day…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  As Yeager drove back to town, Broker worked at shoring…

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Dale crossed to the TV/VCR, pushed in a tape, and…

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Point to point, the distance from Langdon to Lake Elmo…

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  At some point the lull of the tires on the…

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Who was it said everybody should get fifteen minutes of…

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Everybody was yelling at once, piling in, falling all over…

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  First Dale took the 500 mg of Prussian blue. Then he…

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Broker woke up in the process of being bodily thrown…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CHUCK LOGAN

  CREDITS

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter One

  The young brown guy, the slightly older black guy, and the old white guy had been in the room for thirty minutes and now the sweat was running down their arms. They didn’t need to be reminded, but the black guy went and said it anyway.

  “Damn, it’s hot.”

  “It ain’t so hot,” the old white guy said. “Panama was hot. Somalia was hotter. Kuwait was really hot, but that was a dry heat. Now, you take your triple-canopy jungle in Laos…”

  “Don’t start,” the black guy said.

  The temperature in the windowless room had topped ninety degrees at ten A.M., and that was half an hour ago. The room was in a suite of unused offices in an almost vacant strip mall off Highway 12 on the western edge of the Detroit metro area. The building was deserted except for a one-room telemarketing sweatshop at the other end.

  The white guy was closer to sixty than to fifty, and his shaggy white-blond hair was shot with gray, and he’d given up trying to hide the bald spot on top. Once he’d been cinched down tight all over. Now his skin and muscles were starting to look like they were a size too large. He shook his head, toed the dirty carpeting, and laughed.

  “Figures. No A/C. No nothing. Lookit this place. Some op. Shows how much we rate. Where are we? Inkster? What kind of name is that?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the black guy, who was in his late twenties. Unlike his older partner, he enjoyed looking in the mirror every morning. His skin fit him nice and tight.

  They wore Nikes and faded jeans and oversized polo shirts that did not entirely conceal the holstered Berettas, the pagers, the plastic hand ties and cell phones hanging from their belts. They were obviously exhausted. They had not shaved in the last twenty-four hours.

  They were not cops.

  Nobody would admit who or what they were now. Only what they’d been. The old one was former Delta, former SF. The young one had also been with Special Forces. They’d been through the looking glass and now they carried nothing in their wallets or on their gear that could be traced back to the military. They were simply known by their mission name: Northern Route.

  They were volunteers, totally on their own.

  An hour ago they snatched a Saudi Arabian businessman off a busy street, stuffed him in a Chevy van, and brought him to this crummy little room from which the air conditioning, the desks, and the chairs had been removed. There was a touch of method in the selection of this room: the sensation of slow suffocation as an interrogation tool. For now the prisoner remained blindfolded. A little later they would take the blindfold off.

  So it was just the three of them, and a lot of sweat, and the worn gray carpet, the bare walls, and the gray ceiling tiles crowded overhead with their grids of monotonous dots. And now the walls, carpet, and ceiling started closing in to form a solid block of heat.

  The old guy wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “The right way to do this is we should be sitting
on a runway. Three hundred thousand Arab types down the road in Dearborn for these wrongos to hide out with. And there’s not a single military base in this whole town. That’s real smart.”

  “Hollywood, man — just cool it. It’s only half an hour. They’re on the way in from Willow Run to pick him up.” On him, the black guy nodded at the third man in the room.

  “What would be nice, Bugs, is for Omar here to tell us something.”

  Bugs shook his head. “Never happen. We can’t make deals, that’s for the suits. But my guess is this guy’s hardcore Qaeda. No way he’s gonna talk to anybody. Nah, I think he’s gonna sit out the war on the beach in Cuba.”

  Hollywood nodded. “You hear that, Omar? Camp Delta. Nice eight-by-eight chain-link dog kennel. Got your little rug and your prayer arrow scribed on the concrete floor.”

  The third man in the room showed lots of brown skin, as he’d been stripped down to his jockey shorts. He sat stiffly on a metal folding chair, his hands bound tightly behind his back in plastic cuffs. In contrast to his scruffy captors he was clean-shaven, his thick dark hair was styled, his fingernails and toenails looked recently manicured. He smelled of cologne rather than sweat and fatigue. In further contrast, a comfortable two inches of belly flab drooped over his waistband. According to the word, he was the renegade nephew of a Saudi prince, one of the world’s ultimate rich kids.

  But right now he was seriously separated from his Rolex and his Mercedes, and he had a band of duct tape wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. The intell on him suggested he was a dilettante slumming in jihad, that he was soft, that he would crack. So far, the intell was wrong.

  Hollywood scrubbed at the stubble on his chin with his knuckles, then he grimaced at the prisoner. He crossed the room in three swift strides, grabbed a handful of the prisoner’s sleek black hair, yanked him to his feet, and shouted, “We know you’re getting set to move something. So what is it, where is it, and who’s doing it?”

  The prisoner hunched his shoulders and drew his chin into his chest.

  Hollywood’s frustration blew on through to outright anger. He seized the prisoner with both hands and roughly spun him in a circle. “So which way’s Mecca, Omar? Take a fuckin’ guess!”

  “Hey, hey, knock it off,” Bugs said, moving in quick. Their good cop/bad cop choreography was getting out of hand. It was the heat.

  “Yeah, right.” Hollywood rammed the staggering prisoner’s head against the wall.

  “You goddamn redneck — you’re way out of line. Back off!” Now Bugs was shouting as he stepped in between Hollywood and the prisoner, who had collapsed to his knees. They glared at each other, standing so close the sweat on their noses almost merged.

  Hollywood squinted his pale blue eyes. “You young guys — you think this is some kind of extreme sporting event. Let me clue you. This is a war. This scumbag is the enemy. You better get some hate in your chest, son; ’cause if you don’t, when the time comes, you’re gonna hesitate…”

  Bugs stood his ground and stared directly into Hollywood’s eyes. “You got no cause to bad-mouth his religion.”

  “Wise up,” Hollywood said evenly. “This raghead wants to kill your family because he’s an intolerant Wahhabi creep, get it?”

  “Fine, but I’m telling you, he ain’t going to talk, not to us.”

  “Oh yeah? There’s ways.”

  “Spare me.”

  “When I was in Nam…”

  “It’s too early in the day for the geezer hour,” Bugs said. “And it’s way too hot, besides.” Rolling his eyes, he reached down, hoisted the prisoner by the arms, and guided him back to the chair.

  Hollywood walked to the corner, stooped and plucked a half-liter plastic bottle of springwater from a twelve-pack. He got up, opened the bottle, and returned to the seated prisoner. Slowly he poured several ounces of the water on the prisoner’s bare chest. The prisoner reacted to the touch of liquid, instinctively licked his lips. Thirsty.

  “All you need is a gallon of water and a washcloth. Put the rag over his mouth and nose and just dribble the water. Slow suffocation. Works like a charm. Don’t leave mark one,” Hollywood said.

  “They catch you doing that today you go to Leavenworth. Besides, evidence acquired through torture is not admissible in court.”

  “Court? Court!” Hollywood actually shuffled his feet in a brief dance of rage. “Oh great, why don’t we read him his rights and have a séance and see if we can contact William Kunstler.”

  “Maybe you could pull that shit in Afghanistan, but not here,” Bugs said.

  Hollywood was quick to jab a finger at Bugs’s face. “You weren’t in Afghanistan, fresh meat.” They were back to glaring at each other. Then Hollywood relented and took a step back. “I mean, you and me, we’d never do anything like she…” He paused, let his eyes drift toward the door.

  Bugs followed Hollywood’s gaze, narrowed his eyes. “You mean, give him to Pryce?”

  Hollywood shrugged.

  “I thought you didn’t approve of Pryce,” Bugs said.

  “I don’t. Pryce is a freak of nature. But it can’t hurt to try.”

  “We got less than an hour till the suits get here from D.C. Can’t be any rough stuff, not so it’d show.”

  “So we agree,” Hollywood said, smiling. He now approached the prisoner with open hands to show Bugs his benign intent and removed the adhesive blindfold, pulling with steady pressure. The prisoner, still dazed from his trip into the wall, winced, losing a little hair to the tape. He blinked several times, adjusting his eyes to the light. Then he rallied, looked past the two Americans, and fixed his eyes with a disciplined stare on a bare patch of wall.

  “Okay Omar, here’s the deal,” Hollywood said. “I know you got your engineering degree at the sore-fucking-bone in Paris. I know you speak French, German, and excellent English. So I know you hear what I’m saying. And I know you don’t care to talk to us infidels and all. But I feel obligated to clue you to this one important fact.” He yanked his thumb at Bugs. “Him and me, we got our differences but basically we’re guy infidels, you sprecken the comprezvous?”

  The prisoner, whose name was not Omar, continued to stare at the wall.

  Hollywood leaned forward and spoke into the prisoner’s ear. He dropped his voice to a low, amiable tone. “I’m just saying, guy infidels ain’t all we got.”

  The prisoner shifted on the chair and then spoke in precise, un-accented English. “I would like to speak to my attorney and I would like to use the bathroom.”

  Hollywood was still close to the man’s ear. He smiled a kindly smile. Conceivably he was someone’s grandfather. “Number one or number two?” he asked.

  The prisoner shook his head briefly, then refocused his fatalistic gaze straight ahead on the wall.

  “Fair warning,” Hollywood said as he and Bugs ambled across the room and opened the door. As they stepped into the hall, Bugs called out, “The A Team is off the court, you can bring in the bench. Oh, and he wants to go to the john.”

  “Rashid, my man! The Gucci Terrorist — actually you don’t look so bad, considering how your day has gone completely to shit.”

  Hearing his name, Rashid looked up and for a fraction of a second lost his concentration and fixed his gaze on Major Nina Pryce as she walked into the hotbox room. She came straight at him; no frills, no wasted motion, no bullshit. She was a rangy, athletic thirty-five years old and stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed one hundred and forty-three highly trained pounds. Dressed down for the heat, she wore cut-off Levis and a ribbed tank top.

  Rashid was trying to force his stare back to its meditation on the bare patch of wall when their eyes met. Nina raised her arm and ran her fingers through her short flame-red hair. Rashid’s eyes followed the movement and became tangled in the interesting play of flesh on her bare upper arm. He noticed that the lobe of her left ear was missing, just a shrivel of scar tissue. A skull-and-crossbones tattoo grinned on her left shoulder like a memen
to of a wild youth. He saw the old-fashioned 1911 model Colt .45 automatic jammed into her waistband.

  Finally, he yanked his eyes away from her flaunted American body. The light in the depths of Nina’s gray-green eyes adjusted as she noted the way he stared at her bare arms. Her tanned forehead, which was sprinkled with copper freckles, frowned slightly. Uh-huh. So you’re one of those guys.

  Then, as Rashid looked away, she studied the collision of revulsion and lust; the way it flashed in his eyes, then resolved into contempt. She’d pulled several tours of duty in the Middle East. She knew that look from certain Arab men. It was pre-Islamic, rooted in ancient taboos of the North African tribes: contempt for the strangeness they saw in the female sex. And nothing was more alien to them than a free woman packing a .45.

  But quite possibly, in this case his cultural baggage could work to her advantage. So she smiled. And not a bad smile. Ten years earlier and a bit slimmer, she would have been considered downright pretty.

  Today she’d still look pretty — but no longer Starbucks-early morning-coffee pretty; more like last-call pretty in a country-and-western bar. Which was fine, because there was a lot more country than Starbucks in her chosen line of work.

  Her clear, strong voice had served her well singing alto in her high school choir; but that was several lives ago, before she cut a swath through the U.S. Army: first female to command infantry in action (Desert Storm); first female to be awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Now she’d wrangled her way into Northern Route via Delta. No one called her major now. Rank didn’t matter here, only the mission.

  Her cut-off jeans, running shoes, and a close-fitting purple tank top were a practical choice for undercover work, given the heat this July morning. To Rashid, however, the attire was totally revealing of her upper body and lower legs. Breaking his concentration, he now stole glances at her. He averted his eyes from her bare arms and the tidy swell of breasts confined in a sports bra. Her shoulders and throat were trim, muscled, well shaped. The clean physicality of her American-woman sweat cut toward him through the stale air like a dangerously unsheathed blade.

  She smiled knowingly when she saw him struggle to avert his eyes. She stepped directly in front of him so that she was in line with his point of concentration on the wall. She folded her arms.