Right as Rain

5

Ray Boone's jaw was tight from the thick line of crank he'd done. He unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth and licked his dry lips. Ray went behind the long mahogany bar he and his daddy had built themselves, looking to fix himself a drink.

'Daddy, where's that Jack at?' he hollered.

Ray couldn't hear his own voice above the old Randy Travis number that was coming from the Wurlitzer jukebox he'd bought at an auction of the furnishings from a bankrupt restaurant. Edna had turned up the volume, way high.

Earl Boone was sitting in front of a video screen playing electronic poker. He took a sip from a can of Busch beer and dragged on his cigarette.

He tapped ash off the cigarette into a tray without taking his eyes off the screen. 'Wherever the hell you left it, Critter, last time you took a drink.'

'I see it,' said Ray. The Jack was on a low shelf beside the steel sink, in front of a Colt automatic his daddy had hung on a couple of nails he'd driven into the wood behind the bar. Ray grabbed the black-labeled bottle and a tumbler, filled the glass with ice from a chest beside the sink, and free-poured sour mash whiskey halfway to the lip. He filled the rest of the glass with Coke and stirred the cocktail with a dirty finger.

'Ain't you gonna fix me one, baby?' asked Edna Loomis, sitting at a card table covered in green felt. Edna was speed wired, her usual condition this time of the afternoon. She was stacking and restacking a pile of white chips with one hand and playing with her feather-cut shag with the other.

'Don't want you gettin' wasted too early, now,' said Ray, talking to her as he would to a child.

'I won't. Just want a little somethin' to sip while I'm back at the house watching my shows.'

Ray mixed a weak one and walked it over to Edna, who stood to take it from his hand. She reached for the glass, running her long fingers over the backs of his, and clumsily licked her lips. He felt a stirring in his jeans.

'We got time?' she said, looking over his shoulder briefly at the old man.

'Uh-uh,' said Ray. 'Me and Daddy are about to make a run into D.C.'

'When you get back, then,' she said, tossing a head of damaged orange-blond hair off her shoulder, winking as she took a sip of her drink. She moved her hips awkwardly to the Travis tune as she drank, keeping her eyes on him over the glass, and sang as the chorus returned to the song, '"Forever and ever, ay-men.'"

Ray looked her over. Boy, she thought she was so sexy. He wondered what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She was getting up around thirty, and it was showing in the lines around her mouth. Dimples had begun to pucker below her ass, too, and she'd never had young eyes. She did have a nice set, though, the kind that stood at attention, with sharp pink button-nips. She ever let those bad boys go to seed like the rest of her was doin', Ray'd have to think about trading her in for a new model.

'Huh?' she said. 'I asked you a question, Critter. We gonna make like bunny rabbits and do the deed when you get back, or what?'

Her mouth, that was the other thing. Proud titties or no, she didn't learn to shut her mouth some, he might trade her in sooner than she knew.

'Don't call me Critter,' said Ray. 'Only Daddy can call me that.'

'Well, are we?'

'Maybe,' he said. But she'd be sloppy as hell by the time he came back from the city, cooked on crank and drunk as a sailor on shore leave, too. He couldn't stand to fuck her when she got like that.

'Ray?'

'Huh?'

'You're gonna be gone a few hours, right?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Whyn't you leave me some of that ice?'

'You know you're likin' that stuff too much.'

'Please, baby?'

'A little bit, then. All right.' He looked past her and said, 'You about ready, Daddy?'

Earl Boone said, 'Yep,' and flicked ash into the tray.

Ray went to a large door at the back of the barn. The door was steel fortified and it was set in a fortified, fireproofed wall. He took the set of keys he hung from a loop of his jeans and opened the door, which he kept locked at all times. He went in, closed the door behind him, and threw the slide bolt.

On one side of the room sat a weight bench and barbells and plates, with mirrors angled toward the weight bench and hung on the walls. A workbench ran along the opposite wall, with shelves above it and a Peg Board with hooks holding tools. A couple of safes sat beneath the workbench, and in the safes were money, heroin, and guns. Beside the workbench stood a footlocker next to a stand-up case made of varnished oak and glass, in which four shotguns were racked.

On the third wall was a single-unit kitchenette with a two-burner electric stove, sink, and refrigerator stocked with bottled water and beer. Ray used the stove to make his private stash of methamphetamine, both the powder and the crystal, which he cooked on the stove in a small saucepan. On the steel countertop of the kitchenette were bottles of Sudafed and carburetor cleaner, and the other chemicals he used to make the crank.

Ray and his father had plumbed in some pipes and put a bathroom in the room, too. It was big and private, with a solid oak door. Ray could sit on the crapper and look at his stroke books back in there, and if he had a mind to, when he was done wiping himself clean, he could just turn around and pump a load off into the bowl and flush the whole dirty mess.

Beneath the carpet remnant that lay beside the weight bench was a trapdoor. Under that trapdoor was a tunnel that he and his father had dug out the summer before last. The tunnel was their means of escape, in the event that one was needed, and it went back about fifty, sixty yards or so, into the woods behind the barn and the house.

Ray Boone loved this room. Only he and his daddy were allowed back here, that was the rule. Nobody, none of Daddy's friends or his own friends or Edna, would think of coming back here, even if they had access to the key. Edna knew that the drugs she loved so much were in this room. Dumb as she was, though, and she was dumber than a goddamn rock, she was plenty smart enough to know not to try.

Ray picked up a set of barbells and stood before one of the mirrors. He did a set of twenty alternating curls. He dropped the barbells and checked himself out. His prison tats showed just below the sleeves of his white T-shirt. A dagger with blood dripping from it on one arm, a cobra wrapped around the staff of a Confederate flag on the other: standard-issue stuff. The good tattoos, a swastika between two lightning bolts and a colored guy swinging from a tree, he kept covered up on his shoulder and back.

Ray made a couple of serious faces in the mirror, raised his eyebrows, first one, then the other. He wasn't too good-looking so anyone would mistake him for a pretty boy, and he wasn't all that ugly, either. He had acne scars on his face, but they'd never scared any girls off, not that he'd noticed, anyway. And some women liked the way his eyes were set real deep under his hard, protruding brow. A couple of times when he was growing up, some boys called him crosseyed, and he just had to go ahead and pop those boys hard, square in the face. If he was cross-eyed, he didn't see it himself. Edna said he looked like that guy on the Profiler TV series, always played a drug dealer in the movies. Ray liked that guy. There wasn't nothin' pretty about him.

When Ray was done admiring himself he grabbed a vial holding a couple of meth crystals and slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. He took off his sneakers and put on a pair of Dingo boots with four-inch custom heels, opened the safe, and removed a day pack holding plastic packets of heroin the size of bricks that he had scaled out earlier in the day. He found his nine-millimeter Beretta, checked the load, and holstered the automatic in the waistband of his jeans. From the footlocker he withdrew a heavy flannel shirt and jacket, and put them both on, the tail of the shirt worn out to cover the gun. He slung the day pack over his shoulder, left the room, and locked the door behind him.

Edna was waiting for him out in the bar. She gave him a wet kiss as he palmed the vial over to her, then left the barn with her drink in her hand.

'Ready, Daddy?'

'Sure thing.'

Earl hated the city. There was only one thing good about it, far as he was concerned. It was down in the warehouse they called the Junkyard. For him, it was worth the trip.

Earl Boone stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. He killed his beer and crushed the can in his hand, dropping the empty in a wastebasket beside the electronic poker game. He slipped a deck of Marlboro reds into his shirt pocket and watched his son take his own pack of 'Boros off the bar and do the same.

Earl stood as his son crossed the room. Earl was a weathered version of the boy, the plow lines on his cheeks somewhat masking the acne scars, and deep-set, flat eyes. He was taller than Ray by six inches and wider across the shoulders and back. Unlike the boy, he'd never lifted a weight when he wasn't paid to do so, and he didn't understand those who did. A hitch in the Marine Corps and hard work had given him his build.

'Let's do it,' said Ray.

Earl smiled a little, looking at those high-heeled boots on his boy's feet. Ray sure did have a thing about his lack of height.

'Somethin' funny?' said Ray.

'Nothin',' said Earl.

Earl picked up a cooler that held a six-pack and looked around the bar and gaming area before he shut down the lights. He was real proud of what they'd done here, him and his boy. The way they had it fixed up, it looked like one of those old-time saloons. The kind they used to have in those towns out west.

Edna Loomis filled the bowl of a bong with pot and dropped a crystal of methamphetamine on top of the load. She stood at the window of the bedroom where she and Ray slept in the house and watched Ray and Earl leave the barn and head for their car, a hopped-up Ford parked between an F-150 pickup and Ray's Shovelhead Harley.

Edna flicked the wheel of a Bic lighter and got fire. She held the flame over the bowl and drew in a hit of ice over grass. Holding in the high, she watched Ray dismantle the top of the car's bumper, then take the heroin out of the day pack and stuff the packets into the space between the bumper and the trunk of the car.

She coughed out the hit, a mushroom of smoke exploding against the glass of the bedroom window.

Ray put a strip of rubber or something over the heroin and replaced the top of the bumper, pounding it into place with the heel of his hand. Earl was facing the wide gravel path that led in from the state road, keeping an eye out for any visitors. The both of them, thought Edna, they were just paranoid as all hell. No one ever came down that road. There was a locked wooden gate at the head of it, anyhow.

Edna was still coughing, thinking of Ray and Earl and their business, and her head started to pound, and for a moment she got a little bit scared. But she knew the pounding was just the rush of the ice hitting her brain, and then she stopped coughing and felt good. Then she felt better than good, suddenly straightened out right. She lit a Virginia Slim from a pack she kept in a leather case, picked up her drink, and sipped at it, trying to make it last.

She went to the TV set on the bureau and turned up the volume. Some white chick with orange hair was up on a stage, sitting next to a big black dude. The white chick was fat and asshole ugly, not surprising, and now some bubble-assed black chick was walking out on the stage and, boy, did she look meaner than a motherfucker, too. Looked like she was about to put a hurtin' on the white chick for sleeping with her old man. And damn if she wasn't throwing a punch at the white chick now… Edna had seen this one, or it could have been that she was just imagining that she had.

She went back to the window and looked down at the yard. Earl and Ray were three-point turning, heading down the gravel and into the trees.

She checked the level of her drink. It was going down real good today. Nothing like a little Jack and some nicotine behind a hit of speed. Course, Ray wouldn't like it if he came home and found her drunk, but she didn't have to worry about that yet.

She had a sip from the glass and then, what the hell, drank it all down in one gulp. Maybe she'd go down to the barn and fix one more weak one, mostly Coke with just a little mash in it to change its color. Ray wouldn't be home for another few hours anyway, and besides, he'd be all stoked and occupied for the rest of the night. Ray liked to count the cash money he brought back after he made his runs.

Ray and Earl's property was set back off Route 28, between Dickerson and Comus, not too far south of Frederick, at the east-central edge of Montgomery County. There was still forest and open country out here, but not for long. Over the years the Boones had seen the development stretch farther and farther north from D.C., white-flighters, mostly, who claimed they wanted 'more land' and 'more house for the buck.' What they really wanted, Ray knew, was to get away from the niggers and the crime. None of them could stand the prospect of seeing their daughters walking down the street holding the hand of Willie Horton. That was the white man's biggest nightmare, and they ran from it like a herd of frightened animals, all the way out here. Ray could understand it, but still, he wished those builders would go and put their new houses someplace else.

Ray moved the car to the on-ramp of 270 and drove south.

'Here,' said Ray, handing his pistol butt-out to his father. Earl took the gun, opened the glove box, hit a button, and waited for a false back to drop. He placed the Beretta in the space behind the glove box wall.

Ray had bought this particular vehicle from a trap-car shop up in the Bronx. It was your basic Taurus, outfitted with more horses than was legal, more juice than Ford used to put in its high-horse street model, the SHO. The bumper was a false bumper, which meant it could withstand a medium-velocity impact and could also accommodate relatively large volumes of heroin between its outer shell and the trunk of the car. Hidden compartments behind the glove box, to the left of the steering column, and in other spots throughout the interior concealed Ray's guns and his personal stash of drugs.

Ray lit a cigarette off the dash lighter, passed the lighter to his daddy so he could light his.

'You'd know we was the bad guys,' said Ray, 'if this here was a movie.'

'Why's that?'

"Cause you and me smoke.'

'Huh,' said Earl.

'Down county, I hear they want to outlaw smoking in bars.'

'That so.'

'They can have mine,' said Ray, beaming at his cleverness, 'when they pry 'em from my cold, dead fingers. Right?'

Earl didn't answer. He didn't talk much to begin with, and he talked even less with his son. Ray had been absent the day God passed out brains, and when he did say something, it tended to be about how tough he was or how smart he was. Earl had twenty years on Ray, and Earl could take Ray on his weakest day. Ray knew it, too. Earl figured this was just another thing that had kept the chip on his boy's shoulder his entire life.

Earl popped the top on a can of Busch.

Ray dragged on his cigarette. It bothered him that his father barely gave him the time of day. It was him, Ray, who had set up this business they had going on right here. It was him, Ray, who had made all the right decisions. If he had left business matters up to his father, who had never even been able to hold a longtime job on his own, they'd have nothing now, nothing at all.

Course, it took a stretch in Hagerstown, where Ray had done a ten-year jolt on a manslaughter beef, for him to find the opportunity to connect to this gig he had here. Ray had been paid to kill some K-head who'd ripped off the stash of a dealer out in Frederick County. Ray had killed a couple of guys for money since high school, and he'd gotten a rep among certain types as the go-to man in that part of the state. He'd never intended to become a hired murderer – not that he ever lost any sleep over it or anything like that – but these were people who deserved to die, after all. After his first kill, who begged and didn't go quick, it had been easy.

This particular job, Ray's idea had been to do it in the bathroom of a bar where the K-head hung out, then climb out the window and make his escape. After he gutted the thief with a Ka-Bar knife, though, the bar's bouncer came in to take a leak and disarmed Ray, holding him until the pigs could get to the scene. Ray should've killed the bouncer, too, he had replayed it in his head many times, but the bouncer was one of those cro-mags, he broke Ray's wrist real quick, and then there wasn't all that much Ray could do.

What he did do, he claimed the dust bunny had attacked him, and lucky for Ray, a piece-of-shit.22 was found in the jacket pocket of the corpse. So the hard rap couldn't stick, and Ray drew manslaughter and Hagerstown.

Prison life was okay if you could avoid getting punked. The way to avoid it was some strong attitude, but mostly alliances and gangs. The whites hooked up with Christian Identity and the like. The blacks hung together and so did the Spanish, but the whites and Spanish hated the blacks more than they hated each other, so once in a while Ray made talk with a brown or two.

One of them was Roberto Mantilla. Roberto had a cousin in the Orlando area, Nestor Rodriguez, who worked for the Vargas cartel operating out of the Cauca Valley in northern Colombia. Nestor and his brother Lizardo made the East Coast run, selling powder to dealers in D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, and New York. Purer heroin at a lower cost had expanded their market, crushed their foreign competition, and fueled the growth of their business. Roberto said that his cousins could no longer handle the logistics of the transactions themselves and would be willing to sell to a middleman who could make the back-and-forth into D.C. and satisfy the demands of the dealers more readily than they. For this, said Roberto, the middleman would receive a ten-thousand-dollar bounce per transaction.

Ray said, 'All right, soon as I get out, I'd like to give that a try.' A year later, after a parole board hearing at which he convinced the attendees that the good behavior he had exhibited during his term was not an aberration, he was out of Hagerstown. And two years after that, when he had completed his outside time and said good-bye to his PO, he was free to go to work.

Ray supposed he had Roberto Mantilla to thank for his success. But this was impossible, as Roberto had been raped and bludgeoned to death by a cock-diesel with a lead pipe shortly after Ray's release.

'This load we got, it's eighty-five-percent pure, Daddy,' said Ray, thinking of the heroin sealed in the bumper compartment at the rear of the car.

'Lizardo tell you that?' asked Earl, needling his son, knowing Ray hated the Rodriguez brother who never showed Ray an ounce of respect.

'Nestor told me. Down in Florida, they got brown heroin, it's ninety-five-percent pure when it hits the street.'

'So? What's that do?'

'For the Colombians, it kills the competition. I'm talkin' about the Asians, who were putting out seven-, ten-percent product, and the Mexicans, too. The Colombians upped the purity and lowered the price, and now they're gonna own most of the U.S. market. And what this pure shit does, it creates a whole new class of customers: college kids, the boy next door, like that. It's not just for coloreds anymore, Daddy. 'Cause you don't have to pop it, see, to get a rush. You can smoke it or snort it, you want to.'

'That's nice.'

'You're not interested in what we're doin'?'

'Not really, no. Get in, sell it, get out; that's all I'm interested in. Wasn't for the money, I'd just as soon never set eyes on that city again. Let them all kill themselves over this shit for all I care.'

'You wouldn't want that,' said Ray, smiling at his father across the bench. 'Wouldn't have no customers, they all up and died.'

'Critter?'

'What.'

'Someday, you and me, we're gonna wake up and figure out we got enough money. You ever think about that?'

'I'm startin' to,' said Ray, goosing the Ford into the passing lane.

Truth be told, Ray had been thinkin' on it for quite some time. Only piece missing was a way to get out. That's all he and his daddy needed: some kind of plan.