Prayers For Rain Part 89

"Crude's okay," she said. "Is it mean?"

I grinned. "Some might call it that."

"Mean's even better," she said.

Bubba met us at the door wearing a towel and a face completely devoid of hospitality.

Bubba's torso, from the waist to the hollow of his throat, is a ma.s.sive slab of dark and light pink scar tissue in the shapes of lobster tails and smaller red ridges the length and width of children's fingers that litter the pink like slugs. The lobster tails are burns; the slugs are shrapnel scars. Bubba got his chest in Beirut, when he was stationed with the marines the day a suicide bomber drove through the front gates and MPs on duty couldn't shoot him because they'd been given blanks in their rifles. Bubba had spent eight months in a Lebanese hospital before receiving a medal and a discharge. He'd sold the medal and disappeared for another eighteen months, returning to Boston in late 1985 with contacts in the illegal arms trade a lot of other men before him had died trying to establish. He came back with the chest that looked like a mapmaker's representation of the Urals, a refusal to ever discuss the night of the bombing, and a profound lack of fear that made people even more nervous around him than they'd been before he left.

"What?" he said.

"Good to see you, too. Let us in."

"Why?"

"We need stuff."

"What stuff?"

"Illegal stuff."

"No s.h.i.+t."

"Bubba," Angie said, "we already figured out you're doing the nasty with Ms. Moore, so come on. Let us pa.s.s."

Bubba frowned and it thrust his lower lip out. He stepped aside and we entered the warehouse to see Vanessa Moore, wearing one of Bubba's hockey jerseys and nothing else, lying on the red couch in the center of the floor, a champagne flute propped on her washboard abdomen, watching 9 Weeks 9 Weeks on Bubba's fifty-inch TV. She used the remote control to pause it as we came through the door, froze Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger going at it against an alley wall as blue-lit acid rain dripped on their bodies. on Bubba's fifty-inch TV. She used the remote control to pause it as we came through the door, froze Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger going at it against an alley wall as blue-lit acid rain dripped on their bodies.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey. Don't let us disturb you."

She scooped some peanuts from a bowl on the coffee table, popped them in her mouth. "No worries."

"'Nessie," Bubba said, "we got to talk a bit of business."

Angie caught my eye and mouthed, "Nessie?"

"Illegal business?"

Bubba looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded vigorously.

"Yeah," he said.

"Okey-doke." She started to rise from the couch.

"No, no," Bubba said. "Stay there. We'll leave. We got to go upstairs anyway."

"Mmm. Better." She slipped back down into the couch and hit the remote and Mickey and Kim started huffing and puffing to bad eighties synth-rock again.

"You know, I've never seen this movie," Angie said as we followed Bubba up the stairs to the third floor.

"Mickey's actually not very greasy in this one," I said.

"And Kim in those white socks," Bubba said.

"And Kim in those white socks," I agreed.

"Two thumbs-up from the pervert twins," Angie said. "What a boon."

"So look," Bubba said as he turned on the lights on the third floor and Angie wandered off to look through the crates for her weapon of choice, "you got any problem with me, ah, how do I say this-boning Vanessa?"

I covered a smile with my hand, looked down at an open crate of grenades. "Ah, no, man. No problem at all."

Bubba said, "Cause I haven't had a, whatta ya call it, a steady-"

"Girlfriend?"

"Yeah, in like a long time."

"Since high school," I said. "Stacie Hamner, right?"

He shook his head. "In Chechnya, '84, there was someone."

"I never knew."

He shrugged. "I never offered, dude."

"There's that, sure."

He put his hand on my shoulder, leaned in close. "So we're cool?"

"Cool beans," I said. "What about Vanessa? She cool?"

He nodded. "She's the one told me you wouldn't care."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Said you two never cared about each other. It was just exercise."

"Huh," I said, as we crossed back toward Angie. "Exercise."

Angie pulled a rifle from a wooden crate and rested the stock on her hip. The barrel towered over her. The rifle was so thick and looked so heavy and mean, it was hard to believe she could hold it without tipping over on her side.

"You got a target scope with this baby?"

"I got a scope," Bubba said. "What about bullets?"

"The bigger the better."