Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller

by David C. Cassidy

  Maybe State Trooper Berridge, a dutiful bastard if ever there was one, believed that; maybe pigs did fly. All Kain really knew was that guys like Berridge were next of kin to trouble. They asked questions, straight questions, and questions meant answers, answers that made sense, and answers that didn’t make sense meant more questions. With men like Berridge, it was always some wild Abbott and Costello routine.

  More troubling, he’d had to give his real name. For all he knew, Brikker’s claws were dug into every police department, every Sheriff’s office, big and small, from Miami to Moscow. On the surface it seemed absurd, but was there not the chance that something so seemingly innocuous could lead to his capture? With Brikker, it was more likely than not. And then there was Lynn. What would he have said should Officer Berridge come knocking, asking for Brent Thompson or Eddie Lieberman?

  “No,” Kain said. “I don’t think he did.”

  “And Lee? She lied, too?”

  “No. They didn’t get a statement from her.”

  “I guess it was a good thing she broke her nose. They might have wanted to speak with her.”

  That stung. But he deserved it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a cheap shot.”

  “… I didn’t want this between us, Lynn.”

  She sighed. “I don’t like the way it came out. But I’m glad you told me.” They continued along the path, stepping round a deep recess where the way had sunk, but then she stopped cold. “Does my mother know?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t tell her.”

  “Lynn—”

  “My dad, right? He knows Mom’d just go off the deep end if she knew.”

  “I wanted to. I want to. She has a right to know.”

  “No. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Dad’s right. Telling Mom … it’ll just make things difficult.”

  He understood. Difficult meant moving on. His indiscretions had already claimed two lives, for he made no distinction between what was and what is, thank you very much. Good old Beaks had bought the farm, so too his offspring, and he had very nearly cost Lynn Bishop far more than she would have been able to bear. But really, moving on was looking like a grand idea. And now, standing here in the stifling Iowa heat, facing west toward those darkening clouds and sensing a slow churn in the pit of his stomach, he could almost feel that velvety slickness of the rains.

  They walked.

  ~

  “Do you think Clara’ll be all right?” she asked, rounding a long curve that led up a sharp rise. The path narrowed suddenly, and Kain slipped behind her. A gorgeous meadow greeted them at the top of the knoll, the countryside sweeping down below them, the sweet smell of wildflower teasing them in the welcome breeze. Little brown butterflies, Sleepy Duskywings, flittered among the softly flowing grasses and flowers and weeds. Somewhere close, a dragonfly buzzed and bizzed.

  “Owwww.”

  Kain stiffened with a sour grimace.

  “Are you okay?”

  The drifter leaned back and felt a throb in his back. He nodded as he moved up beside her, Lynn helping him up the last few feet, and as he straightened, found the pain diminish as the cool touch of the light wind struck his face. The knoll was barely thirty feet higher than the rest of the landscape, but you could see both farms from this lofty perch, two others in the distance, and beyond them, a few miles off to the northeast, you could sense the blueness of the river as it wove through that boundless prairie. The sky was still clear in the east. The west was a gathering swarm of darkness.

  In a small clearing ahead, just off the path, she spotted a perfectly sawed log that stood on its end. A mess of footprints in the soft earth led them to it. Lynn stepped up to it, brushed off the top (there was some kind of ugly beetle lying on it, legs up, unmoving, looking quite fried and quite dead), and sat down, easing onto it with grace and allure. Her hair dipped and danced in the fine western breeze, blowing gingerly across her lovely skin. And when she smiled at him coyly the way she did, looking so amazingly attractive, he was thankful there was still breath in his lungs to be taken.

  “Did you put this here?” she said.

  “I might have,” he said, smiling.

  She took in the vista. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? God … I haven’t been up here in at least fifteen years. Maybe twenty.”

  “The sunsets are amazing. But for my money you can’t beat the stars.”

  “You come up here at night?”

  “Sometimes. When I can’t sleep.”

  “Drifter troubles?” She apologized immediately. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I mean—oh, God.”

  All he could do was give a small grin in embarrassment. Drifter. It was probably the last thing he expected her to call him.

  “I can’t believe I said that, Kain. Forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” he said, hurting, doing his best not to look it. He moved up beside her and motioned toward a small patch of tall grasses that were postcard perfect.

  “Oh! Look at that!” Lynn was awestruck. Countless monarch butterflies hovered in a living cloud of orange and black, rippling above the flowing grasses in a rhythm that was almost sensual. “They’re so beautiful!”

  “They love the view,” he said, and she smiled with him. He knelt beside her. “Can’t say it’s ever been better myself.”

  She blushed. She blushed and she stiffened.

  “I wonder how Clara’s doing,” she said, the words coming quickly. He feared she was going to stand right up and go running back along the trail. Running screaming. Running scared.

  She did stand. “She’s so frail.” She said this quickly too, as if it was the most important thing in the world. She turned away, looking out over the prairie. The butterflies scattered.

  Kain simply stood with her. There wasn’t much else he could do, now that he’d screwed up.

  “She’s a lot tougher than she looks,” he said, and she regarded him with an anxious smile.

  Clara Brayfield had sprained her wrist in the ordeal, landing hard on her left hand after Big Al had toppled into her. She had lost a perfectly lifeless dress in the process (the tire iron had caught it and torn it), and as the old woman had rambled on to the doctor (once she had calmed down from the sedative), “I wanna go home, my dog is dead and I wanna go home, I wanna go home and listen to Gene Autry,” it was clear she was more than a little messed up (mostly from the accident but partly from the meprobamate), yet above it all, that survivor in her, that survivor that had outlived two husbands and two world conflicts, a Great Depression and nine of her nineteen children, had carried her through. Yes, Old Clara and her shepherds (four out of five ain’t bad) were going to be fine. Just fine.

  Lynn’s expression fell. “Losing a pet like that. It must be awful.”

  She’s worried about Costello, Kain thought. She’s seeing Pepper in her mind, all dopey and dead … but what she’s really seeing is Costello. Lost and alone. Too stupid to find something to eat. Animal Crackers.

  They took the path down the knoll, the trail leading them across the meadow and into a stand of forest that seemed to have no business being there on the great plain. As they entered the thick woods, they were both taken aback by the utter silence that surrounded them. Only the crackling of sticks and underbrush beneath their feet seemed to disturb the solemn semidarkness that befell them. The flies and mosquitoes had a hell-feast on their blood, and they hurried through. Kain came out first, leading them out of the bug-fest, and Lynn followed quickly, thrashing the air madly at the noseeums, but mostly at the seeums. When she moved up beside him (Kain had two blood-filled mosquitoes on his cheek that looked like small sacs of red pus and was about to flatten them), she grabbed him by the wrist and blew them off.

  “Yuck,” she said. “That wouldn’t have been pretty.”

  He directed her. “This way. Away from the bugs.”

  She followed him through another meadow, the breeze growing stronger as they walked
. They crossed a rickety footbridge (it was really nothing more than several rotting logs splayed haphazardly across a narrow, nearly dried-up creek), and when they had come to a fork in the trail, Lynn asked the question he had dreaded her asking. The same one her mother had asked not an hour ago.

  “There’s just one thing,” Georgia Hembruff had said, arms folded, her suspicion coming to bear on the sorry-looking wounded sitting silently in her living room. “I’d like to know what it is makes a dog jump out of a moving car like that.”

  Kain had looked up at her with this idiotic, Search me, ma’am, pasted on his face. Had thanked God when Big Al had leapt in with an answer.

  “Cripes, woman,” the big farmer had said, clearly annoyed by his wife’s probing. “It’s a dog. A goddamned stupid one at that. Look at my goddamned leg.”

  Despite the bandages and the cane he now carried, Georgia had not been pleased with her husband’s tone and language. Nor his explanation. She had stood there for the longest time as silent as a cadaver, waiting for the man with those odd scars and the long hair to offer his own opinion. She had waited and waited and waited … and now her daughter was.

  “What can I say, Lynn? Dogs just don’t take to me. Never have.”

  “And I suppose cats don’t take to you, either? Never have?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said, and said it as if he really didn’t. “Even when I was a boy I could never have pets.”

  “But how can they all not like you? Don’t you find that just a little bit strange?”

  “… More than a little, yes,” he said.

  ~

  She did not pursue the issue further, yet for the life of him, he did not know why. His elusiveness did not dissuade her, no; perhaps she had her suspicions and was simply keeping them under wrap until the pieces of the Kain Richards puzzle began to form a more complete face. Whatever the reason, he was reserved to simply walk, to let the afternoon unfold as it would.

  They emerged from another stand of bug-infested woods. They were at the river now, and already the breeze had grown stronger, coming off the water in short gusts. The clouds in the west were blacker, cutting the deep azure sky like a dark sword. The river led everywhere. Nowhere. He stepped up to the cusp of the water and relished the cool, refreshing wind as it filled his lungs with the purest air a man could breathe. His skin rippled with gooseflesh that was cold and tingling and invigorating. Even the throb in his back seemed to hold. Wave upon wave folded in on the rocky shore, the cresting waves lulling him with hypnotic rhythms, while far, far above, dozens of gulls swarmed in silent symphony, like bright white ships sailing on a dreamy sea of blue.

  The drifter closed his eyes, and suddenly, without really knowing how it came to pass, the words slipped from his lips in a whisper.

  “Now’s the moment … Now’s the time … Make Now count … Every time.”

  Lynn, who stood well behind him, cast him a curious glance. “Is that a song?”

  He didn’t answer. He simply took in the world as it was at that precious instant in the clockwork of things. Every second was a First Time.

  He had no idea how much he loved this place.

  Lynn stepped up and prodded him with a finger. He opened his eyes slowly, as if coming out of a deep slumber.

  He turned to her but said nothing.

  She regarded him as if he had just dropped from the sky. “So how was Oz? Still gleaming?”

  “Just an old, tired drifter,” he said, feeling exactly that way suddenly. “Just trying to catch a slice of something solid.”

  Lynn nodded she understood, but he doubted if she truly appreciated his words. What was the old saying? You had to walk a mile in a man’s shoes to understand him? Try a million. Maybe then she might begin to understand.

  “Was that a Johnny Tillotson song?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Those words … was that a song?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and that was the truth. Gramps never did tell him where they came from. He had always assumed it was something the old man had made up.

  “How did it go?” She started to recite it and gave up.

  He told it to her, slowly, just as his grandfather had told it to him those distant years past. She repeated every phrase as he went along.

  “It’s beautiful, Kain. If it’s not in a song, it should be.”

  Something comforting fell over him then, like a warm blanket on a bitter winter night. He wanted to hold her, kiss her right then and there. The soothing roll of the river, the intoxicating sweetness of the fine air … those incredible eyes … together, they were all too perfect, all too consuming and seductive. But like a nervous schoolboy who has no idea what to do with his hands, he knelt for a flat stone instead and hurled it sidearm over the water. It skipped a half dozen times before a cresting wave swallowed it. He smiled weakly, and she returned it; hers was perhaps weaker than his, perhaps as anxious. He led her downriver, along the shore toward a rolling hill, neither of them saying a word until they crested the rise. The baseball diamond was barely a half mile on.

  The way was wider here (the trail proper was nothing more than a years-old footpath, room barely for two), and they took respite on a cherry iron bench that overlooked the river. A small black plaque with white letters, screwed into the back, read DONATED BY KEN’S WROUGHT IRON FURNITURE. Kain mused briefly over the idea of cutting his hair and reapplying for a job at the ironworks, figuring Ken might give the drifter-cum-farmhand a second chance after all. Right.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he said. Lynn seemed quite taken by the view, but her pensive expression betrayed her.

  “I was just thinking of Ryan. How’s he going to take all this?”

  Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea, Kain thought.

  “And Lee,” Lynn said. “Poor thing.”

  “I’m so sorry for what happened, Lynn. If I could take it all back, I would.”

  “I know. It’s just that … well, she’s a young girl, and … never mind.”

  “No. I understand. She’s worried about her looks.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “She doesn’t have to.”

  “Of course she doesn’t. But she does. It’s hardly a secret she’s not very outgoing. She doesn’t have a lot of confidence as it is.”

  “It’ll only be a few weeks with the bandages. She’ll be her old self in no time.”

  “… I suppose.”

  She had said it as if she supposed it was all right if she’d get the noose instead of the chair.

  “This isn’t about a broken nose,” he said.

  Lynn fumbled with her words. She started, but stopped. She turned to him.

  “You know Jimmy, right? Jimmy Long?”

  An alarm went off in Kain’s head and kept blaring. It was even louder than the static.

  “Yeah. Sure. What about him?”

  “Do you know much about him?”

  “Not much. Works hard. Hell of a fastball.”

  She looked at him somberly. As if the world had turned cold and dark.

  “Lee has a crush on him.”

  ~ 25

  Like a cold, gray day in November, Lynn Bishop had fallen colorless. Lifeless.

  Kain reached for her hand. She barely stirred, and he wondered if she could feel his touch at all. She seemed to be living a nightmare … or imagining one.

  “Lee didn’t want me to say anything.”

  She turned in alarm. “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing that should make the both of you react so strongly.” He paused. “She practically begged me not to tell anyone.”

  “You must think we’re crazy.”

  Again she turned away. She was more than upset—fear had a face, oh yes—and he was dead certain she would not go on. She looked as if simply speaking the words would betray her; as if her darkest thoughts would ring true.

  “It’s Ray,” she said, saying her husband’s name as if she’d said poison. She drew her h
and away and threw both in the air. “Always goddamn Ray.”

  He let her settle. Let her talk.

  “Ray hates Jimmy Long,” she lamented. “Hates anyone who isn’t Made-In-America white.”

  Something sharp clicked in Kain’s head. Lee-Anne had told him that Ryan disliked the boy; the girl had said so in no uncertain terms. At the time, he had thought it adolescent jealousy of the big Sioux’s stature on the ball team, and that might still be so, but suddenly it seemed more a case of, like father, like son. How sad.

  Lynn regarded him darkly. “There was this … thing … a long time ago. Lee was maybe five or six. I think she remembers. I doubt Ryan does. I tried to keep them out of it. We never talked about it, but I know the other kids did. I mean, it was a big deal, right? You can’t run from a secret, Kain. Not out here. Out here the wind whispers everything. Farm to farm. Ear to ear.

  “Ray was working late on a friend’s car. Said he was working, anyway. Imagine that, Ray Bishop lying. He was at the bar. You know the one I told you about, the one that probably sold Ryan the liquor? Anyway, there was this guy. I know how this is going to sound, Kain, but … well, there are people who should know better, no matter how wrong that is … and he should have known better than to go in there. You know what I’m saying?”

  He admired her diplomacy. He nodded.

  “So you see … he was looking for trouble, and he found it. Ray and his cronies, Jake Maxwell and Frank Wright—Larry and Curly if you ask me—they ran the guy right out of there. There was a fight. You would have thought Ray would have been leading the charge, but it was those two idiots who roughed him up. That was supposedly the end of it.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “They said that afterwards, the guy just got in his truck and drove off. Even that snake Henry Roberts backed up their story. Guess he didn’t want to raise any more eyebrows than he normally does. Kain, the man they beat up … they found him dead the next day. His truck was halfway to Spirit Lake in a ditch. His name was Tommy Long.”