A Fistful of Rain by Greg Rucka Read Free Book Online Page A

every angle I could manage, and remained pretty pleased with the results of my survey. I hadn’t been vain before meeting Van, and I didn’t like to think I was, now, but being with her for so long had taken its toll. We’d been a band for less than a month when she shared with me her Thesis of Rock Stardom, which essentially came down to this—for guys, it’s how you sound
first,
then how you look; for women, it’s how you look,
then
how you sound, and even then, it’s more about how you look. It was fine if Click wanted to chow on cheeseburgers and sit on his can watching TV, she’d say; you and me, girlfriend, we’ve got a date at 24-Hour Fitness.
    I wondered if the man with the gun had liked what he’d seen. I wondered if he’d gotten off on it, and then thought I was probably damn lucky he hadn’t.
    And for a second, I wondered if any of it—the man with the gun, the back of the Ford, the drive around for nothing—had happened at all.
    Mikel was wrong about a great many things, and he certainly was no authority on trust or The Truth, but he was right in at least one respect: I am a hell of a liar.
    I’m so good at it, half the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it myself.
    I came back to my reflection, the water still on my skin, and began toweling off. Honestly, I thought I looked pretty good. Hell, I thought I looked better than pretty good, I thought I looked great, and I told my reflection as much, and then added some unkind things about Van and vanity and how it was appropriate that the one was named after the other. I wasn’t quite sure which one I meant, but I was very passionate about the whole thing, and my reflection, if anything, seemed even more sincere about it than I.
    There was another beer waiting, and I went to keep it company, and a little later decided that there were more downstairs, and I could have a couple of those, too. I thought about putting on some clothes or a towel and then decided, my house, my rules. I negotiated the descent okay, and I made it to the kitchen just fine, but I had some trouble getting back up the stairs.
    Actually, I had a lot of trouble getting back up the stairs.
    I remember making it to the bedroom. I remember a bottle breaking on the bathroom tile. I remember that there was blood, and that upset me.
    I don’t really remember much more than that, honestly.

CHAPTER 7
    I suppose what happened in Sydney started in Christchurch, but it probably started long before that. And the sad thing is, the Christchurch gig was amazing, maybe because so much had threatened to go wrong.
    We’d played in a smaller venue than expected, only three hundred people at capacity, and the hall had been crammed, completely SRO. The audience stood shoulder to shoulder, the air-conditioning on the fritz, and the stage monitors that we use to hear ourselves play had suffered what the head sound tech called an Apollo 13. By which he meant a catastrophic failure he had no idea how to fix.
    Given all of these things, we should have stunk on ice. But it was a small stage, and we used it, and Van and I danced around the lip and clambered all over Click and his kit, and we improvised, and we played like hell, but most of all, we had much fun.
    God, we had so much fun.
    And when it’s like that, the audience knows it, and they don’t care that the only fresh air is coming in through the opened windows and the propped doors, they don’t care that they’re getting bumped and knocked from every direction, they don’t care that their feet are killing them. They want the music, the show, and when they get it, they’re someplace else, someplace better.
    Those nights are magic.
    They called us back three times, and at the end of the third encore they were still on their feet, and making so much noise that applause and cheering chased us all the way to the green room. Graham was waiting, and his expression confirmed it; we’d blown the doors off the place.
    “This is it,” he said,