Right as Rain by George P. Pelecanos Read Free Book Online

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 cross—eyed, 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