The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry Read Free Book Online

first wife had worked as legal-aid volunteers out at the prison and were later convicted of aiding in the escape of Leland Sanford, an Oakland stick-up artist who’d gotten a political education in prison. Sanford had hooked up with the Symbionese Liberation Army after he was out, the SLA—the radical group that kidnapped the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, demanding ransom money from her father to feed the poor.
    Old stuff now, newsreel footage, dragged up out of the archives on account of the terror scare. Not too many people remembered the details, but it had been everyday news then, a media circus that made the feds look bad.
    Eventually, most of the SLA had died in a shootout with the police down in Los Angeles. There’d been trouble identifying the bodies afterward, some kind of anomaly in the dental records. So the police could not be sure, absolutely, that Sanford was dead—and he’d become a kind of legendary figure on account of it.
    You still saw posters of him, sometimes, down in the Haight—collector’s items, for those who cared about such things: the radical in his paisley shirt and his beret with a carbine strapped across his chest.
    After the shootout in Los Angeles, there had been a series of robberies attributed to the surviving members of the SLA. It was during the last of these that Eleanor Younger had been killed. But Owens’s exact relationship to all of this, and exactly how closely he’d been tied to the revolutionary underground …
    â€œIt was a long time ago,” said Dante. “I don’t know what kind of case they can make now.”
    They lay there for a little while, saying nothing. Marilyn leaned over him then and kissed him on the mouth. Her face was flushed and pretty. He reached up to unbutton her blouse.
    â€œNot now.”
    He put his hand between her legs.
    â€œNot now,” she whispered again, teasing him, tongue in his ear.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œSoon.”
    She pulled away.
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œTo check on the kids.”
    She was right, of course. Now was not the time, not here on the Owens’s bed. Even if he had not been so sleepy.
    He closed his eyes.
    *   *   *
    When he awoke, it was with a start. The room was dark, and Marilyn lay sleeping next to him.
    It was past midnight.
    It happened sometimes that Dante woke up in this manner, startled out of sleep for no apparent reason, and found himself suddenly sitting bolt upright on the mattress. His jumpiness went back to his time with the company down in New Orleans—those gray years after he’d left the force. He had been involved, seen things, done things—operating in a murky continuum, government approved—that ended badly. That affiliation had ended, or so he liked to tell himself, when he’d returned to San Francisco for his father’s funeral. He had developed certain instincts—but as often as not his tuning was too fine. Waking at a shift in the floorboards, a surge in the power.
    The light in the hall was off. The girl’s door remained as it was, still closed, and so Dante listened from outside, not wanting to wake her, instead waiting until he heard her stir, turning in her sleep. Downstairs, he found the boy’s door wide open.
    The kid lay on top of the bed, asleep in his clothes.
    Dante checked the locks again, examining the yard from the windows. Then he lay on the couch in the television room. The volume had been turned low, and he wondered if this might have been the sound he had heard earlier, coming through the grates upstairs. The station was set to CNN and the news played nonstop. The enemy was on the run in Afghanistan, or so they said, and American troops were gathering in Kuwait. The experts had things to say, almost audible: conspiracy within conspiracies … 9/11 … Al Qaeda … terrorists in Miami …
    Dante turned off the television. He dimmed the