The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry Read Free Book Online Page A

lights. Given how little he’d slept these last few days, it should have been easy to fall asleep, but when he closed his eyes, he still heard those voices, it seemed, whispering in the dark.
    *   *   *
    His cell rang at just past four in the morning. Jill Owens had arrived at the Oakland Airport. She was just at that moment climbing into a taxi, she said, and would be home within half an hour.
    â€œAre the kids awake?”
    â€œNo,” Dante said.
    No sooner had he spoken, though, then he heard Zeke rummaging in the back. Likely he had been awakened by the phone.
    â€œLet them be. I’ll be quiet when I come in.”
    Dante could see the boy had no intention of going back to bed. He came out holding his video game and sat on the couch, leaning his head against Dante’s shoulder. He stayed that way until his mother came in the door, smelling of the airplane, red-eyed, tired, full of indignation, fury, and shame. Dante watched the woman struggle to keep all those feelings off her face as she greeted her son. She was a tawny-haired woman in her early forties who had met Owens in her last year at law school. Now she gathered the boy into her skirt, cooing—but she could not keep her anger from hissing out.
    â€œThose sons of bitches,” she said. “Those goddamn sons of bitches. This is all Blackwell.”
    She petted the boy as she spoke, and he nuzzled closer, understanding the anger was directed elsewhere maybe, at the vague forces outside the house—though he glanced up sheepishly for an instant, as if not quite sure. Something in Zeke’s expression—the blue eyes, the sudden vacantness—reminded Dante of the boy’s father. “The police could have picked Bill up at home, they could have done this a hundred other ways. The people downtown, the DA’s office—they know Moe, they know me. They know Bill’s line of work. They could have told us in advance and made arrangements. But Blackwell wanted his moment. Grandstanding for the press.”
    No doubt there was some truth in what she said. The government wanted a jump on the pretrial publicity—to cast the case in the public eye. It was also true, though, that Owens had gone fugitive in the past.
    â€œBill is innocent. All of this, it has nothing to do with what actually happened back then. The whole point—it’s politics. The government doesn’t want anyone arguing with them, past or present. It’s a way of disrupting our legal practice. Because we defend certain kinds of people. Because the government wants a free hand … That woman, Elise Younger, she hired an investigator.”
    â€œSorrentino?”
    â€œYes, that’s the one.”
    Dante had met Jill Owens once before—that evening here at the house—and she had seemed like a different person, her hazel eyes full of light and confidence. A bit smug about her politics, self-assured, in love with her husband, her kids, dedicated to her work, obsessive, insistent upon its importance, though admitting, too, that some of the people she helped defend, these days, you wouldn’t want to bring home.
    Now her face was puffy, her hair in a ruff. Her son gazed up toward her. “I want you to remember this,” she said to him. “It’s how they work. It’s how they run us down.”
    The daughter appeared on the stairs, Marilyn just behind. Kate faltered a moment at the bottom step, her precociousness stripped away: thin and rangy in her nightshirt, only half-awake, regarding them all with a surliness of the type teenage girls usually reserved for their mothers. Then she started to weep. “Come here, darling,” said Jill. “Your father’s a good man. We are not going to let this happen. Your father will be home in a couple of days. We are not going to let those people do this to us.” She rocked the girl back and forth and looked up at Dante. “Bill trusts