Read Online The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B

Brinks’ trucks and then faded back into the quiet life of the suburbs. For a time, the amateurs ruined crime for everybody.
    The last one to leave was the scene investigator whom I’d requested. He dusted the doors, the bedroom, the bath, looked at me with a shrug, and walked out the door without speaking, which was his way of telling me what he thought of the fruitless work I had just created for him.
    “Did he find something?” Annie said. She sat at the dining room table with a tumbler of whiskey between her fingers. Her face was wan, her voice and blue eyes listless.
    “Everything was probably smeared. Fingerprints never do us much good anyway, not unless we have a body or someone in custody. Even if an examiner has a whole handprint set in blood, he still has to compare it with tens of thousands of file prints, and it’s as much fun as threading a needle with your eyes closed. That’s why he looked so happy when he left here. Look, I’m sorry I brought all this stuff into your house. I got careless tonight. I should have made those guys when they stepped out of their car.”
    “It wasn’t your fault.” Her voice was flat, distant.
    “I think you should have gone in the ambulance. A concussion can fool you sometimes.”
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with a concussion.”
    I looked at her colorless, depleted face.
    “Listen, let me go to my boat and change clothes, then I’ll take you to an Italian restaurant on the lake where they serve lasagna that’ll break your heart,” I said.
    “I don’t think I can go anywhere now.”
    “All right, I’ll go up to that Chinese place on St. Charles and bring us something back. I’ll be gone only a few minutes.”
    She stared quietly into space for a moment.
    “Do you mind not going for a while?” she asked.
    “All right, but I tell you what—no booze. Instead, I’m going to fix some hot milk for you, and an omelette.”
    I took the tumbler of whiskey from her fingertips. Then her eyes looked desperately into mine, her mouth trembled, and the tears ran down her cheeks.
    “He put his hands all over me,” she said. “He put them everywhere. While the other one watched.”
    She started to cry hard now, her chin on her chest, her shoulders shaking.
    “Listen, Annie, you’re a brave person,” I said. “You don’t know it, but you saved my life. How many people could do what you did? Most people just roll over when violence comes into their lives. A guy like that can’t harm a person like you.”
    She had her arms folded tightly across her stomach, and she kept her face turned down toward the table.
    “You come in the living room and sit on the couch with me,” I said. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to the divan. I sat down next to her and picked up her hands in mine. “What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important. You don’t get mad at yourself or feel ashamed because you catch a virus, do you? Listen, I’ll be straight-up with you. You’ve got a lot more guts than I have. I’ve been in a situation where something very bad happened to me, but I didn’t have your courage.”
    She swallowed, widened her eyes, and touched at her wet cheeks with the back of her wrist. Her face jerked slightly each time she breathed, but she was listening to me now.
    “I was in Vietnam in the early days of the war,” I said, “a hotshot lieutenant with a degree in English who really thought he could handle the action. Why not? It had never been very rough while I was there. The Vietcong used to pop at us with some old Japanese and French junk that had been heated up and bent around trees. Half the time it blew up in their faces. Then one day we were going through a rubber plantation and we ran into a new cast of characters—North Vietnamese regulars armed with AK-47s. They sucked us into a mined area, then blew us apart.