A Fistful of Rain

the access way. From his expression, I knew that he’d seen it, too, was probably a lap ahead of me.

“There’s a fucking tape?”

“It’s possible.” Burchett looked at the unit in his hands, then back to me. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Is it off?”

“Yes, ma’am. We did a frequency trap before disconnecting it, so there’s no need for it to ever get switched back on.” He moved the box to his left hand, went into the coin pocket on his Levi’s with his right, coming out with a thin and short metal tube that he held between his thumb and index finger for me to see. “This is one of the cameras. Not much to look at.”

There was a bead of glass on one end of the tube, two tiny wires running from the other. In the light I wasn’t sure, but the wires looked white and black. The whole thing wasn’t much longer or thicker than a matchstick.

“Easy to place, easy to hide, gives a stable enough image,” Burchett continued. “You have the right software, you can clean up whatever it provides pretty nice. Not terribly expensive, either. The technology’s gotten to the point that this is bush-league stuff.”

“Hurrah for technology,” I said.

Chapel finally spoke up. “Rick? How long to get this stuff out of her house?”

“Take us maybe an hour to disconnect everything, get it all pulled and all the little holes spackled so that you can’t much tell they were ever here.”

“Then do it,” I said.

“Then what?” Chapel asked.

“Then what what?” I asked.

“There’s a question of the tape.”

“Potential tape,” Burchett said. “Miss Bracca got home four days ago, that’s nearly a hundred hours of video if the perv who did this kept it all. That’s not likely, Fred. Gets expensive.”

“Just one tape is a problem, Rick. None of us wants to see a ‘Bracca Uncovered’ video hitting the Web.”

“No, don’t suppose we do.”

“Then I want to know who did this. And I want to make sure they don’t have anything damaging to my client.”

“More damaging,” I said, but I said it softly, and neither of them heard me.

Burchett was nodding. “With the frequency, we can track back to the receiver. But we’ll have to move on that fast. Our perv here most likely already knows his system’s gone down. He might guess we’re on to him.”

“Then get on it.”

“We could call the police.”

“No,” I said. “No cops, no publicity. Bad enough the pictures are out there, I don’t want the whole world seeing me like that.”

“Rick, you’ll have to handle this yourself,” Chapel said.

Burchett smiled, nodded his head at me as if tipping the brim of a hat, and I realized what it was that made him so disarming, and that maybe made him as good as Chapel said he was. A man he might be, but in that gesture, you could see the kid who wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up.

As if to prove me right, he said, “We’ll get saddled up.”

Burchett left with the scary woman, leaving the other guy to remove all the pink flags and the cameras they marked, and Chapel told me that he needed to get back to the office, but that I should call him if I wanted anything.

“You going to call Graham?” I asked him.

“That was my intention.”

“You’re going to tell him about the other pictures?”

“I don’t see how I can’t.”

I nodded, not liking it. It was stupid, maybe, but I knew what would happen as soon as Graham got the news. He traveled with a laptop, and it wouldn’t take long before Click and Van saw the pictures. Click would be bad enough, but the thought of Van staring at those images was hard to take. She’d see it not so much as my humiliation, but proof that she’d been right about me all along.

Chapel left me with his home number, and the number for his mobile, as well as the number for Burchett. He told me he’d get in touch as soon as he heard anything, and that I shouldn’t worry, things were well in hand, now. I walked him to the door, and when he was gone I went to the kitchen and got myself a beer, not really giving a damn what the remaining member of Burchett Security might think of that behavior.

I was halfway through the bottle when I realized just how set up I had been, and that brought some dark thoughts running home. Whoever had done this, they’d done it with a lot of time to spare. They’d done it easily, and covered themselves well.

Which made me think it had been an inside job, someone working with the carpenters or the electricians or someone.

There was only one person who had been inside while I’d been on tour, who could come and go as he pleased.

There was early rush-hour traffic on the bridges crossing the Willamette, and it took me close to twenty minutes to get from my place in Irvington to Mikel’s in the Northwest Hills. His condo was in a cluster of similar units, designed to look like Victorian town houses, off Westover. It was high enough that, on a clear day, you could see all of Portland spreading out to the east, with Mount Hood’s snowcap glistening in the far distance, and to the north, the broken top of Mount Saint Helens.

On a clear day. Not today, not with the evening clouds rolling in, heavy with payloads from the Pacific.

I parked on the street and strode to his front door, trying to think of what I would say if Tommy was there. Probably tell him to get the hell away from me, that I didn’t want to see him, that what I had was for Mikel’s ears alone. I’d seemed able to bully Tommy pretty successfully once already, so maybe it would work a second time.

All of the tenant spaces were empty except for Mikel’s, which was filled by his Land Rover, so I knew he was home, and I figured none of his neighbors were, yet. Tommy hadn’t brought a car when he’d visited me, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.

I knocked and didn’t get an answer, so I knocked again, harder, and still didn’t get an answer. It was starting to tick me off, to make my suspicions seem all the more grounded.

All of his alarm about the picture when he’d shown it to me, his need to hear me say that I hadn’t posed. I’d taken it as concern, but maybe it wasn’t concern as much as guilt. Maybe the cops had been right all along, that Mikel had let one of his friends crash at my place. And maybe that friend had made me his personal hobby, his cottage industry.

“Dammit, Mikel, open up!”

I pounded harder and even threw the toe of my boot, just for the added noise. No response.

I stopped banging the door, mostly to give my hand a rest. A wind had kicked up, making the trees along the hillside whisper. Distantly, I heard the whistle of an Amtrak train sliding into Union Station.

“Fucker,” I muttered, and tried the knob for the hell of it, and it turned easy, and the door came open.

From where I was standing in the doorway, I could see somebody’s leg at the end of the hall, sticking out from the living room. A whiff of alcohol and vomit, the scents of my bathroom, brushed my face.

I moved a couple steps forward, across the threshold. Everything in my chest felt like it was compressing, crumpling under pressure.

“Mikel?” I asked.

This time, when he didn’t answer, I knew why.

My brother lay on his side, the way he must have fallen, and there was dark blood down his front and his back, seeping into the white carpet. His eyes and his mouth were open, and I knew he had been in pain when he died.

I took it in, then saw the rest. The empty cans scattered on the carpet, the overturned chairs, the broken lamp.