Right as Rain

The man said nothing and his eyes said nothing. The kitchen radio blared in the room.

'Dante sent me back here,' said Quinn, shouting so the man could hear. Quinn scanned the kitchen quickly and went to where a steel tenderizing mallet lay atop an industrial microwave oven. He picked up the mallet, measured its weight in his hand, waved it stupidly, and said, 'Dante needs one of these out at the bar.'

The man shrugged and dragged on his cigarette, dropping the butt on the Formica at his feet and crushing it under a worn black shoe.

'I'll bring it right back,' said Quinn, but he knew the man didn't care. He was only talking now to hear his own voice and to keep the adrenalin going, and he was out of the kitchen just as quickly as he'd come in.

Now he was back in the hall and walking toward the men's room. Now he was pushing on the men's room door, walking through it and into the men's room, looking at Richard Coles taking a piss at one of the stand-up urinals against the wall.

Quinn kept moving. He said, 'Hey, Richard,' and when Richard Coles turned his head to the side, Quinn swung the mallet fast and hard and connected its ridged surface to the bridge of Richard's nose. Richard's nose shifted to the right, and blood sprayed off in the same direction. A stream of urine swung out and splashed at Quinn's feet. Richard's legs gave out from under him, and Quinn kicked him in the groin as he hit the tiles. He kicked him in the cheekbone, and blood splattered onto the porcelain face of the urinal. Quinn heard his own grunt as he kicked Richard in the side and was about to kick him again when he saw Richard's eyes roll up into his head.

Quinn's hands were shaking. He waited for the rise and fall of Richard's chest. He said, 'Terry Quinn,' and he dropped the mallet to the floor.

Out in the bar there was a buzz, a sense that something had gone down. The dancers were moving on the various stages, but the patrons were turned away from them, talking among themselves.

Men moved out of Quinn's path as he walked through the club. He felt the power, and it was a familiar feeling, though he hadn't felt it for a while. It was like he was wearing the uniform again, and he knew now that this was what he had been missing for a long time. He felt good.

Quinn got into the passenger side of Strange's car and looked over the lip of the bench. Sherman Coles was stretched out and cuffed, lying on the backseat.

Strange nodded at the blood on Quinn's boots. 'You all right?'

'Yeah.'

'Where my brother at?' said Sherman from the backseat.

Neither Quinn nor Strange answered Coles.

'How'd you know I'd walk out of there?' said Quinn.

'I didn't know,' said Strange. 'What I did know, you'd give me enough time.'

'Where's my brother!' yelled Sherman.

Quinn said to Strange, 'You always go for the light work?'

'When I can.' Strange ignitioned the Chevy. 'I got to get little Sherman over to Fifth Street, process the paperwork. I know you don't want to stick around for that.'

'Drop me at the first Metro station you see,' said Quinn. 'I need to get home. I'm seein' a lady tonight.'

'Yeah,' said Strange, thinking of his mother. 'I'm seein' one, too.'

Strange pulled off the curb and drove toward M Street. He looked over at Quinn, still intense, sitting straight up in his seat, his knuckles rapping at the window.

'Gonna split the agent's fee with you on this one, Terry. How's that sound?'

'How's this sound: You and me work together on that other thing.'

'Together? You're the subject of my investigation, you forget about that?'

'I didn't forget.'

'Look, you got nothin' to worry about. The review committee said you were right as rain on that shooting. I got no reason to doubt it.'

'Right as rain. Yeah, I remember, that's exactly what they said.'

'And you couldn't get with me on this, anyway. You don't have the license to be doing the kind of work I do.'

'If you're going to stay on it, I want to be involved.'

Strange goosed the gas, coming out of the turn.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'You and me, we're not through.'

10

Derek Strange's mother, Alethea Strange, lived in the District Convalescent Home in Ward 3, the predominantly white and wealthy section of Northwest D.C. The home, a combination hospice and nursing facility, had been operating in the city since the nineteenth century.

Strange didn't like nursing homes, for the same simple reason he didn't care for hospitals or funeral parlors. After his mother had her stroke back in '96, he had brought her to his house and hired a round-the-clock nurse, but a clot sent her back to the hospital, where the surgeons took her right leg. She had gotten around before with a walker, but now she was permanently wheelchair-bound, paralyzed on her right side, and she had previously lost most of her speech and the ability to read and write. Alethea Strange managed to tell her only living child that she wanted to go somewhere else to live out her days, with people who were sick like her. He suspected she was only asking to go away so as not to be a burden on him. Still, he granted her wish and put her in the District Convalescent Home's long-term care facility, as they accepted patients on Medicaid and there was nothing else that he could see to do.

In the lobby of the home that night, they were having some sort of event, young folks with green shirts, a church group most likely, trying to lead the elderly residents in song. There was a dining facility and a library with an aquarium in it down here, too. Alethea Strange never attended these events or sat in these rooms, and she only came down to the first level when Derek brought her down. In the spring and early summer, she would allow her son to wheel her out to the nicely landscaped courtyard, where a black squirrel, a frequent visitor to the complex, drank water while standing on the lip of the fountain. She'd sit in a block of sun, and he'd sit on a stone bench beside her, rubbing her back and sometimes holding her hand. The sight of the squirrel seemed to bring something to her day.

Strange went to the edge of the hospice at the end of a long hall and took the elevator up to the third floor. He walked through another hall painted drab beige, and as he approached the long-term wing where his mother resided he smelled the mixture of bland food, sickness, and incontinence that he had come to dread.

His mother was in her wheelchair, seated at one of three round tables in a television room where the residents could also take their meals. Next to her was another stroke victim, an Armenian man whose name Strange could never remember, and next to him was a skeletal woman in a kind of reclining wheelchair who never spoke or smiled, just stared up at the ceiling with red-rimmed, hollowed-out eyes. At the table beside them a woman fed her bib-wearing husband, and next to them a man sat sleeping before an untouched tray of food, his chin down on his chest. No one seemed to be watching the basketball contest playing on the television set, or listening to the announcer who was loudly calling the game. Strange patted the Armenian's shoulder, pulled a chair from the other side of the room, and drew it to his mother's side.

'Momma,' said Strange, kissing her on the cheek and taking her hand, light and fragile as paper.

She smiled crookedly at him and slowly blinked her eyes. There was a bead of applesauce hanging on the edge of her lip, and he wiped it clean with the napkin that had fallen into her lap.

'You want a little of this tea right here?'

She pointed with a shaking hand to two sugar packets. Strange ripped the packets open and poured sugar into the plastic cup that held the tea. He stirred it and put the cup in her hand.

'Hot,' she said, the t soft as a whisper.

'Yes, ma'am. You want some more of that meat?'

He called it 'that meat' because he wasn't exactly sure if it was fowl or beef, smothered as it was in a grayish, congealed gravy.