Free A Fistful of Rain by Greg Rucka Page B

right.”
    “Just shut up, Tommy.”
    “Miriam, what I’m saying is that for fifteen years, I’ve thought every day about you and Mikel and that accident.” He was blinking rapidly, as if there was grit in his eyes. The strain was making his voice climb little by little. “I don’t want you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself.”
    “Then what the hell do you want? Is it money? Is that why you’re here?”
    He looked horrified. “What? No—”
    “I’ll tell you what, Tommy. I’ll go and write you a check right now, this very moment, if you can look me in the eye and stop lying long enough to say that it was murder, that it wasn’t accidental. None of this,
I can’t remember,
none of this,
I was drunk.
”
    “Miriam—”
    “What do you say? Thirty grand, would that do it? Just pulling a number from the air. I can go higher.”
    He stared at me.
    “Fifty,” I said. “Fifty grand, right now, you tell me you murdered her, you fucker.”
    Tommy reached for the door, headed out. The sunlight was bright, and made me wince. He started across the porch.
    I stuck with him, feeling the cold of my porch on my bare feet. “Sixty,” I said.
    At the end of the walk, he made a right, heading down the block. There was an old gray Chevy parked at the curb, and I thought it was his, but he kept going past it. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, lowered his head. A wind had risen, tearing leaves from branches up and down the street.
    “Eighty, Tommy!” I shouted after him. “Eighty, all you have to do is say it!”
    He kept walking away from me.
    “I can go as high as a hundred,” I said, but it was more to myself than to him.
    My father disappeared around the corner. He hadn’t looked back.

CHAPTER 10
    Her life was saved by rock and roll.
    Here’s how.
    An ambulance came and took my mother and cops came and took Tommy, and our neighbor, Mrs. Ralleigh, came and took Mikel and me. In her living room across the street, she tried to get me to stop crying, tried to get Mikel to say something, anything. She was an elderly African-American woman who lived alone and would bring us fresh squash and green beans from her garden every fall, and her home smelled strange to me, both antiseptic and greasy all at once.
    I kept trying to get up and run back outside, and Mrs. Ralleigh had to keep blocking me from the door, finally wrapping me in her arms and holding me on her couch until I stopped struggling and surrendered to sobs alone.
    More cops arrived, and we watched them from the window, Mikel and I, working in the rain. There was one not in uniform, and he crossed over to us after a few minutes, knocking on the door. Mrs. Ralleigh went to answer it, and then they came back together.
    “This is Detective Wagner,” Mrs. Ralleigh told us.
    Detective Wagner sat down opposite us, balancing a notepad on his thigh. He was using a chewed pencil to write with, and I could see he’d made drawings, too, what I know now were diagrams, trying to place positions, but then, I thought they were just doodles. I couldn’t tell how old he was; he was ages younger than Mrs. Ralleigh, who I’d always thought was over a hundred, easy.
    “Alice says that your name is Mikel,” Detective Wagner said. “And that your name is Miriam, but that everyone calls you Mim.”
    Mikel didn’t respond, just kept staring toward the window. I nodded, tried to wipe my eyes. I still had tears coming, and they weren’t stopping. When I followed Mikel’s gaze, I could see a man taking pictures of my father’s truck, of the driveway, of the stainless steel bowl.
    “I need to ask you both some questions. Will you let me ask you some questions about what happened?”
    Nothing from Mikel, and again I nodded, and the detective came and sat next to me, gave me a pat on the arm, and started to write in his notepad everything I told him. His handwriting was very bad and I couldn’t read anything on the paper. Mikel never said a word, and I was