Bullets of Rain by David J. Schow Page B

Blitz?"
        Blitz stretched and aired out his tongue. Yes, adventure was fine with him, too.
        "No, you don't understand. This house is a design that some people have called revolutionary. If there's a big blow coming down, I need to monitor it. See how the structure weathers it. Because if I'm right, then rich people up and down the entire coast will be calling, and I won't have to design a goddamn futuristic food court."
        Derek blew out an exasperated breath. "All right. If you're gonna puss on me, then here's what I'll do: I will call you from L.A. with the skinny from Joe. By then the storm'll be done. I will then come back up here and drag your sorry ass back down there, because I want this excursion with you.''
        "I can drive down…"
        "You're missing the point of the whole trip. We have to stay awake all night, drink road beers, get so punchy that everything we see turns viciously funny. I need it, I want it. But you had to go do what you always do, which is logic me out of it. You didn't give me a bullshit excuse, you gave me a real one, so just say yes to the second part and I'll forgive you for the first. And for being such an anus."
        "Am I that much of an anus?''
        Blitz barked. Plea. Both humans dissolved into laughter.
        "Well, stay the night," said Art. "Take off in the morning."
        "Nah," said Derek. "I was listening to the radio, too-what there was of FM. That storm will fuck up the roads soon enough, and I want to get inland."
        "Right this instant?"
        He rubbed the two-day stubble on his cheeks. "Not if you've got another monster movie. And maybe one more beer."
        "Deal." It wasn't until Art stood up again that he realized he was quite drunk already.
        
***
        
        Art opened his eyes to a vista of blank blue on the big Proton TV screen and a wasteland of beer bottles, congregated on the glass table like innocent bystanders at an accident scene. Pain stabbed up and over from his occipital, like a muscle tension headache. His first impulse was to douse some of the overbearing lights; his second, to gulp a fistful of Excedrin…
        … just like the bad old period that followed Lorelle's death,
        when he'd been doing that bottomless-pit drinking that frequently brought blackouts, and lost him entire calendar days.
        Panicked and unbalanced, he looked for the nearest clock and saw that it was eleven-thirty; the darkness outside would make that P.M. But was it eleven-thirty on the night Derek showed up, or some further date? Art stumbled to his computer, holding his head as though he'd been mugged.
        Eleven thirty-two P.M., it advised. Same day.
         So you're by yourself , he thought, walled up in your own fortress, minimizing human contact, and what happens? A flamboyant character from your past shows up practically unannounced to regale you with catch-up stories. He does most of the talking while you bask in nostalgia.
        Art's lungs suddenly felt hot and tender, as if the rattlesnake's maraca tail segments were tickling his chest with dread. He did not like the possibility that was racing toward his conscious mind like an ominous, dark juggernaut.
        Derek shows up and is the very embodiment of hearty macho camaraderie. He spins a fanciful story of how he took charge when his lady was cheating on him in some exotic foreign port, blew away her paramour as smooth as a country-and-western song lyric, and wound up in the Gray Bar Hotel. Yet he's a free man scant years later thanks to a Houdini of a lawyer, or a loophole in the law, or… something. Was there a chance in hell of these cards playing in a shooting death? Art didn't know, and the very seductive convenience of Derek's story began to gnaw at his logic.
        They had talked the follies of love, drunk beer, and watched monster movies, strictly according to Art's idealized template of their past, when