The Ancient Rain Read Online Free

from Code Pink, an antiwar group whose members wore pink T-shirts and black tights.
    Earlier, the women had been gathered at the other side of the plaza, where the passing traffic could see their signs: NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NO WAR IN THE MIDEAST. They had been drawn across the square by the television cameras. There were some street people mixed in, yelling stuff just for the fun of it.
    The cops were edgy.
    It was the kind of job that made you edgy even under normal circumstances. With all the security measures, and the lack of personnel, everyone was working double shift. The public was full of fear, and the cops crankier than usual.
    Anthrax in the post office. Poison gas at the Opera House. A terrorist lurking at the Golden Gate Bridge.
    The anthrax turned out to be laundry detergent, the poison gas was a woman applying hairspray, and the terrorist was a park employee sneaking a cigarette.
    Still, it all had to be investigated, and events like this, a simple press conference, once mundane, required a small army.
    *   *   *
    Dante himself had spent the morning down at the central jail.
    At the end of it, he’d learned the feds were keeping Owens under wraps until they could announce the arrest at a press conference. They wanted to make a show for the cameras.
    So Dante had come down here to the Burton Building—a tallish, nondescript building, steel girders and blue glass, with a windy, anonymous plaza out front. The vehicle barricades had been put in a few months back to protect the entryway, and now a small group emerged from that entry, gathering in the secured area near a makeshift podium. Dante felt a twinge. He had made the walk from those glass doors to the podium once upon a time, when he’d been on the force, a young man on the cusp. It had not been so long ago, really. There were some new faces but some old ones as well, people with whom he was not on the best of terms. A phalanx of go-getters, in uniform and out. Leonard Blackwell stood at the center, and nearby, off to the side, was Leanora Chin, all in blue, hands crossed at the wrist.
    In their midst, a thin, blonde woman—toward whom they were all being quite solicitous, as if she had been injured in some way—wavered from one foot to the other, leaning raillike into the wind. Accompanying the woman, standing close to her, was an older man, out of place with the others, whom Dante recognized despite the fact it had been many years.
    Guy Sorrentino, from the neighborhood.
    Sorrentino had been with the SFPD at one time, too, and like Dante he did investigative work now. He was some twenty years Dante’s senior, but their tenure at the department had overlapped. A long time back, when Sorrentino was a young man and Dante just a boy, he had worked a couple summers for Dante’s father down at the Mancuso warehouse.
    What Sorrentino was doing here, Dante had no idea. He behaved toward the younger woman in a fatherly way, a hand on her forearm.
    On account of the wind and the rustling of the crowd, Dante could not catch her name as she took the podium. She was in her late thirties, with a haircut that was not fashionable, at least not in San Francisco, the hair too high off the head, the blond a bit too much from the bottle. Not unattractive, but with a rawness about her that suggested the regions beyond the city, past the suburbs, where the land was flat and the sunlight caked with dust.
    â€œI have just heard news I have been waiting a long time to hear. I talked to the U.S. Attorney’s office here in San Francisco, to Mr. Blackwell … Twenty-seven years ago, in 1975, my mother was murdered during a bank robbery. She was shot down, while I waited in the car. I saw the ones responsible,” she said. “I saw them leaving the bank. But I was young, and for reasons I have never understood, no arrests were made. Until today.”
    The woman was Elise Younger, Dante realized, the daughter of the woman who