Rain Will Come - Thomas Holgate Page 0,2

found himself wondering about her specific brand of disposable contact lenses. He wasn’t obsessive or compulsive. Not like that caricature of a detective on that stupid fucking show—what was it called? Mook? Monks? He just had one of those brains that was constantly working. Someone attuned to his condition might say this was why he had never married and had few friends. Czarcik himself scoffed at such cheap psychology. He prized self-awareness above all else and would never ascribe his rank misanthropy to a personality quirk. He didn’t particularly care for people and preferred to be left alone. Except, like now, when he wanted company. And for this he was prepared to pay well.

There were some benefits. The traits that made him a pariah in polite society rendered him indispensable to the Bureau of Judicial Enforcement.

He worked most frequently with the Chicago Police Department, and although their high-tech forensic center might have determined that the majority of the West Side’s smack was cut with an unidentified baking sugar, only Czarcik found it strange that low-level dealers wouldn’t just use the cheapest, most common brand available. And only Czarcik was dogged enough to finally track down the particular manufacturer to a family-owned confectionary in Bellagio, Italy, which had exactly one customer in the United States—Buonta & Sons, an authentic Italian grocery store on Grand Avenue, west of the expressway. Buonta was well known for having the best prosciutto this side of the Atlantic. It was less known for being a front for the Argentado family, the closest thing Chicago had to the Corleones. But once the DA initiated an investigation, the whole enterprise collapsed like a house of cards, leading to the biggest organized crime bust since Alphonse Capone had made his home in Cicero.

In recognition of his exemplary service to the public good, Czarcik had received numerous commendations and awards. The district he had been working out of presented him with a framed photo he had taken with the mayor; the mayor mugged for the camera, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face, while his hands smothered Czarcik’s own in a debt of gratitude.

The medals and ribbon bars meant nothing to him, tossed away in the back of a desk drawer. The framed photo, well, its surface was good for cutting coke. But the goodwill he accrued, indispensable. The proverbial “Get Out of Jail Free” card that, eventually, Czarcik assumed he would use quite literally. There had always been whispers about his exploits, but never enough to necessitate an internal investigation. One day, however, his luck would run out. His fatalism all but guaranteed it.

Candy was halfway out the door before shouting a perfunctory thank-you. Czarcik didn’t respond, his attention now focused on the White Sox game being transmitted in glorious low definition. Baseball was the only sport he watched nowadays. He liked its predictable rhythms, its familiar sounds. The dirt, the cowhide, the fresh-cut grass.

Besides, football brought back too many memories of talent squandered. Not to mention broken fingers, which was one of the reasons Czarcik was never as good a shot as he should have been. Hockey players were notoriously tough, but there was just something about grown men in ice skates that he couldn’t get past. Soccer? Come on. He had seen punks on the street take a slug to the torso and go down with less dramatics than those prima donnas in shin guards. And the NBA? He’d liked it in the seventies, when drugs and violence were endemic. Besides, what kind of self-respecting predominately black league would let Steve Nash, a diminutive white point guard, win two consecutive MVPs?

TWO

At the same time that Detective Paul Czarcik was discussing the evolution of pornographic mediums—from magazines to VHS tapes to the internet—with a well-paid and completely dressed escort, almost one thousand miles away, just outside Dallas, in the gated community of Whippoorwill Falls, Judge Jeral Robertson was pulling his Benz into the garage.

Once inside the house, the judge tossed his keys onto the granite countertop in the kitchen. The sound reverberated through his cavernous McMansion.

Judge Robertson lived alone. His wife had left him last year, taking with her the couple’s then-fifteen- and eight-year-old daughters.

After the video had gone viral, everything about his life had changed.

The video had been released on a Monday night. By Tuesday morning, it had been viewed over ten thousand times and generated thousands of page views, as his lawyer had explained. Even in a county, and state, not typically sympathetic to children’s rights,