A Fistful of Rain by Greg Rucka Page A

hickey.”
    Click and Graham both focused on her, and Van’s hand flew to the side of her neck, alarm all across her face. Then she saw me grinning and picked up her butter knife, making a stabbing gesture.
    “Not funny, Mim!”
    “No, especially if he’s not a keeper.”
    “Shut up, drink your coffee.”
    “Yes, my mistress.”
    Graham stowed his PDA, pulled out his briefcase, and started distributing photocopies.
    “Came this morning. You are looking at a mock-up of the article that will run next week in
Rolling Stone
. Complete, I might add, with an image of Tailhook on the cover.”
    Conversation stopped for most of a minute as rustling paper and moving silverware took over the audio. The packets were ten pages, including a copy of the cover photo, stapled together, black-and-white. I skimmed, more interested in combating my headache than finding out how good or bad I looked, but Click and Vanessa both put full attention onto theirs.
    “I’m ‘The Body,’ ” Van announced after a moment. “Me, body.”
    “Not just any body,” Graham said. “
The
Body.”
    “This’ll be in color?”
    “That’s what I’m told. The article is mixed, some b/w, but your shots are color.”
    “The body?” I asked.
    Van showed me the page she was looking at, a picture of her relaxing in a chair, head craned back but turned toward the camera, laughing and stretching. Her belly was bare, showing the hoop through her navel, the tone of her muscle. Not overtly sexual, but attractive. It was captioned with the words “The Body.”
    “Which makes Click?”
    Both Click and Graham answered. “ ‘The Spine.’ ”
    I went to my copy and flipped through. The picture had Click from the waist up, wearing his Winterhawks jersey, looking straight on at the camera with his hand-rolled cigarette drooping from a corner of his mouth. His smile in the shot was amused at the attention.
    I flipped to what they said about me, and when I saw that I’d been labeled “The Brains,” I laughed out loud. Then I saw the picture they were using.
    I wasn’t certain it was me at all for a couple of seconds. I just didn’t think I looked like that, that I could ever look like that. The second thing was that I had no memory of it being taken, no recall of the moment when the camera turned on me to catch me in the pose.
    It wasn’t a studio shot, it was a candid, probably taken during the two weeks the interviewer had been in our shadow, and it looked like I was backstage someplace, alone, sitting on one of the metal gear boxes. Before a show, or maybe after, because I had my concert clothes on, the cargo pants and the tank top. The Tele in my hands, eyes closed, my head back, not exerting myself, just relaxed, just playing, maybe even singing. Light on me and shadow all around.
    I’d never looked that good, that sexy, in all my life.
    “Pretty hot,” Graham said. “Pretty hot, indeed.”
    “You look three seconds from orgasm,” Click observed.
    “You’ve never seen me three seconds from orgasm. How would you know?” I told him.
    “My imagination is active. It looks entirely sexual, it looks like you’re getting off.”
    “Were it that easy.”
    “You’ve had a long-term relationship for a while now, haven’t you?”
    I held up my right hand. “Yes, the five of us are very happy together.”
    “That is a picture that will be on lockers,” Graham told me. “That is a picture that gets reprinted, Mimser.
That
is a picture that immortalizes a rock star.”
    I wasn’t sure what I felt about that.
    From the look on Van’s face, she wasn’t, either.
    The second night in Sydney, all of us—the band, the crew, everyone—went to a party at a club called Home. The party was thrown by the label, celebrating not just the
Rolling Stone
cover, but also the debut of our new single. “Queen of Swords.” It had entered the
Billboard
Top Fifty at twenty-two, as they say, with a bullet, and it was a big fucking deal, because it meant we’d