After the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

television. Unfold over days, weeks, and months.
    There was only one complication.
    The components for the weapon had traveled halfway around the world. They had been painstakingly configured, everything had been calculated for maximum impact.
    The Mole hated leaving anything to chance. He had followed the weapon and had seen it delivered with his own eyes. Four hundred crucial yards now separated the weapon and its target.
    After all the planning and work, there was one last ancient and durable obstacle to overcome. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they had to delay their attack, confronted by a sea of mud.
    They were waiting on the weather.

Chapter Three
    Ace Shuster woke up feeling lucky.
    And he’d be the first to tell you, it was a feeling that slanted uphill against the odds.
    So he kept his eyes clamped shut and tried to hold on to the feeling, which was a challenge considering the ache that wrapped his body. But after a few moments he ascertained that the pain was all surface, the fatigue of a hangover, not a specific injury. And that was a good sign.
    For five long minutes he explored the velvet throb on the back of his eyelids. He’d wait a while, get real prepared before he opened his eyes. This was a habit from the old days when guaranteed trouble would be perched on his bedpost, waiting to pounce.
    First he moved his tongue around in his mouth and found all his teeth were still where they should be. Then he moved his fingers and toes; then his neck, his arms, and his legs. Nothing hurt, so he was pretty sure he had come through the previous night reasonably unscathed. Tentatively, he snaked out his hand and prodded around in the bed and determined he was the sole occupant. He thought on it and assumed he’d been mostly drinking beer last night. He allowedthat he’d made a few passes at the hard stuff around midnight.
    Yesterday, his younger brother, Dale, had given him this rock-bottom nugget of wisdom about drinking: Don’t put it in your mouth, dummy .
    Check it out. Reduced to sitting still for advice from his concerned but severely limited nerd kid brother.
    It wasn’t out of the question to wonder where he was, so he braced himself and finally opened his eyes. A curling baseball poster was Scotch-taped to the wall. Slowly Ace raised a slightly shaky hand and saluted Roger Maris. Same poster had hung over his bed back on the farm when he was in high school.
    So far, so good. He recognized the room. He’d managed to make it home. Then, as his senses unclogged, he heard the familiar sounds that he’d heard all his life. The wind doing its low howl down from Manitoba. The steady backbeat chug of a tractor somewhere out in the green grain ocean. Another enslaved North Dakotan, addicted to adversity. Dumb shit. Probably trying to pull a swather through his flax in this weather. Ace shook his head. The goddamn wind and the goddamn wheat and the goddamn tractor going on forever.
    He saw a corner of clotted gray sky in the window over the bed. He smelled a moody ferment of rain in the air. Barley, durum wheat, and the pungent perfume of canola. God, would it rain again today?
    As if on cue, the tractor stuttered and then quit.
    Had it rained last night? He couldn’t remember. Which meant he drove home blacked out. From where? Okay. Work it back. He got a snapshot of a dark-haired woman with a pretty face, except when she opened her mouth her teeth were too big. There was an Old Milwaukee beer sign over her shoulder. He didn’t remember the woman but he recognized the sign.
    At the bar in Starkweather.
    Where else.
    Ace shook his head. Dumb to go back there. Like picking at a scab.
    Then he got the flash again. Why not something fast and pretty just for him? Why not today?
    Damn. Just something…
     
    Ace rolled over and planted his bare feet on the floor. Originally this room over the bar had been his dad’s office, then it was a storeroom. Next they’d converted it to a one bedroom apartment, then a hangout