Bullets of Rain Read Online Free PDF

down an overpriced Benelli shotgun with a pistol grip and a pair of handguns, both hanging on pegs in shoulder holsters-a Beretta 92F nine-millimeter and a big-cock Desert Eagle.45. All the weapons were loaded. (Art's father had taught him this was the best way to prevent an "accidental" shooting with a rig presumed to be "unloaded.")
        Art's improvised, bare-bones range was on the north side of the house, where what he laughingly called his "yard" hung on for dear chlorophyllic life. He had provided for this lawn area in the basic plan of the house and had thrown a board fence around it with a future eye toward cactus, or some hearty gardening-indistinct plans for amateur horticulture that became extinct once Lorelle had been removed from the equation. Now the lawn was more like one of those welcome mats woven of tough brown fiber, the beds for flowers or plants gone to weedy dirt. Salt air had killed the grass to the point where every footstep raised chaff. Hardier grasses sprouted from the dunes separating the house from the highway, but Art had nothing to do with that.
        He cut Blitz loose to roam and arranged a lineup of two-liter plastic beverage jugs scrounged from the big recycling bin. Filled with water, they took hits most impressively. Art knew bowling pins to be the target of choice for gun geeks because a bowling pin was an "anatomically correct" sketch of the hit zone on a human being, from narrow chin to fatter sternum, but he enjoyed the way the plastic bottles responded. A nine-millimeter hollow-point round would punch a hole the size of a Bic pen and blast an exit path as big as a dessert plate, causing the bottles to somersault, pinwheeling jets of tap water. The.45 cut them in half like a scythe, and the shotgun caused them to simply disintegrate.
        Behind the rickety post rail of bottles at waist height, Art hung regulation paper targets on a nylon clothesline, for the usual plinking. The sky was a dirty dustmop hue, and more than once Art felt speckles of moisture on his bare forearms as he set up.
        He destroyed a few of the bottles with the Beretta, alternating to the paper targets for double- and triple-tap shots. Each round blew a sonic cocoon of air toward his face. Blowback was an oddly pleasing sensation, but the targets were already dancing in the wind, unstable, some barely tethered. No good for skill.
        Concentrate, raise, sight, lire. The motion had to be fluid, more natural, making the gun an extension of his reach. Not plinking, now. As he tried to focus, he knew that he was in danger of retrofitting Lorelle into some kind of no-fault goddess. The conundrum of death was that it sometimes made the dear departed perfect, an icon against whom the still living could never compete. He and Lorelle had navigated through many fights and conflicts; that was just part of getting accustomed to someone who fit you like one hand into another, even though they were inside different skins.
        They'd once had a terrific argument about guns, for example.
        
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        Lorelle is wearing astonishingly brief cutoffs and no underwear, which gives her a low-blow advantage as she assumes what Art has come to know as her defensive posture. She's on the sofa, knees drawn up to her chin, ankles crossed, arms hugging legs, eyes set in infinity focus. It is summer and sea aerates the house, blasting through open windows and doors to rinse out the ambient staleness. Most of the reconstruction of the house is complete, or relegated to buffer zones in need of tweaking. Whenever Lorelle speaks and does not look at him, he knows they have spread their picnic blanket in a minefield.
        "If it's for self-defense, why do you need a dozen of them?''
        "I like the hardware. Call it a boy thing.''
        "You're talking about them as if they're toys. Look at a handgun. It exists for only one purpose-to kill people.''
        "And a lot of people act