Prayers for Rain (32 page)

“What?” he said.

“Good to see you, too. Let us in.”

“Why?”

“We need stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Illegal stuff.”

“No shit.”

“Bubba,” Angie said, “we already figured out you’re doing the nasty with Ms. Moore, so come on. Let us pass.”

Bubba frowned and it thrust his lower lip out. He stepped aside and we entered the warehouse to see Vanessa Moore, wearing one of Bubba’s hockey jerseys and nothing else, lying on the red couch in the center of the floor, a champagne flute propped on her washboard abdomen, watching
9½ Weeks
on Bubba’s fifty-inch TV. She used the remote control to pause it as we came through the door, froze Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger going at it against an alley wall as blue-lit acid rain dripped on their bodies.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey. Don’t let us disturb you.”

She scooped some peanuts from a bowl on the coffee table, popped them in her mouth. “No worries.”

“’Nessie,” Bubba said, “we got to talk a bit of business.”

Angie caught my eye and mouthed, “Nessie?”

“Illegal business?”

Bubba looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded vigorously.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Okey-doke.” She started to rise from the couch.

“No, no,” Bubba said. “Stay there. We’ll leave. We got to go upstairs anyway.”

“Mmm. Better.” She slipped back down into the couch
and hit the remote and Mickey and Kim started huffing and puffing to bad eighties synth-rock again.

“You know, I’ve never seen this movie,” Angie said as we followed Bubba up the stairs to the third floor.

“Mickey’s actually not very greasy in this one,” I said.

“And Kim in those white socks,” Bubba said.

“And Kim in those white socks,” I agreed.

“Two thumbs-up from the pervert twins,” Angie said. “What a boon.”

“So look,” Bubba said as he turned on the lights on the third floor and Angie wandered off to look through the crates for her weapon of choice, “you got any problem with me, ah, how do I say this—boning Vanessa?”

I covered a smile with my hand, looked down at an open crate of grenades. “Ah, no, man. No problem at all.”

Bubba said, “Cause I haven’t had a, whatta ya call it, a steady—”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yeah, in like a long time.”

“Since high school,” I said. “Stacie Hamner, right?”

He shook his head. “In Chechnya, ’84, there was someone.”

“I never knew.”

He shrugged. “I never offered, dude.”

“There’s that, sure.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, leaned in close. “So we’re cool?”

“Cool beans,” I said. “What about Vanessa? She cool?”

He nodded. “She’s the one told me you wouldn’t care.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Said you two never cared about each other. It was just exercise.”

“Huh,” I said, as we crossed back toward Angie. “Exercise.”

Angie pulled a rifle from a wooden crate and rested the stock on her hip. The barrel towered over her. The rifle was so thick and looked so heavy and mean, it was hard to
believe she could hold it without tipping over on her side.

“You got a target scope with this baby?”

“I got a scope,” Bubba said. “What about bullets?”

“The bigger the better.”

Bubba turned his head, shot me a deadpan look. “Funny. That’s what Vanessa says.”

On the roof across from Scott Pearse’s loft, we sat and waited for the phone call. Nelson, intrigued by the rifle, stayed and sat with us.

At ten on the nose, Scott Pearse’s phone rang and we watched him cross the living room and lift the receiver of a black phone attached to the brick support column in the center of the room. He smiled when he heard the voice on the other end, leaned lazily back into the support column and cradled the receiver between neck and shoulder.

His grin faded gradually, and then his face turned into a sickened grimace. He held out his hands as if the caller could see him and spoke rapidly into the phone, his body bending with his pleading.

Then Carrie Dawe must have hung up on the other end, because Scott Pearse jerked his ear back from the phone and stared at it for a moment. Then he screamed and smashed the receiver over and over again into the brick column until all he had left were a few shards of black plastic and a dangling metal mouthpiece.

“Gee,” Angie said, “I hope he has a second phone.”

I pulled the cellular phone I’d gotten at Bubba’s from my pocket. “How much you want to bet he breaks that one, too, once I’m done.”

I dialed Scott Pearse’s number.

Before I hit send, Nelson said, “Hey, Ange,” and pointed at the rifle. “You want me to do the honors?”

“Why?”

“Fucking recoil’ll knock your shoulder back a few blocks is all.” He jerked a thumb at me. “Why can’t he do it?”

“He’s got shitty aim.”

“With that scope?”

“Really shitty aim,” she said.

Nelson held out his hands. “It’d be my pleasure.”

Angie considered the rifle stock, then glanced at her shoulder. Eventually, she nodded. She handed the rifle to Nelson, then told him what we wanted.

Nelson shrugged. “Okay. Why not just kill him, though?”

“Because,” Angie said, “A, we’re not killers.”

“And B?” Nelson asked.

“Killing him’s too nice,” I said.

I depressed the send button on the cell phone and Scott Pearse’s phone rang on the other end.

He’d been leaning with his head against the brick column, and he raised it slowly, turned his head as if unsure what sound he was hearing. Then he walked over to the bar curled around the edge of his kitchen and lifted a portable off the top.

“Hello.”

“Scottie,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“I was wondering how long it would be before you called, Pat.”

“Not surprised?”

“That you learned my identity? I expected no less, Pat. Are you watching me at the moment?”

“Possibly.”

He chuckled. “I sensed as much. Nothing I could put my finger on, mind you—I mean, you’re not bad—but in the last week or so, I had the feeling eyes were watching.”

“You’re an intuitive fella, Scott. What can I say?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Was it your intuition that told you to bayonet five women in Panama?”

He wandered into the living room, head down, index finger scratching the side of his neck, a wry smile curling up one side of his face.

“Well,” he exhaled into the phone. “You’ve done some
extra credit in the homework department, Pat. Very good.”

The grin left his face, but the scratching grew a little faster.

“So, Pat, what’s your plan, buddy?”

“I’m not your buddy,” I said.

“Whoops. My bad. What’s your plan, asshole?”

I laughed. “Getting testy, Scott?”

In the loft, he put a palm to his forehead, then brushed the hair back off his head with it. He looked out at his black windows. He toed a shard of black plastic on the floor with his shoe.

“I can wait you out,” he said. “You’ll tire of watching me do nothing.”

“That’s what my partner said.”

“She’s right.”

“I gotta beg to differ on that score, Scottie.”

“Really?”

“Sure. How long can you wait now that Carrie Dawe knows who Pilot Tim McGoldrick is, knows you’re the same guy who ruined her daughter’s life?”

Scott said nothing. A strange, low hissing noise came from his end like the sound of a teapot in the minute before it comes to a full boil.

“You tell me that, Scottie?” I asked. “I’m just curious.”

Scott Pearse turned suddenly from the brick column and stalked across his shiny blond floors. He reached the oversized windows and stared out at his reflection, raised his eyes and looked up at what could only be, from his side, the barest outline of our roof edge.

“Your sister lives in Seattle, fuck. She and her husband and their—”

“—children, yeah, Scott, just went on vacation,” I said. “My treat. I sent them tickets last Monday, shithead. They left this morning.”

“She’ll come back sometime.” He stared directly up at the roof, and from here I could see cords in his neck strain against the skin.

“But by then, Scottie, this’ll be over.”

“I’m not that easy to shake up, Pat.”

“Sure you are, Scottie. A guy who bayonets a roomful of dying women is a guy who snaps. So, get ready Scott, you’re about to start snapping.”

Scott Pearse stared defiantly at his windowpane. He said, “Listen to—” and I hung up the phone.

He stared at the phone in his hand, shocked beyond reason, I think, that two people had dared hang up on him in the same night.

I nodded at Nelson.

Scott Pearse gripped the phone between his hands and raised it over his head and the window beside him exploded as Nelson fired four rounds into it.

Pearse vaulted backward onto the floor and the phone skittered out of his hand.

Nelson pivoted and fired again, three times, and the window in front of Scott Pearse imploded in a cascade, like ice pouring from the back of a faulty tailgate.

Pearse rolled to his left and up into a crouch.

“Just don’t hit his body,” I said to Nelson.

Nelson nodded and fired several shots into the floor a few inches behind Scott Pearse’s feet as he scampered over the blond wood. He sprang up like a cat and vaulted over the bar into the kitchen.

Nelson looked at me.

Angie glanced up from Bubba’s police scanner as Scott Pearse’s alarm bells ripped through the still summer night. “We got, maybe, two minutes-thirty.”

I backhanded Nelson’s shoulder. “How much damage can you do in a minute flat?”

Nelson smiled. “Fucking boatload, dude.”

“Go nuts.”

Nelson took out the rest of the windows first, then went to work on the lights. The stained-glass Tiffany lamp over the bar looked like a pack of fruity Life Savers stuffed in a cherry bomb by the time he was through with it. The track lights over the kitchen and living room shredded into pop
ping shards of white plastic and pale glass. The video cameras went up in blue and red blurs of electrical spark. Nelson turned the floor to splinters, the couches and slim leather recliners into piles of white moss, and punched so many holes in the refrigerator, most of the food would probably spoil before the cops finished writing their reports.

“One minute,” Angie yelled over the roar. “Let’s go.”

Nelson looked back over his shoulder at the glittering mass of brass shells. “Who loaded the mags?”

“Bubba.”

He nodded. “They’re clean, then.”

We boogied across the roof and down the dark fire escape. Nelson tossed me the rifle and hopped into his Camaro, tore off out of the alley without a word.

We climbed in the Jeep, and I could hear distant sirens ring up Congress from the piers down the other end of the waterfront.

I spun out of the alley and banged a right on Congress, crossed over the harbor and into the city proper. I took a hard right at the yellow light on Atlantic Avenue, slowed as I cut into the left lane, and took the reverse curve, headed south. I felt my heart return to a normal rate as I reached the expressway.

I picked up the cell phone Bubba had given me as I descended the on ramp, pressed redial, then send.

Scott Pearse’s “What?” sounded hoarse, and in the background, I could hear sirens bleating into abrupt silence as they reached his building.

“Here’s how I see it, Scott. First—this is a clone phone I’m using. Triangulate the signal all you want, it won’t mean shit. Second—you finger me for redecorating your loft, I finger you for extortion of the Dawes. Clear so far?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Terrif. Just so you know, Scott, that was a warm-up. Care to know what we have in store for you tomorrow?”

“Do tell,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “You just wait and see. Okay?”

“You can’t do this. Not to me. Not to me!” His voice rose over the hard knocking I could hear at his front door. “You can’t fucking do this to me!”

“I’ve already started, Scott. Know what time it is?”

“What?”

“It’s look-over-your-shoulder time, Scottie. Have a nice night.”

The police were kicking in the door behind him when I hung up.

The next morning, as Scott Pearse loaded mail into a box on the corner of Marlboro and Clarendon, Bubba hopped in his truck and drove away with it.

Pearse didn’t even realize it until Bubba turned onto Clarendon, and by the time he dropped his bag and gave chase, Bubba was turning onto Commonwealth and stepping on the gas pedal.

Angie pulled her Honda up beside the mailbox and I left the passenger door open as I jumped out, grabbed the canvas mailbag off the sidewalk, and got back in the car.

Pearse was still standing on the corner of Clarendon and Commonwealth, his back to us, as we drove away.

“By the end of this day,” Angie said as we turned onto Berklee and headed for Storrow Drive, “what do you think he’ll do?”

“I’m kinda hoping for something irrational.”

“Irrational can mean bloody.”

I turned in the seat and tossed the mailbag in back. “This guy’s proven, he has time to think, it ends up bloody anyway. I want to take thinking out of the equation. I want him to react.”

“So,” Angie said, “his car next?”

“Uh…”

“I know, Patrick, it’s a classic. I understand.”

“It’s
the
classic,” I said. “Possibly the single coolest car ever manufactured in America.”

She put her hand on my leg. “You said we’d be mean.”

I sighed, stared through the windshield at the cars on Storrow Drive. Not one of them, even the obscenely expensive ones, could hold a candle to the ’68 Shelby.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s be mean.”

He kept it parked in a garage on A Street in Southie, about a quarter mile from his loft. Nelson had seen him take it out one night, not for any particular purpose, just to open it up along the waterfront, take a spin around the harbor, and then return it to its roost. I know a lot of guys like that, ones who visit their cars in the storage garage like they’re pets in a boarding kennel, and then illogically feel pity for the lonely beast, strip off the car cover, and drive it around the block a few times.

Actually, I’m one of those guys. Angie used to say I’d grow out of it. More recently, she’s said she’s given up hope on that score.

We took a ticket at the booth, drove up two levels, and parked beside the Shelby, which, even under a thick car cover, was instantly identifiable. Angie gave me a pat on the back to buck me up and then took the stairs down to ground level to keep the attendant occupied with a city map, a tourist’s confusion, and a black mesh T-shirt that didn’t completely reach the waistband of her jeans.

I pulled the cover off the car and almost gasped. The 1968 Shelby Mustang GT-500 is to American automobiles what Shakespeare is to literature and the Marx Brothers are to comedy—that is to say, everything that came before was, in retrospect, a teaser, and everything that came after could never live up to the standard of perfection achieved in one brief blink of time.

I rolled under the car before my knees buckled from the wanting, ran my hand up under the chassis between the engine block and the fire wall, and felt around for a good three minutes before I found the alarm receiver. I yanked
it free, rolled back out, and used a slim jim to open the driver’s door. I reached in and popped the hood, came around the front of the car, and stared in a near-trance at the word
COBRA
stamped in steel atop the filter cover and again along the oil tank, the sheer sense of compressed but certain power that emanated from the gleaming 428 engine.

It smelled clean under the hood, as if the engine and radiator and drive shaft and manifold had just been lifted off the assembly line. It smelled like a car that had been slaved over. Scott Pearse, whatever his feelings for the human race, had loved this car.

“I’m sorry,” I told the engine.

Then I went around to Angie’s trunk for the sugar, the chocolate syrup, and the rice.

After we dumped the contents of Pearse’s mailbag in a box on our side of the city, we returned to the office. I called Devin and asked for any data he could find on Timothy McGoldrick and he wrangled two tickets to October’s Patriots-Jets game out of me as a service fee.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ve been a season-ticket holder for thirteen years while they camped in the basement. Don’t take that game from me.”

“How do you spell that last name?”

“Dev, it’s a Monday night game.”

“Is it M-A-C or just M-C?”

“The latter,” I said. “You suck.”

“Hey, I noticed on the sheets this morning that someone shot the ever-living shit out of some guy’s loft on Sleeper Street. The vic’s name struck me as familiar. Know anything about that?”

“Pats versus Jets,” I said slowly.

“Tuna Bowl,” Devin cried. “Tuna Bowl! Seats still on the fifty?”

“Yup.”

“Rocking. Talk to you soon.” He hung up.

I leaned back in my seat, propped my heels on the belfry window.

Angie smiled at me from her desk. Behind her, an old black-and-white TV on the file cabinet broadcast a game show. A lot of people clapped and a few jumped up and down, but it had no effect on us. The volume on the thing had kicked the bucket years ago, but somehow we both find it comforting to leave it on when we’re up in the belfry.

“We’re making no money on this case,” she said.

“Nope.”

“You just destroyed a car you’ve waited your whole life to touch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And then gave away tickets to the biggest football game of the year.”

“That’s about the size of it.” I nodded.

“You going to cry soon?”

“Trying hard not to.”

“Because real men don’t cry?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid if I start, I might not be able to stop.”

We had lunch as Angie printed up her case overview thus far, and the silent TV behind her aired a soap opera in which everyone dressed really well and seemed to shout a lot. Angie has always had a narrative talent I’ve never possessed, probably because she reads in her off-time while I just watch old movies and play a lot of video golf.

She’d charted the case from my notes regarding my first meeting with Karen Nichols, through Scott Pearse’s charade as Wesley Dawe, the maiming of Miles Lovell, the disappearance of Diane Bourne, the baby switch fourteen years ago that had given the Dawes a child who would fall through ice and ultimately bring Pearse into their lives, all the way up to the beginnings of our current frontal assault on Scott Pearse’s life, shaded, of course, in vague terminology such as “commenced exploitation of subject’s weaknesses as we perceived them.”

“Here’s my problem.” Angie handed me the last page.

Under the heading
Prognosis
, she’d written: “Subject seems to have no viable options left to pursue the Dawes or their money. Subject’s leverage was lost when C. Dawe realized his false identity as T. McGoldrick. Exploitation of subject’s weaknesses, while emotionally gratifying, seems to yield no finite result.”

“Finite,” I said.

“You like that?”

“And Bubba accuses me of showing off my college.”

“Seriously,” she said, placing her turkey sub down on the wax paper beside her desk blotter, “what possible reason could he have for pursuing the Dawes anymore? We blew him out of the water.” She looked at the clock behind her head. “By now, he’s been suspended or fired for losing both his truck and a lot of mail. His car’s fucked. His apartment’s blown to shit. He’s got nothing.”

“He’s got a trump card,” I said.

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. But he’s former military. He loves games. He’d have a fallback position, an ace in the hole. I know it.”

“I disagree. I think he blew his wad.”

“Nice mouth.”

She shrugged, took a bite from her sandwich.

“So you want to shut this case down?”

She nodded, swallowed her piece of sandwich and took a sip of Coke. “He’s done. I think we’ve punished him. We didn’t bring Karen Nichols back, but we rocked his world a bit. He had a few million within his reach and we snatched it from him. Stick a fork in him. It’s over.”

I considered it. There wasn’t much I could argue with. The Dawes were fully prepared to face exposure on the baby-switching they’d done. Carrie Dawe was no longer vulnerable to the charms of McGoldrick/Pearse. It wasn’t like Pearse could hit them over the head and take their money. And, I was reasonably sure, he hadn’t been prepared for us and just how hard we can hit back if you make us mad.

I’d been hoping to anger him to the point where he’d do something stupid. But what? Come after me or Angie or Bubba? There was no percentage in it. Angry or not, he’d see that. Kill Angie, and he’d sign his own death warrant. Kill me, and he’d have Bubba and my case notes to deal with. And as for Bubba, Pearse would have to know that it would be like launching an assault on an armored car with a squirt gun. He might pull it off, but he’d suffer a lot of damage, and again, to what end?

So, I had to agree in principle with Angie. Scott Pearse didn’t seem to pose much of a threat to anyone anymore.

Which is what worried me. It’s the exact moment that you perceive an opponent as defenseless that you, not he, are most vulnerable.

“Twenty-four more hours,” I said. “Can you give me that?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, okay, Banacek, but not a second more.”

I bowed in appreciation and the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Tu-na!” Devin crowed. “Tu-na! Fucking Pah-cells,” he said in his best Revere accent, “I think he’s, like, God, but smahta.”

“Rub it in,” I said. “Wound’s still good and fresh.”

“Timothy McGoldrick,” Devin said. “There’s a bunch of them. But one stands out—born in 1965, died in 1967. Applied for a driver’s license in 1994.”

“He’s dead, but he drives.”

“Neat trick, huh? Lives at One-one-one-six Congress Street.”

I shook my head at the sheer size of Pearse’s balls. He kept a loft on 25 Sleeper Street and another place on Congress. It might seem like a short walk, but it got even shorter when you realized that his building on Sleeper Street also fronted Congress and both addresses were under the same roof.

“You still there?” Devin asked.

“Yeah.”

“No record on this guy. He’s clean.”

“Except that he’s dead.”

“That might interest the Census Bureau, sure.”

He hung up and I dialed the Dawes.

“Hello?” Carrie Dawe said.

“It’s Patrick Kenzie,” I said. “Is your husband home?”

“No.”

“Good. When you met McGoldrick, where did you meet?”

“Why?”

“Please.”

She sighed. “He sublet a place on Congress Street.”

“Corner of Congress and Sleeper?”

“Yes. How did you—”

“Never mind. You thought anymore about that gun in New Hampshire?”

“I’m thinking about it now.”

“He’s ruined,” I said. “He can’t hurt you.”

“He already did, Mr. Kenzie. And he hurt my daughter. What am I supposed to do with that—forgive?”

She hung up, and I looked over at Angie. “I’m not too keen on Carrie Dawe’s emotional state at the moment.”

“You think she still might go gunning for Pearse?”

“Possibly.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Pull Nelson off Pearse, put him on the Dawes for a while.”

“What’s Nelson charging you?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Come on.”

“A buck fifty a day,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “You’re paying him a thousand-fifty a week?”

I shrugged. “It’s his price.”

“We’re going to go broke.”

I held up my index finger. “One more day.”

She spread her arms. “Why?”

Behind her, on the TV, they’d interrupted the soap opera for a live update from the banks of the Mystic River.

I pointed behind Angie’s head. “That’s why.”

She turned her head and looked up at the TV as frogmen pulled a small body from the water and several weathered-looking detectives waved off the cameras.

“Oh, shit,” Angie said.

I looked at the small gray face as the head came to rest on wet rocks, then the detectives succeeded in blocking the cameras with their hands.

Siobhan. She’d never have to worry about seeing Ireland again.