Prayers for Rain (36 page)

“But—”

“We’re exposed,” he said. “Don’t you question my fucking orders.”

Wesley kicked at the floor with his heels, desperate, shaking his head, begging me with his eyes to untie him and pull him out of there.

“Shit,” I said.

Bubba turned to look at the next door, up the hall a few feet and on our right.

He said, “Okay. We’re going to do this by the numbers. Patrick, I want you to—”

The door at the end of the hall opened and all three of us spun toward it. Diane Bourne seemed to levitate into the hallway with her hands raised and her feet off the ground. Scott Pearse stood behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other cocked behind her, pressing a gun to the back of her head.

“Weapons on the floor,” Pearse called, “or she dies.”

“So fucking what?” Bubba said, and settled the stock of his M-16 into his shoulder, sighted down the barrel.

Diane Bourne’s body was wracked with tremors. “Please, please, please.”

“Put your weapons on the deck!” Pearse shouted.

“Pearse,” I said, “give it up. You’re boxed in. This is over.”

“This is not a negotiation,” he yelled.

“You’re fucking A, it ain’t. This is bullshit,” Bubba said. “I’m going to shoot through her now, Pearse. Okay?”

“Wait!” Pearse’s voice sounded as shaky as Diane Bourne’s body.

“Ah, no,” Bubba said.

But then Pearse’s gun dropped from the back of Diane Bourne’s head, and Bubba paused, and Pearse’s arm swung again and was suddenly extended over Diane Bourne’s shoulder and the muzzle centered on Angie’s forehead.

“Move an inch, Miss Gennaro, and your skull disappears.”

Pearse’s voice was not even remotely shaky anymore. His gun hand remained steady as he came down the hallway toward us, his arm still wrapped around Diane Bourne’s waist, her feet lifted off the ground as he used her as a body shield.

Angie was frozen, her .38 hanging down by her side, her eyes on the hole at the end of Pearse’s pistol.

“Anyone doubt I’ll do it?”

Bubba said, “Fuck,” very softly.

“Weapons on the deck, people. Right now.”

Angie dropped hers. I dropped mine. Bubba didn’t even move. He held his bead on Pearse as Pearse closed to within twenty feet of us.

“Rogowski,” Pearse said, “relinquish your weapon.”

“Fuck no, Pearse.”

Sweat darkened the back of Bubba’s hair, but the rifle never wavered.

“Oh,” Pearse said. “Okay.”

And he fired.

I slammed Angie’s shoulder with my own, and then a
hot spear of dry ice tore through my chest, just below the shoulder, and I bounced into the cement wall and landed on my knees in the middle of the hallway.

Pearse fired again, but his shot banged off the wall behind me.

Bubba’s rifle unloaded, and Diane Bourne disappeared in a haze of red, her body jerking like she’d been electrified.

Angie, on her stomach, crawled for her .38, and I felt the corridor swerve, and my back hit the floor.

Bubba spun hard into the doorjamb and dropped his M-16, grabbed his hip.

I tried to get off the floor, but I couldn’t.

Bubba’s hand shot out and grabbed Angie by the hair and yanked her into the room with Wesley Dawe. I could hear bullets clanging off the cement around me, but I couldn’t raise my head to see where they were coming from.

I turned my head to the left, tilted my eyes up.

Bubba stood in the doorway to Wesley’s room and his eyes grew as soft and sad as I’d ever seen them as he looked down at me.

And then he slammed the door closed between us.

The firing stopped. The hallway was still except for the sound of footsteps approaching.

Scott Pearse stood over me and smiled. He ejected the clip from his nine-millimeter and it dropped on the floor beside my head. He slammed another home, and racked one into the chamber. His clothes, neck, and face were saturated with Diane Bourne’s blood. He waved at me.

“You got a hole in your chest, Pat. Is that funny to you? ’Cause it’s funny to me.”

I tried to speak, but all that left my mouth was warm liquid.

“Shit,” Scott Pearse said, “don’t fucking die on me yet. I want you to see me kill your friends.”

He squatted down beside me. “They left all their
weapons out here. And there’s no way out of that room.” He patted my cheek. “Man, you are fast. I was hoping you’d see your little love-bitch take a bullet to the head, but you moved so quick.”

My eyes rolled away from him, not because I’d intended them to, but because they suddenly seemed to be on ball bearings, sliding through grease, beyond my control.

Scott Pearse turned my chin and slapped my temple, and the ball bearings jerked my eyes back to face him.

“Don’t die yet, dude. I need to know where my money is.”

I shook my head slightly. I felt a warm, jagged prickling on the left side of my chest, just below the collarbone. It was very hot, actually, and growing hotter. It was starting to burn.

“You like a joke, right, Pat?” He patted my cheek again. “You’ll love this. You’re going to die here, and even as you do, I want you to understand something—you never, even now, saw the whole board. That, I find hilarious.” He chuckled. “The money’s in your car, which I’m sure is parked close by. I’ll find it.”

“No,” I managed, though I’m not sure any sound came out.

“Yes,” he said. “You were fun for a while there, Pat, but now I’m bored. Okay. Gotta go kill your bitch and that big freak. Be right back.”

He stood and turned toward the door, and I stretched out a numb hand along the floor as the pain blew up in my chest.

Scott Pearse laughed. “The guns are a good five feet past your legs, Pat. But you keep trying.”

I gnashed my teeth together and screamed as I raised my head and back off the floor and managed to sit up, and the blood poured out of the hole in my chest and saturated my waist.

Pearse cocked his head at me, turned his gun in my
direction. “Way to take it for the team, Pat. Bravo.”

I stared at him, willed him to pull the trigger.

“Okay,” he said softly, and pulled back on the hammer. “We’ll end you now.”

The door behind him flung open, and Pearse turned, got off one round that blew a chunk out of Bubba’s thigh.

But Bubba never stopped. He covered Pearse’s gun hand with his own and clamped his other arm around Pearse’s chest from behind.

Pearse let loose a guttural scream and tried to twist his body out of Bubba’s grasp, but Bubba squeezed tighter, and Pearse began to gasp, began to make high-pitched keening yelps, as he saw his gun hand move against his will up toward the side of his head.

He tried to twist his head away, but Bubba reared back and butted his massive forehead into the back of Pearse’s head so hard it sounded like a pool ball exploding.

Pearse’s eyes spun from the shock of impact.

“No,” he yelped. “No, no, no, no.”

Bubba grunted with the effort, blood pouring down his leg as Angie scrambled out into the hallway on all fours and grabbed her .38.

She rose to one knee, pulled back on the hammer, and pointed it at Pearse’s chest.

“Don’t you fucking do it, Ange!” Bubba screamed.

Angie froze, finger curled around the trigger.

“You’re mine, Scott,” Bubba whispered hoarsely in Pearse’s ear. “You are all mine, sweetie.”

“Please,” Pearse begged. “Wait! No! Don’t! Wait! Please!”

Bubba grunted again and slammed the muzzle of Pearse’s gun into Pearse’s temple, shoved his finger over Pearse’s and around the trigger.

“No!”

Bubba said, “Feeling depressed, isolated, possibly suicidal?”

“Don’t!” Pearse batted at Bubba’s head with his free hand.

“Well, call a hot line, but don’t call me, Pearse, ’cause I don’t fucking care.”

Bubba shoved his knee into Pearse’s spine, lifted his feet off the floor.

“Please!” Pearse kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Bubba said.

“Oh, God!”

“Hey, asshole? Say hi to the fucking dog for me, will you?” Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pearse’s brains out the other side of his head.

I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet had entered my upper left chest just below the collarbone and exited through my back, and I’d lost three and a half pints of blood before the EMTs reached the house. I was comatose for four days, and I woke to tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes in my arm, and tubes in my nostrils, hooked up to a respirator, so thirsty I would have signed over the contents of my savings account for a single ice cube.

The Dawes apparently had some pull downtown, because a month after we’d rescued their son, the illegal weapons charges against Bubba simply vanished. Sure, the DA’s office seemed to say, you walked into the Plymouth bunker with enough illegal firepower to invade a country, but you brought a rich kid out alive. So no harm, no foul. I’m sure the DA would have adopted a different attitude had he known Pearse’s original extortion leverage had stemmed from evidence linking the Dawes to a baby switch, but Pearse wasn’t around to discuss it, and the rest of us who knew the secret declined to mention it.

Wesley Dawe came to visit. He held my hand and thanked me with tears in his eyes, and he told me the story of how he’d met Pearse through Diane Bourne, who in addition to being his therapist had also been his lover. She, and eventually Pearse, had controlled his
fragile mind through manipulation, mental and sexual power games, and erratic withholding and dispensing of his medication. It had been his own idea, he admitted, to blackmail his father, but Diane Bourne and Pearse had taken the idea several steps further, ultimately turning it lethal when they came to thinking of the Dawes’ fortune as their own.

In mid-’98, they’d made him their hostage, kept him tied to the chair or his bed, exercised him at gunpoint.

I hadn’t regained my voice yet. It had disappeared when the bullet nicked off a microscopic shard of collarbone and sent that shard careening into my left lung, collapsing it. When I did try to speak those first few weeks, all that came out was a high-pitched wheeze, like a kettle, or Donald Duck losing his temper.

But voice or no voice, I doubt I would have said much to Wesley Dawe. He struck me as sad and weak, and I couldn’t shake the image of a little petulant boy who’d stirred up all this trouble—whether intentionally or not—simply because he needed to throw a snit. His stepsister was dead, and I couldn’t blame him, exactly, but I didn’t feel much desire to forgive him either.

When he visited my room a second time, I pretended to be asleep, and he slipped a check from his father under my pillow and said, “Thank you. You saved me,” in a whisper before leaving the room.

Since Bubba and I were both stuck in Mass General for a while, we ended up beginning our physical therapy together, my arm withered and his right hip replaced by a metal one.

It’s an odd sensation to owe your life to another. It humbles you and makes you feel guilty and weak and your gratitude is sometimes so immense, it feels like an anvil tied to your heart.

“It’s like Beirut,” Bubba said one afternoon in hydrotherapy. “What’s done is done. Talking about it won’t do any good.”

“Maybe not.”

“Shit, dude, you’d have done the same for me.”

And sitting there, I felt a calming certainty in my chest when I realized he was probably right, though I’m not sure that with one bullet in my hip and another in my thigh I’d have been capable of what he pulled off against a guy like Scott Pearse.

“You did it for Ange,” he said. “You’d do it for me.”

He nodded to himself.

I said, “Okay. You’re right. I won’t thank you anymore.”

“You won’t talk about it anymore either.”

“Cool.”

He nodded. “Cool.” He looked around the collection of metal tubs. Mine was beside his, and there were six or seven other people in the room, all soaking in hot, bubbling water. “Know what would be really cool?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Some weed. Right about now?” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it, though?”

“Sure.”

He nudged the middle-aged teacher in the tub beside his. “Know where we can score some pot, sister?”

The woman Bubba had shot when we’d first entered the bunker was identified as Catherine Larve, a onetime model from Kansas City who’d specialized in print ads for midwestern department stores during the late eighties and early ninties. She didn’t have a criminal record and very little else was known about her during the years since she’d left Kansas City with the person neighbors had assumed was her boyfriend—a handsome, blond man who drove a ’68 Shelby Mustang.

Bubba was released from the hospital ten days before I was. Vanessa picked him up, and even before they went back to his warehouse, they drove over to the animal shelter and got themselves a dog.

Those last ten days in the hospital were the worst. Summer died and autumn encroached outside my window, and
all I could do was lie there and listen to the sounds of seasons trading places in the voices of people ten stories below. And I’d be left to wonder how Karen Nichols would have sounded in the newly minted briskness if she’d held on long enough for the heat to end and a leaf to fall.

I took the stairs to my apartment slowly, one arm around Angie, the other squeezing a racquetball in my hand, working the muscles in my ever-so-gradually healing arm.

The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn’t as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.

“We’re home,” Angie said when we reached the landing.

“Home?” I said. “You mean my home or our home?”

“Ours,” she said.

She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie’s flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck’s waiting in the fridge.

Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you’ve molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.

“Home,” I said.

It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweatshirt, which I’d tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a bum, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I’ve learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.

My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.

One was a cassette tape I’d thought I’d lost, a bootleg of Muddy Waters playing live with Mick Jagger and the Red Devils. Another was a book Angie had loaned me, which I’d given up on after fifty pages and stuffed back there in hopes she’d forget it. The third item was a roll of electrical tape I’d tossed up there last summer when I slapped some around a fraying cord and was too lazy to walk it back to my toolbox.

I picked up the cassette, tossed the book back into the darkness, and reached for the electrical tape.

But I never touched it. Instead, I sat back on the floor and stared at it.

And, finally, I saw the whole board.