Prayers for Rain
Page 1
DENNIS LEHANE
PRAYERS FOR RAIN
For my friends
John Dempsey, Chris Mullen, and Susan Hayes,
who let me steal some
of their best lines
and don’t sue.
And
Andre,
who is deeply missed.
I heard the old, old men say,
“All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters.”
—W. B. YEATS
Contents
Epigraph
1
The first time I met Karen Nichols, she struck me…
2
Cody Falk drove a pearl-gray Audi Quattro, and at nine-thirty…
3
It would be six months before I gave any serious…
4
When I walked through his front door with Tony Traverna,…
5
What we presume about strangers when we first meet them…
6
The inside of Pickup on South Street, David Wetterau’s fledgling…
7
I called Devin again, woke him up.
8
Karen Nichols’s mother and stepfather, Carrie and Christopher Dawe, lived…
9
Dr. Christopher Dawe stood in his doorway and watched me…
10
Cody Falk rose at six-thirty the next morning and stood…
11
I did several quick squats to return blood to my…
12
The priest who presided over the noon mass at Saint…
13
The Holly Martens Inn sat fifty yards off an overgrown,…
14
There was a barn out back, about three hundred yards…
15
I had taken my work to a bar when Angie…
16
Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor…
17
I called Bubba from the car. “What are you doing?”
18
Miles Lovell left his house shortly after sundown as the…
19
Three days after Miles Lovell was admitted to ICU, Dr. Diane Bourne…
20
Rain fell softly on sun-drenched streets the afternoon I met…
21
I turned in my chair, looked into the restaurant for…
22
The morning after I had my encounter with Wesley in…
23
Bubba can barely read or write. He has just enough…
24
On Monday we went to work in earnest. Angie planned…
25
“So where you parked, Wes?” I asked as we left…
26
“That’s her,” I said as Siobhan walked down the Dawes’…
27
Information about Wesley, or the man who called himself Wesley,…
28
“I want to burn him alive,” I said to Angie…
29
I spent the week sitting on Scott Pearse—following him to…
30
Angie woke me at five in the morning, warm palms…
31
“He keeps files on everyone,” Siobhan said. “He has a…
32
The next morning, as Scott Pearse loaded mail into a…
33
Last night, as soon as the police had passed him…
34
“We’re driving to Plymouth,” Angie said as we turned onto…
35
Christopher Dawe drove home to his wife with instructions to…
36
I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet…
37
“Mr. Kenzie,” Wesley said when I found him down by…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Books by Dennis Lehane
Copyright
About the Publisher
In the dream, I have a son. He’s about five, but he speaks with the voice and intelligence of a fifteen-year-old. He sits in the seat beside me, buckled tightly, his legs just barely reaching the edge of the car seat. It’s a big car, old, with a steering wheel as large as the rim of a bicycle tire, and we drive it through a late December morning the color of dull chrome. We are somewhere rural, south of Massachusetts but north of the Mason-Dixon Line—Delaware, maybe, or southern New Jersey—and red-and-white-checkered silos peek up in the distance from furrowed harvest fields frosted the pale gray of newspaper with last week’s snow. There is nothing around us but the fields and the distant silos, a windmill frozen stiff and silent, miles of black telephone wire glistening with ice. No other cars, no people. Just my son and myself and the hard slate road carved through fields of frozen wheat.
My son says, “Patrick.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a good day.”
I look out at the still gray morning, the sheer quiet. Beyond the farthest silo, a wisp of dusky smoke rises from a chimney. Though I can’t see the structure, I can imagine the warmth of the house. I can smell food roasting in an oven and see exposed cherry beams over a kitchen constructed of honey-colored wood. An apron hangs from the handle of the oven door. I feel how good it is to be inside on a hushed December morning.
I look at my son. I say, “Yeah, it is.”
My son says, “We’ll drive all day. We’ll drive all night. We’ll drive forever.”
I say, “Sure.”
My son looks out his window. He says, “Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll never stop driving.”
I turn my head and he is looking up at me with my own eyes.
I say, “Okay. We’ll never stop driving.”
He puts his hand on mine. “If we stop driving, we run out of air.”
“Yeah.”
“If we run out of air, we die.”
“We do.”
“I don’t want to die, Dad.”
I run my hand over his smooth hair. “I don’t either.”
“So we’ll never stop driving.”
“No, buddy.” I smile at him. I can smell his skin, his hair, a newborn’s scent in a five-year-old’s body. “We’ll never stop driving.”
“Good.”
He settles back in his seat, then falls asleep with his cheek pressed to the back of my hand.
Ahead of me, the slate road stretches through the dusty white fields, and my hand on the wheel is light and sure. The road is straight and flat and lies ahead of me for a thousand miles. The old snow rustles as the wind picks it off the fields and swirls small tempests of it in the cracks of tar in front of my grille.
I will never stop driving. I will never get out of the car. I will not run out of gas. I will not get hungry. It’s warm here. I have my son. He’s safe. I’m safe. I will never stop driving. I will not tire. I will never stop.
The road lies open and endless before me.
My son turns his head away from my hand and says, “Where’s Mom?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“But it’s okay?” He looks up at me.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s fine. Go back to sleep.”
My son goes back to sleep. I keep driving.
And both of us vanish when I wake.
1
The first time I met Karen Nichols, she struck me as the kind of woman who ironed her socks.
She was blond and petite and stepped out of a kelly-green 1998 VW Bug as Bubba and I crossed the avenue toward St. Bartholomew’s Church with our morning coffee in hand. It was February, but winter had forgotten to show up that year. Except for one snowstorm and a few days in the subzeros, it had been damn near balmy. Today it was in the high forties, and it
was only ten in the morning. Say all you want about global warming, but as long as it saves me from shoveling the walk, I’m for it.
Karen Nichols placed a hand over her eyebrows, even though the morning sun wasn’t all that strong, and smiled uncertainly at me.
“Mr. Kenzie?”
I gave her my eats-his-veggies-loves-his-mom smile and proffered my hand. “Miss Nichols?”
She laughed for some reason. “Karen, yes, I’m early.”
Her hand slid into mine and felt so smooth and uncallused it could have been gloved. “Call me Patrick. That’s Mr. Rogowski.”
Bubba grunted and slugged his coffee.
Karen Nichols’s hand dropped from mine and she jerked back slightly, as if afraid she’d have to extend her hand to Bubba. Afraid if she did, she might not get it back.
She wore a brown suede jacket that fell to midthigh over a charcoal cable-knit crewneck, crisp blue jeans, and bright white Reeboks. None of her apparel looked as if a wrinkle, stain, or wisp of dust had been within a country mile of it.
She placed delicate fingers on her smooth neck. “A couple of real PIs. Wow.” Her soft blue eyes crinkled with her button nose and she laughed again.
“I’m the PI,” I said. “He’s just slumming.”
Bubba grunted again and kicked me in the ass.
“Down, boy,” I said. “Heel.”
Bubba sipped some coffee.
Karen Nichols looked as if she’d made a mistake coming here. I decided then not to lead her up to my belfry office. If people were uncertain about hiring me, taking them to the belfry usually wasn’t good PR.
School was out because it was Saturday, and the air was moist and without a chill, so Karen Nichols, Bubba, and I walked to a bench in the schoolyard. I sat down. Karen Nichols used an immaculate white handkerchief to dust the surface, then she sat down. Bubba frowned at the lack of space on the bench, frowned at me, then sat on the ground in front of us, crossed his legs, peered up expectantly.
“Good doggie,” I said.
Bubba gave me a look that said I’d pay for that as soon as we were away from polite company.
“Miss Nichols,” I said, “how did you hear about me?”
She tore her gaze away from Bubba and looked into my eyes for a moment in utter confusion. Her blond hair was cut as short as a small boy’s and reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of women in Berlin in the 1920s. It was sculpted tight against the skull with gel, and even though it wouldn’t be moving on its own unless she stepped into the wake of a jet engine, she’d clipped it over her left ear, just below the part, with a small black barrette that had a june bug painted on it.
Her wide blue eyes cleared and she made that short, nervous laugh again. “My boyfriend.”
“And his name is…” I said, guessing Tad or Ty or Hunter.
“David Wetterau.”
So much for my psychic abilities.
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.”
“He met someone who used to work with you. A woman?”
Bubba raised his head, glared at me. Bubba blamed me for Angie ending our partnership, for Angie moving out of the neighborhood, buying a Honda, dressing in Anne Klein suits, and generally not hanging out with us anymore.
“Angela Gennaro?” I asked Karen Nichols.
She smiled. “Yes. That’s her name.”
Bubba grunted again. Pretty soon he’d start howling at the moon.
“And why do you need a private detective, Miss Nichols?”
“Karen.” She turned on the bench toward me, tucked an imaginary strand of hair behind her ear.
“Karen. Why do you need a detective?”
A sad, crumpled smile bent her pursed lips and she looked down at her knees for a moment. “There’s a guy at the gym I go to?”
I nodded.
She swallowed. I guess she’d been hoping I’d figure it all out from that one sentence. I was certain she was about to tell me something unpleasant and even more certain that she had, at best, only a very passing acquaintance with things unpleasant.
“He’s been hitting on me, following me to the parking lot. At first it was just, you know, annoying?” She raised her head, searched my eyes for understanding. “Then it got uglier. He began calling me at home. I went out of my way to avoid him at the gym, but a couple of times I saw him parked out in front of the house. David finally got fed up and went to talk to him. He denied it all and then he threatened David.” She blinked, twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fist she’d made of her right. “David’s not physically…formidable? Is that the right word?”
I nodded.
“So, Cody—that’s his name, Cody Falk—he laughed at David and called me the same night.”
Cody. I hated him already on general principle.
“He called and told me how much he knew I wanted it, how I’d probably never had a good, a good—”
“Fuck,” Bubba said.
She jerked a little, glanced at him, and then quickly back to me. “Yeah. A good, well…in my life. And he knew I secretly wanted him to give me one. I left this note on his car. I know it was stupid, but I…well, I left it.”
She reached into her purse, extracted a wrinkled piece of purple notepaper. In perfect Palmer script, she’d written:
Mr. Falk,
Please leave me alone.
Karen Nichols
“The next time I went to the gym,” she said, “I came back to my car, and he’d put it back on my windshield in the same place I’d left it on his. If you turn it over, Mr. Kenzie, you’ll see what he wrote.” She pointed at the paper in my hand.
I turned it over. On the reverse side, Cody Falk had written a single word:
No.
I was really starting to dislike this prick.
“Then yesterday?” Her eyes filled and she swallowed several times and a thick tremor pulsed in the center of her soft, white throat.
I placed a hand on hers and she curled her fingers into it.
“What did he do?” I said.
She sucked a breath into her mouth and I heard it rattle wetly against the back of her throat. “He vandalized my car.”
Bubba and I both did a double take, looked out at the gleaming green VW Bug parked by the schoolyard gate. It looked as if it had just been driven off the lot, still probably had that new-car smell inside.
“That car?” I said.
“What?” She followed my gaze. “Oh, no, no. That’s David’s car.”
“A guy?” Bubba said. “A guy drives that car?”
I shook my head at him.
Bubba scowled, then looked down at his combat boots and pulled them up on his knees.
Karen shook her head as if to clear it. “I drive a Corolla. I wanted the Camry, but we couldn’t afford it. David’s starting a new business, we both have student loans we’re still paying off, so I got the Corolla. And now it’s ruined. He poured acid all over it. He punctured the radiator. The mechanic said he poured syrup into the engine.”
“Did you tell the police?”
She nodded, her small body trembling. “There’s no proof it was him. He told the police he was at a movie that night and people saw him going in and leaving. He…” Her face caved in on itself and reddened. “They can’t touch him, and the insurance company won’t cover the damages.”
Bubba raised his head, cocked it at me.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because they never got my last payment. And I…I sent it. I sent it out over three weeks ago. They said they sent a notice, but I never got it. And, and…” She lowered her head and tears fell to her knees.
She had a stuffed animal collection, I was pretty sure. Her totaled Corolla had either a smiley face or a Jesus fish affixed to the bumper. She read John Grisham novels, listened to soft rock, loved going to bridal showers, and had never seen a Spike Lee movie.
She had never expected anything like this to happen in her life.
“Karen,” I said softly, “wha
t’s the name of your insurance company?”
She raised her head, wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “State Mutual.”
“And the post office branch you sent the check through?”
“Well, I live in Newton Upper Falls,” she said, “but I’m not sure. My boyfriend?” She looked down at her spotless white sneakers, as if abashed. “He lives in Back Bay and I’m over there a lot.”
She said it as if it were a sin, and I found myself wondering where they grew people like her, and if there was a seed, and how I could get my hands on it if I ever had a daughter.
“Have you ever been late on a payment before?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
“How long have you been insured there?”
“Since I graduated college. Seven years.”
“Where’s Cody Falk live?”
She patted her eyes with the heels of her hands to make sure the tears were dry. She wore no makeup, so nothing had run. She was as blandly beautiful as any woman in a Noxzema ad.
“I don’t know. But he’s at the gym every night at seven.”
“What gym?”
“The Mount Auburn Club in Watertown.” She bit down on her lower lip, then tried for that Ivory Snow smile of hers. “I feel so ridiculous.”
“Miss Nichols,” I said, “you’re not supposed to deal with people like Cody Falk. Do you understand that? No one is. He’s just a bad person and you didn’t do anything to cause this. He did.”
“Yeah?” She managed to get a full smile out, but fear and confusion still swam in her eyes.
“Yeah. He’s the bad guy. He likes making people afraid.”
“He does.” She nodded. “You see it in his eyes. The more uncomfortable he made me feel in the parking lot one night, the more he seemed to enjoy it.”