Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  Her chuckle was wet, and she wiped her face again. “I hate five in the morning, too, Patrick.” She raised her head and smiled through trembling lips. “I hate it so, so much.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. That guy I was sleeping with?”

  “Trey,” I said.

  “You make it sound like a dirty word.”

  “What about him?”

  “I could have sex with him, but I didn’t want him holding me afterward. You know? The way I used to turn my back and you’d slide one arm under my neck and the other over my chest—I couldn’t stand anyone else doing that.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say but “Good.”

  “I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’m high maintenance,” she said. “I’m moody. Got the bad temper. Hate to do laundry. Don’t like to cook.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You are.”

  “Hey,” she said. “You’re no walk in the park, pal.”

  “But I cook,” I said.

  She reached out, ran her palm over the permanent scruff—thicker than shadow, thinner than beard—that I’ve kept on my face for three years to hide the scars Gerry Glynn gave me with a straight razor.

  She ran her thumb lazily back and forth through the bristles, gently fingered the ruined, rubbery flesh underneath. Not the biggest scars, necessarily, but they’re on my face, and I’m vain.

  “Can I shave this off tonight?” she said.

  “You once said it made me look hot.”

  She smiled. “It does, but it’s just not you.”

  I considered it. Three years with protective facial hair. Three years hiding the damage delivered on the worst night of my life. Three years keeping my flaws and shame from the world.

  “You want to give me a shave?” I said eventually.

  She leaned in and kissed me. “Among other things.”

  30

  Angie woke me at five in the morning, warm palms on my newly shaven cheeks, her tongue opening my mouth as she kicked the tangle of sheets off us and covered as much of my body as possible with her own.

  “You hear the birds?” she said.

  “No,” I managed.

  “Me, either.”

  After, we lay with the dawn gradually lighting the room, my body spooned behind hers, and I said, “He knows we’re watching.”

  “Scott Pearse,” she said. “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. A week straight of tailing him, he never so much as stops the truck for a coffee break. If he’s going through anyone’s mail, he isn’t doing it there.” She turned in my arms, a smooth slithering of her flesh that felt like lightning in my blood. “He’s smart. He’ll wait us out.”

  I lifted a stray hair off her eyelash.

  “Yours?” she asked.

  “Mine.” I flicked it off the bed. “He said time was an issue. That’s why he met me on the roof and tried to either buy me off or back me off—because he’s pressed for time.”

  “Right,” Angie said. “But we can assume that was when he thought he had a deal with the Dawes. And now that the deal’s off, why—”

  “Who says it’s off?”

  “Christopher Dawe. Christ, he destroyed their daughter. They’re not going to pay him after that. He’s got no more leverage.”

  “But even Christopher Dawe figured he’d come back at them. Go after Carrie, try to destroy her like he did Karen.”

  “But where’s the profit in that?”

  “It’s not entirely about profit,” I said. “I think Christopher Dawe was right about that. I think it’s a matter of principle to Pearse. That money he was extorting? He thinks of it as his already. He’s not going to let it go.”

  Angie ran the backs of her fingers over my abdomen and chest. “But how would he get to Carrie Dawe? I doubt that if she were in therapy, she was using the same therapist as her daughter. So Pearse can’t go the Diane Bourne route. The Dawes don’t live in the city, so he can’t fuck with their mail.”

  I propped myself up on my elbow. “Pearse’s standard MO is to infiltrate through one psychiatrist and one postal area. Okay. But that’s just what’s on hand, the buttons he can press easily. His father was a professional mind fucker. The son was Special Forces.”

  “So?”

  “So I think he’s always prepared. And more than that, I think he’s always ready to improvise. And he always, always works off private information. That’s the foundation of everything he is and everything he does. He knew enough to pay the right people to get information on us. He found out I cared about Bubba and used that. He found out you were untouchable because of your grandfather, and when he couldn’t get to me through Bubba, he went after Vanessa. He’s limited, but he’s seriously smart.”

  “Right. And what he knows about the Dawes, he learned from Wesley.”

  “Sure, but that’s old info. Even if Wesley is still around, bankrolling Pearse, who knows—his information is ten years dated.”

  “True.”

  “Pearse would need somebody who knew the Dawes well and knew them now. A close associate of the doctor’s. The wife’s best friend. Or a—”

  I looked down at her and she raised herself up on both elbows and we said it together:

  “A housekeeper.”

  Siobhan Mulrooney walked into the parking lot of the commuter rail in Weston at six that night, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder, head down, steps quick. As she passed Angie’s Honda, she saw me sitting on the hood and picked up her pace.

  “Hey, Siobhan.” I rubbed my chin between my thumb and forefinger. “What do you think about the new look?”

  She looked back over her shoulder at me, paused. “Didn’t recognize ya, Mr. Kenzie.” She pointed at the light pink scars along the jawline. “You’ve scars.”

  “I do.” I slid off the hood. “Guy gave them to me a couple of years ago.”

  “Whatever for?” Her shoulders jerked slightly as I approached, as if each side of her body wanted to run in the opposite direction.

  “I had figured out he wasn’t who he appeared to be. It made him angry.”

  “He tried to kill you, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Tried to kill her, too.” I pointed behind Siobhan at Angie standing by the stairwell that led up to the station.

  Siobhan looked back at her, then at me. “Nasty man, then, I’d say.”

  “Where you from, Siobhan?”

  “Ireland, of course.”

  “North, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Home of the Troubles,” I said, throwing a brogue around the last word.

  She dropped her head as I reached her. “You don’t make light of it, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “Lost some family, did you?”

  She looked up at me and her small eyes were smaller still and dark with anger. “I did, yeah. Generations of them.”

  I smiled. “Me, too. Great-great-great-grandfather, I think it was, on my father’s side was executed in Donegal in 1798, when the French left us holding the bag. Now my maternal grandfather—me Ma’s Da,” I said with a wink, “they found him kneecapped in his barn with his throat cut and his tongue cut in half.”

  “He was a traitor, then, was he?” Siobhan’s small face was clenched into a defiant fist.

  “A stoolie,” I said. “Yeah. Either that or the Orange did him, wanted it to look that way. You know how it is in a war like that, sometimes people die, you can never be sure why until you meet them on the other side. Other times, people die for no real reason, because the blood’s up, because the more chaos, the easier it is to get away with it. I hear that since the cease-fire, it’s really nuts over there. Everyone running around, taking off heads in revenge hits. Do you know, Siobhan, that more people were killed in South Africa in the two years after apartheid than died during it? Same thing with Yugoslavia after the Communists. I mean, fascism sucks, but it keeps people in line. The moment it’s over, all that bad blood people have been holding i
n? Forget about it. People get whacked for things they forgot they did.”

  “Trying to tell me something, Mr. Kenzie?”

  I shook my head. “Just running off at the mouth, Siobhan. So, tell me, why’d you leave the Old Sod?”

  She cocked her head. “You like poverty, Mr. Kenzie? You like losing well over half your earnings to the government? You like dreary weather and endless cold?”

  “Can’t say I do.” I shrugged. “It’s just a lot of times, people leave the North and can’t ever go back because there are too many people waiting to fuck them up when they step off the boat. You?”

  “Have anyone waiting back there to hurt me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes on the ground, shaking her head as if by doing so that would make it come true. “No. Not me.”

  “Siobhan, could you tell me when Pearse is going to move against the Dawes? And maybe how he plans to go about doing it?”

  She stepped back from me slowly, a weird half smile playing on her tiny face. “Ah, no, Mr. Kenzie. Have yourself a nice day, won’t ya?”

  “You didn’t say, ‘Who’s Pearse?’” I said.

  “Who’s Pearse?” she said. “There now—ya happy?” She turned and walked toward the stairs, her overnight bag swinging on her shoulder.

  Angie stepped aside as Siobhan reached the dark stairwell and began climbing it.

  I waited until she reached the landing midway up.

  “How’s your green card status, Siobhan?”

  She stopped, froze there with her back to us.

  “Did you somehow manage an extended work visa? Because I hear INS is really cracking down on the Irish. Particularly in this city. Kinda sucks, too, because who’s going to paint the houses once they ship them back home?”

  She cleared her throat, back still to us. “You wouldn’t.”

  “We would,” Angie said.

  “You can’t.”

  “We can,” I said. “Help us out here, Siobhan.”

  She half turned, looked down the staircase at me. “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll call a friend of mine in INS, Siobhan, and you’ll celebrate Labor Day in fucking Belfast.”

  31

  “He keeps files on everyone,” Siobhan said. “He has a file on me, one on you, Mr. Kenzie, and one on you as well, Miss Gennaro.”

  “What are in the files?” Angie asked.

  “Your daily routines. Your weaknesses. Oh,” she waved her hand at the smoke from her cigarette, “there’s plenty else. Whatever biographical information he can find.” She pointed the cigarette at Angie. “He was so happy when he found out about the death of your husband. He thought he had you.”

  “Had me?”

  “The means to break you, Miss Gennaro. The means to break you. Everyone has something they can’t face, don’t they. Then he discovered you have some powerful relatives, yeah?”

  Angie nodded.

  “That was not a day you’d have wanted to be around Scott Pearse, you can be certain.”

  “My heart bleeds for him,” I said. “Let me ask you—why’d you speak to me that first time I came to the Dawes’ house?”

  “To throw you off the scent, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “You sent me after Cody Falk.”

  She nodded

  “What, did Pearse think I’d kill him and be done with the case?”

  “It seemed a reasonable possibility, don’t you think?” She looked down at her coffee cup.

  “Is Diane Bourne his only source for psych files?” I asked.

  Siobhan shook her head. “He’s got a man in the records department at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Can you guess how many patients McLean services in a year, Mr. Kenzie?”

  McLean was one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the state. It handled both voluntary and involuntary committals, had locked and unlocked wards, treated everything from narcotics and alcohol dependency to chronic fatigue syndrome to paranoid disassociative schizophrenia with violent tendencies. McLean had over three hundred beds and an average of three thousand admissions a year.

  Siobhan leaned back in the booth and ran a weary hand through her close-cropped hair. We’d left the commuter station in Weston and driven straight into rush hour, pulled out of it in Waltham and stopped at an IHOP on Main Street. At five-thirty in the evening, the IHOP sported only a few patrons, and after we ordered a pot of regular coffee and a pot of decaf, the surly waitress was happy to ignore us and leave us to our privacy.

  “How does Pearse enlist people?” Angie asked.

  Siobhan gave us an acrid smile. “He’s very magnetic, isn’t he?”

  Angie shrugged. “Never met the man up close.”

  “Take it on faith, then,” Siobhan said. “The man looks straight through to your soul.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes.

  “He befriends you,” Siobhan said. “Then he beds you. He learns your weaknesses—whatever those things are you can’t face. Then he owns you. And you do what he asks, or he destroys you.”

  “Why Karen?” I said. “I mean, I know he was trying to teach the Dawes a lesson, but even for Pearse that strikes me as severe.”

  Siobhan lifted her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. “You don’t see it yet?”

  We shook our heads.

  “I’m beginning to lose respect for the both of you, I am.”

  “Gee,” I said. “That hurts.”

  “Access, Mr. Kenzie. It’s all about access.”

  “We know, Siobhan. How do you think we came around to you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m limited—a snatch of conversation here, a glimpse of a bank statement there. Scott despises limits.”

  “So,” Angie said and lit a cigarette, “Scott’s after half the Dawes’ fortune…” She saw something in Siobhan’s face that halted her in midsentence. “No. That wouldn’t be good enough, would it, Siobhan? He wants it all.”

  Siobhan’s nod was barely perceptible.

  “So he destroys Karen because she’s the heir.”

  Another tiny nod.

  Angie took a drag off her cigarette, considered it. “But, wait, impersonating Wesley Dawe would only get him so far. Even if the Dawes die and the circumstances don’t seem suspicious, they’re not leaving their fortune to a son they haven’t seen in ten years. And even if—even if—they did, Pearse’s impersonation of Wesley is limited. It’s not going to pass muster with estate lawyers.”

  Siobhan watched her carefully.

  “But,” Angie said, going really slowly now, “if he destroys Christopher Dawe, he’ll still gain nothing.”

  Siobhan used Angie’s matches to light her own cigarette.

  “Unless,” Angie said, “he’s gained access to…Carrie Dawe.”

  The name fell from her mouth and seemed to drop on the table between us as heavily as a plate.

  “That’s it,” Angie said. “Isn’t it? He and Carrie are in on it together.”

  Siobhan flicked her ash into the ashtray. “No. You were so close there for a moment, Miss Gennaro.”

  “Then…?”

  “She knows him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Siobhan said. “They’ve been lovers for eighteen months. She has no idea he’s the same man who destroyed Karen and wants to destroy her husband.”

  “Shit,” I said. “We had the picture of him and she wasn’t home.”

  Angie kicked the floorboard of the booth with her heel. “We should have gone to the damn country club with it.”

  Siobhan’s tiny eyes had grown large. “You have a picture of him?”

  I nodded. “Several.”

  “Oh, he won’t like that. He won’t like that at all.”

  I shivered and wagged my fingers at her. “Oooh.”

  She frowned. “You have no idea what his rage is like, Mr. Kenzie.”

  I leaned into the table. “Let me tell you something, Siobhan. I don’t give a shit about his rage. I don’t give a shit how magnetic he is. I don’t give a shit if he
can look into your soul and my soul and has God’s phone number on speed dial. He’s a psycho? Yes. He’s a Special Forces bad-ass who can do spin kicks that can rip your head off your neck? Good for him. He destroyed a woman who never wanted more out of life than to be happy and drive a fucking Camry. He turned a guy into a vegetable just for fun. He cut off another guy’s hands and tongue. And he poisoned a dog who I happened to have liked. A lot. You want to see rage?”

  Siobhan had pressed her shoulders and head as far back as possible into the red imitation leather behind her. She glanced nervously at Angie.

  Angie smiled. “It takes a lot, but once he gets revved up, honey?” She shook her head. “Pack up the kids and get out of town, because Main Street’s going to explode.”

  Siobhan glanced back in my direction. “He’s smarter than you,” she whispered.

  I shook my head. “He’s had the advantage of access. Now I do, too. I’m in his life now,” I said. “I’m in it up until the very end.”

  She shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re…” She dropped her eyes, continued to shake her head.

  “No idea of what?” Angie asked.

  She raised her eyes and her head stopped moving. “What you’re truly up against, what you really walked into.”

  “So tell us.”

  “Ah, thank you, no.” She placed her cigarettes in her purse. “I’ve given you all I care to. I trust you won’t call me to the attention of your INS friend. And I wish you both the best, though I don’t think it’ll help.”

  She stood, slid the bag strap over her shoulder.

  “Why did Pearse have to be so merciless with Karen?” I asked.

  She looked down at me. “I just told you. She was the only heir.”

  “I understand that. But why not just have her meet with an accident? Why destroy her piece by piece?”

  “That’s his method.”

  “That’s not method,” I said. “That’s abhorrence. Why did he hate her so bad?”

  She held out her arms, seemingly exasperated. “He didn’t. He barely knew her until Miles introduced them three months before she died.”

  “So why do all that to her?”

  Her hands clapped her outer thigh. “I told you—it’s his way.”