Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “It’s all I have for you.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. “Big chunks of this don’t add up, Siobhan.”

  She rolled her eyes, exhaled a weary sigh. “Well, that’s the thing about us criminal types, yeah, Mr. Kenzie? We tend to be a bit untrustworthy.”

  She turned toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I’ve a friend in Canton. I’ll stay with her for a bit.”

  “How do we know you’re not going straight to Pearse?”

  She gave us a wry grin. “The moment I didn’t arrive on the train into Boston, they knew you’d gotten to me. I’m a weak link now, aren’t I? And Pearse doesn’t like weak links.” She bent for her overnight bag, lifted it off the floor. “Not to worry. No one knows about my friend in Canton, except for you two. I’ll have at least a week before anyone has the time to go looking for me, and by then, I expect you’ll have all killed each other.” Her flat eyes twinkled. “Have a nice day now, won’t you?”

  She walked to the door, and Angie said, “Siobhan.”

  “Yeah?” She grasped the door handle.

  “Where’s the real Wesley?” Angie asked.

  “I don’t know.” She wouldn’t look at us.

  “Guess.”

  “Dead,” she said. She still didn’t meet our eyes.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “He outlived his usefulness, yeah? We all do where Scott is concerned, sooner or later.”

  She opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot. She walked toward the bus stop on Main without a look back, just a steady shake of her small head, as if simultaneously bitter and bemused by the choices that had led her here.

  “She said ‘they,’” Angie said. “You notice that? ‘They knew you’d gotten to me.’”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  Carrie Dawe’s face cracked in on itself as if it had been hit in the center with an ax.

  She didn’t weep. She didn’t cry out or scream or move much at all as she looked down at the photo of Pearse we’d placed on the coffee table in front of her. Her face merely folded inward and her breath turned shallow.

  Christopher Dawe was still at the hospital, and the great empty house felt cold and haunted around us.

  “You know him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Angie said. “Correct?”

  Carrie Dawe nodded.

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “He’s a…” She swallowed, snapped her eyes away from the photo and curled into herself on the couch. “He said he was an airline pilot for TWA. Hell, we met in an airport. I saw his IDs, a route schedule update or two. He was based out of Chicago. It fit. He has the trace of a midwestern accent.”

  “You want to kill him,” I said.

  She looked at me, eyes wide, then dropped her chin.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “Is there a gun in the house?”

  She kept her chin pressed to her chest.

  “Is there a gun in the house?” I repeated.

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “But you have access to one,” I said.

  She nodded. “We have a house in New Hampshire. For ski season. There are two there.”

  “What kind?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What kind, Mrs. Dawe?”

  “A handgun and a rifle. Christopher sometimes hunts in the late autumn.”

  Angie reached out, put a hand over Carrie Dawe’s. “If you kill him, he still wins.”

  Carrie Dawe laughed. “How’s that?”

  “You’re destroyed. Your husband is destroyed. Most of the fortune, I’ll bet, will go to your criminal defense.”

  She laughed again, but this time tears had sprung out along the tops of her cheekbones. “So what?”

  “So,” Angie said softly, tightening her hand on Carrie’s, “he set out years ago to destroy this family. Don’t let him succeed. Mrs. Dawe, look at me. Please.”

  Carrie turned her head, swallowed a pair of tears that reached opposite corners of her mouth at the same time.

  “I’ve lost a husband,” Angie said. “Just as you lost your first. Violently. You got a second chance, and yeah, you’ve fucked it up.”

  Carrie Dawe’s laugh was one of shock.

  “But you still have it,” Angie said. “You can still make it right. Make a third chance out of your second. Don’t let him take that.”

  For a good two minutes, no one spoke. I watched the two women hold hands and stare hard into each other’s faces, heard the clock tick on the mantel above the dark fireplace.

  “You’re going to hurt him?” Carrie Dawe said.

  “Yes,” Angie said.

  “Really hurt him,” she said.

  “Bury him,” Angie said.

  She nodded. She shifted on the couch and leaned forward, placed her free hand over Angie’s.

  “How can I help?” she asked.

  As we drove over toward Sleeper Street to relieve Nelson Ferrare on the roof, I said, “We’ve tailed his ass for a week. Where’s he vulnerable?”

  “Women,” Angie said. “His hatred sounds so pathological—”

  “No,” I said. “That’s deeper than I’m looking for. What makes him vulnerable right now? Where are the chinks in his armor?”

  “The fact that Carrie Dawe knows he and Timothy McGoldrick are one and the same.”

  I nodded. “Flaw number one.”

  “What else?” she asked.

  “He has no curtains on most of his windows.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve been following him during the day. Anything there?”

  She thought about it. “Not really. Wait. Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “He leaves the engine running.”

  “On the truck when he does his stops?”

  She nodded, smiled. “And the keys in the ignition.”

  I looked out the windshield as we approached the end of the Mass Pike, and shifted lanes from the northbound to southbound exit.

  “What are you doing?” Angie asked.

  “Going to drop by Bubba’s first.”

  She leaned forward, peered through the wash of a yellow light strip in the tunnel above us. “You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

  “I have a plan.”

  “A good one?”

  “A bit crude,” I said. “Needs some polish. But effective, I think.”

  “Crude’s okay,” she said. “Is it mean?”

  I grinned. “Some might call it that.”

  “Mean’s even better,” she said.

  Bubba met us at the door wearing a towel and a face completely devoid of hospitality.

  Bubba’s torso, from the waist to the hollow of his throat, is a massive slab of dark and light pink scar tissue in the shapes of lobster tails and smaller red ridges the length and width of children’s fingers that litter the pink like slugs. The lobster tails are burns; the slugs are shrapnel scars. Bubba got his chest in Beirut, when he was stationed with the marines the day a suicide bomber drove through the front gates and MPs on duty couldn’t shoot him because they’d been given blanks in their rifles. Bubba had spent eight months in a Lebanese hospital before receiving a medal and a discharge. He’d sold the medal and disappeared for another eighteen months, returning to Boston in late 1985 with contacts in the illegal arms trade a lot of other men before him had died trying to establish. He came back with the chest that looked like a mapmaker’s representation of the Urals, a refusal to ever discuss the night of the bombing, and a profound lack of fear that made people even more nervous around him than they’d been before he left.

  “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 popping 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.