Prayers For Rain

17

I called Bubba from the car. “What are you doing?”

“Just got off the plane from Mickland,” he said.

“Fun time?”

“Bunch of pissed-off midgets, and don’t even ask me what language they speak ’cause it don’t sound anything like English.”

I did my best pure-porridge Northern Irish accent. “Yer man take yew for a sessiun, did he, yah?”

“What?”

“Fer fook’s sake, Rogowski, got a fierce amount of cotton in yer ars?”

“Cut it out,” Bubba said. “Goddammit.”

Angie put her hand on my arm. “Stop torturing the poor fella.”

“Angie’s with me,” I said.

“No shit. Where?”

“ Back Bay. We need a delivery man.”

“Bomb?” He sounded excited, like he had a few lying around he needed to get rid of.

“Ah, no. Just a tape recorder.”

“Oh.” He sounded bored.

“Come on,” I said. “Remember, Ange is with me. We’ll go drinking afterward.”

He grunted. “Shakes Dooley says you forgot how.”

“Well, school me, brother. School me.”

“So we follow Dr. Bourne home,” Angie said, “and then we somehow slide a tape recorder into her place?”

“Yeah.”

“Dumb plan.”

“You got a better one?”

“Not at the moment.”

“You think she’s dirty?” I said.

“I agree there’s something fishy about her.”

“So we stick to my plan until we have a better one.”

“Oh, there’s a better one. I’ll come up with it. Trust me. There’s a better one.”

At four a black BMW pulled up outside of Dr. Bourne’s office. The driver sat inside for a bit, smoking, and then he got out and stood on the street, leaned back against the hood of the Beemer. He was a short guy who wore a green silk shirt tucked into tight black jeans.

“He has red hair,” I said.

“What?”

I pointed at the guy.

“So? Lotta people with red hair. Particularly in this town.”

Diane Bourne appeared on the front landing of her building. The redheaded guy raised his head in recognition of her. Very slightly, she shook her head. The guy’s shoulders rose in confusion as she walked down the stairs and passed him, her head down, her footsteps fast and deliberate.

The guy watched her go, then he turned slowly and looked around the street as if he suddenly sensed he was being watched. He tossed his cigarette to the sidewalk and climbed in his BMW.

I called Bubba, who was parked over on Newbury in his van. “Change of plans,” I said. “We’re tailing a black Beemer.”

“Whatever.” He hung up. Mr. Hard-to-Impress.

“Why are we following this guy?” Angie said. I let two cars get in between us and the BMW before I pulled away from the curb.

“Because he’s a redhead,” I said. “Because Bourne knew him and acted like she didn’t. Because he looks hinky.”

“Hinky?”

I nodded. “Hinky.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know. I heard it on Mannix once.”

We followed the BMW south out of the city with Bubba’s black van riding our rear bumper straight into the rush-hour crunch. From Albany Street on, we averaged about six miles a decade as we crawled through Southie, Dorchester, Quincy, and Braintree. Twenty miles, and it took us only an hour and fifteen minutes. Welcome to Boston; we just fucking live for traffic.

He got off the expressway in Hingham and led us through another half an hour of bumper-to-bumper down one humid, crabby lane of Route 228. We passed through Hingham-all white colonials and white picket fences and white people-and then wound past a strip of power plants and mammoth gas tanks under high-tension wire before the black Beemer led us into Nantasket.

Once a grungy beach community with a soiled-neon carny atmosphere that attracted lots of bikers and women with flabby, exposed midriffs and stringy hair, Nantasket Beach slipped into a sterile, picture-postcard loveliness when they tore down the amusement park that once fronted its shores. Gone were the cheesy teacup rides and ratty wooden clowns you’d knock down with a softball to win an anemic guppy in a plastic bag. A roller coaster that, in its time, had been acknowledged as the country’s most dangerous had had its twisted dinosaur of a skeleton shattered by wrecking balls and pulled by its roots from the earth so they could build condos overlooking the boardwalk. All that remained of the old days were the ocean itself and a few arcades bathed in sticky orange light along the boardwalk.

Pretty soon they’d replace the arcades with coffee bars, outlaw stringy hair, and as soon as anyone stopped having any fun whatsoever, they could safely call it progress.

It occurred to me, as we wound our way down the beach road past the site of the old amusement park, that if I ever had kids, and I took them to places that had once mattered to me, all there’d be to show for my youth would be the buildings that had replaced it.

The BMW took a quick left just past the end of the boardwalk, then a right, and another left before he pulled into the sandy driveway of a small white Cape with green awnings and trim. We rolled past, and Angie watched in her sideview mirror.

“What the hell is he doing?”

“Who?”

She shook her head, eyes on the mirror. “Bubba.”

I looked in the rearview, saw that Bubba had pulled his black van to a rest on the shoulder about fifty yards before the redhead’s house. As I watched, he hopped out of the van and ran up between two Capes that were near identical to the redhead’s and disappeared somewhere in the backyards.

“This,” I said, “was not part of the plan.”

“Carrottop’s in his house,” Angie said.

I U-turned and drove back down the street, passing the redhead’s house as he closed his front door behind him and continuing past Bubba’s van. I drove another twenty yards and pulled over on the right shoulder in front of a home construction site, the skeleton of another Cape sitting on bare brown land.

Angie and I got out of the car and walked back toward Bubba’s van.

“I hate when he does this,” she said.

I nodded. “Sometimes I forget he has a mind of his own.”

“I know he has a mind of his own,” Angie said. “It’s how he uses it that keeps me up nights.”

We reached the rear of the van just as Bubba came bounding out from between the two houses, pushed us aside, and opened the rear doors.

“Bubba,” Angie said, “what have you done?”

“Sssh. I’m working here.” He tossed a pair of branch cutters into the rear of the van, grabbed a gym bag from the floor, and shut the doors.

“What’re you-”

He put a finger to my lips. “Sssh. Trust me. This is good.”

“Does it involve heavy explosives?” Angie asked.

“You want it to?” Bubba reached for the van door again.

“No, Bubba. Very much no.”

“Oh.” He dropped his hand from the door. “No time. Be right back.”

He jostled us aside and ran in a crouch across the lawns toward the redhead’s house. Even in a crouch, Bubba running across your lawn is about as easy to miss as Sputnik would be. He weighs something less than a piano but something more than a fridge, and he’s got that demented newborn’s face billowing out from under spikes of brown hair and above a neck the circumference of a rhino’s midsection. He kind of moves like a rhino, actually, lumbering and slightly to his right, but oh so quickly.

We watched with mouths slightly ajar as he dropped to his knees by the BMW, slim-jimmed the lock in the time it would take me to do it with a key, and then opened the door.

Angie and I both tensed for the blare of an alarm, but were met with silence as Bubba reached into the car, pulled something out, and slid it in the pocket of his trench coat.

Angie said, “What in the fuck is he doing?”

Bubba reached behind him and unzipped the gym bag by his knees. His hand searched around inside until he found what he was looking for. He removed a small black rectangular object and placed it in the car.

“It’s a bomb,” I said.

“He promised,” Angie said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but he’s, oh, nuts. Remember?”

Bubba used the sleeve of his trench coat to wipe the places he’d touched in and outside the car, then he gently closed the door and scrambled back across the lawn and over to us.

“I,” he said, “am so fucking cool.”

“Agreed,” I said. “What did you do?”

“I mean, I’m the balls, dude. I’m it. I surprise myself sometimes.” He opened the back door of the van, tossed the gym bag on the floor.

“Bubba,” Angie said, “what’s in the bag?”

Bubba was damn near bursting. He threw the folds of the bag wide, waved us to look inside. “Cell phones!” he said with a ten-year-old’s glee.

I looked in the bag. He was right. Ten or twelve of them-Nokias, Ericcsons, Motorolas, most black, a few gray.

“Great,” I said. I looked up into his beaming face. “Actually, why is this great, Bubba?”

“’Cause your idea sucked, and I came up with this one.”

“My idea wasn’t bad.”

“It sucked!” he said happily. “I mean, it blew, dude. Put a bug in a box, have the guy-or wasn’t it some chick at first-take it in the house.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, what if he leaves the box on the dining room table, goes up to the bedrooms to do whatever it is you want to hear?”

“We were kinda hoping he wouldn’t.”

He gave me a thumbs-up. “Fucking great thinking there.”

“So,” Angie said, “what was your idea?”

“Replace his cell phone,” Bubba said. He pointed into the bag. “These all have bugs already inside. All I had to do was match one of mine”-he pulled a charcoal Nokia flip phone from his pocket-“to his.”

“That’s his?”

He nodded.

I nodded with him, let my smile match his own, until I dropped it. “Bubba, no offense, but so what? The guy’s inside his house.”

Bubba rocked back on his heels, raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So-how do I put this?-why the fuck does he need to use his cell phone when he probably has three or four house phones inside?”

“House phones,” Bubba said slowly, a frown beginning to replace the smile. “Never thought of those. He can just pick one up and call anywhere he wants, huh?”

“Yeah, Bubba. That’s sort of their point. He’s probably doing it right now.”

“Shit,” Bubba said. “Too bad I cut the phone lines out back, huh?”

Angie laughed. She clapped his cherub’s face between her hands and kissed his nose.

Bubba blushed and then looked at me, that smile beginning to grow again.

“Ahm…”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“For?”

“Doubting you. Okay? Happy?”

“And talking down to me.”

“And talking down to you, yes.”

“And speaking in a derisive tone of voice,” Angie said.

I glared at her.

“What she said.” Bubba jerked a thumb at Angie.

Angie looked over her shoulder. “He’s coming back out.”

We all climbed into the van, and Bubba shut the door behind us, and we looked out through mirrored glass at the redhead as he kicked his front tire, opened his car door, and reached across the seat, pulled his cellular from the console.

“Why didn’t he call people during the ride back?” Angie asked. “If the calls were important…”

“Roaming,” Bubba said. “Someone’s moving, it’s way easier to tap into their conversation-listen in or clone the phone, whatever.”

“But stationary?” I said.

He screwed his face up. “What, you mean like writing something down? What’s that got to-”

“Not the paper. Stationary,” I said, “as in standing still.”

“Oh.” He rolled his eyes at Angie. “Showing off the college again.” He glanced back at me. “Okay, Joe Word of the Day, yeah, if he’s ‘stationary’ it’s way harder to cut into his transmission. Gotta go through land lines and tin roofs and antennas and satellite dishes, microwaves, the whole fucking nine if you know what I mean.”

Carrottop walked back into his house.

Bubba used one finger to type on a laptop computer on the floor between us. He pulled a grimy piece of paper from his pocket. In his second-grader’s scrawl, he’d listed the cell phone types and serial numbers, and then the frequency numbers for his recording devices beside them. He typed a frequency number into the computer, then sat back on the floor.

“Never tried this before,” he said. “Hope it works.”

I rolled my eyes and sat back against the side panel.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said after about thirty seconds.

“Ooops.” Bubba raised a finger above his head. “Volume.”

He leaned forward and pressed the volume button at the base of the laptop, and after a moment, we heard Diane Bourne’s voice through the tiny speakers.

“…Are you drunk, Miles? Of course it’s an issue. They asked all sorts of questions.”

I smiled at Angie. “And you didn’t want to follow the redhead.”

She rolled her eyes and said to Bubba, “One good hunch in three years, he thinks he’s a god.”

“What questions?” Miles said.

“Who you were, where you worked.”

“How did they get onto me?”

Diane Bourne ignored the question. “They wanted to know about Karen, about Wesley, about how the fucking session notes got in Karen’s possession, Miles.”

“All right, all right, just relax.”

“Fuck relax! You relax! Oh, Jesus,” she said through a long stream of air. “The two of them are smart. Do you understand?”

Bubba nudged me. “Talking about you two?”

I nodded.

“Shit,” Bubba said. “Smart. Oh, sure.”

“Yes,” Miles Lovell said. “They’re smart. We knew that.”

“We never knew they’d trace anything to me. Fucking fix it, Miles. Call him.”

“Just-”

“Fix it!” she snapped. And then she hung up.

No sooner had Miles hung up than he dialed another number.

A man answered on the other end. “Yeah?”

“Two detectives sniffed around today,” Miles said.

“Detectives? You mean cops?”

“No. Private. They know about the session notes.”

“Someone forgot to retrieve them?”

“Someone was drunk. What can Someone say?”

“Sure.”

“She’s rattled.”

“The good doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Too rattled?” the calm voice asked.

“Definitely.”

“She’ll need a speaking to?”

“She may need more. She’s the weak link here.”

“The weak link. Uh-huh.”

There was a long pause. I could hear Miles breathing on his end, static and hiss on the other.

“You there?” Miles asked.

“I find it boring.”

“Which?”

“Working that way.”

“We may not have time for your way. Look, we-”

“Not over the phone.”

“Fine. The usual, then.”

“The usual. Don’t worry so much.”

“I’m not worried. I just want this dealt with faster than your usual inclinations allow.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m serious.”

“I recognize that,” the calm voice said, and then he broke the connection.

Miles hung up, immediately dialed a third number.

A woman picked up a phone on the fourth ring, her voice thick and sluggish. “Yeah.”

“It’s me,” Miles said.

“Uh-huh.”

“’Member that time we were supposed to pick something up at Karen’s?”

“What?”

“The notes. Remember?”

“Hey, it was your deal.”

“He’s pissed.”

“So? It was your deal.”

“That’s not the way he sees it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he could go on another of his warpaths. Be careful.”

“Aww, Jesus,” the woman said. “You…you fucking kidding me? Jesus, Miles!”

“Calm down.”

“No! Okay? Jesus! He owns us, Miles. He owns us.”

“He owns everyone,” Miles said. “Just…”

“What? Just what, Miles? Huh?”

“I dunno. Watch your back.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. Shit.” She hung up.

Miles broke the connection and we sat in the van and watched his house, waited for him to pop his head out and take us wherever it was he intended to go.

“That woman sound like Dr. Bourne to you?”

Angie shook her head. “No. Definitely younger.”

I nodded.

Bubba said, “So this guy in the house, he did something heinous?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

Bubba reached under his trench coat, pulled out a.22 and screwed on a silencer. “So, okay. Let’s go.”

“What?”

He looked at me. “Let’s just kick in the door and shoot him.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “You said he did something heinous. So, okay, let’s shoot him. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Bubba,” I said, and placed my hand over his so he lowered the gun, “we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. We need this guy to lead us to whoever he’s working with.”

Bubba’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open and he stared at the van wall like a child whose birthday balloon just popped in front of his face.

“Man,” he said to Angie, “why’s he bring me along if I can’t shoot someone?”

Angie put a hand on his neck. “There, there, fella. All good things come to those who wait.”

Bubba shook his head. “You know what comes to those who wait?”

“What?”

“More waiting.” He frowned. “And still no one gets shot.” He pulled a bottle of vodka from his trench coat, took a long pull, and shook his massive head. “Don’t seem fair sometimes.”

Poor Bubba. Always showing up for the party in the wrong clothes.