Prayers For Rain

24

On Monday we went to work in earnest. Angie planned to spend the day trying to contact a friend at the IRS in Pittsburgh, see if she could get any hits on Wesley Dawe’s revenue info for the years before he disappeared, and Bubba promised he’d try the same with a guy he knew at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, though he seemed to remember something shady happened concerning his friend but couldn’t recall what that was.

I used the computer in the office to search the Net’s national phone books and any other databases I could think of. Typing in Wesley Dawe over and over and over and getting nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Angie’s friend at the IRS kept her hanging all afternoon, and Bubba never called to report on his progress, and finally, sick of brick walls, I drove downtown to check out Naomi Dawe at the Hall of Records.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in either her birth or death records, but I copied all the info down in a notepad anyway and stuck it in my back pocket as I left City Hall.

I stepped out onto the rear of City Hall Plaza and two beefy guys, both balding, both wearing aviator glasses and thin Hawaiian shirts untucked over jeans, fell into step beside me.

“We’re going to take a little walk,” the guy on my right said.

“Cool,” I said. “If we go to the park, will you buy me an ice cream?”

“Guy’s a comedian,” the one on my left said.

“Sure,” the other guy said. “He’s fucking Jay Leno over here.”

We crossed the plaza toward Cambridge Street and a small gang of pigeons took flight in front of us. I could hear both guys breathing a little heavy, a daily constitutional apparently not something they worked into their schedules.

It was hot, but a colder than normal sweat broke out on my forehead as I noticed the dark pink Lincoln double-parked on Cambridge. I’d seen the same Lincoln parked in Stevie Zambuca’s driveway on Saturday.

“Stevie felt like chatting,” I said. “How nice.”

“You notice his delivery was a little shaky on that one?” the guy on my right side said.

“Maybe this ain’t so funny no more,” the other guy said, and with an amazingly smooth and swift move for a guy his size, his hand slipped under my own shirt and removed my gun.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll keep it in a safe place.”

The back door of the Lincoln opened as we approached and a thin young guy got out of the car and held the door open for me.

I could make a scene, and the two guys beside me would kneecap me and shove me in anyway, broad daylight or not.

I decided to proceed with grace.

I climbed in the car beside Stevie Zambuca and they shut the door behind me.

The front seats were empty. Apparently my beefy handlers did the driving.

Stevie Zambuca said, “Someday that old guy? He’s gonna die. He’s, what, eighty-four now, right?”

I nodded.

“So he dies someday, I’ll fly out to his funeral, pay my respects, and come back and take a pipe to your fucking elbows, Kenzie. You just be ready for that day, because I will be.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” He smiled. “Think you’re pretty fucking cool, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well, you ain’t. But for now, I’ll play ball.” He tossed a brown paper bag on my lap. “There’s eight thou in there. This guy, he paid me ten to back you off.”

“So you’ve done business with him?”

“No. It was a straight job. Ten grand to keep you off his back. Never met the guy until Friday night. He approached one of my people, made his pitch.”

“Did he tell you to threaten Bubba to get to me?”

Stevie stroked his chin. “Matter of fact, yeah. He knows a lot about you, Kenzie. A lot. And he don’t like you. At all, motherfucker. At all.”

“You know anything about where he lives, works, that sort of thing?”

Stevie shook his head. “No. Guy I know in K.C. vouched for him. Heard he was stand-up.”

“K.C.?”

Stevie’s eyes met my own. “K.C. Why’s that bother you?”

I shrugged. “It just doesn’t seem to fit.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. When you see him, give him the eight Gs, tell him the other two Gs are for my aggravation.”

“How do you know I’ll see him?”

“He’s got a real hard-on for you, Kenzie. Like diamond-cutter hard. He kept saying you ‘interfered.’ And Vincent Patriso might be able to back me off, but he can’t back this guy off. He wants you dead.”

“No. He wants me to wish I were.”

Stevie chuckled. “Maybe you got something there. This guy? He’s smart, speaks real well, but in there with all that brain power, there’s disease, Kenzie. Personally, I think he’s got rocks in his head, and the rocks got little birds flying around in ’em.” He laughed, brought his hand down on my knee. “And you pissed him off. Ain’t that great?” He pressed a button on his door console and the locks popped up. “See you later, Kenzie.”

“See you, Stevie.”

I opened the door, blinked in the sun.

“Yeah, you’ll see me,” Stevie said as I stepped out of the car. “After the old guy’s funeral. Up close. In Technicolor.”

One of the beefy guys handed me my gun. “Take it easy, comedian. Try not to shoot off your own foot.”

My cell phone rang as I walked back across City Hall Plaza toward the parking garage where I’d left my car.

I knew it was him before I even said, “Hello.”

“Pat, buddy. How are you?”

“Not bad, Wes. Yourself?”

“Hanging to the left, my friend. Say, Pat?”

“Yeah, Wes?”

“When you get to the parking garage, go up to the roof, will you?”

“We going to meet, Wes?”

“Bring the envelope Don Guido gave you.”

“But of course.”

“Don’t waste our time contacting the police, okay, Pat? There’s nothing to hold me on.”

He hung up.

I waited until I was in the shadows of the garage itself, unseeable to anyone inside or on the roof, before I called Angie.

“How fast can you get down by Haymarket?”

“The way I drive?”

“So about five minutes,” I said. “I’ll be on the roof of the garage at the base of New Sudbury. You know the one?”

“Yup.”

I looked around me. “I need a picture of the guy, Ange.”

“That garage roof? How’m I gonna shoot down on that? All the buildings around it are shorter.”

I found one. “The antiques co-op at the end of Friend Street. Get on the roof.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Outside of the friggin’ expressway, I don’t see any other place you could shoot from.”

“Okay, okay. I’m on my way.”

She hung up and I took the stairs eight stories to the roof, the stairwell dark and dank and reeking of urine.

He was leaning with his arms up on the wall, looking down at City Hall Plaza, Faneuil Hall, the sudden towering eruption of the financial district where Congress met State. For a moment, I considered rushing him, giving his legs a quick lift and chuck, seeing what sounds he’d make as he tumbled end over end and splattered all over the street. With any luck, it’d be ruled a suicide, and if he had a soul, it would choke on the irony all the way down to hell.

He turned to me when I was a good fifteen yards away. He smiled.

“Tempting, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“The thought of throwing me off the roof.”

“A bit.”

“But the police would quickly ascertain that the last call I made from my cell phone was to your cell phone, and they’d triangulate the source of the signals and place you at City Hall, six or seven minutes before I died.”

“That’d be a bummer,” I said. “Sure.” I pulled my gun from my waistband. “On your knees, Wes.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Hands behind your head and lace the fingers.”

He laughed. “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

I was ten feet away now. “No. But I’ll pistol-whip your nose beyond recognition. Would you like that?”

He grimaced, looked at his linen trousers and the dirty ground at his feet.

“How about I just hold up my hands, you frisk me, and I remain standing?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I kicked him in the back of the left knee and he dropped to the ground.

“This is not what you want to do!” He looked back at me, his face scarlet.

“Oooh,” I said. “Wesley gets angry.”

“You have no idea.”

“Hey, psycho, put your fucking hands behind your head. Okay?”

He did.

“Lace the fingers.”

He did.

I ran my hands along his chest, under the flaps of his untucked black silk shirt, along his waistband, crotch, and ankles. He wore black golf gloves in the dead of summer, but they were too tight and too small to conceal even a razor, so I let them be.

“The irony is,” he said as I searched him, “that even as your hand is running all over my body, you can’t touch me, Pat.”

“Miles Lovell,” I said. “David Wetterau.”

“You can place me at the sites of either of their accidents?”

Nope. Son of a bitch.

I said, “Your stepsister, Wesley.”

“Committed suicide, last I heard.”

“I can place you at the Holly Martens Inn.”

“Where I provided aid and sustenance to my clinically depressed sister? Is that what you’re talking about?”

I finished frisking him and stepped back. He was right. I had nothing on him.

He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Oh,” he said, “you’re done?”

He unlaced his fingers and stood, brushed at the dark ovals on each knee, the oily, sunbaked tar permanently imprinted in the linen.

“I’ll send you the bill,” he said.

“Do that.”

He leaned back against the wall, studied me, and I again felt the irrational urge to push him over. Just to hear his scream.

Up close for the first time, I could feel the casual combination of power and cruelty that he wore like a cloak draped over his shoulders. His face was a strange mix of hard angles and ripeness-hard jawline under fleshy red lips, a doughy, pudding softness to his ivory skin interrupted by jutting cheekbones and eyebrows. His hair was blond again, and combined with those fleshy lips and eyes so blue and vibrant and mean, the total effect of his face was defiantly Aryan.

As I studied him, he studied me, cocking his head ever so slightly to the right, his blue eyes narrowing, the hint of a knowing grin curling the corners of his ample mouth.

“That partner of yours,” he said, “is a real babe. You fuck her, too?”

It was as if he wanted me to throw him off the roof.

“I bet you have,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder at the city below. “You bang Vanessa Moore-who by the way I caught in court the other day, quite good-and you’re banging your hot little partner and God knows who else. You’re quite the swordsman, Pat.”

He turned his head back to me and I placed my gun in its holster at the small of my back for fear I’d use it.

“Wes.”

“Yeah, Pat?”

“Don’t call me Pat.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “Found a sore spot. Always interesting. People, you know, you can never be sure where their weaknesses lie until you prod a bit.”

“It’s not a weakness, it’s a preference.”

“Sure.” His eyes glittered. “You keep telling yourself that, Pat, er, rick.”

I chuckled in spite of myself. The guy didn’t quit.

A traffic helicopter from one of the news stations flew over us and then made an arc over the expressway as the crush of rush hour began to swell on the elevated girders to my left.

“I really hate women,” Wesley said evenly, his eyes following the path of the helicopter. “As a species, intellectually, I find them…” He shrugged “…silly. But physically”-he smiled, rolled his eyes-“Christ, it’s all I can do to keep from genuflecting when a really gorgeous one walks by. Interesting paradox, don’t you think?”

“No,” I said. “You’re a misogynist, Wesley.”

He chuckled. “You mean like Cody Falk?” He clucked his tongue. “You couldn’t get me out of bed for rape. It’s pedestrian.”

“You’d prefer to reduce people to shells, that it?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Like your stepsister. Reduce her to nothing, so that the only way she can express her horror is sexually.”

He raised the eyebrow another notch. “She loved it. Are you kidding? Christ, Pat-whatever the fuck your name is-isn’t that what sex is all about? Oblivion. And don’t give me this PC rhetoric about spiritual commingling and making love. Sex is about fucking. Sex is about regressing to our most animalistic state. Caveman. Private. Pre-Ur. We slurp and scratch and bite and groan like animals. All the drugs and marital aids and whips and chains and variances we add to the stew are all just extras meant to heighten-no, accomplish-the same thing. Oblivion. A regressive state that transports us back centuries and de-evolves us. It’s fucking, Pat. It’s oblivion.”

I clapped. “Terrific speech.”

He took a bow. “You like that?”

“You’ve practiced it.”

“It’s been tweaked over the years, sure.”

“Thing is, Wes-”

“What’s ‘the thing,’ Pat? Tell me.”

“You can’t explain poetry to a computer. You can teach it rhyme or meter, but it doesn’t understand beauty. Nuance. Essence. You don’t understand making love. That doesn’t mean a higher state-beyond fucking-doesn’t exist.”

“Is that what you’re shooting for with Vanessa Moore? A higher sexual state? The spirituality inherent in making love?”

“No,” I said, “we’re just fuck buddies.”

He chuckled. “You ever felt love, Pat? For a woman?”

“Sure.”

“Ever achieved that spiritual state you speak of?”

“Yup.”

He nodded. “So where is she now? Or were there more than one? Where are they now? I mean, if it was so great, so fucking spiritual, why aren’t you with one of them instead of talking to me and occasionally dipping your wick in Vanessa Moore?”

I didn’t have an answer. At least not one I felt like attempting to explain to Wesley.

It was a hell of a point, though. If love dies, if relationships deteriorate, if what was making love reverts back to having sex, then was it ever love to begin with? Or just something we sell ourselves on to distance ourselves from the beasts?

“When I came in my own stepsister,” Wesley said, “it purified her. It was voluntary, consensual sex, Pat, I assure you. And she loved it. And thereby found her essence, her true self.” He turned his back to me, looked out as the helicopter made a wide circle over the Broadway Bridge and headed back toward us. “By facing her true self, all the illusions she’d used to prop herself up shattered. And she shattered. It broke her. It could have built her, if she’d been strong enough, brave enough, but it broke her.” He turned back to me.

“Or you did,” I said. “Some would say Karen was destroyed by you, Wes.”

He shrugged. “We all have points we reach where either we break or we build. Karen found hers.”

“With your help.”

“Possibly. And if she’d built from there, who’s to say she wouldn’t be a happier person? What’s your breaking point, Pat? Have you ever wondered just which elements of your current version of happiness you could stand to lose before you were reduced to a glimmer of yourself? Which elements, eh? Your family? Your partner? Your car? Your friends? Your home? How soon before you’d be natal again? Stripped of embroidery? And then-then, Pat-who would you be? What would you do?”

“After I killed you, or before?”

“Why would you kill me?”

I held out my arms, stepped close to him. “Gee, I dunno, Wes. You take everything from some guys, they just figure they got nothing to lose.”

“Sure, Pat. Sure.” He placed a hand to his chest. “But don’t you think I’d have planned for contingencies like that?”

“You mean like hiring Stevie Zambuca to back me off?”

He dropped his eyes, looked at the bag in my hand.

“I presume Stevie’s services are no longer at my disposal.”

I tossed the bag between his feet. “That’s about the size of it. By the way, he took out a two-grand aggravation fee for himself. These mob guys, Wes, you know what I’m saying?”

He shook his head. “Patrick, Patrick, I hope you understand that I’ve been speaking hypothetically. I bear no animosity toward you.”

“Cool. Too bad I can’t say the same thing, Wes.”

He lowered his head until his chin touched his chest. “Patrick, trust me on this: You don’t want to play chess with me.”

I flicked the fingers of my right hand off his chin.

When he raised his head, the blithe cruelty in his eyes had been replaced by raw rage.

“Ah, yes, I do, Wes.”

“Tell you what-take that money, Pat.” His teeth were gritted, his face suddenly damp. “Take it and forget about me. I don’t feel like dealing with you now.”

“But I feel like dealing with you, Wes. A whole lot.”

He laughed. “Take the money, buddy.”

I met his laugh with my own. “I thought you could destroy me, pal. What’s up with that?”

The sleepy malevolence zapped the blue in his eyes again. “I can, Pat. It’s just a time issue at the moment.”

“A time issue? Wes, buddy, I got plenty of time. I’ve cleared my decks for you.”

Wesley’s jaw tightened and he pursed his lips and nodded several times to himself.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

I glanced to my left, spotted a Honda sitting on the expressway, fifty yards off and a few feet above us, the hood up. The hazards blinked and cars beeped and honked and a few people threw the finger as Angie kept her head under the hood, fiddled with some cables, and shot pictures of me and Wesley from the camera sitting atop the oil filter cover.

Wesley raised his head and stuck out his gloved hand. Bright green homicide shone in his eyes.

“War?” he asked.

I shook his gloved hand. “War,” I said. “You bet.”