Prayers For Rain

25

“So where you parked, Wes?” I asked as we left the roof and descended the stairwell.

“Not in the garage, Pat. You’re on six, I believe.”

We reached the sixth-floor landing. Wesley stepped back from me a few feet. I leaned in the doorway.

“Your floor,” he said.

“Yup.”

“Thinking of trying to stick with me?”

“It crossed my mind, yeah, Wes.”

He nodded, rubbed his chin, and parts of him moved with a sudden, blurry explosion of speed. One of his loafers connected with my jaw and knocked me back into the garage.

I scrambled to my feet between two cars, reached for my gun, and had it out of the holster and swinging around toward him when he exploded all over me again. It seemed like I took about six punches and six kicks in roughly four seconds, and my gun clattered across the garage and disappeared under a car.

“You frisked me on the roof because I allowed you to, Pat.”

I hit my hands and knees and he booted me in the stomach.

“You’re alive right now because I’m allowing it. But, I don’t know-maybe I’m changing my mind.”

He telegraphed the next kick. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his ankle flex and his foot leave the ground, and I took the kick in the ribs and held on to the ankle.

I heard the sound of a car approaching from the fifth level, moving up one ramp toward the next, a torn muffler chugging loudly, and Wesley heard it, too.

He kicked me in the chest with his free foot, and I let go of his ankle.

Headlights arced against the wall at the bottom of the ramp.

“Be seeing you, Pat.”

His footsteps clanged down the metal staircase, and I tried to get back on my feet, but my body decided to roll over and lie on its back instead as the approaching car screeched to a halt.

“Jesus,” a woman said as she hopped out of the passenger side. “Oh, my God.”

A guy stepped out of the driver’s side, put his hand on the roof. “Buddy, you all right?”

I raised an index finger as the woman’s feet approached. “One sec, okay?” I pulled my cell phone out and dialed Angie’s cell phone.

“Yeah?”

“He should be exiting the garage any second. You see him?”

“What? No. Wait. There he is.” Horns blared behind her.

“You see a black Mustang anywhere near him?”

“Yup. He’s crossing to it.”

“Get the plate number, Ange.”

“Okay. Kirk, out.”

I hung up and looked up at the couple standing over me. They wore matching black Metallica T-shirts.

I said, “Metallica’s playing the Fleet Center tonight?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I thought they broke up.”

“No.” The guy’s upside-down face blanched as if I’d just predicted one of the signs of the apocalypse. “No, no, no.”

I put my cell phone back in my pocket, raised both hands. “A little help?”

They stepped over me and arranged themselves in position, grasped my hands.

“Gently,” I said.

They pulled me to my feet and the garage lurched up and down several times and the light went all greasy in my head. I touched my ribs, then my upper chest and shoulders, finally my jaw. Nothing seemed broken. Everything, however, hurt. A lot.

“You want us to call security?” the guy said.

I leaned back against a parked car, checked each tooth with my tongue. “No. It’s okay. You might want to step away kinda fast, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m definitely going to puke.”

They moved almost as fast as Wesley had.

Let me get this straight,” Bubba said as he swabbed rubbing alcohol on my scraped forehead. “You got your ass handed to you like a hat by a guy looks like Niles Crane.”

“Uh-huh,” I managed, an ice pack the size of a football pressed to my swollen jaw.

“I don’t know,” Bubba said to Angie. “Can we hang out with him anymore?”

Angie looked up from the photos she’d had developed of Wesley at Foto-Fast while Bubba had checked me for breaks or sprains, taped up my bruised ribs, cleaned the wounds and scrapes from the garage floor and the ring on Wesley’s right hand. Say what you will about Bubba’s intelligence or lack thereof, but he’s a hell of a field medic. Has better drugs, too.

Angie smiled. “You do become more of a liability with every passing day.”

“Ha,” I said. “Nice hair.”

Angie touched the sides of her head and scowled.

The portable phone by her elbow rang, and she picked it up.

“Hey, Devin,” she said after a few seconds. “Huh?” She looked at me. “His jaw looks like a pink grapefruit, but otherwise I think he’s okay. Huh? Sure.” She lowered the phone. “Devin wants to know when you turned into such a Sally.”

“The guy knew fucking kung fu,” I said through gritted teeth, “judo, some goddamn fly-in-the-air, kick-your-head-off shit.”

She rolled her eyes. “What’s that?” she said into the phone. “Oh, okay.” Back to me: “Devin asks why you didn’t just shoot him?”

“Good question,” Bubba said.

“I tried,” I said.

“He tried,” she told Devin. She listened, nodded, said to me, “Devin said next time? Try harder.”

I gave her a bitter smile.

“He’s giving your advice due consideration,” she told Devin. “And those plates?” She listened. “Okay, thanks. Yeah, let’s do that soon. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up. “The plates were stolen from a Mercury Cougar last night.”

“Last night,” I said.

She nodded. “Methinks our Wesley plans ahead for all eventualities.”

“And can high-step like a chorus girl!” Bubba said.

I leaned back in my chair, gave them a “bring it on” gesture with my free hand. “Let’s get it over with. All the jokes. Let’s go.”

“You kidding?” Angie said. “No way.”

“Months,” Bubba said. “Months we’ll be milking this.”

Bubba’s friend at the state revenue office had been indicted last year on multiple fraud charges, so that turned into a dead end, but Angie finally got a call from her IRS contact and started scribbling notes as she listened to him, saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” over and over as I nursed my swollen jaw and Bubba spooned cayenne pepper into a collection of hollow-point bullets.

“Stop that,” I said.

“What? I’m bored.”

“You’re bored a lot lately.”

“Well, look at the company I’ve been keeping.”

Angie looked up from the table as she hung up the phone and smiled at me. “We got him.”

“Wesley?”

She nodded. “Paid taxes from 1984 until ’89, when he disappeared.”

“Okay.”

“It gets better. Guess where he worked?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Bubba spooned some more cayenne into a metal jacket. “Hospitals.”

Angie tossed her pen at his head. “You’re stomping my lines again.”

“Lucky guess. Back off.” Bubba frowned, rubbed his head, went back to his bullets.

“Psych hospitals?” I said.

Angie nodded. “Among others, yeah. He did a summer at McLean. He did a year at Brigham and Women’s. A year at Mass General. Six months at Beth Israel. Apparently, he wasn’t very good at his jobs, but his father kept getting him others.”

“What departments?”

Bubba raised his head, opened his mouth, caught Angie’s glare, and dropped his head again.

“Custodial,” Angie said. “Then Records.”

I sat at the table, looked down at my notes from the Hall of Records. “Where was he working in ’89?”

Angie glanced at her notes. “Brigham and Women’s. Records Department.”

I nodded, held up my notes so she could see them.

“‘Naomi Dawe,’” she read. “‘Born, Brigham and Women’s, December eleven, 1985. Died, Brigham and Women’s, November seventeen, 1989.”

I dropped the notes and stood, walked toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

“Making a phone call.”

“To who?”

“Old girlfriend,” I said.

“We’re working,” Bubba said, “all he’s thinking about is getting some.”

I met Grace Cole on Francis Street in Brookline, in the heart of the Longwood Hospital district. The rain had stopped and we walked down Francis and crossed Brookline Avenue, worked our way down to the river.

“You look…bad,” she said, and tilted her head, considering my jaw. “Still doing the same work, I take it.”

“You look stupendous,” I said.

She smiled. “Always the flirt.”

“Just honest. How’s Mae?”

Mae was Grace’s daughter. Three years ago, the violence in my life had driven them into an FBI safe house, almost derailed Grace’s surgical residency, and pretty much slammed the door on what remained of our relationship. Mae had been four. She’d been smart and pretty and liked to watch the Marx Brothers with me. I couldn’t think of her without it eliciting a scraping sensation under my ribs.

“She’s good. She’s in second grade, doing well. She likes math, hates boys. I saw you on TV last year, when those men were killed near the Quincy Quarries. You were in a crowd shot.”

“Mmm.”

Water dripped from the weeping willows along the river path, and the river itself was a hard chrome in the wake of the dull rain.

“Still mixing it up with dangerous people?” Grace pointed at my jaw, the scrapes on my forehead.

“Me? Nah. Fell in the shower.”

“Into a tub full of rocks?”

I smiled, shook my head.

We stepped aside for a pair of joggers, their legs pumping, their cheeks puffing, the air around them filled with fury.

Our elbows touched as we stepped back, and Grace said, “I took a job in Houston. I leave in two weeks.”

“Houston,” I said.

“Ever been?”

I nodded. “Big,” I said. “Hot. Industrial.”

“Cutting edge in medical technology,” Grace said.

“Congratulations,” I said. “I mean it.”

Grace chewed her lower lip, looked out at the cars gliding past on slick roads. “I’ve almost called you a thousand times.”

“What stopped you?”

She gave me a small shrug, her eyes on the road. “News footage of you near corpses in the quarries, I guess.”

I followed her gaze out onto the road because there was nothing to say.

“You with someone?”

“Not really.”

She looked in my eyes, smiled. “But you’re hoping?”

“I’m hoping, yeah,” I said. “You?”

She looked back at the hospital. “A fellow doctor, yeah. I’m not sure how Houston’s going to affect it. It’s amazing what it takes.”

“How’s that?”

She raised her hand to the road, then dropped it. “Oh, you know, holding down a career, holding down a relationship, second-guessing your choices. Then one day your path is decided, you know? Your choices have been made. For better or worse, it’s your life.”

Grace in Houston. Grace gone from this city. I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly three years, but it’d been comforting, somehow, knowing she was around. A month from now, she wouldn’t be. I wondered if I’d feel the lack like a tiny hole in the fabric of the cityscape.

Grace reached into her bag. “Here’s what you asked for. I didn’t see anything odd. The girl drowned. The fluid in her lungs was consistent with the fluid from a pond. Time of death was consistent with a girl that age who’d fallen in icy water and been rushed to us.”

“She die at the home?”

She shook her head. “In the OR. Her father resuscitated her at the accident scene, got her heart pumping. But it was too late.”

“Do you know him?”

“Christopher Dawe?” She shook her head. “Only by reputation.”

“And what’s his reputation?”

“Brilliant surgeon, weird man.” She handed me the manila folder, looked down the river, then out at the street. “So, okay, well…Look, I…I have to go. It was nice seeing you.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

She put a hand to my chest. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t.”

I looked in her eyes and saw regret and maybe a kind of wild nervousness over the uncertainty of her future, a sense of the buildings that rose behind us closing in.

“We did love each other, didn’t we?” she said.

“Yeah, we sure did.”

“That’s too bad, isn’t it?”

I stood by the river and watched her walk up to the light in her blue scrubs and white lab jacket, her ash-blond hair damp with the moisture that still hung in the air.

I loved Angie. Probably always had. Some part of me still loved Grace Cole, though. Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.

As she disappeared in the throng of medical people and medical buildings, I found myself agreeing with her. It was too bad. It was a fucking shame.

Bubba had placed his bullets in stacked white cases beside his chair by the time I got back to the apartment. He and Angie played Stratego on the dining room table, shared some vodka, and had Muddy Waters playing on my stereo.

Bubba’s rarely good at games. He gets frustrated and usually ends up dumping the board in your lap, but at Stratego, he’s tough to beat. Must be all those bombs. He places them in the last place you’d suspect, and gets downright kamikaze with his scouts, wading into certain death with glee in his baby’s face.

I waited till Bubba took Angie’s flag, studying the intake and birth and death forms on Naomi Dawe, and finding absolutely nothing unusual.

Bubba shouted, “Ha! Now take me to your daughters,” and Angie swept her hand across the board, knocked the pieces to the floor.

“Man, she’s a sore loser.”

“I’m competitive,” Angie said, and bent to pick up the pieces. “There’s a difference.”

Bubba rolled his eyes and then looked at the papers I’d spread across my side of the table. He got out of his chair, stretched, and looked over my shoulder. “What’re those?”

“Hospital records,” I said. “Mother’s intake when she came to give birth. Daughter’s birth. Daughter’s death.”

He looked down at the forms. “They don’t make sense.”

“They make perfect sense. Which word’s giving you trouble?”

He slapped the back of my head. “How come she’s got two blood types?”

Angie raised her head from the other side of the table. “What?”

Bubba pointed down at Naomi’s birth record, and then her death record. “She’s O neg in that one.”

I looked at the death record. “And B positive in this one.”

Angie came over to our side of the table. “What are you two talking about?”

We showed her.

“What the hell could it mean?” I said.

Bubba snorted. “Means only one thing. The kid who was born on that day”-he stabbed the birth record with his finger-“ain’t the same kid who died”-he stabbed the death record-“on this day. Man, you guys are slow sometimes.”