Prayers For Rain

27

Information about Wesley, or the man who called himself Wesley, had the character of Wesley himself: It appeared in scant flashes, bright and fast, and then disappeared. For three days we worked out of the belfry office and my apartment trying to glean, from notes, photos, and rough transcripts of the interviews we’d conducted, any tangible proof of who this guy was. Using contacts at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, BPD, and even agents I’d once worked with from both the FBI and the Justice Department, we ran the photos of Wesley through computers that interfaced with every known justice agency, including Interpol, and got zip.

“Whoever this guy is,” Neal Ryerson at Justice told me, “he keeps the lowest profile since D. B. Cooper.”

Through Ryerson we also acquired a list of the owners of every 1968 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible still in existence in the U.S. Three were registered to owners in Massachusetts. One was a woman, two men. Posing as a writer from a car magazine, Angie visited all three at their homes. None was Wesley.

Hell, Wesley wasn’t even Wesley.

I considered what Stevie Zambuca had said about Wesley being vouched for by someone in Kansas City, but based on our list, no one in the entire city of K.C. owned a ’68 Shelby.

“What’s the oddest thing?” Angie asked on Friday morning, panning her hand over the mountain of paper on my dining room table. “About all of this? What jumps out?”

“Oh, I dunno,” I said. “Everything?”

Angie grimaced, sipped from her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup. She picked up the list the Dawes had compiled for us, as best they could remember, of addresses where they’d sent the bimonthly cash deposits.

“This bugs me,” she said.

“Okay.” I nodded. It bugged me, too.

“Instead of trying to find Wesley, maybe we should see where the money takes us.”

“Fine. But I bet they’re bullshit drops. I bet they’re big homes where he knew no one was home and the postman would have to leave the packages on the porch, and once he’d left, Wesley just swooped in and picked them up.”

“Possibly,” she said. “But if just one of them is the address of someone who knows Wesley, or whoever the hell this guy is?”

“Then it’s worth the effort. You’re right.”

She placed the list down directly in front of her. “Most of these are local. We got Brookline once, Newton twice, Norwell once, Swampscott, Manchester-by-the-Sea…”

The phone rang and I picked it up. “Hello.”

“Patrick,” Vanessa Moore said.

“Vanessa, what’s up?”

Angie looked up from the list, rolled her eyes.

“I think you were right,” Vanessa said.

“About what?”

“That guy on the patio.”

“What about him?”

“I think he’s trying to hurt me.”

Her nose was broken and a sallow brown bruise fringed the orbital bone of her left eye while a streak of hard black ran underneath it. Her hair was unkempt, the ends split and frizzy, and her good eye had a bag underneath it as dark as the bruise. Her normally ivory skin was gray and faded. She was chain-smoking, even though she’d once told me she’d quit five years ago and never missed it.

“What’s this,” she said, “Friday?”

“Yeah.”

“One week,” she said. “My life has fallen apart in one week.”

“What happened to your face, Vanessa?”

She turned it up to me as we walked. “Pretty, huh?” She shook her head and the tangled hair fell in her face. “I never saw him. The guy who did it. Never saw him.” She yanked the leash in her hand. “Come on, Clarence. Keep up.”

We were in Cambridge, along the Charles. Twice a week, Vanessa taught a law class at Radcliffe. I’d been dating her when she was offered the job, and was initially surprised she’d accepted it. The stipend Radcliffe paid wouldn’t cover her annual dry cleaning bill, and it wasn’t like she needed more work. She’d jumped at it, though. Even with all her other work, the part-time teaching offer had validated something in her she couldn’t completely articulate, and besides, she got to take Clarence into the classroom with her and have it chalked up as the eccentricity of a brilliant mind.

We’d walked down Brattle from her classroom and crossed over the river to let Clarence run wild for a bit on the grass. Vanessa hadn’t spoken for a long time. She’d been busy smoking.

When we began working our way west along the jogging path, she finally began to speak. We made slow progress because Clarence stopped to sniff every tree, chew every fallen branch, lick every discarded coffee cup or soda can. The squirrels, seeing he was on a leash, started fucking with him, darting in far closer than they’d normally dare, and I swear one smiled when Clarence lunged only to be jerked back against his leash, fell to the grass on his belly, and covered his eyes with his paws as if humiliated by it all.

Now, though, we’d left the squirrels behind, and he simply dawdled, chewing grass like a calf, while Vanessa was having none of it.

“Clarence,” she snapped, “here!”

Clarence looked at her, seemed to acknowledge the command, then started walking the other way.

Vanessa clenched the leash in her hand and seemed ready to yank back so hard she’d decapitate the dumb bastard.

“Clarence,” I said in a firm, normal tone I’d heard Bubba use a thousand times with his dogs, and then I followed it with a whistle. “Here, boy. Stop fucking around.”

Clarence trotted over to us and then fell into step a few feet ahead of Vanessa, his little butt wiggling like a Parisian hooker’s on Bastille Day.

“How come he listens to you?” Vanessa said.

“He can hear the tension in your voice. It’s making him nervous.”

“Yeah, well, I got reason to be tense. He’s a dog, what’s he got to be tense about-missing a nap?”

I put a hand on the back of her neck, kneaded the muscles and tendons between my fingers. It was as stiff and gnarled back there as one of the tree trunks.

Vanessa let out a long breath. “Thanks.”

I kneaded the flesh some more, felt it starting to loosen a bit. “Keep going?”

“As long as you can.”

“You got it.”

She gave me a tiny smile. “You’d be a good friend, Patrick. Wouldn’t you?”

“I am your friend,” I said, not sure it was true, but then, sometimes just saying something plants the seed that allows it to become truth.

“Good,” she said. “I need one.”

“So this guy who hit you?”

Hard pebbles sprouted under the skin at the back of her neck again.

“I was walking up to the door of a coffee shop. He was apparently waiting on the other side. The door was smoked glass. He could see out. I couldn’t see in. Just as I reached for the door, he slammed it open into my face. Then he just hopped over me as I was lying on the pavement and walked away.”

“Witnesses?”

“Inside the coffee shop, yeah. Two people remembered seeing a tall, slim guy wearing a baseball cap and Ray-Bans-they couldn’t agree on his age, but they both knew what kind of sunglasses he wore-who stood by the door, looking down at a leaflet in his hand.”

“Anything else they remember about him?”

“Yeah. He wore driving gloves. Black. Middle of the summer, guy’s wearing gloves, nobody finds him suspicious. Jesus.”

She stopped to light her third cigarette of the walk. Clarence took that as his signal to go off the path again and sniff a pile of shit left by another dog. Probably the primary reason I’ve never owned a dog is because of this colorful aspect of their personalities. Give Clarence another thirty seconds, he’d try to eat it.

I snapped my fingers. He looked up at me with that slightly confused, slightly guilty look that to me is the most defining characteristic of his species.

“Leave it,” I said, again relying on recollections of Bubba for my tone of voice.

Clarence turned his head sadly and then wiggled his butt away from it, and we all resumed walking.

It was another dull August day, humid and clammy without being particularly hot. The sun was somewhere behind slate clouds and the mercury hovered in the high seventies. The bicyclists and joggers and speed-walkers and Rollerbladers all seemed to be moving past us through a jungle of thin, transparent cobwebs.

Along this stretch of the river path, small tunnels cropped up every now and then. No more than sixty feet long and fifteen wide, they formed the bases of the footbridges that led pedestrians over from the other side of the Soldiers Field Road/Storrow Drive split. Walking through the tunnels, stooping slightly, felt like walking through a child’s fun house. I felt huge and a bit silly.

“My car was stolen,” Vanessa said.

“When?”

“Sunday night. I still can’t believe this has been only a week. You want to hear about Monday through Thursday?”

“Very much.”

“Monday night,” she said, “someone managed to slip past building security and throw the main circuit breaker in the basement. Power was off for about ten minutes. No big deal unless your alarm clock is electric and fails to go off in the morning and you end up being seventy-five minutes late for opening arguments in a fucking murder trial.” A small gasp escaped her lips, and she bit down on it and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

“Tuesday night, I come home to a series of pornographic recordings on my answering machine.”

“Guy’s voice, I assume.”

She shook her head. “No. The caller had placed the phone up to a TV playing pornographic movies. Lots of moaning and ‘Take that, bitch,’ and ‘Come in my face,’ shit like that.” She flicked her cigarette into the damp sand to the left of the path. “Normally, I guess I’d have shrugged it off, but I was starting to get a feeling of dread in my stomach, and the message total was twenty.”

“Twenty,” I said.

“Yup. Twenty different recordings of porno movies. Wednesday,” she said with a long sigh, “someone pickpockets my wallet from my bag as I eat lunch in the courtyard of the federal courthouse.” She patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “All I have in here is cash and whatever credit cards I was smart enough to leave in the drawer back home because they’d made my wallet bulge.”

Just to my left, Clarence suddenly stopped and cocked his head high and to his left.

Vanessa stopped, too weary to pull him forward, and I stopped with her.

“Any activity on the stolen credit cards before you noticed they were gone?”

She nodded. “At a hunting and fishing store in Peabody. A man-the fucking clerks remember he was a man, but they never noticed he was using a fucking woman’s credit card-purchased several lengths of rope and a buck knife.”

About 150 yards ahead of us, three teenage boys broke from a tunnel on Rollerblades, their feet slashing expertly back and forth in front of one another, bodies low, arms swinging in tandem with their feet. It looked like they were talking shit to one another, laughing, goading one another on.

“Thursday,” Vanessa said, “I got hit with the door. Had to walk back into court with an ice pack on my nose and ask for an emergency continuance until Monday.”

An ice pack, I thought, and gingerly touched my jaw. Wesley should have his own patent on the things.

“This morning,” Vanessa said, “I start receiving phone calls about mail that never arrived at its destination.”

Clarence let out a low growl, his head still cocked, body a single tensed muscle.

“What did you just say?” I looked away from Clarence and hard at Vanessa, my body beginning to tingle with the connection Angie and I had kept missing.

“I said some of my mail never reached its destination. No big deal, unto itself, but piled on top of everything else.”

We stepped to the side of the path as the Rollerbladers approached, their skates hissing off asphalt, and I kept one eye on Vanessa and one on Clarence, because he’s been known to take off without warning after anything moving faster than he can.

“Your mail,” I said, “didn’t get through.”

Clarence barked, but not at the Rollerbladers; his nose pointed up and far off, down toward the tunnel.

“No.”

“Where’d you mail it from?”

“The mailbox in front of my building.”

“Back Bay,” I said, stunned it had taken me this long to see it.

The first two kids whizzed past us, and then I saw the elbow of the third one rise. I reached for Vanessa and pulled her toward me, saw the flash of a grin on the kid’s face as he dropped the elbow and grabbed the strap of Vanessa’s bag.

The kid’s speed, the force of his pull, and the way I’d twisted Vanessa’s body awkwardly toward me combined to create a mess of bad balance and flailing limbs. When the bag was ripped from Vanessa’s shoulder, she instinctively tried to grasp it, her arm going back and twisting up as I put my foot out to trip the kid, all of this happening in less than a second before Vanessa was wrenched back forward again, slamming into me and knocking me over onto my back.

The kid’s skates left the ground and flew over my reaching fingers, and Vanessa dropped the leash as her hip slammed off the pavement and her abdomen slammed into my knee. I heard the air leave her in a burst, cut off a yelp of pain from the impact of her hip, and the kid looked back over his shoulder at me as his skates returned to earth. He laughed.

Vanessa rolled off me.

“You okay?”

“No breath,” she managed.

“Wind got knocked out of you. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

She nodded, gulping for air, and I took off after the kid.

He’d caught up with the group and they had twenty yards on me, easy, by the time I gave chase. Every ten yards I ran, they clocked an extra five. I was running full out, and I’m pretty fast in the first place, but I was losing ground steadily as they reached a straightaway, no curves, no tunnels.

I dipped my hand as I ran, scooped up a rock, and took another four steps as I zeroed in on the back of the kid with Vanessa’s bag. I threw sidearm, putting my whole body into it, my feet leaving the ground like Ripken throwing from third to first.

The rock hit the kid high on the back between the shoulder blades, and he doubled over like he’d been punched in the stomach. His gangly body canted hard to the left, and one skate left the pavement. His arms pinwheeled, with Vanessa’s bag jerking in his left hand, and then he lost it all at once. He pitched forward, with his head surging for the pavement and his hands coming around too late, the bag swinging out and away, falling to the grass to his left as he performed a triple somersault on asphalt.

His friends gave one shocked glance back over their shoulders and then accelerated. They reached a bend and disappeared just as I caught up with the acrobat.

Even with knee and elbow pads, he looked like he’d been thrown from a plane. His arms, legs, and chin were a raw, pink mess of scrapes and contusions. He rolled over on his back and I was grateful to see that he was older than I’d first guessed-twenty, at least.

I picked up Vanessa’s bag, and the kid said, “I’m bleeding all over, motherfucker.”

I spied a compact, a set of keys, and a box of Altoids on the grass, but otherwise the contents of Vanessa’s bag seemed intact. Bills in a silver money clip and credit cards bound by a rubber band sat at the bottom amid cigarettes, lighter, and makeup.

“You’re bleeding?” I said. “Oh. Whoops.”

The kid tried to sit up, then decided against it and flopped back down.

My cell phone rang.

“That would be him,” the kid said through huffing breaths.

Humid as all hell out here, and my spine turned to dry ice.

“What?”

“The guy who gave us a hundred bucks to take you off. He said he’d be calling.” The kid closed his eyes and hissed at the pain.

I pulled the cell phone from the front pocket of my jeans, looked back up at the bend where I’d left Vanessa. Fuck the kid, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.

And I broke into a run as I put the cell phone to my ear.

“Wesley.”

I heard snorts and liquid chewing close to the receiver, Wesley’s voice echoing in the background like he was in a bathroom.

“Aww, who’s a good doggie? Yeah. That’s it, boy. Good boy. Yeah. Mmm. Chow down, fella.”

“Wesley.”

“Don’t they feed you at home?” Wesley said in the background as Clarence’s greedy chewing continued.

I turned the bend, saw Vanessa getting to her feet, her back to the tunnel 150 yards beyond her, where I could see the dark shapes of a short dog and a tall man bending over him, hand below his snout.

“Wesley!” I shouted.

The man in the tunnel straightened, and Vanessa spun and looked toward the tunnel as Wesley’s voice came directly into the phone.

“Gotta love a dog whistle, Pat. We don’t hear a fucking thing, but those pooches go wild.”

“Wesley, listen to-”

“You’re never sure which thing will make a woman crack like a fucking egg, Pat. The fun lies in trying.”

He broke the connection and the man in the tunnel stepped out the far side and disappeared.

I reached Vanessa, pointed at her wild face as I passed. “Stay here. You hear me?”

She tried to catch up. “Patrick?” She grasped her hip, wincing, kept trying to run.

“Stay here!” I screamed it, could hear the echoes of desperation in my voice as I ran forward with my torso twisted back toward her.

“No. What’re you-”

“Don’t take another fucking step!” I tossed her bag so that it exploded all over the pavement in front of her and she followed the bounce and slide of her money clip. She bent by it and I turned my torso forward, willed myself to run even faster.

I slowed, though, as I neared the tunnel, felt something build in my chest, rise up my esophagus, and catch there, burning, even before I saw him.

Clarence wobbled out of the darkness toward me, his normally sad dog eyes now confused and afraid.

“Here, boy,” I said softly, and dropped to my knees, felt the liquid burning in my throat find my eyes.

He took another four steps on quaking legs and then sat back on his haunches. He stared at me through drooping eyelids. He seemed to be trying to ask me something.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Hey, guy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

I willed myself not to look away from the bewildered pain in his face, that searching question.

He lowered his head slowly and vomited a stream of pure black.

“Oh, Jesus.” It came out of me in a hoarse whisper.

I crawled over to him, and when I touched his head, I felt the fire there, the scorch of fever. He rolled over and lay on his side and panted. I turned on my side with him and he looked up at me as I caressed his trembling rib cage and sweaty, feverish brow.

“Hey,” I whispered as his eyes rolled up to whites. “Hey, you’re not alone, Clarence. Okay? You’re not alone.”

His mouth opened wide as if he were about to yawn and a racking shudder thrust its way through his body from his back paws to his burning head.

“Goddammit,” I said when he died. “Goddammit.”