Prayers For Rain

31

“He keeps files on everyone,” Siobhan said. “He has a file on me, one on you, Mr. Kenzie, and one on you as well, Miss Gennaro.”

“What are in the files?” Angie asked.

“Your daily routines. Your weaknesses. Oh,” she waved her hand at the smoke from her cigarette, “there’s plenty else. Whatever biographical information he can find.” She pointed the cigarette at Angie. “He was so happy when he found out about the death of your husband. He thought he had you.”

“Had me?”

“The means to break you, Miss Gennaro. The means to break you. Everyone has something they can’t face, don’t they. Then he discovered you have some powerful relatives, yeah?”

Angie nodded.

“That was not a day you’d have wanted to be around Scott Pearse, you can be certain.”

“My heart bleeds for him,” I said. “Let me ask you-why’d you speak to me that first time I came to the Dawes’ house?”

“To throw you off the scent, Mr. Kenzie.”

“You sent me after Cody Falk.”

She nodded

“What, did Pearse think I’d kill him and be done with the case?”

“It seemed a reasonable possibility, don’t you think?” She looked down at her coffee cup.

“Is Diane Bourne his only source for psych files?” I asked.

Siobhan shook her head. “He’s got a man in the records department at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Can you guess how many patients McLean services in a year, Mr. Kenzie?”

McLean was one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the state. It handled both voluntary and involuntary committals, had locked and unlocked wards, treated everything from narcotics and alcohol dependency to chronic fatigue syndrome to paranoid disassociative schizophrenia with violent tendencies. McLean had over three hundred beds and an average of three thousand admissions a year.

Siobhan leaned back in the booth and ran a weary hand through her close-cropped hair. We’d left the commuter station in Weston and driven straight into rush hour, pulled out of it in Waltham and stopped at an IHOP on Main Street. At five-thirty in the evening, the IHOP sported only a few patrons, and after we ordered a pot of regular coffee and a pot of decaf, the surly waitress was happy to ignore us and leave us to our privacy.

“How does Pearse enlist people?” Angie asked.

Siobhan gave us an acrid smile. “He’s very magnetic, isn’t he?”

Angie shrugged. “Never met the man up close.”

“Take it on faith, then,” Siobhan said. “The man looks straight through to your soul.”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

“He befriends you,” Siobhan said. “Then he beds you. He learns your weaknesses-whatever those things are you can’t face. Then he owns you. And you do what he asks, or he destroys you.”

“Why Karen?” I said. “I mean, I know he was trying to teach the Dawes a lesson, but even for Pearse that strikes me as severe.”

Siobhan lifted her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. “You don’t see it yet?”

We shook our heads.

“I’m beginning to lose respect for the both of you, I am.”

“Gee,” I said. “That hurts.”

“Access, Mr. Kenzie. It’s all about access.”

“We know, Siobhan. How do you think we came around to you?”

She shook her head. “I’m limited-a snatch of conversation here, a glimpse of a bank statement there. Scott despises limits.”

“So,” Angie said and lit a cigarette, “Scott’s after half the Dawes’ fortune…” She saw something in Siobhan’s face that halted her in midsentence. “No. That wouldn’t be good enough, would it, Siobhan? He wants it all.”

Siobhan’s nod was barely perceptible.

“So he destroys Karen because she’s the heir.”

Another tiny nod.

Angie took a drag off her cigarette, considered it. “But, wait, impersonating Wesley Dawe would only get him so far. Even if the Dawes die and the circumstances don’t seem suspicious, they’re not leaving their fortune to a son they haven’t seen in ten years. And even if-even if-they did, Pearse’s impersonation of Wesley is limited. It’s not going to pass muster with estate lawyers.”

Siobhan watched her carefully.

“But,” Angie said, going really slowly now, “if he destroys Christopher Dawe, he’ll still gain nothing.”

Siobhan used Angie’s matches to light her own cigarette.

“Unless,” Angie said, “he’s gained access to…Carrie Dawe.”

The name fell from her mouth and seemed to drop on the table between us as heavily as a plate.

“That’s it,” Angie said. “Isn’t it? He and Carrie are in on it together.”

Siobhan flicked her ash into the ashtray. “No. You were so close there for a moment, Miss Gennaro.”

“Then…?”

“She knows him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Siobhan said. “They’ve been lovers for eighteen months. She has no idea he’s the same man who destroyed Karen and wants to destroy her husband.”

“Shit,” I said. “We had the picture of him and she wasn’t home.”

Angie kicked the floorboard of the booth with her heel. “We should have gone to the damn country club with it.”

Siobhan’s tiny eyes had grown large. “You have a picture of him?”

I nodded. “Several.”

“Oh, he won’t like that. He won’t like that at all.”

I shivered and wagged my fingers at her. “Oooh.”

She frowned. “You have no idea what his rage is like, Mr. Kenzie.”

I leaned into the table. “Let me tell you something, Siobhan. I don’t give a shit about his rage. I don’t give a shit how magnetic he is. I don’t give a shit if he can look into your soul and my soul and has God’s phone number on speed dial. He’s a psycho? Yes. He’s a Special Forces bad-ass who can do spin kicks that can rip your head off your neck? Good for him. He destroyed a woman who never wanted more out of life than to be happy and drive a fucking Camry. He turned a guy into a vegetable just for fun. He cut off another guy’s hands and tongue. And he poisoned a dog who I happened to have liked. A lot. You want to see rage?”

Siobhan had pressed her shoulders and head as far back as possible into the red imitation leather behind her. She glanced nervously at Angie.

Angie smiled. “It takes a lot, but once he gets revved up, honey?” She shook her head. “Pack up the kids and get out of town, because Main Street’s going to explode.”

Siobhan glanced back in my direction. “He’s smarter than you,” she whispered.

I shook my head. “He’s had the advantage of access. Now I do, too. I’m in his life now,” I said. “I’m in it up until the very end.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re…” She dropped her eyes, continued to shake her head.

“No idea of what?” Angie asked.

She raised her eyes and her head stopped moving. “What you’re truly up against, what you really walked into.”

“So tell us.”

“Ah, thank you, no.” She placed her cigarettes in her purse. “I’ve given you all I care to. I trust you won’t call me to the attention of your INS friend. And I wish you both the best, though I don’t think it’ll help.”

She stood, slid the bag strap over her shoulder.

“Why did Pearse have to be so merciless with Karen?” I asked.

She looked down at me. “I just told you. She was the only heir.”

“I understand that. But why not just have her meet with an accident? Why destroy her piece by piece?”

“That’s his method.”

“That’s not method,” I said. “That’s abhorrence. Why did he hate her so bad?”

She held out her arms, seemingly exasperated. “He didn’t. He barely knew her until Miles introduced them three months before she died.”

“So why do all that to her?”

Her hands clapped her outer thigh. “I told you-it’s his way.”

“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.

“One minute,” Angie yelled over the roar. “Let’s go.”

Nelson looked back over his shoulder at the glittering mass of brass shells. “Who loaded the mags?”

“Bubba.”

He nodded. “They’re clean, then.”

We boogied across the roof and down the dark fire escape. Nelson tossed me the rifle and hopped into his Camaro, tore off out of the alley without a word.

We climbed in the Jeep, and I could hear distant sirens ring up Congress from the piers down the other end of the waterfront.

I spun out of the alley and banged a right on Congress, crossed over the harbor and into the city proper. I took a hard right at the yellow light on Atlantic Avenue, slowed as I cut into the left lane, and took the reverse curve, headed south. I felt my heart return to a normal rate as I reached the expressway.

I picked up the cell phone Bubba had given me as I descended the on ramp, pressed redial, then send.

Scott Pearse’s “What?” sounded hoarse, and in the background, I could hear sirens bleating into abrupt silence as they reached his building.

“Here’s how I see it, Scott. First-this is a clone phone I’m using. Triangulate the signal all you want, it won’t mean shit. Second-you finger me for redecorating your loft, I finger you for extortion of the Dawes. Clear so far?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Terrif. Just so you know, Scott, that was a warm-up. Care to know what we have in store for you tomorrow?”

“Do tell,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “You just wait and see. Okay?”

“You can’t do this. Not to me. Not to me!” His voice rose over the hard knocking I could hear at his front door. “You can’t fucking do this to me!”

“I’ve already started, Scott. Know what time it is?”

“What?”

“It’s look-over-your-shoulder time, Scottie. Have a nice night.”

The police were kicking in the door behind him when I hung up.