Prayers For Rain

33

Last night, as soon as the police had passed him on the waterfront, Nelson was supposed to turn around and go back, park a few blocks down on Congress Street and watch Pearse’s building, see if he went anywhere after the police finished up and left.

As long as he did his job, I didn’t mind paying Nelson a grand a week. It was a small price for knowledge of Pearse’s movements.

But it was way too much to pay for a fuck-up.

“I did watch him,” Nelson said when I caught up with him. “And I’m watching him now, too. Dude, I’m on this guy like white on rice.”

“Tell me what happened last night.”

“The cops drove him over to the Meridian Hotel. He got out, went inside. The cops leave. He comes back out and hails a cab, takes it back to the building.”

“He went back to his loft?”

“Fuck no. But he went in the building. I couldn’t tell exactly where.”

“What, no lights went on? No-”

“Fucking place is a city block, man. You got the Sleeper Street side, the Congress side, and two alleys. How’m I supposed to cover all that?”

“But he went in there and stayed.”

“Yeah. Until he left for work this morning. Then he comes back around a half hour ago, looking pissed. He goes in the building, been there since.”

“He managed to kill someone last night.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sorry, Nelson, but there must be a way out of there that we don’t know about.”

“Where’d the vic live?”

“She was staying in Canton. They pulled her out of the Mystic this afternoon.”

“Bullshit,” he said again, this time twice as hard. “Patrick, the cops finished up with him last night, it was, like, almost four in the morning. He went to work at seven. How’s he gonna slip out of the building without me seeing, somehow get all the way down to fucking Canton, ace someone, transport the body up to the North fucking Shore, and then, then he’s-what?-he’s gonna come back, slip by me again and get ready for work? Whistle while he’s fucking shaving and shit? How’s he going to do all that?”

“It’s not possible,” I said.

“You’re fucking A, it ain’t. He mighta done a lotta bad shit, Patrick, but in the last ten hours, he ain’t done nothing at all.”

I hung up, put the heels of my hands over my eyes.

“What?” Angie asked.

I told her.

“And Nelson’s sure?” she said when I finished.

I nodded.

“So if Pearse didn’t kill her, who did?”

I resisted the urge to bang my swelling head against the desktop. “I don’t know.”

“Carrie?”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Carrie. Why?”

“Maybe she figured out that Siobhan was working for Pearse.”

“How? We didn’t tell her.”

“But she’s a smart woman. Maybe she…” She held up her hands, then dropped them. “Shit. I don’t know.”

I shook my head. “I can’t see it. Carrie goes over to Canton, whacks Siobhan, drives her to the Mystic, and dumps her body in? How’s she going to lift the body? The woman weighs less than you do. Hell, why would she even think to drive clear across to the other side of the city and dump the body?”

“Maybe she didn’t kill her in Canton. Maybe she drew her out to a meeting place.”

“I’ll buy that someone drew her out. Carrie just doesn’t fit. I’m not saying she couldn’t kill-she could. But it’s the dumping of the body that bothers me. It’s too cool. It’s too methodical.”

Angie leaned back in her chair, lifted the phone off the cradle, and hit speed dial.

“Hey,” she said into the phone, “I don’t have Patriots tickets to trade, but can you answer me one question?”

She listened as Devin said something back.

“No, nothing like that. The woman they just pulled out of the Mystic, what was the cause of death?” She nodded. “To the back of the head? Okay. Why’d she come to the surface so fast?” She nodded again, several times. “Thanks. Huh? I’ll ask Patrick on that one and get back to you.” She smiled, looked at me. “Yes, Dev, we’re back together.” She put her hand over the phone, said to me, “He wants to know for how long.”

“At least till prom,” I said.

“At least till prom. Aren’t I lucky?” she told him. “Talk to you soon.”

She hung up. “Siobhan was found with a rope dangling from her waist. The operating theory is she was tied to something heavy and dropped to the bottom, where something ate through the rope and part of her hip. She wasn’t supposed to come up.”

I banged my chair back as I stood and went to the window, looked down at the avenue.

“Whatever his move is, he’s going to make it soon.”

“Yet we’re agreed he couldn’t have killed her.”

“But he’s behind it,” I said. “Fucker’s behind everything.”

We left the belfry and went across to my apartment, entered the living room to a ringing phone. Just as I had that early evening on City Hall Plaza, I knew it was him before I picked up the receiver.

“That was pretty funny,” he said, “getting me suspended from my job. Ha, Patrick! Ha ha!”

“Doesn’t feel good, does it?”

“Getting suspended?”

“Knowing someone’s fucking with you and might not let up for a while.”

“I can appreciate the irony, just so you know. Someday, I’m sure, I’ll look back on this and just laugh and laugh and laugh.”

“Or maybe you won’t.”

“Whatever,” he said calmly. “Look, let’s say we’re square now. Okay? You go your way, I’ll go mine.”

“Sure, Scott,” I said. “Okay.”

For a minute he didn’t say anything.

“You still there?” I asked.

“Yeah. Honestly, Patrick, I’m surprised. Are you serious, or are you fucking with me?”

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m losing money here, and you can’t get to the Dawes’ money anymore, so I’d say it’s a draw.”

“If that was the case, why’d you shoot up my apartment, buddy? Why’d you steal my truck?”

“To make sure I drove the point home.”

He chuckled. “You did. You certainly did. Outstanding, sir. Outstanding. Let me ask you-am I going to blow up the next time I start my car?” He laughed.

I laughed with him. “Why would you think that, Scott?”

“Well,” he said happily, “you went after my home, then my job, I figure the next logical step would have been my car.”

“It won’t blow up when you start it, Scott.”

“No?”

“No. But, then, I’m pretty sure it’ll never start again.”

His laugh boomed. “You fucked up my car?”

“Hate to break the news to you, but yeah.”

“Oh, Jesus!” His laughter grew louder for about a minute, then decreased until it was a barely connected string of soft chuckles. “Sugar in the gas tank, acid in the engine?” he asked. “That sort of thing?”

“Sugar, yeah. Acid, no.”

“Then what was it, huh?” I could hear his frozen smile. “I figure you for the inventive type.”

“Chocolate syrup,” I said, “and about a pound of unconverted rice.”

He roared with glee. “In the engine?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you run it for a while, you wacky bastard?”

“It was running when I left it,” I said. “Didn’t sound real good, but it was running.”

“Whoo!” he shouted. “So, so, Patrick, you’re saying you totaled out an engine that took me years to rebuild. And…and…you destroyed my gas tank, the filters, I mean, everything really but the interior.”

“Yeah, Scott.”

“I could…” He giggled. “I could just kill you about now, buddy. I mean, with my own bare hands.”

“I kind of figured. Scott?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not done with the Dawes, are you?”

“Fucked up my car,” he said softly.

“Are you?”

“I’m going to go now, Patrick.”

“What’s the fallback plan?” I asked.

“I’m willing to forgive the suspension and even the destruction to my loft, but the car’s going to take some time. I’ll let you know what I decide.”

“What do you have on them?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“On the Dawes,” I said. “What do you have on them, Scott?”

“I thought we agreed to leave each other be, Patrick. That’s how I was hoping to end this call-knowing you and I will never see each other again.”

“Under the stipulation that you leave the Dawes alone.”

“Oh. Right.”

“But you can’t do that, can you, Scott?”

He let out a light, airy sigh. “You sound like you might be a half-decent chess player, Patrick. Am I right?”

“Nope. I just never got the hang of the game.”

“Why not?”

“A friend of mine says I’m good with general tactics, but I suffer from an inability to see the whole board.”

“Huh,” Scott Pearse said. “That would have been my guess, too.”

And he hung up.

I looked at Angie as I put the receiver back in the cradle.

“Patrick,” she said with a slow shake of her head.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t answer the phone for a while.”

We decided to leave Nelson on watch at Scott Pearse’s place, and Angie and I drove over to the Dawes’, watched their house from a half block down.

We sat on it into the night, well after their interior lights had gone out and their exterior security lights had gone on.

Back in my apartment, I lay back on the bed to wait for Angie to come out of the shower, and tried to push back the tug of sleep, the ache and muscle-tightening of too many days and nights spent sitting in cars or up on roofs, the niggle of dread in the back of my skull that told me I’d overlooked something, that Pearse was thinking a few moves ahead of me.

My eyelids drooped closed and I snapped them open, heard the shower running, imagined Angie’s body under the spray. I decided to get up off the bed. Forget imagining what I could experience instead.

But my body didn’t move, and my eyes drooped again, and the bed seemed to gently undulate under me as if I lay on a raft, floated on a glassy lake.

I never heard the shower shut off. I never heard Angie settle into bed beside me and turn off the light.

It’s this way,” my son says, and takes my hand, tugs at me as we walk out of the city. Clarence trots beside us, chugging, panting softly. It’s just before sunrise, and the city is a deep, metallic blue. We step off a curb, my son’s hand in mine, and the world turns red and fills with mist.

We are in the cranberry bog, and for a moment-aware that I’m dreaming-I know that it’s impossible to step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, but then I think, It’s a dream, and these things happen in dreams. You don’t have a son, yet he’s here, tugging your hand, and Clarence is dead, yet he’s not.

So I go with it. The morning fog is dense and white, and Clarence barks from somewhere ahead of us, lost to the fog as my son and I step off the soft embankment and onto the wooden cross. Our footsteps echo off the planks as we walk through the thick white, and I can see the outline of the equipment shed gradually take on definition as each step leads us toward it.

Clarence barks again, but we’ve lost him in the fog.

My son says, “It should be loud.”

“What?”

“It’s big,” he says. “Four plus two plus eight equals fourteen.”

“It does.”

Our steps should be bringing us closer to the equipment shed, but they don’t. It sits twenty yards away in the mist, and we walk quickly, yet it remains in the distance.

“Fourteen is heavy,” my son says. “It’s loud. You’d hear it. Especially out here.”

“Yeah.”

“You’d hear it. So why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

My son hands me a map book. It’s open to this place, a dot of a cranberry bog surrounded by forest on all sides except the one I’d driven up through.

I drop the map into the fog. I understand something, but then I forget immediately what it is.

My son says, “I like dental floss. I like the feel of it when you slide it between your teeth.”

“That’s good,” I tell him as I feel a rumble on the planks ahead of us. It’s moving fast through the fog, approaching. “You’ll have fine teeth.”

“He can’t talk with his tongue cut out,” he says.

“No,” I agree. “That would be hard.”

The rumbling grows louder. The shed is swallowed by the white fog. I can’t see the planks under my feet. I can’t see my feet.

“She said ‘they.’”

“Who?”

He shakes his head at me. “Not ‘him,’ but ‘they.’”

“Right. Sure.”

“Mom’s not in the shed, is she?”

“No. Mom’s too smart for that.”

I squint at the fog as it engulfs us. I want to see what’s rumbling.

“Fourteen,” my son says, and when I look back down at him, Scott Pearse’s head sits atop his small body. He leers up at me in the mist. “Fourteen should be awfully loud, you dumb shit.”

The rumble is close now, almost upon me, and I squint into the fog and see a dark shape as it vaults airborne, arms outstretched, streaking through the cotton-candy fog toward me.

“I’m smarter than you,” the Scott Pearse/my son thing says.

And a snarling face bursts through the fog at a hundred miles an hour-snarling and smiling and gasping, teeth bared.

It’s Karen Nichols’s face, and then it’s Angie’s attached to Vanessa Moore’s naked body, and then it’s Siobhan with dead skin and dead eyes, and finally it’s Clarence, and he hits me in the chest with all four paws and knocks me onto my back, and I should land on the planks of wood, but they’re gone, and I fall into the fog, start to suffocate in it.

I sat up in bed.

“Go back to sleep,” Angie mumbled, her face pressed into the pillow.

“Pearse didn’t drive to the cranberry bog,” I said.

“He didn’t drive,” she said into the pillow. “’Kay.”

“He walked,” I said. “From his house.”

“Still dreaming,” she said.

“No. I’m up now.”

She raised her head slightly off the pillow, looked up at me through blurry eyes. “Can it wait till morning?”

“Sure.”

She plopped back to the pillow, closed her eyes.

“He has a house,” I said softly to the night, “in Plymouth.”