Prayers For Rain

34

“We’re driving to Plymouth,” Angie said as we turned onto Route 3 at the Braintree split, “because your son spoke to you in a dream?”

“Well, he’s not my son. I mean, in the dream he is, but in the dream Clarence is alive, and we both know Clarence is dead, and besides, you can’t step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, and even if you could-”

“Enough.” She held up a hand. “I get it. So this kid who’s your son but not your son, he babbled on about four plus two plus eight equaling fourteen and-”

“He didn’t babble,” I said.

“-this told you what again?”

“Four-two-eight,” I said. “The Shelby engine.”

“Oh, dear Jesus!” she shrieked. “We’re back to the friggin’ car? It’s a car, Patrick. Do you get that part? It can’t kiss you, cook for you, tuck you in, or hold your hand.”

“Yes, Sister Angela the Grounded. I understand that. A four-two-eight engine was the most powerful engine of its time. It could blow anything else off the road, and-”

“I don’t see what-”

“-and it makes one hell of a lot of noise when you turn it over. You think this Porsche rumbles? The four-two-eight sounds like a bomb by comparison.”

She banged the heels of her palms off my dashboard. “So?”

“So,” I said, “did you hear anything in the cranberry bog that night that sounded like an engine? A really goddamned big engine? Come on. I looked at the map before we followed Lovell. There was one way in-ours. The nearest access road on Pearse’s side was two full miles through woods.”

“So he walked it.”

“In the dark?”

“Sure.”

“Why?” I said. “He couldn’t have guessed we’d be tailing Lovell at that point. Why not just be parked in the clearing where we were? And even if he was suspicious, there was an access road four hundred feet to the east. So why’d he go north?”

“Because he liked the walk? I don’t know.”

“Because he lives there.”

She propped her bare feet up on the dash, slapped a palm over her forehead and eyes. “This is the dumbest hunch you’ve ever had.”

“Sure,” I said. “Bitch. That helps.”

“And you’ve had some monumentally dumb hunches.”

“Would you prefer wine or beer with your crow?”

She buried her head between her knees. “If you’re wrong, screw the crow, you’ll be eating shit till the millennium.”

“Thank God it’s approaching fast,” I said.

A map took up most of the east wall in the Plymouth Tax Assessor’s Office. The clerk behind the counter, far from being the dweeby, bespectacled, balding type one would expect to meet in a tax assessor’s office, was tall, well built, blond, and judging by Angie’s furtive glances at him, something of a male babe.

Himbos, I swear. There ought to be a law that keeps them from ever leaving the beach.

It took me a few minutes to zero in on the bog we’d followed Lovell to. Plymouth is absolutely rotten with cranberry bogs. Bad news if for some reason you don’t dig the smell of cranberries. Good news if you cultivate them.

By the time I found the correct bog, I’d counted four separate times I’d caught Himbo the Tax Stud checking out the places where the frays of Angie’s cutoff jeans exposed more than merely the backs of her upper thighs.

“Prick,” I said under my breath.

“What?” Angie said.

“I said, ‘Look.’” I pointed at the map. Due north of the center of the bog, about a quarter of a mile, I estimated, sat something marked PARCEL #865.

Angie turned from the map, spoke to Himbo. “We’re interested in purchasing parcel eight-sixty-five. Could you tell us who owns it?”

Himbo gave her a brilliant smile of the whitest teeth I’d seen on a man this side of David Hasselhoff. Caps, I decided. Bet the bastard wears caps.

“Sure.” His fingers zipped over his computer keyboard. “That was eight-sixty-five. Correct?”

“You got it,” Angie said.

I peered up at the parcel. Nothing around it. No eight-six-six or eight-six-four. Nothing for at least twenty acres, maybe more.

“Spooky Land,” Himbo said softly, his eyes on the computer screen.

“What’s that?”

He looked up, startled to realize, I think, that he’d spoken aloud. “Oh, well…” He gave us an embarrassed smile. “When we were kids, we used to call that area Spooky Land. We’d dare each other to walk through it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.” He looked down at his keyboard. “See, no one’s supposed to know…”

“But…?” Angie leaned into the counter.

Himbo shrugged. “Hey, it’s been over thirty years. Heck, I wasn’t even born then.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thirty years.”

He leaned into the counter, lowered his voice, and his eyes glinted like a born gossip about to dish some dirt. “Back in the fifties, the army supposedly kept a kinda research facility there. Nothing big, my parents said, just a few stories tall, but real hush-hush.”

“What kind of research?”

“People.” He stifled a nervous laugh with his fist. “Supposedly mental patients and the retarded. See, that’s what scared us as kids-you know, that the ghosts running around Spooky Land were the ghosts of lunatics.” He held up his hands, took one step back. “It could all have been a ghost story used by our parents to keep us away from the bog.”

Angie gave him her most lascivious smile. “But you know different, don’t you?”

His ivory skin flushed. “Well, I did do some checking once.”

“And?”

“And there was a structure on that land until 1964, when it was either razed or burned, and the land was owned by the government until ’95, when it sold at auction.”

“To?” I asked.

He looked at the computer screen. “Bourne is the owner of record of parcel eight-sixty-five. Diane Bourne.”

The Plymouth Library had an aerial map of the entire town. It was relatively current, too, the photo taken just a year ago on a cloudless day. We spread the map across a large table in the reference room, used a magnifying glass we’d bummed from the librarian, and after about ten minutes, we found the cranberry bog, then moved a tenth of an inch to the right across the map.

“There’s nothing there,” Angie said.

I moved the glass in micro-increments over the blurry patch of green and brown. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a roof.

I raised the magnifying glass slightly, considered the whole area. “We got the right bog?”

Angie’s finger appeared under the magnifying glass. “Yeah. There’s the access road. That looks like the equipment shed. There’s Myles Standish forest. That’s it. So much for your psychic dream.”

“Diane Bourne owns this land,” I said. “You telling me that means nothing?”

“I’m telling you,” she said, “that there’s no house in there.”

“There’s something,” I said. “There has to be.”

The bugs were angry. It was another hot, humid day, the heat steaming the surface of the bog, the cranberries smelling sharp and spoiled in the heat. The sun beat down like the flat of a razor blade, and the mosquitoes smelled our flesh and went nuts.

Angie slapped the backs of her legs and neck so much that pretty soon I couldn’t tell which red welts were from the bloodsuckers and which were from her hands.

For a while I tried the Zen trick of ignoring them, willing my body to seem unattractive. After a few hundred bites or so, though, I thought, fuck Zen. Confucius never lived in ninety-eight percent humidity on a ninety-two-degree day. If he had, he’d have hacked off a few heads and told the emperor he was fresh out of peppy bromides until someone outfitted the palace with AC.

We crouched along the tree line on the eastern side of the bog and peered through binoculars. If Scott Pearse of the Special Forces and Panamanian brothel massacre did hide out back in these woods, I was pretty sure there’d be trip wires, defenses I couldn’t see, Bouncing Betties waiting to make any possibility of Viagra in my future a moot point.

But all I could see from here were woods, parched brambles grown brittle with heat, withered birches and knotty pines, crumbling moss the texture of asbestos. It was one ugly plot of land, fetid and irritable in the heat.

I scoped everything within range of the binoculars Bubba had picked up from a navy SEAL, and even with all that power and clarity, I didn’t see a house.

Angie slapped another mosquito. “I’m dying here.”

“You see anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Focus on the ground.”

“Why?”

“It could be underground.”

She slapped her flesh again. “Fine.”

Another five minutes, and we’d lost blood from every pore and still found nothing but forest floor, pine needles, squirrels, and moss.

“It’s in there,” I said as we walked back across the bogs.

“I’m not staking it out,” she said.

“Not asking you to.”

We climbed in the Porsche, and I took one long look across the bog at the stand of trees.

“That’s where he hides,” I said.

“Then I’d say he’s hiding pretty well,” Angie said.

I started the car, dropped my elbow over the wheel, stared at the trees.

“He knows me.”

“What?”

I glanced at the shed in the center of the cross.

“Pearse. He knows me. He’s got my number.”

“And you have his,” Angie said.

“Not as well,” I admitted.

The stand of trees seemed to whisper. They seemed to groan.

Stay away, they said. Stay away.

“He knew I’d find this place eventually. Maybe not as quickly as I did, but eventually.”

“So?”

“So, he’s gotta move. He’s gotta move fast. Whatever he’s planning, it’s either about to happen, or it’s already in motion.”

She reached out and her palm found my lower back.

“Patrick, don’t let him in your head. He wants that.”

I stared at the trees, then the shed, then the bloody, misting bog.

“Too late,” I said.

“This is a shitty Xerox,” Bubba said. He looked down at the copy we’d made of the cranberry bog grid from the aerial map.

“It’s the best we could do.”

He shook his head. “Intel like this, my headstone would be in Beirut.”

“How come you don’t talk about that?” Vanessa sat on the bar stool behind him.

“Which?” he said absently, his eyes on the Xerox.

“Beirut.”

He turned his huge head, smiled at her. “Lights went out, things went boom. I lost my sense of smell for three years. Now I’ve talked about it.”

She backhanded his chest with her fingers. “Bastard.”

He chuckled, looked back at the Xerox. “That’s wrong.”

“What?”

He lifted the magnifying glass we’d brought, held it over the grid. “That.”

Angie and I looked over his shoulder through the glass. All I could see was a clump of green, a bush photographed from two thousand feet.

“It’s a bush,” I said.

“Ah, duh,” Bubba said. “Look again.”

We looked.

“What?” Angie said.

“It’s too oval,” he said. “Look at the top. It’s smooth. It’s like the top of this magnifying glass.”

“So?” I offered.

“So bushes don’t grow like that, ya fucking slug head. They’re bushes, you know? That makes them, ah, bushy.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. We both shook our heads.

Bubba thumped his index finger down on the bush in question. “See? It’s curved perfectly, like the top of my fingernail. That’s not nature. That’s fucking man, dude.” He dropped the magnifying glass. “You want my opinion, it’s a satellite dish.”

“A satellite dish.”

He nodded, walked to the fridge. “Yup.”

“For what purpose? To call in air strikes?”

He pulled a bottle of Finlandia from the freezer. “Doubtful. I’m guessing so’s they can watch TV.”

“Who?”

“The people living under that forest, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said.

He nudged Vanessa’s shoulder with the vodka bottle. “And you thought he was smarter than me.”

“Not smarter,” Vanessa said. “More articulate.”

Bubba took a swig of vodka, then belched. “Articulatedness is overrated.”

Vanessa smiled. “You do make that case, baby. Trust me.”

“She calls me ‘baby.’” Bubba took another shot from the bottle, winked at me.

“You said this used to be some kind of army nuthouse? My guess is there’s still a basement under those woods. A big one.”

The phone by his fridge rang and he picked it up, cradled it between his ear and shoulder, and said nothing. After about a minute, he hung it back up.

“Nelson lost Pearse.”

“What?”

He nodded.

“Where?” I said.

“Rowes Wharf,” he said. “That hotel there? Pearse walks in, stands around on the pier. Nelson stays inside, you know, hanging back, being cool. Pearse waits till the last second, jumps on the airport ferry.”

“So why didn’t Nelson drive out to the airport, meet him on the other side?”

“He tried.” Bubba tapped his watch. “It’s five o’clock on a Friday, man. You ever try the tunnel then? Nelson gets over to Eastie, it’s five-forty-five. The ferry docked at five-twenty. Your man is gone.”

Angie buried her face in her hands, shook her head. “You were right, Patrick.”

“How?”

“Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it now.”

Fifteen minutes later, after I’d called Carrie Dawe, we stood by Bubba’s door as he carried a black duffel bag across the floor to us and dropped it by our feet.

Vanessa, so tiny in comparison to the mountain that was Bubba, stepped up close to him and put her hands on his chest.

“Is this where I’m supposed to say, ‘Be careful’?”

He jerked a thumb back at us. “I dunno. Ask them.”

She looked out from under his arm at us.

We both nodded.

“Be careful,” she said.

Bubba pulled a.38 from his pocket, handed it to her. “The safety’s off. Anyone comes through that door, shoot ’em. Like a bunch of times.”

She looked up at the greasepaint on his forehead and under his eyelids, the smatterings on his cheekbones.

“Can I get a kiss?”

“In front of them?” Bubba shook his head.

Angie whacked my arm. “We’re looking at the door.”

We turned to the door, stared at the metal, the four locks, the reinforced steel bar.

Even now, I don’t know if they kissed or not.

Christopher Dawe was where his wife had told us he’d be.

He backed his Bentley out of the Brimmer Street garage and we blocked him in from the front with Bubba’s van and from the back with my Porsche.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said as he rolled down his window and I approached.

“There’s a gym bag in your trunk,” I said. “How much is in it?”

“Go to hell.” His lower lip quivered.

“Doctor,” I said and leaned my arm on the hood, looked down at him, “your wife told us you received a phone call from Pearse. How much is in the bag?”

“Step back from the car.”

“Doctor,” I said, “he’ll kill you. Wherever it is you think you’re going, whatever it is you think you’re walking into, you won’t walk back out.”

“I will,” he said, and his lower lip quivered even more and a fragmentation found his eyes.

“What does he have on you?” I said. “Doctor? Please. Help me end this.”

He stared up at me, trying for defiance, but losing the battle. He clamped his teeth down on his lower lip, and his narrow face seemed to turn concave, and then tears rolled from his eyes and his shoulders shook.

“I can’t…I can’t…” His shoulders jerked up and down, up and down, like he was riding whitewater rapids and had lost his oar. He sucked in a high-pitched breath. “I can’t take another second of this.” His mouth formed a plaintive O and his cheeks turned to rubber, formed riverbeds for the tears.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to. Give me the weight, Doctor. I’ll carry it.”

He closed his eyes tight and shook his head repeatedly and the tears stained his suit like white rain.

I knelt by the door. “Doctor,” I said softly, “she’s watching.”

“Who?” It came out strangled, but loud.

“Karen,” I said. “I believe that. Look in my face.”

His head turned tightly, as if pushed to its left, and he opened his bleary eyes, looked into my own.

“She’s watching. I want to do right by her.”

“You barely knew her.”

I held his eyes. “I barely know anyone.”

His eyes widened, then immediately closed again, and he tightened them to slits, the tears sprouting out hot and barren.

“Wesley,” he said.

“What about him? Doctor? What about him?”

He slapped the seat console several times. He slapped the dashboard. He slapped the wheel. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and removed a plastic bag. It was wrapped up tight so that it was the shape of a cigar when he pulled it out, but then he held it aloft, and the bag unfurled, and I saw what was trapped inside and I felt the hissing of the night’s heat on the back of my skull.

A finger.

“It’s his,” Christopher Dawe said. “Wesley’s. He sent it to me this afternoon. He said…he said…he said unless I delivered the money to a rest stop on Route Three, he’d send me a testicle next.”

“Which rest stop?”

“Just before the Marshfield exit, heading south.”

I glanced at the bag. “How do you know it’s your son’s?”

He screamed, “He’s my son!”

I lowered my head for a moment, swallowed. “Yes, sir, but how are you sure?”

He shoved the bag in my face. “See? See the scar over the knuckle?”

I looked. It was faint but unmistakable. It perforated the lines over the knuckle like a small asterisk.

“See it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the imprint of a Phillips-head screw. Wesley fell in my workshop when he was young. He embedded the screw head into his knuckle, shattered the bone.” He hit my face with the bag. “My son’s finger, Mr. Kenzie!”

I didn’t lean back from the slap of the bag. I held his wild eyes, willed mine to be calm, flat.

After a while, he removed the bag, rolled it back up very carefully, and placed it back inside his suit pocket. He sniffed, wiped at the wetness on his face. He stared out the windshield at Bubba’s van.

“I want to die,” he said.

“That’s what he wants you to feel,” I said.

“Then he’s succeeded.”

“Why not call in the police?” I said, and he began to violently shake his head. “Doctor? Why not? You’re willing to come clean on what you did with Naomi when she was a baby. We know who’s behind this now. We can nail him.”

“My son,” he said, still shaking his head.

“Could already be dead,” I said.

“He’s all I have. If I lose him because I called the police, I will die, Mr. Kenzie. Nothing will hold me back.”

The first drops of rain found my head as I crouched by the car door and looked in at Christopher Dawe. It wasn’t a refreshing rain, though. It was warm as sweat and oily with humidity. It felt dirty in my hair.

“Let me stop him,” I said. “Give me the bag in the trunk, and I’ll bring your son home alive.”

He leaned one arm over the driver’s wheel, turned his head to me. “Why should I trust you with five hundred thousand dollars?”

“Five hundred thousand?” I said. “That’s all he asked for?”

He nodded. “It’s all I could lay my hands on with such short notice.”

“Doesn’t that tell you something?” I asked. “The short notice, his willingness to settle for far less than he originally asked? He’s in a rush, Doctor. He’s burning his bridges and cutting his losses. You go to that rest stop, you’ll never see your house, your office, the inside of this car, again. And Wesley will die, too.”

He dropped his head back into the seat, stared up at the ceiling.

The rain fell harder, but not in drops so much as strips, sheer ropes of warm water that bled down the inside of my shirt.

“Trust me,” I said.

“Why?” His eyes remained on the ceiling.

“Because…” I wiped the rain from my eyes.

He turned his head. “Because why, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Because you’ve paid for your sins,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

I blinked at the rain and nodded. “You’ve paid, Doctor. You did a terrible thing, but then she fell through the ice, and first your son and now Pearse have tortured you for ten years. I don’t know if that’s enough justice for God, but it’s enough for me. You’ve done your time. You’ve had your hell.”

He groaned. He ground the back of his head into the seat rest. He watched the rain cascade down his windshield.

“It’s never enough. It’s never going to end. The pain.”

“No,” I said. “But he will. Pearse will.”

“What?”

“End, Doctor.”

He stared at me for a long time.

Then he nodded. He opened his glove box and pressed a button and the trunk popped open.

“Take the bag,” he said. “Pay the debt. Do whatever you have to do. But bring my son home, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

I started to rise and he put a hand on my arm.

I bent back into the window.

“I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“Karen,” he said.

“In what way?”

“She wasn’t weak. She was good.”

“Yeah, she was.”

“That might be why she died.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Maybe this is how God punishes the bad,” he said.

“How’s that, Doctor?”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “He lets us live.”