Prayers For Rain

35

Christopher Dawe drove home to his wife with instructions to pack a bag and check into the Four Seasons, where I’d reach him when this was over.

“Whatever you do,” I said before he drove off, “don’t answer either your cell phone, your pager, or your home phone.”

“I don’t know if-”

I held out my hand. “Give me them.”

“What?”

“Your cell phone and your pager. Now.”

“I’m a surgeon. I-”

“I don’t care. This is your son’s life, not a stranger’s. Your phone and pager, Doctor.”

He didn’t like it, but he handed them over, and we watched him drive away.

“The rest stop’s bad,” Bubba said once I climbed in his van. “There’s no way to guess at his defenses. I like Plymouth.”

“But the place in Plymouth’s probably a lot more heavily fortified,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Predictably, though. I know where I’d put the trip wires if I was in for the long haul. The rest stop, though?” He shook his head. “I can’t deal with him if he’s improvising. It’s too risky.”

“So we go to Plymouth,” I said.

“Back to the bog,” Angie said.

“Back to the bog.”

Christopher Dawe’s cell phone rang just as we pulled off the expressway into Plymouth. I held it to my ear as Bubba’s taillights flashed red at the stop sign ahead, palmed the shift into neutral.

“You’re late, Doctor.”

“Scottie!” I said.

Silence.

I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear, shifted up to first, and turned right behind Bubba.

“Patrick,” Scott Pearse said eventually.

“I’m kind of like bronchitis, don’t you think, Scott? Every time you’re sure you’re through with me, I come back.”

“That’s a good one, Pat. Tell it to the doctor when his son’s aorta shows up in the mail. I’m sure he’ll have a good laugh.”

“I got your money, Scott. You want it?”

“You have my money.”

“Yup.”

Bubba turned off the main drag onto the access road that cut through the edge of the Myles Standish forest and would eventually lead us to the bog.

“What sort of hoops do I have to jump through for it, Pat?”

“Call me Pat one more time, Scottie, and I’ll fucking burn it.”

“Okay, Patrick. What do I need to do?”

“Give me your cell phone number.”

He gave it to me and I repeated it to Angie, who wrote it down on the pad held by a suction cup to my glove box.

“Nothing will happen tonight, Scott, so go home.”

“Wait.”

“And if you try to contact the Dawes, you’ll never see a dime of this money. We clear?”

“Yeah, but-”

I hung up.

Angie watched Bubba’s taillights turn off onto the smaller road.

“How do you know he won’t go back to Congress Street?”

“Because if Wesley’s stashed anywhere, he’s stashed here. Pearse is feeling his control slip. He’ll come back here to see his trump card, to feel that control again.”

“Wow,” she said. “You almost sound like you believe that.”

“Ain’t got much,” I said, “but I got hope.”

We drove past the clearing and down another four hundred yards, buried our cars in the trees, and walked back up the access road.

For the first time in at least ten years, Bubba wasn’t wearing his trench coat. He wore all black. Black jeans, black combat boots, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, black gloves, and a black knit hat over his head. We had, per his command, stopped at my apartment on the way out to intercept Christopher Dawe and grabbed black clothes as well, and we donned them before we left the cars behind in the trees.

As we walked back up the road, Bubba said, “Once we locate the house, I walk point. Point is very simple. You stay ten paces behind me.” He looked back at us and held up a finger. “Exactly behind me. Where I step, you step. If I blow up or trip a wire, you run back the same way you came in. You don’t fucking think about carrying me out. Clear?”

This was not a Bubba I’d ever seen before. All traces of psychosis seemed to have vanished. Along with the disappearance of the loose-cannon aspect, his voice had changed, deepened slightly, and the aura of otherness and loneliness that usually hovered around him had disappeared, given way to a total confidence and ease with his surroundings.

He was, I realized, home. He was as in his element as he ever could be. He was a warrior, and he’d been called to battle, and he knew he was born to it.

As we followed him up the road, I saw what men in Beirut must have seen-that if it came to battle, no matter who your commanding officer was, it was Bubba you’d follow, Bubba you’d listen to, Bubba you’d depend on to lead you through the fire and back to safety.

He was a born sergeant; next to him, John Wayne was a pussy.

He unslung the duffel bag from his back and brought it around under his arm. He unzipped it as he walked, pulled an M-16 out, and looked back at us.

“You sure you don’t want one of these?”

Both of us shook our heads. An M-16. I’d probably fire it once, break my shoulder.

“Pistols are fine,” I said.

“You got extra clips?”

I nodded. “Four.”

He looked at Angie. “Speed-loaders?”

She nodded. “Three.”

Angie looked at me. She swallowed. I knew how she felt. My mouth was getting kind of dry, too.

We crossed the planks and passed the pump shed.

Bubba said, “We find this house, and get inside? Anything moves, shoot it. Don’t question. If it’s not chained down, it’s not a hostage. If it’s not a hostage, it ain’t friendly. Clear?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Ange?” He looked back at her.

“Yeah. Clear.”

Bubba paused and stared at Angie, her pale face and large eyes.

“You up for this?” he asked her softly.

She nodded several times.

“Because-”

“Don’t be a sexist, Bubba. This isn’t hand-to-hand combat. All I have to do is point and shoot, and I’m a better shot than either of you guys.”

Bubba looked at me. “You, on the other hand…”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll go back home.”

He smiled. Angie smiled. I smiled. In the still of the bog and the dark of night, I had the feeling it was the last time any of us would smile for a while.

“All right,” Bubba said. “It’s all three of us, then. Just remember, the only sin in combat is hesitation. So don’t fucking hesitate.”

We stopped at the tree line and Bubba unslung the bag from his shoulder and lay it softly on the ground. He opened it and removed three square objects with head straps tied to the back and lenses protruding from the front. He handed two of them to us.

“Put ’em on.”

We did, and the world turned green. The dark bushes and trees were the color of mint, the moss was emerald, the air was a light kelly hue.

“Take your time,” Bubba said. “Get used to it.”

He removed a huge pair of infrared binoculars and raised them to his eyes, panned across the woods in quarter-inch increments.

The green felt assaultive, nauseating. My.45 felt like a hot poker against the small of my back. The drought in my mouth had worked its way down my throat, seemed to be closing off my respiratory passages. And, quite honestly, with the bulky infrared glasses attached to my face, I also felt really silly. I felt like a Power Ranger.

“Got it,” Bubba said.

“What?”

“Follow my finger.”

He raised his arm and pointed and I sighted down the tip and followed the seaweed world through bushes and brambles and around trees until I saw the windows.

There were two of them. They suddenly stared back at us from the forest floor like oblong periscopes. They were only a foot and a half tall, but seeing them appear out of the green it was nearly impossible to imagine how we’d missed them.

“No way you could have seen them in daylight,” Bubba said, “unless you caught a reflection off the panes. Everything but the glass is painted green, even the trim.”

“Well, thanks for-”

He silenced me with a raised finger and cocked his head. About thirty seconds later, I heard it, too, a car engine and tires rolling up the access road toward us. The tires squished the soft earth in the clearing to the north, and Bubba whacked our shoulders and picked up his duffel bag, walked in a crouch to our left along the tree line. We followed as the car door opened and closed, and then shoes crunched down the path to the bog embankment.

Bubba disappeared into the trees at the far edge, and we ducked back in there with him.

A green Scott Pearse stepped out onto the cross and his footsteps banged hard off the wood as he half walked, half trotted past the equipment shed and then over to our side. He seemed about to burst into the woods when he stopped on the embankment and went very still.

His head swiveled slowly in our direction, and for one long moment, he seemed to look directly into my eyes. He bent at the waist and squinted. He held out his arms as if to silence the mosquitoes and mist along the bog, the distant slapping of the fruit in the water. He closed his eyes and listened.

After what felt like a month or so, he opened his eyes and shook his head. He parted the branches in front of him and walked into the woods.

I turned my head, but Bubba wasn’t beside us anymore, and I’d never heard him move. He was about ten yards ahead, crouched, hands resting on his knees as he watched Scott Pearse make his way through the woods.

I turned my head back toward Pearse, watched him stop about ten yards before the two windows and reach down to the forest floor. He raised his arm and a bulkhead door came up with it. He bent, lowered himself, and closed the door over his head.

Bubba was suddenly back beside us again.

“We don’t know if he’s got motion detectors or trip wires he turns on from inside, but I figure we got maybe a minute. Follow me. Exactly.”

He moved out onto the embankment again like the world’s swiftest, bulkiest jungle cat, Angie followed ten steps behind him, and I followed five steps behind her.

Bubba turned sharply into the trees, and we went in behind him. He never showed a stutter-step’s worth of hesitation as he raced silently across the same terrain Scott Pearse had trod.

He reached the door in the forest floor and waved quickly at us.

We reached him and I suddenly felt the strongest desire in the world to slow down, to backtrack, to put the brakes on for a moment. This was all happening faster than I would have imagined. Blindingly fast. Too fast to breathe.

“It moves, shoot,” Bubba whispered, and flicked the M-16’s selector switch forward to full auto. “Keep your goggles on until we know there’s light inside. If there is, don’t waste time taking them off your head. Drop them down your face, let ’em hang from your neck. Ready?”

I said, “Ah…”

“One-two-three,” Bubba said.

“Jesus,” Angie said.

“No bullshit,” Bubba whispered harshly. “We’re in or out. Right now. No time.”

I took my.45 from the holster at the small of my back, thumbed off the safety. I wiped my palm on my jeans.

“In,” Angie said.

“In,” I said.

“We get separated,” Bubba said, “I’ll see you back in the world.”

He grinned and reached for the door handle.

“I’m so happy,” he whispered.

I gave Angie a quick, bewildered glance, and she tightened her hands on her.38 to quell her shakes, and Bubba threw back the door.

A white stone staircase greeted us, dropping steeply fifteen steps before it ended at a steel door.

Bubba knelt on the top of the staircase, aimed his M-16, and fired several rounds into the upper left and lower left corners of the door. The bullets hammered the steel and erupted into yellow sparks. The noise was deafening.

The windows ahead of us shattered, and I saw muzzles pointing our way. We ducked low, and Bubba jumped to the bottom of the stairs and kicked the door off its shattered hinges.

We dropped in after him as the rifles fired from the windows, and then we were through the door and facing a cement hallway about thirty yards long with several doors opening off on the right and left.

It was bathed in light, and I dropped the infrared glasses down my face, let them hang around my throat. Angie did the same, and we stood there, tense, terrified, blinking at the harsh white light.

A small woman stepped out of a doorway about ten yards up on our right. I had time to see that she was thin and brunette and pointing a.38 before Bubba depressed the trigger of his M-16 and her chest disappeared in a puff of red.

The.38 flew out of her hand and into the corridor, and she slumped down the doorway, dead before she hit the floor.

“Move,” Bubba said.

He kicked in the door closest to him, and we were met with an empty study. Bubba rolled in a canister of tear gas anyway, then shut the door behind him.

We stepped over to the doorway where the woman’s corpse sat. It was a bedroom, small and empty as well.

Bubba toed the woman’s corpse. “Recognize her?”

I shook my head, but Angie nodded. “She was the woman in the pictures with David Wetterau.”

I took another look. Her head was upside down and askew, her eyes rolled back and blank, blood splattering her chin, but Angie was right.

Bubba stepped in front of the door across from us. He kicked it in and was about to fire when I swung up into his rifle with my arm.

A pale, balding man sat in a metal chair. His left wrist was bound tightly to the arm of the chair with thick yellow rope, and a blue racquetball served as a gag in the man’s mouth. His right wrist was free, strands of the yellow rope dangling from underneath it as if he’d managed to somehow extricate his wrist before we got there. He was about my age, and his right index finger was missing. A roll of electrical tape lay at his feet, but his legs were untied for some reason.

“Wesley,” I said.

He nodded, his eyes wild and confused and terrified.

“Let’s get him out of here,” I said.

“No,” Bubba said. “This is an uncontained situation. We don’t move him until it’s contained.”

I looked back at the stairwell. Just ten yards back.

“But-”

“We’re exposed,” he said. “Don’t you question my fucking orders.”

Wesley kicked at the floor with his heels, desperate, shaking his head, begging me with his eyes to untie him and pull him out of there.

“Shit,” I said.

Bubba turned to look at the next door, up the hall a few feet and on our right.

He said, “Okay. We’re going to do this by the numbers. Patrick, I want you to-”

The door at the end of the hall opened and all three of us spun toward it. Diane Bourne seemed to levitate into the hallway with her hands raised and her feet off the ground. Scott Pearse stood behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other cocked behind her, pressing a gun to the back of her head.

“Weapons on the floor,” Pearse called, “or she dies.”

“So fucking what?” Bubba said, and settled the stock of his M-16 into his shoulder, sighted down the barrel.

Diane Bourne’s body was wracked with tremors. “Please, please, please.”

“Put your weapons on the deck!” Pearse shouted.

“Pearse,” I said, “give it up. You’re boxed in. This is over.”

“This is not a negotiation,” he yelled.

“You’re fucking A, it ain’t. This is bullshit,” Bubba said. “I’m going to shoot through her now, Pearse. Okay?”

“Wait!” Pearse’s voice sounded as shaky as Diane Bourne’s body.

“Ah, no,” Bubba said.

But then Pearse’s gun dropped from the back of Diane Bourne’s head, and Bubba paused, and Pearse’s arm swung again and was suddenly extended over Diane Bourne’s shoulder and the muzzle centered on Angie’s forehead.

“Move an inch, Miss Gennaro, and your skull disappears.”

Pearse’s voice was not even remotely shaky anymore. His gun hand remained steady as he came down the hallway toward us, his arm still wrapped around Diane Bourne’s waist, her feet lifted off the ground as he used her as a body shield.

Angie was frozen, her.38 hanging down by her side, her eyes on the hole at the end of Pearse’s pistol.

“Anyone doubt I’ll do it?”

Bubba said, “Fuck,” very softly.

“Weapons on the deck, people. Right now.”

Angie dropped hers. I dropped mine. Bubba didn’t even move. He held his bead on Pearse as Pearse closed to within twenty feet of us.

“Rogowski,” Pearse said, “relinquish your weapon.”

“Fuck no, Pearse.”

Sweat darkened the back of Bubba’s hair, but the rifle never wavered.

“Oh,” Pearse said. “Okay.”

And he fired.

I slammed Angie’s shoulder with my own, and then a hot spear of dry ice tore through my chest, just below the shoulder, and I bounced into the cement wall and landed on my knees in the middle of the hallway.

Pearse fired again, but his shot banged off the wall behind me.

Bubba’s rifle unloaded, and Diane Bourne disappeared in a haze of red, her body jerking like she’d been electrified.

Angie, on her stomach, crawled for her.38, and I felt the corridor swerve, and my back hit the floor.

Bubba spun hard into the doorjamb and dropped his M-16, grabbed his hip.

I tried to get off the floor, but I couldn’t.

Bubba’s hand shot out and grabbed Angie by the hair and yanked her into the room with Wesley Dawe. I could hear bullets clanging off the cement around me, but I couldn’t raise my head to see where they were coming from.

I turned my head to the left, tilted my eyes up.

Bubba stood in the doorway to Wesley’s room and his eyes grew as soft and sad as I’d ever seen them as he looked down at me.

And then he slammed the door closed between us.

The firing stopped. The hallway was still except for the sound of footsteps approaching.

Scott Pearse stood over me and smiled. He ejected the clip from his nine-millimeter and it dropped on the floor beside my head. He slammed another home, and racked one into the chamber. His clothes, neck, and face were saturated with Diane Bourne’s blood. He waved at me.

“You got a hole in your chest, Pat. Is that funny to you? ’Cause it’s funny to me.”

I tried to speak, but all that left my mouth was warm liquid.

“Shit,” Scott Pearse said, “don’t fucking die on me yet. I want you to see me kill your friends.”

He squatted down beside me. “They left all their weapons out here. And there’s no way out of that room.” He patted my cheek. “Man, you are fast. I was hoping you’d see your little love-bitch take a bullet to the head, but you moved so quick.”

My eyes rolled away from him, not because I’d intended them to, but because they suddenly seemed to be on ball bearings, sliding through grease, beyond my control.

Scott Pearse turned my chin and slapped my temple, and the ball bearings jerked my eyes back to face him.

“Don’t die yet, dude. I need to know where my money is.”

I shook my head slightly. I felt a warm, jagged prickling on the left side of my chest, just below the collarbone. It was very hot, actually, and growing hotter. It was starting to burn.

“You like a joke, right, Pat?” He patted my cheek again. “You’ll love this. You’re going to die here, and even as you do, I want you to understand something-you never, even now, saw the whole board. That, I find hilarious.” He chuckled. “The money’s in your car, which I’m sure is parked close by. I’ll find it.”

“No,” I managed, though I’m not sure any sound came out.

“Yes,” he said. “You were fun for a while there, Pat, but now I’m bored. Okay. Gotta go kill your bitch and that big freak. Be right back.”

He stood and turned toward the door, and I stretched out a numb hand along the floor as the pain blew up in my chest.

Scott Pearse laughed. “The guns are a good five feet past your legs, Pat. But you keep trying.”

I gnashed my teeth together and screamed as I raised my head and back off the floor and managed to sit up, and the blood poured out of the hole in my chest and saturated my waist.

Pearse cocked his head at me, turned his gun in my direction. “Way to take it for the team, Pat. Bravo.”

I stared at him, willed him to pull the trigger.

“Okay,” he said softly, and pulled back on the hammer. “We’ll end you now.”

The door behind him flung open, and Pearse turned, got off one round that blew a chunk out of Bubba’s thigh.

But Bubba never stopped. He covered Pearse’s gun hand with his own and clamped his other arm around Pearse’s chest from behind.

Pearse let loose a guttural scream and tried to twist his body out of Bubba’s grasp, but Bubba squeezed tighter, and Pearse began to gasp, began to make high-pitched keening yelps, as he saw his gun hand move against his will up toward the side of his head.

He tried to twist his head away, but Bubba reared back and butted his massive forehead into the back of Pearse’s head so hard it sounded like a pool ball exploding.

Pearse’s eyes spun from the shock of impact.

“No,” he yelped. “No, no, no, no.”

Bubba grunted with the effort, blood pouring down his leg as Angie scrambled out into the hallway on all fours and grabbed her.38.

She rose to one knee, pulled back on the hammer, and pointed it at Pearse’s chest.

“Don’t you fucking do it, Ange!” Bubba screamed.

Angie froze, finger curled around the trigger.

“You’re mine, Scott,” Bubba whispered hoarsely in Pearse’s ear. “You are all mine, sweetie.”

“Please,” Pearse begged. “Wait! No! Don’t! Wait! Please!”

Bubba grunted again and slammed the muzzle of Pearse’s gun into Pearse’s temple, shoved his finger over Pearse’s and around the trigger.

“No!”

Bubba said, “Feeling depressed, isolated, possibly suicidal?”

“Don’t!” Pearse batted at Bubba’s head with his free hand.

“Well, call a hot line, but don’t call me, Pearse, ’cause I don’t fucking care.”

Bubba shoved his knee into Pearse’s spine, lifted his feet off the floor.

“Please!” Pearse kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Bubba said.

“Oh, God!”

“Hey, asshole? Say hi to the fucking dog for me, will you?” Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pearse’s brains out the other side of his head.