Prayers for Rain (18 page)

“Sure.”

“She’s rattled.”

“The good doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Too rattled?” the calm voice asked.

“Definitely.”

“She’ll need a speaking to?”

“She may need more. She’s the weak link here.”

“The weak link. Uh-huh.”

There was a long pause. I could hear Miles breathing on his end, static and hiss on the other.

“You there?” Miles asked.

“I find it boring.”

“Which?”

“Working that way.”

“We may not have time for your way. Look, we—”

“Not over the phone.”

“Fine. The usual, then.”

“The usual. Don’t worry so much.”

“I’m not worried. I just want this dealt with faster than your usual inclinations allow.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m serious.”

“I recognize that,” the calm voice said, and then he broke the connection.

Miles hung up, immediately dialed a third number.

A woman picked up a phone on the fourth ring, her voice thick and sluggish. “Yeah.”

“It’s me,” Miles said.

“Uh-huh.”

“’Member that time we were supposed to pick something up at Karen’s?”

“What?”

“The notes. Remember?”

“Hey, it was your deal.”

“He’s pissed.”

“So? It was
your
deal.”

“That’s not the way he sees it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he could go on another of his warpaths. Be careful.”

“Aww, Jesus,” the woman said. “You…you fucking kidding me? Jesus, Miles!”

“Calm down.”

“No! Okay? Jesus! He owns us, Miles. He owns us.”

“He owns everyone,” Miles said. “Just…”

“What? Just what, Miles? Huh?”

“I dunno. Watch your back.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. Shit.” She hung up.

Miles broke the connection and we sat in the van and watched his house, waited for him to pop his head out and take us wherever it was he intended to go.

“That woman sound like Dr. Bourne to you?”

Angie shook her head. “No. Definitely younger.”

I nodded.

Bubba said, “So this guy in the house, he did something heinous?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

Bubba reached under his trench coat, pulled out a .22 and screwed on a silencer. “So, okay. Let’s go.”

“What?”

He looked at me. “Let’s just kick in the door and shoot him.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “You said he did something heinous. So, okay, let’s shoot him. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Bubba,” I said, and placed my hand over his so he lowered the gun, “we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. We need this guy to lead us to whoever he’s working with.”

Bubba’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open and he stared at the van wall like a child whose birthday balloon just popped in front of his face.

“Man,” he said to Angie, “why’s he bring me along if I can’t shoot someone?”

Angie put a hand on his neck. “There, there, fella. All good things come to those who wait.”

Bubba shook his head. “You know what comes to those who wait?”

“What?”

“More waiting.” He frowned. “And still no one gets
shot.” He pulled a bottle of vodka from his trench coat, took a long pull, and shook his massive head. “Don’t seem fair sometimes.”

Poor Bubba. Always showing up for the party in the wrong clothes.

Miles Lovell left his house shortly after sundown as the sky saturated itself in tomato red and the smell of low tide rode the breeze inland.

We let him get a few blocks away before we turned out onto the beach road and picked him back up again near the gas tanks on that industrial-refuse stretch of 228. Traffic was much lighter now, and what there was of it headed toward the beach, not away from it, so we hung a quarter mile back, waiting for the light to leave the sky.

The red only deepened, though, and plumes of deep blue feathered up around it. Angie rode with Bubba in the van and I rode ahead of them in the Porsche as Lovell led us back through Hingham and onto Route 3 again, heading farther south.

It wasn’t a long ride. A few exits later, he pulled off by Plymouth Rock, and then, a mile later, turned down several smaller dirt roads, each getting dustier and less developed as we hung way back and hoped we didn’t lose him in any switchbacks or small lanes shrouded by thick vegatation and low tree limbs.

I had my windows rolled down and the radio off, and I could hear him occasionally, the crunch of his tires on rutted road up ahead, a strain of the jazz on his stereo flowing through his sunroof. We were deep in the Myles Standish forest, as far as I could tell, the pine
and white maple and larch towering over us under the red sky, and I smelled the cranberries long before I saw them.

It was a sweet, sharp smell, hot with a secondary odor of fermenting fruit laid bare to a day’s sun. White vapors rose and drifted through the trees as the night cooled the bog, and I pulled over in the last clearing before the bog itself, watching Lovell’s taillights wind down the final small lane that led to the soft banks.

Bubba’s van pulled in beside the Porsche, and the three of us exited our vehicles and carefully shut our doors behind us so that the only noises they made were soft clicks as the locks caught. Fifty yards through thin trees we heard Miles Lovell’s door open, followed by the snap of it shutting. The sounds were hard and clear out here, traveling over the misty bogs and through the thin tree line as if they were occurring beside us.

We walked down the damp, dark lane that led to the bog, and through the thin trees we caught glimpses of the sea of cranberry, green at this stage of their growth, the knobby surfaces of the fruit bobbing in the moisture and white vapor, lapping gently against themselves.

Footsteps echoed off wood and a crow cawed in the deepening night air and the treetops rustled in a soft humid kiss of wind. We reached the edge of the tree line by the rear bumper of the BMW, and I peeked my head around the final tree trunk.

The cranberry bog lay wide and undulating before me. The white vapor hung like cold breath an inch over the crop, and a cross of dark plank wood divided the entire bog into four long rectangles. Miles Lovell walked up one of the shorter planks. In the center of the cross was a small wood pump shed, and Lovell opened its door, walked inside, and shut the door behind him.

I crept out along the shoreline, used Lovell’s car to block me, I hoped, from the view of anyone on the far side of the bog, and looked at the shed. It was barely big enough to qualify as a Porta Potti, and there was one win
dow on the right side facing the long plank that stretched north across the bog. A muslin curtain hung down on the other side of the glass, and as I watched, the panes turned muted orange with light and Lovell’s muddy silhouette passed by and vanished on the other side.

Save for the car, there was no cover out here—just soggy shore and marshy ground to my right that buzzed gently with bees, mosquitoes, and crickets rousing themselves for the night shift. I crept back to the tree line. Angie, Bubba, and I worked our way through the thin trunks to the last group fronting the bog. From there we could see the front and left side of the hut and a portion of the cross that stretched over to the opposite shore and disappeared in a black thicket of trees.

“Shit,” I said. “Wish I’d brought the binoculars.”

Bubba sighed, pulled a pair from his trench coat, and handed them to me. Bubba and his trench coat—sometimes you’d swear he carried a Kmart in the thing.

“You’re like Harpo Marx with that coat. I ever tell you that?”

“Seven, maybe eight hundred times.”

“Oh.” My cool quotient was definitely slipping.

I trained the binoculars on the shed, racked the focus, and got nothing for my efforts but a clear view of wood. I doubted there was a window on the far side, and the one I’d seen on the right wall had been curtained, so it appeared for the moment that all there was to do was wait for the mystery man to appear for his meeting with Lovell and hope the mosquitoes or bees didn’t come out in force. Of course, if they did, Bubba probably had a can of repellent in his trench coat, maybe a bug light.

Around us, the sky bled free of red and gradually painted itself dark blue, and the green cranberries brightened against the fresh backdrop while the mist changed from white to mossy gray and the trees turned black.

“You think the guy Miles is meeting could’ve shown up first?” I asked Angie after a while.

She looked out at the hut. “Anything’s possible. He would have had to approach from another way, though. Lovell made the only tracks over there, and we’re parked to the north.”

I panned the binoculars to the southern tip of the cross where it disappeared in tall stalks of withered yellow vegetation rising out of a gaseous marsh teeming with mosquitoes. That definitely seemed the least appealing and most difficult direction from which to approach, unless you really dug malarial infections.

Behind me, Bubba snorted and kicked at the ground, snapped a few thick twigs off a tree.

I turned the lenses on the opposite shore, the eastern tip of the cross. There, the shore looked firmer and the trees were thick and dry and tall. So thick, in fact, that no matter how much I adjusted and readjusted the focus, I could see nothing but black trunks and green moss going back fifty yards.

“If he’s in there, he came from the other side.” I pointed, then shrugged. “I guess we get a glimpse of him on the way out. You got a camera?”

Angie nodded, pulled from her bag a small Pentax with built-in auto lenses and flash adjustments for night shooting.

I smiled. “One of my Christmas presents.”

“Christmas ’97.” She chuckled. “The only one I can safely show in public.”

I caught her eyes, and she held my gaze for a moment in which I felt a stab of sudden, overpowering yearning. Then she dropped her eyes, a flush of heat rose up my face, and I went back to the binoculars.

“You guys do this sort of shit every day, don’t you?” Bubba said after about another ten minutes. He took another pull from his vodka bottle and burped.

“Oh, sometimes we get car chases,” Angie said.

“What a godawful boring fucking life.” Bubba fidgeted, then absently punched a tree trunk.

I heard a muffled thump from the shed, and a line of lower shingles shook. Miles Lovell, stuck in a pump shed, kicking the walls, as bored as Bubba.

A crow, maybe the same one we’d heard earlier, cawed as it glided low over the bog, swept gracefully around the front of the hut, skimmed its beak over the water, then swooped up and away into the dark trees.

Bubba yawned. “I’m gonna leave.”

“Okay,” Angie said.

His hand swept the trees around him. “I mean, this is great and all, but there’s pro wrestling on tonight.”

“Of course,” Angie said.

“Ugly Bob Brutal versus Sweet Sammy Studbar.”

“Where I’d be,” Angie said, “but, alas, I have a job.”

“I’ll tape it for you,” Bubba promised.

Angie smiled. “Would ya? Gosh, that’d be just super.”

The sarcasm completely eluded Bubba. His spirits picked up and he rubbed his hands together. “Sure. Look, I got a whole bunch of old ones on tape. Sometime we could—”

“Sssh,” Angie said suddenly, and put a finger to her lips.

I turned my head back toward the hut, heard a door close quietly from the far side. I raised the binoculars and stared through them as a man exited the far side of the shed and walked along the plankwood toward the stand of thick trees.

I could only see the back of him. He had blond hair and stood maybe six-two. He was slim and moved with a casual fluid ease, one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other swaying languidly at his side. He wore light gray trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. His head was tilted back slightly, and the sound of his soft whistling carried back over the mist and bogs to us.

“Sounds like ‘Camp Town Ladies,’” Bubba said.

“Nah,” Angie said. “That’s not it.”

“Then what is it, you know so much?”

“I don’t know. I just know what it isn’t.”

“Oh, sure,” Bubba said.

The man had almost reached the middle of the planks and I waited for him to turn and look back so I could see his face. The whole point of coming here had been to see who Miles was meeting, and if the blond guy had a car in those trees, he’d be long gone even if we gave chase right now.

I picked a rock up off the ground and arced it out through the trees and over the bog. It dropped into the watery mass of bobbing fruit about six feet to the blond guy’s left and made a distinct plunking sound that we could hear thirty yards away.

The man didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t break stride. He kept whistling.

“I’m telling you,” Bubba said, picking up his own rock, “it’s ‘Camp Town Ladies.’”

Bubba threw his rock, a hefty two-pounder that only reached halfway across the bog but made twice as much noise. Instead of a plunk, we got a heavy splash, and still the blond man showed no visible reaction.

He’d reached the end of the planks, and I made a decision. If he knew someone was following him, he might vanish, but he was going to vanish anyway, and I needed to see his face.

I screamed, “Hey!” and my voice ripped the mist and sullen bog air, sent birds shredding upward through the trees.

The man stopped at the tree line. His back tensed. His shoulder turned ever so slightly to the left. Then he raised his arm so that his hand was held up at a ninety-degree angle from his body, as if he were a traffic cop halting the flow, or a party guest waving goodbye as he left the party.

He’d known we were there. And he wanted us to know it.

He lowered his hand and disappeared into the dark tree line.

I bolted from our stand of thin trees and out onto the
soggy shore, with Angie and Bubba right behind me. I’d been loud enough that Miles Lovell would have heard my call across the bog, so our cover was blown in either case. Now our only hope was to get to Lovell while he was alone on a bog, before
he
could bolt, and scare the truth out of him.

As our heels hammered the plank wood and the sharp scent of the bog turned bitter in my nostrils, Bubba said, “Come on. Back me up, man. It was ‘Camp Town,’ right?”

“It was ‘We’re the Boys of Chorus,’” I said.

“What?”

I picked up my pace and the hut canted from side to side as we bounded toward it; the planks felt like they’d give way underfoot.

“From the Looney Tunes cartoon,” I said.

“Oh, yeah!” Bubba said, and then he sang it: “Oh, we’re the boys of chorus. We hope you like our show. We know you’re rooting for us. But now we have to go-oh-oh!”

The words, as they boomed from Bubba’s mouth over the still, silent bog, rode up my spine like insects.

As I reached the hut, I grasped the doorknob.

Angie said, “Patrick!”

I looked back at her and froze in her glare. I couldn’t believe what I’d almost done—run up to a closed door with a potentially armed stranger waiting on the other side and been about to throw open the door like I was going home.

Angie’s mouth remained open, her head cocked and her eyes blazing, stunned, I think, by my almost criminal mental lapse.

I shook my head at my own stupidity and stepped back from the door as Angie pulled her .38 and stood to the left, pointed it at the center of the door. Bubba had already pulled his gun—a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip—and he stood to the right, pointing it at the door with all the trepidation of a geography teacher pointing out Burma on a dated classroom map.

He said, “Uh, we’re ready now, genius.”

I pulled my Colt Commander, stepped to the left of the doorjamb, and rapped the wood with my knuckles. “Miles, open up!”

Nothing.

I rapped again. “Hey, Miles, it’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private detective. I just want to talk.

I heard the sound of something hitting cheap wood inside, followed by the rattle of tools or some metal in a corner.

I knocked a last time. “Miles, we’re going to come in. Okay?”

Something banged up and down against the floorboards inside.

I flattened my back against the wall and reached around to the knob, looked at Angie and Bubba. They both nodded. A bullfrog croaked from somewhere out on the bog. The breeze died and the trees were still and dark.

I turned the knob and threw open the door and Angie said, “Jesus Christ!”

Bubba said, “Wow,” with a touch of admiration, if not awe, in his voice, and lowered his shotgun.

Angie lowered her .38, and I stepped in front of the doorway and looked in the shed. It took me a second or two to realize what I was looking at because there was so much to digest and yet nothing you really wanted to.

Miles Lovell sat tied to the motor of a septic pump in the center of the shed. He’d been fastened to the motor by a thick electrical cord wrapped tight around his waist and tied off behind his back.

The gag in his mouth had darkened with blood that seeped past the corners of his mouth and down his chin.

His arms and legs had been left untied, and his heels kicked the floorboards as he writhed against the metal block.

His arms, however, hung immobile by his sides, and the man who’d done this to him hadn’t been worried Miles would use them to untie himself because Miles no longer had possession of his own hands.

They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards. The blond man had applied tourniquets over both stumps and left the ax embedded in the wood between the hands.