Prayers for Rain (30 page)

Vanessa sipped coffee at the bar that begins at the pinball machine and ends at the basketball hoop. She’d just come from the shower, and her hair was still damp. She wore a black silk shirt over ripped jeans and her feet were bare and she kneaded a sterling silver necklace between her fingers as she swiveled slowly from side to side on the bar stool.

“The post office deals with complaints first by telling you mail occasionally gets lost. As if we didn’t know. When I mentioned that eleven letters were sent to eleven different destinations and none arrived, they recommended I contact the Postal Inspector’s office, though they doubted it would do much good. The Postal Inspector’s office said they’d send an investigator by to interview my
neighbors
, see if they had something to do with it. I said, ‘I put the mail in the box myself.’ To which they responded that if I provided them with a list of the destinations, they’d send someone to interview people on the
receiving
end.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” Angie said.

Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “It was pure Kafka. When I said, ‘Why don’t you investigate the carrier or pickup driver on that route?’ they said, ‘Once we’ve ascertained that no one else was involved…’ I go, ‘So what you’re telling me is that when mail gets lost the presumption of guilt is laid on everyone
but
the person entrusted with delivering it.’”

“Tell ’em what they said to that,” Bubba said as he came into the kitchen and bar area from somewhere in the back.

She smiled at him, then looked back at us. “They said, ‘So will you be giving us a list of your neighbors, ma’am?’”

Bubba went to the fridge, opened the freezer, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. As he did, I noticed that the hair above the nape of his neck was damp.

“Fucking post office,” Vanessa said as she finished her coffee. “And they wonder why everyone’s switching to e-mail, Federal Express, and paying bills by computer.”

“Only thirty-three cents for a stamp, though,” Angie said.

Vanessa turned on the bar stool as Bubba approached with the bottle of vodka.

“Should be glasses by your knee,” he said to her.

Vanessa dropped her eyes and rummaged under the bar.

Bubba watched the way her damp hair fell across her neck as she did so, the vodka bottle motionless and aloft in his hand. Then he looked over at me. Then he looked at the bar. He placed the bottle on top as Vanessa placed four shot glasses on the wood.

I looked at Angie. She was watching them with her lips slightly parted and a growing confusion in her eyes.

“I’m thinking I’m just going to cap this asshole,” Bubba said as Vanessa poured the chilled liquor into the glasses.

“What?” I said.

“No,” Vanessa said. “We talked about that.”

“We did?” Bubba threw back a shot and placed the glass on the bar again, and Vanessa refilled it.

“Yes,” Vanessa said slowly. “If I have knowledge that a crime is to be committed, I have a sworn duty to notify the police.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bubba threw back a second shot. “Forgot that.”

“Be a good boy,” Vanessa said.

“Uh, okay.”

Angie narrowed her eyes at me. I resisted the urge to jump off my bar stool and run screaming from the room.

“You guys want to stay for dinner?” Vanessa asked.

Angie stood up awkwardly and knocked her bag to the floor. “No, no. We’re…We already ate. So…”

I stood. “So, yeah, we’ll be, ah…”

“Going?” Vanessa said.

“Right.” Angie picked up her bag. “Going. That’s us.”

“You didn’t touch your drinks,” Bubba said.

“You have ’em,” I said as Angie crossed the floor in five or six steps, reached the door.

“Cool.” Bubba threw back another shot.

“You have any limes?” Vanessa asked him. “I’m in a tequila mood.”

“I could scare some up.”

I reached the door, looked back over my shoulder at the two of them. Bubba’s huge frame was tilted as he leaned his shoulder into the fridge, and Vanessa’s lithe body seemed to curl toward him like smoke from the top of the bar stool.

“See ya,” she called, her eyes on Bubba.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “See ya.” And then I got the hell out of there.

Angie started laughing as soon as we left Bubba’s building. It was a helpless giggle, a stoner’s laugh almost, that bent her body and led her out through the hole in the fence and into the playground beyond.

She got control of it as she lay against the jungle gym, looked up at the thick lead glass of Bubba’s windows. She wiped her eyes and sighed through a few remaining chuckles.

“Dear, oh, dear.
Your
attorney and Bubba. My God. I’ve seen it all.”

I leaned back on the metal rungs beside her. “She’s not
my
anything.”

“Not anymore,” she said, “that’s for sure. After him, she’ll be ruined for normal men.”

“He’s borderline monosyllabic, Ange.”

“True. But the man’s hung, Patrick.” She grinned at me. “I mean, hung.”

“Firsthand info?”

She laughed. “You wish.”

“So, how do you know?”

“Men can tell a woman’s cup size if she’s wearing three sweaters and an overcoat. You think we’re any different?”

“Ah,” I said, still back at the bar area, Vanessa doing those slow swivels on the stool, Bubba watching the way the hair fell across her neck.

“Bubba and Vanessa,” Angie said, “sitting in a tree.”

“Jesus. Quit it, will ya?”

She leaned her head back on the jungle gym, turned it my way. “Jealous?”

“No.”

“Not a little bit?”

“Not even a smidgen.”

“Liar.”

I turned my head fully to the right and our noses almost touched. We didn’t say anything for a while, just lay back on the jungle gym with our cheeks pressed to the rungs, the night softening against our skin, eyes locked. Far off behind Angie, a harvest moon rose in the dark sky.

“Do you hate my hair?” Angie whispered.

“No. It’s just…”

“Short?” She smiled.

“Yeah. I don’t love you because of your hair, though.”

She shifted slightly, turned her shoulder into the holes between rungs.

“Why do you love me?”

I chuckled. “You want me to count the ways?”

She didn’t say anything, just watched me.

“I love you, Ange, because…I don’t know. Because I always have. Because you make me laugh. A lot. Because…”

“What?”

I turned my shoulder in between the rungs as she had,
placed my palm on her hip. “Because since you left I have these dreams that you’re sleeping beside me. And I wake up and I can still smell you, and I’m still half dreaming, but I don’t know it, so I reach for you. I reach across to your pillow, and you’re not there. And I gotta lie there at five in the morning, with the birds waking up outside and you not there and your smell just fading away. It fades and there’s—” I cleared my throat. “There’s nothing but me left there. And white sheets. White sheets and those fucking birds and it hurts, and all I can do is close my eyes and lie there and wish I didn’t feel like dying.”

Her face was very still, but her eyes had picked up a sheen like a thin film of glass. “That’s not fair.” She dabbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“Nothing’s fair,” I said. “You say we don’t
work
?”

She held up a hand.

I said, “What does work, Ange?”

Her chin dropped to her chest and she stayed that way a long time before she whispered, “Nothing.”

“I know,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.

Her chuckle was wet, and she wiped her face again. “I hate five in the morning, too, Patrick.” She raised her head and smiled through trembling lips. “I hate it so, so much.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That guy I was sleeping with?”

“Trey,” I said.

“You make it sound like a dirty word.”

“What about him?”

“I could have sex with him, but I didn’t want him holding me afterward. You know? The way I used to turn my back and you’d slide one arm under my neck and the other over my chest—I couldn’t stand anyone else doing that.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say but “Good.”

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’m high maintenance,” she said. “I’m moody. Got the bad temper. Hate to do laundry. Don’t like to cook.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”

“Hey,” she said. “You’re no walk in the park, pal.”

“But I cook,” I said.

She reached out, ran her palm over the permanent scruff—thicker than shadow, thinner than beard—that I’ve kept on my face for three years to hide the scars Gerry Glynn gave me with a straight razor.

She ran her thumb lazily back and forth through the bristles, gently fingered the ruined, rubbery flesh underneath. Not the biggest scars, necessarily, but they’re on my face, and I’m vain.

“Can I shave this off tonight?” she said.

“You once said it made me look hot.”

She smiled. “It does, but it’s just not you.”

I considered it. Three years with protective facial hair. Three years hiding the damage delivered on the worst night of my life. Three years keeping my flaws and shame from the world.

“You want to give me a shave?” I said eventually.

She leaned in and kissed me. “Among other things.”

Angie woke me at five in the morning, warm palms on my newly shaven cheeks, her tongue opening my mouth as she kicked the tangle of sheets off us and covered as much of my body as possible with her own.

“You hear the birds?” she said.

“No,” I managed.

“Me, either.”

After, we lay with the dawn gradually lighting the room, my body spooned behind hers, and I said, “He knows we’re watching.”

“Scott Pearse,” she said. “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. A week straight of tailing him, he never so much as stops the truck for a coffee break. If he’s going through anyone’s mail, he isn’t doing it there.” She turned in my arms, a smooth slithering of her flesh that felt like lightning in my blood. “He’s smart. He’ll wait us out.”

I lifted a stray hair off her eyelash.

“Yours?” she asked.

“Mine.” I flicked it off the bed. “He said time was an issue. That’s why he met me on the roof and tried to either buy me off or back me off—because he’s pressed for time.”

“Right,” Angie said. “But we can assume that was when he thought he had a deal with the Dawes. And now that the deal’s off, why—”

“Who says it’s off?”

“Christopher Dawe. Christ, he destroyed their daughter. They’re not going to pay him after that. He’s got no more leverage.”

“But even Christopher Dawe figured he’d come back at them. Go after Carrie, try to destroy her like he did Karen.”

“But where’s the profit in that?”

“It’s not entirely about profit,” I said. “I think Christopher Dawe was right about that. I think it’s a matter of principle to Pearse. That money he was extorting? He thinks of it as his already. He’s not going to let it go.”

Angie ran the backs of her fingers over my abdomen and chest. “But how would he get to Carrie Dawe? I doubt that if she were in therapy, she was using the same therapist as her daughter. So Pearse can’t go the Diane Bourne route. The Dawes don’t live in the city, so he can’t fuck with their mail.”

I propped myself up on my elbow. “Pearse’s standard MO is to infiltrate through one psychiatrist and one postal area. Okay. But that’s just what’s on hand, the buttons he can press easily. His father was a professional mind fucker. The son was Special Forces.”

“So?”

“So I think he’s always prepared. And more than that, I think he’s always ready to improvise. And he always, always works off private information. That’s the foundation of everything he is and everything he does. He knew enough to pay the right people to get information on us. He found out I cared about Bubba and used that. He found out you were untouchable because of your grandfather, and when he couldn’t get to me through Bubba, he went after Vanessa. He’s limited, but he’s seriously smart.”

“Right. And what he knows about the Dawes, he learned from Wesley.”

“Sure, but that’s old info. Even if Wesley is still around, bankrolling Pearse, who knows—
his
information is ten years dated.”

“True.”

“Pearse would need somebody who knew the Dawes well and knew them now. A close associate of the doctor’s. The wife’s best friend. Or a—”

I looked down at her and she raised herself up on both elbows and we said it together:

“A housekeeper.”

Siobhan Mulrooney walked into the parking lot of the commuter rail in Weston at six that night, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder, head down, steps quick. As she passed Angie’s Honda, she saw me sitting on the hood and picked up her pace.

“Hey, Siobhan.” I rubbed my chin between my thumb and forefinger. “What do you think about the new look?”

She looked back over her shoulder at me, paused. “Didn’t recognize ya, Mr. Kenzie.” She pointed at the light pink scars along the jawline. “You’ve scars.”

“I do.” I slid off the hood. “Guy gave them to me a couple of years ago.”

“Whatever for?” Her shoulders jerked slightly as I approached, as if each side of her body wanted to run in the opposite direction.

“I had figured out he wasn’t who he appeared to be. It made him angry.”

“He tried to kill you, yeah?”

“Yeah. Tried to kill her, too.” I pointed behind Siobhan at Angie standing by the stairwell that led up to the station.

Siobhan looked back at her, then at me. “Nasty man, then, I’d say.”

“Where you from, Siobhan?”

“Ireland, of course.”

“North, right?”

She nodded.

“Home of the Troubles,” I said, throwing a brogue around the last word.

She dropped her head as I reached her. “You don’t make light of it, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Lost some family, did you?”

She looked up at me and her small eyes were smaller still and dark with anger. “I did, yeah. Generations of them.”

I smiled. “Me, too. Great-great-great-grandfather, I think it was, on my father’s side was executed in Donegal in 1798, when the French left us holding the bag. Now my maternal grandfather—me Ma’s Da,” I said with a wink, “they found him kneecapped in his barn with his throat cut and his tongue cut in half.”

“He was a traitor, then, was he?” Siobhan’s small face was clenched into a defiant fist.

“A stoolie,” I said. “Yeah. Either that or the Orange did him, wanted it to look that way. You know how it is in a war like that, sometimes people die, you can never be sure why until you meet them on the other side. Other times, people die for no real reason, because the blood’s up, because the more chaos, the easier it is to get away with it. I hear that since the cease-fire, it’s really nuts over there. Everyone running around, taking off heads in revenge hits. Do you know, Siobhan, that more people were killed in South Africa in the two years
after
apartheid than died during it? Same thing with Yugoslavia after the Communists. I mean, fascism sucks, but it keeps people in line. The moment it’s over, all that bad blood people have been holding in? Forget about it. People get whacked for things they forgot they did.”

“Trying to tell me something, Mr. Kenzie?”

I shook my head. “Just running off at the mouth, Siobhan. So, tell me, why’d you leave the Old Sod?”

She cocked her head. “You like poverty, Mr. Kenzie? You like losing well over half your earnings to the government? You like dreary weather and endless cold?”

“Can’t say I do.” I shrugged. “It’s just a lot of times, people leave the North and can’t ever go back because
there are too many people waiting to fuck them up when they step off the boat. You?”

“Have anyone waiting back there to hurt me?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” she said, her eyes on the ground, shaking her head as if by doing so that would make it come true. “No. Not me.”

“Siobhan, could you tell me when Pearse is going to move against the Dawes? And maybe how he plans to go about doing it?”

She stepped back from me slowly, a weird half smile playing on her tiny face. “Ah, no, Mr. Kenzie. Have yourself a nice day, won’t ya?”

“You didn’t say, ‘Who’s Pearse?’” I said.

“Who’s Pearse?” she said. “There now—ya happy?” She turned and walked toward the stairs, her overnight bag swinging on her shoulder.

Angie stepped aside as Siobhan reached the dark stairwell and began climbing it.

I waited until she reached the landing midway up.

“How’s your green card status, Siobhan?”

She stopped, froze there with her back to us.

“Did you somehow manage an extended work visa? Because I hear INS is really cracking down on the Irish. Particularly in this city. Kinda sucks, too, because who’s going to paint the houses once they ship them back home?”

She cleared her throat, back still to us. “You wouldn’t.”

“We would,” Angie said.

“You can’t.”

“We can,” I said. “Help us out here, Siobhan.”

She half turned, looked down the staircase at me. “Or what?”

“Or I’ll call a friend of mine in INS, Siobhan, and you’ll celebrate Labor Day in fucking Belfast.”