Prayers for Rain (35 page)

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.”

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.