Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“You bet,” I said. “Come on back and fag-bash me. Use the chair.”

I peered through the rain at the windows on the other side of the street.

“And she picked up the check,” he said, his soft monotone like a whisper in a dark room. “She picked up the check, wanted to blow you, looks like six or seven million bucks-fake tits, true, but nice fake tits, and hey, no one’s perfect-and you still say no. Hats off to you, buddy. You’re a stronger man than me.”

A man with a baseball cap on his head and an umbrella raised above him walked through the mist toward me, a cellular pressed to his ear, his strides loose and confident.

“Me,” the voice said, “I’d figure her for a screamer. Lots of ‘Oh, Gods’ and ‘Harder, harders.’”

I said nothing. The man with the baseball cap was still too far away for me to see his face, but he was getting closer.

“Can I be frank with you, Pat? A piece of ass like that comes along so seldom that if I were in your place-and I’m not, I know that, but if I were-I’d just feel compelled to go back with her to that apartment on Exeter, and I gotta be honest with you, Pat, I’d hump her till the blood ran down her thighs.”

I felt cold moisture that didn’t come from the rain seep down behind my ear.

“Really?” I said.

The man with the baseball cap was close enough for me to see his mouth, and his lips moved as he approached.

The guy on the other end of the line was silent, but somewhere on his end, I could hear a truck grind its gears, the patter of rain off a car hood.

“…and I can’t do that, Melvin, if you’ve got half my shit tied up offshore.” The man in the baseball cap passed me, and I could see he was at least twice the age of the guy from the patio.

I stood, looked as far up and down the street as I could.

“Pat,” the guy on the phone said.

“Yeah?”

“Your life is about to get…” He paused and I could hear him breathing.

“My life’s about to get what?” I said.

He smacked his lips. “Interesting.”

And he hung up.

I swung my body over the wrought-iron fence that separated the patio from the sidewalk, and the rain found my head and chest as I stood on the sidewalk for a while with people walking around me and occasionally jostling a shoulder. Eventually, I realized standing there did no good. The guy could be anywhere. He could have called from the next county. The truck that had ground its gears in the background hadn’t been in my immediate vicinity or I would have heard it on my end.

But he’d been close enough to know when Vanessa left and to call within a minute of her abrupt departure.

So, no, he wasn’t in another county. He was here in Back Bay. But even so, that was a lot of ground to cover.

I started walking again, my eyes searching the streets for a glimpse of him. I dialed Vanessa’s number and when she answered, I said, “Don’t hang up.”

“Okay.”

She hung up.

I gritted my teeth and pressed redial.

“Vanessa, please listen a sec. Someone just threatened you.”

“What?”

“That guy you thought was a friend of mine on the patio?”

“Yes…” she said slowly, and I heard Clarence yip in the background.

“He called me when you left. He’s a total stranger, Vanessa, but he knew my name, and your occupation, and he made it clear to me that he knew where you lived.”

She gave me that martini chuckle of hers. “And let me see, you need to come over here to protect me? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t need these games. You want to fuck me, you should have said yes on the patio.”

“Vanessa, no. I want you to go to a hotel for a while. Now. Send my office the bill.”

The chuckle was replaced by a mean laugh. “Because some weirdo knows where I live?”

“This guy’s not your average weirdo.”

I turned on Hereford, walked toward Commonwealth Avenue. The rain had lessened, but the mist had thickened around it, turned the air to warm onion soup.

“Patrick, I’m a defense attorney. Hang on-Clarence, down! Down, now! Sorry,” she said to me. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Do you know how many gangbangers and petty sociopaths and freaks in general have threatened my life when I’ve failed to get them Get Out of Jail Free cards? Are you serious?”

“This may be a little different.”

“According to a screw I know at Cedar Junction, Karl Kroft-whom I unsuccessfully defended on murder one and ag rape-drew up a shit list-and I’m being quite literal here-in his cell. And before-”

“Vanessa.”

“And before they wiped it off, Patrick, and put dear Karl under twenty-four-hour watch, my friend the guard said he saw the list. He said my name was number one. Above Karl’s ex-wife, who he’d already tried to kill once with a saw.”

I wiped thick condensation from my eyes, wished I’d worn a hat. “Vanessa, just listen a second. I think this-”

“I live in a building with twenty-four-hour security and two doormen, Patrick. You’ve seen how hard it is to get in. I have six locks on my front door, and even if you could reach my windows on the fourteenth floor, they’re impenetrable. I have Mace, Patrick. I have a stun gun. And if that doesn’t work, I have a real gun, fully loaded, and always within reach.”

“Listen. That guy they found in the cranberry bog last week with his tongue and hands cut off. He was-”

Her voice rose. “And if anyone can get past all that , then, Patrick, fuck it, they can have me. Hell, they certainly put in the effort.”

“I understand, but-”

“Ta, sweetie. Good luck with your latest weirdo.”

She hung up, and I clenched the phone in my hand as I crossed into the Commonwealth Avenue mall, a mile-long stretch of green grass and ebony trees, small benches and tall statues, that cuts up the center of the avenue between the east- and westbound lanes.

Warren Martens had said that Miles Lovell’s friend dressed shabby-rich. That he had an air about him that suggested power or at least a power complex.

That pretty much described the guy on the patio.

Wesley Dawe, I wondered. Could this be Wesley? Wesley was blond, but the height and build were right, and hair dye is cheap and easily obtained.

My car was parked four blocks down Commonwealth, and while the rain was light, it was steady, and the mist was threatening to turn into a fog. Whoever the guy was, I decided, he’d either chosen or been sent to rattle my cage, to let me know that he knew me, and I didn’t know him, and that made me vulnerable and gave him a semblance of omnipotence.

I’ve had my cage rattled by pros, though-wiseguys, cops, gangbangers, and in one case a pair of bona fide serial killers-so the days when a disembodied voice on the other end of a phone line could give me the shakes and a dry mouth were gone. Still, it did have me guessing, which may have been the point.

My cell phone rang. I stopped under the canopy of a tree, and it rang a second time. No shakes or dry mouth. Just a small quickening of the pulse. Midway through the third ring, I answered.

“Hello.”

“Hey, pal. Where you at?”

Angie. My pulse slowed.

“ Comm Ave., heading to my car. You?”

“Outside an office in the Jeweler’s Exchange.”

“Fun with your diamond merchant?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s aces. When he isn’t hitting on me, he’s telling racist jokes to his male bodyguards.”

“Some girls have all the luck.”

“Yeah. Well, just thought I’d check in. I meant to tell you something, but I can’t remember what it was.”

“That’s helpful.”

“No, it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but…Well, whatever, he’s coming out again. I’ll call you back when I think of it.”