Dennis Lehane: Prayers For Rain

Cody eventually turned his head toward mine and the grimace on his face reminded me of a skeleton’s smile.

I watched his eyes to see if the fear would turn to rage, if the vulnerability would be replaced by that casual superiority of the born predator. I waited to see that look Karen Nichols had seen in the parking lot, the same one I’d glimpsed just before Bubba pulled the.22’s trigger that first time.

I waited some more.

The pain began to subside and the grimace relaxed on Cody Falk’s face; the skin loosened up by his hairline, and his breathing returned to a semiregular rhythm. But the fear stayed. It was dug in deep, and I knew it would be several nights before he slept more than an hour or two, a month at least before he could shut the garage door behind him while he was still inside. For a long, long time, he would, at least once a day, look over his shoulder for Bubba and me. Cody Falk, I was almost certain, would spend the rest of his life in a state of fear.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the note Karen Nichols had left on his car. I crumpled it into a ball.

“Cody,” I whispered.

His eyes snapped to attention.

“Next time, the lights will just go out.” I tilted his chin up with my fingers. “You understand? You’ll never hear us or see us.”

I shoved the balled-up note into his mouth. His eyes widened and he tried not to gag. I slapped the underside of his chin and his mouth closed.

I stood up, walked to the door, kept my back to him.

“And you’ll die, Cody. You’ll die.”

It would be six months before I gave any serious thought to Karen Nichols again.

A week after we dealt with Cody Falk, I received a check in the mail from her, a smiley face drawn within the “o” in her name, yellow ducklings embossed along the borders of the check, a card enclosed that said, “Thanks! You’re the absolute best!”

Given what would happen, I’d like to say I never heard from her again until that morning six months later when I heard the news on the radio, but the truth is she called once several weeks after I’d received her check.

She reached my answering machine. I came in an hour later to grab a pair of sunglasses, heard the message. The office was closed that week because I was taking off to Bermuda with Vanessa Moore, a defense attorney who had no more interest in a serious relationship than I did. She liked beaches, though, and she liked daiquiris and sloe gin fizzes and nooners followed by late afternoon massages. She looked mouthwatering in a business suit, coronary-inducing in a bikini, and she was the only person I knew at the time who was at least as shallow as I was. So, for a month or two, we were a good match.

I found my sunglasses in a lower desk drawer as Karen Nichols’s voice played through a tinny speaker. It took me a minute to recognize it, not because I’d forgotten how she sounded, but because this didn’t sound like her voice. It sounded hoarse and weary and ragged.

“Hey, Mr. Kenzie. This is Karen. You, ahm, helped me out a month ago, maybe six weeks? Yeah, so, ahm, look, give me a call. I, ah, I’d like to run something by you.” There was a pause. “Okay, so, yeah, just give me a call.” And she left her number.

Vanessa beeped the horn out on the avenue.

Our plane left in an hour, and traffic would be a bitch, and Vanessa could do this thing with her hips and calf muscles that was probably outlawed in most of Western civilization.

I reached for the replay button and Vanessa beeped again, louder and longer, and my finger jumped and hit the erase button instead. I know what Freud would have made of the mistake, and he’d probably be right. But I had Karen Nichols’s number somewhere, and I’d be back in a week, and I’d remember to call her. Clients had to understand that I had a life, too.

So I went to my life, let Karen Nichols go to hers, and, of course, forgot to call her back.

Months later, when I heard about her on the radio, I was driving back from Maine with Tony Traverna, a bail jumper who was usually considered by those who knew him as both the best safecracker in Boston and the dumbest man in the universe.

Tony T, the jokes went, couldn’t outwit a can of soup. Put Tony T in a room full of horse shit and twenty-four hours later he’d still be looking for the horse. Tony T thought manual labor was the president of Mexico, and had once wondered aloud what night they broadcast Saturday Night Live.

Whenever Tony had jumped bail before, he’d gone to Maine. He’d driven, even though he didn’t have driver’s license. Tony’d never had a license because he’d failed the written part of the exam. Nine times. He could drive, though, and the savant part of him ensured that man had yet to invent a lock he couldn’t crack. So he’d boost a car and drive three hours to his late father’s fishing cabin in Maine. Along the way, he’d pick up a few cases of Heineken and several bottles of Bacardi, because in addition to having the world’s smallest brain, Tony T seemed determined to have the world’s hardest liver, and then he’d hunker down in the cabin and watch cartoons on Nickelodeon until someone came to get him.

Tony Traverna had made some serious cash over the years, and even when you took into consideration all the money he’d burned on the booze and the hookers he paid to dress up like Indian squaws and call him “Trigger,” you had to figure he had plenty stashed away somewhere. Enough, anyway, for a plane ticket. But instead of jumping bail and flying off to Florida or Alaska or someplace he’d be harder to find, Tony always drove to Maine. Maybe, as someone once said, he was afraid to fly. Or maybe, as someone else suggested, he didn’t know what planes were.

Tony T’s bond was held by Mo Bags, an ex-cop and practicing hard-ass who would have gone after Tony himself with Mace and stun guns, brass knuckles and nunchucks, if it weren’t for a recent flare-up of gout that bit into Mo’s right hip like fire ants every time he drove a car for more than twenty miles. Besides, Tony and I had a history. Mo knew I’d find him, no problem, and Tony wouldn’t bolt on me. This time Tony’s bail had been put up by his girlfriend, Jill Dermott. Jill was the latest in a long line of women who looked at Tony and felt swept off their feet by a need to mother the man. It had been this way most of Tony’s life, or at least the portion I was familiar with. Tony walked into a bar (and he was always walking into a bar) and took a seat and started talking to the bartender or the person on the seat beside him, and half an hour later, most of the unmarried women in the bar (and a few of the married ones) were huddled on the seats around Tony, buying him drinks, listening to the slow, light cadence of his voice and deciding that all this boy needed to fix him up was nurture, love, and maybe some night classes.

Tony had a soft voice and one of those small but open faces that induce trust. Mournful almond eyes loomed above a crooked nose and an even more crooked smile, a permanent turn of the lips that seemed to say Tony had been there, too, my friend, and, really, what could you do about it except buy a round and share your story with new and old friends alike?

With that face, if Tony had chosen to be a con man, he’d have done all right. But Tony, ultimately, wasn’t smart enough to run a con, and maybe he was just too nice. Tony liked people. They seemed to confuse him the way just about everything did, but he genuinely liked them, too. Unfortunately, he also liked safes. Liked them a lot. Maybe just a hair more than people. He had an ear that could hear a feather settle on the surface of the moon and fingers so nimble he could solve a Rubik’s Cube one-handed without glancing at it. In his twenty-eight years on the planet, Tony had cracked so many safes that anytime an all-night burn job left a gutted shell in place of a bank vault, cops drove over to Tony’s Southie apartment even before they stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts, and judges cut search-and-seizure warrants in the time it takes most of us to write a check.