Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“I thought they broke up.”

“No.” The guy’s upside-down face blanched as if I’d just predicted one of the signs of the apocalypse. “No, no, no.”

I put my cell phone back in my pocket, raised both hands. “A little help?”

They stepped over me and arranged themselves in position, grasped my hands.

“Gently,” I said.

They pulled me to my feet and the garage lurched up and down several times and the light went all greasy in my head. I touched my ribs, then my upper chest and shoulders, finally my jaw. Nothing seemed broken. Everything, however, hurt. A lot.

“You want us to call security?” the guy said.

I leaned back against a parked car, checked each tooth with my tongue. “No. It’s okay. You might want to step away kinda fast, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m definitely going to puke.”

They moved almost as fast as Wesley had.

Let me get this straight,” Bubba said as he swabbed rubbing alcohol on my scraped forehead. “You got your ass handed to you like a hat by a guy looks like Niles Crane.”

“Uh-huh,” I managed, an ice pack the size of a football pressed to my swollen jaw.

“I don’t know,” Bubba said to Angie. “Can we hang out with him anymore?”

Angie looked up from the photos she’d had developed of Wesley at Foto-Fast while Bubba had checked me for breaks or sprains, taped up my bruised ribs, cleaned the wounds and scrapes from the garage floor and the ring on Wesley’s right hand. Say what you will about Bubba’s intelligence or lack thereof, but he’s a hell of a field medic. Has better drugs, too.

Angie smiled. “You do become more of a liability with every passing day.”

“Ha,” I said. “Nice hair.”

Angie touched the sides of her head and scowled.

The portable phone by her elbow rang, and she picked it up.

“Hey, Devin,” she said after a few seconds. “Huh?” She looked at me. “His jaw looks like a pink grapefruit, but otherwise I think he’s okay. Huh? Sure.” She lowered the phone. “Devin wants to know when you turned into such a Sally.”

“The guy knew fucking kung fu,” I said through gritted teeth, “judo, some goddamn fly-in-the-air, kick-your-head-off shit.”

She rolled her eyes. “What’s that?” she said into the phone. “Oh, okay.” Back to me: “Devin asks why you didn’t just shoot him?”

“Good question,” Bubba said.

“I tried ,” I said.

“He tried,” she told Devin. She listened, nodded, said to me, “Devin said next time? Try harder.”

I gave her a bitter smile.

“He’s giving your advice due consideration,” she told Devin. “And those plates?” She listened. “Okay, thanks. Yeah, let’s do that soon. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up. “The plates were stolen from a Mercury Cougar last night.”

“Last night,” I said.

She nodded. “Methinks our Wesley plans ahead for all eventualities.”

“And can high-step like a chorus girl!” Bubba said.

I leaned back in my chair, gave them a “bring it on” gesture with my free hand. “Let’s get it over with. All the jokes. Let’s go.”

“You kidding?” Angie said. “No way.”

“Months,” Bubba said. “Months we’ll be milking this.”

Bubba’s friend at the state revenue office had been indicted last year on multiple fraud charges, so that turned into a dead end, but Angie finally got a call from her IRS contact and started scribbling notes as she listened to him, saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” over and over as I nursed my swollen jaw and Bubba spooned cayenne pepper into a collection of hollow-point bullets.

“Stop that,” I said.

“What? I’m bored.”

“You’re bored a lot lately.”

“Well, look at the company I’ve been keeping.”

Angie looked up from the table as she hung up the phone and smiled at me. “We got him.”

“Wesley?”

She nodded. “Paid taxes from 1984 until ’89, when he disappeared.”

“Okay.”

“It gets better. Guess where he worked?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Bubba spooned some more cayenne into a metal jacket. “Hospitals.”

Angie tossed her pen at his head. “You’re stomping my lines again.”

“Lucky guess. Back off.” Bubba frowned, rubbed his head, went back to his bullets.

“Psych hospitals?” I said.

Angie nodded. “Among others, yeah. He did a summer at McLean. He did a year at Brigham and Women’s. A year at Mass General. Six months at Beth Israel. Apparently, he wasn’t very good at his jobs, but his father kept getting him others.”

“What departments?”

Bubba raised his head, opened his mouth, caught Angie’s glare, and dropped his head again.

“Custodial,” Angie said. “Then Records.”

I sat at the table, looked down at my notes from the Hall of Records. “Where was he working in ’89?”

Angie glanced at her notes. “Brigham and Women’s. Records Department.”

I nodded, held up my notes so she could see them.

“‘Naomi Dawe,’” she read. “‘Born, Brigham and Women’s, December eleven, 1985. Died, Brigham and Women’s, November seventeen, 1989.”

I dropped the notes and stood, walked toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

“Making a phone call.”

“To who?”

“Old girlfriend,” I said.

“We’re working,” Bubba said, “all he’s thinking about is getting some.”

I met Grace Cole on Francis Street in Brookline, in the heart of the Longwood Hospital district. The rain had stopped and we walked down Francis and crossed Brookline Avenue, worked our way down to the river.

“You look…bad,” she said, and tilted her head, considering my jaw. “Still doing the same work, I take it.”

“You look stupendous,” I said.

She smiled. “Always the flirt.”

“Just honest. How’s Mae?”

Mae was Grace’s daughter. Three years ago, the violence in my life had driven them into an FBI safe house, almost derailed Grace’s surgical residency, and pretty much slammed the door on what remained of our relationship. Mae had been four. She’d been smart and pretty and liked to watch the Marx Brothers with me. I couldn’t think of her without it eliciting a scraping sensation under my ribs.

“She’s good. She’s in second grade, doing well. She likes math, hates boys. I saw you on TV last year, when those men were killed near the Quincy Quarries. You were in a crowd shot.”

“Mmm.”

Water dripped from the weeping willows along the river path, and the river itself was a hard chrome in the wake of the dull rain.

“Still mixing it up with dangerous people?” Grace pointed at my jaw, the scrapes on my forehead.

“Me? Nah. Fell in the shower.”

“Into a tub full of rocks?”

I smiled, shook my head.

We stepped aside for a pair of joggers, their legs pumping, their cheeks puffing, the air around them filled with fury.

Our elbows touched as we stepped back, and Grace said, “I took a job in Houston. I leave in two weeks.”

“Houston,” I said.

“Ever been?”

I nodded. “Big,” I said. “Hot. Industrial.”

“Cutting edge in medical technology,” Grace said.

“Congratulations,” I said. “I mean it.”

Grace chewed her lower lip, looked out at the cars gliding past on slick roads. “I’ve almost called you a thousand times.”

“What stopped you?”

She gave me a small shrug, her eyes on the road. “News footage of you near corpses in the quarries, I guess.”

I followed her gaze out onto the road because there was nothing to say.

“You with someone?”

“Not really.”

She looked in my eyes, smiled. “But you’re hoping?”