Dennis Lehane: Prayers For Rain

Tony’s real problem, though, at least in the legal sense, wasn’t the safes, and it wasn’t the stupidity (though it didn’t help); it was the drink. All but two of Tony’s jail terms had come from DUIs, and his latest was no different-driving north in the southbound lane of Northern Avenue at three in the morning, resisting arrest (he’d kept driving), malicious destruction of property (he’d crashed), and fleeing the scene of an accident (he’d climbed a telephone pole because he had a theory the cops might not notice him twenty feet above the wrecked car on a dark night).

When I entered the fishing cabin, Tony looked up from the living room floor with a face that said, What took you so long? He sighed and used the remote to flick off Rugrats , then stood unsteadily and slapped his thighs to get the blood flowing through them again.

“Hey, Patrick. Mo send you?”

I nodded.

Tony looked around for his shoes, found them under a throw pillow on the floor. “Beer?”

I looked around the cabin. In the day and a half he’d been here, Tony had managed to fill every windowsill with empty Heineken bottles. The green glass captured the sun glinting off the lake and then refracted it into the room in tiny beams so that the entire cabin glowed the emerald of a tavern on St. Patrick’s Day.

“No, thanks, Tony. I’m trying to cut back on beer for breakfast.”

“Religious thing?”

“Something like that.”

He crossed one leg over the other and pulled the ankle up to his waist, hopped around on the other foot as he tried to get a shoe on. “You gonna cuff me?”

“You going to bolt?”

He got the shoe on somehow, then stumbled as he dropped the foot to the floor. “Nah, man. You know that.”

I nodded. “So no cuffs, then.”

He gave me a grateful smile, then raised the other foot off the floor and started hopping around again as he tried to put on the second shoe. Tony got the shoe over his foot, then stumbled back into the couch and fell on his ass, short of breath from all that hopping. Tony’s shoes didn’t have laces, just Velcro flaps. Word was that-oh, never mind. You can guess. Tony strapped the Velcro flaps together and stood.

I let him gather up a change of clothes, his Game Boy, and some comic books for the ride. At the door, he stopped and looked hopefully at the fridge.

“Mind if I grab a roadie?”

I couldn’t see what harm a beer on the ride could do to a guy heading off to jail. “Sure.”

Tony opened the fridge and pulled out an entire twelve-pack.

“You know,” he said as we left the cabin, “in case we hit traffic or something.”

We did hit some traffic, as it turned out-small squalls of it outside Lewiston, then Portland, the beach communities of Kennebunkport and Ogunquit. The soft summer morning was turning into a white sear of a day, the trees and roads and other cars glinting pale, hard, and angry under a high sun.

Tony sat in the back of the black ’91 Cherokee I’d picked up when the engine of my Crown Victoria seized up that spring. The Cherokee was great for the rare bounty hunt because it had come with a steel gate between the seats and the stow bed in back. Tony sat on the other side of the gate, his back against the vinyl seat cover over the spare tire. He stretched out his legs like a cat settling into a sun-baked windowsill and cracked open his third beer of the early afternoon, then burped up the vapor of the second.

“Excuse yourself, man.”

Tony caught my eyes in the rearview. “Excuse me. Didn’t realize you were such a stickler for, ahm-”

“Common courtesy?”

“That, yeah.”

“I let you think it’s okay to burp in my ride, Tony, then you’ll think it’s okay to take a leak.”

“Nah, man. Wish I’d brought a big cup or something, though.”

“We’ll stop at the next exit.”

“You’re all right, Patrick.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m swell.”

We actually made several stops in Maine and one in New Hampshire. This will happen when you allow an alcoholic bail jumper into your car with a twelve-pack, but, in truth, I didn’t mind all that much. I enjoyed Tony’s company in the same way you’d enjoy an afternoon with a twelve-year-old nephew who was a little slow on the uptake but irrevocably good-natured.

Somewhere during the New Hampshire leg of our trip, Tony’s Game Boy stopped blipping and beeping, and I looked in the rearview to see that he’d passed out back there, snoring softly, his lips flapping gently as one foot wagged back and forth like a dog’s tail.

We’d just passed into Massachusetts and I’d pressed the seek button on my car radio and tried to get lucky and pick up WFNX while I was still a good distance from their weak antenna when Karen Nichols’s name floated out of a tangle of static and air hiss. The digital call numbers raced by on the radio’s LED screen, paused for just a moment on a thin signal at 99.6:

“…now identified as Karen Nichols of Newton, apparently jumped from-”

The tuner left the station and jumped to 100.7.

I swerved the car slightly as I reached for the manual tune button and brought it back to 99.6.

Tony woke up in the back and said, “What?”

“Sssh.” I held up a finger.

“…police department sources say. How Miss Nichols gained entrance to the observation deck of the Custom House is not yet known. Turning to weather, meteorologist Gil Hutton says to expect more heat…”

Tony rubbed his eyes. “Crazy shit, huh?”

“You know about this?”

He yawned. “Saw it on the news this morning. Chick took a buck-naked header off the Custom House, forgot that gravity kills, man. You know? Gravity kills.”

“Shut up, Tony.”

He recoiled as if I’d swatted him, turned away from me, and scrounged through the twelve-pack for another beer.

There could be another Karen Nichols in Newton. Probably several. It was a mundane, pedestrian American name. As boring and common as Mike Smith or Ann Adams.

But something cold and spreading through my stomach told me that the Karen Nichols who’d jumped from the Custom House observation deck was the same one I’d met six months ago. The one who ironed her socks and had a stuffed animal collection.

That Karen Nichols didn’t seem like a woman who’d jump nude from a building. But, still, I knew. I knew.

“Tony?”

He looked up at me with the injured eyes of a hamster in the rain. “Yeah?”

“Sorry I snapped at you.”

“Yeah, okay.” He took a sip from his beer, continued to watch me warily.

“The woman who jumped,” I said, not even sure why I was explaining myself to a guy like Tony, “I may have known her.”

“Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry. Fucking people sometimes, you know?”

I looked at the highway, tinted a metallic blue under the harsh sun. Even with the air-conditioning running at max, I could feel the heat needle the skin at the nape of my neck.

Tony’s eyes were wet and the smile that rolled up his cheeks was too big, too wide. “It calls to you sometimes, man. You know?”

“The booze?”

He shook his head. “Like with your friend who jumped?” He got up on his knees, pressed his nose to the grate between us. “It’s, like, I went out on this guy’s boat once, right? I can’t swim, but I go out on a boat . We get stuck in this storm, swear to God, and the boat’s, like, tipping all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, the fucking waves look like big-ass roads curling up at us on all sides. And, okay, I’m scared shitless, ’cause I fall in, I’m done. But I’m also, I dunno how to say it, I feel kinda content, okay? I feel like, ‘Good. My questions’ll be answered. No more wondering how and when and why I’m gonna die. I am gonna die. Right now. And that’s kinda a relief.’ You ever feel that way?”