Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“I do.” I slid off the hood. “Guy gave them to me a couple of years ago.”

“Whatever for?” Her shoulders jerked slightly as I approached, as if each side of her body wanted to run in the opposite direction.

“I had figured out he wasn’t who he appeared to be. It made him angry.”

“He tried to kill you, yeah?”

“Yeah. Tried to kill her, too.” I pointed behind Siobhan at Angie standing by the stairwell that led up to the station.

Siobhan looked back at her, then at me. “Nasty man, then, I’d say.”

“Where you from, Siobhan?”

“Ireland, of course.”

“North, right?”

She nodded.

“Home of the Troubles,” I said, throwing a brogue around the last word.

She dropped her head as I reached her. “You don’t make light of it, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Lost some family, did you?”

She looked up at me and her small eyes were smaller still and dark with anger. “I did, yeah. Generations of them.”

I smiled. “Me, too. Great-great-great-grandfather, I think it was, on my father’s side was executed in Donegal in 1798, when the French left us holding the bag. Now my maternal grandfather-me Ma’s Da,” I said with a wink, “they found him kneecapped in his barn with his throat cut and his tongue cut in half.”

“He was a traitor, then, was he?” Siobhan’s small face was clenched into a defiant fist.

“A stoolie,” I said. “Yeah. Either that or the Orange did him, wanted it to look that way. You know how it is in a war like that, sometimes people die, you can never be sure why until you meet them on the other side. Other times, people die for no real reason, because the blood’s up, because the more chaos, the easier it is to get away with it. I hear that since the cease-fire, it’s really nuts over there. Everyone running around, taking off heads in revenge hits. Do you know, Siobhan, that more people were killed in South Africa in the two years after apartheid than died during it? Same thing with Yugoslavia after the Communists. I mean, fascism sucks, but it keeps people in line. The moment it’s over, all that bad blood people have been holding in? Forget about it. People get whacked for things they forgot they did.”

“Trying to tell me something, Mr. Kenzie?”

I shook my head. “Just running off at the mouth, Siobhan. So, tell me, why’d you leave the Old Sod?”

She cocked her head. “You like poverty, Mr. Kenzie? You like losing well over half your earnings to the government? You like dreary weather and endless cold?”

“Can’t say I do.” I shrugged. “It’s just a lot of times, people leave the North and can’t ever go back because there are too many people waiting to fuck them up when they step off the boat. You?”

“Have anyone waiting back there to hurt me?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” she said, her eyes on the ground, shaking her head as if by doing so that would make it come true. “No. Not me.”

“Siobhan, could you tell me when Pearse is going to move against the Dawes? And maybe how he plans to go about doing it?”

She stepped back from me slowly, a weird half smile playing on her tiny face. “Ah, no, Mr. Kenzie. Have yourself a nice day, won’t ya?”

“You didn’t say, ‘Who’s Pearse?’” I said.

“Who’s Pearse?” she said. “There now-ya happy?” She turned and walked toward the stairs, her overnight bag swinging on her shoulder.

Angie stepped aside as Siobhan reached the dark stairwell and began climbing it.

I waited until she reached the landing midway up.

“How’s your green card status, Siobhan?”

She stopped, froze there with her back to us.

“Did you somehow manage an extended work visa? Because I hear INS is really cracking down on the Irish. Particularly in this city. Kinda sucks, too, because who’s going to paint the houses once they ship them back home?”

She cleared her throat, back still to us. “You wouldn’t.”

“We would,” Angie said.

“You can’t.”

“We can,” I said. “Help us out here, Siobhan.”

She half turned, looked down the staircase at me. “Or what?”

“Or I’ll call a friend of mine in INS, Siobhan, and you’ll celebrate Labor Day in fucking Belfast.”

“He keeps files on everyone,” Siobhan said. “He has a file on me, one on you, Mr. Kenzie, and one on you as well, Miss Gennaro.”

“What are in the files?” Angie asked.

“Your daily routines. Your weaknesses. Oh,” she waved her hand at the smoke from her cigarette, “there’s plenty else. Whatever biographical information he can find.” She pointed the cigarette at Angie. “He was so happy when he found out about the death of your husband. He thought he had you.”

“Had me?”

“The means to break you, Miss Gennaro. The means to break you. Everyone has something they can’t face, don’t they. Then he discovered you have some powerful relatives, yeah?”

Angie nodded.

“That was not a day you’d have wanted to be around Scott Pearse, you can be certain.”

“My heart bleeds for him,” I said. “Let me ask you-why’d you speak to me that first time I came to the Dawes’ house?”

“To throw you off the scent, Mr. Kenzie.”

“You sent me after Cody Falk.”

She nodded

“What, did Pearse think I’d kill him and be done with the case?”

“It seemed a reasonable possibility, don’t you think?” She looked down at her coffee cup.

“Is Diane Bourne his only source for psych files?” I asked.

Siobhan shook her head. “He’s got a man in the records department at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Can you guess how many patients McLean services in a year, Mr. Kenzie?”

McLean was one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the state. It handled both voluntary and involuntary committals, had locked and unlocked wards, treated everything from narcotics and alcohol dependency to chronic fatigue syndrome to paranoid disassociative schizophrenia with violent tendencies. McLean had over three hundred beds and an average of three thousand admissions a year.

Siobhan leaned back in the booth and ran a weary hand through her close-cropped hair. We’d left the commuter station in Weston and driven straight into rush hour, pulled out of it in Waltham and stopped at an IHOP on Main Street. At five-thirty in the evening, the IHOP sported only a few patrons, and after we ordered a pot of regular coffee and a pot of decaf, the surly waitress was happy to ignore us and leave us to our privacy.

“How does Pearse enlist people?” Angie asked.

Siobhan gave us an acrid smile. “He’s very magnetic, isn’t he?”

Angie shrugged. “Never met the man up close.”

“Take it on faith, then,” Siobhan said. “The man looks straight through to your soul.”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

“He befriends you,” Siobhan said. “Then he beds you. He learns your weaknesses-whatever those things are you can’t face. Then he owns you. And you do what he asks, or he destroys you.”

“Why Karen?” I said. “I mean, I know he was trying to teach the Dawes a lesson, but even for Pearse that strikes me as severe.”

Siobhan lifted her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. “You don’t see it yet?”

We shook our heads.

“I’m beginning to lose respect for the both of you, I am.”

“Gee,” I said. “That hurts.”

“Access, Mr. Kenzie. It’s all about access.”

“We know, Siobhan. How do you think we came around to you?”

She shook her head. “I’m limited-a snatch of conversation here, a glimpse of a bank statement there. Scott despises limits.”

“So,” Angie said and lit a cigarette, “Scott’s after half the Dawes’ fortune…” She saw something in Siobhan’s face that halted her in midsentence. “No. That wouldn’t be good enough, would it, Siobhan? He wants it all.”