Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

She laughed again, but this time tears had sprung out along the tops of her cheekbones. “So what?”

“So,” Angie said softly, tightening her hand on Carrie’s, “he set out years ago to destroy this family. Don’t let him succeed. Mrs. Dawe, look at me. Please.”

Carrie turned her head, swallowed a pair of tears that reached opposite corners of her mouth at the same time.

“I’ve lost a husband,” Angie said. “Just as you lost your first. Violently. You got a second chance, and yeah, you’ve fucked it up.”

Carrie Dawe’s laugh was one of shock.

“But you still have it,” Angie said. “You can still make it right. Make a third chance out of your second. Don’t let him take that.”

For a good two minutes, no one spoke. I watched the two women hold hands and stare hard into each other’s faces, heard the clock tick on the mantel above the dark fireplace.

“You’re going to hurt him?” Carrie Dawe said.

“Yes,” Angie said.

“Really hurt him,” she said.

“Bury him,” Angie said.

She nodded. She shifted on the couch and leaned forward, placed her free hand over Angie’s.

“How can I help?” she asked.

As we drove over toward Sleeper Street to relieve Nelson Ferrare on the roof, I said, “We’ve tailed his ass for a week. Where’s he vulnerable?”

“Women,” Angie said. “His hatred sounds so pathological-”

“No,” I said. “That’s deeper than I’m looking for. What makes him vulnerable right now? Where are the chinks in his armor?”

“The fact that Carrie Dawe knows he and Timothy McGoldrick are one and the same.”

I nodded. “Flaw number one.”

“What else?” she asked.

“He has no curtains on most of his windows.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been following him during the day. Anything there?”

She thought about it. “Not really. Wait. Yeah.”

“What?”

“He leaves the engine running.”

“On the truck when he does his stops?”

She nodded, smiled. “And the keys in the ignition.”

I looked out the windshield as we approached the end of the Mass Pike, and shifted lanes from the northbound to southbound exit.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked.

“Going to drop by Bubba’s first.”

She leaned forward, peered through the wash of a yellow light strip in the tunnel above us. “You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

“I have a plan.”

“A good one?”

“A bit crude,” I said. “Needs some polish. But effective, I think.”

“Crude’s okay,” she said. “Is it mean?”

I grinned. “Some might call it that.”

“Mean’s even better,” she said.

Bubba met us at the door wearing a towel and a face completely devoid of hospitality.

Bubba’s torso, from the waist to the hollow of his throat, is a massive slab of dark and light pink scar tissue in the shapes of lobster tails and smaller red ridges the length and width of children’s fingers that litter the pink like slugs. The lobster tails are burns; the slugs are shrapnel scars. Bubba got his chest in Beirut, when he was stationed with the marines the day a suicide bomber drove through the front gates and MPs on duty couldn’t shoot him because they’d been given blanks in their rifles. Bubba had spent eight months in a Lebanese hospital before receiving a medal and a discharge. He’d sold the medal and disappeared for another eighteen months, returning to Boston in late 1985 with contacts in the illegal arms trade a lot of other men before him had died trying to establish. He came back with the chest that looked like a mapmaker’s representation of the Urals, a refusal to ever discuss the night of the bombing, and a profound lack of fear that made people even more nervous around him than they’d been before he left.

“What?” he said.

“Good to see you, too. Let us in.”

“Why?”

“We need stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Illegal stuff.”

“No shit.”

“Bubba,” Angie said, “we already figured out you’re doing the nasty with Ms. Moore, so come on. Let us pass.”

Bubba frowned and it thrust his lower lip out. He stepped aside and we entered the warehouse to see Vanessa Moore, wearing one of Bubba’s hockey jerseys and nothing else, lying on the red couch in the center of the floor, a champagne flute propped on her washboard abdomen, watching 9½ Weeks on Bubba’s fifty-inch TV. She used the remote control to pause it as we came through the door, froze Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger going at it against an alley wall as blue-lit acid rain dripped on their bodies.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey. Don’t let us disturb you.”

She scooped some peanuts from a bowl on the coffee table, popped them in her mouth. “No worries.”

“’Nessie,” Bubba said, “we got to talk a bit of business.”

Angie caught my eye and mouthed, “Nessie?”

“Illegal business?”

Bubba looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded vigorously.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Okey-doke.” She started to rise from the couch.

“No, no,” Bubba said. “Stay there. We’ll leave. We got to go upstairs anyway.”

“Mmm. Better.” She slipped back down into the couch and hit the remote and Mickey and Kim started huffing and puffing to bad eighties synth-rock again.

“You know, I’ve never seen this movie,” Angie said as we followed Bubba up the stairs to the third floor.

“Mickey’s actually not very greasy in this one,” I said.

“And Kim in those white socks,” Bubba said.

“And Kim in those white socks,” I agreed.

“Two thumbs-up from the pervert twins,” Angie said. “What a boon.”

“So look,” Bubba said as he turned on the lights on the third floor and Angie wandered off to look through the crates for her weapon of choice, “you got any problem with me, ah, how do I say this-boning Vanessa?”

I covered a smile with my hand, looked down at an open crate of grenades. “Ah, no, man. No problem at all.”

Bubba said, “Cause I haven’t had a, whatta ya call it, a steady-”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yeah, in like a long time.”

“Since high school,” I said. “Stacie Hamner, right?”

He shook his head. “In Chechnya, ’84, there was someone.”

“I never knew.”

He shrugged. “I never offered, dude.”

“There’s that, sure.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, leaned in close. “So we’re cool?”

“Cool beans,” I said. “What about Vanessa? She cool?”

He nodded. “She’s the one told me you wouldn’t care.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Said you two never cared about each other. It was just exercise.”

“Huh,” I said, as we crossed back toward Angie. “Exercise.”

Angie pulled a rifle from a wooden crate and rested the stock on her hip. The barrel towered over her. The rifle was so thick and looked so heavy and mean, it was hard to believe she could hold it without tipping over on her side.

“You got a target scope with this baby?”

“I got a scope,” Bubba said. “What about bullets?”

“The bigger the better.”

Bubba turned his head, shot me a deadpan look. “Funny. That’s what Vanessa says.”

On the roof across from Scott Pearse’s loft, we sat and waited for the phone call. Nelson, intrigued by the rifle, stayed and sat with us.

At ten on the nose, Scott Pearse’s phone rang and we watched him cross the living room and lift the receiver of a black phone attached to the brick support column in the center of the room. He smiled when he heard the voice on the other end, leaned lazily back into the support column and cradled the receiver between neck and shoulder.

His grin faded gradually, and then his face turned into a sickened grimace. He held out his hands as if the caller could see him and spoke rapidly into the phone, his body bending with his pleading.