Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

Then Carrie Dawe must have hung up on the other end, because Scott Pearse jerked his ear back from the phone and stared at it for a moment. Then he screamed and smashed the receiver over and over again into the brick column until all he had left were a few shards of black plastic and a dangling metal mouthpiece.

“Gee,” Angie said, “I hope he has a second phone.”

I pulled the cellular phone I’d gotten at Bubba’s from my pocket. “How much you want to bet he breaks that one, too, once I’m done.”

I dialed Scott Pearse’s number.

Before I hit send, Nelson said, “Hey, Ange,” and pointed at the rifle. “You want me to do the honors?”

“Why?”

“Fucking recoil’ll knock your shoulder back a few blocks is all.” He jerked a thumb at me. “Why can’t he do it?”

“He’s got shitty aim.”

“With that scope?”

“Really shitty aim,” she said.

Nelson held out his hands. “It’d be my pleasure.”

Angie considered the rifle stock, then glanced at her shoulder. Eventually, she nodded. She handed the rifle to Nelson, then told him what we wanted.

Nelson shrugged. “Okay. Why not just kill him, though?”

“Because,” Angie said, “A, we’re not killers.”

“And B?” Nelson asked.

“Killing him’s too nice,” I said.

I depressed the send button on the cell phone and Scott Pearse’s phone rang on the other end.

He’d been leaning with his head against the brick column, and he raised it slowly, turned his head as if unsure what sound he was hearing. Then he walked over to the bar curled around the edge of his kitchen and lifted a portable off the top.

“Hello.”

“Scottie,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“I was wondering how long it would be before you called, Pat.”

“Not surprised?”

“That you learned my identity? I expected no less, Pat. Are you watching me at the moment?”

“Possibly.”

He chuckled. “I sensed as much. Nothing I could put my finger on, mind you-I mean, you’re not bad-but in the last week or so, I had the feeling eyes were watching.”

“You’re an intuitive fella, Scott. What can I say?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Was it your intuition that told you to bayonet five women in Panama?”

He wandered into the living room, head down, index finger scratching the side of his neck, a wry smile curling up one side of his face.

“Well,” he exhaled into the phone. “You’ve done some extra credit in the homework department, Pat. Very good.”

The grin left his face, but the scratching grew a little faster.

“So, Pat, what’s your plan, buddy?”

“I’m not your buddy,” I said.

“Whoops. My bad. What’s your plan, asshole?”

I laughed. “Getting testy, Scott?”

In the loft, he put a palm to his forehead, then brushed the hair back off his head with it. He looked out at his black windows. He toed a shard of black plastic on the floor with his shoe.

“I can wait you out,” he said. “You’ll tire of watching me do nothing.”

“That’s what my partner said.”

“She’s right.”

“I gotta beg to differ on that score, Scottie.”

“Really?”

“Sure. How long can you wait now that Carrie Dawe knows who Pilot Tim McGoldrick is, knows you’re the same guy who ruined her daughter’s life?”

Scott said nothing. A strange, low hissing noise came from his end like the sound of a teapot in the minute before it comes to a full boil.

“You tell me that, Scottie?” I asked. “I’m just curious.”

Scott Pearse turned suddenly from the brick column and stalked across his shiny blond floors. He reached the oversized windows and stared out at his reflection, raised his eyes and looked up at what could only be, from his side, the barest outline of our roof edge.

“Your sister lives in Seattle, fuck. She and her husband and their-”

“-children, yeah, Scott, just went on vacation,” I said. “My treat. I sent them tickets last Monday, shithead. They left this morning.”

“She’ll come back sometime.” He stared directly up at the roof, and from here I could see cords in his neck strain against the skin.

“But by then, Scottie, this’ll be over.”

“I’m not that easy to shake up, Pat.”

“Sure you are, Scottie. A guy who bayonets a roomful of dying women is a guy who snaps. So, get ready Scott, you’re about to start snapping.”

Scott Pearse stared defiantly at his windowpane. He said, “Listen to-” and I hung up the phone.

He stared at the phone in his hand, shocked beyond reason, I think, that two people had dared hang up on him in the same night.

I nodded at Nelson.

Scott Pearse gripped the phone between his hands and raised it over his head and the window beside him exploded as Nelson fired four rounds into it.

Pearse vaulted backward onto the floor and the phone skittered out of his hand.

Nelson pivoted and fired again, three times, and the window in front of Scott Pearse imploded in a cascade, like ice pouring from the back of a faulty tailgate.

Pearse rolled to his left and up into a crouch.

“Just don’t hit his body,” I said to Nelson.

Nelson nodded and fired several shots into the floor a few inches behind Scott Pearse’s feet as he scampered over the blond wood. He sprang up like a cat and vaulted over the bar into the kitchen.

Nelson looked at me.

Angie glanced up from Bubba’s police scanner as Scott Pearse’s alarm bells ripped through the still summer night. “We got, maybe, two minutes-thirty.”

I backhanded Nelson’s shoulder. “How much damage can you do in a minute flat?”

Nelson smiled. “Fucking boatload, dude.”

“Go nuts.”

Nelson took out the rest of the windows first, then went to work on the lights. The stained-glass Tiffany lamp over the bar looked like a pack of fruity Life Savers stuffed in a cherry bomb by the time he was through with it. The track lights over the kitchen and living room shredded into popping shards of white plastic and pale glass. The video cameras went up in blue and red blurs of electrical spark. Nelson turned the floor to splinters, the couches and slim leather recliners into piles of white moss, and punched so many holes in the refrigerator, most of the food would probably spoil before the cops finished writing their reports.

“One minute,” Angie yelled over the roar. “Let’s go.”

Nelson looked back over his shoulder at the glittering mass of brass shells. “Who loaded the mags?”

“Bubba.”

He nodded. “They’re clean, then.”

We boogied across the roof and down the dark fire escape. Nelson tossed me the rifle and hopped into his Camaro, tore off out of the alley without a word.

We climbed in the Jeep, and I could hear distant sirens ring up Congress from the piers down the other end of the waterfront.

I spun out of the alley and banged a right on Congress, crossed over the harbor and into the city proper. I took a hard right at the yellow light on Atlantic Avenue, slowed as I cut into the left lane, and took the reverse curve, headed south. I felt my heart return to a normal rate as I reached the expressway.

I picked up the cell phone Bubba had given me as I descended the on ramp, pressed redial, then send.

Scott Pearse’s “What?” sounded hoarse, and in the background, I could hear sirens bleating into abrupt silence as they reached his building.

“Here’s how I see it, Scott. First-this is a clone phone I’m using. Triangulate the signal all you want, it won’t mean shit. Second-you finger me for redecorating your loft, I finger you for extortion of the Dawes. Clear so far?”

“I’m going to kill you.”