Dennis Lehane: Prayers For Rain

I glanced over my shoulder at his face pressed against the small squares of steel, the flesh of his cheeks spilling over to my side of the gate and filling the squares like soft, white chestnuts.

“Once,” I said.

“Yeah?” His eyes widened and he leaned back from the gate a bit. “When?”

“Guy had a shotgun pointed at my face. I was pretty sure he was going to pull the trigger.”

“And for just a second”-Tony held his thumb and forefinger a hairsbreadth apart-“just one second, you thought, This could be cool. Right?”

I smiled at him in the rearview. “Maybe, something like that. I don’t know anymore.”

He sat back on his haunches. “That’s how I felt on that boat. Maybe your friend, maybe she felt that way last night. Like, ‘Wow, I’ve never flown. Let’s give this a try.’ You know what I’m trying to say?”

“Not really, no.” I looked in the rearview. “Tony, why did you go on that boat?”

He rubbed his chin. “Cause I couldn’t swim.” He shrugged.

Close to the end of our trip, and the road seemed endless before me, the weight of the final thirty miles hanging behind my eyes like a steel pendulum.

“Come on,” I said. “Really.”

Tony tilted his chin up, and his face grew pinched with thought.

“It’s the not knowing,” he said. And then he burped.

“What is?”

“Why I went on the boat, I guess. The not knowing-all the not knowing in this fucking life, you know? It gets to you. Makes you crazy. You just want to know.”

“Even if you can’t fly?”

Tony smiled. “ Because you can’t fly.”

He patted the gate between us with his palm. He burped again, then excused himself. He curled up on the floor and sang the theme song to The Flintstones very softly.

By the time we reached Boston, he was snoring again.

When I walked through his front door with Tony Traverna, Mo Bags looked up from his meatball and Italian sausage sub and said, “Hey, fucko! How ya doing?”

I was pretty sure he was talking to Tony, but with Mo sometimes you couldn’t tell.

He dropped the sub, wiped his greasy fingers and mouth on a napkin, then came around his desk as I dropped Tony in a chair.

Tony said, “Hey, Mo. ”

“Don’t ‘ Hey Mo ’ me, scumbag. Give me your wrist.”

“Mo,” I said, “come on.”

“What?” Mo snapped a cuff around Tony’s left wrist, then attached the other end to the chair arm.

“How’s the gout?” Tony seemed genuinely concerned.

“Better’n you, mutt. Better’n you.”

“Good to hear.” Tony belched.

Mo narrowed his eyes at me. “He drunk?”

“I don’t know.” I spied a copy of the Trib on Mo’s leather couch. “Tony, you drunk?”

“Nah, man. Hey, Mo, you got a bathroom I can use?”

“This guy’s drunk,” Mo said.

I lifted the sports page off the pile of newspaper, found the front page underneath. Karen Nichols had made it above the fold: WOMAN JUMPS FROM CUSTOM HOUSE. Beside the article was a full color photo of the Custom House at night.

“Guy is fucking drunk,” Mo said. “Kenzie?”

Tony belched again, then began singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

“Okay. He’s drunk,” I said. “Where’s my money?”

“You let him drink?” Mo wheezed like a chunk of meatball had lodged in his esophagus.

I picked up the newspaper, read the lead. “ Mo. ”

Tony heard the tone of my voice and stopped singing.

Mo was too fired up to notice, though. “I dunno here, Kenzie. I don’t fucking know about guys like you. You’re gonna give me a bad rep.”

“You already have a bad rep,” I said. “Pay me.”

The article began: “An apparently distraught Newton woman jumped to her death late last night from the observatory deck of one of the city’s most cherished monuments.”

Mo asked Tony, “You believe this fucking guy?”

“Sure.”

“Shut up, fucko. No one’s talking to you.”

“I need a bathroom.”

“What’d I say?” Mo breathed loudly through his nostrils, paced behind Tony, and lightly rapped the back of his head with his knuckles.

“Tony,” I said, “it’s just past this couch, through that door.”

Mo laughed. “What, he’s going to take the chair with him?”

Tony unlocked the cuff around his wrist with a sudden snap and walked into the bathroom.

Mo said, “Hey!”

Tony looked back at him. “I gotta go, man.”

“Identified as Karen Nichols,” the article continued, “the woman left behind her wallet and clothes on the observatory deck before leaping to her death…”

A half-pound hunk of ham hit my shoulder and I turned to see Mo pulling back his clenched fist.

“The fuck you doing, Kenzie?”

I went back to reading the paper. “My money, Mo. ”

“You dating this mug? You fucking buy him beers, maybe get him in the mood for love?”

The observatory deck of the Custom House is twenty-six stories up. Dropping, you’d probably glimpse the top of Beacon Hill, Government Center, skyscrapers in the financial district, and finally Faneuil Hall and Quincy Marketplace. All in a second or two-a mélange of brick and glass and yellow light before you hit cobblestone. Part of you would bounce, the other part wouldn’t.

“You hearing me, Kenzie?” Mo went to punch me again.

I slipped the punch, dropped the paper, and closed my right hand around his throat. I backed him into his desk and pushed him onto his back.

Tony stepped out of the bathroom and said, “Like, shit. Wow.”

“Which drawer?” I asked Mo.

His eyes bulged in a frantic question.

“Which drawer is my money in, Mo?”

I eased my grip on his throat.

“Middle drawer.”

“It better not be a check.”

“No, no. Cash.”

I let him go and he lay there wheezing as I went around the desk, opened the drawer, and found my money wrapped in a rubber band.

Tony sat back in the chair and recuffed his own wrist.

Mo sat up and his bulk dropped his feet to the floor. He rubbed his throat, gacked like a cat spitting up a hair ball.

I came back around the desk and picked the newspaper up off the floor.

Mo’s tiny eyes darkened into bitterness.

I straightened the pages of the paper, folded it neatly, and tucked it under my arm.

“Mo,” I said, “you have a pimp’s piece in the holster on your left ankle, and a lead sap in your back pocket.”

Mo’s eyes hardened some more.

“Reach for either of them, I’ll show you exactly how bad my mood is today.”

Mo coughed. He dropped his eyes from mine. He rasped, “Your name is shit now in this business.”

“Gosh,” I said. “More’s the pity, huh?”

Mo said, “You’ll see. You’ll see. Without Gennaro, I hear you need every penny you can get. You’ll be begging me for work come winter. Begging.”

I looked down at Tony. “You be okay?”

He gave me a thumbs-up.

“ At Nashua Street,” I told him, “there’s a guard named Bill Kuzmich. Tell him you’re a friend of mine, he’ll watch out for you.”

“Cool,” Tony said. “Think he’d bring me a keg every now and then?”

“Oh, sure, Tony. That’ll happen.”

I read the paper sitting in my car outside Mo Bags Bail Bonds on Ocean Street in Chinatown. There wasn’t much in the article I hadn’t heard off the radio, but there was a picture of Karen Nichols taken from her driver’s license.

It was the same Karen Nichols who’d hired me six months before. In the picture she looked as bright and innocent as she had the day I met her, smiling into the camera as if the photographer had just told her what a pretty dress she had on, and what nice shoes, too.