Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

Angie turned from the map, spoke to Himbo. “We’re interested in purchasing parcel eight-sixty-five. Could you tell us who owns it?”

Himbo gave her a brilliant smile of the whitest teeth I’d seen on a man this side of David Hasselhoff. Caps, I decided. Bet the bastard wears caps.

“Sure.” His fingers zipped over his computer keyboard. “That was eight-sixty-five. Correct?”

“You got it,” Angie said.

I peered up at the parcel. Nothing around it. No eight-six-six or eight-six-four. Nothing for at least twenty acres, maybe more.

“Spooky Land,” Himbo said softly, his eyes on the computer screen.

“What’s that?”

He looked up, startled to realize, I think, that he’d spoken aloud. “Oh, well…” He gave us an embarrassed smile. “When we were kids, we used to call that area Spooky Land. We’d dare each other to walk through it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.” He looked down at his keyboard. “See, no one’s supposed to know…”

“But…?” Angie leaned into the counter.

Himbo shrugged. “Hey, it’s been over thirty years. Heck, I wasn’t even born then.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thirty years.”

He leaned into the counter, lowered his voice, and his eyes glinted like a born gossip about to dish some dirt. “Back in the fifties, the army supposedly kept a kinda research facility there. Nothing big, my parents said, just a few stories tall, but real hush-hush.”

“What kind of research?”

“People.” He stifled a nervous laugh with his fist. “Supposedly mental patients and the retarded. See, that’s what scared us as kids-you know, that the ghosts running around Spooky Land were the ghosts of lunatics.” He held up his hands, took one step back. “It could all have been a ghost story used by our parents to keep us away from the bog.”

Angie gave him her most lascivious smile. “But you know different, don’t you?”

His ivory skin flushed. “Well, I did do some checking once.”

“And?”

“And there was a structure on that land until 1964, when it was either razed or burned, and the land was owned by the government until ’95, when it sold at auction.”

“To?” I asked.

He looked at the computer screen. “Bourne is the owner of record of parcel eight-sixty-five. Diane Bourne.”

The Plymouth Library had an aerial map of the entire town. It was relatively current, too, the photo taken just a year ago on a cloudless day. We spread the map across a large table in the reference room, used a magnifying glass we’d bummed from the librarian, and after about ten minutes, we found the cranberry bog, then moved a tenth of an inch to the right across the map.

“There’s nothing there,” Angie said.

I moved the glass in micro-increments over the blurry patch of green and brown. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a roof.

I raised the magnifying glass slightly, considered the whole area. “We got the right bog?”

Angie’s finger appeared under the magnifying glass. “Yeah. There’s the access road. That looks like the equipment shed. There’s Myles Standish forest. That’s it. So much for your psychic dream.”

“Diane Bourne owns this land,” I said. “You telling me that means nothing?”

“I’m telling you,” she said, “that there’s no house in there.”

“There’s something,” I said. “There has to be.”

The bugs were angry. It was another hot, humid day, the heat steaming the surface of the bog, the cranberries smelling sharp and spoiled in the heat. The sun beat down like the flat of a razor blade, and the mosquitoes smelled our flesh and went nuts.

Angie slapped the backs of her legs and neck so much that pretty soon I couldn’t tell which red welts were from the bloodsuckers and which were from her hands.

For a while I tried the Zen trick of ignoring them, willing my body to seem unattractive. After a few hundred bites or so, though, I thought, fuck Zen. Confucius never lived in ninety-eight percent humidity on a ninety-two-degree day. If he had, he’d have hacked off a few heads and told the emperor he was fresh out of peppy bromides until someone outfitted the palace with AC.

We crouched along the tree line on the eastern side of the bog and peered through binoculars. If Scott Pearse of the Special Forces and Panamanian brothel massacre did hide out back in these woods, I was pretty sure there’d be trip wires, defenses I couldn’t see, Bouncing Betties waiting to make any possibility of Viagra in my future a moot point.

But all I could see from here were woods, parched brambles grown brittle with heat, withered birches and knotty pines, crumbling moss the texture of asbestos. It was one ugly plot of land, fetid and irritable in the heat.

I scoped everything within range of the binoculars Bubba had picked up from a navy SEAL, and even with all that power and clarity, I didn’t see a house.

Angie slapped another mosquito. “I’m dying here.”

“You see anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Focus on the ground.”

“Why?”

“It could be underground.”

She slapped her flesh again. “Fine.”

Another five minutes, and we’d lost blood from every pore and still found nothing but forest floor, pine needles, squirrels, and moss.

“It’s in there,” I said as we walked back across the bogs.

“I’m not staking it out,” she said.

“Not asking you to.”

We climbed in the Porsche, and I took one long look across the bog at the stand of trees.

“That’s where he hides,” I said.

“Then I’d say he’s hiding pretty well,” Angie said.

I started the car, dropped my elbow over the wheel, stared at the trees.

“He knows me.”

“What?”

I glanced at the shed in the center of the cross.

“Pearse. He knows me. He’s got my number.”

“And you have his,” Angie said.

“Not as well,” I admitted.

The stand of trees seemed to whisper. They seemed to groan.

Stay away, they said. Stay away.

“He knew I’d find this place eventually. Maybe not as quickly as I did, but eventually.”

“So?”

“So, he’s gotta move. He’s gotta move fast. Whatever he’s planning, it’s either about to happen, or it’s already in motion.”

She reached out and her palm found my lower back.

“Patrick, don’t let him in your head. He wants that.”

I stared at the trees, then the shed, then the bloody, misting bog.

“Too late,” I said.

“This is a shitty Xerox,” Bubba said. He looked down at the copy we’d made of the cranberry bog grid from the aerial map.

“It’s the best we could do.”

He shook his head. “Intel like this, my headstone would be in Beirut.”

“How come you don’t talk about that?” Vanessa sat on the bar stool behind him.

“Which?” he said absently, his eyes on the Xerox.

“Beirut.”

He turned his huge head, smiled at her. “Lights went out, things went boom. I lost my sense of smell for three years. Now I’ve talked about it.”

She backhanded his chest with her fingers. “Bastard.”

He chuckled, looked back at the Xerox. “That’s wrong.”

“What?”

He lifted the magnifying glass we’d brought, held it over the grid. “That.”

Angie and I looked over his shoulder through the glass. All I could see was a clump of green, a bush photographed from two thousand feet.

“It’s a bush,” I said.

“Ah, duh,” Bubba said. “Look again.”

We looked.

“What?” Angie said.

“It’s too oval,” he said. “Look at the top. It’s smooth. It’s like the top of this magnifying glass.”

“So?” I offered.