Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“So bushes don’t grow like that, ya fucking slug head. They’re bushes, you know? That makes them, ah, bushy.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. We both shook our heads.

Bubba thumped his index finger down on the bush in question. “See? It’s curved perfectly, like the top of my fingernail. That’s not nature. That’s fucking man, dude.” He dropped the magnifying glass. “You want my opinion, it’s a satellite dish.”

“A satellite dish.”

He nodded, walked to the fridge. “Yup.”

“For what purpose? To call in air strikes?”

He pulled a bottle of Finlandia from the freezer. “Doubtful. I’m guessing so’s they can watch TV.”

“Who?”

“The people living under that forest, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said.

He nudged Vanessa’s shoulder with the vodka bottle. “And you thought he was smarter than me.”

“Not smarter,” Vanessa said. “More articulate.”

Bubba took a swig of vodka, then belched. “Articulatedness is overrated.”

Vanessa smiled. “You do make that case, baby. Trust me.”

“She calls me ‘baby.’” Bubba took another shot from the bottle, winked at me.

“You said this used to be some kind of army nuthouse? My guess is there’s still a basement under those woods. A big one.”

The phone by his fridge rang and he picked it up, cradled it between his ear and shoulder, and said nothing. After about a minute, he hung it back up.

“Nelson lost Pearse.”

“What?”

He nodded.

“Where?” I said.

“Rowes Wharf,” he said. “That hotel there? Pearse walks in, stands around on the pier. Nelson stays inside, you know, hanging back, being cool. Pearse waits till the last second, jumps on the airport ferry.”

“So why didn’t Nelson drive out to the airport, meet him on the other side?”

“He tried.” Bubba tapped his watch. “It’s five o’clock on a Friday, man. You ever try the tunnel then? Nelson gets over to Eastie, it’s five-forty-five. The ferry docked at five-twenty. Your man is gone.”

Angie buried her face in her hands, shook her head. “You were right, Patrick.”

“How?”

“Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it now.”

Fifteen minutes later, after I’d called Carrie Dawe, we stood by Bubba’s door as he carried a black duffel bag across the floor to us and dropped it by our feet.

Vanessa, so tiny in comparison to the mountain that was Bubba, stepped up close to him and put her hands on his chest.

“Is this where I’m supposed to say, ‘Be careful’?”

He jerked a thumb back at us. “I dunno. Ask them.”

She looked out from under his arm at us.

We both nodded.

“Be careful,” she said.

Bubba pulled a.38 from his pocket, handed it to her. “The safety’s off. Anyone comes through that door, shoot ’em. Like a bunch of times.”

She looked up at the greasepaint on his forehead and under his eyelids, the smatterings on his cheekbones.

“Can I get a kiss?”

“In front of them ?” Bubba shook his head.

Angie whacked my arm. “We’re looking at the door.”

We turned to the door, stared at the metal, the four locks, the reinforced steel bar.

Even now, I don’t know if they kissed or not.

Christopher Dawe was where his wife had told us he’d be.

He backed his Bentley out of the Brimmer Street garage and we blocked him in from the front with Bubba’s van and from the back with my Porsche.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said as he rolled down his window and I approached.

“There’s a gym bag in your trunk,” I said. “How much is in it?”

“Go to hell.” His lower lip quivered.

“Doctor,” I said and leaned my arm on the hood, looked down at him, “your wife told us you received a phone call from Pearse. How much is in the bag?”

“Step back from the car.”

“Doctor,” I said, “he’ll kill you. Wherever it is you think you’re going, whatever it is you think you’re walking into, you won’t walk back out.”

“I will,” he said, and his lower lip quivered even more and a fragmentation found his eyes.

“What does he have on you?” I said. “Doctor? Please. Help me end this.”

He stared up at me, trying for defiance, but losing the battle. He clamped his teeth down on his lower lip, and his narrow face seemed to turn concave, and then tears rolled from his eyes and his shoulders shook.

“I can’t…I can’t…” His shoulders jerked up and down, up and down, like he was riding whitewater rapids and had lost his oar. He sucked in a high-pitched breath. “I can’t take another second of this.” His mouth formed a plaintive O and his cheeks turned to rubber, formed riverbeds for the tears.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to. Give me the weight, Doctor. I’ll carry it.”

He closed his eyes tight and shook his head repeatedly and the tears stained his suit like white rain.

I knelt by the door. “Doctor,” I said softly, “she’s watching.”

“Who?” It came out strangled, but loud.

“Karen,” I said. “I believe that. Look in my face.”

His head turned tightly, as if pushed to its left, and he opened his bleary eyes, looked into my own.

“She’s watching. I want to do right by her.”

“You barely knew her.”

I held his eyes. “I barely know anyone.”

His eyes widened, then immediately closed again, and he tightened them to slits, the tears sprouting out hot and barren.

“Wesley,” he said.

“What about him? Doctor? What about him?”

He slapped the seat console several times. He slapped the dashboard. He slapped the wheel. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and removed a plastic bag. It was wrapped up tight so that it was the shape of a cigar when he pulled it out, but then he held it aloft, and the bag unfurled, and I saw what was trapped inside and I felt the hissing of the night’s heat on the back of my skull.

A finger.

“It’s his,” Christopher Dawe said. “Wesley’s. He sent it to me this afternoon. He said…he said…he said unless I delivered the money to a rest stop on Route Three, he’d send me a testicle next.”

“Which rest stop?”

“Just before the Marshfield exit, heading south.”

I glanced at the bag. “How do you know it’s your son’s?”

He screamed, “He’s my son!”

I lowered my head for a moment, swallowed. “Yes, sir, but how are you sure?”

He shoved the bag in my face. “See? See the scar over the knuckle?”

I looked. It was faint but unmistakable. It perforated the lines over the knuckle like a small asterisk.

“See it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the imprint of a Phillips-head screw. Wesley fell in my workshop when he was young. He embedded the screw head into his knuckle, shattered the bone.” He hit my face with the bag. “My son’s finger, Mr. Kenzie!”

I didn’t lean back from the slap of the bag. I held his wild eyes, willed mine to be calm, flat.

After a while, he removed the bag, rolled it back up very carefully, and placed it back inside his suit pocket. He sniffed, wiped at the wetness on his face. He stared out the windshield at Bubba’s van.

“I want to die,” he said.

“That’s what he wants you to feel,” I said.

“Then he’s succeeded.”

“Why not call in the police?” I said, and he began to violently shake his head. “Doctor? Why not? You’re willing to come clean on what you did with Naomi when she was a baby. We know who’s behind this now. We can nail him.”

“My son,” he said, still shaking his head.

“Could already be dead,” I said.

“He’s all I have. If I lose him because I called the police, I will die, Mr. Kenzie. Nothing will hold me back.”