Prayers for Rain (Kenzie & Gennaro 5)

“All right.”

“Thanks, man.”

“No sweat. You be there?”

“I’ll be long gone,” I said.

“Thanks for the tip, brother. I owe you.”

“You don’t owe anybody anything, man.”

“Peace.” He hung up.

I found a roll of electrical tape on a shelf and then let myself back into the house through the other door in the garage, came out into a rec room, empty except for a Stair-Master in the center, a few curling bars on the floor. I walked through that and opened another door onto the kitchen, took two steps, and was standing over Cody Falk again.

“What guy?” he said immediately. “You said you knew a guy. Who are you talking about?”

I said, “Cody, this is very important.”

“What guy?”

“Shut up about the guy. I’ll get to him. Cody, listen to me.”

He looked up at me, all sweet and harmless and willing to please suddenly, the fear treading water like mad behind his eyes.

“I need an honest answer, and I don’t care what it is. I won’t blame you on this one. I just need to know. Did you or did you not vandalize Karen Nichols’s car?”

The same confusion I’d seen in his face that night I’d come here with Bubba filled it again.

“No,” he said firmly. “I…I mean, that’s not my style. Why would I fuck up a perfectly good car?”

I nodded. He was telling the truth.

And some small alarm bell had gone off in my head that night in the garage with Bubba, but I’d been too angry at Cody’s stalking and rape history to listen to it.

“You really didn’t, did you?”

He shook his head. “No.” He glanced at his ankle. “Could I have some ice?”

“Don’t you want to hear about this guy?”

He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Who is he?”

“He’s a nice guy mostly. Regular dude, works a job, has a life. But a decade ago two sick fucks broke into his house and raped his wife and daughter when he wasn’t home. They never caught the guys. His wife recovered as best women can after encounters with assholes like you, but his daughter, Cody? She just locked herself up in her brain and floated away. She’s in an institution now, ten years later. She doesn’t talk. She just stares out into space. Twenty-three years old now, and she looks forty.” I lowered myself to my haunches in front of Cody. “So, this guy? Ever since, he hears about a rapist, he gathers this, I dunno, posse, I guess you’d call it, and they…Well, you ever hear the story about that guy a few years back in the D Street projects-they found him bleeding from every orifice with his own dick cut off and stuck in his mouth?”

Cody ground the back of his head into the fridge and gagged.

“So you’re familiar with that story,” I said. “That’s not urban legend, that’s fact, Cody. That was my buddy and his crew.”

Cody’s voice was a whisper. “Please.”

“Please?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s good. Try that with this guy and his friends.”

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t.”

“Keep working at it, Cody,” I said. “You almost got the hang of it.”

“No,” Cody moaned.

I pulled a foot of electrical tape from the roll, snapped it off in my teeth. “See, I figure with Karen, maybe half of it was a mistake. You did get those notes and you are dumb, so…” I shrugged.

“Please,” he said. “Please, please, please.”

“But there have been a lot of other women, haven’t there, Cody? Ones who never asked for it. Ones who never pressed charges.”

Cody tried to drop his eyes before I could see the truth there.

“Wait,” he whispered. “I have money.”

“Spend it on a therapist. After my buddy and his friends get through with you, you’re going to need one.”

I slapped the electrical tape over his mouth and his eyes bulged.

He screamed and the sound was muffled and helpless behind the tape.

“Bon voyage, Cody.” I walked to the glass doors. “Bon voyage.”

12

The priest who presided over the noon mass at Saint Dominick of the Sacred Heart Church acted like he had tickets for the Sox game at one. Father McKendrick strode up the front aisle at the stroke of twelve with two altar boys who had to jog to keep pace. He riffled through the greeting, penitential rite, and opening prayer like his Bible was afire. He zipped through Paul’s Letter to the Romans as if Paul drank too much coffee. By the time he slammed through the Gospel According to Luke and waved the parishioners to sit, it was seven past noon and most of the people in the pews looked wiped.

He gripped the lectern in both hands, stared down into the pews with a coldness bordering on disdain. “Paul wrote: ‘We must wake from darkness and clothe ourselves in the armor of light.’ What does that mean, you think-to wake from darkness, to wear armor of light?”

In the days when I went with any regularity, I’d always liked this part of the mass least. The priest would attempt to explain deeply symbolic language penned almost two thousand years ago and then apply his explanation to the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, the Bruins’ Stanley Cup chances. He’d wear you out with his grasping.

“Well, it means what it says,” Father McKendrick said as if he were talking to a room full of first-graders who’d ridden in on the short bus. “It means get out of bed. Leave the darkness of your venal desires, your petty bickerings, your hating of your neighbors and distrust of your spouse and allowing your children to be raised and corrupted by TV. Get outside, Paul says, out in the fresh air! Into the light! God is the moon and the stars and He is most definitely the sun. Feel the sun’s warmth. Pass that warmth on. Do good things. Give extra to the collection boxes today. Feel the Lord working in you. Donate the clothes you like to a shelter. Feel the Lord. He is the armor of light. Get out and do what’s right.” He thumped the lectern for emphasis. “Do what’s light . Do you see?”

I looked around the pews. Several people nodded. No one looked like he had the first clue as to what Father McKendrick was talking about.

“Well then,” he said. “Good. All rise.”

We stood back up. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes flat. The fastest sermon I’d ever witnessed. Father McKendrick definitely had Red Sox tickets.