I turned in my chair, looked into the restaurant for the sandy-haired man. He wasn’t at a table. He wasn’t at the bar as far as I could see.
“Who is this?” I said.
“What a tearful breakup scene, Pat. For a minute, I was pretty sure she’d toss a drink in your face.”
He knew my name.
I turned again in the chair, looked along the sidewalk for him, for anyone with a cellular phone.
“You’re right,” I said. “The chair’s free. Come on back and get it.”
His voice was the same gentle monotone I’d heard on the patio when he’d tried to take the chair. “She has incredible lips, that attorney. Incredible. I don’t think they’re implants either. Do you?”
“Yeah,” I said, scanning the other side of the street, “they’re nice lips. Come on back for the chair.”
“And she’s asking you, Pat—she’s asking you—to come slide your dick through those lips and you say no? What’re you, gay?”
“You bet,” I said. “Come on back and fag-bash me. Use the chair.”
I peered through the rain at the windows on the other side of the street.
“And she picked up the check,” he said, his soft monotone like a whisper in a dark room. “She picked up the check, wanted to blow you, looks like six or seven million bucks—fake tits, true, but nice fake tits, and hey, no one’s perfect—and you still say no. Hats off to you, buddy. You’re a stronger man than me.”
A man with a baseball cap on his head and an umbrella raised above him walked through the mist toward me, a cellular pressed to his ear, his strides loose and confident.
“Me,” the voice said, “I’d figure her for a screamer. Lots of ‘Oh, Gods’ and ‘Harder, harders.’”
I said nothing. The man with the baseball cap was still too far away for me to see his face, but he was getting closer.
“Can I be frank with you, Pat? A piece of ass like that comes along so seldom that if I were in your place—and I’m not, I know that, but if I were—I’d just feel compelled to go back with her to that apartment on Exeter, and I gotta be honest with you, Pat, I’d hump her till the blood ran down her thighs.”
I felt cold moisture that didn’t come from the rain seep down behind my ear.
“Really?” I said.
The man with the baseball cap was close enough for me to see his mouth, and his lips moved as he approached.
The guy on the other end of the line was silent, but somewhere on his end, I could hear a truck grind its gears, the patter of rain off a car hood.
“…and I can’t do that, Melvin, if you’ve got half my shit tied up offshore.” The man in the baseball cap passed me, and I could see he was at least twice the age of the guy from the patio.
I stood, looked as far up and down the street as I could.
“Pat,” the guy on the phone said.
“Yeah?”
“Your life is about to get…” He paused and I could hear him breathing.
“My life’s about to get what?” I said.
He smacked his lips. “Interesting.”
And he hung up.
I swung my body over the wrought-iron fence that separated the patio from the sidewalk, and the rain found my head and chest as I stood on the sidewalk for a while with people walking around me and occasionally jostling a shoulder. Eventually, I realized standing there did no good. The guy could be anywhere. He could have called from the next county. The truck that had ground its gears in the background hadn’t been in my immediate vicinity or I would have heard it on my end.
But he’d been close enough to know when Vanessa left and to call within a minute of her abrupt departure.
So, no, he wasn’t in another county. He was here in Back Bay. But even so, that was a lot of ground to cover.
I started walking again, my eyes searching the streets for a glimpse of him. I dialed Vanessa’s number and when she answered, I said, “Don’t hang up.”
“Okay.”
She hung up.
I gritted my teeth and pressed redial.
“Vanessa, please listen a sec. Someone just threatened you.”
“What?”
“That guy you thought was a friend of mine on the patio?”
“Yes…” she said slowly, and I heard Clarence yip in the background.
“He called me when you left. He’s a total stranger, Vanessa, but he knew my name, and your occupation, and he made it clear to me that he knew where you lived.”
She gave me that martini chuckle of hers. “And let me see, you need to come over here to protect me? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t need these games. You want to fuck me, you should have said yes on the patio.”
“Vanessa, no. I want you to go to a hotel for a while. Now. Send my office the bill.”
The chuckle was replaced by a mean laugh. “Because some weirdo knows where I live?”
“This guy’s not your average weirdo.”
I turned on Hereford, walked toward Commonwealth Avenue. The rain had lessened, but the mist had thickened around it, turned the air to warm onion soup.
“Patrick, I’m a defense attorney. Hang on—Clarence, down! Down, now! Sorry,” she said to me. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Do you know how many gangbangers and petty sociopaths and freaks in general have threatened my life when I’ve failed to get them Get Out of Jail Free cards? Are you serious?”
“This may be a little different.”
“According to a screw I know at Cedar Junction, Karl Kroft—whom I unsuccessfully defended on murder one and ag rape—drew up a shit list—and I’m being quite literal here—in his cell. And before—”
“Vanessa.”
“And before they wiped it off, Patrick, and put dear Karl under twenty-four-hour watch, my friend the guard said he saw the list. He said my name was number one. Above Karl’s ex-wife, who he’d already tried to kill once with a saw.”
I wiped thick condensation from my eyes, wished I’d worn a hat. “Vanessa, just listen a second. I think this—”
“I live in a building with twenty-four-hour security and two doormen, Patrick. You’ve seen how hard it is to get in. I have six locks on my front door, and even if you could reach my windows on the fourteenth floor, they’re impenetrable. I have Mace, Patrick. I have a stun gun. And if that doesn’t work, I have a real gun, fully loaded, and always within reach.”
“Listen. That guy they found in the cranberry bog last week with his tongue and hands cut off. He was—”
Her voice rose. “And if anyone can get past all that, then, Patrick, fuck it, they can have me. Hell, they certainly put in the effort.”
“I understand, but—”
“Ta, sweetie. Good luck with your latest weirdo.”
She hung up, and I clenched the phone in my hand as I crossed into the Commonwealth Avenue mall, a mile-long stretch of green grass and ebony trees, small benches and tall statues, that cuts up the center of the avenue between the east- and westbound lanes.
Warren Martens had said that Miles Lovell’s friend dressed shabby-rich. That he had an air about him that suggested power or at least a power complex.
That pretty much described the guy on the patio.
Wesley Dawe, I wondered. Could this be Wesley? Wesley was blond, but the height and build were right, and hair dye is cheap and easily obtained.
My car was parked four blocks down Commonwealth, and while the rain was light, it was steady, and the mist was threatening to turn into a fog. Whoever the guy was, I decided, he’d either chosen or been sent to rattle my cage, to let me know that he knew me, and I didn’t know him, and that made me vulnerable and gave him a semblance of omnipotence.
I’ve had my cage rattled by pros, though—wiseguys, cops, gangbangers, and in one case a pair of bona fide serial killers—so the days when a disembodied voice on the other end of a phone line could give me the shakes and a dry mouth were gone. Still, it did have me guessing, which may have been the point.
My cell phone rang. I stopped under the canopy of a tree, and it rang a second time. No shakes or dry mouth. Just a small quickening of the pulse. Midway through the third ring, I answered.
“Hello.”
“Hey, pal. Where you at?”
Angie. My pulse slowed.
“Comm Ave., heading to my car. You?”
“Outside an office in the Jeweler’s Exchange.”
“Fun with your diamond merchant?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s aces. When he isn’t hitting on me, he’s telling racist jokes to his male bodyguards.”
“Some girls have all the luck.”
“Yeah. Well, just thought I’d check in. I meant to tell you something, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“That’s helpful.”
“No, it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but…Well, whatever, he’s coming out again. I’ll call you back when I think of it.”
“Cool.”
“Okay. McGarrett out.” She hung up.
I stepped out from under the tree and had taken all of four steps when Angie remembered what she’d forgotten and called back.
“You remember?” I said.
“Hi, Pat,” the sandy-haired guy said. “Enjoying the rain?”
An extra heart appeared in the center of my chest and began to thump. “Loving it. You?”
“I’ve always liked rain, myself. Let me ask you—was that your partner you were talking to?”
I’d been under a large tree on the southern side of the mall. No way he could have seen me from the north. That left east, west, and south.
“Don’t have a partner, Wesley.” I looked south. The sidewalk across from me was empty except for a young woman being pulled across the slick concrete by three large dogs.
“Ha!” he shouted. “Very quick, Pat. You’re good, buddy. Or was that a lucky guess?”
I looked east to Clarendon Street. Just street traffic crossing at the light, no one on a cellular that I could see.
“Little of both, Wesley. Little of both.”
“Well, I’m real proud of you, Pat.”
I turned very slowly to my right and through the thick mist and drizzle, I saw him.
He stood on the southeast corner of Dartmouth and Commonwealth. He’d covered his upper half with a hooded, transparent slicker. When our eyes met, he gave me a wide grin and waved.
“Now you see me…” he said.
I took a step off the curb and cars that had just jumped off the light at Dartmouth screamed past. A Karmann Ghia almost clipped my kneecap as its horn blared and it jerked a hair to its right.
“Oooh,” Wesley said. “Close one. Careful, Pat. Careful.”
I walked along the edge of the mall toward Dartmouth, my eyes on Wesley as he took several casual steps backward.
“I knew a guy who got hit by a car once,” Wesley said as I lost him around the corner.
I broke into a trot and reached Dartmouth. The traffic continued to smoke the road in front of me, rain hissing off the tires. Wesley stood at the mouth of the public alley that ran parallel to Commonwealth Avenue from the Public Garden to the Fens a mile west.
“This guy tripped and a car fender hit his head while he was down. Turned his frontal lobe to egg salad.”
The light turned yellow, but this was merely an excuse for eight cars in two lanes to speed up as they broke through the intersection.
Wesley gave me another wave and disappeared into the alley.
“Always be careful, Pat. Always.”
I bolted across the avenue as a Volvo turned right onto Commonwealth and cut me off. The driver, a woman, shook her head at me, and then roared down the avenue.
I reached the sidewalk, spoke into the phone as I ran toward the mouth of the alley. “Wesley, you still there, buddy?”
“I’m not your buddy,” he whispered.
“But you said you were.”
“I lied, Pat.”
I reached the alley and slid on the sole strip of cobblestone at its mouth, banged into an overflowing Dumpster. A soaked paper bag exploded upward from the Dumpster and a rat surged up and over the edge, dropped to the alley. A cat that had been lying in wait under the Dumpster took off after it, and the two of them bolted the length of a city block in about six seconds. The cat looked big and mean, but so did the rat, and I wondered who exactly was controlling the chase. If I’d been betting, I’d have to have given a slight edge to the rat.
“You ever play Bronco Buster?” Wesley whispered.
“Which?” I looked up at the fire escapes dripping water from chipped iron. Nothing.
“Bronco Buster,” Wesley whispered. “It’s a game. Try it with Vanessa Moore some night. What you do is you mount the woman from behind, doggie style. You with me?”
“Sure.” I walked down the center of the alley, peering through the fog and drizzle at the rear doorways of opulent town houses, the small garages, and the shadowed places where buildings met buildings and some jutted out and others didn’t.
“So you have her from behind and you slip your dick in there so it’s good and firm, as deep as it can go. How deep would that be in your case, Pat?”
“I’m Irish, Wesley. You figure it out.”
“None too deep, then,” he said, and a low “ha-ha” rode his whisper.
I craned my head up at the odd collection of small wooden decks that protruded from the brick, like lean-tos for those underneath. I peered up at the cracks between the wood slats, looking for any shape resembling feet.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “once the two of you are attached good and snug, you whisper another woman’s name in her ear and then hold on tight like a bronco buster as the bitch goes wild.”
I spotted a few roof gardens, but they were too high up to tell if anyone was in them, and besides, none of the fire escapes looked close enough for easy access.
“Think you’d like that game, Pat?”
I turned a slow 360, willed my eyes to relax, to glide over the surface and see if anything incongruous showed itself.
“I asked if you’d like that game, Pat.”
“No, Wes.”
“Too bad. Oh, Pat?”
“What, Wes?”
“Take another look due east.”
I turned 180 degrees to my right and saw him down the far end of the alley, a tall figure made opaque by the fog, silhouette of a phone held to his ear.
“Whattaya say?” he said. “Let’s play.”
I broke into a run and he bolted as soon as I did. I heard the slap and clatter of his feet on wet cement and then he broke the connection.
By the time I reached the Clarendon Street end of the alley, he was gone. Shoppers and tourists and high school students filled the sidewalks. I saw men in trench coats and yellow macs and construction workers drenched to the bone. I saw steam rising from the sewer grates and enveloping taxis as they rolled past. I saw a kid on Rollerblades wipe out in front of a parking lot on Newbury. But not Wesley.
Just the mist and rain he’d left behind.