The next morning, as Scott Pearse loaded mail into a box on the corner of Marlboro and Clarendon, Bubba hopped in his truck and drove away with it.
Pearse didn’t even realize it until Bubba turned onto Clarendon, and by the time he dropped his bag and gave chase, Bubba was turning onto Commonwealth and stepping on the gas pedal.
Angie pulled her Honda up beside the mailbox and I left the passenger door open as I jumped out, grabbed the canvas mailbag off the sidewalk, and got back in the car.
Pearse was still standing on the corner of Clarendon and Commonwealth, his back to us, as we drove away.
“By the end of this day,” Angie said as we turned onto Berklee and headed for Storrow Drive, “what do you think he’ll do?”
“I’m kinda hoping for something irrational.”
“Irrational can mean bloody.”
I turned in the seat and tossed the mailbag in back. “This guy’s proven, he has time to think, it ends up bloody anyway. I want to take thinking out of the equation. I want him to react.”
“So,” Angie said, “his car next?”
“Uh…”
“I know, Patrick, it’s a classic. I understand.”
“It’s the classic,” I said. “Possibly the single coolest car ever manufactured in America.”
She put her hand on my leg. “You said we’d be mean.”
I sighed, stared through the windshield at the cars on Storrow Drive. Not one of them, even the obscenely expensive ones, could hold a candle to the ’68 Shelby.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s be mean.”
He kept it parked in a garage on A Street in Southie, about a quarter mile from his loft. Nelson had seen him take it out one night, not for any particular purpose, just to open it up along the waterfront, take a spin around the harbor, and then return it to its roost. I know a lot of guys like that, ones who visit their cars in the storage garage like they’re pets in a boarding kennel, and then illogically feel pity for the lonely beast, strip off the car cover, and drive it around the block a few times.
Actually, I’m one of those guys. Angie used to say I’d grow out of it. More recently, she’s said she’s given up hope on that score.
We took a ticket at the booth, drove up two levels, and parked beside the Shelby, which, even under a thick car cover, was instantly identifiable. Angie gave me a pat on the back to buck me up and then took the stairs down to ground level to keep the attendant occupied with a city map, a tourist’s confusion, and a black mesh T-shirt that didn’t completely reach the waistband of her jeans.
I pulled the cover off the car and almost gasped. The 1968 Shelby Mustang GT-500 is to American automobiles what Shakespeare is to literature and the Marx Brothers are to comedy—that is to say, everything that came before was, in retrospect, a teaser, and everything that came after could never live up to the standard of perfection achieved in one brief blink of time.
I rolled under the car before my knees buckled from the wanting, ran my hand up under the chassis between the engine block and the fire wall, and felt around for a good three minutes before I found the alarm receiver. I yanked it free, rolled back out, and used a slim jim to open the driver’s door. I reached in and popped the hood, came around the front of the car, and stared in a near-trance at the word COBRA stamped in steel atop the filter cover and again along the oil tank, the sheer sense of compressed but certain power that emanated from the gleaming 428 engine.
It smelled clean under the hood, as if the engine and radiator and drive shaft and manifold had just been lifted off the assembly line. It smelled like a car that had been slaved over. Scott Pearse, whatever his feelings for the human race, had loved this car.
“I’m sorry,” I told the engine.
Then I went around to Angie’s trunk for the sugar, the chocolate syrup, and the rice.
After we dumped the contents of Pearse’s mailbag in a box on our side of the city, we returned to the office. I called Devin and asked for any data he could find on Timothy McGoldrick and he wrangled two tickets to October’s Patriots-Jets game out of me as a service fee.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ve been a season-ticket holder for thirteen years while they camped in the basement. Don’t take that game from me.”
“How do you spell that last name?”
“Dev, it’s a Monday night game.”
“Is it M-A-C or just M-C?”
“The latter,” I said. “You suck.”
“Hey, I noticed on the sheets this morning that someone shot the ever-living shit out of some guy’s loft on Sleeper Street. The vic’s name struck me as familiar. Know anything about that?”
“Pats versus Jets,” I said slowly.
“Tuna Bowl,” Devin cried. “Tuna Bowl! Seats still on the fifty?”
“Yup.”
“Rocking. Talk to you soon.” He hung up.
I leaned back in my seat, propped my heels on the belfry window.
Angie smiled at me from her desk. Behind her, an old black-and-white TV on the file cabinet broadcast a game show. A lot of people clapped and a few jumped up and down, but it had no effect on us. The volume on the thing had kicked the bucket years ago, but somehow we both find it comforting to leave it on when we’re up in the belfry.
“We’re making no money on this case,” she said.
“Nope.”
“You just destroyed a car you’ve waited your whole life to touch.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then gave away tickets to the biggest football game of the year.”
“That’s about the size of it.” I nodded.
“You going to cry soon?”
“Trying hard not to.”
“Because real men don’t cry?”
I shook my head. “I’m afraid if I start, I might not be able to stop.”
We had lunch as Angie printed up her case overview thus far, and the silent TV behind her aired a soap opera in which everyone dressed really well and seemed to shout a lot. Angie has always had a narrative talent I’ve never possessed, probably because she reads in her off-time while I just watch old movies and play a lot of video golf.
She’d charted the case from my notes regarding my first meeting with Karen Nichols, through Scott Pearse’s charade as Wesley Dawe, the maiming of Miles Lovell, the disappearance of Diane Bourne, the baby switch fourteen years ago that had given the Dawes a child who would fall through ice and ultimately bring Pearse into their lives, all the way up to the beginnings of our current frontal assault on Scott Pearse’s life, shaded, of course, in vague terminology such as “commenced exploitation of subject’s weaknesses as we perceived them.”
“Here’s my problem.” Angie handed me the last page.
Under the heading Prognosis, she’d written: “Subject seems to have no viable options left to pursue the Dawes or their money. Subject’s leverage was lost when C. Dawe realized his false identity as T. McGoldrick. Exploitation of subject’s weaknesses, while emotionally gratifying, seems to yield no finite result.”
“Finite,” I said.
“You like that?”
“And Bubba accuses me of showing off my college.”
“Seriously,” she said, placing her turkey sub down on the wax paper beside her desk blotter, “what possible reason could he have for pursuing the Dawes anymore? We blew him out of the water.” She looked at the clock behind her head. “By now, he’s been suspended or fired for losing both his truck and a lot of mail. His car’s fucked. His apartment’s blown to shit. He’s got nothing.”
“He’s got a trump card,” I said.
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. But he’s former military. He loves games. He’d have a fallback position, an ace in the hole. I know it.”
“I disagree. I think he blew his wad.”
“Nice mouth.”
She shrugged, took a bite from her sandwich.
“So you want to shut this case down?”
She nodded, swallowed her piece of sandwich and took a sip of Coke. “He’s done. I think we’ve punished him. We didn’t bring Karen Nichols back, but we rocked his world a bit. He had a few million within his reach and we snatched it from him. Stick a fork in him. It’s over.”
I considered it. There wasn’t much I could argue with. The Dawes were fully prepared to face exposure on the baby-switching they’d done. Carrie Dawe was no longer vulnerable to the charms of McGoldrick/Pearse. It wasn’t like Pearse could hit them over the head and take their money. And, I was reasonably sure, he hadn’t been prepared for us and just how hard we can hit back if you make us mad.
I’d been hoping to anger him to the point where he’d do something stupid. But what? Come after me or Angie or Bubba? There was no percentage in it. Angry or not, he’d see that. Kill Angie, and he’d sign his own death warrant. Kill me, and he’d have Bubba and my case notes to deal with. And as for Bubba, Pearse would have to know that it would be like launching an assault on an armored car with a squirt gun. He might pull it off, but he’d suffer a lot of damage, and again, to what end?
So, I had to agree in principle with Angie. Scott Pearse didn’t seem to pose much of a threat to anyone anymore.
Which is what worried me. It’s the exact moment that you perceive an opponent as defenseless that you, not he, are most vulnerable.
“Twenty-four more hours,” I said. “Can you give me that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, okay, Banacek, but not a second more.”
I bowed in appreciation and the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Tu-na!” Devin crowed. “Tu-na! Fucking Pah-cells,” he said in his best Revere accent, “I think he’s, like, God, but smahta.”
“Rub it in,” I said. “Wound’s still good and fresh.”
“Timothy McGoldrick,” Devin said. “There’s a bunch of them. But one stands out—born in 1965, died in 1967. Applied for a driver’s license in 1994.”
“He’s dead, but he drives.”
“Neat trick, huh? Lives at One-one-one-six Congress Street.”
I shook my head at the sheer size of Pearse’s balls. He kept a loft on 25 Sleeper Street and another place on Congress. It might seem like a short walk, but it got even shorter when you realized that his building on Sleeper Street also fronted Congress and both addresses were under the same roof.
“You still there?” Devin asked.
“Yeah.”
“No record on this guy. He’s clean.”
“Except that he’s dead.”
“That might interest the Census Bureau, sure.”
He hung up and I dialed the Dawes.
“Hello?” Carrie Dawe said.
“It’s Patrick Kenzie,” I said. “Is your husband home?”
“No.”
“Good. When you met McGoldrick, where did you meet?”
“Why?”
“Please.”
She sighed. “He sublet a place on Congress Street.”
“Corner of Congress and Sleeper?”
“Yes. How did you—”
“Never mind. You thought anymore about that gun in New Hampshire?”
“I’m thinking about it now.”
“He’s ruined,” I said. “He can’t hurt you.”
“He already did, Mr. Kenzie. And he hurt my daughter. What am I supposed to do with that—forgive?”
She hung up, and I looked over at Angie. “I’m not too keen on Carrie Dawe’s emotional state at the moment.”
“You think she still might go gunning for Pearse?”
“Possibly.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Pull Nelson off Pearse, put him on the Dawes for a while.”
“What’s Nelson charging you?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“Come on.”
“A buck fifty a day,” I said.
Her eyes widened. “You’re paying him a thousand-fifty a week?”
I shrugged. “It’s his price.”
“We’re going to go broke.”
I held up my index finger. “One more day.”
She spread her arms. “Why?”
Behind her, on the TV, they’d interrupted the soap opera for a live update from the banks of the Mystic River.
I pointed behind Angie’s head. “That’s why.”
She turned her head and looked up at the TV as frogmen pulled a small body from the water and several weathered-looking detectives waved off the cameras.
“Oh, shit,” Angie said.
I looked at the small gray face as the head came to rest on wet rocks, then the detectives succeeded in blocking the cameras with their hands.
Siobhan. She’d never have to worry about seeing Ireland again.