Access to the loft was out of the question. There was no way to bug the place. Each night when he entered, Scott Pearse disengaged an alarm inside the front door. Video cameras were positioned in the upper corners of the loft and triggered, I suspected, by motion detectors. Even if we could get past all that, Scott Pearse, I was pretty sure, had defenses I couldn’t see, backup plans to his backup plans.
I was beginning to wonder, as I sat up on the roof every night and fought off sleep while I watched him do nothing upon nothing, if maybe he was on to us. Knew we’d discovered who he was. It seemed unlikely, but still, all it would have taken was a casual anecdote from the postman I’d run into on the street. Hey, Scott, some guy thought you were his old college roommate, but I set him straight.
One night, Scott Pearse walked to his window. He sipped some scotch. He stared down at the street. He raised his head and looked directly at me. But it wasn’t me he was looking at. In a room bathed in track lighting, with the dark night outside his window forming a slate wall before him, all he’d be able to see would be his own reflection.
He must have been fascinated with it, though, because he stared in my direction for a long time. Then he raised his glass, as if in a toast. And smiled.
We moved Vanessa at night, took her out via the service elevator and along a maintenance corridor, out through a back door into the alley behind her building, and drove her away in Bubba’s van. Vanessa, unlike most women if they’d just climbed into a van and found Bubba in back with them, didn’t blink several times or gasp or move as far away as possible. She sat on the bench that ran from behind the driver’s seat to the rear doors and lit a cigarette.
“Ruprecht Rogowski,” she said. “Right?”
Bubba stifled a yawn with his fist. “No one calls me Ruprecht.”
She held up a hand as Angie pulled the van out of the alley. “My mistake. It’s Bubba, then?”
Bubba nodded.
“What’s your stake in all this, Bubba?”
“Guy killed a dog. I like dogs.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Let me ask you—you got a problem spending time with a mental defective who’s got what they call ‘antisocial tendencies’?”
She smiled. “You are aware what it is I do for a living?”
“Sure,” Bubba said. “You got my buddy Nelson Ferrare off.”
“How is Mr. Ferrare?”
“Same old,” Bubba said.
Nelson, as they spoke, was in fact taking my place on the rooftop across from Scott Pearse’s place. He’d just returned from Atlantic City, where he’d fallen in love with a cocktail waitress who’d loved him back until he ran out of money. Now he was back in town, willing to do anything for a little cash and a chance to go back to his cocktail waitress and run out of money again.
“Does he still fall in love with every woman he sees?” Vanessa asked.
“Pretty much.” Bubba rubbed his chin. “So we’re clear, sister, here’s the deal: I’m going to stick to you like crabs.”
“Like crabs,” Vanessa said. “How appealing.”
“You’ll sleep at my place,” Bubba said, “eat with me, drink with me, and I’ll be with you in court. Till the mailman goes down, you’re never out of my sight. Get used to it.”
“Can’t wait,” Vanessa said, then shifted on the bench. “Patrick?”
I turned fully in the captain’s chair, looked over at her. “Yeah?”
“You’ve decided not to guard my body?”
“We have a past relationship. That means I’m compromised emotionally. Makes me the worst choice for the job.”
She looked at the back of Angie’s head as Angie turned onto Storrow Drive. “Compromised,” she said. “Sure.”
“Scott Pearse,” Devin said the next night at Nash’s Pub on Dorchester Avenue, “was born in the Philippines to military parents stationed in Subic Bay. Grew up all over the globe.” He opened his notebook, leafed through it until he found the correct page. “West Germany, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, Alaska, Georgia, and finally, Kansas.”
“Kansas?” Angie said. “Not Missouri.”
“Kansas,” Devin repeated.
Devin’s partner, Oscar Lee, said, “Surrender, Dorothy. Surrender.”
Angie narrowed her eyes at him, shook her head.
Oscar shrugged, picked his dead cigar out of the ashtray and relit it.
“Father was a colonel,” Devin said. “Colonel Ryan Pearse of Army Intelligence, designation classified.” He looked at Oscar. “But we got friends.”
Oscar looked at me and jerked his cigar back at his partner. “Notice White Boy always says ‘we’ when he talks about me and my sources?”
“It’s a race thing,” Devin assured us.
Oscar tapped some ash off his cigar. “Colonel Pearse was Psych Ops.”
“Which?” Angie said.
“Psychological Operations,” Oscar said. “Kind of guy gets paid to think up new ways to torture the enemy, spread disinformation, generally fuck with your head.”
“Was Scott his only son?”
“You betcha,” Devin said. “Mother divorced the father when the son was eight, moved to some shitty subsidized housing in Lawrence. Restraining orders against the father follow. She drags his ass into court a few times, and here’s where it gets fun. She claims the father is using psych ops against her, fucking with her mind, trying to make everyone think she was crazy. But she’s got no proof. Father gets the restraining orders dropped eventually, gains bimonthly visitation rights with the kid, and one day the kid comes home when he’s, like, eleven to find Mommy sitting on the living room couch with her wrists cut open.”
“Suicide,” Angie said.
“Yup,” Oscar said. “Kid goes to live with the father on base, joins Special Forces when he turns eighteen, gets an HD after—”
“A what?”
“An honorable discharge,” Oscar said, “after serving in Panama during that five-minute conflict over there in late ’89. And this made me curious.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Oscar said, “these Special Forces guys, they’re career soldiers. They don’t just do a couple of years and muster out like regular grunts. They’re after Langley or the Pentagon. Plus, Pearse should have come back from Panama in the catbird seat: He had honest-to-God battle time now. He should have been it, you know?”
“But?” Angie said.
“But he wasn’t,” Oscar said. “So I called another of my buddies”—he shot a look at Devin—“and he did some digging and essentially your boy, Pearse, got shitcanned.”
“For what?”
“Lieutenant Pearse’s unit, under his immediate command, hit the wrong target. He was almost court-martialed because he gave the orders. In the end, he knew some brass with pull because he and his unit escaped with the military equivalent of a severance package. They walked with HD’s, but no Pentagon, no Langley for those boys.”
“What target?” Angie said.
“They were supposed to hit a building allegedly housing members of Noriega’s secret police. Instead they went two doors down.”
“And?”
“Wasted a whorehouse at six in the morning. Sprayed everyone inside. Two johns, both Panamanian, and five prostitutes. Your boy then allegedly walked through the room and bayonetted all the female corpses before they torched the place. That’s just rumor, mind you, but that’s what my source remembers hearing.”
“And the army,” Angie said, “never prosecuted.”
Oscar looked at her like she was drunk. “It was Panama. Remember? Killed nine times as many civilians as military personnel? All to capture a drug dealer with former ties to the CIA during the administration of a president who used to run the CIA. This shit was fishy enough without calling attention to your mistakes. The rule of combat’s simple—if there are photographs or members of the press in attendance? You broke it, you buy it. But if not, and you cap the wrong guy or guys or village?” He shrugged. “Shit happens. Set t
he torches and march double-time.”
“Five women,” Angie said.
“Oh, he didn’t kill ’em all,” Oscar said. “The whole squad went in there and unloaded. Nine guys firing ten rounds a second.”
“No, he didn’t kill them all,” Angie said. “He just made sure they were all dead.”
“With a bayonet,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Devin said, and lit a cigarette, “if there were only nice people in the world, we’d lose our jobs. Anyway, Scott Pearse musters out, comes back to the States, lives with his dad, who’s retired, a couple years, and then his dad dies of a heart attack and a few months later, Scott wins the lottery.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he won the Kansas State Lottery.”
“Bullshit.”
He shook his head, held up a hand. “On my mother. I swear. Good news was he picked the winning six numbers, and the jackpot was for a million-two. Bad news was, eight other people picked the same numbers. So he collects his payout, which is like eighty-eight grand after the IRS gets through, and he buys a black ’68 Shelby GT-500 from a classic car dealer, and then shows up in Boston, summer of ’92, and takes the postal exam. And from there on in, far as we know, he’s been a model citizen.”
Oscar looked at his empty mug and empty shot glass, said to Devin, “We staying for another?”
Devin nodded vigorously. “They’re buying.”
“Oh, yeah!” Oscar waved at the bartender, circled his finger over the table to indicate another round.
The bartender nodded happily. Of course he was happy. When the tab was on me, Oscar and Devin drank only top shelf. And they threw it back like water. And ordered more. And more.
By the time I got the tab, I wondered who’d gotten the better of the deal. And whether the bill would max out my Visa. And why I couldn’t just have normal friends who drank tea.
“You want to know how the United States Postal Service deals with several pieces of mail that don’t reach their destination?” Vanessa Moore asked us.
“Pray tell,” Angie said.
We were on the second floor of Bubba’s warehouse, which serves as his living quarters. The front third of the floor is mined with explosives because…well, because Bubba’s fucking nuts, but he’d somehow managed to deactivate them for the length of Vanessa’s stay.
Vanessa sipped coffee at the bar that begins at the pinball machine and ends at the basketball hoop. She’d just come from the shower, and her hair was still damp. She wore a black silk shirt over ripped jeans and her feet were bare and she kneaded a sterling silver necklace between her fingers as she swiveled slowly from side to side on the bar stool.
“The post office deals with complaints first by telling you mail occasionally gets lost. As if we didn’t know. When I mentioned that eleven letters were sent to eleven different destinations and none arrived, they recommended I contact the Postal Inspector’s office, though they doubted it would do much good. The Postal Inspector’s office said they’d send an investigator by to interview my neighbors, see if they had something to do with it. I said, ‘I put the mail in the box myself.’ To which they responded that if I provided them with a list of the destinations, they’d send someone to interview people on the receiving end.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Angie said.
Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “It was pure Kafka. When I said, ‘Why don’t you investigate the carrier or pickup driver on that route?’ they said, ‘Once we’ve ascertained that no one else was involved…’ I go, ‘So what you’re telling me is that when mail gets lost the presumption of guilt is laid on everyone but the person entrusted with delivering it.’”
“Tell ’em what they said to that,” Bubba said as he came into the kitchen and bar area from somewhere in the back.
She smiled at him, then looked back at us. “They said, ‘So will you be giving us a list of your neighbors, ma’am?’”
Bubba went to the fridge, opened the freezer, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. As he did, I noticed that the hair above the nape of his neck was damp.
“Fucking post office,” Vanessa said as she finished her coffee. “And they wonder why everyone’s switching to e-mail, Federal Express, and paying bills by computer.”
“Only thirty-three cents for a stamp, though,” Angie said.
Vanessa turned on the bar stool as Bubba approached with the bottle of vodka.
“Should be glasses by your knee,” he said to her.
Vanessa dropped her eyes and rummaged under the bar.
Bubba watched the way her damp hair fell across her neck as she did so, the vodka bottle motionless and aloft in his hand. Then he looked over at me. Then he looked at the bar. He placed the bottle on top as Vanessa placed four shot glasses on the wood.
I looked at Angie. She was watching them with her lips slightly parted and a growing confusion in her eyes.
“I’m thinking I’m just going to cap this asshole,” Bubba said as Vanessa poured the chilled liquor into the glasses.
“What?” I said.
“No,” Vanessa said. “We talked about that.”
“We did?” Bubba threw back a shot and placed the glass on the bar again, and Vanessa refilled it.
“Yes,” Vanessa said slowly. “If I have knowledge that a crime is to be committed, I have a sworn duty to notify the police.”
“Oh, yeah.” Bubba threw back a second shot. “Forgot that.”
“Be a good boy,” Vanessa said.
“Uh, okay.”
Angie narrowed her eyes at me. I resisted the urge to jump off my bar stool and run screaming from the room.
“You guys want to stay for dinner?” Vanessa asked.
Angie stood up awkwardly and knocked her bag to the floor. “No, no. We’re…We already ate. So…”
I stood. “So, yeah, we’ll be, ah…”
“Going?” Vanessa said.
“Right.” Angie picked up her bag. “Going. That’s us.”
“You didn’t touch your drinks,” Bubba said.
“You have ’em,” I said as Angie crossed the floor in five or six steps, reached the door.
“Cool.” Bubba threw back another shot.
“You have any limes?” Vanessa asked him. “I’m in a tequila mood.”
“I could scare some up.”
I reached the door, looked back over my shoulder at the two of them. Bubba’s huge frame was tilted as he leaned his shoulder into the fridge, and Vanessa’s lithe body seemed to curl toward him like smoke from the top of the bar stool.
“See ya,” she called, her eyes on Bubba.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “See ya.” And then I got the hell out of there.
Angie started laughing as soon as we left Bubba’s building. It was a helpless giggle, a stoner’s laugh almost, that bent her body and led her out through the hole in the fence and into the playground beyond.
She got control of it as she lay against the jungle gym, looked up at the thick lead glass of Bubba’s windows. She wiped her eyes and sighed through a few remaining chuckles.
“Dear, oh, dear. Your attorney and Bubba. My God. I’ve seen it all.”
I leaned back on the metal rungs beside her. “She’s not my anything.”
“Not anymore,” she said, “that’s for sure. After him, she’ll be ruined for normal men.”
“He’s borderline monosyllabic, Ange.”
“True. But the man’s hung, Patrick.” She grinned at me. “I mean, hung.”
“Firsthand info?”
She laughed. “You wish.”
“So, how do you know?”
“Men can tell a woman’s cup size if she’s wearing three sweaters and an overcoat. You think we’re any different?”
“Ah,” I said, still back at the bar area, Vanessa doing those slow swivels on the stool, Bubba watching the way the hair fell across her neck.
“Bubba and Vanessa,” Angie said, “sitting in a tree.”
?
??Jesus. Quit it, will ya?”
She leaned her head back on the jungle gym, turned it my way. “Jealous?”
“No.”
“Not a little bit?”
“Not even a smidgen.”
“Liar.”
I turned my head fully to the right and our noses almost touched. We didn’t say anything for a while, just lay back on the jungle gym with our cheeks pressed to the rungs, the night softening against our skin, eyes locked. Far off behind Angie, a harvest moon rose in the dark sky.
“Do you hate my hair?” Angie whispered.
“No. It’s just…”
“Short?” She smiled.
“Yeah. I don’t love you because of your hair, though.”
She shifted slightly, turned her shoulder into the holes between rungs.
“Why do you love me?”
I chuckled. “You want me to count the ways?”
She didn’t say anything, just watched me.
“I love you, Ange, because…I don’t know. Because I always have. Because you make me laugh. A lot. Because…”
“What?”
I turned my shoulder in between the rungs as she had, placed my palm on her hip. “Because since you left I have these dreams that you’re sleeping beside me. And I wake up and I can still smell you, and I’m still half dreaming, but I don’t know it, so I reach for you. I reach across to your pillow, and you’re not there. And I gotta lie there at five in the morning, with the birds waking up outside and you not there and your smell just fading away. It fades and there’s—” I cleared my throat. “There’s nothing but me left there. And white sheets. White sheets and those fucking birds and it hurts, and all I can do is close my eyes and lie there and wish I didn’t feel like dying.”
Her face was very still, but her eyes had picked up a sheen like a thin film of glass. “That’s not fair.” She dabbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Nothing’s fair,” I said. “You say we don’t work?”
She held up a hand.
I said, “What does work, Ange?”
Her chin dropped to her chest and she stayed that way a long time before she whispered, “Nothing.”
“I know,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.