Prayers for Rain Read Free Page B

garage door rolled up with a whir. Even with his windows closed, I could hear the bass thumping from his car speakers, and we rolled right up the driveway behind him without his hearing a thing. I cut the engine just before we would have followed him into the garage. He got out of the Audi and we left the Porsche as the garage door began to close. He popped his trunk, and Bubba and I stepped under the door and in there with him.
    He jumped back when he saw me, and shoved his hands out in front of him as if warding off a horde. Then his eyes began to narrow. I’m not a particularly big guy and Cody looked fit and tall and well muscled. His fear of a stranger in his garage was already giving way to calculation as he sized me up, saw I had no weapon.
    Then Bubba shut the trunk that had blocked him from Cody’s view, and Cody gasped. Bubba has that effect on people. He has the face of a deranged two-year-old—as if the features softened and stopped maturing around the same time his brain and conscience did—and it sits atop a body that reminds me of a steel boxcar with limbs.
    “Who the hell—”
    Bubba had taken Cody’s tennis racket from his bag, and he twirled it lightly in his hand. “How come you park in driveways, but drive on parkways?” he asked Cody.
    I looked at Bubba and rolled my eyes.
    “What? How the fuck do I know?”
    Bubba shrugged. Then he smashed the tennis racket down onto the Audi’s trunk, drove a gouge in the center that was about nine inches long.
    “Cody,” I said as the garage door slammed closedbehind me, “you don’t say a word unless I ask you a direct question. We clear?”
    He stared at me.
    “That was a direct question, Cody.”
    “Uh, yeah, we’re clear.” Cody glanced at Bubba, seemed to shrink into himself.
    Bubba removed the tennis racket cover and dropped it on the floor.
    “Please don’t hit the car again,” Cody said.
    Bubba held up a comforting hand. He nodded. Then he sliced a pretty fluid backhand through the air and connected with the Audi’s rear window. The glass made a loud popping noise before it dropped all over Cody’s backseat.
    “Jesus!”
    “What did I say about talking, Cody?”
    “But he just smashed my—”
    Bubba flung the tennis racket like a tomahawk and it hit Cody Falk in the center of the forehead, knocked him back into the garage wall. He crumpled to the floor and blood streamed from the gash over his right eyebrow and he looked like he was going to cry.
    I picked him up by his hair and slammed his back into the driver’s door.
    “What do you do for a living, Cody?”
    “I…What?”
    “What do you do?”
    “I’m a restaurateur.”
    “A what?” Bubba said.
    I looked back over my shoulder at him. “He owns restaurants.”
    “Oh.”
    “Which ones?” I asked Cody.
    “The Boatyard in Nahant. I own the Flagstaff downtown, and part of Tremont Street Grill, the Fours in Brookline. I…I—”
    “Sshh,” I said. “Anyone in the house?”
    “What?” He looked around wildly. “No. No. I’m single.”
    I pulled Cody to his feet. “Cody, you like to harass women. Maybe even rape them sometimes, knock them around when they don’t play ball?”
    Cody’s eyes darkened as a thick drop of blood began its descent down the bridge of his nose. “No, I don’t. Who—”
    I backhanded the wound on his forehead and he yelped.
    “Quiet, Cody. Quiet. If you ever bother a woman again—any woman—we’ll burn down your restaurants and put you in a wheelchair for life. Do you understand?”
    Something about women brought out the stupid in Cody. Maybe it was the telling him he couldn’t have them in the manner he’d come to enjoy. Whatever the case, he shook his head. He tightened his jaw. A predatory amusement crept into his eyes as if he believed he’d found my Achilles’ heel: a concern for the “weaker” sex.
    Cody said, “Well. Yes, well. I don’t think I can do that.”
    I stepped aside as Bubba came around the car, pulled a .22