Prayers For Rain Part 106

"Okay," he said softly, and pulled back on the hammer. "We'll end you now."

The door behind him flung open, and Pea.r.s.e turned, got off one round that blew a chunk out of Bubba's thigh.

But Bubba never stopped. He covered Pea.r.s.e's gun hand with his own and clamped his other arm around Pea.r.s.e's chest from behind.

Pea.r.s.e let loose a guttural scream and tried to twist his body out of Bubba's grasp, but Bubba squeezed tighter, and Pea.r.s.e began to gasp, began to make high-pitched keening yelps, as he saw his gun hand move against his will up toward the side of his head.

He tried to twist his head away, but Bubba reared back and b.u.t.ted his ma.s.sive forehead into the back of Pea.r.s.e's head so hard it sounded like a pool ball exploding.

Pea.r.s.e's eyes spun from the shock of impact.

"No," he yelped. "No, no, no, no."

Bubba grunted with the effort, blood pouring down his leg as Angie scrambled out into the hallway on all fours and grabbed her .38.

She rose to one knee, pulled back on the hammer, and pointed it at Pea.r.s.e's chest.

"Don't you f.u.c.king do it, Ange!" Bubba screamed.

Angie froze, finger curled around the trigger.

"You're mine, Scott," Bubba whispered hoa.r.s.ely in Pea.r.s.e's ear. "You are all mine, sweetie."

"Please," Pea.r.s.e begged. "Wait! No! Don't! Wait! Please!"

Bubba grunted again and slammed the muzzle of Pea.r.s.e's gun into Pea.r.s.e's temple, shoved his finger over Pea.r.s.e's and around the trigger.

"No!"

Bubba said, "Feeling depressed, isolated, possibly suicidal?"

"Don't!" Pea.r.s.e batted at Bubba's head with his free hand.

"Well, call a hot line, but don't call me, Pea.r.s.e, 'cause I don't f.u.c.king care."

Bubba shoved his knee into Pea.r.s.e's spine, lifted his feet off the floor.

"Please!" Pea.r.s.e kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.

"Yeah, yeah, sure, sure," Bubba said.

"Oh, G.o.d!"

"Hey, a.s.shole? Say hi to the f.u.c.king dog for me, will you?" Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pea.r.s.e's brains out the other side of his head.

36.

I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet had entered my upper left chest just below the collarbone and exited through my back, and I'd lost three and a half pints of blood before the EMTs reached the house. I was comatose for four days, and I woke to tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes in my arm, and tubes in my nostrils, hooked up to a respirator, so thirsty I would have signed over the contents of my savings account for a single ice cube.

The Dawes apparently had some pull downtown, because a month after we'd rescued their son, the illegal weapons charges against Bubba simply vanished. Sure, the DA's office seemed to say, you walked into the Plymouth bunker with enough illegal firepower to invade a country, but you brought a rich kid out alive. So no harm, no foul. I'm sure the DA would have adopted a different att.i.tude had he known Pea.r.s.e's original extortion leverage had stemmed from evidence linking the Dawes to a baby switch, but Pea.r.s.e wasn't around to discuss it, and the rest of us who knew the secret declined to mention it.

Wesley Dawe came to visit. He held my hand and thanked me with tears in his eyes, and he told me the story of how he'd met Pea.r.s.e through Diane Bourne, who in addition to being his therapist had also been his lover. She, and eventually Pea.r.s.e, had controlled his fragile mind through manipulation, mental and s.e.xual power games, and erratic withholding and dispensing of his medication. It had been his own idea, he admitted, to blackmail his father, but Diane Bourne and Pea.r.s.e had taken the idea several steps further, ultimately turning it lethal when they came to thinking of the Dawes' fortune as their own.

In mid-'98, they'd made him their hostage, kept him tied to the chair or his bed, exercised him at gunpoint.

I hadn't regained my voice yet. It had disappeared when the bullet nicked off a microscopic shard of collarbone and sent that shard careening into my left lung, collapsing it. When I did try to speak those first few weeks, all that came out was a high-pitched wheeze, like a kettle, or Donald Duck losing his temper.

But voice or no voice, I doubt I would have said much to Wesley Dawe. He struck me as sad and weak, and I couldn't shake the image of a little petulant boy who'd stirred up all this trouble-whether intentionally or not-simply because he needed to throw a snit. His stepsister was dead, and I couldn't blame him, exactly, but I didn't feel much desire to forgive him either.

When he visited my room a second time, I pretended to be asleep, and he slipped a check from his father under my pillow and said, "Thank you. You saved me," in a whisper before leaving the room.

Since Bubba and I were both stuck in Ma.s.s General for a while, we ended up beginning our physical therapy together, my arm withered and his right hip replaced by a metal one.

It's an odd sensation to owe your life to another. It humbles you and makes you feel guilty and weak and your grat.i.tude is sometimes so immense, it feels like an anvil tied to your heart.

"It's like Beirut," Bubba said one afternoon in hydrotherapy. "What's done is done. Talking about it won't do any good."

"Maybe not."

"s.h.i.+t, dude, you'd have done the same for me."

And sitting there, I felt a calming certainty in my chest when I realized he was probably right, though I'm not sure that with one bullet in my hip and another in my thigh I'd have been capable of what he pulled off against a guy like Scott Pea.r.s.e.

"You did it for Ange," he said. "You'd do it for me."

He nodded to himself.

I said, "Okay. You're right. I won't thank you anymore."

"You won't talk about it anymore either."

"Cool."

He nodded. "Cool." He looked around the collection of metal tubs. Mine was beside his, and there were six or seven other people in the room, all soaking in hot, bubbling water. "Know what would be really cool?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Some weed. Right about now?" He raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't it, though?"

"Sure."

He nudged the middle-aged teacher in the tub beside his. "Know where we can score some pot, sister?"

The woman Bubba had shot when we'd first entered the bunker was identified as Catherine Larve, a onetime model from Kansas City who'd specialized in print ads for midwestern department stores during the late eighties and early ninties. She didn't have a criminal record and very little else was known about her during the years since she'd left Kansas City with the person neighbors had a.s.sumed was her boyfriend-a handsome, blond man who drove a '68 Shelby Mustang.