Four Kinds of Rain (17 page)

Jesse managed a smile.

“That’s true,” she said. “There’s another question I have to ask you, Bobby.”

“Sure,” Bob said. “Shoot.”

“Well, I know you jumped over the hole in the floor with the boy on your back, but how did you get over it the first time?”

“What?” Bob said. He really didn’t understand the question. “What first time?”

“When you came into the building,” Jesse said. “How did you get over the hole to get to the kids you heard screaming?”

Bob looked at her with astonishment. She really was sharp … thank God she was on his side.

“Well, that’s the weird thing,” he heard himself say. “You see, when I first went into the building, the hole wasn’t there yet. But while I was inside trying to wake Ronnie up, there was this huge, thunderous roar and the whole damn foundation just collapsed. So when I came back out …”

“The hole
was
there,” Jesse said, finishing his sentence for him. “That’s what I thought, Bob. It’s just amazing.”

“And it’s all true,” Bob said. “Have a little faith in me, Jess.”

“I do, Bobby. You know I do.”

She bent down and kissed him on the forehead.

“Don’t stay up too late,” she said.

“I won’t, baby,” Bob said. “Now you go get some sleep.”

Though it killed his battered knees and made his headache worse, Bob ran through the back alleys, over potholed cobblestones, past piles of trash as he made his way toward the American Brewery Building.

All the way there he heard the voices in his head: What if it’s gone? What if it’s gone?

The thought tortured him and his head throbbed all the worse for his fears.

Finally he came to the huge, old brick building, which loomed over him in the dark. He saw the yellow crime tape around the whole place. Good God, that had somehow never occurred to him, that they would search the whole building, inside and out. They might already have found the suitcase, sitting there behind the goddamned Dumpster.

Or maybe they left it there, empty, of course, to see who would come back and fetch it.

He wondered if they would have a guard hanging around the building now, just waiting for him to come. Bob began to berate himself. Christ, he’d been a fool, an idiot to save those kids. He’d gotten a few minutes of fame and glory, but the money might be gone. And there was Garrett, too. What if the guy was following him? Bob looked around the streets, at the alleys and the bar across the street called Mike’s. Detective Garrett could be sitting right in there, just waiting for him to come….

Maybe he should just leave the money. He was getting famous, right? Maybe his book and life story would be worth so much that he just shouldn’t risk it.

Yeah, right. You’re going to leave five million dollars sitting there, after what you went through to get it?

Bob felt a chill in the air, coming off the bay.

Time to go, hero.

Time to get paid, as dead Ray used to say.

He ran around the back of the building, staying close to the walls, trying to blend in with the shadows.

He walked over the condoms and pieces of charred concrete and then he saw it, the Dumpster. Same as it was yesterday. Great piles of cardboard on it. They hadn’t gotten to it yet ….

But what if some bum … some guy …

Shut the fuck up.

He had to look, he had to look now….

He slid back behind the Dumpster, reached down in the darkness. It should be right here.

And was.

Just like that. Easy as pie. He had the briefcase in his hand.

But was there anything inside?

He knew he should wait, wait until he got it in his house, but he couldn’t stand it.

Bob stepped out into the light and clicked open the case.

It was there. Money … piles and piles of neatly wrapped hundreds.

Oh, Jesus Christ on a crutch, he was rich … rich, rich, rich. And don’t forget famous, famous, and soon to be even more famous.

And then he heard it, a car coming, a siren screaming. Where the hell was it? Just a block away on Gay Street and heading this way. A trap? Had they just been waiting for the rat to come and pick up the case?

Bob turned and ran, across the battered, filthy lot next to the building, sliding on the gravel as he hit the alley, and then he was flying through the alley … his knees creaking, his body wracked with pain from his heroic leap. But he was moving fast, faster than he had in years, and the briefcase was in his hand and he wasn’t ever going to stop until he got home.

In the back of his basement, Bob sat on an old lawn chair and opened the suitcase. There it was … all his … all that money.

M.O.N.E.Y.

Five million dollars.

He took out a few of the packets, rubbed them across his cheek.

Oh God, he was rich.

He, Bob Wells, the poor guy, the martyr, the former laughingstock, was loaded.

He loved the smell of the new bills. They smelled like … like … well, there were no really good metaphors. Money smelled like money and nothing else smelled half as good. Okay, maybe a woman’s skin, yes, sometimes that could be great, but the feeling of power, the intoxication of the money, right now, it was way better than sex. Just holding so much of it made him a little giddy, mad. He wanted to get closer to the money. He wanted to inhale it. He wanted to take a bath in it. He wanted to—go ahead, admit it—make love to the money.

What a mad, mad thought … but why not? When you had money, anything you wanted became legitimate, didn’t it?

Mon, mon, money, moneeeeeey! All for him. Money!

He was like an animal that had finally found his own habitat. All those years of groveling to state officials to get money for the poor. All those years of visiting people in crummy bomb shelters of homes. That was over, history. He didn’t need that shit anymore.

It was the world of money, success, and glitter for Dr. Bobby Wells now.

He kissed the packets and felt like a priest observing a religious ritual.

“Yes, my son, you are witnessing a High Holy Moment. The Blessing of the Packets.”

He laughed wildly, kissed one packet of hundreds after another.

Oh money, money, money. How do I love thee, let me count the fucking ways.

He took out the packets and covered himself with them. A blanket of money.

A coat of money, a coat that would protect him in his old age.

A coat that would lift him, along with his newfound celebrity, to higher and higher circles of power.

Oh God, he loved it. Absolutely loved it.

He lay that way for a little while, then reminded himself that he had to be practical, together. Many a criminal had been caught wallowing in his newfound dough. He had to play it smart. And he would.

He quickly gathered up all the packets and put them back into the briefcase, then carried it over to his knotty-pine wall. And right here, Bob thought, was further proof that having the money was his destiny, because for years there had been this loose knotty-pine board on the back wall, a board Bob had intended to fix but had never gotten around to. And now he knew why. Because this loose piece of knotty-pine planking was there expressly for the purpose of providing a hiding place for his money. He pulled the board out and felt around inside, and there it was, a neat little hollow that was just big enough to stick the briefcase in.

Well, of course, it was. Because this was all fated.

Bob put the knotty-pine plank back up, then began to beat the nails in with the heel of his shoe.

The money was safe there in the wall, he was pretty sure of that. Safe for a few days anyway.

But what was the next move?

Ray had mentioned a guy he knew, Jake Gimble, a crooked lawyer, who would launder the money for them. But going to see Gimble seemed dicey. Before the bomb blast, Bob had just assumed that he and Ray would waltz in there and see Jake, and because no one fucked with Ray, the guy would treat them both like solid citizens.

But now he had to go see the guy all by himself. How did that work? You went in and gave the guy all your money and what did you get back, some kind of lame bank receipt from the Cayman Islands?

Like, what would it say? “Received from Bob Wells: Five Million (Minus Gimble’s Cut) in Blood Money.”

And, Christ, what if the guy decided to stiff him? It wasn’t like you could go to a cop and say, “Ah, Officer, perhaps you heard about the big bombing down at the old American Brewery, in which quite a few people were blown to very tiny bits? Well, just purely by accident, ha ha, I happened to end up with all the stolen dough and I gave it to this crooked lawyer fellow and he seems to have had the temerity to steal it from me, and I wonder if you could possibly aid me in getting it back?”

Yeah, that would be just great.

He wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Christ, what in God’s name was he going to do? Trust the guy? No way …

Then he realized the answer. He would have to convince the banker that he was no one to fuck around with. Yep, that was it. He’d have to go in and see Jakey boy and let him know that if there were any games he’d blow his nuts off.

That was his new power, after all. Since he no longer played by civilized rules, after all, he’d have to be willing to back up his threats.

But could he?

If the guy stole from him, could he be like Scarface and do something … something violent?

Bob Wells, the kindness merchant? Do something completely, openly vicious?

The truth was, he didn’t know. There was a time, not long ago at all, that he would have said absolutely not …. Okay, he had punched Garrett in the nose once long ago in a street fight, but that was just a tussle.

That wasn’t gangster stuff.

But kill a guy or badly hurt him over money?

Could he do that?

Now he wasn’t sure and the thought tortured him. He had gone through so much to get the money, seen men die. Okay, not the best men in the world, but living, breathing men … guys he had started to feel a kind of maggoty affection for. Dead, flaming, their heads on fire … images he never wanted to think of again yet would never forget.

He had almost been one of them, but fate had spared him.

But having undergone all that, hadn’t he been changed forever?

If someone threatened his money now, money he had gone through hell for, wasn’t it his right as a man to protect what was his?

Okay, okay … he had stolen it. He’d almost forgotten that. But it didn’t feel that way. Why, it was as if the money had been left to him by the recently deceased. Yes, and he was the rightful and legitimate heir to the fortune.

And if some banker tried to steal it from him …

For that matter, if Emile Bardan came back, and he might very well … what was he willing to do to protect his money, his and Jesse’s future?

Would he really hurt his old patient to stop him from grabbing the money?

Forget “hurt.” That wasn’t the real question. The question became one of killing.

Would he kill Emile to keep the money?

Bob continued to nail the knotty-pine plank back into his wall and felt the sweat run down his neck.

It had all seemed so funny when it had started. Bob remembered doing his little dance down at the pier. It was a lark, a crazy scam…. No one was going to be hurt, not even Emile, who certainly was insured for the mask. But now … the laughs were over.

Bob had to decide now. How far would he go to protect his new fame, and his money?

And the scariest part of all was he suspected he already knew the answer to that question.

After all, having gone this far, he could never, ever go back to the moldy old land of the poor.

The
Today
show people came to Baltimore just as they claimed they would. Bob made sure Dave knew all about it so that he and Lou Anne could be in the show, too. Bob had worried a little that Ethel Roop and Perry Swann wouldn’t want their stories aired on national television, but this only showed how out of the loop he was. Not only did they want in, they couldn’t
wait
to tell their stories to Lori Weisman. Bob stood by stunned, as Ethel Roop described her “battle with flab,” even pinching her chunky thighs on camera, so the whole world would know exactly how gross she was. She said all the right things about Bob, what a great shrink he was, how much he cared, how amazing his insights were, things she had never said before, things Bob doubted she even believed. The truth was he felt that he’d failed with her and he was pretty sure that she felt the same way. But none of that seemed to matter now. She was, after all, on a major television show; the script called for a hero, so a hero Bob would be.

The same went for Perry Swann, who had once flat out called Bob a “fake” and a “jerkoff,” but who now told the cameras that Bob was “the only man I’d ever confess my sins to. Because he took the job as seriously as a priest.” Bob wasn’t sure that was such a compliment, given the quality of priests these days, but Perry radiated such sincerity that Lori Weisman said, “Beautiful. Right after the show they’re probably going to fucking canonize you, Bob.”

The same went for all the old black women Bob saw every week. Lutitia Morgan, the ninety-year-old woman who sang spirituals for Bob, said, “Dr. Bobby is the onliest white man I would ever trust.”

Dave, of course, got on camera and positively gushed about Bob.

“Bob is the kind of guy whose whole being is bound up in helping other people. And what does he get for it? Nothing. Sometimes less than nothing. Sometimes a kick in the teeth! But it doesn’t stop him from being a great guy.”

Frizzy-haired, hip Lori Weisman lapped it up. She interviewed Bob outside his house as Jesse watched from the neighbor’s stoop alongside Dave and Lou Anne.

“How do you manage to keep your equilibrium, your balance, when you see longtime friends like Rudy Runyon making money, while you, frankly, have so little?”

Bob smiled his modest smile and gave Lori Weisman his best Gentle Ben look, then did a variation on the speech he’d given when he was coming out of the hospital, ending with his “I consider myself one of the luckiest men on earth” line. He almost added, “Thank you, Lou Gehrig,” but managed to resist.