Four Kinds of Rain (15 page)

It was almost funny. He had wanted to be the Cal Ripken of crime, but he was just a rookie who’d had a good first half of the season and ended up back playing in the Delmarva D League.

He’d blown it for all of them, and yet … and yet, he thought, suddenly selfish (easy to be selfish on Vicodin), he hadn’t lost everything. Not yet. No, not yet.

Behind the Dumpster was the briefcase with five million dollars inside.

His money, yes, his money. Hadn’t he paid for it in blood? If he could just get out of bed. Bob tried to sit up, but the pain in his head and his neck was so great he nearly blacked out.

Jesus, what could he do? He could just see some guy coming by, some old bum hanging out, drinking cheap wine or doing a pipe back there behind the Dumpster, and finding it. His money, his five million …

He tried again to climb out of bed, got his upper body halfway up, then fell back on his pillow, unconscious.

He lay there for the longest time, drifting in and out of consciousness, all the time hearing a little beat in his head:

“Get the money. Get the money. Get the money.”

He fell into sleep once and then felt himself wake up, the red nurse’s light on above his head, the smell of disinfectant in the room, and then he knew that someone was watching him, someone over by the window.

Someone with large, sad eyes, a balding head, deep wrinkles in his cheeks, and a little slash of a mouth. And another one who looked something like a baboon with a tie.

Detectives Bud Garrett and Ed Geiger of the Baltimore Police Department.

“Hey, hero,” Garrett said.

“Officers Garrett and Geiger,” Bob said. “What time is it?”

“About four A.M.,” Garrett said. “We’re working nights this week.”

“Yeah,” Geiger said. “Just thought we’d come by and see a real-life hero for ourselves.”

“I just did what any man would have done,” Bob said.

“A modest hero, too,” Garrett said.

“I’d expect nothing less from brave Dr. Bobby,” Geiger said.

Garrett moved closer to Bob’s bed and his face reflected the night-light. It reminded him of a funhouse giant that had terrified Bob when he was a kid.

“Look, Garrett,” Bob said. “I don’t know how you got in here, but if I push the button and get the night nurse, you’ll be right out on the street.”

“That’s true,” Garrett said. “But you won’t do that.”

“No? Why’s that?”

“Because you want to seem like a good citizen. A Good Samaritan. You get me tossed, it might make us police think of you as bad news. If you had me thrown out of here, I might think, for example, that you had something to do with all the bodies we found on the fifth floor.”

“Bodies?” Bob said.

Garrett smiled and turned to his partner, who had crept up just behind him.

“That’s good, huh, Ed? The nice soft way he said that. ‘Bodies?’“

“Yeah,” Geiger said. “It had a nice, surprised quality to it. Only one thing gave him away though.”

“Look, Garrett,” Bob said, slurring his speech from his cotton-mouth. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“You rubbed your nose,” Geiger said. “You said ‘bodies’ real soft and innocent-like. But you rubbed your nose like this, right after you said it.”

Geiger rubbed his nose with his right forefinger. Bob forced down a gulp of air.
Had
he rubbed his nose? He was pretty sure he hadn’t. But what if he had?

“You like me rubbing my nose so much, Geiger, I’ll do it for you again,” Bob said. He rubbed it again. Garrett laughed.

“That’s good,” Garrett said. “Why don’t we talk bodies, Bobby? Why don’t you tell me who was upstairs on the fifth floor?”

“Gee, I’d like to,” Bob said. “But I don’t know anything about …”

“Uh, uh, uh,” Garrett said. “You don’t want to say that. You want to be helpful, because when you’re helpful you don’t get the lethal inject for murder one.”

“Murder?” Bob said. “Everybody around here has been talking about a bomb. Surely you don’t think I set off a bomb, do you, Detective? Explain to me how that would work. Let’s see, I set off a bomb, to do what? Blow myself up? Then I had a change of heart and saved a couple of kids?”

Bob knew he was saying too much, but he couldn’t resist a chance to bait Garrett. He still had his radical father’s old hatred of cops.

Garrett smiled and wagged a finger at Bob. A finger that seemed to come out of the past, back when a cop’s finger had a certain mythical and moral dimension.

“See, the problem, Bobby, is that some of the bodies we found had holes in them. Not from the bomb blast but from bullets. We figure that some people were up there, one of them being Ray Wade, who everyone knows is a pal of yours, doing some nefarious shit. And one of the players brought a bomb, which he had in the elevator.”

“The elevator?” Bob said. “Why would there be an elevator in that old building?”

“Worked off a portable generator,” Garrett said. “For the janitorial crew. They’re cleaning the building up. So they can turn it into a museum.”

Bob felt a huge desire to rub his nose and to rip the Vicodin drip out of his arm. Jesus Christ, what if the janitors came tomorrow and looked down into the Dumpster?

“Well, maybe you ought to ask the janitors about the building,” Bob said. “Maybe one of them saw something, but I didn’t. I was just taking a walk …”

“In the rain?”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “And I was singing in it, too.”

“That’s another good one,” Geiger said. “You’re gonna do really well.”

“What do you mean?”

“In prison,” Geiger said. “They say that the guys who do the best are the ones with a sense of humor. That would be you, Dr. Bobby. You’ve always been a clown. Hey, when you get down the Cut maybe you can be in, like, the prison talent show. That’s assuming you tell us all about what you and Ray Wade and all the other stiffs were doing up there before we find out from another source. See, once we do that, then you’ll be in for murder one, and they don’t allow the death-row inmates to take part in the Christmas pageant.”

“You’re scaring me to death, guys.”

How he hated cops. How he wanted to get out of the bed and rip their faces off.

“I’m feeling sleepy, if you don’t mind,” Bob said.

“I don’t mind a bit, Bobby,” Garrett said. “I hear they’re letting you out of here tomorrow. Maybe you’ll feel more like talking to me when you’re back home. Hey, maybe then I can talk to your girlfriend. She might be able to help us help one another, huh?”

“Fuck you, Garrett,” he said. “You leave Jesse alone or I’ll get a lawyer and nail you on a civil suit.”

“Shocking, Dr. Bobby,” Garrett said, as the two detectives headed for the door. “Is that any way for a hero to talk?”

“Good night, hero,” Geiger said. “We’re really gonna look forward to having you down to interrogation real soon.”

They disappeared into the hallway. Bob could hear them laughing as their footsteps receded to the elevators.

The shits … they knew … they
knew
he was bad. And they’d be waiting, but to hell with them. He had to somehow get some sleep. Tomorrow, no matter what he felt like, he had to grab the money.

For all of Bob Wells’s adult life he had harbored the secret desire (and until a few years past, the secret belief) that one day all his good works would be recognized by the City of Baltimore, the State of Maryland, and then, suddenly, his fame would catch fire and would spread wildly, until he was celebrated around the world.

It would start humbly with the local media coming to his door to canonize him. They would be in awe at his purity of purpose, his total commitment to the poor, the indigent, the lame and the halt, the blind and the deaf, the suicidal and the mad.

They would come and they would bow down in obeisance. They would see that you didn’t have to go to India to find a true saint. There was a local saint right here in funky old Baltimore, a guy who rivaled them all when it came to goodness.

Having heard the news, the mayor and the city elders would decide to give him Bob Wells Day, with a parade and a float, covered with sick winos and junkies and beat-to-shit unwed mothers, exhausted homeless people hanging off the sides.

A band would play, speeches would be given down at the Inner Harbor, and from there the national media would pick up on it. Overnight Bob would be not only locally famous, but universally acclaimed, as well.

He had been so good for so long. Why, it had to happen, didn’t it?

It was only when he chugged past fifty that Bob finally realized that the answer to that question was a collective shrug of the shoulders. Not even a “no” writ in thunder. The world couldn’t even work itself up to that much passion regarding the sainthood of Robert Marshall Wells.

To put it bluntly, nobody cared.

And so Bob had seen the truth. He was like some obscure artist who works and works and struggles and really masters his craft and is never discovered, ever, his life a meaningless toil for absolutely no reward.

Instead of Bob Wells, a living example of good-eventually-rewarded, his life would be emblematic of another kind of universal truth:

Bob Wells, an example of the ultimate absurdity of human existence.

This would be his fate. Bob would be Captain Anonymous. Unheralded and unsung.

“For all your good work, Bob, today, a very special day, we give you (trumpets blare) … nothing. A sack of shit. Zero. Zip. Nada.”

Until now, that is.

Until Leslie and Ronnie told their inspiring story to none other than Dave McClane, who wrote up the piece while Bob was asleep, and printed it in the
Baltimore Sun
under the headline, “The ‘Saint’ Saves Two.” It was Dave at his thirties agitprop best. No cliché lay unwritten as he heaped praise on his old pal, telling of Bob’s hard early years fighting against city hall and then going on to itemize all the other wonderful things Bob Wells had done, without “asking for or even wanting any recognition.” Bob was “old school,” the kind of “real man’s man who didn’t need to brag or publicize his accomplishments,” just like the modest “greatest generation of World War Two.”

Bob read the piece in his hospital bed and didn’t quite know what to make of it. It was so emotional, so full of fiery (if cornball) passion. Not the type of thing the
Sun
usually ran at all. Maybe Dave had pictures of the editors with barnyard animals or something. In any case, Dave had gotten really worked up, getting quotes from guys at the Lodge, which all sounded too good to be true. Bob’s bandmate Curtis had said: “In this age of hype and phoniness, Bob Wells is the real McCoy.” To which Dave added: “People want to know how he did it, ran into a burning building and made the impossible leap with a hundred-and-sixty-pound teenage boy on his shoulder, but in downtown Highlandtown they already know. They know that Bob Wells was able to run up those steps precisely because his entire life has been an act of selfless heroism. Not as dramatic as the rescue he made yesterday perhaps, but equally courageous and heroic. Bob Wells, a real-life, honest-to-God hero, who is at this moment unconscious from the terrible beating he took in yesterday’s impossible and brilliant rescue, is a man this reporter is proud to call his friend.”

Bob was pleased, of course, but wondered if the emotional piece would be seen as even credible. Wasn’t it all a little too much? As Jesse wheeled him down the hospital corridor, Bob found himself wishing that somebody else had written the piece, someone less emotional, who could have given the whole event the dignity it and he deserved.

One more bad joke on him, Bob thought bitterly as Jesse rolled him toward the door. He finally does something semiheroic and the guy who writes it up is too much of a hack for anyone to believe him.

But, about this, as about so many other things, Bob was dead wrong.

For as Jesse pushed him out of the hospital in his wheelchair, Bob suddenly saw the camera trucks. There were five, six … good Lord, eight of them in the Johns Hopkins Hospital parking lot. And there were reporters, clustered against the doorway, microphones in their hands, their cameramen behind them. God, he even recognized some of them. There was Stormy Terrell, from channel 13,
Eyewitness News,
and there was Johnny Moorehead from channel 11, and there was, oh man, who was the one sticking the microphone into his face? Oh yes, she was Lake Harper from
The Morning Show.
Man, she was really cute, a pixie’s face, and she was smiling at him, like she was madly in love. And there were radio guys and print journalists, one long-haired guy, must be from the free
City Paper,
and as Bob cleared his throat, he swore that he wouldn’t be like
some
celebs who didn’t talk to the print journalists, no sir, not Bob, he would talk to them all.

Jesse pushed him down the steps and he heard them yelling, “Bob! Bob, you saved two kids! How did you make it over that crevasse?”

And then, incredibly, Jesse was saying:

“Bob can’t answer questions just now. He’s just gotten out of the hospital! Step back, all of you!”

Bob jammed on the handbrake on the wheelchair, turned, and glared at Jesse. What the fuck was wrong with her? Not talk to the press? For God’s sake, that’s all he wanted to do! He’d talk until his voice had turned to sandpaper and he had to use sign language. This was his golden moment. This was his
shot
! Had she gone mad?

“Whoa, hold it, Jess,” Bob said, holding up his palm. “We have a duty here. Now if you’ll just hold on, I’ll try to answer everyone’s questions. Regarding the jump across the crevasse, I don’t exactly know how I did it. I mean, I saw that it was huge, but I also saw that there was no other way, and I just set my mind to it, you know? I said, ‘We have to get over. If we don’t, we die.’ Maybe you could say … a really terrifying fear of death compelled me to jump.”

The reporters all laughed. They liked that, he could tell. A self-effacing, good guy. A real American hero. What a story!

“Bob, you’ve given your life for others,” Lake Harper said. “Don’t you ever feel, well, bitter, that you’ve not been recognized more by society?”

Not only was Lake adorable but she was smart, too. This was the money question, and she’d offered it up as a home-run lob.