Free Boston Noir by Dennis Lehane

not long settled into the chapter on "discomfort" when she heard the knocking on the front door downstairs, which was immediately perplexing for she did not really know anyone in the area that intimately, she'd just moved near six months now, had told no one of her whereabouts except her best friend Rhonda, and she was not expecting Rhonda, nor expecting that Rhonda would've disclosed her location to Fred. And yet who could it be knocking on her door at this hour--11 according to the clock on the bedside table. Who could it be?
    She swung out of bed irritated as hell, padded over to the window, and flung back the lace curtains. Outside the night was impenetrable and the trees swayed drunkenly and against the frosted window, the silvery slanted rain. It had been raining all day, and now it was dark, with big winds howling through the walls and the rain battering the roof, and outside, outside was the black and sodden night. She was wearing a long see-through pink gown that in the early years of her marriage used to excite her husband greatly. But that was another story altogether. She hauled on a white duster over her gown, pulled on satin slippers, and looked around quickly for something big, something heavy, something that with just one blow would carry off the culprit. She found a screwdriver, which she slipped into her pocket, and a big heavy-duty metal flashlight she switched on at once, lighting her way downstairs to put an end to the disturbance.
    Her name was Perle, she was forty-seven, and just six months ago she got up one morning and decided she was leaving her marriage. She was not leaving her children, mind you, who were away at college, she was leaving Fred, as things between them had been dead for some time, the two of them like ships passing in the night en route to some unknown destination. The truth was, early on she had lost herself, had given it over, thinking that was love, did not know where he ended and she began, and now she wanted to retrieve herself, for she had stopped living, she was just coasting now, on the sea of life. It sounded like a cliche, she knew, but that was how she saw it. She did not say a word to him the morning she left. She waited until he was gone to the hospital to visit the sick and the dying--he was an evangelical minister who believed in the laying on of hands--then she packed one suitcase full of clothes, another of her face products as she had a tendency to break out into boils, and she called the movers to collect the upright her mother had given her. Heading west, she slowly drove away from her life that morning in the white Pontiac, stopping only once to fill it with gas and to buy a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. She rented a semi-furnished one-bedroom in Watertown, a sleepy little place that had a river running through it. She knew no one, no one knew her, and except for the tortured sonatas she played in the early mornings upon arising, she interacted only with the hairdresser where she went for a weekly rinse and set, the cashier at the bank for she was living off some CDs she'd put away for a rainy day, and the Armenian grocers that lined both sides of the main drag with their dark overstocked little shops full of Mediterranean goods.
    Who is it? she cried weakly, and then she muscled up herself, for this was ridiculous. Who is it? she snapped, her voice unrecognizable even to her, and the pounding stopped at once. A face was pressed up against the glass, a dark face wet and wild with a falling-down mustache and a felt hat pulled so low she could barely see the eyes, but she could sense the desperateness in them. And when a sliver of lightning lit up the porch, she saw it was a white man slightly stooped, or maybe he was holding something, his raincoat glowing in the brief light.
    It was crazy what she was about to do, she knew all the stories, knew them up and down, knew too there were white men who preyed on black women, and yet she yanked open the door and