Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

Poole said, “Mother of God,” and hopped up on one leg.

I flattened against the cheap wall, and Angie joined me, and a hunk of thick fur slithered over my foot.

Broussard jerked to his right and then left, whacked at the hem of his suit jacket.

The cats weren’t after us, though. They were after sunlight.

Outside, Helene shrieked as they poured through the open doorway. “Holy shit! Help!”

“What I tell ya?” A voice I recognized as the middle-aged lady’s yelled. “A blight. A goddamned blight on the city a’ Charlestown!”

Inside the house, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the tick of a clock coming from the kitchen.

“Cats,” Poole said with thick disdain, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

Broussard bent to check his pant cuffs, dusted a wisp of cat hair off his shoes.

“Cats are smart.” Angie came off the wall. “Better than dogs.”

“Dogs get the paper for you, though,” I said.

“Dogs don’t scratch the shit out of couches, either,” Broussard said.

“Dogs don’t eat their owners’ corpses when they’re hungry,” Poole said. “Cats do.”

“Ugh,” Angie managed. “That’s not true. Is it?”

We moved slowly into the kitchen.

As soon as we entered, I had to stop for a moment, catch my breath, and suck in the cologne on my upper lip with flared nostrils.

Angie said, “Shit,” and buried her face in her handkerchief.

A naked man was tied to a chair. A woman knelt on the floor a few feet away from him, her chin to her chest, the straps of her bloody white negligee hanging down to her elbows, her wrists and ankles hog-tied together behind her back. Both bodies had thickened with gas and turned the white of volcanic ash after blood stopped pumping through their veins.

The man had taken a large blast to his chest that had demolished his sternum and upper rib cage. By the size of the hole, I had to assume the blast had been unleashed from a shotgun at close range. And unfortunately, Poole had been right about the feeding habits and questionable loyalty of felines. More than just buckshot had chewed into the man’s flesh. Between the damage wrought by the blast, time, and the cats, his upper chest looked as if it had been pushed open by surgical shears from the inside.

“Those aren’t what I think they are,” Angie said, her eyes on the gaping hole.

“Sorry to inform you,” Poole said, “but those are the man’s lungs.”

“It’s official,” Angie said. “I’m nauseous.”

Poole titled the man’s chin up with a ballpoint pen. He took a step back. “Well, hello, David!”

“Martin?” Broussard said, and took a step closer to the body.

“The same.” Poole dropped the chin and touched the man’s dark hair. “You’re looking peaked, David.”

Broussard turned to us. “David Martin. Also known as Wee David.”

Angie coughed into her handkerchief. “He looks pretty tall to me.”

“It has nothing to do with his height.”

Angie glanced at the man’s groin. “Oh.”

“This must be Kimmie,” Poole said, and stepped over a puddle of dried blood to the woman in the negligee.

He lifted her head with the pen, and I said, “Christ almighty.”

A black wound cut a small canyon across Kimmie’s throat. Her chin and cheekbones were splattered with black blood and her eyes looked upward, as if asking for deliverance or help or proof that something, anything, waited for her beyond this kitchen.

Her arms bore several deep cuts, thick and caked black with blood, and holes I recognized as cigarette burns dotted her shoulders and collarbone.

“She was tortured.”

Broussard nodded. “In front of the boyfriend. ‘Tell me where it is or I cut her again.’ That sort of thing.” He shook his head. “This kinda sucks. Kimmie was all right for a cokehead.”

Poole stepped back from Kimmie’s corpse. “The cats didn’t touch her.”

“What?” Angie said.

He pointed at Wee David. “As you can see, they feasted on Mr. Martin. Not Kimmie, though.”

“What’s your point?” I said.

He shrugged. “They liked Kimmie. Didn’t like Wee David. Too bad the killers didn’t feel the same way.”

Broussard stepped up beside his partner. “You think Wee David gave up the goods?”

Poole lowered Kimmie’s head gently back to her chest, made a tsk noise. “He was a greedy bastard.” He looked over his shoulder at us. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but-” He shrugged.

“Wee David and a previous girlfriend broke into a drugstore a couple of years ago, raided the place for Demerol, Darvon, Valium, whatever. Anyway, the cops are coming and Wee Dave and his girl go out a back door, have to jump down to an alley from a second-story fire escape. The girl sprains her ankle. Wee Dave loves her so much he unburdens her of her supply and leaves her there in the alley.”

First Big Dave Strand. Now Wee Dave Martin. Time to stop naming our children David.

I looked around the kitchen. The floor tiles had been torn up, the pantry shelves swept clear of food; piles of canned goods and empty potato-chip bags littered the floor. The ceiling slats had been removed and lay in a pile of white dust by the kitchen table. The oven and refrigerator had been pulled away from the wall. The cupboard doors lay open.

Whoever had killed Wee David and Kimmie seemed to have been thorough.

“You want to call it in?” Broussard said.

Poole shrugged. “Why don’t we poke around a bit first?”

Poole produced several pairs of thin plastic gloves from his pocket. He separated them and passed a pair each to Broussard, Angie, and me.

“This is a crime scene,” Broussard said to Angie and me. “Don’t queer it.”

The bedroom and bathroom were in the same state of distress as the kitchen and living room. Everything had been overturned, cut open, emptied onto the floor. Given the houses of other drug addicts I’ve seen, it wasn’t noticeably worse than most.

“The TV,” Angie said.

I stuck my head out of the bedroom as Poole came out of the kitchen and Broussard exited the bathroom. We joined Angie around the TV.

“No one thought to touch it.”

“Probably because it’s on,” Poole said.

“So?”

“Kind of hard to hide two hundred grand in there and keep all the parts working,” Broussard said. “Don’t you think?”

Angie shrugged, looked at the screen, watched one of Jerry Springer’s guests being restrained. She turned up the volume.

One of Jerry Springer’s guests called another guest a ho’, called an amused man a dirty dog.

Broussard sighed. “I’ll get a screwdriver.”

Jerry Springer looked at the audience knowingly. The audience hooted. Many words were bleeped out.

Behind us, Helene said, “Oh, cool. Springer Time.”

Broussard came out of the bathroom with a tiny screwdriver with a red rubber handle. “Miss McCready,” he said, “I need you to wait outside.”

Helene sat on the edge of the torn-up futon, eyes on the TV. “That lady’s yelling ’cause of the cats. She said she’s calling the police.”

“You tell her we are the police?”

Helene smiled distantly as one of Jerry’s female guests threw a lopping punch at another one. “I told her. She said she was going to call ’em anyway.”

Broussard brandished the screwdriver and nodded at Angie. She shut off the TV in mid-bleep.

Helene said, “Damn.” She sniffed the air. “Smells in here.”

“Want some cologne?”

She shook her head. “My old boyfriend’s trailer smelled worse. He used to, like, leave dirty socks soaking in the sink. Now that’s a smell, lemme tell you.”

Poole tilted his head as if about to say something, but then he glanced at her and changed his mind, exhaled a loud, hopeless sigh.