Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

Roberta Trett, I remembered, had been a florist, a gifted one apparently, if she’d been able to coax color from the hard earth and long winter. I couldn’t picture it-the same lumbering woman who’d held the gun to Bubba’s head last night, thumbed back the hammer on her.38, had a gift for delicacy, for softness, for drawing growth from dirt and producing soft petals and fragile beauty.

The house was a small two-story, and the upper windows fronting the road were boarded up with black wood. Below those windows, the shingles were cracked or missing in several places, so that the upper third of the house resembled a triangular face with blackened eyes and a ragged smile of shattered teeth.

Just as I’d felt when I approached the house in the dark, decay permeated it like an odor, garden or no garden.

A tall fence with cyclone wire stretched on top divided the back of Trett’s property line from his neighbor’s. The sides of the house looked out on a half acre of weeds, those two condemned and abandoned homes, and nothing else.

“No way to approach but through that front door,” Angie said.

“Seems to be the case,” Poole said.

The screen door Bubba had destroyed last night lay in a tangle on the lawn, but the main door, a white wooden one with cracks in the center, had replaced it. This end of the street was still and had the empty feeling of a place few in the neighborhood ventured. In the time we’d been here, only one car had passed us.

The back door of the Crown Victoria opened and Broussard climbed in beside Poole, shaking rain from his hair, splattering drops on Poole ’s chin and temples.

Poole wiped at his face. “You’re a dog now?”

Broussard grinned. “Wet out.”

“I noticed.” Poole pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “I repeat: You’re a dog now?”

“Ruff.” Broussard gave his head another shake. “The back door’s where Kenzie said it was. Same approximate location as the front door. One upper window on the east side, one on the west, one in back. All boarded up. Heavy curtains over all the lower windows. A locked bulkhead by the rear corner, about ten feet to the right of the back door.”

“Any signs of life in there?” Angie asked.

“Impossible to tell with the curtains.”

“So what do we do?” I said.

Broussard took the handkerchief from Poole and wiped his face, tossed it back on Poole ’s lap. Poole looked down at it with a mixture of amazement and disgust.

“Do?” Broussard said. “You two?” He raised his eyebrows. “Nothing. You’re civilians. You go through that door or tip Trett’s hand, I’ll arrest you. My once and future partner and I are going to walk up to that house in a minute and knock on the door, see if Mr. Trett or his wife wants to chat. When they tell us to fuck off, we’ll walk back out and call Quincy P.D. for backup.”

“Why not just call for backup now?” Angie said.

Broussard looked at Poole. They both glanced at her and shook their heads.

“Excuse me for being retarded,” Angie said.

Broussard smiled. “Can’t call for backup without probable cause, Miss Gennaro.”

“But you’ll have probable cause once you knock on the door?”

“If one of them’s stupid enough to open it,” Poole said.

“Why?” I said. “You think you’re just going to look in through a crack and see Samuel Pietro standing there holding a HELP ME sign?”

Poole shrugged. “It’s amazing what you can hear through the crack of a partially opened door, Mr. Kenzie. Why, I’ve known cops have mistaken the whistling of a kettle for a child’s screams. Now it’s a shame when doors have to be kicked in and furniture destroyed and inhabitants manhandled over such a mistake, but it’s still within the purview of probable cause.”

Broussard held out his hands. “It’s a flawed justice system, but we try to make do.”

Poole pulled a quarter from his pocket, perched it on his thumbnail, and nudged Broussard. “Call it.”

“Which door?” Broussard said.

“Statistically,” Poole said, “the front door draws more fire.”

Broussard glanced out through the rain. “Statistically.”

Poole nodded. “But we both know it’s a long walk to that back door.”

“Through a lot of open ground.”

Poole nodded again.

“Loser gets to knock on the back door.”

“Why not just go together to the front door?” I asked.

Poole rolled his eyes. “Because there’s at least three of them, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Divide and conquer,” Broussard said.

“What about all those guns?” Angie said.

Poole said, “The ones your mystery friend said he saw in there?”

I nodded. “Those, yeah. Calico M-110s, he seemed to think.”

“But no clips to go with them.”

“Not last night,” I said. “Who knows if they had time to score some somewhere else in the last sixteen hours?”

Poole nodded. “Heavy firepower, if they have the clips.”

“Fall off that bridge when we come to it.” Broussard turned to Poole. “I always lose the coin toss.”

“Yet here’s chance come knocking again.”

Broussard sighed. “Heads.”

Poole flicked his thumb and the coin spun up through the half-dark of the backseat, caught some of the amber light woven on the rain, and shone, for just a millisecond, like Spanish gold. The quarter landed in Poole’s palm and he slapped it over the back of his hand.

Broussard looked down at the coin and grimaced. “Best two out of three?”

Poole shook his head, pocketed the coin. “I have the front, you get the back.”

Broussard sat back against the seat, and for a full minute no one said anything. We stared through the slanted sheets of rain at the dirty little house. Just a box, really, with a prevalent sense of rot in the deep sag of the porch, the missing shingles and boarded windows.

Looking at the house, it was impossible to imagine love being made in its bedrooms, children playing in its yards, laughter curling up into its beams.

“Shotguns?” Broussard said eventually.

Poole nodded. “Real western-style, pardner.”

Broussard reached for the door handle.

“Not to spoil this John Wayne moment,” Angie said, “but won’t shotguns seem suspicious to the occupants of the house if you’re supposedly just there to ask questions?”

“Won’t see the shotguns,” Broussard said, as he opened his door to the rain. “That’s why God created trench coats.”

Broussard walked across and up the road to the back of the Taurus and popped the trunk. They’d parked the car by a tree as old as the town; large, misshapen, its roots having disgorged the sidewalk around it, the tree blocked the car and Broussard from view of the Tretts’ house.

“So we’re clear,” Poole said gently, from the backseat.

Broussard pulled a trench coat from the trunk and shrugged it on. I looked back at Poole.

“If anything goes wrong, use your cellular phone and call Nine-one-one.” He leaned forward and placed an index finger up by our faces. “Under no circumstances do you move from this vehicle. Are we understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Miss Gennaro?”

Angie nodded.

“Well, then, it’s all fine.” Poole opened his door and stepped out into the rain.

He crossed the road and joined his partner at the back of the Taurus. Broussard nodded at something Poole said and looked over at us as he slipped a shotgun under the flap of his trench coat.

“Cowboys,” Angie said.

“This may be Broussard’s chance to get back to detective rank. Of course he’s excited.”

“Too excited?” Angie asked.

Broussard seemed to have read our lips. He smiled through the rivulets of water pouring down our windows and shrugged. Then he turned back to Poole, said something with his lips an inch from the older man’s ear. Poole patted him on the back and Broussard walked away from the Taurus, strode up the road through the slanting rain, stepped into the east side of Trett’s yard, ambled casually through the weeds, and made his way toward the back of the house.