Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

When I turned my head back, the cold metal bores of the shotgun dug into my forehead, and my eyes met the curl of a red finger on the other side of the trigger guard. This close, the finger looked like an insect or a red and white worm. It looked like it had a mind of its own.

“Close your eyes,” Casper said. “Close ’em tight.”

“Mr. Broussard,” Lionel said. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

“Pull the fucking trigger!” Popeye turned toward his companion. “Do it!”

Angie said, “Broussard-”

“Stop saying that fucking name!” Popeye kicked a chair into the wall.

I kept my eyes open, felt the curve of metal against my flesh, smelled the cleaning oil and old gunpowder, watched the finger twitch against the trigger.

“It’s over,” I said again, and it came out in a croak through my arid throat and mouth. “It’s over.”

For a long, long time, no one said anything. In that hard hush of silence, I could hear the whole world creak on its axis.

Casper’s face tilted as Broussard cocked his head and I saw that look in his eyes that I’d seen yesterday at the football game, the one that was hard, that danced and burned.

Then a clear, resigned defeat replaced it and shuddered softly through his body, and his finger slipped from the trigger as he lowered the gun from my head.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Over.”

“Are you dicking me?” his partner said. “We have to do this. We have to do this, man. We have orders. Do it! Now!”

Broussard shook his head, the moony face and child’s smile of the Casper mask swaying with it. “This is done. Let’s go.”

“Fuck you, this is done! You can’t cap these fuckers? Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can!”

Popeye raised his arm and pointed his gun in the center of Lionel’s face as Ryerson’s hand dropped into his lap and the first gunshot was muffled by the top of the table as it tore through the flesh of Popeye’s left thigh.

His gun went off as he jerked backward, and Lionel screamed, grabbed the side of his head, and toppled from his chair.

Ryerson’s gun cleared the tabletop, and he shot Popeye twice in the chest.

When Broussard pulled the trigger of the shotgun, I distinctly heard the pause-a microsecond’s worth of silence-between the trigger engaging the round and the blast that roared in my ears like an inferno.

Neal Ryerson’s left shoulder disappeared in a flash of fire and blood and bone, just melted and exploded and evaporated all at the same time in a sonic boom of noise. A splatter of him hit the wall, and then his body toppled out of the chair as the shotgun rose through the smoke in Remy Broussard’s hand and the table toppled to the left with Ryerson. His.9 mm fell from his hand and bounced off a chair on the way to the floor.

Angie had cleared her gun, but she dove to her left as Broussard pivoted.

I drove my head into his stomach, wrapped my arms around him, and ran straight back for the bar. I rammed his spine against the rail, heard him grunt, and then he drove the stock of the shotgun down onto the back of my neck.

My knees hit the floor, my arms fell back from his body, and Angie screamed, “Broussard!” and fired her.38.

He threw the shotgun at her as I reached for my.45, and it hit her in the chest, knocked her to the floor.

He vaulted the two darts players and sprinted for the front door like a born athlete.

I closed my left eye and sighted down the barrel and fired twice as Broussard reached the front of the bar. I saw his right leg jerk and skitter away from him before he turned the corner, threw the bolt lock, and burst out into the night.

“Angie!”

I turned as she sat up amid a pile of overturned chairs. “I’m fine.”

Ryerson shouted, “Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!”

I looked down at Lionel. He rolled on the floor, moaning, his head in his hands, blood pouring through the fingers.

I looked at the bartender. “The ambulance!”

He picked up the phone and dialed.

Ryerson leaned back against the wall, most of his shoulder gone, and screamed up at the ceiling, his body convulsing wildly.

“He’s going into shock,” I said to Angie.

“I got him.” She crawled toward Ryerson. “I need all the towels from the bar, and I need ’em now!”

One of the secretaries hopped over the bar.

“Beatrice,” Lionel moaned. “Beatrice.”

The rubber band holding Popeye’s mask to his head had snapped when he dropped down the bar, Ryerson’s bullets popping through his sternum. I looked down at the face of John Pasquale. He was dead, and he’d been right yesterday, after the football game: Luck always ran out.

I met Angie’s eyes as she caught a towel the secretary tossed across the room to her. “Get Broussard, Patrick. Get him.”

I nodded as the secretary rushed past me and dropped down by Lionel, placed a towel to the side of his head.

I checked my pocket for a second clip, found it, and left the bar.

I followed Broussard’s trail across Broadway and up C Street, where it wound into the trucking and warehouse district along East Second. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow. He’d discarded the Casper mask as soon as he left the bar, and it lay looking up at me as I stepped out, holes for eyes, a toothless smile. Drops of blood, so fresh they shone under street lamps, pointed out their owner’s path in a jagged line. They grew thicker and wider in diameter the farther they led into the scantily lit, cracked-cobblestone blocks of dark depots, empty loading docks, and cubbyhole teamster bars with curtains drawn and small neon signs missing half the bulbs. Semis headed for Buffalo or Trenton rolled and heaved and bumped down the cracked streets, and their headlights flashed across the end of the trail, the place where Broussard had stopped long enough to jimmy a door. The blood dropping from a hole in his body had formed a puddle, splattered the door in thin streaks. I hadn’t thought a leg could bleed like that, but maybe my bullet had blown apart the femur or savaged crucial arteries.

I looked up at the building. It was seven stories tall and built of the chocolate-brown brick they’d used at the turn of the century. Weeds rose to the windowsills on the first level, and the boards over the windows themselves were cracked and defaced by graffiti. It was wide enough to have served as storage for large objects or the manufacture and assembly of machines.

Assembly, I decided as I entered. The first thing I noticed was the silhouette of an assembly belt, pulleys and chains dropping from the rafters twenty feet above it. The belt itself and the rollers that had once been beneath it were gone, but the main frame remained, bolted to the floor, and hooks curled out from the ends of the chains like beckoning fingers. The rest of the floor was empty, everything of value either stolen by vagrants and kids or stripped by the final owners and sold.

To the right, a cast-iron staircase led to the next floor, and I climbed it slowly, unable to follow the trail of blood anymore in the darkness, peering through the black for holes rusted through the steps, gingerly reaching out for the rail before each step, hoping to press against metal and not the body of some angry, hungry rat.

My eyes adjusted somewhat to the dark as I reached the second floor, saw nothing but an empty loft space, the shapes of a few overturned pallets, the glow from dim streetlights pressing through lead windows shattered by rocks. The staircases were stacked one on top of each other at identical points on each floor, so that to reach the next, I had to turn left at the wall and follow it back about fifteen feet until I found the opening, looked up the stack of thick iron risers until I saw the rectangular hole up top.