Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

As I stood there, I heard a heavy metallic groan from several levels up, the thump of a thick steel door as it fell back on its hinges and banged into cement.

I took the steps two at a time, stumbling a few times, turned the corner on the third floor, and jogged around to the next staircase. I went up a little faster, my feet beginning to pick up a rhythm, a sense where each riser rose through the dark.

The floors were all empty, and with each level the harbor and downtown skyline cast more light under the arches of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The staircases remained dark save for the rectangular openings at their tops, and as I reached the last one, bathed in moonlight and stretching to an open sky, Broussard called down to me from the roof.

“Hey, Patrick, I’d stay down there.”

I called back up. “Why’s that?”

He coughed. “Because I got a gun pointed at the opening. Stick your head through, I’ll take a chunk out of it.”

“Oh.” I leaned against the banister, smelled the harbor channel and the fresh cool night wafting through the opening. “What’re you planning to do up there, call for helicopter evac?”

He chuckled. “Once in a lifetime’s enough of that. No, I just thought I’d sit here for a bit, look at the stars. Fuck, man, you’re a shitty shot,” he hissed.

I looked through the square of moonlight. From the sound of his voice, I was pretty sure he was to the left of the opening.

“Good enough to shoot you,” I said.

“It was a friggin’ ricochet,” he said. “I’m pulling tile out of my ankle.”

“You’re saying I hit the floor and the floor hit you?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Who was that guy?”

“Which?”

“The guy in the bar with you.”

“The one you shot?”

“That guy, yeah.”

“Justice Department.”

“No shit? I figured him for some sort of spook. He was way too fucking calm. Put three shots in Pasquale like it was target practice. Like it was nothing. I saw him sitting at that table, I knew the shit was going to turn bad.”

He coughed again, and I listened. I closed my eyes as he hacked uncontrollably for about twenty seconds, and I was certain by the time he finished that he was left of the opening by about ten yards.

“Remy?”

“Yo.”

“I’m coming up.”

“I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His pistol snapped at the night air, and the bullet hit the steel staircase support clamped to the wall. The metal sparked like someone had struck a kitchen match off it, and I dropped flat against the stairs as the bullet clanged overhead, ricocheted off another piece of metal, and embedded itself with a soft hiss into the wall on my left.

I lay there for a bit, my heart squeezed into my esophagus and not too happy about the relocation, banging against the walls, scrambling to get back out.

“Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“You hit?”

I pushed off the steps, straightened to my knees. “No.”

“I told you I’d shoot.”

“Thanks for the warning. You’re swell.”

Another round of hacking coughs, then a loud gurgle as he sucked it back into his lungs and spit.

“That didn’t sound real healthy,” I said.

He gave a hoarse laugh. “Didn’t look too healthy, either. Your partner, man, she’s the shooter in the family.”

“She tagged you?”

“Oh, yeah. Quick cure for smoking, what she did.”

I placed my back against the banister, pointed my gun up at the roof, and inched up the staircase.

“Personally,” Broussard said, “I don’t think I could have shot her. You, maybe. But her? I don’t know. Shooting women, you know, it’s just not something you want in your obit. ‘Twice decorated officer of the Boston Police Department, loving husband and father, carried a two-fifty-two bowling average, and could shoot the hell out of women.’ You know? Sounds…bad, really.”

I crouched on the fifth step from the top, kept my head below the opening, took a few breaths.

“I know what you’re thinking: But, Remy, you shot Roberta Trett in the back. True. But Roberta wasn’t no woman. You know? She was…” He sighed and then coughed. “Well, I don’t know what she was. But ‘woman’ seems too limiting a term.”

I raised my body through the opening, gun extended, and stared down the barrel at Broussard.

He wasn’t even looking my way. He sat with his back against an industrial cooling vent, his head tilted back, the downtown skyline spread out before us in a sweep of yellow and blue and white against a cobalt sky.

“Remy.”

He turned his head and stretched his arm out, pointed his Glock at me.

We stood there for quite a while that way, neither of us sure how this was going to go, if one wrong look, one involuntary twitch or tremor of adrenaline and fear would jerk a finger, punch a bullet through a flash of fire at the end of a muzzle. Broussard blinked several times, sucked at the pain, as what looked like the oversized bulb of a bright red rose gradually spread on his shirt, blooming, it seemed, opening its petals with steady, irrevocable grace.

Keeping his gun hand steady and his finger curled around the trigger, he said, “Feel like you’re suddenly in a John Woo movie?”

“I hate John Woo movies.”

“Me, too,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”

I shook my head slightly. “Warmed-over Peckinpah with none of the emotional subtext.”

“What’re you, a film critic?”

I smiled tightly.

“I like chick movies,” he said.

“What?”

“True.” On the other side of his gun, his eyes rolled. “Sounds goofy, I know. And maybe it’s ’cause I’m a cop, I watch those action movies, I keep saying, ‘Oh, bullshit.’ You know? But, yep, you toss Out of Africa or All About Eve in the VCR? I’m there, man.”

“You’re a ton of surprises, Broussard.”

“That’s me.”

It was tiring to hold a gun extended and pointed all this time. If we were going to shoot, we’d have probably done it by now. Of course, maybe that’s what a lot of guys think just before they get shot. I noticed the advancing winter gray in Broussard’s flesh, the sweat obscuring the silver along his temples. He couldn’t last much longer. As tiring as it was for me, I didn’t have a bullet in my chest and shards of floor in my ankle.

“I’m going to lower my gun,” I said.

“Your choice.”

I watched his eyes, and maybe because he knew I was watching them, he gave me nothing but an opaque, even gaze.

I raised my gun and slipped my finger off the trigger, held it up in my palm and climbed up the last few steps. I stood on the light gravel dusting the rooftop and looked down at him, cocked an eyebrow.

He smiled.

He lowered his gun to his lap and leaned his head against the vent.

“You paid Ray Likanski to draw Helene out of the house,” I said. “Right?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have to pay him. Promised to let him off the hook on some bust somewhere up the road. That was all it took.”

I crossed until I was in front of him. From there I could see the dark circle in his upper chest, the place where the rose petals grew. It was just right of center, and it still pumped brightly but slowly.

“Lung?” I said.

“Nicked it, I think.” He nodded. “Fucking Mullen. Mullen wasn’t there that night, it would have gone without a hitch. Dumb-ass Likanski doesn’t tell me he ripped Olamon off. That would have changed things, I knew that. Believe me.” He shifted slightly and groaned from the effort. “Forces me-me, for Christ’s sake-to get into bed with a mutt like Cheese. Even though I was setting him up, man, that hurt the ego, I’ll tell you.”