The harsh light of the kitchen seemed to etch her and Bubba’s outlines as they stood in the center of the room, both of them the size of something you’d normally climb with rope and pitons, not give birth to.
I slid my .45 out of the holster at the small of my back, dropped it down behind my right leg, and released the safety.
“Two hundred twenty,” Bubba said, as Roberta Trett took another step toward him, “two hundred thirty, two hundred forty, dude, shoot this bitch, will ya, two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty…”
Roberta Trett stopped and cocked her head slightly to the left, as if unsure of what she’d heard. She looked unable to identify what her options were. She looked unfamiliar with that sensation.
I doubted she’d ever been ignored in her life.
“Mr. Miller, you will stop counting now.” She extended her arm until it was T-bar straight and hard, and her knuckles whitened against the black steel.
“…three hundred, three hundred ten, three hundred twenty, I said, shoot the big bitch, three hundred thirty…”
That time she was sure of what she’d heard. A tremor appeared in her wrist, and the pistol shook.
“Ma’am,” I said, “put the gun down.”
Her eyes rolled right in their sockets, and she saw that I hadn’t moved, that I wasn’t pointing anything at her. And then she noticed that she couldn’t see my right hand, and that’s when I used my thumb to pull back the hammer on my .45, the sound cutting into the fluorescent hum of that bright kitchen as cleanly as a gunshot itself.
“…four fifty, four sixty, four seventy…”
Roberta Trett looked over Bubba’s shoulder at Leon, and the .38 shook some more and Bubba kept counting.
Beyond the kitchen I heard the sound of a door open and close very quickly. It came from the back of the house, from the far end of the long hallway that split the building.
Roberta heard it too. Her eyes jerked to the left for a moment, then back to Leon.
“Make him stop,” Leon said. “Make him stop counting. It hurts.”
“…six hundred,” Bubba said, and his voice grew an octave louder. “Six ten, six twenty, six twenty-five—enough with the fives already—six thirty…”
A set of soft footsteps approached from the hall, and Roberta’s back stiffened.
Leon said, “Stop it. Stop that counting.”
A man even smaller than Leon went rigid as he stepped through the doorway, his dark eyes widening in confusion, and I removed the gun from behind my leg and pointed it at the center of his forehead.
He had a chest so sunken it seemed to have been produced in reverse, the sternum and rib cage curling in while the small belly protruded like a pygmy’s. His right eye was lazy and kept sliding away from us as if it were asea on a floundering boat. Small scratches over his right nipple reddened in the white light.
He wore only a small blue terry-cloth towel, and his skin was sheened with sweat.
“Corwin,” Roberta said, “you go back to your room now.”
Corwin Earle. I guess he’d found his nuclear family after all.
“Corwin’s going to stay right here,” I said, and extended my arm its full length, watched Corwin’s good eye meet the hole in the barrel of the .45.
Corwin nodded and placed his hands by his sides.
All eyes but mine turned back to Bubba and gave him their full attention.
“Two thousand!” he crowed. He raised the wad of cash in his hand.
“We agree you’ve been compensated,” Roberta Trett said, and her voice shook like the gun in her hand. “Now complete the transaction, Mr. Miller. Give us the clips.”
“Give us the clips!” Leon shrieked.
Bubba looked over his shoulder at him.
Corwin Earle took a step back, and I said, “That’s a no-no.”
He swallowed and I waved the gun forward and he moved with it.
Bubba chuckled. It was a low, soft heh-heh-heh, and it put a hard curve up the back of Roberta Trett’s neck.
“The clips,” Bubba said, and turned back to Roberta, seemed to notice the gun pointed at him for the first time. “Of course.”
He pursed his lips and blew a kiss to Roberta. She blinked and stepped back from it as if it were toxic.
Bubba reached toward the pocket of his trench coat, and then his arm shot back up.
“Hey!” Leon said.
Roberta jerked backward as Bubba slapped his wrist into hers and the .38 jumped from her hand, flew over the sink, and sped toward the counter.
Everyone but Bubba ducked.
The .38 hit the wall above the counter. Its hammer dropped on impact, and the gun fired.
The bullet tore a hole through the cheap Formica behind the sink and ricocheted into the wall beside the window where Leon crouched.
The .38 clattered loudly as it fell to the counter, and the barrel spun and ended up pointing at the dusty dish rack.
Bubba looked at the hole in the wall. “Cool,” he said.
The rest of us straightened, except for Leon. He sat down on the floor and placed a palm over his heart, and those pale eyes of his hardened in such a way that I knew he was far less frail than his cringing act during Bubba’s counting would lead us to believe. It was just a mask, a role he played, I assumed, to lull us into forgetting about him, and it dropped from his face as he sat on the floor and looked up at Bubba with naked hatred.
Bubba stuffed the second wad in his pocket. He closed the distance between himself and Roberta, then tapped his foot on the floor in front of her until she raised her head and met his eyes.
“You had a gun pointed at me, Xena the Large.” He rubbed his jaw with his palm, filled the kitchen with the scratch of bristles against rough flesh.
Roberta placed her hands by her sides.
Bubba smiled gently at her.
Very softly, he said, “So, should I kill you now?”
Roberta shook her head once from side to side.
“You sure?”
Roberta nodded, very deliberately.
“You pointed that gun at me, after all.”
Roberta nodded again. She tried to speak, but nothing came out but a gurgle.
“What was that?” Bubba said.
She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller.”
“Oh.” Bubba nodded.
He winked at me and there was that green and angry light dancing in his smiling eyes that I’ve seen before, the one that said anything could happen. Anything.
Leon used the kitchen table for support as he got to his feet behind Bubba.
“Little man,” Bubba said, his eyes on Roberta, “you reach for that Charter twenty-two you got strapped under the table, and I’ll unload it into your balls.”
Leon’s hand fell from the edge of the table.
Sweat poured from Corwin’s hair, and he blinked against it, placed his palm against the doorjamb to hold himself up.
Bubba walked over to me, kept his eyes on the room as he leaned in and whispered in my ear, “They’re armed to the fucking teeth. We’re gonna be leaving in a rush. Got it?”
I nodded.
As he crossed back to Roberta, I watched Leon’s eyes glance first at the table, then over at a cupboard, then at the dishwasher, which was rusty, caked with dirt along the door, and probably hadn’t washed a dish since I was in high school.
I caught Corwin Earle doing the same; then he and Leon’s eyes met for a moment, and the fear dissipated.
I had to agree with Bubba’s assessment. We were, it seemed, standing in the middle of Tombstone. As soon as we dropped our guards, the Tretts and Corwin Earle would grab their weapons and show us their vivid reenactment of the OK Corral.
“Please,” Roberta Trett said to Bubba, “go.”
“What about the clips?” Bubba said. “You wanted the clips. Do you still want ’em?”
“I—”
Bubba touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “Yes or no?”
She closed her
eyes. “Yes.”
“Sorry.” Bubba beamed. “Can’t have ’em. Gotta go.”
He looked at me and cocked his head and headed for the doorway.
Corwin pinned himself against the wall and I trained my gun on the room as I backed out after Bubba, saw the fury in Leon Trett’s eyes and knew they’d be coming out after us in a hurry.
I grabbed Corwin Earle behind the neck and shoved him into the center of the kitchen by Roberta. Then I met Leon’s eyes.
“I’ll kill you, Leon,” I said. “Stay in the kitchen.”
The whiny, eight-year-old’s voice was gone when he spoke. What replaced it was deep and slightly husky, cold as rock salt.
“You got to make the front door, boy. And it’s a long walk.”
I backed into the hallway, kept the .45 trained on the kitchen. Bubba stood a few feet down the hall, whistling.
“Think we should run?” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
He looked back over his shoulder. “Probably.”
And he took off, charging toward the front door like a linebacker, his boots slamming the old floorboards, laughing maniacally, a booming Ah-ha-ha! tearing up through the house.
I dropped my arm and ran after him, saw the dark hall and the dark living room swing crazily from side to side as I charged behind Bubba and we ran full out for the front door.
I could hear them scrambling in the kitchen, the swing of the dishwasher door opening, then dropping on its hinges. I could feel target sights on my back.
Bubba didn’t pause to open the screen door between us and freedom, he ran straight through it, the wood frame shattering on impact, the green webbing shrouding his head like a veil.
I risked a look back as I reached the threshold, saw Leon Trett step into the hallway, arm extended. I backed up and pointed down the dark hall at him, but I was outside now, and for a long moment Trett and I stared across dark space at each other, guns pointed.
Then he lowered his arm and shook his head at me. “Another time,” he called.
“Sure,” I said.
Behind me, on the lawn, Bubba made a great racket as he cast what remained of the door off his head and boomed that crazy laugh of his.
“Ah-ha-ha! I am Conan!” he shouted, and spread his arms wide. “Grand slayer of evil gnomes! No man dare test my mettle or strength in battle! Ah-ha-ha!”
I came out on the lawn, and we jogged to his Hummer. I kept my back to the Hummer and my eyes on the house, gripping my gun in both hands as Bubba got in and unlocked my door. Nothing in the house moved.
I climbed in the fat, wide machine and Bubba peeled off from the curb before I’d even shut the door.
“Why’d you renege on the clips?” I asked, once we’d gotten a full block between us and the Tretts.
Bubba rolled through a stop sign. “They annoyed me and fucked up my counting.”
“That’s it? For that you held back the clips?”
He scowled. “I hate when people interrupt my counting. Hate it. Really, really hate it.”
“By the way,” I said, as we turned a corner, “what was with the evil gnomes thing?”
“What?”
“There were no evil gnomes in Conan.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty much.”
“Damn.”
“Sorry.”
“Why do you have to ruin everything?” he said. “Man, you’re no fun at all.”
25
“Ange!” I called, as Bubba and I came bounding into my apartment.
She stuck her head out of the tiny bedroom where she worked. “What’s up?”
“You’ve been following the Pietro case pretty closely, right?”
A needle of hurt pierced her eyes for a moment. “Yeah.”
“Come into the living room,” I said, tugging her. “Come on, come on.”
She looked at me, then at Bubba, who rocked back on his heels and blew a large pink balloon of Bazooka through his thick, rubbery lips.
“What have you two been drinking?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Come on.”
We turned on lights in the living room and told her about our trip to the Tretts’.
“You two are friggin’ chuckleheads,” she said, when we finished. “Like little psycho boys going out to play with the psycho family.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ange, what was Samuel Pietro wearing when he disappeared?”
She leaned back in her chair. “Jeans, a red sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, a blue and red parka, black mittens, and hi-top sneakers.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “So what?”
“That’s it?” Bubba said.
She shrugged. “Yeah. That and a Red Sox baseball cap.”
I looked at Bubba and he nodded, then held up his hands.
“I can’t go anywhere near this. Those are my guns in that house.”
“No problem,” I said. “We’ll call Poole and Broussard.”
“Call Poole and Broussard for what?” Angie said.
“You saw Trett wearing a Red Sox baseball hat?” Poole said, sitting across from us in a Wollaston coffee shop.
I nodded. “Which was three or four sizes too small for him.”
“And this leads you to believe said hat belonged to Samuel Pietro.”
I nodded again.
Broussard looked at Angie. “You going along with this?”
She lit a cigarette. “Circumstantially, it fits. The Tretts are in Germantown, directly across from Weymouth, a couple of miles from the Nantasket Beach playground where Pietro was just before he disappeared. And the quarries, the quarries aren’t too far from Germantown, and—”
“Oh, please!” Broussard crumpled an empty cigarette pack, tossed it to the table. “Amanda McCready again? You think just because Trett lives within five miles of the quarries, then of course he must have killed her? You serious?”
He looked at Poole, and they both shook their heads.
“You showed us the pictures of the Tretts and Corwin Earle,” Angie said. “You remember that? You told us Corwin Earle liked to pick up kids for the Tretts. You told us to keep our eyes peeled for him,” Angie said. “That was you, Detective Broussard, wasn’t it?”
“Patrol officer,” Broussard reminded her. “I’m not a detective anymore.”
“Well, maybe,” Angie said, “If we drop by the Tretts and poke around a bit, you will be again.”
Leon Trett’s house was set off the road about ten yards in a field of overgrown grass. Behind the amber sheets of rain, the small white house looked grainy and smeared by large swirling fingers of grime. Near the foundation, however, someone had planted a small garden, and the flowers had begun to bud or bloom. It should have been beautiful, but it was unsettling to see such a tenderly cared for array of purple crocus, white snowdrops, bright red tulips, and soft yellow forsythia burgeoning in the shadows cast by such a greasy, decrepit house.
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?”