“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.
Poole closed the trunk and pulled at his trench coat flaps until they covered his shotgun. The shotgun was nestled between his right arm and chest. He held his Glock behind his back in his left hand as he walked up the road, his head tilted up toward the boarded-up windows.
“You see that?” Angie said.
“What?”
“The window to the left of the front door. I think the curtain moved.”
“You sure?”
She shook her head. “I said I ‘think.’” She took her cellular phone from her purse, placed it on her lap.
Poole reached the steps. He raised his left foot toward the first step, and then he must have seen something there he didn’t like, because he extended his leg over the first step, brought his foot down on the second, and climbed up onto the porch.
The porch sagged deeply in the middle, and Poole’s body canted to the left as he stood there, the rain running off the porch between his feet in the gutter formed by the deep sag.
He looked over at the window to the left of the door, kept his head turned that way for a moment, then turned toward the right window, stared at it.
I reached into the glove box, pulled my .45 out.
Angie reached over me and removed her .38, flicked her wrist and checked the cylinder, snapped it back into place.
Poole approached the door and raised the hand that held the Glock, rapped on the wood with his knuckles. He stepped back, waited. His head turned to the left, then to the right, then back to the door. He leaned forward and rapped the wood again.
The rain barely made noise as it fell. The drops were thin and the sheets fell at an angle, and except for the high-pitched moan of the wind, the road outside the car was silent.
Poole leaned forward and twisted the doorknob to the right and left. The door remained closed. He knocked a third time.
A car drove past, a beige Volvo station wagon with bicycles tied to the roof rack, a woman with a peach headband and a pinched nervous face hunched over the wheel. We watched her brake lights flare red at the stop sign a hundred yards down the road; then the car turned left and disappeared.
The blast of a shotgun from the back of the house ripped through the moaning wind, and glass shattered. Something shrieked in the whispering rain like the clack of damaged brakes.
Poole looked back at us for a moment. Then he raised his foot to kick in the door and disappeared in an eruption of splinters and fire and bursts of light, the chattering of an automatic weapon.
The blast blew him off his feet, and he hit the porch banister so hard it cracked and peeled back from the porch like an arm snapped free at the shoulder socket. Poole’s Glock jumped out of his hand and landed in the flower bed below the porch and his shotgun clattered down the steps.
And the gunfire stopped as suddenly as it had started.
For a moment, we froze inside the car, inside the din left in the aftermath of the gunfire. Poole’s shotgun slid
off the last step and the stock disappeared in the grass as the barrel shone black and wet on the pavement. A strong gust blew the rain with renewed force, and the small house whined and creaked as the gust pushed hard against its roof, rattled its windows.
I opened the car door and stepped out on the road, kept myself low as I ran toward the house. In the soft hiss of the rain, I could hear the thump of my rubber soles on the wet tar and gravel.
Angie ran beside me, the cellular phone up by her right ear and the corner of her mouth. “Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut Road in Germantown. Say again: Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut, Germantown.”
As we ran up the walkway leading to the steps, my eyes darted from the windows to the door and back again. The door had been eviscerated, as if large animals had attacked it with stiletto claws. The wood was gouged in ragged teardrops; in several places I could see through the holes into the house, catch quick glimpses of muted colors or light.
As we reached the steps, the holes were suddenly obscured by darkness. I swung out with my right arm, knocked Angie off her feet and onto the lawn as I dove left.
It was as if the world exploded. Nothing prepares you for the sound of a gun firing seven rounds a second. Through a wooden door, the rage of the bullets sounded almost human, a cacophony of biting, rabid homicide.
Poole flopped to his left as the bullets spit off the porch, and I reached down into the grass by my feet, curled my hand around the stock of his shotgun. I holstered my .45 and rose to one knee. I pointed through the rain and fired into the door, and the wood belched smoke. When the smoke cleared, I was looking at a hole in the center the size of my fist. I rose off my knee but slipped on the wet grass and heard glass tinkling to my left.
I spun and fired over the porch banister into the window, blew the glass and frame to pieces, ripped a hole in the dark curtain.
Inside the house, someone screamed.
The gunfire had stopped. Echoes of the shotgun blasts and the chatter of the automatic weapon stormed through my head.
Angie was on her knees by the bottom of the steps, a tight grimace on her face, .38 pointed at the hole in the door.
“You all right?” I said.
“My ankle’s fucked up.”
“Shot?”
She shook her head, her eyes never leaving the door. “I think it snapped when you pushed me to the ground.” She took a long breath through pursed lips.
“Snapped as in broken?”
She nodded, sucked in another breath.
Poole moaned, and blood slid from the corner of his mouth in a bright, swift current.
“I have to get him off the porch,” I said.
Angie nodded. “I’ll cover.”
I laid the shotgun on the wet grass and reached up, grabbed the top of the banister Poole had bent back when his body had slammed into it. I put my foot against the foundation of the porch and pulled down, felt the base of the banister wrench away from the rotted wood. I gave it another hard pull and the banister and half the railing ripped away from the porch. Poole tumbled back into me, knocked me to the wet grass.
He moaned again and writhed in my arms, and I slid out from under him, saw the curtain in the right window move.
I said, “Angie,” but she’d already pivoted. She fired three rounds into the window and glass spit out of the frame, showered to the porch.
I crouched by the low bushes along the foundation, but no one returned fire and Poole’s back arched off the lawn and a mist of blood burst from his lips.
Angie lowered her gun, took one last long look at the door and the windows, then scrambled across the walk toward us on her knees, her left ankle twisted and held aloft as she pulled herself forward. I drew my .45, pointed over her as she crawled past, and then slid over to the other side of Poole.
Another eruption of automatic weapon fire tore through the back of the house.
“Broussard.” Poole spit the word as he grabbed Angie’s arm, his heels kicking at the grass.
Angie looked at me.
“Broussard,” Poole said again, a thick gurgle in his throat, his back arching off the grass.
Angie pulled her sweatshirt over her head, pressed it to the dark fountain of blood in the center of Poole’s chest. “Sssh.” She placed a hand on his cheek. “Sssh.”
Whoever was firing in the back of the house had a huge clip. For a full twenty seconds, I could hear the staccato screech of that gun. There was a brief pause, then it started again. I wasn’t sure if it was the Calico or some other automatic weapon, but it didn’t make much difference. A machine gun is a machine gun.
I closed my eyes for just a second, swallowed against a painfully dry throat, felt the adrenaline wash through my blood like toxic fuel.
“Patrick,” Angie said, “don’t even fucking think about it.”
I knew if I looked back at her, I’d never leave that lawn. Somewhere in the back of that house, Broussard was pinned down or worse. Samuel Pietro could be in there, bullets flying around his body like hornets.
“Patrick!” Angie screamed, but I’d already vaulted the three steps and landed on the crevice where the two sides of the ruined porch met.
The doorknob had been blown off in the ambush on Poole, and I kicked the door open and fired at chest level into the dark room. I spun right, then left, and emptied my clip, dropped it out of the butt and slammed a fresh one home as it hit the floor. The room was empty.
“Need immediate assistance,” Angie screamed into the cell phone behind me. “Officer down! Officer down!”
The inside of the house was a dark gray that matched the sky outside. I noticed a swath of blood on the floor that had come from a body dragging itself into the hallway. At the other end of the hall, light poured through bullet holes in the back door. The door itself dipped toward the ground, its lower hinge blown off the jamb.
Halfway down the hall, the swath of blood broke to the right and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. I turned in the living room, checked the shadows, saw the broken glass under the windows, the pieces of wood and curtain fabric that had come apart in the gun blasts, an old couch spilling stuffing and littered with beer cans.
The automatic gunfire had ceased as soon as I’d entered the house, and for the moment all I heard was the rain spitting against the porch behind me, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the back of the house, and the sound of my own breathing, shallow and ragged.
The floorboards creaked as I made my way across the living room, followed the blood into the hall. Sweat poured down my face and softened my hands as my eyes darted from the door at the end of the hall to the four separate doorways that lay ahead of me in the narrow corridor. The one ten feet up on my right was the kitchen. The one on the left spilled yellow light into the hall.
I flattened myself against the right wall and inched along until I had a partially obstructed view of the room to the left. It appeared to be a sitting room of some kind. Two chairs were positioned on either side of a wine cabinet built into the wall. One was the recliner I’d been able to make out in the dark last night. The other matched it. The wine cabinet hung in the center of the wall and the glass casing that usually ran over the shelves had been removed. The shelves were filled with stacks of newspaper and glossy magazines, and several more magazines were stacked on the floor beside the chairs. Two old-fashioned pewter ashtrays in three-foot stands stood by the arms of the leather chairs, and a half-smoked cigar still smoldered in one. I stood pressed against the wall, my gun pointed at the right side of that room, watching for moving shadows, listening for creaks on the floorboards.
Nothing.
I took two tight steps across the hall, pinned myself against the other wall, and pointed my gun into the kitchen.
The black-and-white tile floor glistened with streaks of blood and viscera. Wet hand prints, tinged a bright orange under the harsh fluorescent, stained the cupboards and refrigerator door. I saw a shadow spill out from the right side of the room, heard a ra
gged breathing that wasn’t my own.
I took a long, deep breath, counted down from three, and then jumped across to the other side of the doorway, saw in a flash that the reading room to my right was empty, stared down the barrel of my gun at Leon Trett sitting up on the kitchen counter, his eyes fastened on me.
One of the Calico M-110s lay just inside the doorway. I kicked it under the table to my right as I entered.
Leon watched me come with a pained grin on his face. He’d shaved, and his soft, curdled skin had an unhealthy, raw sheen to it, as if the flesh had been scraped with a wire brush and then lathered in oil, as if it could be lifted from the bone with a spoon. Without the beard, his face was longer than it had appeared last night, the cheeks so sunken his mouth was a perpetual oval.
His left arm hung useless by his side, a hole pumping dark blood from the biceps. His right arm was crossed over his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in. His tan trousers were saturated with his own blood.
“Come to give me my clips?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Got some of my own this morning.”
I shrugged.
“Who are you?” he said in a soft voice, his right eyebrow cocked.
“Down on the floor,” I said.
He grunted. “Sweetie, you see me holding my guts in up here? How’m I supposed to move and keep them in?”
“Not my problem,” I said. “Down on the floor.”
His long jaw clenched. “No.”
“Get down on the fucking floor.”
“No,” he said again.
“Leon. Do it.”
“Fuck you. Shoot me.”
“Leon—”
His eyes flickered to his left for just a moment, and the tightness left his jaw. He said, “Show some mercy, baby. Come on.”
I watched his eyes flicker again, saw the hint of a smile form on his lips, and I dropped to my knees as Roberta Trett fired at the place I’d been and blew her own husband’s head off with a sustained burst from her M-110.
She screamed in shock and surprise as Leon’s face disappeared like a balloon popped by a pin, and I rolled onto my back and squeezed off a round that hit her right hip and jerked her into the corner of the kitchen.