Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  When it came back at a slightly higher elevation, the blast from the rotors was strong enough to knock me down, and the whine of the turbine dug against my eardrums like a metal pick.

  As I scrambled to my feet, the helicopter bounced once, then twice off the smooth stone. I could see the pilot’s face tighten in the cockpit as he fought for purchase, and the nose dipped and the tail rose and for a second I thought the rotors would scrape the crop of rocks that separated the cliff top from the tree line.

  A cop in a dark blue jumpsuit and black helmet jumped from the cabin and kept his head low and his knees bent as he ran across the rock toward me.

  “Kenzie?” he shouted.

  I nodded.

  “Come on.” He grabbed my arm and pushed my head down as the other helicopter shot away from the water and off toward the slope where we’d left Poole. There was no way they’d land over there, I knew. It was too tight, no clearing to speak of. Their only hope of getting him out of there was to drop a man and a basket over the side and pull Poole up and out.

  The cop shoved me into the cabin as the rotors continued to whip overhead, and as soon as I was inside, the machine lurched off the rock and dropped over the side.

  I could see Angie below us as we swooped down toward her. She held Amanda’s doll in one hand and dropped below the surface. As the helicopter slid over the surface, the water began to churn and swirl.

  “Go back up!” I screamed.

  The co-pilot looked back at me.

  I jerked my thumb toward the ceiling. “You’ll drown her! Go back up!”

  The co-pilot nudged the pilot and the pilot pulled back on the throttle and my stomach slid into my intestines as the helicopter banked to the right and a graffiti-strewn cliff loomed through the cockpit window and then broke away from us as we rose and turned in a full circle and hovered from a height of about thirty feet over the last place we’d seen Angie.

  She came up and flailed at the eddies engulfing her, spit water from her mouth, and turned onto her back.

  “What’s she doing?” the cop beside me said.

  “Going to shore,” I said, as Angie backstroked toward the rocks, the doll arcing with the windmill motion of her left arm.

  The cop nodded, his rifle aimed at the tree line.

  Angie’s high school had no swim team, so she competed for the Girls Clubs of America, won a silver medal when she was sixteen in a regional competition. Even with the years of smoking, she still had the stroke. Her body cut cleanly through the water, barely disturbing it, leaving so little in her wake that she could have been an eel as she slid toward shore.

  “She’s going to have to walk back,” the co-pilot shouted. “We can’t land down there.”

  Angie sensed a small outcropping of jagged rocks just before she would have crashed into them. She turned her body and floated the rest of the way to the rocks, placed the doll gingerly in a crevice between them, then pulled herself up on top.

  The pilot swung the helicopter down by the rocks and spoke through a megaphone mounted above the light: “Miss Gennaro, we cannot attempt evacuation. The walls are too close and there’s no purchase.”

  Angie nodded and waved tiredly, her body white in the harsh spotlight, strings of her long black hair clamped to her cheeks.

  “Directly behind those rocks,” the pilot called over the megaphone, “is a trail. Follow it down and keep turning left. You’ll end up on Ricciuti Drive. There’ll be someone there to meet you.”

  Angie gave him a thumbs-up and sat down on the rocks, inhaled deeply, and placed the doll on her lap.

  She shrank to nothing but a pale dot in a wall of black as the helicopter banked once again and shot up over the quarry walls, and the land raced far too quickly underneath as we dipped over the old railway route and then headed west for the ski slopes in the Blue Hills.

  “The hell was she looking for down there?” The cop beside me lowered his rifle.

  “The girl,” I said.

  “Hell,” the cop said, “we’re going back in with divers.”

  “At night?” I said.

  The cop looked through his visor at me. “Probably,” he said, with a bit of hesitation. “Definitely in the morning.”

  “I think she was hoping to find her before it got to that point,” I said.

  The cop shrugged. “Man, if Amanda McCready’s in that quarry, only God decides whether we find her corpse or not.”

  19

  We landed on the bunny slope of the Blue Hills Reservation, dropped down neatly between the ski lift lines, and watched as the second helicopter did the same, settled gently about twenty yards away.

  Several police cars and ambulances, two MDC ranger cars, and a few trooper units greeted us.

  Broussard jumped out of the second helicopter and raced toward the first police car, pulled the uniformed cop from the driver’s seat.

  I jogged over as he started the engine. “Where’s Poole?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He wasn’t where we left him. He wasn’t anywhere on the trail. I think he either tried to make it back down on his own or came up to the top when he heard the shots.”

  Major Dempsey came rushing across the grass toward us. “Broussard, what the hell happened up there?”

  “Long story, Major.”

  I climbed in beside Broussard.

  “Where’s the child?”

  “There was no kid up there,” Broussard said. “It was a setup.”

  Dempsey leaned in the window. “I heard the girl’s doll was floating in the water.”

  Broussard looked at me, eyes wild.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t see her body, though.”

  Broussard dropped the shift into DRIVE. “Got to find Poole, sir.”

  “Sergeant Raftopoulos called in two minutes ago. He’s on Pritchett Street. Says we got some DOAs.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Dempsey leaned back from the window. “I have a ranger unit going over to Ricciuti Drive to get your partner, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who fired all the ordnance up there?”

  “Don’t know, sir. They pinned my ass down, though.”

  The sudden whine of a turbine screeched into the field, and Dempsey had to shout to be heard.

  “They can’t get out!” Dempsey yelled. “They’re locked in! There’s no way out!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No sign of the girl?” Dempsey seemed to think that if he asked the question enough, sooner or later he’d get the answer he was hoping for.

  Broussard shook his head. “Look, sir, with all due respect, Sergeant Raftopoulos had some sort of heart attack on the trail. I want to get to him.”

  “Go.” Dempsey stepped aside and waved several cars into line behind us as Broussard punched the gas and drove down the slope, pinned the wheel at a line of trees and spun onto a dirt path, swung left a few seconds later, and sped down a crater-ravaged trail toward the expressway off-ramp that would lead around a rotary and onto Pritchett Street.

  Two more dusty paths and we broke onto Quarry Street and raced down the southern side of the hills, with red and blue lights bouncing and swerving behind us in the rearview mirror.

  Broussard didn’t slow as he shot through a stop sign at the end of Quarry Street. He fishtailed over the shoulder and turned into the rotary, actually giving the gas pedal a deeper push. All four tires fought him for a second. The heavy car seemed to jerk in against itself and buckle, as if it would suddenly turn on its side, but then the wheels caught and the powerful engine moaned and we shot off the rotary. Broussard pinned the wheel again, and we tore over another shoulder, spewed grass and dirt up onto the hood, and burst past an abandoned mill on our right, saw Poole sitting against the rear quarter panel of the Lexus RX 300 on the left side of the road about fifty yards past the mill.

  Poole’s head lolled against the fender. His shirt was open to the navel, and he’d placed one hand
against his heart.

  Broussard slammed the car to a stop and jumped out, slid on the dirt, and dropped to his knees by Poole.

  “Partner! Partner!”

  Poole opened his eyes, smiled weakly. “Got lost.”

  Broussard felt his pulse, then put a hand to his heart, pushed up Poole’s left eyelid with his thumb. “Okay, buddy. Okay. You’re gonna be…you’re gonna be fine.”

  Several police cars pulled past us. A young cop stepped out of the first one, a Quincy unit, and Broussard said, “Open your back door!”

  The cop fumbled with the flashlight in his hand, dropped it to the dirt. He reached down to pick it up.

  “Open your fucking door!” Broussard screamed. “Now!”

  The young cop managed to kick the flashlight under the car before he reached back and opened the door.

  “Kenzie, help me lift him.”

  I got a grip on Poole’s lower legs, and Broussard eased behind him and wrapped his arms around his chest, and we carried him to the back of the police car and slid him onto the seat.

  “I’m fine,” Poole said, and his eyes rolled to the left.

  “Sure you are.” Broussard smiled. He turned his head to look at the young cop, who appeared very nervous. “You drive fast?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  Behind us, several troopers and Quincy cops approached the front of the Lexus, guns drawn.

  “Step out of the car now!” one trooper shouted, pointing his weapon at Gutierrez’s windshield.

  “Which hospital is closer?” Broussard asked. “Quincy or Milton?”

  “Uh, from here, sir, it’s Milton.”

  “How fast can you get there?” Broussard asked the cop.

  “Three minutes.”

  “Make it two.” Broussard slapped the cop’s shoulder and shoved him toward the driver’s door.

  The cop hopped behind the wheel. Broussard squeezed Poole’s hand and said, “See you in a bit.”

  Poole nodded sleepily.

  We stepped back and Broussard shut the back door.

  “Two minutes,” he repeated to the cop. The wheels of the unit spewed gravel and kicked up clouds of dust as the cop blew out onto the road, turned on his lights, and sped down the asphalt so fast he could have been shot from a rocket booster.

  “Holy shit,” another cop said. He stood at the front of the Lexus. “Holy shit,” he said again.

  Broussard and I walked toward the Lexus and Broussard grabbed a pair of troopers, pointed at the abandoned mill building. “Secure that building. Now.”

  The troopers didn’t even question. They placed hands to the guns on their hips and ran back up the road toward the mill.

  We reached the Lexus, worked our way through the small crowd of cops blocking the front bumper, and looked through the windshield at Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez. Gutierrez was in the driver’s seat, Mullen riding shotgun. The headlights were still on. The engine was running. A single hole formed a small spiderweb in the windshield in front of Gutierrez. An identical hole was bored through the glass in front of Mullen.

  The holes in their heads were pretty similar, too—both the size of a dime, both puckered and white around the edges, both spilling a thin stream of blood down the men’s noses.

  By the looks of it, Gutierrez had taken the first shot. His face registered nothing except a sense of impatience, and both his hands were empty and lying palms up on the seat. The keys were in the ignition, the shift in PARK. Chris Mullen’s right hand gripped the gun in his waistband, and the look on his face was a sudden frozen seizure of fear and surprise. He’d had about half a second to know he was going to die, maybe less. But enough time for everything to turn slow-motion on him, a thousand terrified thoughts scrambling through his angry brain in the time it took for him to register the bullet that had killed Pharaoh, reach for his gun, and hear the spit of the next bullet punch through the windshield.

  Bubba, I thought.

  Fifty yards in front of the Lexus, the abandoned mill with its sagging widow’s walk would have provided a perfect sniper’s perch.

  In the shafts of light cast by the car’s headlamps, I could see the two Staties approaching it slowly, knees bent slightly, guns drawn and aimed up at the widow’s walk. One of them pointed to the other, and they approached the side door. One threw it open, and the other stepped in front of it, gun pointed at chest level.

  Bubba, I thought, I hope you didn’t do this just for fun. Tell me you have Amanda McCready.

  Broussard followed my gaze. “How much you want to bet the angle of trajectory tells us the bullets were fired from that building?”

  “No bet,” I said.

  Two hours later, they were still sorting out the mess. The night had turned suddenly cold, and a light sleet fell and splattered windshields and stuck in our hair like lice.

  The troopers who’d entered the mill had come back out with a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle they’d found, with LAD target scope attached. The rifle had been dumped in a barrel of ancient oil on the second floor, just to the right of the window that led to the widow’s walk. The serial numbers had been filed off, and the first guy from Forensics who looked at it laughed when someone suggested the possibility of prints.

  More troopers were sent into the mill to look for further evidence, but in two hours they hadn’t found shell casings or anything else, and Forensics had been unable to get any prints off the railing of the widow’s walk or the frame of the window leading out there.

  The ranger who’d met Angie on the back side of the hill leading to Swingle’s Quarry had given her a bright orange raincoat to cover herself and a pair of thick socks for her feet, but still she shivered in the night, kept rubbing her dark hair with a towel even though it had dried or frozen hours ago. Indian summer, it appeared, had gone the way of the Massachusetts Indian.

  Two divers had attempted a search of the Granite Rail Quarry but reported visibility at absolute zero below thirty feet, and once the weather kicked in, the slit deposits loosened from the granite walls had turned even the shallow water into a sandstorm.

  The divers quit at ten without finding anything but a pair of men’s jeans hanging from a shelf about twenty feet below the water line.

  When Broussard had reached the south side of the quarry, almost directly across from the cliff where Angie and I had seen the doll, a note had been waiting for him, placed neatly under a small boulder and illuminated by a pencil-thin flashlight hung from a branch above it.

  Duck.

  As Broussard reached for the note, the trees erupted with gunfire, and he dove out from the tree line onto the cliff plateau, grappling for his gun and walkie-talkie, leaving the money bag and his flashlight back at the tree line. A second barrage of bullets drove him to the edge of the cliff, where he lay in darkness, his only safety, and trained his gun on the tree line but didn’t fire for fear the muzzle flashes would reveal his exact position.

  A search of Broussard’s last position found the note, the kidnapper’s pencil light, Broussard’s flashlight, and the bag, which was open and empty. Over a hundred spent shells had been found in the trees and ledges directly behind Broussard’s cliff in the last hour and the trooper who radioed it in said:

  “We’re gonna find a lot more. Looks like the shooters went house back here. Looks like Grenada, for Christ’s sake.”

  The troopers and rangers on our side of the quarry had called down to report finding evidence of at least fifty rounds fired into our cliff plateau or the trees behind us.

  The consensus was pretty much summed up by a trooper we heard over the radio. “Major Dempsey, sir, they weren’t supposed to walk back out of here. No way in hell.”

  All roads into and out of the area remained locked down, but based on the fact that the shots were fired from the southern side of Granite Rail Quarry, troopers, rangers, and local police with hounds were sent to concentrate their search for the suspects there, and even from the street on the northern side we could occa
sionally see the symphony of lights playing off the treetops.

  Poole had suffered what doctors believed was a myocardial infarction, exacerbated by his walk downhill to Quarry Street. Once there, Poole, already disoriented and possibly delirious, had apparently seen Gutierrez and Mullen in the Lexus heading for Pritchett Street and had made his way over there in time to find their corpses and call in from the car phone in the Lexus.

  Last we’d heard, Poole was in ICU at Milton Hospital, his condition critical.

  “Anybody done the math yet?” Dempsey asked us. We were leaning against the hood of our Crown Victoria, Broussard smoking one of Angie’s cigarettes, Angie shivering and slurping coffee from a cup with the seal of the MDC on it as I ran a hand up and down her back, trying to push some heat back into her blood.

  “Which math?” I said.

  “The math that puts Gutierrez and Mullen down on the road at about the same time you three were under fire.” He chewed a red plastic toothpick, touched it occasionally with his thumb and index, but never removed it from his mouth. “’Less they had a helicopter, too, and I don’t think they did somehow…. You?”

  “I don’t think they had a helicopter,” I said.

  He smiled. “Right. So, barring that, there’s really no way they could have been on top of those hills and tooling around down here in their Lexus a minute or so later. Just seems—I dunno—impossible. You follow?”

  Angie’s teeth chattered as she said, “So who else was up there?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? Among others.” He looked back over his shoulder at the dark shape of the hills rising on the other side of the expressway. “Not to mention, where’s the girl? Where’s the money? Where’s the person or persons who unloaded a Schwarzenegger movie’s worth of firepower up there? Where’s the person or persons who DOA’d Gutierrez and Mullen so smoothly?” He put his foot up on the fender, touched the toothpick again, and looked up at the cars racing past on the expressway just on the other side of the Lexus. “Press is going to have a field day.”