Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  The truth, I told her once, was that someone in Cheese’s organization had pulled a double-cross on Mullen and Gutierrez after they’d dumped Amanda over a cliff. And this someone had taken them out and walked away with two hundred thousand dollars.

  “Cheese didn’t think so,” she said.

  “Broussard was right about that. Cheese was a professional liar.”

  She shrugged. “I beg to differ.”

  So at night she’d return to autumn and all that had gone wrong, and I would either read, watch an old movie on AMC, or shoot pool with Bubba—which is what I was doing when he said, “I need you to ride shotgun on something down in Germantown with me.”

  I’d only had half a beer by this point, so I was pretty sure I’d heard him right.

  “You want me to go on a deal with you?”

  I stared across the pool table at Bubba as some heathen chose a Smiths song on the jukebox. I hate the Smiths. I’d rather be tied to a chair and forced to listen to a medley of Suzanne Vega and Natalie Merchant songs while performance artists hammered nails through their genitalia in front of me than listen to thirty seconds of Morrissey and the Smiths whine their art-school angst about how they are human and need to be loved. Maybe I’m a cynic, but if you want to be loved, stop whining about it and you just might get laid, which could be a promising first step.

  Bubba turned his head back toward the bar and shouted, “What pussy played this shit?”

  “Bubba,” I said.

  He held up a finger. “One sec.” He turned back toward the bar. “Who played this song. Huh?”

  “Bubba,” the bartender said, “now calm down.”

  “I just want to know who played this song.”

  Gigi Varon, a thirty-year-old alkie who looked a shriveled forty-five, raised her meek hand from the corner of the bar. “I didn’t know, Mr. Rogowski. I’m sorry. I’ll pull the plug.”

  “Oh, Gigi!” Bubba gave her a big wave. “Hi! No, never mind.”

  “I will, really.”

  “No, no, hon.” Bubba shook his head. “Paulie, give Gigi two drinks on me.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rogowski.”

  “No problem. Morrissey sucks, though, Gigi. Really. Ask Patrick. Ask anyone.”

  “Yeah, Morrissey sucks,” one of the old guys said, and then several other patrons followed suit.

  “I put the Amazing Royal Crowns in next,” Gigi said.

  I’d turned Bubba on to the Amazing Royal Crowns a few months back, and now they were his favorite band.

  Bubba spread his arms wide. “Paulie, make it three drinks.”

  We were in Live Bootleg, a tiny tavern on the Southie/ Dorchester line that had no sign out front. The brick exterior was painted black, and the only indication the bar had a name at all was scrawled in red paint on the lower right corner of the wall fronting Dorchester Avenue. Ostensibly owned by Carla Dooley, aka “The Lovely Carlotta,” and her husband, Shakes, Live Bootleg was really Bubba’s bar, and I’d never been in the place when every stool wasn’t filled and the booze wasn’t flowing. It was a good crowd, too; in the three years since Bubba had opened it, there’d never been a fight or a line for the bathroom because some junkie was taking too long to shoot up in the stall. Of course, everyone who entered knew who the real owner was and how he’d feel if anyone ever gave the police reason to knock on his door, so for all its dark interior and shady rep, Live Bootleg was about as dangerous as the Wednesday night bingo game at Saint Bart’s. Had better music, too, most times.

  “I don’t see why you’re giving Gigi a small coronary,” I said. “You own the jukebox. You loaded the Smiths CD.”

  “I didn’t load no friggin’ Smiths CD,” Bubba said. “It’s one of those Best of the Eighties compilations. I had to live with a Smiths song ’cause it’s got ‘Come on, Eileen’ on it and a whole bunch of other good shit.”

  “Katrina and the Waves?” I said. “Bananarama? Real cools bands like that?”

  “Hey,” he said, “it’s got Nena, so shut up.”

  “‘Ninety-nine Luftballoons,’” I said. “Well, all right.” I leaned into the table, pocketed the seven. “Now what’s this about me accompanying you on a deal?”

  “I need backup. Nelson’s out of town and the Twoomeys are doing two-to-six.”

  “Million other guys will help you for a C-note.” I dropped the six, but it kissed Bubba’s ten on the way in, and I stepped back from the table.

  “Well, I got two reasons.” He leaned over the table and banged the cue ball off the nine, watched it bounce around the table, and then shut his eyes tight as the cue dropped in the side pocket. For someone who plays so much pool, Bubba really sucks.

  I put the cue back on the table, lined up for the four in the side. “Reason number one?”

  “I trust you and you owe me.”

  “That’s two reasons.”

  “It’s one. Shut up and shoot.”

  I dropped the four, and the cue rolled slowly into a sweet lie across from the two ball.

  “Reason number two is,” Bubba said, and chalked his stick with great squeaking turns, “I want you to get a look at these people I’m selling to.”

  I pocketed the two but buried the cue behind one of Bubba’s balls. “Why?”

  “Trust me. You’ll be interested.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “I’m not sure if they are who I think they are, so you gotta join me, see for yourself.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I win this game.”

  “How dangerous?” I said.

  “No more dangerous than normal.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Very dangerous then.”

  “Don’t be such a puss. Shoot the ball.”

  Germantown is set hard against the harbor that separates Quincy from Weymouth. Given its name back in the mid-1700s when a glass manufacturer imported indentured laborers from Germany and laid out the town lots with ample streets and wide squares in the German tradition, the company failed and the Germans were left to fend for themselves when it became apparent that the cost of giving them their freedom would be less expensive than sending them someplace else.

  A long line of failure followed, seemed to haunt the tiny seaport and the generations descended from the original indentured servants. Pottery, chocolate, stockings, whale-oil products, and medicinal salt and saltpeter industries all cropped up and fell by the wayside over the next two centuries. For a while the cod-and whale-fishing industries enjoyed some popularity, but they, too, picked up and moved north to Gloucester or farther south toward Cape Cod in search of better catches and better waters.

  Germantown became a forgotten slip of land, its waters cut off from its inhabitants by chain-link fence and polluted by refuse from the Quincy Shipyards, a power plant, oil tanks, and the Procter & Gamble factory that formed the only silhouettes in its skyline. An early experiment with public housing for war veterans left its shoreline marred by cul-de-sac housing developments the color of pumice, each one a collection of four buildings housing sixteen units and curved in on each other in a horseshoe, skeletal metal clothesline structures rising out of pools of rust in the cracked tar.

  The house Bubba parked his Hummer in front of was a block off the shore, and the homes on either side of it were condemned and cascading back into the earth. In the dark, the house seemed to sag as well, and while I couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, there was an air of certain decay to the structure.

  The old man who answered the door had a close-cropped beard that quilted his jawline in square tufts of silver and black but refused to grow in over the cleft of his long chin, leaving a pink puckered circle of exposed flesh that winked like an eye. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty, with a gnarled curve to his small frame that made him appear much older. He wore a weathered Red Sox baseball cap that looked too small even for his tiny head, a yellow half T-shirt that left a wrinkled, milky midriff exposed, and a pair of black nylon tights that ended above hi
s bare ankles and feet and bunched up around his crotch so tightly his appendage resembled a fist.

  The man pulled the brim of the baseball cap farther down his forehead and said to Bubba, “You Jerome Miller?”

  “Jerome Miller” was Bubba’s favored alias. It was the name of Bo Hopkins’s character in The Killer Elite, a movie Bubba had seen about eleven thousand times and could quote at will.

  “What do you think?” Bubba’s enormous body loomed over the slight man and obscured him from my view.

  “I’m asking,” the man said.

  “I’m the Easter Bunny standing on your doorstep with a gym bag filled with guns.” Bubba leaned in over the man. “Let us the fuck in.”

  The old man stepped aside, and we crossed the threshold into a dark living room acrid with cigarette smoke. The old man bent by the coffee table and lifted a burning cigarette from an overstuffed ashtray, sucked wetly on the butt, and stared through the smoke at us, his pale eyes all but glowing in the dark.

  “So, show me,” he said.

  “You want to turn on a light?” Bubba said.

  “No light here,” the man said.

  Bubba gave him a wide, cold smile, all teeth. “Take me to a room that has one.”

  The man shrugged his bony shoulders. “Suit yourself.”

  As we followed him down a narrow hallway, I noticed that the strap at the back of the baseball cap hung open, the ends too wide apart to clasp, and in general the back of the hat rode oddly on the man’s head, too far up the skull. I tried to put my finger on who the guy reminded me of. Since I didn’t know many old men who dressed in half T-shirts and tights, I would have figured the list of possibilities to be relatively small. But there was something familiar about the guy, and I had the feeling that either the beard or the baseball hat was throwing me off.

  The hallway smelled like dirty bathwater left undrained for days, and the walls reeked of mildew. Four doorways opened off the hall, which led straight to the back door. Above us, on the second floor, something made a sudden soft thump. The ceiling throbbed with bass, the vibrations of speakers turned up loud, even though the music itself was so faint—a tinny whisper, really—that it could have been coming from half a block away. Soundproofing, I decided. Maybe they had a band up there, a group of old men in Spandex and half-shirts covering old Muddy Waters songs, gyrating to the beat.

  We neared the first two doorways midway down the hall, and I glanced in the one on my left, saw only a dark room with shadows and shapes I guessed were a recliner and stacks of either books or magazines. The smell of old cigar smoke wafted from the room. The one on the right took us into a kitchen bathed so harshly in white light, I was pretty sure the fluorescent wattage was industrial, the kind normally found in truck depots, not private homes. Instead of illuminating the room, it washed it out, and I had to blink several times to regain my vision.

  The man lifted a small object off the counter and tossed it sideways in my direction. I blinked in the brightness, saw the object coming in low and to my right, and reached out and snagged it. It was a small paper bag, and I’d caught it by the bottom. Sheafs of money threatened to spill to the floor before I righted the bag and pushed the bills back inside. I turned back to Bubba and handed it to him.

  “Good hands,” the man said. He smiled a yellow tobacco-stained grin in Bubba’s direction. “Your gym bag, sir.”

  Bubba swung the gym bag into the man’s chest, and the force of it knocked him on his ass. He sprawled on the black-and-white tile, arms spread, and propped the heels of his hands on the tile for support.

  “Bad hands,” Bubba said. “How about I just put it on the table?”

  The man looked up at him and nodded, blinked at the light above his face.

  It was his nose that looked so familiar, I decided, the hawkish curve to it. It jutted out from the otherwise flat plane of the man’s face like a precipice, hooked downward so dramatically the tip cast a shadow on the man’s lips.

  He got up off the floor and dusted the seat of his black tights, rubbed his hands together as he stood over the table and watched Bubba unzip the gym bag. Twin orange fires lit the man’s eyes like the glints of taillights in the dark as he stared into the bag, and dots of perspiration speckled his upper lip.

  “So these are my babies,” the man said, as Bubba pulled back the folds of the bag and revealed four Calico M-110 machine pistols, the black aluminum alloy glistening with oil. One of the strangest-looking weapons I’ve ever seen, the Calico M-110 is a handgun that fires a hundred rounds from the same helical-feed magazine used for its carbines. Roughly seventeen inches long, the grip and barrel take up the front eight inches, with the slide and the majority of the gun frame jutting back behind the grip. The gun reminded me of the fake ones we’d built as kids out of rubber bands, clothespins, and popsicle sticks to fire paper clips at one another.

  But with rubber bands and popsicle sticks, we couldn’t fire more than ten paper clips in a minute. The M-110, at full auto, was capable of unleashing one hundred bullets in roughly fifteen seconds.

  The old man lifted one from the bag and laid it flat in the palm of his hand. He raised his arm up and down to feel the weight, his pale eyes glistening as if they’d been oiled like the gun. He smacked his lips as if he could taste the gunfire.

  I said, “Stocking up for a war?”

  Bubba shot me a look and began counting the money from the paper bag.

  The man smiled at the gun as if it were a kitten. “Persecution exists on all fronts at all times, dear. One must be prepared.” He stroked the gun frame with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, my my my,” he cooed.

  And that’s when I recognized him.

  Leon Trett, the child molester Broussard had given me a picture of in the early days of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. The man suspected in the rapes of over fifty children, the disappearance of two.

  And we’d just armed him.

  Oh, joy.

  He looked up at me suddenly, as if he could sense what I was thinking, and I felt myself go cold and small in the wash of his pale eyes.

  “Clips?” he said.

  “When I leave,” Bubba said. “Don’t fuck up my counting.”

  He took a step toward Bubba. “No, no. Not when you leave,” Leon Trett said. “Now.”

  Bubba said, “Shut up. I’m counting.” Under his breath, I could hear: “…four hundred fifty, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five—”

  Leon Trett shook his head several times, as if by doing so he could make the clips appear, make Bubba turn reasonable.

  “Now,” Trett said. “Now. I want my clips now. I paid for them.”

  He reached out for Bubba’s arm and Bubba backhanded him in the chest, knocked him into the small table underneath the window.

  “Motherfucker!” Bubba stopped counting, slammed the bills together in his hands. “Now I gotta start all over.”

  “You give me my clips,” Trett said. His eyes were wet and there was a spoiled eight-year-old’s whine in his voice. “You give them to me.”

  “Fuck off.” Bubba started counting the bills again.

  Trett’s eyes filled and he slapped the gun between his hands.

  “What’s the matter, baby?”

  I turned my head toward the sound of the voice and laid eyes on the largest woman I’d ever seen. She wasn’t just an Amazon of a woman, she was a Sasquatch, bulky and covered in thick gray hair, at least five inches of it rising off the top of her head and then spilling down the sides of her face, obscuring her cheekbones and the corners of her eyes, billowing out on her wide shoulders like Spanish moss.

  She was dressed in dark brown from head to toe, and the girth under those folds of loose clothing seemed to shake and rumble as she stood in the kitchen doorway with a .38 held loosely in one great paw of a hand.

  Roberta Trett. Her photograph did not do her justice.

  “They won’t give me the clips,” Leon said. “They’re taking the money, but they won’t gi
ve me the clips.”

  Roberta took a step into the room, surveyed it with a slow roll of her head from right to left. The only one who hadn’t acknowledged her presence was Bubba. He remained in the center of the kitchen, head down, trying to count his money.

  Roberta pointed the gun quite casually in my direction. “Give us the clips.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t got ’em.”

  “You.” She waved the gun at Bubba. “Hey, you.”

  “…eight hundred fifty,” Bubba said, “eight hundred sixty, eight hundred seventy—”

  “Hey!” Roberta said. “You look at me when I’m talking.”

  Bubba turned his head slightly toward her, but kept his eyes on the money. “Nine hundred. Nine hundred ten, nine hundred twenty—”

  “Mr. Miller,” Leon said desperately, “my wife is talking to you.”

  “…nine hundred sixty-five, nine hundred seventy—”

  “Mr. Miller!” Leon’s shriek was so high-pitched I felt it ring in my inner ears, buzz along the brain stem.

  “One thousand.” Bubba stopped in the middle of the wad of money and placed the chunk he’d already counted in his jacket pocket.

  Leon sighed audibly and relief sagged across his face.

  Bubba looked at me as if unaware of what all the fuss was about.

  Roberta lowered the gun. “Now, Mr. Miller, if we could just—”

  Bubba licked the corner of his thumb and peeled off the top bill in the pile that remained in his hands. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred….”

  Leon Trett looked like he’d suffered an embolism on the spot. His chalky face turned crimson and bloated and he squeezed the empty gun between his hands and hopped back and forth as if he needed a bathroom.

  Roberta Trett raised the gun again, and this time there was nothing casual about it. She pointed it directly at Bubba’s head and closed her left eye. She sighted down the barrel and pulled back the hammer.