Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  When I turned my head back, the cold metal bores of the shotgun dug into my forehead, and my eyes met the curl of a red finger on the other side of the trigger guard. This close, the finger looked like an insect or a red and white worm. It looked like it had a mind of its own.

  “Close your eyes,” Casper said. “Close ’em tight.”

  “Mr. Broussard,” Lionel said. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

  “Pull the fucking trigger!” Popeye turned toward his companion. “Do it!”

  Angie said, “Broussard—”

  “Stop saying that fucking name!” Popeye kicked a chair into the wall.

  I kept my eyes open, felt the curve of metal against my flesh, smelled the cleaning oil and old gunpowder, watched the finger twitch against the trigger.

  “It’s over,” I said again, and it came out in a croak through my arid throat and mouth. “It’s over.”

  For a long, long time, no one said anything. In that hard hush of silence, I could hear the whole world creak on its axis.

  Casper’s face tilted as Broussard cocked his head and I saw that look in his eyes that I’d seen yesterday at the football game, the one that was hard, that danced and burned.

  Then a clear, resigned defeat replaced it and shuddered softly through his body, and his finger slipped from the trigger as he lowered the gun from my head.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “Over.”

  “Are you dicking me?” his partner said. “We have to do this. We have to do this, man. We have orders. Do it! Now!”

  Broussard shook his head, the moony face and child’s smile of the Casper mask swaying with it. “This is done. Let’s go.”

  “Fuck you, this is done! You can’t cap these fuckers? Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can!”

  Popeye raised his arm and pointed his gun in the center of Lionel’s face as Ryerson’s hand dropped into his lap and the first gunshot was muffled by the top of the table as it tore through the flesh of Popeye’s left thigh.

  His gun went off as he jerked backward, and Lionel screamed, grabbed the side of his head, and toppled from his chair.

  Ryerson’s gun cleared the tabletop, and he shot Popeye twice in the chest.

  When Broussard pulled the trigger of the shotgun, I distinctly heard the pause—a microsecond’s worth of silence—between the trigger engaging the round and the blast that roared in my ears like an inferno.

  Neal Ryerson’s left shoulder disappeared in a flash of fire and blood and bone, just melted and exploded and evaporated all at the same time in a sonic boom of noise. A splatter of him hit the wall, and then his body toppled out of the chair as the shotgun rose through the smoke in Remy Broussard’s hand and the table toppled to the left with Ryerson. His .9 mm fell from his hand and bounced off a chair on the way to the floor.

  Angie had cleared her gun, but she dove to her left as Broussard pivoted.

  I drove my head into his stomach, wrapped my arms around him, and ran straight back for the bar. I rammed his spine against the rail, heard him grunt, and then he drove the stock of the shotgun down onto the back of my neck.

  My knees hit the floor, my arms fell back from his body, and Angie screamed, “Broussard!” and fired her .38.

  He threw the shotgun at her as I reached for my .45, and it hit her in the chest, knocked her to the floor.

  He vaulted the two darts players and sprinted for the front door like a born athlete.

  I closed my left eye and sighted down the barrel and fired twice as Broussard reached the front of the bar. I saw his right leg jerk and skitter away from him before he turned the corner, threw the bolt lock, and burst out into the night.

  “Angie!”

  I turned as she sat up amid a pile of overturned chairs. “I’m fine.”

  Ryerson shouted, “Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!”

  I looked down at Lionel. He rolled on the floor, moaning, his head in his hands, blood pouring through the fingers.

  I looked at the bartender. “The ambulance!”

  He picked up the phone and dialed.

  Ryerson leaned back against the wall, most of his shoulder gone, and screamed up at the ceiling, his body convulsing wildly.

  “He’s going into shock,” I said to Angie.

  “I got him.” She crawled toward Ryerson. “I need all the towels from the bar, and I need ’em now!”

  One of the secretaries hopped over the bar.

  “Beatrice,” Lionel moaned. “Beatrice.”

  The rubber band holding Popeye’s mask to his head had snapped when he dropped down the bar, Ryerson’s bullets popping through his sternum. I looked down at the face of John Pasquale. He was dead, and he’d been right yesterday, after the football game: Luck always ran out.

  I met Angie’s eyes as she caught a towel the secretary tossed across the room to her. “Get Broussard, Patrick. Get him.”

  I nodded as the secretary rushed past me and dropped down by Lionel, placed a towel to the side of his head.

  I checked my pocket for a second clip, found it, and left the bar.

  33

  I followed Broussard’s trail across Broadway and up C Street, where it wound into the trucking and warehouse district along East Second. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow. He’d discarded the Casper mask as soon as he left the bar, and it lay looking up at me as I stepped out, holes for eyes, a toothless smile. Drops of blood, so fresh they shone under street lamps, pointed out their owner’s path in a jagged line. They grew thicker and wider in diameter the farther they led into the scantily lit, cracked-cobblestone blocks of dark depots, empty loading docks, and cubbyhole teamster bars with curtains drawn and small neon signs missing half the bulbs. Semis headed for Buffalo or Trenton rolled and heaved and bumped down the cracked streets, and their headlights flashed across the end of the trail, the place where Broussard had stopped long enough to jimmy a door. The blood dropping from a hole in his body had formed a puddle, splattered the door in thin streaks. I hadn’t thought a leg could bleed like that, but maybe my bullet had blown apart the femur or savaged crucial arteries.

  I looked up at the building. It was seven stories tall and built of the chocolate-brown brick they’d used at the turn of the century. Weeds rose to the windowsills on the first level, and the boards over the windows themselves were cracked and defaced by graffiti. It was wide enough to have served as storage for large objects or the manufacture and assembly of machines.

  Assembly, I decided as I entered. The first thing I noticed was the silhouette of an assembly belt, pulleys and chains dropping from the rafters twenty feet above it. The belt itself and the rollers that had once been beneath it were gone, but the main frame remained, bolted to the floor, and hooks curled out from the ends of the chains like beckoning fingers. The rest of the floor was empty, everything of value either stolen by vagrants and kids or stripped by the final owners and sold.

  To the right, a cast-iron staircase led to the next floor, and I climbed it slowly, unable to follow the trail of blood anymore in the darkness, peering through the black for holes rusted through the steps, gingerly reaching out for the rail before each step, hoping to press against metal and not the body of some angry, hungry rat.

  My eyes adjusted somewhat to the dark as I reached the second floor, saw nothing but an empty loft space, the shapes of a few overturned pallets, the glow from dim streetlights pressing through lead windows shattered by rocks. The staircases were stacked one on top of each other at identical points on each floor, so that to reach the next, I had to turn left at the wall and follow it back about fifteen feet until I found the opening, looked up the stack of thick iron risers until I saw the rectangular hole up top.

  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 li
ttle 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.”

  “Where is Likanski?” I said.

  He tilted his head up toward me. “Look over your shoulder and down to your right a bit.”

  I tilted my head. The Fort Point Channel broke away from a white and dusty lip of land, rolled under bridges and Summer and Congress streets, stretched toward t
he skyline and the piers and the dark blue release of Boston Harbor.

  “Ray sleeps with the fishes?” I said.

  Broussard gave me a lazy smile. “’Fraid so.”

  “How long?”

  “I found him that night in October, right after you two came on to the case. He was packing. I interrogated him about the scam he ran on Cheese. Got to hand it to him, he never gave up the location of the money. Never thought he’d have that kind of spine, but two hundred grand gives some people balls, I guess. Anyway, he’s planning to leave. I didn’t want him to. Things got physical.”

  He coughed violently, arching forward, and pressed a hand over the hole in his chest, gripped his gun tightly in his lap.

  “We need to get you off this roof.”

  He looked up at me, wiped at his mouth with the back of his gun hand. “I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere.”

  “Come on. There’s no point in dying.”

  He gave me that wonderful, boyish grin of his. “Funny, I’d argue the opposite about now. You got a cell phone to call for an ambulance?”

  “No.”

  He placed his gun on his lap and reached into his leather jacket, removed a slim Nokia. “I do,” he said, and he turned and tossed if off the roof.

  I heard it shatter distantly as it hit the pavement seven stories below.

  “Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “Fucker comes with a hell of a warranty.”

  I sighed and sat down on the small tar riser at the edge of the roof, faced him.

  “Determined to die on this roof,” I said.

  “Determined not to go to jail. A trial?” He shook his head. “Not for me, pal.”

  “Then tell me who has her, Remy. Go out right.”

  His eyes widened. “So you can go get her? Bring her back to that fucking thing society calls her mother? Kiss my ass, man. Amanda stays gone. You got that? She stays happy. She stays well-fed and clean and looked after. She has a few fucking laughs in her life and she grows up with a chance. You need brain surgery, you think I’m going to tell you where she is, Kenzie.”

  “The people who have her are kidnappers.”

  “Ah, no. Wrong answer. I’m a kidnapper. They’re people who took a child in.” He blinked several times at the sweat bathing his face on a cool night, sucked in a long breath that rattled in his chest. “You were at my house this morning. My wife called me.”