Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

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 give 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.”