Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“...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.

The harsh light of the kitchen seemed to etch her and Bubba’s outlines as they stood in the center of the room, both of them the size of something you’d normally climb with rope and pitons, not give birth to.

I slid my .45 out of the holster at the small of my back, dropped it down behind my right leg, and released the safety.

“Two hundred twenty,” Bubba said, as Roberta Trett took another step toward him, “two hundred thirty, two hundred forty, dude, shoot this bitch, will ya, two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty…”

Roberta Trett stopped and cocked her head slightly to the left, as if unsure of what she’d heard. She looked unable to identify what her options were. She looked unfamiliar with that sensation.

I doubted she’d ever been ignored in her life.

“Mr. Miller, you will stop counting now.” She extended her arm until it was T-bar straight and hard, and her knuckles whitened against the black steel.

“...three hundred, three hundred ten, three hundred twenty, I said, shoot the big bitch, three hundred thirty…”

That time she was sure of what she’d heard. A tremor appeared in her wrist, and the pistol shook.

“Ma’am,” I said, “put the gun down.”

Her eyes rolled right in their sockets, and she saw that I hadn’t moved, that I wasn’t pointing anything at her. And then she noticed that she couldn’t see my right hand, and that’s when I used my thumb to pull back the hammer on my .45, the sound cutting into the fluorescent hum of that bright kitchen as cleanly as a gunshot itself.

“...four fifty, four sixty, four seventy…”

Roberta Trett looked over Bubba’s shoulder at Leon, and the .38 shook some more and Bubba kept counting.

Beyond the kitchen I heard the sound of a door open and close very quickly. It came from the back of the house, from the far end of the long hallway that split the building.

Roberta heard it too. Her eyes jerked to the left for a moment, then back to Leon.

“Make him stop,” Leon said. “Make him stop counting. It hurts.”

“...six hundred,” Bubba said, and his voice grew an octave louder. “Six ten, six twenty, six twenty-five—enough with the fives already—six thirty…”

A set of soft footsteps approached from the hall, and Roberta’s back stiffened.

Leon said, “Stop it. Stop that counting.”

A man even smaller than Leon went rigid as he stepped through the doorway, his dark eyes widening in confusion, and I removed the gun from behind my leg and pointed it at the center of his forehead.

He had a chest so sunken it seemed to have been produced in reverse, the sternum and rib cage curling in while the small belly protruded like a pygmy’s. His right eye was lazy and kept sliding away from us as if it were asea on a floundering boat. Small scratches over his right nipple reddened in the white light.

He wore only a small blue terry-cloth towel, and his skin was sheened with sweat.

“Corwin,” Roberta said, “you go back to your room now.”

Corwin Earle. I guess he’d found his nuclear family after all.

“Corwin’s going to stay right here,” I said, and extended my arm its full length, watched Corwin’s good eye meet the hole in the barrel of the .45.

Corwin nodded and placed his hands by his sides.

All eyes but mine turned back to Bubba and gave him their full attention.

“Two thousand!” he crowed. He raised the wad of cash in his hand.

“We agree you’ve been compensated,” Roberta Trett said, and her voice shook like the gun in her hand. “Now complete the transaction, Mr. Miller. Give us the clips.”

“Give us the clips!” Leon shrieked.

Bubba looked over his shoulder at him.

Corwin Earle took a step back, and I said, “That’s a no-no.”

He swallowed and I waved the gun forward and he moved with it.

Bubba chuckled. It was a low, soft heh-heh-heh, and it put a hard curve up the back of Roberta Trett’s neck.

“The clips,” Bubba said, and turned back to Roberta, seemed to notice the gun pointed at him for the first time. “Of course.”

He pursed his lips and blew a kiss to Roberta. She blinked and stepped back from it as if it were toxic.

Bubba reached toward the pocket of his trench coat, and then his arm shot back up.

“Hey!” Leon said.

Roberta jerked backward as Bubba slapped his wrist into hers and the .38 jumped from her hand, flew over the sink, and sped toward the counter.

Everyone but Bubba ducked.

The .38 hit the wall above the counter. Its hammer dropped on impact, and the gun fired.

The bullet tore a hole through the cheap Formica behind the sink and ricocheted into the wall beside the window where Leon crouched.

The .38 clattered loudly as it fell to the counter, and the barrel spun and ended up pointing at the dusty dish rack.

Bubba looked at the hole in the wall. “Cool,” he said.

The rest of us straightened, except for Leon. He sat down on the floor and placed a palm over his heart, and those pale eyes of his hardened in such a way that I knew he was far less frail than his cringing act during Bubba’s counting would lead us to believe. It was just a mask, a role he played, I assumed, to lull us into forgetting about him, and it dropped from his face as he sat on the floor and looked up at Bubba with naked hatred.

Bubba stuffed the second wad in his pocket. He closed the distance between himself and Roberta, then tapped his foot on the floor in front of her until she raised her head and met his eyes.