Gone, Baby, Gone (44 page)

“So you’ve seen her,” I said.

He nodded. “She’s happy. She really does smile now.” Something caught in his throat, and he swallowed against it. “She doesn’t know I see her. Broussard’s first rule was that her whole past life had to be wiped out. She’s four. She’ll forget, given time. Actually,” he said slowly, “She’s five now. Isn’t she?”

The realization that Amanda had celebrated a birthday he hadn’t witnessed slid softly across his face. He shook his head quickly. “Anyway, I’ve snuck up there, watched her with her new parents, and she looks great. She looks…” He cleared his throat, looked away from us. “She looks loved.”

“What happened the night she disappeared?” Ryerson said.

“I came in from the back of the house. I took her out. I told her it was a game. She liked games. Maybe because Helene’s idea was a trip down to the bar, play with the Pac-Man machine, honey.” He sucked ice from his glass and crushed it between his teeth. “Broussard was parked on the street. I waited in the doorway to the porch, told Amanda to be real, real quiet. The only neighbor who could have seen us was Mrs. Driscoll, across the street. She was sitting on her stoop, had a direct line on the house. She left the stoop for a second, went back in the house for another cup of tea or something, and Broussard gave me an all-clear signal. I carried Amanda to Broussard’s car, and we drove away.”

“And no one saw a thing,” I said.

“None of the neighbors. We found out later, though, that Chris Mullen did. He was parked on the street, staking out the house. He was waiting for Helene to come back so he could find out where she’d hid the money she stole. He recognized Broussard. Cheese Olamon used it to blackmail Broussard into retrieving the missing money. He was also supposed to steal some drugs from evidence lockup, give them to Mullen that night at the quarry.”

“Back to the night Amanda disappeared,” I said.

He took a second cube of ice from the glass with his thick fingers, chewed it. “I told Amanda my friend was going to take her to see some nice people. Told her I’d see her in a few hours. She just nodded. She was used to being dropped off with strangers. I got out a few blocks away and walked home. It was ten-thirty. It took my sister almost twelve hours to notice her daughter was gone. That tell you anything?”

For a while we were so quiet, I could hear the thump of darts hitting cork near the back of the bar.

“When the time was right,” Lionel said, “I figured I’d tell Beatrice, and she’d understand. Not right away. A few years down the road, maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that through. Beatrice hates Helene, and she loves Amanda, but something like this…See, she believes in the law, all the rules. She’d never have gone along with something like this. But I hoped, maybe, once enough time had passed…” He looked up at the ceiling, gave a small shake of his head. “When she decided to call you two, I got in contact with Broussard and he said try and dissuade her, but not too hard. Let her do it if she has to. He told me the next day that if push came to shove, he had some things on you two. Something about a murdered pimp.”

Ryerson gave me a raised eyebrow and a cold, curious smile.

I shrugged and looked away, and that’s when I saw the guy in the Popeye mask. He came in through the back fire exit, his right arm extended, a .45 automatic pointed at chest level.

His partner brandished a shotgun and also wore a plastic Halloween mask. Casper the Friendly Ghost’s moony white face stared out as he came through the front door and shouted, “Hands on the table! Everyone! Now!”

Popeye herded the two darts players in front of him, and I turned my head in time to see Casper throw the bolt lock on the front door.

“You!” Popeye screamed at me. “You deaf? Hands on the fucking table.”

I put my hands on the table.

The bartender said, “Oh, shit. Come
on
.”

Casper pulled a string by the window and a heavy black curtain fell across it.

Beside me, Lionel’s breathing was very shallow. His hands, flat on the table, were completely still. One of Ryerson’s hands dropped below the table, and one of Angie’s did as well.

Popeye hit one of the darts throwers on the back of the spine with his fist. “Down! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Do it. Do it. Do it now!”

Both men dropped to their knees and began locking their hands behind their necks. Popeye looked at them, his head cocked. It was an awful moment, filled with the worst sort of possibility. Whatever Popeye decided, he could do. Shoot them, shoot us, cut their throats. Whatever.

He kicked the older of the two in the base of the spine.

“Not on your knees. On your stomachs. Now.”

The men dropped to their stomachs by my feet.

Popeye turned his head very slowly, stopped on our table.

“Hands on the damn table,” he whispered. “Or you fucking die.”

Ryerson withdrew his hand from under the table, held both empty palms to the air, then placed them flat on the wood. Angie did the same.

Casper came up to the bar across from us. He leveled the shotgun at the bartender.

Two middle-aged women, office workers or secretaries by the looks of their clothes, sat in the middle of the bar directly in front of Casper. When he extended the shotgun, it brushed the hair of one of the women. Her shoulders tensed and her head jerked to the left. Her companion moaned.

The first woman said, “Oh, God. Oh, no.”

Casper said, “Stay calm, ladies. This will all be over in a minute or two.” He pulled a green trash bag from the pocket of his leather bombardier’s jacket and tossed it on the bar in front of the bartender. “Fill it up. And don’t forget the money from the safe.”

“There’s not much,” the bartender said.

“Just get what there is,” Casper said.

Popeye, the crowd control, stood with his legs spread apart by roughly a foot and a half and bent slightly at the knees, his .45 steadily moving in an arc from left to right, right to left, and back again. He was about twelve feet from me, and I could hear his breathing from behind the mask, even and steady.

Casper stood in an identical stance, shotgun trained on the bartender, but his eyes scanned the mirror behind the bar.

These guys were pros. All the way.

Besides Casper and Popeye, there were twelve people in the bar: the bartender and waitress behind the bar, the two guys on the floor, Lionel, Angie, Ryerson, and me, the two secretaries, and two guys at the end of the bar closest to the entrance, teamsters by the look of them. One wore a green Celtics jacket, the other a canvas and denim thing, old and thickly lined. Both were mid-forties and beefy. A bottle of Old Thompson sat between two shot glasses on the bar in front of them.

“Take your time,” Casper said to the bartender, as the bartender knelt behind the bar and fiddled with what I assumed was the safe. “Just go slow, like nothing’s happening, and you won’t spin past the numbers.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” one of the men on the floor said. “We got families.”

“Shut up,” Popeye said.

“No one’s getting hurt,” Casper said. “As long as you keep quiet. Just keep quiet. Very simple.”

“You know whose fucking bar this is?” the guy in the Celtics jacket said.

“What?” Popeye said.

“You fucking heard me. You know whose bar this is?”

“Please, please,” one of the secretaries said. “Be quiet.”

Casper turned his head. “A hero.”

“A hero,” Popeye said, and looked over at the idiot.

Without moving his mouth it seemed, Ryerson whispered, “Where’s your piece?”

“Spine,” I said. “Yours?”

“My lap.” His right hand moved three inches to the edge of the table.

“Don’t,” I whispered, as Popeye’s head and gun turned back in our direction.

“You guys are fucking dead,” the teamster said.

“Why are you talking?” the secretary said, her eyes on the bar top.

“Good question,” Casper said.

“Dead. Got it? You fucking punks. You fucking humps. You fucking—”

Casper took four steps and punched the teamster in the center of the face.

The teamster dropped off the back of his stool and hit his head so hard on the floor that you could hear the crack when the back of his skull split.

“Any comment?” Casper asked the guy’s friend.

“No,” the guy said, and looked down at the bar.

“Anyone else?” Casper said.

The bartender came up from behind the bar and placed the trash bag on top.

The bar was as silent as a church before a baptism.

“What?” Popeye said, and took three steps toward our table.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking to us, another moment to know with a complete certainty that this was all about to go terribly wrong terribly fast.

None of us moved.

“What did you just say?” Popeye pointed the gun at Lionel’s head, and his eyes behind the mask skittered uncertainly over Ryerson’s calm face, then came back to Lionel’s.

“Another hero?” Casper took the bag off the bar, came over to our table with his shotgun pointed at my neck.

“He’s a talker,” Popeye said. “He’s talking shit.”

“You got something to say?” Casper said, and turned his shotgun on Lionel. “Huh? Speak up.” He turned to Popeye. “Cover the other three.”

Popeye’s .45 turned toward me and the black eye stared into my own.

Casper took another step closer to Lionel. “Just yapping away. Huh?”

“Why do you keep antagonizing them? They have guns,” one of the secretaries said.

“Just be quiet,” her companion hissed.

Lionel looked up into the mask, his lips shut tight, his fingertips digging into the tabletop.

Casper said, “Go for it, big man. Go for it. Just keep talking.”

“I don’t have to listen to this shit,” Popeye said.

Casper rested the tip of the shotgun against the bridge of Lionel’s nose. “
Shut up!
”

Lionel’s fingers shook and he blinked against the sweat in his eyes.

“He just don’t want to listen,” Popeye said. “Just wants to keep talking trash.”

“Is that it?” Casper said.

“Everyone stay calm,” the bartender said, his hands held straight up in the air.

Lionel said nothing.

But every witness in the bar, deep in states of panic, sure they were going to die, would remember it the way the shooters wanted them to—that Lionel had been talking. That all of us at the table had. That we’d antagonized some dangerous men, and they’d killed us for it.

Casper racked the slide on the shotgun and the noise was like a cannon going off. “Got to be a big man. Is that it?”

Lionel opened his mouth. He said, “Please.”

I said, “Wait.”

The shotgun swung my way, its dark, dark eyes the last thing I’d see. I was sure of it.

“Detective Remy Broussard!” I yelled, so the whole bar could hear me. “Everyone got that name? Remy Broussard!” I looked through the mask at the deep blue eyes, saw the fear in there, the confusion.

“Don’t do it, Broussard,” Angie said.

“Shut the fuck up!” It was Popeye this time, and his cool was slipping. The tendons in his forearm clenched as he tried to cover the table.

“It’s over, Broussard. It’s over. We know you took Amanda McCready.” I craned my neck out to the bar. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready?”

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.