Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

Broussard held out his hands. “It’s a flawed justice system, but we try to make do.”

Poole pulled a quarter from his pocket, perched it on his thumbnail, and nudged Broussard. “Call it.”

“Which door?” Broussard said.

“Statistically,” Poole said, “the front door draws more fire.”

Broussard glanced out through the rain. “Statistically.”

Poole nodded. “But we both know it’s a long walk to that back door.”

“Through a lot of open ground.”

Poole nodded again.

“Loser gets to knock on the back door.”

“Why not just go together to the front door?” I asked.

Poole rolled his eyes. “Because there’s at least three of them, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Divide and conquer,” Broussard said.

“What about all those guns?” Angie said.

Poole said, “The ones your mystery friend said he saw in there?”

I nodded. “Those, yeah. Calico M-110s, he seemed to think.”

“But no clips to go with them.”

“Not last night,” I said. “Who knows if they had time to score some somewhere else in the last sixteen hours?”

Poole nodded. “Heavy firepower, if they have the clips.”

“Fall off that bridge when we come to it.” Broussard turned to Poole. “I always lose the coin toss.”

“Yet here’s chance come knocking again.”

Broussard sighed. “Heads.”

Poole flicked his thumb and the coin spun up through the half-dark of the backseat, caught some of the amber light woven on the rain, and shone, for just a millisecond, like Spanish gold. The quarter landed in Poole’s palm and he slapped it over the back of his hand.

Broussard looked down at the coin and grimaced. “Best two out of three?”

Poole shook his head, pocketed the coin. “I have the front, you get the back.”

Broussard sat back against the seat, and for a full minute no one said anything. We stared through the slanted sheets of rain at the dirty little house. Just a box, really, with a prevalent sense of rot in the deep sag of the porch, the missing shingles and boarded windows.

Looking at the house, it was impossible to imagine love being made in its bedrooms, children playing in its yards, laughter curling up into its beams.

“Shotguns?” Broussard said eventually.

Poole nodded. “Real western-style, pardner.”

Broussard reached for the door handle.

“Not to spoil this John Wayne moment,” Angie said, “but won’t shotguns seem suspicious to the occupants of the house if you’re supposedly just there to ask questions?”

“Won’t see the shotguns,” Broussard said, as he opened his door to the rain. “That’s why God created trench coats.”

Broussard walked across and up the road to the back of the Taurus and popped the trunk. They’d parked the car by a tree as old as the town; large, misshapen, its roots having disgorged the sidewalk around it, the tree blocked the car and Broussard from view of the Tretts’ house.

“So we’re clear,” Poole said gently, from the backseat.

Broussard pulled a trench coat from the trunk and shrugged it on. I looked back at Poole.

“If anything goes wrong, use your cellular phone and call Nine-one-one.” He leaned forward and placed an index finger up by our faces. “Under no circumstances do you move from this vehicle. Are we understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Miss Gennaro?”

Angie nodded.

“Well, then, it’s all fine.” Poole opened his door and stepped out into the rain.

He crossed the road and joined his partner at the back of the Taurus. Broussard nodded at something Poole said and looked over at us as he slipped a shotgun under the flap of his trench coat.

“Cowboys,” Angie said.

“This may be Broussard’s chance to get back to detective rank. Of course he’s excited.”

“Too excited?” Angie asked.

Broussard seemed to have read our lips. He smiled through the rivulets of water pouring down our windows and shrugged. Then he turned back to Poole, said something with his lips an inch from the older man’s ear. Poole patted him on the back and Broussard walked away from the Taurus, strode up the road through the slanting rain, stepped into the east side of Trett’s yard, ambled casually through the weeds, and made his way toward the back of the house.

Poole closed the trunk and pulled at his trench coat flaps until they covered his shotgun. The shotgun was nestled between his right arm and chest. He held his Glock behind his back in his left hand as he walked up the road, his head tilted up toward the boarded-up windows.

“You see that?” Angie said.

“What?”

“The window to the left of the front door. I think the curtain moved.”

“You sure?”

She shook her head. “I said I ‘think.’” She took her cellular phone from her purse, placed it on her lap.

Poole reached the steps. He raised his left foot toward the first step, and then he must have seen something there he didn’t like, because he extended his leg over the first step, brought his foot down on the second, and climbed up onto the porch.

The porch sagged deeply in the middle, and Poole’s body canted to the left as he stood there, the rain running off the porch between his feet in the gutter formed by the deep sag.

He looked over at the window to the left of the door, kept his head turned that way for a moment, then turned toward the right window, stared at it.

I reached into the glove box, pulled my .45 out.

Angie reached over me and removed her .38, flicked her wrist and checked the cylinder, snapped it back into place.

Poole approached the door and raised the hand that held the Glock, rapped on the wood with his knuckles. He stepped back, waited. His head turned to the left, then to the right, then back to the door. He leaned forward and rapped the wood again.

The rain barely made noise as it fell. The drops were thin and the sheets fell at an angle, and except for the high-pitched moan of the wind, the road outside the car was silent.

Poole leaned forward and twisted the doorknob to the right and left. The door remained closed. He knocked a third time.

A car drove past, a beige Volvo station wagon with bicycles tied to the roof rack, a woman with a peach headband and a pinched nervous face hunched over the wheel. We watched her brake lights flare red at the stop sign a hundred yards down the road; then the car turned left and disappeared.