Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“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 the 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.”

I nodded. “She made the ransom call to Lionel, didn’t she?”

He shrugged, looked off at the skyline. “You at my house,” he said. “Christ, that pissed me off.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You see my son?”

“He’s not yours.”

He blinked. “You see my son?”

I looked up at the stars for a moment, a rarity in these parts, so clear on a cold night. “I saw your son,” I said.

“Great kid. Know where I found him?”

I shook my head.

“I’m talking to this snitch in the Somerville projects. I’m alone, and I hear this baby screaming. I mean screaming like he’s being bitten by dogs. And the snitch, the people walking down the corridor, they don’t hear it. They just don’t hear it. ’Cause they hear it every day. So I tell the snitch to beat it, I follow the sound, kick in the door of this shit-smelling apartment, and I find him in the back. The place is empty. My son—and he is my son, Kenzie, fuck you if you don’t think so—he’s starving. He’s lying in a crib, six months old, and he’s starving. You can see his ribs. He’s fucking handcuffed, Kenzie, and his diaper is so filled it’s leaking through the seams, and he’s stuck—he’s fucking stuck to the mattress, Kenzie!”

Broussard’s eyes bulged, and his whole body seemed to lunge against itself. He coughed blood onto his shirt, wiped it with his hand, and smeared it on his chin.