Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“Your methods,” I said, “sucked.”

Poole put a hand on Broussard’s chest. Broussard looked down at it and kept his eyes there for a bit, his jaw muscles rolling up under the flesh.

I walked across the parking lot, felt the adrenaline turning to jelly in my calves, the gravel crunching underfoot, heard the sharp cry of a bird slicing through the air from the direction of Walden Pond, saw the sun soften and spread against the tree trunks as it died. I leaned against the back of the Taurus, placed a foot up on the bumper. Poole still had a hand on Broussard’s chest, was talking to him, his lips close to the younger man’s ear.

All the shouting aside, my temper hadn’t really shown itself yet. If I’m truly angry, if that switch in my head has been tripped, my voice rides a flat line, becomes dead and monotonous, and a red marble of light drills through my skull and blots out all fear, all reason, all empathy. And the hotter the red marble glows, the colder my blood chills, until it’s the blue of fine metal, and the monotone becomes a whisper.

That whisper—rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else—is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot, the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.

It is my father’s temper.

So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.

The crucial difference between my father and me—I hope—has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.

At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.

So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere—except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.

Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.

“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”

“Then quit your job,” I said.

“We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”

I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.

“What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.

Broussard looked away.

“Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.

“Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.

“You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”

“Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,” I said, “but it ain’t house money either. It’s bribe and property-tax petty cash. For one year. What if he wants to make a moral point?”

Broussard shook his head. “Cheese Olamon has no morals.”

“Yes, he does.” I kicked the bumper with my heel, as surprised as anyone, I think, by the vehemence in my voice. More quietly, I repeated, “Yes, he does. And the number one moral law in his universe is: Don’t fuck with Cheese.”

Poole nodded. “And Helene did.”

“Goddamn right.”

“And if Cheese is pissed off enough, you think he’ll kill the girl and say ‘fuck it’ to the money just to send that message.”

I nodded. “And sleep right through the night.”

Poole’s face took on a gray cast as he stepped into the shadow between Broussard and me. He suddenly looked very old, no longer vaguely threatening so much as vaguely threatened, and the sense of elfin mischief had left him.

“What if,” he said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “Cheese wishes to make both his moral point and a profit?”

“Run a bait-and-switch?” Broussard said.

Poole dug his hands into his pockets, steeled his back and shoulders against the sudden late-afternoon bite in the breeze.

“We may have tipped our hand in there, Rem.”

“How so?”

“Cheese now knows we’re so desperate to get the child back that we’re willing to break the rules, leave the badge at home, and step into a money-for-child scenario with no official authority.”

“And if Cheese wants to walk away a winner…”

“Then no one else walks away at all,” Poole said.

“We’ve got to get to Chris Mullen,” I said. “See who he leads us to. Before the trade goes down.”

Poole and Broussard nodded.

“Mr. Kenzie.” Broussard offered his hand. “I was out of line in there. I let that mug get the better of me, and I could have fucked us on this.”

I took the hand. “We’ll bring her home.”

He tightened his grip on my hand. “Alive.”

“Alive,” I said.

“You think Broussard’s cracking under the strain?” Angie said.

We sat parked at the edge of the financial district on Devonshire Street, covering the rear of Devonshire Place, Chris Mullen’s condo tower. The CAC detectives who’d tailed Mullen back here had gone home for the night. Several other two-man teams covered all the other key players in Cheese’s crew, while we watched Mullen. Broussard and Poole covered the front of the building from the Washington Street side. It was just past midnight. Mullen had been inside for three hours.

I shrugged. “Did you see Broussard’s face when Poole talked about finding Jeannie Minnelli’s body in the barrel of cement?”

Angie shook her head.

“It was worse than Poole’s. He looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown just hearing about it. Hands started to shake, face got all white and shiny. The man looked bad.” I looked up at the three yellow squares on the fifteenth floor that we’d identified as Mullen’s windows as one of them went black. “Maybe he is losing it. He overreacted with Cheese, that’s for sure.”