Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

Poole coughed some more. I tilted my flashlight, saw tiny dots of blood speckle his chin.

“Just a minute,” he said.

I shook my head and Broussard nodded, pulled his walkie-talkie from his jacket.

Poole reached up and grasped his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Calling it in,” Broussard said. “We got to get you off this hill, my man.”

Poole tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist, coughed so hard I thought he’d lurch into a convulsion for a minute.

“You don’t call anything in,” he said. “We’re supposed to be alone.”

“Poole,” Angie said, “you’re in some trouble here.”

He looked up at her and smiled. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Broussard said, and looked away from the blood on Poole’s chin.

“Really.” Poole shifted on the ground, wrapped the inside of his forearm around the vine. “Go over the hill, children. Go over the hill.” He smiled, but the corners of his mouth twitched against his shiny cheeks.

We looked down at him. He looked like he was one arch of the back or roll of the eyes from a headstone. His flesh was the color of raw scallop and his eyes wouldn’t stay focused. His breathing sounded like rain through a window screen.

His grip on Broussard’s wrist was still as tight as a jailer’s, though. He glanced at the three of us and seemed to guess what we were thinking.

“I’m old and in debt,” he said. “And I’ll be fine. You don’t find that girl, she won’t be.”

Broussard said, “I don’t know her, Poole. Get it?”

Poole nodded and tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist until the flesh in his hand turned red. “’Preciate that, son. Really do. What’s the first thing I taught you?”

Broussard looked away, and his eyes glistened in the light bouncing from Angie’s flashlight, off his partner’s chest and into his pupils.

“What’s the first thing I taught you?” Poole said.

Broussard cleared his throat, spit into the woods.

“Huh?”

“Close the case,” Broussard said, and his voice sounded as if Poole’s hand had left his wrist and found his throat.

“Always,” Poole said. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the ridge behind him. “So, go close it.”

“I—”

“Don’t you dare pity me, kid. Don’t you dare. Take the bag.”

Broussard lowered his chin to his chest. He reached under Poole and pulled the bag out, slapped the dirt off the bottom.

“Go,” Poole said. “Now.”

Broussard pulled his wrist from Poole’s fingers and stood up. He looked off into the dark woods like a kid who’s just been told what alone means.

Poole glanced at me and Angie and smiled. “I’ll survive. Save the girl, call for evac.”

I looked away. Poole, to the best of my knowledge, had just suffered either a small heart attack or a stroke. And the blood that had shot from his lungs didn’t exactly give cause for optimism. I was looking down at a man who, unless he got immediate help, would die.

Angie said, “I’ll stay.”

We looked at her. She’d remained on her knees by Poole since he’d sat down, and she ran a palm over his white forehead, ran it back through the bristles of his hair.

“The hell you will,” Poole said, and swatted at her hand. He tilted his head, looked up into her face. “That child is going to die tonight, Miss Gennaro.”

“Angie.”

“That child is going to die tonight, Angie.” He gritted his teeth for a moment and grimaced at something shooting up his sternum, swallowed hard to force it back down. “Unless we do something. We need every person we have to get her out of here in one piece. Now”—he struggled with the vine, pulled himself up a bit—”you’re going up to those quarries. And so are you, Patrick.” He turned his head to Broussard. “And you most definitely fucking are. So go. Go now.”

None of us wanted to. That was obvious. But then Poole held out his arm and tilted the wrist up toward us until we could all read the illuminated hands of his watch: 8:03.

We were late.

“Go!” he hissed.

I looked at the top of the hill, then off into the dark woods behind Poole, then down at the man himself. Splayed there, legs spread and one foot lolling off to the side, he looked like a scarecrow tossed from his perch.

“Go!”

We left him there.

We scrambled up the hill, Broussard taking the lead as the path was narrowed by thickets of weeds and brambles. Except for the sounds of our progress, the night was so still it would have been easy to believe we were the only creatures out in it.

Ten feet from the top, we met a chain-link fence twelve feet high, but it didn’t prove much of an obstacle. A section of it as wide and tall as a garage door had been cut out, and we walked through the hole without pausing.

At the top of the hill, Broussard stopped long enough to engage his walkie-talkie and whisper into it. “Have reached the quarry. Sergeant Raftopoulos is ill. On my signal—repeat, on my signal—send evac to the railroad slope fifteen yards from the top. Wait for my signal. Copy.”

“Affirmative.”

“Out.” Broussard placed the walkie-talkie back in his raincoat.

“What now?” Angie said.

We stood on a cliff about forty feet above the water. In the dark, I could see the silhouettes of other cliffs and crags, bent trees, and jutting rock shelves. A line of cut, strewn, and disrupted granite rose off to our immediate left, a few jagged peaks another ten to fifteen feet higher than the one on which we stood. To our right, the land rolled flat for about sixty yards, then curved and became jagged and erratic again, erupting into the dark. Below, the water waited, a wide circle of light gray against the black cliff walls.

“The woman who called Lionel said wait for instructions,” Broussard said. “You see any instructions?”

Angie shone her flashlight at our feet, bounced it off the granite walls, arced it off the trees and bushes. The dancing light was like a lazy eye that gave us fractured glimpses into a dense, alien world that could alter itself dramatically within inches—go from stone to moss to battered white bark to mint-green vegetation. And flowing through the tree line like reams of dental floss were silver stripes of chain link.

“I don’t see any instructions,” Angie said.

Bubba, I knew, was out there somewhere. He could probably see us right now. Maybe he could see Mullen and Gutierrez and whoever was working with them. Maybe he could see Amanda McCready. He’d approached from the Milton side and cut through Cunningham Park and up along a path he’d found years before, when he’d gone there to dump hot weapons, or a car, or a body—whatever it was guys like Bubba dumped in the quarries.