Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“I don’t see why you’re giving Gigi a small coronary,” I said. “You own the jukebox. You loaded the Smiths CD.”

“I didn’t load no friggin’ Smiths CD,” Bubba said. “It’s one of those Best of the Eighties compilations. I had to live with a Smiths song ’cause it’s got ‘Come on, Eileen’ on it and a whole bunch of other good shit.”

“Katrina and the Waves?” I said. “Bananarama? Real cools bands like that?”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s got Nena, so shut up.”

“‘Ninety-nine Luftballoons,’” I said. “Well, all right.” I leaned into the table, pocketed the seven. “Now what’s this about me accompanying you on a deal?”

“I need backup. Nelson’s out of town and the Twoomeys are doing two-to-six.”

“Million other guys will help you for a C-note.” I dropped the six, but it kissed Bubba’s ten on the way in, and I stepped back from the table.

“Well, I got two reasons.” He leaned over the table and banged the cue ball off the nine, watched it bounce around the table, and then shut his eyes tight as the cue dropped in the side pocket. For someone who plays so much pool, Bubba really sucks.

I put the cue back on the table, lined up for the four in the side. “Reason number one?”

“I trust you and you owe me.”

“That’s two reasons.”

“It’s one. Shut up and shoot.”

I dropped the four, and the cue rolled slowly into a sweet lie across from the two ball.

“Reason number two is,” Bubba said, and chalked his stick with great squeaking turns, “I want you to get a look at these people I’m selling to.”

I pocketed the two but buried the cue behind one of Bubba’s balls. “Why?”

“Trust me. You’ll be interested.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“I’m not sure if they are who I think they are, so you gotta join me, see for yourself.”

“When?”

“As soon as I win this game.”

“How dangerous?” I said.

“No more dangerous than normal.”

“Ah,” I said. “Very dangerous then.”

“Don’t be such a puss. Shoot the ball.”

Germantown is set hard against the harbor that separates Quincy from Weymouth. Given its name back in the mid-1700s when a glass manufacturer imported indentured laborers from Germany and laid out the town lots with ample streets and wide squares in the German tradition, the company failed and the Germans were left to fend for themselves when it became apparent that the cost of giving them their freedom would be less expensive than sending them someplace else.

A long line of failure followed, seemed to haunt the tiny seaport and the generations descended from the original indentured servants. Pottery, chocolate, stockings, whale-oil products, and medicinal salt and saltpeter industries all cropped up and fell by the wayside over the next two centuries. For a while the cod-and whale-fishing industries enjoyed some popularity, but they, too, picked up and moved north to Gloucester or farther south toward Cape Cod in search of better catches and better waters.

Germantown became a forgotten slip of land, its waters cut off from its inhabitants by chain-link fence and polluted by refuse from the Quincy Shipyards, a power plant, oil tanks, and the Procter & Gamble factory that formed the only silhouettes in its skyline. An early experiment with public housing for war veterans left its shoreline marred by cul-de-sac housing developments the color of pumice, each one a collection of four buildings housing sixteen units and curved in on each other in a horseshoe, skeletal metal clothesline structures rising out of pools of rust in the cracked tar.

The house Bubba parked his Hummer in front of was a block off the shore, and the homes on either side of it were condemned and cascading back into the earth. In the dark, the house seemed to sag as well, and while I couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, there was an air of certain decay to the structure.

The old man who answered the door had a close-cropped beard that quilted his jawline in square tufts of silver and black but refused to grow in over the cleft of his long chin, leaving a pink puckered circle of exposed flesh that winked like an eye. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty, with a gnarled curve to his small frame that made him appear much older. He wore a weathered Red Sox baseball cap that looked too small even for his tiny head, a yellow half T-shirt that left a wrinkled, milky midriff exposed, and a pair of black nylon tights that ended above his bare ankles and feet and bunched up around his crotch so tightly his appendage resembled a fist.

The man pulled the brim of the baseball cap farther down his forehead and said to Bubba, “You Jerome Miller?”

“Jerome Miller” was Bubba’s favored alias. It was the name of Bo Hopkins’s character in The Killer Elite, a movie Bubba had seen about eleven thousand times and could quote at will.

“What do you think?” Bubba’s enormous body loomed over the slight man and obscured him from my view.

“I’m asking,” the man said.

“I’m the Easter Bunny standing on your doorstep with a gym bag filled with guns.” Bubba leaned in over the man. “Let us the fuck in.”

The old man stepped aside, and we crossed the threshold into a dark living room acrid with cigarette smoke. The old man bent by the coffee table and lifted a burning cigarette from an overstuffed ashtray, sucked wetly on the butt, and stared through the smoke at us, his pale eyes all but glowing in the dark.

“So, show me,” he said.

“You want to turn on a light?” Bubba said.

“No light here,” the man said.

Bubba gave him a wide, cold smile, all teeth. “Take me to a room that has one.”

The man shrugged his bony shoulders. “Suit yourself.”

As we followed him down a narrow hallway, I noticed that the strap at the back of the baseball cap hung open, the ends too wide apart to clasp, and in general the back of the hat rode oddly on the man’s head, too far up the skull. I tried to put my finger on who the guy reminded me of. Since I didn’t know many old men who dressed in half T-shirts and tights, I would have figured the list of possibilities to be relatively small. But there was something familiar about the guy, and I had the feeling that either the beard or the baseball hat was throwing me off.

The hallway smelled like dirty bathwater left undrained for days, and the walls reeked of mildew. Four doorways opened off the hall, which led straight to the back door. Above us, on the second floor, something made a sudden soft thump. The ceiling throbbed with bass, the vibrations of speakers turned up loud, even though the music itself was so faint—a tinny whisper, really—that it could have been coming from half a block away. Soundproofing, I decided. Maybe they had a band up there, a group of old men in Spandex and half-shirts covering old Muddy Waters songs, gyrating to the beat.