Gone, Baby, Gone

  She spun back toward me, that great mass of gray hair swinging across her face, and unfortunately the M-110 came with her. One sweaty finger grasped for the trigger, kept sliding off the guard, and her free hand grasped at the wound on her hip as her eyes stayed locked on her husband’s missing head. I watched the muzzle swing my way, and I knew that any second she’d come out of shock and find the trigger.

  I dove out of the kitchen, back into the hall. I rolled to my right as Roberta Trett spun full circle and the Calico muzzle winked at me. I got to my feet and ran for the back door, saw the door getting closer and closer, and then I heard Roberta step out into the hall behind me.

  “You killed my Leon, motherfucker. You killed my Leon!”

  The hallway blew up like an earthquake as Roberta got her finger around the trigger and let loose.

  I dove without looking into the room off to my left, discovered too late that it wasn’t a room at all but a staircase.

  My forehead rammed a stair about seven or eight steps up, and the impact of wood against bone rocked back through my teeth like electrical voltage. I heard Roberta’s heavy footsteps as she stumbled down the hallway toward the staircase.

  She wasn’t firing her gun, and that terrified me more than if she were.

  She knew she had me boxed in.

  My shin screamed as it banged against the edge of a riser as I tore up the staircase, slipped once and kept going, saw a metal door at the top and prayed please God please God let it be open.

  Roberta reached the opening below and I lunged for the door, hit it in the center with the heel of my hand, felt it give way like a burst of oxygen breaking from my lungs.

  My chest bounced off the floor as Roberta unloaded her gun again. I rolled to my left and slammed the door behind me on a splatter of lead that banged off the metal like hail on a tin roof. The door was heavy and thick—the door to an industrial cooler or a vault—and bolt locks lined the inside: four of them from a height of about five and a half feet to a depth of about six inches. I threw them one by one as the bullets continued to ping and thunk off the other side. The door itself was bulletproof, the locks incapable of being shot out from the other side, sealed by sheets of layered steel on this side.

  “You killed my Leon!”

  The bullets had stopped and Roberta wailed from the other side of the door, a lunatic’s wail so violated and sheared and steeped in sudden, awful aloneness that the sound of it wrenched something in my chest.

  “You killed my Leon! You killed him! You will die! Fucking die!”

  Something heavy slammed into the door, and I realized after a second thump that it was Roberta Trett herself, throwing that oversized body of hers against the door like a battering ram, over and over, howling and shrieking and calling her husband’s name, and—bam, bam, bam—hurling herself at the only boundary between us.

  Even if she lost her gun and I still had mine, I knew that if she got through that door she’d rip me to pieces with her bare hands, no matter how many rounds I fired into her.

  “Leon! Leon!”

  I listened for the sounds of sirens, the squawk of walkie-talkies, the bleat of a bullhorn. The police had to have reached the house by now. They had to.

  That’s when it hit me that I couldn’t hear anything except Roberta, and only because she was directly on the other side of the door.

  A bare forty-watt bulb hung over the room, and as I turned and took in my surroundings, I felt an express train of cold fear barrel through my veins.

  I was in a large bedroom fronting the street. The windows were boarded up, thick black wood screwed into the molding, the dead silver eyes of forty or fifty flatheads apiece staring back at me from each window.

  The floor was bare and strewn with the droppings of rodents. Bags of potato chips and Fritos and tortilla chips were scattered by the baseboards, their crumbs ground into the wood. Three bare mattresses, soiled with excrement and blood and God knew what else lay against the walls. The walls themselves were covered in thick gray sections of sponge and the Styrofoam soundproofing found in a recording studio. Except this wasn’t a recording studio.

  Metal posts had been hammered into the walls just above the bare mattresses, and handcuffs hung to small ringlets that had been welded to the ends of the posts. A small metal wastebasket in the western corner of the room held a variety of riding crops, whips, spiked dildos, and leather straps. The entire room smelled of flesh so soiled and tainted the taint had spilled into the heart and poisoned the brain.

  Roberta had stopped banging into the door, but I could hear her muffled wailing in the stairwell.

  I walked toward the east end of the bedroom, saw where a wall had been knocked down to open the room up, the ridge of plaster and dust still rising from the floor. A fat mouse with spiked fur ran past me, took a right at the east end of the room, and disappeared through an opening just past the end of the wall.

  I kept my gun pointed ahead of me as I stepped through more bags of chips and NAMBLA newsletters, empty cans of beer with mold growing by their openings. Magazines, printed on the cheapest glossy paper, lay open and gaping: boys, girls, adults—even animals—engaged in something I knew wasn’t sex, even though it appeared to be. Those photos seared their way into my brain in the half second before I could turn away, and what they’d captured and imprisoned on film had nothing to do with normal human interaction, only with cancer—cancerous minds and hearts and organs.

  I reached the opening where the mouse had disappeared, a small space under the eaves of the house, where the roof slanted to the gutters. Beyond it was a small blue door.

  Corwin Earle stood in front of the door, his back hunched under the eaves, a crossbow held up by his face, the stock resting against his shoulder, his left eye trying to squint down the sight and blink away sweat at the same time. His lazy right eye searched for focus, slid toward me again and again before it was pushed back to the right as if by a motor. He closed it eventually, resettling his shoulder against the crossbow stock. He was naked, and there was blood on his chest, a smattering of it on his protruding abdomen. A sense of defeat and weary victimization was imprinted in his sad crumble of a face.

  “The Tretts don’t trust you with the machine guns, Corwin?”

  He shook his head slightly.

  “Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I said.

  He shook his head again, this time more slowly, and flexed his shoulders against the weight of the crossbow.

  I looked at the tip of the arrowhead, saw it wavering slightly, noticed the tremors running up and down the undersides of Corwin Earle’s arms.

  “Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I repeated.

  He shook his head again, and I shot him in the stomach.

  He didn’t make a sound. He folded over at the waist and dropped the crossbow on the floor in front of him. He fell to his knees and then tipped to his right in a fetal ball, lay there with his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a dog’s.

  I stepped over him and opened the blue door, entered a bathroom the size of a small closet. I saw the boarded-up black window, and a tattered shower curtain lying under the sink, and blood on the tile, the toilet, splashed against the walls as if hurled from a bucket.

  A child’s white cotton underwear lay soaked in blood in the sink.

  I looked in the bathtub.

  I’m not sure how long I stood there, head bent, mouth open. I felt a hot wetness on my cheeks, streams of it, and it was only after that double eternity of staring into the tub at the small, naked body curled up by the drain that I realized I was weeping.

  I walked back out of the bathroom and saw Corwin Earle on his knees, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his back to me, as he tried to use his kneecaps to carry himself across the floor.

  I stayed behind him and waited, my gun pointed down, his dark hair rising up from the other side of the black metal sight on the barrel.

  He made a chugging sound as he crawled, a low yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh that reminded me of the
chug of a portable generator.

  When he reached the crossbow and got one hand on the stock, I said, “Corwin.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at me, saw the gun pointed at him, and scrunched his eyes closed. He turned his head, gripping the crossbow tight with a bloody hand.

  I fired a round into the back of his neck and kept walking, heard the shell skitter on wood and Corwin’s body thump against the floor as I turned left, back into the bedroom, and walked to the vault door. I unsnapped the locks one by one.

  “Roberta,” I said. “You still out there? You hear me? I’m going to kill you now, Roberta.”

  I unsnapped the last of the locks, threw the door open, and came face-to-face with a shotgun barrel.

  Remy Broussard lowered the barrel. Between his legs, Roberta Trett lay facedown on the stairs, a dark red oval the size of a serving dish in the center of her back.

  Broussard steadied himself against the railing as sweat poured like warm rain from his hairline.

  “Had to blow the lock on the bulkhead and come up through the basement,” he said. “Sorry it took so long.”

  I nodded.

  “Clear in there?” He took a deep breath, watched me steadily with dark eyes.

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Corwin Earle is dead.”

  “Samuel Pietro,” he said.

  I nodded. “I think it’s Samuel Pietro.” I looked down at my gun, saw that it jumped from the tremors in my arm, the shakes wracking my body like a series of small strokes. I looked back at Broussard, felt the warm streams spring from my eyes again. “It’s hard to tell,” I said, and my voice cracked.

  Broussard nodded. I noticed that he was weeping, too.

  “In the basement,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Skeletons,” he said. “Two of them. Kids.”

  My voice didn’t sound like my own as I said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

  “I don’t either,” he said.

  He looked down at Roberta Trett’s corpse. He lowered the shotgun and placed it against the back of her head, and his finger curled around the trigger.

  I waited for him to blow her dead brains all over the staircase.

  After a while, he removed the gun and sighed. He took his foot and brought it down gently on the top of her head, and then he pushed her down.

  That’s what the Quincy police met as they reached the stairs: Roberta Trett’s large corpse sliding down the dark staircase toward them and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.

  26

  It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in the bathtub had, in fact, been that of Samuel Pietro. The work the Tretts and Corwin Earle had done on his face with a knife had made dental records the only sure means of identification. Gabrielle Pietro had gone into shock after a reporter from the News, acting on a tip, called before the police contacted her to ask for a statement regarding her son’s death.

  Samuel Pietro had been dead forty-five minutes by the time I found him. The medical examiner ascertained that in the two weeks since his disappearance he’d been sodomized repeatedly, flogged along his back, buttocks, and legs, and handcuffed so tightly that the flesh around his right wrist was worn down to the bone. He’d been fed nothing but potato chips, Fritos, and beer since he’d left his mother’s house.

  Less than an hour before we’d entered the Trett house, either Corwin Earle, one or both of the Tretts, or maybe all three of them—who the hell knew and ultimately what difference did it make?—had stabbed the boy in the heart and then drawn the knife blade across his throat and severed his carotid artery.

  I’d spent the morning and most of the afternoon up in our cramped office, tucked in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church, feeling the weight of the great building around me, the spires reaching for heaven. I stared out the window. I tried not to think. I drank cold coffee and sat, felt a soft ticking in my chest, in my head.

  Angie’s ankle had been set and plastered last night at the New England Med emergency room, and she’d left the apartment this morning as I was waking up, taken a taxi to her doctor’s office so he could check the ER resident’s work and tell her what to expect from time spent in a cast.

  I left the belfry office, once I got the details regarding Samuel Pietro from Broussard, and descended the stairs into the chapel. I sat in the front pew in the still half-dark, smelled the remains of incense and the bloom of chrysanthemums, met the gem-shaped gaze of several stained-glass saints, and watched the lights of small votive candles flicker off the mahogany altar rail, wondered why an eight-year-old child had been allowed to live on this earth just long enough to experience everything horrific in it.

  I looked up at the stained-glass Jesus, his arms held open above the gold tabernacle.

  “Eight years old,” I whispered. “Explain that.”

  I can’t.

  Can’t or won’t?

  No answer. God can calm up with the best of them.

  You put a child on this earth, give him eight years of life. You allow him to be kidnapped, tortured, starved, and raped for fourteen days—over three hundred and thirty hours, nineteen thousand eight hundred long minutes—and then as a final image You provide him with the faces of monsters who shove steel into his heart, cleave the flesh from his face, and open his throat on a bathroom floor.

  What’s your point?

  “What’s Yours?” I said loudly, heard my voice echo off stone.

  Silence.

  “Why?” I whispered.

  More silence.

  “There’s no goddamned answer. Is there?”

  Don’t blaspheme. You’re in church.

  Now I knew the voice in my head wasn’t God’s. My mother’s probably, maybe a dead nun’s, but I doubted God would get hung up on technicalities during such a time of dire need.

  Then again, what did I know? Maybe God, if He did exist, was as petty and trivial as the rest of us.

  If so, He wasn’t a God I could follow.

  Yet I stayed in the pew, unable to move.

  I believe in God because of…what?

  Talent—the kind Van Gogh or Michael Jordan, Stephen Hawking or Dylan Thomas were born with—always seemed proof of God to me. So did love.

  So, okay, I believe in You. But I’m not sure I like You.

  That’s your problem.

  “What good comes from a child’s rape and murder?”

  Don’t ask questions your brain is too small to answer.

  I watched the candles flicker for a while, sucked the quiet into my lungs, closed my eyes to it, and waited for transcendence or a state of grace or peace or whatever the hell it was the nuns had taught me you were supposed to wait for when the world is too much with you.

  After about a minute, I opened my eyes. Probably the reason I’d never been a successful Catholic—I lacked patience.

  The rear door of the building opened and I heard the clack of Angie’s crutches against the door bar, heard her say, “Shit,” and then the door closed and she appeared at the landing between the chapel and the stairs leading up to the belfry. She noticed me just before she turned toward the stairs. She swiveled around awkwardly, looked at me, and smiled.

  She worked her way down the two carpeted steps to the chapel floor, swung her body past the confessionals and baptismal font. She paused by the altar rail in front of my pew, hoisted herself up onto it, and leaned her crutches against the rail.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up at the ceiling, the painting of the Last Supper, back down at me. “You’re inside the chapel and the church is still standing.”

  “Imagine,” I said.

  We sat there for a bit, neither of us saying anything. Angie’s head tilted back as she scanned the ceiling, the detail carved into the molding atop the nearest pilaster.

  “What’s the verdict on the leg?”

  “The doctor s
aid it’s a stress fracture of the lower left fibula.”

  I smiled. “You love saying that, don’t you?”

  “Lower left fibula?” She gave me a broad grin. “Yeah. Makes me feel like I’m on ER. Next I’m going to ask for a Chem-Seven and BP count. Stat.”

  “The doctor told you to stay off it, I suppose.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s what they always say.”

  “How long you have to wear the cast?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “No aerobics.”

  She shrugged again. “No a lot of things.”

  I looked down at my shoes for a bit, then back up at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “It hurts all over. Samuel Pietro. I can’t get my head around it. When Bubba and I went to that house, he was still alive. He was upstairs and he was…we—”

  “You were in a house with three heavily armed, very paranoid felons. You couldn’t have—”

  “His body,” I said, “it…”

  “They confirmed it was his body?”

  I nodded. “It was so small. It was so small,” I whispered. “It was naked and cut into and…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” I wiped at acidic tears, leaned my head back.

  “Who’d you talk to?” Angie said gently.

  “Broussard.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “’Bout the same as me.”

  “Any word on Poole?” She leaned forward a bit.

  “He’s bad, Ange. They don’t expect him to pull through.”

  She nodded and kept her head down for a bit, her good leg swaying back and forth lightly off the rail.

  “What did you see in that bathroom, Patrick? I mean, exactly?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on,” she said softly. “This is me. I can take it.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Not again. Not again. I think about it for a second—I see that room flash through my head—and I want to die. I don’t want to carry it around with me. I want to die and make it go away.”

  She slid gingerly off the rail and used the front of the pew to pull herself around to the seat. I moved over and she sat beside me. She took my face in her hands, but I couldn’t meet her eyes, was sure that seeing the warmth and the love in them would make me feel more soiled, for some reason, more unhinged.