Gone, Baby, Gone (32 page)

But with rubber bands and popsicle sticks, we couldn’t fire more than ten paper clips in a minute. The M-110, at full auto, was capable of unleashing one hundred bullets in roughly fifteen seconds.

The old man lifted one from the bag and laid it flat in the palm of his hand. He raised his arm up and down to feel the weight, his pale eyes glistening as if they’d been oiled like the gun. He smacked his lips as if he could taste the gunfire.

I said, “Stocking up for a war?”

Bubba shot me a look and began counting the money from the paper bag.

The man smiled at the gun as if it were a kitten. “Persecution exists on all fronts at all times, dear. One must be prepared.” He stroked the gun frame with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, my my my,” he cooed.

And that’s when I recognized him.

Leon Trett, the child molester Broussard had given me a picture of in the early days of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. The man suspected in the rapes of over fifty children, the disappearance of two.

And we’d just armed him.

Oh, joy.

He looked up at me suddenly, as if he could sense what I was thinking, and I felt myself go cold and small in the wash of his pale eyes.

“Clips?” he said.

“When I leave,” Bubba said. “Don’t fuck up my counting.”

He took a step toward Bubba. “No, no. Not when you leave,” Leon Trett said. “Now.”

Bubba said, “Shut up. I’m counting.” Under his breath, I could hear: “…four hundred fifty, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five—”

Leon Trett shook his head several times, as if by doing so he could make the clips appear, make Bubba turn reasonable.

“Now,” Trett said. “Now. I want my clips now. I paid for them.”

He reached out for Bubba’s arm and Bubba backhanded him in the chest, knocked him into the small table underneath the window.

“Motherfucker!” Bubba stopped counting, slammed the bills together in his hands. “Now I gotta start all over.”

“You give me my clips,” Trett said. His eyes were wet and there was a spoiled eight-year-old’s whine in his voice. “You give them to me.”

“Fuck off.” Bubba started counting the bills again.

Trett’s eyes filled and he slapped the gun between his hands.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

I turned my head toward the sound of the voice and laid eyes on the largest woman I’d ever seen. She wasn’t just an Amazon of a woman, she was a Sasquatch, bulky and covered in thick gray hair, at least five inches of it rising off the top of her head and then spilling down the sides of her face, obscuring her cheekbones and the corners of her eyes, billowing out on her wide shoulders like Spanish moss.

She was dressed in dark brown from head to toe, and the girth under those folds of loose clothing seemed to shake and rumble as she stood in the kitchen doorway with a .38 held loosely in one great paw of a hand.

Roberta Trett. Her photograph did not do her justice.

“They won’t give me the clips,” Leon said. “They’re taking the money, but they won’t give me the clips.”

Roberta took a step into the room, surveyed it with a slow roll of her head from right to left. The only one who hadn’t acknowledged her presence was Bubba. He remained in the center of the kitchen, head down, trying to count his money.

Roberta pointed the gun quite casually in my direction. “Give us the clips.”

I shrugged. “I don’t got ’em.”

“You.” She waved the gun at Bubba. “Hey, you.”

“…eight hundred fifty,” Bubba said, “eight hundred sixty, eight hundred seventy—”

“Hey!” Roberta said. “You look at me when I’m talking.”

Bubba turned his head slightly toward her, but kept his eyes on the money. “Nine hundred. Nine hundred ten, nine hundred twenty—”

“Mr. Miller,” Leon said desperately, “my wife is talking to you.”

“…nine hundred sixty-five, nine hundred seventy—”

“Mr. Miller!” Leon’s shriek was so high-pitched I felt it ring in my inner ears, buzz along the brain stem.

“One thousand.” Bubba stopped in the middle of the wad of money and placed the chunk he’d already counted in his jacket pocket.

Leon sighed audibly and relief sagged across his face.

Bubba looked at me as if unaware of what all the fuss was about.

Roberta lowered the gun. “Now, Mr. Miller, if we could just—”

Bubba licked the corner of his thumb and peeled off the top bill in the pile that remained in his hands. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred….”

Leon Trett looked like he’d suffered an embolism on the spot. His chalky face turned crimson and bloated and he squeezed the empty gun between his hands and hopped back and forth as if he needed a bathroom.

Roberta Trett raised the gun again, and this time there was nothing casual about it. She pointed it directly at Bubba’s head and closed her left eye. She sighted down the barrel and pulled back the hammer.

The harsh light of the kitchen seemed to etch her and Bubba’s outlines as they stood in the center of the room, both of them the size of something you’d normally climb with rope and pitons, not give birth to.

I slid my .45 out of the holster at the small of my back, dropped it down behind my right leg, and released the safety.

“Two hundred twenty,” Bubba said, as Roberta Trett took another step toward him, “two hundred thirty, two hundred forty, dude, shoot this bitch, will ya, two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty…”

Roberta Trett stopped and cocked her head slightly to the left, as if unsure of what she’d heard. She looked unable to identify what her options were. She looked unfamiliar with that sensation.

I doubted she’d ever been ignored in her life.

“Mr. Miller, you will stop counting now.” She extended her arm until it was T-bar straight and hard, and her knuckles whitened against the black steel.

“…three hundred, three hundred ten, three hundred twenty, I said, shoot the big bitch, three hundred thirty…”

That time she was sure of what she’d heard. A tremor appeared in her wrist, and the pistol shook.

“Ma’am,” I said, “put the gun down.”

Her eyes rolled right in their sockets, and she saw that I hadn’t moved, that I wasn’t pointing anything at her. And then she noticed that she couldn’t see my right hand, and that’s when I used my thumb to pull back the hammer on my .45, the sound cutting into the fluorescent hum of that bright kitchen as cleanly as a gunshot itself.

“…four fifty, four sixty, four seventy…”

Roberta Trett looked over Bubba’s shoulder at Leon, and the .38 shook some more and Bubba kept counting.

Beyond the kitchen I heard the sound of a door open and close very quickly. It came from the back of the house, from the far end of the long hallway that split the building.

Roberta heard it too. Her eyes jerked to the left for a moment, then back to Leon.

“Make him stop,” Leon said. “Make him stop counting. It hurts.”

“…six hundred,” Bubba said, and his voice grew an octave louder. “Six ten, six twenty, six twenty-five—enough with the fives already—six thirty…”

A set of soft footsteps approached from the hall, and Roberta’s back stiffened.

Leon said, “Stop it. Stop that counting.”

A man even smaller than Leon went rigid as he stepped through the doorway, his dark eyes widening in confusion, and I removed the gun from behind my leg and pointed it at the center of his forehead.

He had a chest so sunken it seemed to have been produced in reverse, the sternum and rib cage curling in while the small belly protruded like a pygmy’s. His right eye was lazy and kept sliding away from us as if it were asea on a floundering boat. Small scratches over his right nipple reddened in the white light.

He wore only a small blue terry-cloth towel, and his skin was sheened with sweat.

“Corwin,” Roberta said, “you go back to your room now.”

Corwin Earle. I guess he’d found his nuclear family after all.

“Corwin’s going to stay right here,” I said, and extended my arm its full length, watched Corwin’s good eye meet the hole in the barrel of the .45.

Corwin nodded and placed his hands by his sides.

All eyes but mine turned back to Bubba and gave him their full attention.

“Two thousand!” he crowed. He raised the wad of cash in his hand.

“We agree you’ve been compensated,” Roberta Trett said, and her voice shook like the gun in her hand. “Now complete the transaction, Mr. Miller. Give us the clips.”

“Give us the clips!” Leon shrieked.

Bubba looked over his shoulder at him.

Corwin Earle took a step back, and I said, “That’s a no-no.”

He swallowed and I waved the gun forward and he moved with it.

Bubba chuckled. It was a low, soft
heh-heh-heh
, and it put a hard curve up the back of Roberta Trett’s neck.

“The clips,” Bubba said, and turned back to Roberta, seemed to notice the gun pointed at him for the first time. “Of course.”

He pursed his lips and blew a kiss to Roberta. She blinked and stepped back from it as if it were toxic.

Bubba reached toward the pocket of his trench coat, and then his arm shot back up.

“Hey!” Leon said.

Roberta jerked backward as Bubba slapped his wrist into hers and the .38 jumped from her hand, flew over the sink, and sped toward the counter.

Everyone but Bubba ducked.

The .38 hit the wall above the counter. Its hammer dropped on impact, and the gun fired.

The bullet tore a hole through the cheap Formica behind the sink and ricocheted into the wall beside the window where Leon crouched.

The .38 clattered loudly as it fell to the counter, and the barrel spun and ended up pointing at the dusty dish rack.

Bubba looked at the hole in the wall. “Cool,” he said.

The rest of us straightened, except for Leon. He sat down on the floor and placed a palm over his heart, and those pale eyes of his hardened in such a way that I knew he was far less frail than his cringing act during Bubba’s counting would lead us to believe. It was just a mask, a role he played, I assumed, to lull us into forgetting about him, and it dropped from his face as he sat on the floor and looked up at Bubba with naked hatred.

Bubba stuffed the second wad in his pocket. He closed the distance between himself and Roberta, then tapped his foot on the floor in front of her until she raised her head and met his eyes.

“You had a gun pointed at me, Xena the Large.” He rubbed his jaw with his palm, filled the kitchen with the scratch of bristles against rough flesh.

Roberta placed her hands by her sides.

Bubba smiled gently at her.

Very softly, he said, “So, should I kill you now?”

Roberta shook her head once from side to side.

“You sure?”

Roberta nodded, very deliberately.

“You pointed that gun at me, after all.”

Roberta nodded again. She tried to speak, but nothing came out but a gurgle.

“What was that?” Bubba said.

She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller.”

“Oh.” Bubba nodded.

He winked at me and there was that green and angry light dancing in his smiling eyes that I’ve seen before, the one that said anything could happen. Anything.

Leon used the kitchen table for support as he got to his feet behind Bubba.

“Little man,” Bubba said, his eyes on Roberta, “you reach for that Charter twenty-two you got strapped under the table, and I’ll unload it into your balls.”

Leon’s hand fell from the edge of the table.

Sweat poured from Corwin’s hair, and he blinked against it, placed his palm against the doorjamb to hold himself up.

Bubba walked over to me, kept his eyes on the room as he leaned in and whispered in my ear, “They’re armed to the fucking teeth. We’re gonna be leaving in a rush. Got it?”

I nodded.

As he crossed back to Roberta, I watched Leon’s eyes glance first at the table, then over at a cupboard, then at the dishwasher, which was rusty, caked with dirt along the door, and probably hadn’t washed a dish since I was in high school.

I caught Corwin Earle doing the same; then he and Leon’s eyes met for a moment, and the fear dissipated.

I had to agree with Bubba’s assessment. We were, it seemed, standing in the middle of Tombstone. As soon as we dropped our guards, the Tretts and Corwin Earle would grab their weapons and show us their vivid reenactment of the OK Corral.

“Please,” Roberta Trett said to Bubba, “go.”

“What about the clips?” Bubba said. “You wanted the clips. Do you still want ’em?”

“I—”

Bubba touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “Yes or no?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Sorry.” Bubba beamed. “Can’t have ’em. Gotta go.”

He looked at me and cocked his head and headed for the doorway.

Corwin pinned himself against the wall and I trained my gun on the room as I backed out after Bubba, saw the fury in Leon Trett’s eyes and knew they’d be coming out after us in a hurry.

I grabbed Corwin Earle behind the neck and shoved him into the center of the kitchen by Roberta. Then I met Leon’s eyes.

“I’ll kill you, Leon,” I said. “Stay in the kitchen.”

The whiny, eight-year-old’s voice was gone when he spoke. What replaced it was deep and slightly husky, cold as rock salt.

“You got to make the front door, boy. And it’s a long walk.”

I backed into the hallway, kept the .45 trained on the kitchen. Bubba stood a few feet down the hall, whistling.

“Think we should run?” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Probably.”

And he took off, charging toward the front door like a linebacker, his boots slamming the old floorboards, laughing maniacally, a booming
Ah-ha-ha
! tearing up through the house.

I dropped my arm and ran after him, saw the dark hall and the dark living room swing crazily from side to side as I charged behind Bubba and we ran full out for the front door.

I could hear them scrambling in the kitchen, the swing of the dishwasher door opening, then dropping on its hinges. I could feel target sights on my back.

Bubba didn’t pause to open the screen door between us and freedom, he ran straight through it, the wood frame shattering on impact, the green webbing shrouding his head like a veil.