Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(117)

“What happened the night she disappeared?” Ryerson said.

“I came in from the back of the house. I took her out. I told her it was a game. She liked games. Maybe because Helene’s idea was a trip down to the bar, play with the Pac-Man machine, honey.” He sucked ice from his glass and crushed it between his teeth. “Broussard was parked on the street. I waited in the doorway to the porch, told Amanda to be real, real quiet. The only neighbor who could have seen us was Mrs. Driscoll, across the street. She was sitting on her stoop, had a direct line on the house. She left the stoop for a second, went back in the house for another cup of tea or something, and Broussard gave me an all-clear signal. I carried Amanda to Broussard’s car, and we drove away.”

“And no one saw a thing,” I said.

“None of the neighbors. We found out later, though, that Chris Mullen did. He was parked on the street, staking out the house. He was waiting for Helene to come back so he could find out where she’d hid the money she stole. He recognized Broussard. Cheese Olamon used it to blackmail Broussard into retrieving the missing money. He was also supposed to steal some drugs from evidence lockup, give them to Mullen that night at the quarry.”

“Back to the night Amanda disappeared,” I said.

He took a second cube of ice from the glass with his thick fingers, chewed it. “I told Amanda my friend was going to take her to see some nice people. Told her I’d see her in a few hours. She just nodded. She was used to being dropped off with strangers. I got out a few blocks away and walked home. It was ten-thirty. It took my sister almost twelve hours to notice her daughter was gone. That tell you anything?”

For a while we were so quiet, I could hear the thump of darts hitting cork near the back of the bar.

“When the time was right,” Lionel said, “I figured I’d tell Beatrice, and she’d understand. Not right away. A few years down the road, maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that through. Beatrice hates Helene, and she loves Amanda, but something like this…See, she believes in the law, all the rules. She’d never have gone along with something like this. But I hoped, maybe, once enough time had passed…” He looked up at the ceiling, gave a small shake of his head. “When she decided to call you two, I got in contact with Broussard and he said try and dissuade her, but not too hard. Let her do it if she has to. He told me the next day that if push came to shove, he had some things on you two. Something about a murdered pimp.”

Ryerson gave me a raised eyebrow and a cold, curious smile.

I shrugged and looked away, and that’s when I saw the guy in the Popeye mask. He came in through the back fire exit, his right arm extended, a .45 automatic pointed at chest level.

His partner brandished a shotgun and also wore a plastic Halloween mask. Casper the Friendly Ghost’s moony white face stared out as he came through the front door and shouted, “Hands on the table! Everyone! Now!”

Popeye herded the two darts players in front of him, and I turned my head in time to see Casper throw the bolt lock on the front door.

“You!” Popeye screamed at me. “You deaf? Hands on the fucking table.”

I put my hands on the table.

The bartender said, “Oh, shit. Come on.”

Casper pulled a string by the window and a heavy black curtain fell across it.

Beside me, Lionel’s breathing was very shallow. His hands, flat on the table, were completely still. One of Ryerson’s hands dropped below the table, and one of Angie’s did as well.

Popeye hit one of the darts throwers on the back of the spine with his fist. “Down! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Do it. Do it. Do it now!”

Both men dropped to their knees and began locking their hands behind their necks. Popeye looked at them, his head cocked. It was an awful moment, filled with the worst sort of possibility. Whatever Popeye decided, he could do. Shoot them, shoot us, cut their throats. Whatever.

He kicked the older of the two in the base of the spine.

“Not on your knees. On your stomachs. Now.”

The men dropped to their stomachs by my feet.

Popeye turned his head very slowly, stopped on our table.

“Hands on the damn table,” he whispered. “Or you fucking die.”

Ryerson withdrew his hand from under the table, held both empty palms to the air, then placed them flat on the wood. Angie did the same.

Casper came up to the bar across from us. He leveled the shotgun at the bartender.

Two middle-aged women, office workers or secretaries by the looks of their clothes, sat in the middle of the bar directly in front of Casper. When he extended the shotgun, it brushed the hair of one of the women. Her shoulders tensed and her head jerked to the left. Her companion moaned.

The first woman said, “Oh, God. Oh, no.”

Casper said, “Stay calm, ladies. This will all be over in a minute or two.” He pulled a green trash bag from the pocket of his leather bombardier’s jacket and tossed it on the bar in front of the bartender. “Fill it up. And don’t forget the money from the safe.”

“There’s not much,” the bartender said.

“Just get what there is,” Casper said.

Popeye, the crowd control, stood with his legs spread apart by roughly a foot and a half and bent slightly at the knees, his .45 steadily moving in an arc from left to right, right to left, and back again. He was about twelve feet from me, and I could hear his breathing from behind the mask, even and steady.