Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(34)

“Aramis?” I said. “What, they were out of Brut?”

Poole raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Old Spice, too, unfortunately.”

He passed the bottle around, and we each applied it liberally to our upper lips. Angie doused a handkerchief with it as well. Nasty as it smelled as it scorched the insides of my nostrils, it was still preferable to smelling a bloater without anything at all.

Bloaters are what some cops, paramedics, and doctors call bodies that have been dead for a while. Once the body’s gases and acids have been allowed to run rampant after rigor mortis, the body will bloat and balloon and do all sorts of other really appetizing things.

A porch the width of my car greeted us. Winter boots caked with dried salt sat stuck to last February’s newspapers beside a spade with gashes in the wood handle, a rusted hibachi, and a bag of empty beer cans. The thin green rug was ripped apart in several places, and the bloody footprints of several cats had dried into the fabric.

The next room we entered was a living room, and light from the windows was joined by the silver shaft from a TV with the volume turned down. The inside of the house was dark, but gray light came in from the side windows, filling the rooms with a pewter haze that didn’t do much to improve the squalid surroundings. The rugs on the floors were a mismatched shag, patched together with a drug addict’s sense of aesthetics. In several places, you could see the tufts rising in ridges where the sections had been cut and placed side by side. The walls were paneled in blond plywood, and the ceilings flaked white paint. A shredded futon couch sat against the wall, and as we stood in the center of the room, our eyes adjusting to the gray light, I noticed several sets of sparkling eyes brighten from the torn fabric.

A soft electric hum, like cicadas buzzing around a generator, rolled out from the futon, and the several sets of eyes moved in a jagged line.

And then they attacked.

Or at least it seemed that way at first. A dozen high-pitched meows preceded a scratch-and-scramble exodus as the cats—Siamese and calicoes and tabbies and one Hemingway—shot off the couch and over the coffee table, hit the shag carpet sections, burst through our legs, and banged off the baseboards on their way toward the door.

Poole said, “Mother of God,” and hopped up on one leg.

I flattened against the cheap wall, and Angie joined me, and a hunk of thick fur slithered over my foot.

Broussard jerked to his right and then left, whacked at the hem of his suit jacket.

The cats weren’t after us, though. They were after sunlight.

Outside, Helene shrieked as they poured through the open doorway. “Holy shit! Help!”

“What I tell ya?” A voice I recognized as the middle-aged lady’s yelled. “A blight. A goddamned blight on the city a’ Charlestown!”

Inside the house, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the tick of a clock coming from the kitchen.

“Cats,” Poole said with thick disdain, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

Broussard bent to check his pant cuffs, dusted a wisp of cat hair off his shoes.

“Cats are smart.” Angie came off the wall. “Better than dogs.”

“Dogs get the paper for you, though,” I said.

“Dogs don’t scratch the shit out of couches, either,” Broussard said.

“Dogs don’t eat their owners’ corpses when they’re hungry,” Poole said. “Cats do.”

“Ugh,” Angie managed. “That’s not true. Is it?”

We moved slowly into the kitchen.

As soon as we entered, I had to stop for a moment, catch my breath, and suck in the cologne on my upper lip with flared nostrils.

Angie said, “Shit,” and buried her face in her handkerchief.

A naked man was tied to a chair. A woman knelt on the floor a few feet away from him, her chin to her chest, the straps of her bloody white negligee hanging down to her elbows, her wrists and ankles hog-tied together behind her back. Both bodies had thickened with gas and turned the white of volcanic ash after blood stopped pumping through their veins.

The man had taken a large blast to his chest that had demolished his sternum and upper rib cage. By the size of the hole, I had to assume the blast had been unleashed from a shotgun at close range. And unfortunately, Poole had been right about the feeding habits and questionable loyalty of felines. More than just buckshot had chewed into the man’s flesh. Between the damage wrought by the blast, time, and the cats, his upper chest looked as if it had been pushed open by surgical shears from the inside.

“Those aren’t what I think they are,” Angie said, her eyes on the gaping hole.

“Sorry to inform you,” Poole said, “but those are the man’s lungs.”

“It’s official,” Angie said. “I’m nauseous.”

Poole titled the man’s chin up with a ballpoint pen. He took a step back. “Well, hello, David!”

“Martin?” Broussard said, and took a step closer to the body.

“The same.” Poole dropped the chin and touched the man’s dark hair. “You’re looking peaked, David.”

Broussard turned to us. “David Martin. Also known as Wee David.”

Angie coughed into her handkerchief. “He looks pretty tall to me.”

“It has nothing to do with his height.”