Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(83)

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.

We neared the first two doorways midway down the hall, and I glanced in the one on my left, saw only a dark room with shadows and shapes I guessed were a recliner and stacks of either books or magazines. The smell of old cigar smoke wafted from the room. The one on the right took us into a kitchen bathed so harshly in white light, I was pretty sure the fluorescent wattage was industrial, the kind normally found in truck depots, not private homes. Instead of illuminating the room, it washed it out, and I had to blink several times to regain my vision.

The man lifted a small object off the counter and tossed it sideways in my direction. I blinked in the brightness, saw the object coming in low and to my right, and reached out and snagged it. It was a small paper bag, and I’d caught it by the bottom. Sheafs of money threatened to spill to the floor before I righted the bag and pushed the bills back inside. I turned back to Bubba and handed it to him.

“Good hands,” the man said. He smiled a yellow tobacco-stained grin in Bubba’s direction. “Your gym bag, sir.”

Bubba swung the gym bag into the man’s chest, and the force of it knocked him on his ass. He sprawled on the black-and-white tile, arms spread, and propped the heels of his hands on the tile for support.

“Bad hands,” Bubba said. “How about I just put it on the table?”

The man looked up at him and nodded, blinked at the light above his face.

It was his nose that looked so familiar, I decided, the hawkish curve to it. It jutted out from the otherwise flat plane of the man’s face like a precipice, hooked downward so dramatically the tip cast a shadow on the man’s lips.

He got up off the floor and dusted the seat of his black tights, rubbed his hands together as he stood over the table and watched Bubba unzip the gym bag. Twin orange fires lit the man’s eyes like the glints of taillights in the dark as he stared into the bag, and dots of perspiration speckled his upper lip.

“So these are my babies,” the man said, as Bubba pulled back the folds of the bag and revealed four Calico M-110 machine pistols, the black aluminum alloy glistening with oil. One of the strangest-looking weapons I’ve ever seen, the Calico M-110 is a handgun that fires a hundred rounds from the same helical-feed magazine used for its carbines. Roughly seventeen inches long, the grip and barrel take up the front eight inches, with the slide and the majority of the gun frame jutting back behind the grip. The gun reminded me of the fake ones we’d built as kids out of rubber bands, clothespins, and popsicle sticks to fire paper clips at one another.