Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(84)

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.