Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(89)

Broussard walked across and up the road to the back of the Taurus and popped the trunk. They’d parked the car by a tree as old as the town; large, misshapen, its roots having disgorged the sidewalk around it, the tree blocked the car and Broussard from view of the Tretts’ house.

“So we’re clear,” Poole said gently, from the backseat.

Broussard pulled a trench coat from the trunk and shrugged it on. I looked back at Poole.

“If anything goes wrong, use your cellular phone and call Nine-one-one.” He leaned forward and placed an index finger up by our faces. “Under no circumstances do you move from this vehicle. Are we understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Miss Gennaro?”

Angie nodded.

“Well, then, it’s all fine.” Poole opened his door and stepped out into the rain.

He crossed the road and joined his partner at the back of the Taurus. Broussard nodded at something Poole said and looked over at us as he slipped a shotgun under the flap of his trench coat.

“Cowboys,” Angie said.

“This may be Broussard’s chance to get back to detective rank. Of course he’s excited.”

“Too excited?” Angie asked.

Broussard seemed to have read our lips. He smiled through the rivulets of water pouring down our windows and shrugged. Then he turned back to Poole, said something with his lips an inch from the older man’s ear. Poole patted him on the back and Broussard walked away from the Taurus, strode up the road through the slanting rain, stepped into the east side of Trett’s yard, ambled casually through the weeds, and made his way toward the back of the house.

Poole closed the trunk and pulled at his trench coat flaps until they covered his shotgun. The shotgun was nestled between his right arm and chest. He held his Glock behind his back in his left hand as he walked up the road, his head tilted up toward the boarded-up windows.

“You see that?” Angie said.

“What?”

“The window to the left of the front door. I think the curtain moved.”

“You sure?”

She shook her head. “I said I ‘think.’” She took her cellular phone from her purse, placed it on her lap.

Poole reached the steps. He raised his left foot toward the first step, and then he must have seen something there he didn’t like, because he extended his leg over the first step, brought his foot down on the second, and climbed up onto the porch.

The porch sagged deeply in the middle, and Poole’s body canted to the left as he stood there, the rain running off the porch between his feet in the gutter formed by the deep sag.

He looked over at the window to the left of the door, kept his head turned that way for a moment, then turned toward the right window, stared at it.

I reached into the glove box, pulled my .45 out.

Angie reached over me and removed her .38, flicked her wrist and checked the cylinder, snapped it back into place.

Poole approached the door and raised the hand that held the Glock, rapped on the wood with his knuckles. He stepped back, waited. His head turned to the left, then to the right, then back to the door. He leaned forward and rapped the wood again.

The rain barely made noise as it fell. The drops were thin and the sheets fell at an angle, and except for the high-pitched moan of the wind, the road outside the car was silent.

Poole leaned forward and twisted the doorknob to the right and left. The door remained closed. He knocked a third time.

A car drove past, a beige Volvo station wagon with bicycles tied to the roof rack, a woman with a peach headband and a pinched nervous face hunched over the wheel. We watched her brake lights flare red at the stop sign a hundred yards down the road; then the car turned left and disappeared.

The blast of a shotgun from the back of the house ripped through the moaning wind, and glass shattered. Something shrieked in the whispering rain like the clack of damaged brakes.

Poole looked back at us for a moment. Then he raised his foot to kick in the door and disappeared in an eruption of splinters and fire and bursts of light, the chattering of an automatic weapon.

The blast blew him off his feet, and he hit the porch banister so hard it cracked and peeled back from the porch like an arm snapped free at the shoulder socket. Poole’s Glock jumped out of his hand and landed in the flower bed below the porch and his shotgun clattered down the steps.

And the gunfire stopped as suddenly as it had started.

For a moment, we froze inside the car, inside the din left in the aftermath of the gunfire. Poole’s shotgun slid off the last step and the stock disappeared in the grass as the barrel shone black and wet on the pavement. A strong gust blew the rain with renewed force, and the small house whined and creaked as the gust pushed hard against its roof, rattled its windows.

I opened the car door and stepped out on the road, kept myself low as I ran toward the house. In the soft hiss of the rain, I could hear the thump of my rubber soles on the wet tar and gravel.

Angie ran beside me, the cellular phone up by her right ear and the corner of her mouth. “Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut Road in Germantown. Say again: Officer down at 322 Admiral Farragut, Germantown.”

As we ran up the walkway leading to the steps, my eyes darted from the windows to the door and back again. The door had been eviscerated, as if large animals had attacked it with stiletto claws. The wood was gouged in ragged teardrops; in several places I could see through the holes into the house, catch quick glimpses of muted colors or light.