Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(96)

He smiled and drained what remained of a bottle of Mount Gay. He tossed the dead soldier into the sand, pulled a full one from his topcoat, and cracked the seal. He spun the cap off and into the sand with a flick of his thumb. “It’s a burden, being this good-looking. Heh-heh.”

“How’s Poole?”

Broussard shook his head several times. “Nothing’s changed. He’s alive, but barely. He hasn’t regained consciousness.”

I sat on the swing beside his. “And the prognosis?”

“Not good. Even if he lives, he’s had several strokes in the last thirty hours, lost a ton of oxygen to the brain. He’d be partially paralyzed, the doctors figure, mute most likely. He’ll never get out of bed again.”

I thought of that first afternoon I’d met Poole, the first time I’d seen his odd ritual of sniffing a cigarette before snapping it in half, the way he’d looked up into my confused face with his elfin grin and said, “I beg your pardon. I quit.” Then, when Angie’d asked if he’d mind if she smoked, he’d said, “Oh, God, would you?”

Shit. I hadn’t even realized until now how much I liked him.

No more Poole. No more arch remarks, delivered with a knowing, bemused glint in his eye.

“I’m sorry, Broussard.”

“Remy,” Broussard said, and handed me a plastic cocktail cup. “You never know. He’s the toughest bastard I ever met. Has a hell of a will to live. Maybe he’ll pull through. How about you?”

“Huh?”

“How’s your will to live?”

I waited while he filled half the cup with rum.

“It’s been stronger,” I said.

“Mine, too. I don’t get it.”

“What?”

He held the bottle aloft and we toasted silently, then drank.

“I don’t get,” Broussard said, “why what happened in that house has got me so turned around. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of horrible shit.” He leaned forward in his swing, looked back over his shoulder at me. “Horrible shit, Patrick. Babies fed Drano in their bottles, kids suffocated and shaken to death, beat so bad you can’t tell what color their skin really is.” He shook his head slowly. “Lotta shit. But something about that house…”

“Critical mass,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Critical mass,” I repeated. I took another swig of rum. It wasn’t going down easy yet, but it was close. “You see this horrible thing, that one, but they’re spaced out. Yesterday, we saw all sorts of evil shit and it all reached critical mass at once.”

He nodded. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that basement,” he said. “And then that kid in the tub?” He shook his head. “A few months shy of my twenty, and I’ve never…” He took another swig and shuddered against the burn of alcohol. He gave me a slight smile. “You know what Roberta was doing when I shot her?”

I shook my head.

“Pawing at the door like a dog. Swear to God. Pawing and mewing and crying about her Leon. I’d just climbed out of that cellar, found those two little kid skeletons sunk in limestone and gravel, the whole fucking place something out of a spook show, and I see Roberta at the top of the stairs? Man, I didn’t even look for her gun. I just unloaded mine.” He spit into the sand. “Fuck her. Hell’s too good a place for that bitch.”

For a while we sat in silence, listening to the creak of the swings’ chains, the cars passing along the avenue, the slap and scrape of some kids playing street hockey in the parking lot of the electronics plant across the street.

“The skeletons,” I said to Broussard after a bit.

“Unidentified. Closest the ME can tell me is that one’s male, one’s female, and he thinks neither is older than nine or younger than four. A week before he knows shit.”

“Dentals?”

“The Tretts took care of that. Both skeletons showed traces of hydrochloric acid. The ME thinks the Tretts marinated them in the shit, pulled out the teeth while they were soft, dumped the bones in boxes of limestone in the cellar.”

“Why leave them in the cellar?”

“So they could look at them?” Broussard shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”

“So one could be Amanda McCready.”

“Most definitely. Either that or she’s in the quarry.”

I thought about the cellar and Amanda for a bit. Amanda McCready and her flat eyes, her lowered expectations for all the things that kids should have the highest expectations for, her lifeless corpse being dropped in a bathtub filled with acid, her hair stripping away from her head like papier-maché.

“Hell of a world,” Broussard whispered.

“It’s a fucking awful world, Remy. You know?”

“Two days ago I would have argued with you. I’m a cop, okay, but I’m lucky, too. Got a great wife, nice house, invested well over the years. I’ll leave all this shit soon as I hit my twenty and a wake-up call.” He shrugged. “But then something like—Jesus—that carved-up kid in that fucking bathroom and you start thinking, ‘Well, fine, my life’s okay, but the world’s still a pile of shit for most people. Even if my world is okay, the world is still a pile of evil shit.’ You know?”