I smiled at her. “I have to. You have the keys to my car.” I softly put my hand on the top of her head. “Go on now, Mary. I’ll be done soon.” She watched me for a second. She looked down at the keys in her hand and then back up to me. Turning, she took one step toward the car, then spun and threw her thin arms around my neck in a hug. She squeezed with all she had, let go, and then ran to the car. I watched her, wiping hot wetness from my eyes. The car door closed behind her and I heard the click of the lock. With a deep breath I stood, stepped over the crackhead mother, and walked up the steps.
Pulling out the oily rag, I smeared it over the camera lens, turning it into a greasy blind eye. For extra measure, I tossed the rag over the camera. It draped and hung, covering me from sight. My fingers swiped down my denim-clad thigh to wipe away the oil again and then closed on the slide of the shotgun.
The door was steel. It opened to the inside and was secured with a giant dead bolt. I shoved the breeching shroud just above the lock, leaning into it. Steel met steel in a soft clang. The barrel was aimed down toward the lock, stock pressed securely into my shoulder.
One deep breath in. Hold. Release.
Pull the trigger.
The end of the shotgun exploded, shooting fire out through the tiny gaps between door and shroud. I rocked back through my knees. Taking the kick of the gun. Absorbing it. Pushing back toward the door. The world closed down around the blast, my ears gone silent behind the roar.
The lead-covered steel ball blasted through the lock. Shoving metal apart. Ripping a tunnel through. I pivoted left, jacked the slide, squeezed the trigger, and blasted another round through. Pivot right. Jack the slide. Pull the trigger. Absorb the shock.
The lock was gone. Smashed to smithereens. A fist-sized hole glared out at me.
Spinning to the side of the door, my fingers pulled extra rounds off the stock and shoved them into the breach. With the gun fully loaded again, I turned to the door, leaned back, and planted a size thirteen boot beside the doorknob. The steel door flew in, smashing against a crackhead holding a pistol. The skinny man yelled out in pain and grabbed his arm that held a gun. I shouldered in, twisted, and slammed the stock of my gun across the side of his head, right across the temple. He bowled over into the wall, dropping the pistol, and crumpling into a heap. My fingers flicked on the light mounted to the tactical rail. A halogen beam cut through dim shadows as I started walking down the unlit hallway.
The hall was narrow and short. Walls closed in toward me, made dingy by a sickly sweet haze of crack-pipe smoke that hung in the air. I tried to breathe shallow and keep as much of that poison out of my lungs as possible. That shit is corrosive, which is why crackheads have train wrecks for smiles. The crack smoke erodes enamel and dissolves the tooth. A lot of crackheads suck the pipe the same way, time after time putting it in the same place as they smoke. Those crackheads will have a perfect hole eaten through their smile like it was etched in acid.
Trash carpeted the floor. Paper, bottles, rotten food, discarded clothing. It all lay on the floor in piles and heaps, kicked to the side, shoved against the baseboards. I stepped carefully, sweeping the light back and forth. Inside the house, the hot itch was almost unbearable, so choking that the back of my throat was dry and scratchy. My stomach gurgled, roiling around on itself.
My hearing was clearing up, sounds coming back to me. Yelling. Screaming. I kept moving, clearing the first room by the door quickly. It was empty except for filthy broken-down couches occupied by filthy broken-down people. Most of them stared at me, openmouthed. Two were so far gone they didn’t wake up, dead asleep or just dead, wasted away again in Crack-a-ritaville. One stared at me while still holding a small butane lighter to the glass tube stuck between desiccated lips, held by corroded teeth.
They were no threat; I moved on.
Noise came from the end of the hall, where it turned to the rest of the house. Moving quickly, I closed the gap. Two gangbangers rounded the corner. Pants sagging, shirts three sizes too big, with bandannas noosed around their heads and arms full of jailhouse ink, they raised cheap pistols at me. Spinning on my foot, my back slammed into the wall as I pushed out of their line of fire.
Time shrank, wrapping us in a bubble. The one in front jerked his finger on the trigger, spitting death into the space I was just in. He held the cheap semiautomatic sideways, playing a video game in his head. The slide convulsed back, hot shell casings flying to plink him in the face. My shoulders flexed, bouncing me off the wall. Three giant strides put me right up in his face. The shotgun swung up over my head.Pushing off the ground,the top of my boot tightened across my instep. I rose up and drove the butt of the gun into the top of his skull. The shock jolted to my shoulders as I bashed him to the floor. His knees went out as he dropped, both legs going into a split. He slumped to the ground, face thudding into the litter-strewn hallway. I let the momentum spin me around as I landed. The shotgun swung down, pointing at the second gangbanger’s face.
Acne scars stood out on sallow cheekbones as his cardboard brown complexion washed white in the halogen gleam of the tactical light mounted on the shotgun. Sweat popped out below his bandanna, glimmering in trails down the sides of his baby face. White showed all around dark brown irises, pupils shrinking to pinpricks in the harsh glare of the light on the shotgun. Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he looked to be about fifteen years old.
“Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh,” I hissed at him. I kept my voice low. “Drop the gun.” His fingers opened, sleek Berretta 9mm tumbling to the floor, lost in the litter. It was a nice gun.
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “It’s cool esse, it’s cool.” His voice was brittle with fear.
“Who else is on your crew?”
“Nobody, Holmes. Just me and Jaime.” I believed him. The stink of fear rolled off him like cheap cologne.
“Where’s McMahon?” He shook his head, lips pulled tight, refusing to speak. I pushed the barrel of the shotgun to his face. Blood welled up around the teeth of the breeching shroud as it bit his cheek. “Do you think I’m playing with you? Where. Is. He?”
He jerked a thumb behind him. “Back there. Please don’t shoot me, man. My grandma’s sick. I needed the money.” Tears streamed out of his eyes.
He was a kid. He should have been in high school, playing baseball or rugby or something. A tiny spot inside my chest loosened up for him as I looked into that baby face and those fear-filled brown eyes.
And then I remembered.
This “kid” was a drug dealer. He sold poison to people, watching them become animals a twenty rock at a time. I remembered the crackhead in front of the house, bringing her daughter to trade for drugs. This “kid” would have been the one answering the door, taking the girl to this McMahon, handing over the nugget of crack cocaine. This “kid” knew about little Kaylee Anne Dobbs, missing now for almost twelve hours.
That tiny spot in my chest hardened to concrete.
My boot lashed out, steel toe cracking across his shinbone. I felt it give under my foot with a wet snap. The kid dropped to the ground. A high-pitched scream ripped out of his throat on the way to the floor. He rolled over, still screaming. His hand came up with the Beretta. He had found it in the trash on the floor. He pointed it at me. From two feet away he wouldn’t miss. I whipped the shotgun barrel down, across the bones of his forearm. The steel tube might as well have been a baseball bat and I might as well have been Babe Ruth. His arm snapped over just below his wrist. Ivory bone popped through the skin in a well of dark blood as the Beretta went flying. The kid made a moist choking sound as he stared at his arm.
Then he passed out cold.
I stepped over him, moving back through the house. The hallway turned at a ninety-degree angle. I rounded the corner, gun ready, and stepped into a new layer of supernatural weirdness.
My stomach jerked into a knot and the air took on the consistency of a blanket that had been drenched in boiling water. Everything was hot, so smotheringly hot I could barely breathe.
Down the hallway were two openings between me and the back wall. On my left was a steel gate, like prison bars. It had a big lock on it. I swept the light inside the bars. There were shelves lining each wall stacked with bins. In the center of the room was a long, cheap table. At the table sat naked women stuffing little white rocks of crack into small ziplock bags. They were naked so they couldn’t steal crack from the drug dealers, so high they moved like automatons. Robotically, they swung their arms from piles of crack to piles of plastic bags. So far gone that none of them looked over at the big scary man with the shotgun and the halogen spotlight. I turned away, moving on.
A few steps down the hall was a wide-open archway. Warm yellow light spilled out, cutting a space open on the floor of the hallway. The carpet of trash abruptly stopped just short of the opening, leaving a clean hardwood floor under the spilled light. I pressed my back against the wall and listened. There was a clinking noise, low and chiming. Not repetitive, but similar each time it sounded. My mind couldn’t pick out a pattern to it or place where I had heard it before. The supernatural taint to the air was oppressive. I took a deep breath to center myself. The inhale brought me up short.
I smelled pot roast.
The scent of cooked meat tore through the air, so out of place in the environment I was in that it was jarring. The smell clashed in my mind, reminding me of Sunday dinners at home with my family after Mass.
I shoved that memory away. I couldn’t get caught in it, especially back then. They still sneak up on me even today. Memories like that, they blindside you. Memories like that could drive me to my knees. Memories like that could drive me insane. Memories like that could get me killed, and there were two little girls waiting on me to save them: Kaylee Anne Dobbs and Mary with the big brown eyes who was waiting in the Comet. They needed me. I couldn’t fall apart because of a memory. So I ripped it out of my mind and crammed it deep down, pushing it away violently.
The smell still jangled on my nerves. So out of place. My skin was tight, every muscle primed. Adrenaline simmered in my veins as I swung around the archway to face whatever was in that glowing, yellow room.
I found a man sitting at a table eating supper.
The man was huge. His silverware looked dainty in hands the size of catcher’s mitts. He was well-groomed, red hair and full beard neatly kept. The clothes he wore were very suburban. A light blue polo shirt strained over shoulders the size of bowling balls, and I could see khaki pants covering his legs under the small table where he sat. The hems of the pants sat on loafers the size of shoeboxes that stretched out between the table legs.
He didn’t look up, even with the shotgun’s light shining on him. He just continued eating the last of the meal on the plate in front of him. The knife in one hand cut meat with a clinking scrape. The fork in the other stabbed the meat along with potatoes and carrots, and scooped them up to his mouth.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you McMahon?”
Ignoring me, he tucked away his last bite, chewing and savoring it. With a sigh, he wiped his mouth with a wad of fabric and looked up. His eyes were beady and black, set in a wide face. There was still a bit of potato stuck in his beard.
“I am McMahon. Who the hell are you?” His voice had an Irish lilt to it.
“Where is Kaylee Dobbs?”
“Oh, you are here about the girl.” His hands came down on the table and he looked like he was going to stand up. I swiveled the shotgun and squeezed the trigger. Thunder roared out of the barrel as the last breecher slug smashed into the refrigerator beside him. Racking the slide kicked the spent shell out to fly over my shoulder and dance on the linoleum floor. Another shell slipped into its place like a familiar lover.
“Stay where you are or the next one will blow your skull apart.” I took a step closer to him. “Where is Kaylee? Answer the question or I won’t wait for you to move.”
“You are not a cop.” He said it as a statement.
Most people, even men his size, get nervous when a gun is pointed at them, especially a shotgun. Most people shit their pants. He was sitting calmly in the fifties-style kitchen and talking to me as if I were an acquaintance.
My shoulders grew tight. This was a dangerous man. There was something more than his size that made the hair stick up on my arms. My finger tightened, taking the slack out of the trigger, one twitch away from shooting him in the face.
“What I am is the man who is about one second from blasting a cap in your ass if you don’t tell me where Kaylee is.”
He sighed. “Do you know how easy it is to get a little girl to come with you? The classics still work, even in this age of heightened awareness.” His smile was wide, making the tiny piece of potato tumble from his beard and onto his shirt. “‘Little girl, do you want some candy?’” He chuckled and shook his head. “For instance, sweet little Kaylee just wanted to help me find my lost puppy.”
My stomach churned in disgust. I turned, squeezing the trigger again. The shotgun bucked and roared, blasting into the stove. The oven door fell off and heat washed into the room. I racked the slide and pointed the barrel back to his head, fighting to keep from squeezing the trigger.