Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [111]
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.
As we reached the steps, the holes were suddenly obscured by darkness. I swung out with my right arm, knocked Angie off her feet and onto the lawn as I dove left.
It was as if the world exploded. Nothing prepares you for the sound of a gun firing seven rounds a second. Through a wooden door, the rage of the bullets sounded almost human, a cacophony of biting, rabid homicide.
Poole flopped to his left as the bullets spit off the porch, and I reached down into the grass by my feet, curled my hand around the stock of his shotgun. I holstered my .45 and rose to one knee. I pointed through the rain and fired into the door, and the wood belched smoke. When the smoke cleared, I was looking at a hole in the center the size of my fist. I rose off my knee but slipped on the wet grass and heard glass tinkling to my left.
I spun and fired over the porch banister into the window, blew the glass and frame to pieces, ripped a hole in the dark curtain.
Inside the house, someone screamed.
The gunfire had stopped. Echoes of the shotgun blasts and the chatter of the automatic weapon stormed through my head.
Angie was on her knees