Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [114]
I dove out of the kitchen, back into the hall. I rolled to my right as Roberta Trett spun full circle and the Calico muzzle winked at me. I got to my feet and ran for the back door, saw the door getting closer and closer, and then I heard Roberta step out into the hall behind me.
“You killed my Leon, motherfucker. You killed my Leon!”
The hallway blew up like an earthquake as Roberta got her finger around the trigger and let loose.
I dove without looking into the room off to my left, discovered too late that it wasn’t a room at all but a staircase.
My forehead rammed a stair about seven or eight steps up, and the impact of wood against bone rocked back through my teeth like electrical voltage. I heard Roberta’s heavy footsteps as she stumbled down the hallway toward the staircase.
She wasn’t firing her gun, and that terrified me more than if she were.
She knew she had me boxed in.
My shin screamed as it banged against the edge of a riser as I tore up the staircase, slipped once and kept going, saw a metal door at the top and prayed please God please God let it be open.
Roberta reached the opening below and I lunged for the door, hit it in the center with the heel of my hand, felt it give way like a burst of oxygen breaking from my lungs.
My chest bounced off the floor as Roberta unloaded her gun again. I rolled to my left and slammed the door behind me on a splatter of lead that banged off the metal like hail on a tin roof. The door was heavy and thick—the door to an industrial cooler or a vault—and bolt locks lined the inside: four of them from a height of about five and a half feet to a depth of about six inches. I threw them one by one as the bullets continued to ping and thunk off the other side. The door itself was bulletproof, the locks incapable of being shot out from the other side, sealed by sheets of layered steel on this side.
“You killed my Leon!”
The bullets had stopped and Roberta wailed from the other side of the door, a lunatic’s wail so violated and sheared and steeped in sudden, awful aloneness that the sound of it wrenched something in my chest.
“You killed my Leon! You killed him! You will die! Fucking die!”
Something heavy slammed into the door, and I realized after a second thump that it was Roberta Trett herself, throwing that oversized body of hers against the door like a battering ram, over and over, howling and shrieking and calling her husband’s name, and—bam, bam, bam—hurling herself at the only boundary between us.
Even if she lost her gun and I still had mine, I knew that if she got through that door she’d rip me to pieces with her bare hands, no matter how many rounds I fired into her.
“Leon! Leon!”
I listened for the sounds of sirens, the squawk of walkie-talkies, the bleat of a bullhorn. The police had to have reached the house by now. They had to.
That’s when it hit me that I couldn’t hear anything except Roberta, and only because she was directly on the other side of the door.
A bare forty-watt bulb hung over the room, and as I turned and took in my surroundings, I felt an express train of cold fear barrel through my veins.
I was in a large bedroom fronting the street. The windows were boarded up, thick black wood screwed into the molding, the dead silver eyes of forty or fifty flatheads apiece staring back at me from each window.
The floor was bare and strewn with the droppings of rodents. Bags of potato chips and Fritos and tortilla chips were scattered by the baseboards, their crumbs ground into the wood. Three bare mattresses, soiled with excrement and blood and God knew what else lay against the walls. The walls themselves were covered in thick gray sections of sponge and the Styrofoam soundproofing found in a recording studio. Except this wasn’t a recording studio.
Metal posts had been hammered into the walls just