Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [56]
Broussard started in as soon as our shoes hit gravel. “How much bullshit were you willing to swallow from that slug, Mr. Kenzie? Huh?”
“Whatever it took to—”
“Maybe you’d like to go back in, talk about dog suicides and—”
“—get a fucking deal, Detective Broussard! That’s what I—”
“—how much you’re down with your man Cheese.”
“Gentlemen.” Poole stepped in between us.
The echo of our voices was raw in that parking lot, and our faces were red from shouting. The tendons in Broussard’s neck bulged like lines of rope stretched taut, and I could feel adrenaline shake my blood.
“My methods were sound,” Broussard said.
“Your methods,” I said, “sucked.”
Poole put a hand on Broussard’s chest. Broussard looked down at it and kept his eyes there for a bit, his jaw muscles rolling up under the flesh.
I walked across the parking lot, felt the adrenaline turning to jelly in my calves, the gravel crunching underfoot, heard the sharp cry of a bird slicing through the air from the direction of Walden Pond, saw the sun soften and spread against the tree trunks as it died. I leaned against the back of the Taurus, placed a foot up on the bumper. Poole still had a hand on Broussard’s chest, was talking to him, his lips close to the younger man’s ear.
All the shouting aside, my temper hadn’t really shown itself yet. If I’m truly angry, if that switch in my head has been tripped, my voice rides a flat line, becomes dead and monotonous, and a red marble of light drills through my skull and blots out all fear, all reason, all empathy. And the hotter the red marble glows, the colder my blood chills, until it’s the blue of fine metal, and the monotone becomes a whisper.
That whisper—rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else—is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot, the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.
It is my father’s temper.
So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.
The crucial difference between my father and me—I hope—has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.
At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.
So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere—except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.
Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.
“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”
“Then quit your job,” I said.
“We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”
I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.
“What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.
Broussard looked away.
“Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.
“Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.
“You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”
“Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,