“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 above the bare mattresses, and handcuffs hung to small ringlets that had been welded to the ends of the posts. A small metal wastebasket in the western corner of the room held a variety of riding crops, whips, spiked dildos, and leather straps. The entire room smelled of flesh so soiled and tainted the taint had spilled into the heart and poisoned the brain.
Roberta had stopped banging into the door, but I could hear her muffled wailing in the stairwell.
I walked toward the east end of the bedroom, saw where a wall had been knocked down to open the room up, the ridge of plaster and dust still rising from the floor. A fat mouse with spiked fur ran past me, took a right at the east end of the room, and disappeared through an opening just past the end of the wall.
I kept my gun pointed ahead of me as I stepped through more bags of chips and NAMBLA newsletters, empty cans of beer with mold growing by their openings. Magazines, printed on the cheapest glossy paper, lay open and gaping: boys, girls, adults—even animals—engaged in something I knew wasn’t sex, even though it appeared to be. Those photos seared their way into my brain in the half second before I could turn away, and what they’d captured and imprisoned on film had nothing to do with normal human interaction, only with cancer—cancerous minds and hearts and organs.
I reached the opening where the mouse had disappeared, a small space under the eaves of the house, where the roof slanted to the gutters. Beyond it was a small blue door.
Corwin Earle stood in front of the door, his back hunched under the eaves, a crossbow held up by his face, the stock resting against his shoulder, his left eye trying to squint down the sight and blink away sweat at the same time. His lazy right eye searched for focus, slid toward me again and again before it was pushed back to the right as if by a motor. He closed it eventually, resettling his shoulder against the crossbow stock. He was naked, and there was blood on his chest, a smattering of it on his protruding abdomen. A sense of defeat and weary victimization was imprinted in his sad crumble of a face.
“The Tretts don’t trust you with the machine guns, Corwin?”
He shook his head slightly.
“Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I said.
He shook his head again, this time more slowly, and flexed his shoulders against the weight of the crossbow.
I looked at the tip of the arrowhead, saw it wavering slightly, noticed the tremors running up and down the undersides of Corwin Earle’s arms.
“Where’s Samuel Pietro?” I repeated.
He shook his head again, and I shot him in the stomach.
He didn’t make a sound. He folded over at the waist and dropped the crossbow on the floor in front of him. He fell to his knees and then tipped to his right in a fetal ball, lay there with his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a dog’s.
I stepped over him and opened the blue door, entered a bathroom the size of a small closet. I saw the boarded-up black window, and a tattered shower curtain lying under the sink, and blood on the tile, the toilet, splashed against the walls as if hurled from a bucket.
A child’s white cotton underwear lay soaked in blood in the sink.
I looked in the bathtub.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, head bent, mouth open. I felt a hot wetness on my cheeks, streams of it, and it was only after that double eternity of staring into the tub at the small, naked body curled up by the drain that I realized I was weeping.
I walked back out of the bathroom and saw Corwin Earle on his knees, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his back to me, as he tried to use his kneecaps to carry himself across the floor.
I stayed behind him and waited, my gun pointed down, his dark hair rising up from the other side of the black metal sight on the barrel.
He made a chugging sound as he crawled, a low yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh that reminded me of the chug of a portable generator.
When he reached the crossbow and got one hand on the stock, I said, “Corwin.”
He looked back over his shoulder at me, saw the gun pointed at him, and scrunched his eyes closed. He turned his head, gripping the crossbow tight with a bloody hand.
I fired a round into the back of his neck and kept walking, heard the shell skitter on wood and Corwin’s body thump against the floor as I turned left, back into the bedroom, and walked to the vault door. I unsnapped the locks one by one.
“Roberta,” I said. “You still out there? You hear me? I’m going to kill you now, Roberta.”
I unsnapped the last of the locks, threw the door open, and came face-to-face with a shotgun barrel.
Remy Broussard lowered the barrel. Between his legs, Roberta Trett lay facedown on the stairs, a dark red oval the size of a serving dish in the center of her back.