system.
I walked back out. The Broaches were doing their best to get into packing mode again, but clearly our conversation had thrown them off.
'Kasey was a recovering alcoholic?' I asked.
Mrs. Broach flushed not a favorite topic of discussion. 'Well. As I said, she had some problems in her teen years, right after Jennifer was born. We got her help.'
'Did she ever slip?'
'We just celebrated with a twenty-year cake.'
'Do you think she would have ever taken Xanax?'
'Not a prayer of a chance. She wouldn't touch my Black Forest cake, not even with the cherry brandy cooked off.'
In the kitchen Mr. Broach dropped a coffeemaker, and the pot shattered. He looked down at it blankly.
A potent three seconds passed before his wife said, 'What were we going to do with it anyways?'
'I've put you behind schedule,' I said. 'Would you mind if I helped?'
Mr. Broach said, 'We wouldn't mind that at all.'
For the next hour, as the whine of traffic diminished and the kids chased each other around the street, whooping and screaming, I helped pack and load. We made decent progress.
I came out with a halogen floor lamp and a framed Matisse print to find Mrs. Broach sitting on the ground, running her thumb over a white-ribbon barrette that had fallen from a bag.
Mr. Broach paused before her, helped her to her feet.
'I think that's enough for tonight,' he said.
We finished loading the stuff by the U-Haul, and he turned to shake my hand.
'Maybe they're wrong about you. With Genevieve Bertrand.'
'I hope so,' I said back to him.
Mrs. Broach smiled sadly at me. 'You take care of yourself, Andrew.'
Jennifer offered me a wave from the U-Haul as they pulled out, and I stood and watched until the taillights were two distant eyes in the darkness. The kids circled with their crew cuts and ten-year-old voices, yelling about stickups and screeching imagined injuries. Their toy guns emitted electronic blips and blasts, red lights blinking deep inside the barrels.
I was almost to my car when I noticed that one kid's pistol was deadly silent, nothing inside the bore but a circle of shadow. I jogged a few steps after him.
'Hey,' I called out. 'Hey.'
He pivoted with a crooked grin and said, 'Bang bang, you're dead, buddy.'
The gun he was pointing at me was real.
Chapter 30
I put my hands in the air. 'All right, I'm sticking 'em up, buddy.
Don't shoot.'
He smiled, showing off a gap between his front teeth. All fun and games.
I watched his little finger tighten around the trigger and said, 'Wait! Lemme give you my wallet first.'
Shuffling forward, I dug in my pocket and produced the pitifully light leather billfold. It distracted him just as I hoped, and I snatched the gun out of his hand, grabbing the barrel from the side and twisting it out and free. He stared at me, rubbing his wrist, stunned. 'I was just playing.'
'This is a real gun.'
A shitty. 22, to be precise. I nosed back the slide no round in the chamber. Lucky thing, or someone would be bleeding out on the pavement right now. I dropped the magazine. A hollow point peeked out from the top, spring- loaded and ready to go. I reseated the mag and thumbed the safety on.
'Where'd you get this?'
'I didn't steal it. I didn't. It was in my trash.' He pointed to a row of houses backing on the parking lot. Garbage cans lined the rickety wooden fence, awaiting pickup. 'I found it. On my property. It's mine.'
I turned the pistol to check the serial number on the frame above the trigger and was not surprised to find only a stripe of gouged metal. 'When?'
The other kids circled, scared but keeping a good distance. A boy in an Angels cap ran off toward the row of houses.
'Dunno. Coupla days ago.'
'The night the cops were here?'
'Day after. They weren't looking for this, though. A lady got kidnapped from right there. That's why we're all playing together now. Buddy system.'
'You talk to the cops about this?'
He shook his head, scared. I looked across at his house. The kid in the Angels cap was returning, tugging at the hand of a big man in a flannel shirt. Through a back window, I could make out trophies and baseball pennants.
'You see anything the night she was kidnapped? Out front here? Around ten, eleven?'
'A car was there a little while.' He pointed at a parking space to the left of Kasey's door her car would have held the front slot. 'Then it was gone. That's all. I was up watching TV, so I didn't even see nobody.'
'What kind of car?'
'It had a big butt on it with windows.'
The best description I'd ever heard of a Volvo. I opened my door, digging through printouts. 'What color was it?'
'Brown, or black even. It was hard to tell, 'cause there was no light.'
I handed him a picture of a Volvo 760. 'Like this one?'
'Yeah.' A dirty fingernail tapped the printout. 'Like that one. Now can I have my gun back?'
'Can I help you?' the man in the flannel shirt shouted, advancing quickly.
'He was playing with a gun.'
'My boys can play with whatever they damn well please.'
'A real gun.'
'Where's my ten-year-old son gonna get a real gun?'
'It's not, Daddy. I swear.'
The man continued at me aggressively. I didn't want to fight a father in front of his son, so I chambered a round, aimed straight up, and fired. The boom sent the kids sprawling on the concrete and the man back on his heels, crouching, arms raised over his head.
'It's a real gun,' I said.
Their scared reaction didn't make me feel good about myself. Not even close.
The kids stayed down on the ground until I drove off.
'Remember for Chainer's Law you showed me how to restore a serial number that had been filed off?' I raised my shirt, showing the pistol snugged in the front of my jeans.
Lloyd stared at me across the pristine sheet of butcher paper that covered his lab bench. 'You want to blow your pecker off? This isn't a movie, Drew.'
I withdrew the. 22 and set it down beside the skull-and-bones matchbook, dimpling the glossy paper. Lloyd coughed uneasily and glanced around.
He'd gotten stuck processing some paint chips and was eager to get home to his wife. Given my excitement over the pistol, he'd yielded to my pressure to see him at the lab. He was working late and figured his superiors would be gone by this hour. I'd caught a few stares on my way in, but the halls were mostly abandoned.
'This doesn't make sense,' he said, snapping on latex gloves. 'Why bring a gun if he was planning on knocking Broach out with gas?'
'It wasn't for Kasey. Her he wanted alive and unconscious. It was in case one of the neighbors stumbled in on
