Beluga (13 page)

These spots go in and out of cultivation as the crop prices fluctuate. This one had been wild for three or four years and was a glorified eighty-acre thicket with a sandy road going in to what I guess you could call a pond. If you'd never seen a pond and had a high opinion of puddles. It was a mud hole really, overrun with snapping turtles and blue herons, and I'm sure it was the buggiest spot for many miles around.

When Kendell finally found us, he pulled up in his cruiser and even climbed out of it and left it for half a minute. The gnats and mosquitoes went for him with such relish that he hopped back in his car and called Desmond on the phone.

“Follow me,” he said. So Desmond did, and I followed the pair of them out of that wildlife thicket, west a few miles, and onto the levee road. If there was a breeze to be caught in the Delta, you were sure to catch it up there. The road runs along the crown of the levee. I had a clear view of the Mississippi to my left and a swampy wooded island called Kentucky Bend. There was even a small herd of cattle up there to keep the levee grass down.

Kendell found a grove of sycamore trees and parked in the shade beneath them. There was enough breeze stirring—maybe the river current kicked it up—to drive most of the bugs away. The rushing water provided a sort of constant background tremor.

“You know what I think?” Kendell asked us both straightaway. He didn't wait for an answer. “I think I'm not going to like any of this.”

“It's nothing we're into,” Desmond said. “We just let out some money.”

“To Larry?”

Desmond managed a reluctant grimace.

“What did he get into?”

“The problem is…” I said to Kendell.

He pointed a finger at me. “Shut up.”

He looked back at Desmond.

“Tires,” Desmond told him. “Must have been Shambrough's or something.”

“Are you the one that kicked him around?” Kendell asked Desmond.

Desmond shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

“You, then,” Kendell told me.

“What's a Shambrough?” I said.

“Sounds like you. Went over to see if you could straighten everything out. Probably started out regular and friendly. Ended up in a fight. You saw her, didn't you? Had her right there.”

“Don't know what you mean.”

Kendell exhaled. Chuffed really, like a black bear might. He looked out over the great river. Big brown ropy strands of current racing south.

“Dead guy's a jailbird,” Kendell said. “Figures to be one of Larry's friends.”

When me and Desmond didn't say anything, Kendell looked at us and shook his head. “I can help you,” he said. “I'm not hoping to see any of you locked up or dead.”

“Desmond's in kind of a delicate spot,” I told him.

“Shawnica'll kill me,” Desmond said. “Might just kill you and him, too.”

“Didn't you put Larry in Parchman the last time he was up there?” Kendell asked him. “That was you, right?”

“He stole Momma's car. They caught him in Jackson. We didn't know it was him when we called it in.”

“You're shitting me,” I said to Desmond. I'd never heard that one before. “Why are you worried about his sorry ass now?”

“That's the question, isn't it,” Kendell said.

But we all knew the answer.

“She won't like this,” Desmond told us, more in downtrodden, pathetic sorrow than anything else.

“Let me talk to Shawnica,” Kendell suggested.

“She's got a knife,” I told him. “And a bad attitude. And no volume control. And those stick-on nails are sharp.”

“She's my wife's cousin,” Kendell told me. “I think I can handle Shawnica.” Spoken like a man sure to be getting sewn up later on.

“What are you going to tell her exactly?” Desmond wanted to know.

Kendell was almost chipper now. “I'll just ask her how she wants her brother—planted in the churchyard or locked up?”

 

TWELVE

I called Officer T. Raintree because I thought I should. It seemed the polite thing to do, and I wanted to talk to her anyway. I wanted to see if Kendell had phoned in to update my bio, adding the beat-up boy in the catfish pond I might have helped get killed.

She didn't quite say what I'd hoped she'd say when she answered.

“How did you get this number?” she wanted to know.

“Didn't you give it to me?”

“No.”

“I don't know. Kendell maybe. You heard from him today?”

“Saw him at roll call. What's the problem?”

“No problem. Just got a thing I need to talk to him about.”

“You got his number?”

“Must somewhere,” I told her. “Enjoyed last night,” I said.

“Right. Yeah.” I heard some clanking and a dull roar in the background. Tula shouted at somebody, “Hey!” Then she said to me, “Got to do this,” and she hung up on me.

I didn't feel any better for having dialed her. I was pretty certain I felt considerably worse.

Since Kendell was heading over to talk to Shawnica, me and Desmond stopped in at Kalil's to see if he had the sort of job that might make us both feel better. We'd worked plenty of repos where the customer was just low on luck. He'd lost his job or the last of his cash had gone to a bill he couldn't not pay, so he'd gotten behind on whatever creature comfort he'd contracted for with Kalil.

There he'd be with his head in his hands sitting on his rented sofa, and me and Desmond or some fool like Ronnie would show up at his door to take it.

We didn't want one of those, and we sure didn't want to mess with any Duponts, but we were hoping for a loudmouth, wrongheaded redneck. He'd threaten us with a bat or a length of rebar, ready to lay down his life for his TiVo, so me and Desmond wouldn't have much choice except to go on ahead and scuff him the hell up.

It was sure to be therapeutic for us and probably good practice for Desmond. I'd had a little workout with Lucas Shambrough and his schoolgirl assassin. Aside from Larry, I couldn't remember the last time Desmond had wailed on anybody hard.

Out in Kalil's parking lot, I asked him to name his last victim.

Desmond thought. He told me, “Hmmm.” Then he thought some more. “That Ketner, I guess. The one with the hat.”

I could just about picture him. The hat had been a fedora. He'd fancied himself some sort of backcountry hipster. I believe he'd quoted Bukowski at us. Hard to know. He was short a few teeth, so everything came out sounding about the same.

“Table saw, right?”

Desmond nodded.

That Ketner had been building an addition onto his trailer. He'd been going at it, I have to think, the way backcountry hipsters all over would. He'd collected some lumber and a roll of Tyvek. He'd bought a saw on time from Kalil, and then he'd left it all to sit out in the weather for going on three months.

He got offended when I asked him, “What's all this shit?”

That's when he quoted the poetry, I think, and reached back inside for his shotgun. It was nearly as rusty as the saw. He'd whacked the barrel off for convenience's sake.

Desmond has a talent for dealing with people who've decided to point a gun at him. It's a gift really, and I lack it entirely, so my first move—I can't help myself—was to show my palms to that Ketner and tell him with the best smile I could muster, “Let's just hold on here, buddy.”

Desmond does something else entirely. He always goes toward the gun. Desmond is massive. There must be a Samoan somewhere in the woodpile. Desmond is just a huge heap of a guy, so he's got to really know what he's up to to make himself seem unthreatening.

When the guns come out, he just starts talking in a low and humble way. He has this story he likes to tell about a cousin on his daddy's side who met every kind of upset with a weapon until one of them finally went off. He either killed somebody or didn't, depending on whatever Desmond happens to think will serve his purposes best.

With that Ketner, Desmond's cousin inadvertently gunned down a simple man collecting a wage, just hired to do a job. A man like Desmond. A man like me. A man just like that Ketner. Except, of course, for the fedora. I felt certain that was setting Desmond off.

Desmond hates poseurs in a deep-seated and instinctive sort of way. Hipsters especially, who dress like they're living in 1928 but are twenty-first-century stupid in the regular, modern way. So that Ketner had to be working on him. The fedora was bad enough, but he was wearing a vest and pleated trousers and two-tone wingtips as well.

All of it out in a swampy wasteland down past Itta Bena. His trailer was shoved back into a hedgerow. His garbage was piled up in sacks. He'd bought all the wrong wood to build his addition that he wasn't even building, and he had two car seats by way of lawn furniture—another of Desmond's dislikes.

Desmond fought through all of that and gave that Ketner the cousin story with all the usual blandishments and dramatic grace notes and the sorts of touches that always saw Desmond safely into what he called
Oh, fuck!
range.

He'd ease forward as he spoke, making a friend along the way of whoever had a firearm pointed at him. The theme of Desmond's story was felonious regret. His cousin had known a full dose of it. Desmond had taken that lesson to heart and was prepared these days to talk almost anything out.

He was close by then. I'd about made it to a cypress tree that I could put between myself and that Ketner if he decided to pull the trigger.

We got more poetry (I think) as Desmond arrived in
Oh, fuck!
range. He was saying something soothing when he snatched at that Ketner's shotgun, racked it around, and plucked it out of his hands. Desmond had hinged the barrel open, ejected the loads, and broken that Ketner's nose with the butt within about seven seconds. Then Desmond proceeded to truly scuff that boy up. He reserved some hard treatment for the fedora as well.

Then that Ketner helped us load his table saw into my Ranchero. By “helped” I mean we watched him, and he did it all himself. Desmond bent his sawed-offed barrel for him between two saplings, handed the gun back to that Ketner, who was covered in nose blood by then.

Desmond supplied him a bit of counsel as well. “Straighten the fuck up,” he told him.

That was back in March, and I remember how good we'd felt driving away from that Ketner with the saw he'd probably ruined and both of us unshot. We probably felt like soldiers feel when they come out of a firefight unscathed. We were elated, giddy even, and more than a little revived.

After seeing Larry's buddy all beat to pieces and drowned, me and Desmond both knew that we could do with some reviving. Kalil, God bless him, had a morsel for us. He was standing by the counter and waving the tissuey invoice as we came in.

“Dale,” he said. “I sent Paco this morning.” Kalil pressed his lips together and shook his head. That meant Paco was probably visiting the critical care clinic by now.

Paco was from Alabama. He wasn't Mexican. He just ate burritos morning, noon, and night and was about as slow-witted as a man can be and still boast of a fifth-grade education. I think Kalil kept him on because, somehow, Paco had a current driver's license. It had to be some kind of DMV oversight.

We hated Dale. He'd been a state policeman, and he'd been married to Patty, who used to work for Kalil. We'd hated Patty, too, but mostly because she was fond of Dale. Once they'd divorced and she'd grown to despise him, we'd softened on her a little.

Dale had skimmed. He'd chiseled. He'd taken bribes outright. He'd moonlighted for a meth kingpin and worked as muscle for a while. He finally beat up some girl he was seeing, a hot mess over in Grenada who'd threatened to bring him up on charges and then even actually did.

Dale spent eight months in the county lockup. He was a muscle head already and so just passed his sentence lifting weights and fighting with the cons. I think they finally turned him out because they were sick of messing with him. He moved into a tenant house on a spread his uncle owned and proceeded to get fired from a series of low-wage jobs for being, well, Dale.

“What's he got?” I asked Kalil.

“TV,” he told me. He checked the invoice. “Panasonic.”

“The big one?”

He nodded.

“Why in the hell did you let him have it?” Desmond wanted to know.

Kalil gave us the devilish smile we saw sometimes when he was tickled. “So you two could go and pick it up.”

Kalil could sometimes be thoughtful like that. Mostly he was a raging screamer, but that's probably why the kind turns he did usually touched us so. They were rare and out of character. He offered us the invoice. We tried to thank him, but Kalil just waved us off.

“Don't get anything broken,” he said. “Especially my damn TV.”

In a way, it was a lot easier going after Dale than the likes of that Ketner. We knew Dale wouldn't pull a firearm on us. He was too proud of his physique for that. Dale insisted on a fight. He preferred fists mostly, but he'd beat you with a stick of wood or a garden shovel if either one of them came to hand. We usually did the gentlemanly thing and went after him one at a time.

“Me first,” Desmond told me as we pulled up before Dale's house.

Dale had bought Desmond's old Geo Metro from the guy Desmond had sold it to, so it was probably seventh-hand by now. The thing was sitting up in Dale's yard sheathed in filth.

When Desmond saw it, he said mournfully, “Aw, baby.”

“You hated that car,” I reminded him.

“Didn't keep me from washing it.”

“Dale can't lift and do that, too.”

Dale's weight bench was up by the fuel oil tank with his dumbbells and his barbells scattered around it.

“Going for that prison yard look,” Desmond told me.

And that's about when Dale shouted at us through the door screen, “What?”