Beluga (14 page)

He knew “What” already. He'd been waiting for us.

“I'm all tingly,” I told Desmond once Dale had shoved the door open and stepped out onto the stoop.

He was shirtless, of course. Being a sculpted specimen was about all Dale had anymore. He'd lost his wife and his Grenada girlfriend, his state police badge and his cruiser. Somebody had even adopted his dog. Now it was just Dale and his free weights and his leased-out Panasonic. That made things awfully simple. We'd come to get it, and he wasn't giving it back.

“Why do you want to do this?” Desmond asked him.

We were obliged to go through the motions.

“Think of all the shit I've done for Kalil,” Dale said and flexed his biceps. He was always keen for us to see how musclebound he was.

He had done a lot for Kalil. He'd broken his plate-glass store window twice. Once with a punch just to prove that he could and once with the grille of his state police cruiser. He'd been raging drunk both times. Dale had also been the cause of various spectacles whenever he would fight with Patty. She'd be there at the store just doing her work, and Dale would show up to berate her. We'd have to haul him out of there, with Kendell if we were feeling charitable. But sometimes we'd just gang up on him and take him to pieces by ourselves.

Dale's trouble was that he couldn't really fight. He was thick and slow and fancied himself a home-schooled mixed martial artist. He had the six-pack for it and the quads and the lats, but he was the sort of guy who almost thought out loud. When I tangled with Dale, I knew what he was doing before he did. I liked to work my way around him—ducking and dodging—and just flat tear him up.

“You're three months behind,” Desmond told him. “You know how that's got to go.”

“All right, then,” Dale said and pounded his fists together. Then he told us what he always did. “Let's get it on.”

The problem was we hadn't really tangled with Dale since his stint in the lockup, where, as it turned out, he'd picked up a couple of moves. He used one on Desmond. It was a showy, spinning kick we'd neither of us seen before. Ordinarily, Dale would just run at you low and hope to knock you over. Then he'd perch on you and show you his muscles, tell you what a girl you were, and flail at you with those weak-ass punches musclemen are prone to. A hard left from Dale was a lot like getting hit with a sofa bolster.

A firm grip on his testicles was usually all it took to get Dale up and shrieking, and then you could pummel him at will. Dale didn't have any stamina. He was just a show pony.

So Desmond walked up expecting the usual, and Dale wheeled around and kicked Desmond in the head. It wasn't a vicious kick or even a little debilitating, because it had been delivered by musclebound Dale.

It was surprising nonetheless, and Desmond got himself in trouble when he turned around to say to me, “You see that?”

Dale kicked him again. This one was a straight blow to the back of Desmond's knee, and Desmond folded up like a church chair and tumbled over face-first onto the ground.

“Hell,” he said, “I think I tore something.”

That's when Dale piled on top of him and started smacking Desmond on either side of his head. Desmond had too much girth and too little dexterity to reach behind himself to much effect, so he just kept getting punched and wearying of it. Dale gloated that way Dale does, and I just had to stand there and watch it all. Me and Desmond had policies and rules. We didn't like to gang up on people, most particularly if those people were Dale because he was lumbering and slow.

But I made a decision standing there watching Dale drumming on the back of Desmond's head. If he'd picked up the kind of moves in jail that made him more of a danger, then Dale no longer qualified for gentlemanly treatment.

“I'm coming,” I told him. “You'd better get up.”

Dale tattooed Desmond again. Desmond wasn't bloodied or anything. He was simply irritated.

“Just washed this shirt,” Desmond told me. “My damn knee hurts like hell.”

Naturally Dale hadn't gotten entirely up by the time I'd reached him. I waited for him to stand, and he took his sweet time. He had stuff to explain to me. He wanted to talk about lines I'd crossed and offenses I'd committed. He also wanted to tell me how humbled I was about to be. Then he tried on me the same roundhouse kick he'd lately landed on Desmond. It only missed me by a foot and a half and left Dale's back to me.

I would have hated to see Dale tangle with the ninja schoolgirl assassin. She wouldn't have needed her Taser. Dale would have worn himself out with his kicks, and then she could have just savaged him with all that vicious shit she got up to. He was lucky, I told myself, that it was me instead of her.

Then I hit him, and he made that altogether satisfying noise he makes. The sort of noise you don't want to make in a fight because it tells your opponent, “Ouch.”

He tried another kick. I saw that one coming, too, now that I knew Dale had picked up a fresh technique in jail. I hit him again, a straight left. Dale smiled and spit a bloody tooth my way.

“I think he's drunk,” I told Desmond.

Desmond had clambered up and was testing his knee by then. Dale just laughed and tried to kick me some more, but he was halfway across the yard and so couldn't begin to reach me.

“You all right?” I asked Desmond.

“Feels kind of funny.” He worked his knee and grimaced. “Let's get this damn TV and just go on.”

“Try it,” Dale told us.

He'd gone all John L. Sullivan on me. He had his fists up in front of him in proper nineteenth-century form. I hit his left hand with my right one, and Dale managed to break his own nose. Then I hit him low and hit him high and doubled up everywhere he was open. His arms were down by then, so I was throttling him all over.

Dale gave me that look I'd seen before, the one that says, “I'm falling down now.”

He dropped like he always did, tipped forward and landed on his face. You'd think he would have figured out how to use those massive arms to break his fall, but experience has never been much of a teacher with Dale.

I poked him with my foot until he turned his head and groaned and I could be certain that Dale was breathing on his own. Desmond was already gimping up into the house by then while Dale laid there on the hardpan and talked trash to me. Muttered it, anyway, and puffed up little wisps of dust. He had devastating plans for me, intended to bust me all to pieces.

I tried Kendell's approach. I pointed at him and said to Dale, “Shut up.”

Me and Desmond ripped out all of Dale's connections and hauled his TV into the yard.

“You know where to buy it back,” Desmond told him.

Dale made another dusty threat.

“Should we drag him out of the sun?” I asked Desmond.

He shook his head. “He'll be in the shade in an hour.”

“You're a hard man.”

“Fucker kicked me. Better not be nothing tore.”

Desmond made me go by critical care before we returned to Kalil's. Paco was still in the waiting room. We thought he was still in the waiting room, anyway, but it turned out he was back in the waiting room. He'd gone out for a burrito, thinking he could keep his place in line without actually being there. Paco had a gaping wound over his right eyebrow, probably an eight- or ten-stitcher that was seepy and crusty and had kind of welded shut.

“What did he hit you with?” I asked him.

Paco shrugged and shook his head. He couldn't really say. “I was barely out of the car, hadn't told him nothing except hey.”

I pointed at Desmond. “He got kicked.”

Desmond nodded glumly as the door to the back hallway swung open. There stood Kendell with four bright green butterfly sutures on his cheek. His uniform shirt was spattered with blood. He didn't appear too happy to see us.

I let Desmond do the honors.

“Talk to Shawnica?”

Kendell snorted one time, touched his sutured cheek, and told us, “Yep.”

 

THIRTEEN

Naturally, the only place Shawnica would consider retreating to for her safety was the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood, a swanky Delta spa.

Kendell relayed the message to us at a back table of the Pecan House, where we'd stopped in for coffee and nut clusters once we'd finished with critical care. Desmond had a sprain. That was the considered opinion, anyway, of the doctor who manipulated his knee. Desmond also had high blood pressure and about two hundred extra pounds, which he heard about from the critical care doctor as well.

The guy was giving Desmond dietary advice—he seemed down on Coney Islands—when Desmond put his trousers on and left the examination room.

Paco was jonesing for a burrito, but we convinced him to stay behind and get sewn up. We told him we'd go out and get him one, but that was just to hold him there.

So it was me and Kendell and Desmond once more talking the whole business over.

“Knife?” I asked him.

Kendell touched a suture. He shook his head. “Stick-on nail.”

“Told you.”

Kendell sipped his coffee. “Awful short fuse,” he said.

“What about Larry and Skeeter?” Desmond asked Kendell.

“What about them?”

“Just leave them there for Shambrough? We're sure to find them beat to shit and dead someplace soon enough.”

“They can't take care of themselves?” Kendell asked. It was a sensible question. They'd both been in and out of prison. You'd think they'd have learned how to get out of sight when being nowhere was best.

“They're both kind of clueless,” I told Kendell. “Shambrough and that girl of his will chew them up.”

“So you'll hide them away, too.”

“Us?” I asked him.

“I've got no budget for it. If you want me to take care of Larry and his buddy, they're going right in a cell.”

“No more in-laws,” I told Desmond. “Ever.”

Desmond shifted and winced a little in a play for sympathy.

“Don't want to hear about your knee,” I told him. “This is coming out of yours.”

“His what?” Kendell asked me. “Share? I know you took all that crazy meth head's money. Go on. Fess up. What can I do about it now?”

I wasn't quite sure the answer was nothing.

“We're just frugal,” I told Kendell.

The Alluvian Hotel, as luck would have it, was packed full of Delta blues tourists and wouldn't have a vacancy for a couple of nights. Me and Desmond had driven over to have a look at the place, see if it was the sort of establishment that could tolerate Shawnica and put up with Larry and his buddy Skeeter. Or rather, I'd driven over and Desmond had complained about his knee all along the way.

When we hit the outskirts of Greenwood, he insisted I stop at the CVS and get him some Tylenol and a cane.

“Can't hope to climb out of here,” Desmond said. He'd found a way to be both pitiful and knock my car.

So I went in and bought his aspirin. They had a box of canes, the adjustable aluminum kind. One of them was pink with daisies on it. The thing had feet at the bottom so it would go on standing up even if you toppled over. That was the one I bought Desmond.

I told him when I came out, “Only one they had.”

The young lady at the desk at the Alluvian Hotel was wearing a tailored ebony jacket and didn't talk at all like a girl from Yazoo City, which is where it turned out she was from. The hotel trained their people to fit in with the decor, all of it expensive and tasteful and (I guess) ready to be undone by a desk clerk who'd greet guests with a “How y'all?”

Her name tag said she was Tabatha, but when I called her that, she didn't seem to know who I meant. I asked about a suite that would accommodate three people.

“Adults?” she asked us.

Desmond said, “More or less.”

“What are your dates?”

“A full week?” I asked Desmond. “Starting tonight maybe?”

That seemed sensible to him, and he nodded.

“We're full up until day after tomorrow,” Tabatha told us. “Blues tour.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Make it Thursday to Thursday.”

She needed a deposit for the booking. Desmond handed me his pretty pink cane while he dug through his wallet. I could tell by the way she was looking at us what was going through her head. She was thinking we must be one of those couples that proved that love came in all colors and sizes.

Desmond offered her cash. His mother had ruined his credit standing a few years back. She was smoking rocks at the time for pain she had and ordering all manner of crap off the television with Desmond's Visa.

“We'll need a card on file,” she told us, “for incidentals and such.” Like repainting the place, I had to figure, once Beluga had put his feet on all the walls.

I gave her mine.

“You're all set,” she said just as me and Desmond both heard a familiar voice from an adjacent room.

I pointed toward the doorway. “What's in there?”

“Our lounge,” Tabatha from Yazoo City told us.

It was more of a bar, really, with its own variety of bar rat. Big honking white guys in button-down shirts and a few of their shrill wives. The wood was dark. The lights were low. There was mercifully no music, and over at a table against the window was the source of the laugh we'd heard. Kalil was having his Armagnac with some buddies, a quartet of gentlemen who, along with Kalil, looked like a boozed up U.N. delegation. One of them was Delta Chinese. One of them was Delta Hispanic. A Delta Hassidim, and by the paleness of him, a Delta Canadian I had to guess.

They were having a jolly time of it. When Kalil saw us, he waved us over.

“Sit,” he said.

There was no room for us, and we didn't want to join them anyway. Everybody scooted and chattered at us, but we just stayed where we were.

“Got Dale's TV,” I told him. “Still out in the truck.”