Beluga (19 page)

She sounded profoundly skeptical about my whole afternoon's worth of plans.

“It's kind of a mess. I'll give you that. But it's Larry's mess, and it's Skeeter's mess, and they've got to explain it to Kendell. You know how he is.”

She did. We all did. Kendell was like God. You always had to atone in the end.

“Uh-huh,” Shawnica told me.

I offered her my scrap of paper again. She reached out with her glittery fingers and snatched it from me.

“Just find out where they are, and don't tell them I'm coming for them. Probably better I should explain it all face-to-face.”

“What did I say?” Shawnica was talking past me to the gentleman with the miniature goat. He couldn't give up on selling the other customers on its virtues, so it was slipping again on the floor tiles and getting a rise out of the spaniel, causing the puppy to pee again on the floor.

When that fellow started making goat justification noises, Shawnica went over and held the door open for him. She pointed to a shady spot in the far corner of the lot. There wasn't a thing in this world he could do but go.

We followed him out. Shawnica called Pearl's cell number from the front clinic landing. She didn't get an answer—I imagined Skeeter examining the phone—so she called back and raised the pair of them.

“Where are you?” She listened, pointed toward the truck route. “Then where?” More listening and pointing. “All right.” She ended the call. “RadioShack. Then the Walmart. Over in Greenwood.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

I got a Shawnica “Uh-huh.”

 

SEVENTEEN

Greenwood was a good half hour east from where I was. Living in the Delta is all about driving to hell and back in a regular way, so I just switched on the radio to the Valley State gospel station, worked my way over to 82, and went.

At least the Walmart was on the near end of town. The RadioShack was, too. It was one of the few going businesses left in a sprawling shopping plaza where the department store had folded and the Shoe Show had given up. There'd been a pharmacy there for a bit as well, but the Walmart had done them in. So now there was the RadioShack, one of those edible florist shops, and a big junky fell-off-the-truck store that didn't even have a sign out front. There was also enough parking for a municipal airport or two.

I tried the RadioShack first. They'd been there, all right.

“A couple of guys in ugly suits,” I said to the fellow working the counter.

He nodded immediately. “Bought a universal remote.”

“How long ago?”

“Half an hour.”

It was a short hop over to the Walmart, where I found Pearl's Buick in the lot. At least I felt reasonably certain the Regal I found was, in fact, Pearl's. She had a talent for banging it at every corner, being a contact parker, but I'd lately noticed a few of her friends were fond of the same technique. It was a gray Buick Regal with shoes on the back floorboard and a big-buttoned phone in the cup holder. I went ahead and decided to feel encouraged.

My optimism evaporated shortly because I wandered through the whole damn store without running across Larry or Skeeter. I went straight back to electronics first, what with the universal remote and all, but there was just a large woman there in with the TVs complaining about her reception and an employee informing her every chance he got, “Yes, ma'am.”

I checked out the automotive section. The hardware section. I even went into the grocery end. Since it was the middle of a Wednesday, there weren't that many customers to speak of, and Larry and Skeeter in Gil's old sport coats would have fairly leapt out at me. They weren't anywhere. I even had a wander through menswear and ducked into the eyeglass shop. Then I went back out to the parking lot to see if that Regal had gotten gone.

It was sitting right where it had been. I took a harder look this time and spied two pair of espadrilles under the passenger seat. It was Pearl's, all right, so I had a look around the lot. Nothing special there, just the usual trucks and 4
×
4s and bug-encrusted sedans. I headed back into the store determined to be organized and systematic. I started over with the pharmacy against the front wall and figured I'd work through from there.

I almost didn't see her because I wasn't looking for her and because she was wearing what they used to call a shift. At least that's what they called them back when my sister wore them. So she looked a little like she'd stepped out of 1972. Her jumper had daisies in the pattern and bright green stalks of grass. She was wearing white tights and shiny black patent leather shoes. Her inky black hair looked freshly combed. She was walking away from me down an aisle, the one with the toasters and waffle irons and six different styles of coffeepot. I glanced at her and kept on going. I was two aisles past her when I stopped.

I couldn't have said at the time what caught my attention. I've thought about it since, and there was something in the way she walked that contradicted how she looked. She had the girlish clothes, but something in her stride … It wasn't swagger exactly. It was confidence. Assurance. A sense of security that actual adolescents never give off. They're always faking it at best. This was the genuine thing. So I backed up for another glance, but she was out of the aisle by then.

I hadn't noticed the tattoo or the stitches I'd caused her, but I was dead certain I'd just seen the ninja schoolgirl going away. I hustled down her aisle to look for where she might have turned and found myself in the notions section or the sewing department or something. There was some guy standing there by the thread rack. He turned and took me in. He was comparing two spools of sage green thread like he truly meant to buy one.

It was an odd enough sight to distract me a little. The guy smiled, and he had about twelve too many teeth. They were turned all which way. I felt sure I was looking at a couple of them on end.

He held up the spools so I could see them. He said to me, “Huh?”

I think that's what he said, anyway. The clatter kind of drowned him out. It turned out to be the sound a toaster oven makes when it hits me in the head.

Lucky for me I'd caught the flat part, and I told anybody who cared to hear it, “Ow. Shit.”

I felt sure she was behind it, but I turned to see it wasn't her. It was some Latin guy in a green sequin shirt and white jeans with scarlet piping. He had his hair slicked back with greasy pomade and a perilously thin mustache riding his upper lip. His belt buckle had both turquoise and rhinestones on it. He looked like the emcee at a West Hollywood rodeo.

He blew a bubble with his gum and giggled at me like a forties starlet. Then he swung that damn toaster oven and tried to hit me with it again. I picked up a bolt of the ugliest yellow fabric I ever hope to see and swung it like a fungo. I caught him just under the chin. His teeth clapped together and he groaned and staggered. I would have enjoyed it more if the guy with thread hadn't decided to join in. I was expecting him sooner. He came up behind me and hooked an arm around my neck.

He was wearing cheap sneakers on his massive feet, so there wasn't a lot of aiming required. I just stomped until I hit one, caught it right below the ankle. Everybody in that end of the Walmart heard his foot bones fracture and snap. He didn't scream, but he sure sucked lively air through all those teeth of his. I gave him an elbow in the throat, and that sent him hobbling back.

Just in time, because the other one was coming at me again by then. He was bleeding all over his sparkly shirt, and he'd pulled out a knife in the meantime. He whipped it around the way his sort will while licking blood off his lip and giggling at me. He seemed just the sort of fellow batty enough to cut me into stew beef.

I picked up a box with a sewing machine in it and tried to use it as a shield, but it was a flimsy thing and didn't have any heft to speak of.

I backed into one of the main aisles, hit a pallet of deep-fat fryers. I worked my way around them while that sparkly fellow lunged at me and the other one hobbled along behind him like some redneck Frankenstein. A customer with oxygen tubes in his nose perched on an electric cart rolled up between me and those two guys and made for decent interference. When they jostled him as they tried to push past, he supplied them both with a scrap of advice. Something to the effect they should watch where the fuck they were going. That he'd kick the shit out of them, even with his emphysema. He'd been in the goddamned air force. He'd make them sorry they were born.

I thought the sparkly one might slice him up there for a second. But he just licked more blood and giggled. The other one wheezed through his teeth while I backed into an automotive aisle. I didn't find much help there. Just assorted wiper blades, oil filters, and aftermarket floor mats. I rounded the end cap and headed up the next aisle as the boys behind me got wise. The one with the broken foot went back toward the fryer pallet to head me off on that end while the sparkly one kept after me to drive me into his partner's arms.

So I'd be obliged to make my stand in among a display of chrome wheels, trailer hitches, and a pair of heavy-duty garage jacks that mercifully came with heavy-duty handles. I grabbed one out of its socket. Four feet of tubular steel with a rubber grip on my end and just bare metal on the other. I decided to go for knife boy first, and he giggled his way right into trouble.

I gave him a lesson in not bringing a knife to a Walmart jack handle fight.

As he rounded the corner into my aisle, I tapped him flush on top of his head. That stopped him from walking and giggling both. He staggered a little and moaned. Since I wasn't looking to crush his skull—that would involve a lot of explaining, maybe some of it in open court—I just tapped him again. That's what I'll call it, anyway. It was enough to reduce him into a Larry pile, which freed me to pivot around and pay my full regard to his partner.

He had nothing but a broken foot, far too many teeth, and free-range animosity. He snatched up a lug wrench out of a hopper at the end of the aisle, but it was one of those stunted useless ones. Not good for changing a tire and certainly no-count where it came to a fight with a man with a steel jack handle. I tapped him as well, sort of like I was knighting him but with a hell of a lot less ceremony and fond regard.

He told me, “Uh,” and staggered back into the wide aisle with the pallets. There was nothing but fryers and coolers and throw rugs out there.

I gave him kind of a line drive swing. He blocked it with his arm and then appeared to wish he hadn't. He threw a fryer at me. I think I hit a double with it. We were attracting both associates and customers by then.

Some management type in a vest came stalking up to straighten us out. I didn't even have to talk to him. My buddy clubbed him with a cooler, and he hit the floor crawling and squirming and rethinking his career.

The customers, ladies mostly, were profoundly scandalized and gathered in clumps to tell each other all about the sorry state of people while I beat everything my guy picked up directly out of his hands. Knife boy revived enough to make another stagger at me. The ladies raised a mortified fuss when he came pitching into the main aisle, so I knew to whip around, and I smacked him one more time. He landed on his face. I couldn't make out any giggles. I had to doubt that he'd be getting up.

The other one with the busted foot made a bid to slip away, but he wasn't quite agile enough for that. I softened him up with a blow to the ribs, and when he groaned and turned my way, I dropped my jack handle and punched him. A fist to the jaw was enough to send him into a bin of rubber dodge balls. The brick red ones with the pebbly texture like they used when I was in school.

I knew the Greenwood cops would be showing up shortly, so I ducked down the towel aisle. I tried to look a little like I was shopping while I kept an eye out for the schoolgirl assassin and Larry and Skeeter as well. Everybody else was moving toward the upset in the fryer aisle.

So the deeper into the store I got, the more I had the Walmart to myself. I didn't see anybody, aside from the people at the checkout. Certainly no ninja assassin, and not Larry or Skeeter either. Then I drew up in the men's department so I could reconnoiter. I was standing there by a rack of twelve-dollar Puritan trousers, the pleated kind that pass for dress slacks in the Delta, when I thought I heard somebody. I picked up something that sounded like sniveling.

I'm sensitive to sniveling. I tolerate whining better than most, but sniveling tends to set me off, particularly from adults. Working in law enforcement back in Virginia and doing repo for K-Lo, I'd run across an awful lot of sniveling, had even been the cause of some. It's two steps past pleading, downslope from whining. When you're sniveling, you're both quitting and making a plea for sympathy. It's like coming out and saying, “I can't even be bothered to whine.”

I've kicked a sniveler or two. I'll admit that. Partly to buck them up and partly out of exasperation. Snivelers are always trying to explain themselves, and it mostly comes out snot and bubbly saliva. I just happen to react to sniveling the way some people react to snakes. It's an instinctive thing. I always want to reach for a shovel or a poleax.

The longer I stood there by the trousers, the surer I grew that I heard sniveling. I didn't see anybody, and there wasn't a conventional place for a person to be. Just racks of knit shirts and pants and sweatsuits and underwear and socks. I froze there and listened. It was sniveling, all right. With spit and snot and laced through with self-pity.

I crouched and looked under the display racks. There were feet in with the sweatsuits. Somebody was cowering back under the rack. I stepped over and stood there, listening some more.

“Larry?” I finally said.

He said something gurgly to me.

I reached down and grabbed an ankle and dragged him out.