Beluga (21 page)

It was more of a smack really, but there wasn't any foreplay at all. Jasper didn't ask me if I'd rather just confess or if I had details I might want to volunteer about what had gone on at the Walmart. He just charged through the door, flung it shut behind him, and came straight over and clapped me across the ear with his open beefy hand.

“Shit, Jasper!”

Jasper laughed. I guess he was laughing. He opened his mouth and made a noise, and there was a brand of delight in his eyes like he'd discovered a basket of doubloons.

“Donnie says you're an asshole.”

“Donnie doesn't really know me.”

Jasper popped me again with his open hand. It was like getting hit with a sack of gravel.

“Can't we talk about this?”

“Uh-uh.”

Jasper made a fist and swung. I managed to get my free arm up but punched myself from the blow.

Jasper laughed—I'm extrapolating again. “Ain't you some friend of Dale's?”

I kind of nodded. I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

Jasper told me, “Fucker,” and swung again. I had to figure not.

Now it's one thing to tell yourself you'll just take a beating, especially from a muscle-head dope like Jasper, and it's something else entirely to actually sit there and take it. Every scrap and fiber of me was desperate to punch him back, so I was dodging him and fighting me, but I soon knew what was coming.

“We'd better talk about this,” I informed Jasper.

He grunted and spat onto the floor. Jasper gave me a right to the kidney. Then he asked me, “Why?”

The trouble with people generally is they're not detail oriented. That's particularly true, I've discovered, in the Deep South. There they'd gone to the trouble to drill a hole in a perfectly good tabletop and had positioned it so you could lock a regular handcuff bracelet through it. But nobody had bothered to fix the table to the floor. It was a smallish table but stout. I knew I could pick it up. I'd tried already as soon as Officer Earl had locked me in. So while Jasper had his fists and his sculpted physique, I had the biggest nunchuck a fellow would probably ever need.

“Tell me what you want to know.” I was all about giving Jasper chances.

“Guess I want to know how this feels.” He swung at me again. This one would have surely broken my jaw if I hadn't managed to dodge it. Then the instincts just took over, and Jasper turned into table meat.

I picked that table up level and whipped it around. Jasper's shoulder broke off the near leg as the table edge met the side of his head and knocked him into the wall. I rammed the whole thing into his midsection. Jasper was still a little stunned. Then I wheeled around with it and hit him again, and it started breaking apart.

The top was pine, and the planks separated as the banding and the legs busted free. So I was loose enough soon to grab up a leg and raise it over Jasper, but there at the last second I decided just to punch him in the face instead. A couple of blows and Jasper went still and silent.

I fully expected Donnie or Kevin or Officer Earl to come rushing in. Me and Jasper, after all, had been making quite a lot of racket and then suddenly and comprehensively we weren't. So I just sat back down and waited, prepping my explanation. I tried out various versions of “Jasper slipped.”

A good ten minutes passed. I couldn't hear anything in the hallway or so much as a lone snivel from Larry's room next door. I was down to just my cuff by then, had gotten rid of all the splintered table, so I went to the door, opened it a crack, and peeked out into the hall. There was nobody anywhere I could see, and the air sure was inviting. It smelled a lot less like an active sewer out there.

Jasper was groaning a little by then, so I punched him again before I left and then slipped into the hallway and eased next door. I couldn't hear any voices from inside. I opened the door a crack and thought the room was empty at first. Larry was back in the far corner curled up on the floor. He was unconscious after a fashion but only because he was asleep.

“Hey,” I said and nudged him with my foot. Larry didn't look so good. Jasper had caught him a flush one to his left eye, and it was already puffy and swollen nearly shut.

I couldn't really blame Beluga for waking up sniveling. “I don't know nothing about it,” he said even before he looked to have quite figured out where he was.

“Get up,” I told him.

“Are we done?”

I put a finger to my lips and nodded.

I went back to the door and checked the hallway.

“Where's that big motherfucker?” Larry asked me. He'd yet to move from where I found him.

I dragged a finger across my neck. “Get up,” I said.

Larry also was cuffed at one wrist, so we made kind of a conspicuous pair. But Larry was wearing Gil's peach sport coat, which meant he could shove his handcuffs up the sleeve and so look like a civilian with awful taste in clothes. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, so there wasn't much I could do but look escaped and shady.

“This way,” I told him and held the door so Larry would follow me into the hall.

We moved down to the right and away from the general racket of the squad room. We found a stairwell at the corridor's end, went down a flight to a basement landing. There was a furnace, a bunch of file boxes, and a door that gave onto an alley. It had a lone throw bolt and was swollen in the jamb, but once Larry and I had bucked against it, the thing opened enough to let us out.

The station house backed onto a big square Methodist church downtown. Me and Larry slipped over to the cross street and turned west toward the Yazoo River. I figured we'd find a phone at one of the service stations on Grand Boulevard and just park somewhere discreet until Desmond could pick us up.

“They didn't know shit about nothing” was the first thing Larry told me. He might have looked like hell, but he sounded proud.

“Did you only talk to Jasper?”

“The big one?”

I nodded.

“Just him,” Larry told me.

I had to break it to him that Jasper didn't know shit about nothing for a living.

“Didn't ask me about no tires, or that boy Bugle with the broken leg. Didn't ask me about none of that. Kept going on about some shitheads in the Walmart. I didn't see no damn body but her.”

“She had friends,” I told him. “A couple of guys.”

“You get into it with them?”

“The only way they'd have it.”

“So what are they all over us for?”

“Me and you were handy and awake.”

“I'd be looking for her if I was them. Got those dead eyes like she's not even in there.”

We crossed the river on the steel bridge and cut over to the Sunoco. They still had a pay phone out on the wall between the drink box and the bathrooms. They had everything, anyway, but the handset that somebody had made off with.

“Car's at the Walmart,” Larry told me. “Skeeter had the keys.” He pointed in precisely the wrong direction. “Think it's over there somewhere.”

I had a spare Ranchero key in a magnetic bumper box, so if we could get to the Walmart parking lot, we'd be good to go.

“Give me your shirt,” I said

Larry made like he was going to argue about it until I gave him, I guess, a Jasper look, when he came straight out of his sport coat, peeled off his shirt, and handed it to me. I fashioned it into a sling that I could hide my handcuff in. Larry slipped Gil's seersucker jacket back on over his naked torso. Together we didn't look like a pair decent people would tolerate loose on the land.

“You go straight up Grand. Left up there at the light. Then cut back through behind the drugstore, and you'll see the car lot and the Walmart.” Larry gave me his skeptical look until I added, “Just walk.”

To his credit, he did. I cut over first and then went west. I saw a cruiser a block beyond me heading the other way, but not with any frantic purpose like they knew we were out and loose. It must have been midafternoon by then and too hot for people to be stirring, so it was just me strolling down a residential street in Greenwood like I was taking my broken arm for an airing. I wouldn't have paid any notice to me either. I was just another guy without a car.

I crossed Park at the grocery store, cut past the school behind it, went around the nursing home, where I could hear a fellow yelling from inside. He didn't like something. He didn't sound sure what it was, but he knew how he felt. I came onto the Walmart lot past the garage bays and over by the gas pumps. I didn't go straight to my Ranchero but stopped at a truck first just to see what was what and who was where.

There were still a couple of cop cars and an EMT truck in the fire lane. Two deputies were crowding the shade by a trash can, passing the time and smoking. They didn't seem to be paying much attention to anything out in the lot at all.

“Hey.”

Larry had slipped up on me, and I almost wheeled around and decked him.

“Want me to go see what's up?” he asked me and pointed at the cops.

“We know what's up,” I told him.

“Maybe they grabbed that girl or something.”

“Maybe they'll grab you.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Come on.” Larry followed me halfway across the lot to where I'd left my Ranchero. I felt around the muddy fender well until I found my magnetic key box, and we eased out of the Walmart as inconspicuously as a calypso coral truck thingy allows.

 

NINETEEN

“What happened to you?” K-Lo asked me and pointed at my arm. That qualified as a misty display of compassion for Kalil. Then he lit a Merit menthol and forgot to wait for me to say.

I pulled my arm out of my shirt sling and showed Desmond the dangling handcuff.

“Figured you were gone for longer than you needed.” It was hard to excite Desmond. “Who'd you get loose from?”

I liked the way he couldn't be bothered to ask me what I'd done. I preferred to believe he just assumed it was something that needed doing.

“Jasper,” I told him.

Dale heard me from inside. He came walking out the door with a broom in hand to tell us all, “That son of a bitch.” Then he turned around and went straight back inside.

“She was at the Walmart,” I told Desmond.

“Ninja girl?”

I nodded.

“Tore up Skeeter something awful,” Larry said.

“How bad?”

“Haven't seen him,” I told Desmond. “Talked to some cop named Donnie. You know him?”

Desmond didn't.

“He said Skeeter'd pull through, but he looked like hell. She beat him with a tennis racket.”

“In the Walmart?” Desmond asked me.

I nodded. “Had some buddies with her, too. Guy with a knife, snakeskin boots, little Kid Creole mustache. Came down from Memphis, according to Donnie.”

That didn't ring a bell with Desmond. He shook his head and glanced at K-Lo. Since this had nothing to do with his income, Kalil wasn't even listening to us.

“Other one was a big guy. Teeth all sideways.”

“Lazy eye?”

I squinted to picture him. “Could have been, now that you say it.”

“He's a Hoyt,” Desmond told me. “Whole gang of them out by Blue Hole. Big. Dumb. Usually got teeth enough for two people. Been working for Shambroughs a long time.”

“He was a sight,” I said.

“So the cops picked up you two?” Desmond looked from me to Larry and back.

I nodded. “She cleared out somehow. Nobody else was in any shape to talk.”

“And you busted out?”

“Kind of. Goddamn Jasper.”

Dale stepped out with his broom again and told us, “Son of a bitch.”

K-Lo didn't want us using his good saw. He'd just bought new blades, and he was convinced anyway that his bolt cutters would take those cuffs straight off.

“The chain maybe,” I told him, “but the bracelet?”

“Oh yeah.”

That stopped me a little. I'd heard K-Lo say “Oh yeah” about all sorts of things he'd made a hash of. Like when he told us he knew how to wire-weld hinges so that nothing around them would catch fire. It's a wonder he hadn't burned the store down and the rest of the shopping plaza with it. So I had reason to think that “Oh yeah” meant
I've got no fucking clue.

“Hey, Larry,” I said. “Come here. K-Lo's going to take your cuff off.”

When Larry saw that mine was still attached, he immediately got suspicious, but it was too late by then since me and Desmond had a grip on him between us.

“Shit, man,” he said as we turned him over so K-Lo could get a good angle. He worked the bottom jaw of his loppers in between the bracelet and Larry's wrist. Then he squeezed the handles together to limited effect. Limited effect on the steel, anyway. The effect on Larry was all but boundless.

He yelled like Kalil was cutting through bone. A glazier even came over to look. Not look like
Does this guy need my help?
but more like
Get a load of this shit.
Those boys were having a livelier day than they would have known in Grenada.

“Turn it a little,” Desmond suggested. “You're going off sideways. Straighten it up.”

“How would Jasper do this?” I finally asked Dale.

He threw down his broom and his dustpan and came stomping over to us.

“Give me that.” He grabbed the bolt cutter away from K-Lo, worked the blade underneath the bracelet again, and sliced right through the steel.

“Once more,” I said to Dale, showing him my handcuffs. “Jasper,” I added, and he had me free of that bracelet in a couple of seconds.

“Think they'll come here looking for you?” Desmond asked me.

“They've got my wallet and my phone. Might figure out where to go after a while.”

“Want to get Kendell to talk to them?”

“He won't like it. They won't either. If we can find the ninja girl and take her in, that'd smooth things out a lot. They'd probably forget all about me and Larry if we could give her to them.”