Beluga (25 page)

We didn't see much point in making our Hoyt ride in the wayback anymore. Pearl sat between him and Larry on the backseat and chattered indiscriminately about all varieties of piffle. That Hoyt threw in every now and again while Larry just sat and sulked.

“Can we run by and see Skeeter?” Larry finally asked us.

“Where did they take him?” I asked Desmond.

“Greenville likely.”

“Swing by and then down to Mayersville?” I suggested. “I'd kind of like to see him myself. Maybe that ninja schoolgirl said something to him while she was beating him half to death.”

“Think Shambrough was in there watching?” Desmond asked me.

That was enough to raise a grunty groan.

We parked across the road from the Greenville hospital because there were cruisers in that lot as well. Me and Desmond prepped Pearl. The plan was to send her in to ask after Skeeter, but beyond “Heard a guy once call him Hank or Howard,” Larry didn't know Skeeter's given name.

“I thought he was your friend,” I said to Larry.

“Parchman friend,” he told me.

Pearl had gotten it in her head that Skeeter had been injured in a tennis accident.

“Forget the racket,” I told her, but she couldn't seem to do it and stayed confused about what Skeeter had been up to in the Walmart.

“I'll go with her,” our Hoyt finally said.

“You'll just keep on going,” Desmond told him.

“You got my gun,” he said and tossed his head toward the disassembled 20-gauge in the wayback. “Used to be Daddy's. Ain't like I'm leaving it here.”

Short of holding his hound or his mother hostage, we didn't guess we could do much better.

“Go on,” I said. “See if you can get on his floor. Find out if they've got a cop on guard. I doubt it, but you never know around here.”

“All right,” our Hoyt said, and him and Pearl climbed out of the car together. They crossed the street and rounded the magnolia trees by the foyer.

“His name might have been Henry,” Larry told us. “I think he's from Dyersburg or somewhere up there.”

“Fine,” I said. “Henry from Dyersburg.”

“Or that might have been some other guy.”

Desmond was troubled. I could tell. Anybody with ears could tell. He had a particular way of breathing when something was nagging at him. I wasn't sure I wanted to know what exactly was up, so I ignored him for a while. Then he got a little louder like a dog will when it's ready to be fed.

We'd been sitting about ten minutes before I finally asked him, “What?”

“I don't know,” Desmond said, his usual preamble. “Seems a little off. That's all.”

“Off how exactly?”

“Wasn't Dyersburg. It was Blytheville,” Larry said.

Desmond just breathed some more.

“What seems off?” I asked him.

“That Hoyt was coming after you and him, right?” Desmond asked me and jabbed a thumb Larry's way.

I nodded.

“Skeeter probably, too.”

“Probably,” I told Desmond.

“And here we've sent him in there, just with Pearl, so he can check on Skeeter.”

“Ironic.”

“Is it?”

“We've got his shotgun.”

“You even think it was his daddy's?”

Larry reached over the seat back and picked up our Hoyt's shotgun stock. It was all dinged and scarred like it had been tossed around for years and even recently battered about half to pieces.

“All tore up,” Larry told us.

That was Desmond's method. I'd start out satisfied, and he'd steer me into doubts and sensible misgivings.

“Just wondering what he's up to,” Desmond said.

“Why has he got to be up to something?” I asked him.

“Because he's a Hoyt,” Desmond told me.

“I don't know from Hoyts.”

“That's right. Didn't you scuff one up at the Walmart?”

I nodded.

“Cousin of his. Isn't that what he said?”

I nodded again.

“But he's put that completely out of his mind. Now you and him are buddies.”

“We're going in, aren't we?” I finally said to Desmond.

Desmond unbuckled as he told me, “Yeah.”

Me and Desmond climbed out of the Escalade, and Larry shifted up under the wheel.

“Stay right here,” Desmond told him, “until you get run off.”

Larry had gotten too busy adjusting the seat and sizing up the radio dials to pay proper attention to Desmond, who reached in and gave him a pop. “Right here.”

Larry whined, “You always hitting.” He rubbed his head. “The both of you, always hitting. Like that does anybody any good.”

I followed Desmond into the main hospital reception area. There was a cop I'd never seen before back in a corridor behind the counter. He glanced at me and Desmond as we entered but then went straight back about his business. If the local PD was looking for me because of my dustup with Jasper in Greenwood, I didn't get the feeling they were looking for me hard. That was the virtue of the Delta. They all knew Jasper, too.

I didn't see Pearl at first, but I heard her soon enough. She was over in a corner of the waiting room, parked next to a woman on a couch. It turned out they were former garden club friends who'd fallen out of touch, and now here they'd run into each other at the hospital in Greenville out of the blue and all.

They had almost more catching up to do than Pearl could find the breath to manage.

“Pearl?” I said.

She introduced me to her friend, Minnie, and started in on an exhaustive explanation of who exactly Minnie was. I waited for a gap—it came right after news of Minnie's remarkable green thumb with Heritage Beauty roses—when I said, “Excuse me, but did you find out anything about Skeeter?”

Pearl nodded. “He's on eight.”

“And your … friend?” I asked as I looked around for some sign of that Hoyt.

“Goodloe went to make a phone call,” Pearl told me. She pointed in the direction of the combination gift shop and café.

“Goodloe,” I muttered to Desmond as we headed for the shop.

Goodloe wasn't in the gift shop. He wasn't in the adjacent café either. I found the pay phone back down the slip of a hall that led to the public toilets. No Goodloe. I checked the men's room. Just an orderly on break. I described our Hoyt to him.

“Like he climbed out of a ditch. Teeth all sideways.”

He shook his head. “Saw a guy with an eye patch out back smoking.”

I thanked him anyway and went over to join Desmond by the elevators. “Skeeter's on eight,” I told him.

A reception lady was saying to both of us, “Sir,” by then. We ignored her. Me and Desmond were good at that, like we'd just popped in from Albania and didn't speak the English much.

“Sir.”

The doors finally opened, and we entered the car with a candy striper pushing a cart freighted with flower arrangements. She was a bubbly teen volunteer who was having a blessed day. She told us all about it on her way up to seven.

“Cancer floor,” she informed us in a whisper. “They'll be needing prayers from you and you.” As she spoke she poked first me and then Desmond in the sternum. Then she winked and licked her pouty lips. She was probably all of fifteen.

“Bye now,” she said as she rolled her cart off the elevator. She gave us a backwards wave.

Then we were at eight. Desmond stuck his head out of the car and looked up and down the hallway.

“Just a nurse down there,” he told me.

He stepped into the corridor, and I followed him. We went off in the direction that would carry us away from the nurses' station, and we peeked into all the rooms as we passed. Most of the doors were standing half open, so there wasn't much of a challenge to it. We had to open a few. Desmond played the orderly, and he only walked in on one sponge bath. We finally found Skeeter at the far end of the hall.

He didn't have a roommate. The bed near the door was empty and crisply made. Skeeter was over by the window looking like a man who'd been little short of murdered outright with ground strokes. He was swollen and bandaged and wrapped and plastered. He had probes and drips and a tube down his throat. He was unconscious and breathing in a regular way, but he looked awful bad.

“She did that?” Desmond couldn't believe it. Skeeter looked like he'd been set upon by a quartet of longshoremen.

“With some kind of metal racket. Not even a pricey one.”

“What sort of man could tug his junk to that?”

“That Shambrough bloodline must be getting awfully thin.”

Then we heard a groan. Not from Skeeter but from behind the bathroom door. It was across the room, past the far bed. It was shut entirely. The toilet flushed, and when we didn't hear any wash-up water in the sink but instead saw that door straight swing open, I think we both knew who'd be coming out.

“Oh,” our Hoyt said when he saw us. “Hey.”

“Ribs go through you?” I asked him.

“I's just”—he held up a copy of the
Trading Post
—“kind of looking for a truck.”

“Who'd you call?” Desmond wanted to know.

That Hoyt went profoundly perplexed. He tilted his head and squinted like he couldn't imagine what Desmond meant.

“Who,” I said, “Goodloe?”

He shook his head a little like we had him confused with somebody else. Somebody who might have used a phone, while he most assuredly hadn't.

“Hit the fucker,” I suggested to Desmond, who was already making a fist.

He sailed on over that way he does, just gliding across the floor, and put himself between our Hoyt and the hallway.

“All right now,” that Hoyt told him mostly. “Might have dialed, but weren't nobody home.”

“Dialed who?” I asked him.

He started a shrug, and that's when Desmond slugged him. If you let them, guys like that Hoyt could tell you nothing for days on end.

“Hey!” he snapped at Desmond, who, in a display of contrition, drew directly back and slugged that Hoyt again.

“Shit!” he told us and covered up. “Called a guy I know.”

“And told him what?” I asked.

“Weren't nobody there.”

Desmond caught him in the kidneys this time. It served to crumple that Hoyt and drop him. He piled up on the floor the way Larry likes to.

Desmond looked down at him with conspicuous disappointment. He shook his head and told me, “People anymore.”

That's just when the hallway door eased open enough for a nurse to stick her head in. She looked over at me and Skeeter, took in Desmond and that Hoyt, and then appeared to decide we were more of a problem than she could manage.

She just said, “Well,” and drew back out again.

“Let's go before she finds a cop,” I told Desmond.

“And him?” He pointed at our piled-up Hoyt.

“I'll get him. You get Pearl.”

I reached down and grabbed that Hoyt by the collar of his shirt. As I lifted, the collar gave way and left me with a handful of poplin and our Hoyt heaped up once more on the floor.

So we grabbed him each under an arm and hoisted him off the floor. He made out to be invertebrate there for a second.

“Walk,” I told him and twisted a finger for emphatic effect.

He whimpered a little and told me, “All right.”

There was an actual cop at the nurses' desk by the time we got into the hallway.

“Go on,” Desmond told me and pointed at the stairwell door. “I've got this.” He struck out down the hallway, gliding along and largely blocking me and that Hoyt from view.

That Hoyt complained all the way to the ground floor. He had hip troubles he told me about and a hernia that needed doctoring but he didn't have the scratch. He just prattled on and on and made me stop at every landing so he could catch his breath.

“Why don't you shut the hell up and see how that works?” I finally told him down on three.

“You're hard to like,” that Hoyt informed me. Then he dredged and spat. It didn't seem to matter to him that he wasn't outdoors yet. I didn't hit him only because I didn't want him to pile up.

We came out on the backside of the building. We spilled out first into a hallway and then exited through a steel security door and set off an alarm. I was spending as much time looking back behind us as I was looking where we were going, just waiting for cops or troopers or something to come spilling out in pursuit.

So I wasn't paying quite the attention that I should have paid to just exactly where we were heading as we passed the assorted hospital Dumpsters and skirted around the ambulance bay. I was kind of following our Hoyt. He seemed to be heading for the road. He had pluck all of a sudden, and energy. He was scooting along pretty good. I was just happy I wasn't having to drag him.

We were out on the far edge of some kind of emergency room parking lot when I finally woke up to the fact our Hoyt was running me into trouble. I've got to hand it to him. He made it look random, and then I finally saw the car. It was a Biscayne with the finish gone. Dull blue with no shine at all to it, and a vinyl top that had rotted to tatters and was shedding its yellow stuffing.

It had more people in it than even a Biscayne ought to hold. Packed three across the front and four across the back. A couple of them looked a little to me like women. One of them stuck her head out a back side window.

She waved in that Hoyt's direction and told him, “Hey!”

Her hair was matted. She had no chin to speak of. The teeth I saw were all turned sideways.

It was a little like running headlong into a hornets' nest but for the fact that those Hoyts were far too chunky to come swarming out of that sedan. It turned out they didn't need to. They'd deployed a skirmisher.

I heard him behind me. He must have been hiding himself down between cars. He was adenoidal and a little wheezy, maybe sixteen years old. He delivered the first blow as I turned. He had a camp shovel like soldiers use. It must have been authentic surplus judging from how it hurt like hell. I nearly got an arm raised before he coiled and struck again.