Beluga (26 page)

He caught me right on the side of the head, and I collapsed just like Beluga. I kind of remember somebody airing the Hoyt variety of “Uh-huh.”

 

TWENTY-THREE

I don't guess you've really lived until you've come to in the trunk of a car. Worse still, the trunk of a Biscayne owned and operated by Delta Hoyts. They seemed to store their excess wardrobe in it. Coveralls, I had to guess, from the zippers and the stink. There were quarts of motor oil as well because that Biscayne was a burner. I was getting the full treatment from the fumes seeping into the trunk.

Or rather,
we
were getting the full treatment. I found my companion with my foot, and I would have shot straight out onto the road but for the trunk lid keeping me in.

“Who's that!?”

Nothing. Not even a groan.

I probed with my foot. My feet really, since they were taped together. My wrists were taped behind me, but they hadn't bothered with my mouth. Their sedan was raising such a racket, any noise I might have raised could hardly have competed with it. If they had a muffler on the thing, it was bound to be mostly holes.

I shoved whoever was in there with me with my feet again.

“Hey,” I said. Still nothing.

I decided it was a body. Not Desmond. I knew that for certain. He probably wouldn't fit in a Biscayne trunk, and I couldn't imagine Hoyts could muster the gumption to lift him.

I finally heard a groan that wasn't one of mine.

“Hey,” I said.

More groaning. I shoved the guy some more.

“Quit it!” was what I finally heard.

“Larry?”

He told me, “Beluga.”

“Great.”

“What the hell's all this?” he asked me.

“Hoyts have got us,” I told him. “They pull you out of the car?”

“Don't know,” Larry said. “I was just listening to tunes. Some fucker hit me with something.”

“A shovel,” I said.

“I think I'm bleeding,” Larry informed me. “This hasn't been much of a day.”

On the contrary, it had been quite a day. It had started with a homicide and seemed about to end with two, and there'd been a solid quartet of assaults right there in the middle. It had been a signal day, all right, but I kind of knew what Larry meant.

“Smells like bears been living in here or something,” Larry said. “Where are we going?”

“They didn't tell me.”

“Shambrough'll be there. You can figure on that.”

“Girl of his probably, too.”

“Going to kill us, aren't they?”

“I would.”

“Dying's bad enough without him jerking off.”

I thought of our Hoyt's dumbshow, of his cracked tongue hanging out.

“I can't breathe,” Larry told me.

That wasn't quite right, but I knew what he meant. There was plenty of air. The trouble was that all of it was tainted. The clothes stink was just unpleasant. The true problem we had was with the exhaust.

“We keep going,” I told Larry, “that girl won't have to kill us.”

“That'd be all right,” Larry allowed. He was already slurring his words.

I kicked him. “Larry.”

He mumbled a little.

“Larry. Stay awake.”

I kicked him some more but just got the occasional grunt from Larry. Then I didn't get anything no matter how hard I hit him. I was fighting off drowsiness myself. I tried yelling at those Hoyts, but they probably couldn't hear me over the clatter. I don't imagine they would have done much but yelled back and hooted and hollered. Lucas Shambrough had deployed them after Larry, I had to figure, and they were bringing him in along with me for a bonus. There must have been a certain amount of triumph in that for those Hoyts.

I thought I heard them laughing. What with the racket, I couldn't be sure. All I know is, I started dropping off and starting back awake. Then I was having a dream that I was sleeping in a baby cradle. It was big enough for me and my dappled pony, Frank. I was explaining to Frank how a barcode scanner worked but got distracted once I'd discovered that Frank was eating a carrot in bed. We had a rule against that. A firm rule, I told him. Frank kept chewing his carrot. Then he gave me a horsey look I didn't like. He kicked me twice.

When I woke up, I was out of the trunk and on the ground behind the car. I was lying on my back and looking up at Hoyts gathered all around me.

“Wake the fuck up,” one of them told me. He looked a little like our Hoyt. A little like Frank my spotted pony as well.

He kicked me in the ribs and laughed.

I saw his teeth and thought,
Oh. Right
.

Some more of them kicked me but not hard enough to keep me from dozing off. I was aware of the clatter as they hauled Larry out of the trunk and tossed him down beside me.

Larry said, “Ow!”

I laughed and told him, “Yeah. Ow.”

Then I slept some more, and I only woke up because my arms were hurting. I thought at first I was still lying down somewhere, but it turned out I was standing up. The light was low and gloomy. The air was dank. The place smelled like last year's laundry hamper. My wrists were cuffed at about shoulder height, and I was sagging so that my weight was about to tear my arms clean off.

That's quite enough to wake a guy up, even from CO
2
poisoning and the well-aimed boots of a pack of Hoyts.

I stood full upright as best I could, though I was a little shaky still. As my eyes focused and adjusted, I could see I was in a basement. The view just confirmed everything my nose had already told me. It was a damp, seepy basement. A cellar really. Dug out for a furnace and a bunch of dusty bottles on shelves. Neglected preserves, they looked like to me. Miserly light came in from grimy transom windows. I counted four of them.

Larry spit up a little, and that harnessed my attention. He was three or four feet down the wall from me and shackled just like I was. It was hard at that point to imagine that this had all started because of some tires.

“Hey,” I said.

Larry grunted. He vomited in earnest. All over his shirt. All over his shoes. All over the cement floor. It was hard to feel anything but pity for him, but I managed nonetheless.

“This is your mess,” I told him,
“Beluga.”
I said it with as much scathing contempt as I could muster, given my circumstances.

Larry looked around. Squinted and blinked. My eyes were adjusted to the gloom by then. I could see off in a corner a moth-eaten hunk of taxidermy. A beaver or a groundhog. I couldn't tell which, but I couldn't miss the fact that it was albino.

“Where are we?” Larry asked.

“Shambrough's,” I told him. “Lair of the white worm.”

“The what?” Larry was frantic now.

“We're fucked,” I said, by way of clarification.

We were both locked up in two pairs of regular handcuffs with one bracelet attached to our wrists and the other U-bolted into the wall. It was an ancient brick wall, and the bolts had been sunk deep into the mortar joint. My left bolt wouldn't move a bit, but the right one had the merest hint of play.

“Try to move your arms,” I told Larry.

“Can't,” he said. “Locked up.”

“Try,” I told him. “See if you can move those bolts.”

He made a halfhearted effort and then went pouty. “That damn Bugle,” he said. “He didn't have no business under that truck and getting himself run over.”

“I'm going to say this once,” I told him. Then we both heard creaking from upstairs. All we could see overhead was floor joists and what looked like cypress plank sheathing. The house was stout and well built. We were probably hearing somebody walking, but there was so much wood between us and them, we couldn't be sure of that.

Silence followed, so I told Larry, “None of this is that boy's fault. You didn't start on time because
you
were late.”

“I had … complications,” Larry said.

“Right. We wouldn't be down here if you could do any damn thing like it ought to be done.”

“Skeeter mostly,” Larry told me.

Out of impulse I tried to hit him, but my handcuffs held me back. Larry grinned when he saw what I was up to.

“He was supposed to pay that boy off.”

“With money you didn't give him.”

“Well now, let's be clear. You and Desmond didn't get it to me in any hurry.”

Now it was our fault. That was enough to prompt me to discover I could kick him. My legs were free to go where they wanted, so I caught Larry in the thigh.

“Hey!” he shouted and craned to get away as best he could since he wasn't able, like usual, to drop to the floor in a heap.

“Your doing,” I told him. “If that girl doesn't take you out, I will.”

“Now, boys.”

I don't know where he came from. He might have been lurking in a corner all along. Over behind the stairs that led up into the house proper or just beyond the boiler, back behind his albino beaver. He might have come down while we were fighting. All I know is he was suddenly there.

Lucas Shambrough had on proper clothes. As it turned out, he was a chino and a sockless loafer guy, so I wouldn't have liked him even if I hadn't known reason to detest him already. He was wearing a button-down oxford shirt, freshly laundered and creased. He was shaved and coiffed. Presentable. He stood just out of kicking range.

“So,” he said. He looked us over, Larry in particular. “Mr. Beluga LaMonte. So nice to finally see you.”

Larry looked like he was hoping to find a way to pass through the solid brick wall behind him. Anything to get away from Lucas Shambrough, who had
creepy
about as down as a human could ever hope to get it.

“You, sir,” Shambrough informed Larry, “have made a terrible mistake.”

Larry pulled one of his victimized faces in a bid to let Lucas Shambrough know that mistakes were something that happened to him, not the sorts of things he got up to. Shambrough didn't appear to take his meaning or even try.

“Your friend told us what you did. Chapter. Verse. Whole damn thing.”

“What friend?” I asked him.

Shambrough didn't even glance my way. “I'm not talking to you.”

Since Larry couldn't find a way to seep into the wall, he asked Shambrough, “What friend?” as well.

“And my friend Bugle is going to have a limp. His doctor all but promised that.”

When Larry started in on how that boy had no business under the trailer, Shambrough took a quick step his way and hit him once. It wasn't a punch. It was an open-handed slap. The sort of blow you might get if you'd offended a dowager at the opera. That didn't keep Larry from whimpering and informing Lucas Shambrough that he was a little goddamned tired of getting hit.

Naturally enough, that got him hit again. Another slap. It was either Shambrough's preference or he didn't know how to make a decent fist.

Larry looked around at the floor like he had designs to pile up on it, but given his restraints, he could only manage an ungainly squat.

“She's dressing for you,” Shambrough told us. He looked my way. “Especially you.”

I rattled my handcuffs. “Not very sporting.”

“No,” Lucas Shambrough allowed with a smile. “It's not.”

Then he stepped backward into the gloom and climbed the steps up to the landing. We got a burst of light from upstairs as he opened the basement door. Then gloom again as he shut it.

“This ain't right,” I heard Larry say.

It qualified as borderline sniveling, which made for helpful aggravation as I worked to further loosen my right-hand bolt, going at it like you'd go at a tooth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Larry just whined and pouted, and he was so accomplished at that sort of thing that I found I could draw off of Larry for fuel.

I even provoked him a little when I feared I might flag. “Think Skeeter spilled it?” I asked him.

Larry exhaled like a man who'd been asked to balance the federal budget. “Probably,” he said. “He's like that. And it was all his idea.”

That gave me a spark, and I went at that bolt until it was truly wiggling. An eighth of an inch to either side, enough to make me optimistic.

“That damn Skeeter,” I said.

Larry was all over that in a second. He cataloged for me all the times that Skeeter had disappointed him by being unreliable and shiftless. “I don't know,” Larry said. “Can't figure people sometimes.”

He was like spinach for Popeye. The more pitiful Larry got, the harder I went at that bolt. Soon it was a quarter inch to either side, and I could hear the mortar going sandy.

“That guy in Belzoni,” I said to Larry. “Probably told them all kinds of shit, too.”

“Yeah.” Larry exhaled. “Probably. I should have figured he might all along.”

A half inch either side, and I could feel the cement going to rubble. I pulled at that bolt. It came a little. I worked it and jerked again. The threads were barely holding, and then the place lit up as the door upstairs swung open. I stopped what I was up to, pressed my back against the bricks, and made to look quite thoroughly restrained.

For his part, Larry swallowed hard and said just generally, “Shit.”

She'd gotten dressed, all right. A tartan plaid wool skirt with knee socks and a crisp white blouse with a middy collar. A mixed metaphor as fashion goes, like Robert the Bruce at sea.

It sounded like her shoes—the shiny patent leather schoolgirl sort—had taps on them by the way she clicked on the stairs and then clicked on the concrete as well. She had clamps in her hair and was wearing horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them. She'd left in the eyebrow studs and the nose jewel. She couldn't do much about the tattoo.

She was an unsettling sight. I'll give her that, and you didn't have to be shackled in a cellar to recognize it, though the shackling and the cellar together probably didn't hurt.