Beluga (8 page)

I held up the sketch so Izzy could see it. “She did this?”

Izzy nodded. Izzy told me, “Eeahh.”

“Who'd she have with her?”

Izzy shook his head.

“Just her,” Kendell told us. “She chatted Izzy up at the grocery store. Asked him for a ride. Checkout girl remembered her, said that was pretty close.”

“Still don't see what this got to do with Larry,” Desmond said.

Kendell was ready now. “That's all she wanted from Izzy. Wanted to know where Larry was.”

“Izzy wouldn't tell her?” I asked Kendell, eyeing Izzy's battered body up and down. “Or Izzy didn't know?”

“Told her what he could. Must have sent her over where Shawnica used to live.”

“Place in Sunflower?” Desmond asked.

Kendell nodded. Shawnica had moved out six months back. Fight with the landlord. Fight with the neighbors. She was a bad one for quarrels and hard feelings.

“What happened over there?” I asked Kendell.

He consulted his pad. “Mrs. Ruth Marie Messick. She's in the ICU in Ruleville.”

“Same shit?”

“Same shit,” he told me.

Me and Desmond eyed each other. Kendell saw us do it. He just stood by and waited. Kendell was awfully gifted at that sort of thing.

“Think Ruth Marie Messick knows where Shawnica went?” I asked Desmond.

“Doubt it.”

“Fifty-three-year-old white woman,” Kendell said. “Not even conscious yet.”

“What the hell's that girl want with Larry?” Desmond asked like he couldn't imagine the answer.

“That's kind of what I was hoping to know,” Kendell told us both.

He stood there waiting, giving us time to break. I don't know why we didn't.

“This girl have a car?” I asked Kendell.

“Does now. Ruth Messick's Dodge.”

“We'd better find Larry,” Desmond said. “No telling what he's up to.”

Desmond sold it a little too hard. Kendell told us both, “Yeah, right.”

The nurse in the sky blue sweater came back and jabbed her thumb toward the hallway.

Back in the lot, Kendell said to us both, “I don't care much about Larry. He gets what he gets. It's plain to me he's mightily pissed somebody off. But this kicking the shit out of folks between here and him, that's going to stop one way or another.”

What could we do but nod and mumble?

“Bring him in,” Kendell told us. “You hear me?”

We did. We nodded.

Me and Desmond were leaning against the Ranchero tailgate as Kendell drove away.

“Don't say it,” Desmond told me.

“We need a shiftless ex-con in-law policy. Don't you think?”

Desmond grunted.

“We probably ought to start with Shawnica.”

“And tell her what?” Desmond asked me.

“Ninja schoolgirl assassin on the loose. It's something she ought to know.”

“I'd almost like to see those two go at it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Almost.”

*   *   *

The clinic where Shawnica worked was just south of Indianola. If I'd had a dog, I wouldn't have taken him into the place on a bet. A fellow who thought Shawnica was a good choice for reception wasn't likely to know the first thing about veterinary medicine.

I parked in the shade and stayed in the car, sent Desmond in alone. He was gone for a good ten minutes before they both came out together. Shawnica was wearing a lab coat covered in, I guess, cat hair, and she was in something far more incendiary than her usual rage, which made it an apocalyptic, end-times sort of thing.

“What's this
SHIT
?” she was yelling at me as she stalked toward my car.

I climbed out. There wasn't a thing to do but stand before her and take it. You had to hand it to Shawnica. She knew how to pitch a fit.

She waved her arms and sniped at me in that sassy voice of hers. She told me back everything Desmond had just finished telling her in the clinic. Somehow the whole bloody business was our fault.

“We've got to sit Larry down,” I told her, “and figure out exactly who he pissed off.”

“Who is this bitch?” Shawnica asked me. “She don't want to be finding me.”

“Got a gun?” I asked.

Shawnica told me, “Ha!” She pulled a knife out of her pocket. Springloaded. A mother-of-pearl handle. It opened with a wicked metallic click. She whipped it around so close to my chin I could feel the air of the blade.

“All right” seemed appropriate, so that's what I said. “How about Larry?”

“He's got one of those little guns,” she told me.

“A derringer?'

Shawnica nodded. He didn't even have that anymore.

“Did they go to Belzoni this morning?”

“Hell,” she told me, “I don't know.”

“You don't want to stay somewhere else until we figure out what's what?”

Shawnica gave me one of her primal sneers, folded her knife shut, and went back inside.

Me and Desmond just stood there and watched her go.

“Fiery,” Desmond told me like it was something he admired.

“Your church girlfriend got any of that?”

Desmond thought for a moment. “No.”

 

SEVEN

We rode all the way to Belzoni, found the trailer still untarped. There were tires gone from it. That was obvious to us, so we figured Larry and Skeeter were down Delta making sales calls.

“That ought to be enough,” I suggested to Desmond, “to keep them out of harm's way for now.”

“Who do you figure she is, a girl like that?”

We'd been chewing on the matter in the car. Desmond couldn't wrap his mind around that brand of sadistic violence from a woman. He was old-fashioned that way, I guess, and believed women were better than men. More honorable and decent, less likely to go off. Maybe even squeamish and retiring.

“Might have been some guy in a wig,” he suggested.

“And a skirt and knee socks?”

“Why the hell not. It'd be throwing us off. Here we are all looking for a girl.”

We went riding around that catfish farm in search of Larry and Skeeter's buddy, but there wasn't any sign of him either, so we headed back toward home.

“I'm just wondering who sent her,” I said to Desmond once we were back on 49. “Or
him
.”

“It's not like we can say what kind of shit Beluga's been up to,” Desmond allowed. “Maybe he pissed somebody off before we ever heard of those tires.”

“Maybe. Why don't you try him again?”

Desmond had been dialing Larry all along and just getting the “mobile caller is unavailable” message.

“Ringing,” he told me. “Larry?”

I could hear the squeak of a voice on the phone.

“Where are you?”

More squeaky chatter.

“You're breaking up.”

No squeak.

“Larry?” Desmond shook his head.

“Where is he?”

“In a fucking Chevy,” Desmond told me. “That's all he got out before I lost him.”

I dropped Desmond back at Kalil's place so he could pick up his car. It was about quitting time by then, so Kalil was into the Armagnac.

It never seemed to relax him much. His anger just got more scattershot and appreciably less coherent. He'd go from vilifying deadbeats to pitching a fit about crows in his yard. Then he'd complain about the dodgy components in Korean televisions. It was all bilious and hotheaded but didn't really amount to much.

This evening he came out into the lot to yammer at us. He was mad already before Desmond said we'd get to his invoices tomorrow. Desmond told him we'd been tied up with a buddy at the hospital and tried to leave it at that, but Kalil got off on the cost of insurance for him and his employees and something he'd read about a woman who'd gone in for a nose job and ended up getting a kidney taken out.

“Well, all right,” I told him and tried to climb into my car, but Kalil had another insurance horror story to share with us. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite remember what it was.

He kept sipping at his go cup and making the odd agitated comment. He was talking to us. He was talking to himself. He didn't seem to notice that me and Desmond were having a side conversation.

“I'm going to go arm up,” I said. “Meet you at Shawnica's in about an hour.”

“Bring one for me. Momma's got the PPK. Lent the Steyr to a cousin.”

“So you've got nothing?”

“Nothing I'd want to depend on.”

Kalil had started singing. He was wailing out “Lullaby of Broadway” as we pulled into the street.

*   *   *

Pearl had a serving of casserole for me. She came out to the driveway when she heard me pull in. She'd found that casserole in her freezer, back behind the sherbet and underneath a pie crust.

“Didn't even know it was there,” she said.

It wasn't in a proper container, one with a lid, anyway. The plastic wrap was just laying there. The casserole had ice all over it. There was something green in it and something brown in it. Something yellow in it, too.

“Just zap it,” Pearl suggested.

I gave her my usual “All right” and threw the stuff into the sink as soon as I'd walked in my apartment.

The more defrosted that casserole got, the less like food it looked. You had to figure the woman in my life who was always giving me dinner would have to be the woman in my life who couldn't cook a lick.

My apartment above Pearl's car shed was just a big room with a full bath off the back. I had a bed and a sofa and a twenty-inch TV, plus a drop-leaf dinette table I could make into something grander if I ever felt the itch to throw a dinner party. Mostly I just piled mail on it. I tended to eat over the sink.

There was an attic space behind a knee wall on the south end of the building, and I kept most of my weapons back there in a big canvas duffel. I crawled in and pulled that duffel out so I could sort through what I had. I couldn't quite say how much firepower might be needed for a ninja schoolgirl. The evidence was she liked her instruments blunt. She'd not plugged anybody yet.

I set aside a couple of pistols and an air-cooled M-4A1 that I'd traded a spanking-new Fryolator for. I had a little Bersa .308 I carried sometimes in an ankle holster, and that seemed like a sensible option given who we were dealing with. It was small caliber but still more firepower than a tattooed girl with a club. By the time I'd packed up what I needed and loaded all the clips I could find, I was beginning to smell Pearl's casserole. Raccoon, I figured. Or maybe goat.

Desmond was already parked outside Shawnica's house when I got there. The front door was shut. The lights were low. There didn't appear to be anybody home. It was late spring twilight, and the mosquitoes were swarming, so we sat in Desmond's Escalade with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner running.

That was one of the leading troubles of the Delta, as far as I could tell. When it was hot, it was too damn hot. When it was cold, it was windy and bitter. When the temperature was tolerable, the bugs made for misery. Lovebugs and mosquitoes mostly, biting flies every now and again, and in such concentrations there wasn't enough DEET on the globe to keep them away.

I got in complaining about the mosquitoes. Desmond had heard it all before. He let me talk. He even watched me like he was listening to me. I finished. He gave a little nod and said, “Heard from Kendell.”

“They catch her?”

He shook his head. “But they found that woman's car. Lady beat up over in Sunflower. It was parked at the IGA on Highway 1, over there by Greenville.”

“Isn't that where she picked up Izzy?”

Desmond nodded. “Kendell figures she drove in from somewhere. Parked in the lot. Picked up Izzy, rode with him, tore him all to pieces. Took his car to Sunflower and beat up that woman there. Drove her car back out to Greenville to get the one she'd come in.”

“Prints or anything?”

“Working on it. Kendell didn't sound too hopeful.”

“Why? Did she wipe it down or something?”

“Other way. He said the car was a nasty mess. Woman has dogs or kids or both. He said he wouldn't keep pigs in it.”

We both heard the backfire together and turned to see Larry's Chevy truck chugging down the road.

Larry whipped into the yard. The bed was empty. I took that as a good sign. The truck lurched to a stop, and the suspension creaked. Larry piled out and slammed the door. He made a show of brushing the insulation off himself. He hawked and spat. Skeeter climbed out and just leaned on the bed rail and watched him.

“This ain't no way to go,” Larry shouted my way and stormed toward his sister's house.

“Pray to Jesus for patience,” Desmond told me as he threw open his door.

“How did it go?” I asked Skeeter.

He nodded. “Everybody wants them.”

We made for the house with Skeeter just behind us. Larry had already turned on the television and flopped down onto the couch.

“Where's Shawnica?” he asked Desmond.

“Don't know.”

“You didn't bring no beer?”

I switched off the TV, and Larry very nearly got up off the couch. He pitched and whined, uncorked an additional Chevy complaint.

Once he'd stopped to draw breath, I told him, “We've got a problem.”

Larry nodded. “I ain't got no supper.”

Desmond said, “Somebody's looking for you.”

“Who?”

Desmond described the creature, right down to the eye rings and the nose studs and the elaborate neck tattoo. I watched Larry, glanced at Skeeter. The girl wasn't ringing any bells.

“What the hell she want?” Larry asked us.

“You in the ground, sounds like,” I told him. “She found your buddy Izzy. Broke him all to pieces.”

“A girl,” Larry said.

Desmond nodded. “Busted him up pretty bad.” Desmond described the sack of fractured bones we'd seen at the hospital. “You're just lucky he didn't have anything to give up.”