Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (25 page)

Eddie made a gagging sound. “Shit. Man, I hope we can figure out where Jeff is at. I just don’t want to be the first one to find the body. You know?”

“I know,” Truman said.

“You looked all over?” Eddie asked, opening the supply closet and peering in.

“All over in here,” Truman said. “I’ve been wanting to take a good look in that garage. Wormy made it real clear when he caught me out there the other day that the garage and the fenced-in lot were strictly off- limits.”

“Off-limits?” Eddie said. “That’s the magic word.”

They moved Eddie’s truck around to the side of the lot, to make it less conspicuous.

“If they show up,” Truman cautioned, “don’t pick a fight with Wormy. Just tell him, uh,…”

“I’m gonna tell them if they want Wesley Coombs’s Monte Carlo, they gonna have to pay me in advance to go back over there,” Eddie said. “Cops wouldn’t let me take it without the paperwork.”

In the daylight, with the overhead work lights on, the garage didn’t look nearly as foreboding.

They divided the area into quadrants. “Like they do on search-and-rescue missions on TV,” Eddie suggested.

The garage had a dusty, disused smell, like it hadn’t seen a lube job or a brake adjustment in a long time.

“As Is” was Ronnie’s motto. There was a grease rack in the center of the garage, and the lift was in the up position. Truman stood away from it to get a good look. Crude wooden boards had been laid across the platform, and now the lift was being used as storage. From where he stood, Truman could see a rusty Pepsi vending machine, odds and ends of lumber, some chrome fenders and hubcaps, faded wooden sign-boards for Bondurant Motors, even an old toilet.

“Eddie,” he called.

“Whassup?” Eddie asked. He was kneeling down on the floor examining a seventy-five-gallon steel drum marked “Solvents.”

Truman pointed up. “That grease rack would be as good a place as any to put a body.”

Eddie went over to the workbench and picked up a rusty screwdriver. “Yeah. We can get to that. What about this drum, though? It’s real heavy, and the lid’s on there really tight. If it was me, I’d bend the body in half, stick it in there. Put some acid or shit like that in there, presto. No body.” He shuddered at the grisly possibility his own imagination had conjured up.

While Eddie worked at one side of the drum’s lid, Truman fetched a tire iron and started prying on the other side. The lid made a metallic clank, and then the sucking sound of a vacuum being broken. A viscous bile-green syrup floated within an inch of the drum’s surface. The foam at the edge of the liquid had an oily sheen and a sharp, chemical odor, like the smell of nail polish remover or dry-cleaning solution. They took a half step backward.

“Shit,” Eddie whispered. “That’s nasty.”

From the door leading out of the garage to the office came the soft dinging of the doorbell in the showroom.

Wordlessly, Eddie picked up the lid and put it back on the drum, pounding it back into place with a single thump from his fist. Truman took the tools and dropped them on the workbench. He reached in his pocket for a handful of coins.

He dropped the money in the slot of the snack machine, jabbed a button at random. He dropped in two more coins and made another selection.

The corn chips he tossed to Eddie, keeping the beef jerky stick for himself.

He gave Eddie the nod. They strolled together into the showroom.

“Where the hell were you?” Wormy snarled.

Jackie counted out her tip money at the table nearest the dining-room door. Lunch had been as slow as breakfast. She had a discouragingly small pile of bills, all singles, and a hill of silver: quarters, dimes, nickles, and pennies. Way too many pennies. She needed $77.10 to make the car payment tomorrow. And she had exactly $56.50 in tips saved. Tomorrow was payday. She’d get around $220 after taxes, but her room rent and phone bill were due, and she tried to give her mama $20 every week, when she could.

The red Corvette blared seductively in her imagination. Not broken, ruined, worthless, as good sense told her it was, but the car that had beckoned her in the beginning: speedy and shiny and sinful.

Jackie swept the money into the pocket of her apron. Twenty bucks, she thought. Twenty bucks and she could make her payment to that bloodsucker Bondurant and keep her claim to the ‘Vette alive. Maybe she could get Milton to do the work, if she swapped him baby-sitting for car repairs. But tonight was tuna casserole night. Not even the youth hostel kids would show up to eat that mess. No customers meant no tips.

She was recounting, out loud this time, when Ollie pulled up a chair and invited himself to sit down. “Any lunch left?” he asked.

“You made me lose count. Not that it matters,” she added. She was about to give up, call it quits. But a glint of an idea worked itself around in her head. “Might be I can make you a ham sandwich.”

“Good,” Ollie said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m starved.”

Out in the kitchen, Jackie piled two inches of thick-sliced ham onto the bread, then added a finish coat of mayonnaise, then mustard. She added a mound of potato chips to the plate, and a fan of dill pickle slices. When she was putting the food back into the walk-in refrigerator, she spied a lonely-looking bowl of banana pudding way in the back. After removing the plastic, she topped the pudding with a healthy spoonful of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.

“Wow,” Ollie said when she put the dishes on the table with a little flourish. “Thanks!”

“That’ll be twenty dollars,” Jackie said. “Cash.”

Ollie nearly fell off the chair. “What?” he yelped. “Since when does a ham sandwich cost that much?”

“Since I came up twenty dollars short for my car payment,” Jackie said. She whipped the plates back onto her tray. “If you don’t want this, I’ll just take it back in the kitchen. Lunch is over, you know.”

“There’s a name for this,” Ollie told her. “It’s called extortion. What if Mr. Wiggins finds out you extort money from the guests?”

“You let me worry about Mr. Wiggins,” Jackie said. She hoisted the trayful of food to her shoulder. “Well?”

He reached for his hip pocket. “All you had to do was ask. I would have loaned you the money since you need it that bad.”

“Right,” Jackie said sarcastically. She knew, as did all of his friends, that Ollie was a hoarder. It wasn’t that he was selfish, or even miserly, it was just that he had been tucking away bits of money for years, “in case of a rainy day.”

Ollie took out his moth-eaten black change purse and turned away so that Jackie would not see his stash. He counted out twenty ones, then turned back around and put the faded bills into her outstretched hand.

“I thought you weren’t going to pay those crooks any more money,” he said, just a hint of maliciousness in his voice. After all, they had left him out of all the fun the night before. “Thought you were going to get Truman to prove they stole your car and make them give it back. What happened to that idea?”

She put the money in the pocket of the apron with the rest of her savings and gave it a pat to reassure herself. “We’re still working on it,” she said. “But I need to make that payment. Just in case.”

Ronnie and Wormy were world-class pissed off. Two hours they’d spent trying to find LeeAnn Pilker. Her apartment was empty, and nobody was around to say whether or not they’d seen her lately. Her boss at the club, a guy named Ike, claimed he hadn’t seen her, even after Ronnie flicked a $100 bill his way.

“Anywhere else she’d go?” Wormy asked. “Like, if she was hiding?”

“Why would she be hiding?” Ike asked coolly. He pushed the $100 bill back at Ronnie. He remembered these two from earlier in the week. Big spenders, but they’d scared away half his regular clientele. And he knew LeeAnn had gone home with the guy in the golf shirt. Bondurant—who ran the car lot across the street.

“Like, if she stole some money or something,” Wormy said, heavy-lidded.

“Let me talk to your other girls,” Ronnie said, cutting Wormy short. “All these girls tell stuff to each other. One of them probably knows something. I’ll pay for their time,” he added.

“No dice,” Ike said. “The girls work for me, not you. And they mind their own business. If LeeAnn shows up, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

Ronnie cussed him out good, until the hulking blond dyke from the front door heard him shouting and showed up at the manager’s door brandishing a bad-looking length of iron pipe wrapped in black tape.

“Anything wrong, Ike?” she asked.

“Naw,” Ike said. “You wanna show these guys the back door? They got a business appointment to get to.”

Ronnie cussed all the way across the street. “Fucking pimp,” he fumed as they dodged between cars. “He’s probably got the bitch hidden somewhere right inside that club.”

His mood didn’t lighten any when they walked in the front door of the showroom. Nobody was there. The place was deserted, the front door unlocked so that any asshole could just walk in off the street and rip them off.

“Where’s the old man?” Ronnie asked, looking around the showroom. “I told that old bastard to mind the store. Where the hell is he?”

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Wormy said.

“Shut the fuck up and find him,” Ronnie said.

Just then, the door from the garage opened, and Truman strolled inside, still working on the cellophane wrapper of a beef jerky stick. Right behind him was Eddie Nevins, both of them chatting away like long-lost chums.

“You’re supposed to be out here answering the phones,” Ronnie said. His voice was almost a whisper. A dull pink flush was creeping up his neck. All day long, he’d been getting no respect, now even the hired help was treating him like he was nothing.

“What if somebody came in here, wanting to make their payment?” Ronnie demanded. “What if somebody walked on the lot, wanted to talk to a salesman about a car? You just put out a sign, ‘Gone Fishin’? Screw that, Kicklighter! You’re here working for me, you better be working, not wandering around feeding your face, snooping someplace you got no business.”

Truman felt his face burn. He counted silently. “I’ve been here since noon, Ronnie,” he said, sounding cooler than he felt. “No lunch. Nothing. I just went in back to get a snack. Eddie was here, too, waiting to talk to you. We were gone maybe two minutes. I could hear the phone ring from the garage, and the doorbell, too. You want to fire me, go ahead. I’m not a young man, you know. I’ve got to keep my blood sugar up.”

“Who called you?” Ronnie asked, looking at Eddie.

“I called me,” Eddie said, crossing his arms across his chest to show off the rippling biceps below the cutoff sweatshirt sleeves. “You want to know where Wesley Coombs’s Monte Carlo is at?”

“It’d better be right here,” Ronnie said. “You been paid. I want that car.”

“Ask Wormy here what happened when I went to get the Monte Carlo,” Eddie suggested. “Ask him if he deliberately set me up to get hauled off to jail. Ask him if he notified the cops about the pick up.”

Wormy’s expression did not change. “Tough luck, Nevins. I forgot. Guess I must have been busy with something … important.”

Eddie cracked his knuckles, one at a time. “I had to pay five hundred dollars to get out of jail and get my truck out of the impound lot. And as far as I know, Wesley Coombs is laughing his ass off, ‘cause he’s still driving that Monte Carlo and he ain’t paid a dime on it for three months.”

“Goddamn,” Ronnie said, slamming his fist down on the desk. “Can’t I trust anybody around here? I’m surrounded by morons and incompetents.”

“Hey!” Wormy protested. “It slipped my mind. Honest.”

Ronnie stomped off to his office and slammed the door behind him. He opened the safe, reached past the pistols, and retrieved a stack of bills. Peeling off the needed amount, he closed the safe and twirled the lock around.

After this whole mess was over with, with LeeAnn, Boone, everybody, Ronnie promised himself, he was gonna have to rethink his personnel situation. Even Wormy. Especially Wormy. His daddy had warned him time and time again about putting trust in others. Lawton Bondurant had always been a friendless type, suspicious of everybody, including his own flesh and blood.

Not Ronnie. He believed in getting along and going along. He liked to party, liked to wheel and deal. A people person, that was Ronnie Bondurant. Him and Wormy, they’d been a team for a lot of years. Going way back to Dixie Highway Motors when Wormy came in to buy a ‘68 Cougar and stayed to work for Ronnie’s old man.

Wormy had his quirks. His moods. His hang-ups. He hated blacks, Cubans, Mexicans, women, and fags. But up until now, he’d been invaluable. Lately though, Wormy had let him down. Those pills he was popping kept him blitzed out of his mind. And the thing with Cantrell. Wormy had fired first, Ronnie was sure. He’d screwed up the red Corvette grab, too. He couldn’t get along with people. Take LeeAnn. She was afraid of him. Wormy had said or done something to make her suspicious of him. And now she was gone, his one shot at perfection.

Now Eddie. The best repo man around. Cheapest, too. If only Wormy didn’t know so much about the business, Ronnie thought. Too late now. Wormy knew, literally, where all the bodies were buried. Old Dad was right again.