Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (13 page)

I heard Kendell behind me as he mounted the landing and lingered at the threshold.

“Got to figure,” I told him, “that boy’s been keeping his energy bottled up.”

“Yeah,” Kendell said. “Pretty impressive.”

I’ll admit to being awestruck. That Boudrot had been about as thoroughly destructive as a human could hope to be.

“What do you figure he did it with?” I asked.

Kendell directed me to a mallet on the floor by the far wall. It must have been Gil’s and had one of those hard rubber heads that was full of shot.

“Knife too, I guess,” Kendell allowed as we considered together the sofa. Most of the stuffing that had been on the inside was on the outside now.

“Pearl’s house?” I asked him.

“Not so bad. Busted up her TV. It looks like he took some clothes.”

“You got a roadblock up or something?” I toed a heap of rubble with my boot. It turned out to be all my dinner plates and sandwich saucers gone to litter.

“They’re talking about it.”

“Who?”

Kendell shrugged. “Bosses.”

I heard Luther climbing the stairs. He had taps on the heels of his boots. He stepped inside my destroyed apartment, didn’t seem much phased by the mess.

“Grady’s raising a fuss,” he told me. “Got work and shit to do.”

“Who’s Grady?” Kendell asked him.

That’s when Luther finally tuned in to the wholesale destruction.

“Flat tore it up, didn’t he?” he said to Kendell.

“Who’s Grady?” Kendell asked me.

“A Greer,” I told him.

“The body shop guy?”

I nodded. “He’s got some quarrel with Percy Dwayne Dubois. We’re trying to sort it out.”

I followed Kendell onto the landing from where we could look down on the crew. Desmond had his tailgate dropped and was sweeping out his way back with the whisk broom that he carried to keep his vehicle neat. Eugene and Dale and Barbara were watching him. That Greer was leaning on the Escalade, looking glum and mouthing off. They made for a wretched sight as far as clutches of people go. Eugene was scarlet from the lye soap. Dale and that Greer were both splotchy and swollen from various punches they’d taken. Their clothes hadn’t been much improved by rolling around on the levee either.

Kendell looked on for a quarter minute. He said, “Hmm,” through his nose primarily. He adjusted his belt, laid his hand to the hilt of pistol. When he finally settled on what to ask me, it was, “Why’s that dog wearing a shirt?”

THIRTEEN

In Pearl’s house that Boudrot had busted whatever he could reach on his route through the place. He’d kicked in the den door off the back screened porch and had knocked Pearl’s TV onto the carpet. It looked like he’d broken the screen with Pearl’s floor lamp. He’d pitched her magazines all over the place and had blundered into the dining room where he’d shattered Pearl’s cake plate and both her pickle dishes. He’d broken the mirror on her sideboard and thrown her candlesticks into the kitchen. He’d even jerked her drapes onto the floor, had yanked the curtain rods out of the wall.

I had come inside with Desmond and Kendell to survey the destruction.

“What do you figure he has against curtains?” Desmond asked as he surveyed the damage.

We had to figure out how to lock up Pearl’s house, no easy thing with the back door kicked in, but we found enough plywood to plug the doorway up and then gathered on the driveway to work out how best to proceed.

I know now it was along about then when Tula met with trouble. She called me, and I eventually got her message, but my phone never rang in my pocket, one of those cellular hiccups that seem to happen all the damn time. When I finally heard her voicemail, a good three or four hours later, it was Tula calling to ask me, “What are you doing way down here?”

The Delta’s a fairly sizable place—a hundred miles long and seventy wide—but the people are all concentrated in pockets here and there. The humans are crowded around the edges to make room for the agriculture, to leave the arable land wide open for the crops to thrive and the planes to dust. So there are clumps of populated Delta like oases in the desert, and not so terribly many spots where people congregate.

On her way back up from Baton Rouge, where she’d dropped C.J. and the dog with her aunt, Tula had left the interstate at Jackson and headed north on 49. That took her straight up by Yazoo City and, as I understand it now, she was sitting at a light in the commercial clottage on the north side of town when she caught sight of my Ranchero in the lot of a shopping plaza. I knew the spot well enough myself. It was adjacent to the Yazoo Sonic, which me and Desmond had stopped at for lunch a few times in a pinch.

So I was acquainted with that shopping plaza. I’d sat and looked out on its lot. There was Kroger at the near end. A lady’s boutique in the middle. Some kind of cut-rate drugstore just beyond it, and a payday loan place down from that. As I understand it now, my Ranchero was parked catty-cornered in front of the loan shop, and the sight of it had tempted Tula off the road and into the lot.

There weren’t so terribly many calypso-coral Ranchero’s around. Maybe only mine. I’d seen a blue one once, but it was half beat to pieces. El Caminos were far more common, but nobody kept them up.

So there wasn’t much chance that Tula would fail to notice that Ranchero, and it was decidedly unlikely she’d doubt that it was mine. The way I heard it, she got out of her Honda and glanced in the cab of my Ranchero. Everything looked normal but for the bag of Cheez Doodles on the passenger seat and the skinny Red Bull can sitting on the console. Those weren’t part of my standard diet, but Tula was ready to file them both under the heading of The Shit Men’ll Do When They Think You’re Not Looking.

That’s just when that Boudrot came out of the payday loan store in one of Gil’s seersucker sport coats. That Boudrot wasn’t wearing the thing with any flare to speak of. It was just hanging on him like a cheap slipcover on a couch. He was carrying a freighted shopping bag in one hand and a pistol in the other. One of those thin white shopping bags with
THANK YOU!
printed on it. Tula noticed it was crammed full of loose cash money before she even saw the gun.

And there she was standing hard alongside that Boudrot’s getaway car. They were both accomplished enough in their fields for things to come to a head dead quick.

Tula told that Boudrot, “Police,” as she reached for the weapon she carried off duty. It was a .380 she kept in a snapped-down holster around in the small of her back.

So she needed to reach while that Boudrot had a revolver already at hand. My revolver as it turned out, a .38 I keep in my glove compartment. The way I heard it, he swung it on Tula and caught her flush on the side of the head. She toppled toward my Ranchero and fell half in the bed. That Boudrot popped her another time and tipped her in entirely. Then he tossed his bag of money in the cab, piled in behind it and took off. He stopped up the road somewhere. By then he’d found all the stuff that me and Desmond tend to use in the course of rough days on the job. I had a full roll of duct tape in the console along with a box of .38 rounds and a package of three-mil plastic sheeting. The kind you buy in the homewares store if you’re thinking of painting your bedroom. Or if you’re worried about some fool bleeding all over your area rug.

All Tula knew when she came around was that she was taped in place all over and wrapped up with a plastic drop cloth in the cargo bed of my Ranchero. That Boudrot seemed to be racing somewhere on an agonizingly bumpy road.

Back at Pearl’s, right at that very time, we were working on Grady Greer to see how we might free up Percy Dwayne. Desmond and Kendell were in agreement that Percy Dwayne was safer where he was than out with us in the Escalade riding the roads and looking for trouble.

“What about that wife of his and little P.D. Junior?” I asked them.

“She’s a Vardaman,” Luther and Desmond and even Kendell told me all at once. They said it like being a Vardaman was like being a Tyrannosaurus.

“I know she’s mean as hell,” I told them, “but she’s not bulletproof. And at the very least we need to let Percy Dwayne know that Boudrot’s running free.”

I finally convinced them the decent thing to do was locate Percy Dwayne, tell him that Boudrot was loose from Parchman, and let him do what he wanted after that.

Even Luther, Percy Dwayne’s nephew, decided that was fair enough to suit him, and he immediately closed on Grady and said, “All right, then. Where’s he at?”

“I told you. Daddy’s got him. Him and Uncle Flo.”

“Where?” Kendell asked.

That Greer country pointed nowhere much. “Farm,” he said.

“Why?” Kendell asked him.

“They didn’t go into it much. Sounds like that Dubois beat them out of some cash.”

“You going to show us where?” Desmond asked.

That Greer just nodded. He said, “All right, but I ain’t got all day.”

With that he piled onto the backseat of Desmond’s Escalade. That Greer told us, “Come on, dammit,” like we’d been ballast all along.

We left Kendell at Pearl’s, and I probably would have checked in with Tula along about then, but I didn’t want to tell her what I was up to and who with exactly. She didn’t approve of Dale and wouldn’t have had much use for Luther. Throw in that Greer and Eugene and a hound in a Mandrell Sisters T-shirt, and I was riding around in her idea of shiftless hell on earth. And she didn’t like to be checked in with anyway in the general course of things, always took it somehow as constricting and more than a little nosy.

At least that’s how I’ve worked it out in my head ever since that afternoon. I let myself off for having not called her because she didn’t like getting called.

I thought we’d never get to that Greer’s daddy’s farm. It was way up the hell in the middle of no damn where. That’s saying a lot in the Delta where most every place is nowhere much. But this spread was well off the paved road, no asphalt near it for miles. It was up in Bolivar County somewhere in the vicinity of Rosedale. We rode right by that house in Beulah where we’d hauled that woman’s donkeys.

I was about to point it out when Desmond grumbled my way, “Shit.”

It didn’t help that Grady Greer didn’t seem to know where his daddy lived. He sent us down a road that ended in a hedgerow.

“All right now, wait a minute,” was all he said.

“Want me to hit him?” Dale asked us.

“Ain’t you wasted enough time,” Eugene asked Dale, “getting your sorry ass kicked?”

“There they are,” that Greer told us and pointed.

We could see a tin roof through the scrub.

“Got to go around,” that Greer said to Desmond. “Back to the junction and over. I had you turn a little short.”

A good four miles later we were easing up the track that passed with that Greer’s daddy for a driveway. I think his house had a trailer in it somewhere, one of those stubby single-wides that was probably the core of the entire structure. He’d just added on rooms and wings and breezeways as the mood struck him and the need arose. He had Tyvek instead of siding and blue tarp where there wasn’t tin.

That Greer’s daddy and his brother, the Uncle Flo we’d heard about, came out on the front porch when they heard us rolling up. Uncle Flo had a Buntline revolver shoved down in his pants. That Greer’s daddy was holding a rifle that looked for all the world like a musket.

“I ain’t getting out,” I heard Luther say.

“I’m all right back here,” Eugene told us.

We actively wanted Dale to stay in the car, but he had his door open before we’d stopped. He was a tip-of-the-spear sort of guy without the feel or capacity for it.

“What the hell’s all this?” Dale shouted toward the house.

Our Greer, of course, was still in the car, so those gentlemen had no earthly idea who we were or why we’d come. It wasn’t the Greer way to call ahead or to even have a phone. So there was an Escalade with a bunch of guys inside it and Dale out as our mouthpiece, and he looked as rough as a fellow could look. His face was scarlet and puffy. His knuckles were all skinned up, and he was filthy from rolling around on the ground while getting punched and scuffed.

Those Greer brothers did about the only thing gentlemen of their vintage could do. They both leveled their guns at Dale and warned him that they’d shoot him about a half a second before both of them fired and missed. Uncle Flo put a round in one of Desmond’s headlights while that Greer’s daddy scattered shot all over the place. It sounded like sand on the windshield and the hood. It might have been salt by the racket of it, but that didn’t make much difference to Desmond.

He threw open his door and rolled out of his seat to tell those fellows, “Hey!”

So now, in addition to Dale, there was a big black guy in their yard. Naturally, they trained fire on him as well. These were hardly the sort of men to much trouble themselves with consequences. This time the Buntline bullet hit the bumper, and that Greer’s daddy’s rifle smoked when he pulled the trigger. There was a fizzle somewhere back in the works, and then the thing caught fire.

“Throw it!” our Greer bellowed from the backseat.

His daddy did just that. He flung that rifle into the yard where it went off and hit the pump house. Then the stock fell off the barrel, and the whole thing came apart.

“Just hold on here.” I was out by then. I turned and told our Greer, “Come on.”

He stuck his head up over the open back door, “Hell, Daddy,” he said.

It looked for a second there like Uncle Flo might draw a bead on our Greer. There wasn’t much doubt he wanted to.

“Shit, it’s Grady,” he told Grady’s daddy.

“Let him be,” Grady’s daddy said to his brother with weary resignation. He shook his head at the sight of his son. He dredged some phlegm and spat.

“What did you do?” I asked our Greer.

“We kind of fell out,” he told me.

That was a going local trend, as far as I could tell. Families went to loggerheads over every damn thing in the Delta, from “Why’s my wife in your house naked?” to “Where’d my pack of Old Golds go?”

“Money?” I asked our Greer.