Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (22 page)

“Who the hell’s got a stick?” Dale asked the guy. “Ain’t no damn stick in there.”

Dale sort of had him on that one. You could hardly expect people to travel with a stick they’d bust up their bowel movements with.

That motor lodge clerk knew he was caught out, so he did what most people do. He started yelling at Dale about the general mess he’d left the room in, all the racket he’d made along with his buddies, all the people they’d woken up. It fit right in with the general tone of the lot. Everybody else was screaming already.

Desmond never got out of the Escalade. He whistled from the driver’s seat. Desmond had a powerful whistle. It was piercing and arresting. Everybody quit what they were about and turned to look our way.

“Let’s go,” Desmond shouted in his baritone rumble at full volume.

By then, Luther and Percy Dwayne and Dale were all looking to bug out anyway.

“Pile in,” I told Eugene and lifted the back gate for him.

Barbara was feeling sprightly enough to leap in and Eugene followed hard upon her.

Dale and Luther we’re already halfway across the lot by then, but Percy Dwayne had hung back to suggest to some woman, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up.”

Percy Dwayne must not have noticed that she had some kind of stick in her hand. Probably not her toilet stick. It looked like an old broom handle that she half used for a cane and half used for flogging shitheads like Percy Dwayne. She was leaning on it until suddenly she wasn’t, and Percy Dwayne was getting tattooed.

He covered up there at first and swore, but she kept whacking him with a fury, and Percy Dwayne was just the sort to swing on a woman after a while.

“Quit it!” he told her.

She didn’t.

I hustled over to do what I could. We were already leading a fairly delicate existence in Columbus what with Gary trussed up in the back of a cruiser and Deputy Dale Junior about four shades of dumb. We didn’t need any more police interaction, and I could tell by the way the desk clerk was stalking toward his office that he was either off to fetch a bazooka or dial 911.

“Come on.” I grabbed Percy Dwayne’s coverall sleeve and yanked him.

That damn woman caught me flush on the wrist bone with what proved a shovel handle. It stung like hell. She swung it on me again. I raised my hand and grabbed the thing. I tried to break it over my knee, but it was stout and ash and didn’t do a thing but hurt like hell. So I threw it instead, flung it out into the weedy patch of ground down from the parking lot, and
that
was the thing that served to set the crowd off. You would have thought I’d impaled her with it. Now they were all yelling at me.

“Let’s go,” I told Percy Dwayne.

“Fuck it,” he said. “We can take them.”

“Let’s go!”

I about had to drag him with me. Not that Percy Dwayne wanted to fight. He just didn’t want to seem like the sort of guy who’d walk away from trouble. I could see the desk clerk on the phone in the motel office.

“Who you looking at?”

Percy Dwayne had stopped to shout back at some fellow. A big ugly guy in his undershorts and a pair of dingy tube socks. He had a tattoo on what must have been his six-pack some years back. A spiderweb originally, but now the thing was so stretched and blown out it looked like a cargo net.

“Looking at you,” he told Percy Dwayne. “You got a problem with that, boy?”

“Aw, fucker.” Percy Dwayne laid his hands to his hips and spat.

“Come on,” I told him.

“Let me see to this asshole first.”

The guy in the undershorts spat as well and readied himself for battle. There wasn’t a lot he could do, given the little he was wearing, so he tried to take off a sock. His belly got in the way, though, and he ended up shouting, “Mama!”

A bony woman in curlers and a housedress closed on him. She bent over and raised his foot up like she was fixing to shoe a horse.

“Let’s go,” I told Percy Dwayne.

He shook his head. He wasn’t budging. That woman peeled off one nasty sock and let that be enough. Percy Dwayne and that fellow looked ready to ram together like mountain goats.

Desmond had sized up the situation from over in the Escalade. He wheeled the thing around between Percy Dwayne and that fellow and had Luther throw open the back door.

“Get in,” I told Percy Dwayne.

He fixed his mouth like he had an objection, so I punched him one time hard in the gut and then tossed Percy Dwayne into the car myself.

I climbed straight in, and off we went. We weren’t a quarter mile from the place when we passed three police cruisers, rolling full tilt. Desmond watched them in his rearview as they swung into the motor lodge lot.

“We might want to get on out of Columbus,” Desmond suggested to me. He said it that way that let me know he’d made his decision already.

“What about the guns?” I asked him.

“They got guns in Alabama.”

“They who?”

“I know a boy,” Desmond told me.

“Where?”

“Gordo,” he said. “It’s right on the way. Just this side of Tuscaloosa.”

“How about some waffles or something.” Dale had taken the nasty hand he’d wiped his ass with out of his mouth long enough to talk.

“Yeah,” Luther threw in. “Ought to be a Waffle House out here somewhere.”

It turned out there was one just off the truck route. We could see it from the road. The noise that crew made when Desmond failed to pull off approached caterwauling.

Luther laid up on the seat back. “What the hell’s up with you?” he said.

He meant mostly Desmond, since he had the wheel, but Desmond was in his getaway mode. Just trying to clear out to safety. He left me to explain things to Luther.

“Alabama first,” I said.

I knew all those boys—probably even Dale too—had a queer sense of police jurisdiction, so I played on that. I made out like we’d be like Nazis in Brazil once we’d hit the Alabama line and broke out of Mississippi.

*   *   *

It turned out to be about twenty miles or so to the Alabama state line. We finally hit a place called Reform. The town didn’t have much—a shabby grocery store, a lumber yard, a Fred’s, a Magic Wand, a Kangaroo gas station. On the far end of the clutter, when we’d just about given up hope, we rolled up on a Jack in the Box, and Desmond wheeled into the lot.

There was a state police car and two county four-by-fours already parked in a back corner. The sight of them gave me and Desmond pause, but the rest of those boys piled right out. We were in Alabama after all where none of their misdeeds had followed.

We watched them parade on into the place like they were untouchable.

“Don’t you wish sometimes you could be like them?”

Desmond turned full around to gaze upon me like I was daft.

They didn’t have waffles exactly. Didn’t have waffles at all but instead burritos and biscuits and something called the Hearty Breakfast Bowl. It looked like a meal a collie would make if a collie could half cook.

The boys were up at the counter ordering by the time we went into the place. They were getting the hard once-over from two deputies and a trooper who were sipping their coffee and munching their hash brown sticks in a far corner booth.

I heard Luther tell the girl at the register, “Yeah, this is all together.” Then he glanced my way and pointed. He told her, “Him.”

“You talk to Kendell?” I asked Desmond.

“You know I didn’t.”

“Want me to?”

“You know I do.”

I gave Desmond my wallet. “Just get me some coffee.” My chicken had gone in fine as well, but it was still right where I’d put it.

I went back out to the Escalade, fished Desmond’s phone out of the cup holder, and called up Kendell while I wandered around the Jack in the Box lot.

“Where you been?” he said instead of hello.

“It’s Nick. We’re in Alabama.”

“Alabama where?”

I looked around like that might help me. “Nearly to Tuscaloosa. Hour or so away.”

“You talk to her?”

“No. Did you?”

“Yeah,” Kendell told me. “Last night.”

“You talked to Tula directly?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How’d she sound?”

“Mostly pissed.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Define ‘okay’.”

“He hasn’t hurt her or … you know, messed with her.”

“I can’t see Tula standing for that. She said she was fine. I believed her. But she’s spent more time with that nut than any human ought to have to.”

“What else did she tell you?”

“Nothing much. Just proved she was alive. Then that Boudrot got on and yammered at me.”

“Where do you figure they are?” I asked him.

“Tech guy here says they’re in Tuscaloosa. South of the river, north of the interstate. That’s the best he can do.”

“That’ll work,” I told Kendell. Not that I’d ever been to Tuscaloosa and knew what we’d be up against between the river and the four-lane.

“Get you some firepower?” Kendell asked me.

“Wrinkle,” I told him.

Like his cousin Desmond, Kendell had an assortment of snorts as well. He deployed one my way.

“Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

He had a snort for that too.

“Hold on.”

I opened the way back of the Escalade and let Barbara out to pee. Two guys came out of the Jack in the Box just as she hit the ground.

The one without the toothpick said, “Hey!” to me twice. He pointed at Barbara, who was squatting, while he informed me it took a goddamn faggot to think Kyle Petty was worth a shit.

“Nick … Nick!” Kendell was calling to me over the phone.

I raised the thing to my ear again. “Yeah.”

“You can’t fix Alabama,” Kendell told me. “Let it go. Maybe you can beat him up on the way back.”

I paused to salute those gentlemen as they pulled out of the lot in their camo pickup.

“Yeah. I’ll keep a good thought.”

Desmond came out of the Jack in the Box with my cup of coffee.

“Still getting armed, right?” Kendell asked me.

“Desmond says he knows a guy.”

“Not that fool over there in Gordo.”

“I’ll let him tell you.”

I tried to put Desmond on, but he wouldn’t take the phone. He just shook his head, said, “Uh-uh,” and stayed just out of reach.

That was Desmond’s way with Kendell, his usual technique with rectitude. If somebody was keen on him doing something he knew he ought to do, something there was no earthly chance of him doing, Desmond preferred to make himself unavailable to advice. His arms got short and his fingers useless. His ears became obstructed, and you couldn’t ever find his front side because he was always turning away.

“He’s doing that thing,” I said to Kendell, and it was all I needed to say.

“That Gordo boy?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Don’t eat anything he gives you.”

“What’s he going to give me?”

“You’ll see.” Kendell must have been at the Greenville station house already. I could hear somebody yelling about his rights and liberties. He sounded drunk or maybe only toothless. “Got to go.”

“All right.”

“Call me from Tuscaloosa. I might know a little more by then.”

“Pull your pants up, fool!” I heard Kendell shout. It made do for “good-bye.”

“That buddy of yours in Gordo,” I said to Desmond. “He some kind of chef or something?”

Desmond took his phone back from me. “He ain’t no buddy of mine,” he said.

TWENTY-TWO

It turned out we were less than half an hour out of Gordo, which was kind of someplace, unlike Reform that hadn’t been any place at all. Gordo had a water tower and four actual blocks of downtown. Two of them going east to west and two of them north to south.

We stopped at the Marathon station so Percy Dwayne could use the bathroom. The Jack in the Box Jumbo Breakfast Platter wasn’t agreeing with him.

“Likely the bacon,” Luther explained to me. “Maybe the hash browns. Could be the pancakes. Eggs were a little greasy too.”

“That’s all on one plate?” I asked him.

Luther nodded. “Jumbo,” he explained.

Eugene bought some cigarettes. He smoked one and grew dizzy. He sat down on a curb stone over by the air hose. Barbara closed on him and laid her head in his lap.

“Used to settle me out,” Eugene told me, waving his pack of Merits.

“Jumbo Breakfast Platter?” I asked him.

He owned up in sadness. “Yeah.”

Desmond didn’t have a current number for his guy. He checked his phone for the time.

“Not but eight thirty,” he said. “He won’t be up for a while.”

“Can’t we get him up?”

Desmond grunted. Desmond nodded. “Probably going to have to.”

Dale had gone into the minimart and bought an
Iron Man Magazine
. Without intervention, I could see us spending our forenoon parked right there while Dale perched on the ring in the men’s room and did more monumental business.

“No sir,” I told Dale and pointed at the Escalade. “When Percy Dwayne comes out, we leave.”

“Ain’t like I can control it.”

“Try.”

I shut him in the backseat.

“Time to wake up your buddy,” I told Desmond. I shouted to Percy Dwayne, “Come on!”

He said something from the toilet. He sounded like a mouse behind a wall. I went over and kicked the door twice. Percy Dwayne came out pulling up his pants.

“It was that last hash brown.” Percy Dwayne had been doing some powerful analyzing. “I’ve seen cleaner Dumpsters,” he told me of the Marathon men’s room. “Got a good mind to write a letter.” We both knew he never would.

Desmond couldn’t precisely remember where his friend in Gordo lived. It was out in the Alabama wilds just north and east of Gordo proper. In Desmond’s defense, they looked to have logged half the county since he’d last been through there. A lot of bald red dirt and stumps and lap wood and ugly unchecked erosion.

“Who’d want to live here?” Luther asked us about every ninety seconds, right up until Dale distracted him with a picture of a woman from his magazine. A gatefold photo of an oily bemuscled creature holding up the front end of a truck.

“Is that even a girl?” Luther asked Dale.

That was enough to make Dale quarrel. “Hell, I’d do her,” he told Luther. It came out sounding like a challenge.