Beluga (10 page)

I don't know what I'd expected, but I'd not quite expected him. He was wearing a Texas Rangers ball cap. He had stringy gray hair and chin stubble. He looked about sixty to me.

He reached up and shoved at one of his bicuspids with his thumb. “Goddamn tooth's killing me” was the first thing that he said.

He stopped behind a massive oak desk in the far corner of the room.

“Do I know you?”

I told him, “No sir.”

He sat down and shouted, “Flora!”

The maid from before showed up in the doorway. “Toast or something,” he told her. She turned and went back out.

The Shambrough place felt like one of those houses where nobody bothered to stir before noon.

“Do I want to know you?”

“Probably not.”

“Figures.” He was piddling around with the clutter on his desk, opening drawers and shutting them. I half expected him to pull out a pistol, shoot me twice, and have me stuffed.

He just yelled again, “Flora!”

The maid showed up.

“Where's my damn…” He plucked up a pair of spectacles and waved them at her. “Go on.”

She went.

“So?” he said.

“Here about some tires.”

He put on his glasses, well down his nose, and studied me over top of them.

“Service station's up the road.”

“Michelins,” I told him. “Whole trailer full. A couple of fellows I know drove the thing off by mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“That's what I'm hearing.”

“I just might want to talk to those boys.”

“They'd be nervous about that. That's why I'm here.”

“You don't get nervous?” he asked me.

“No cause. I didn't take anything.”

“But you know the wrong people.”

“Have a knack for that.”

Only once he'd glanced past me did I realize we weren't alone. She was in a bathrobe, too. It wasn't a wig. She wasn't a guy. Her jet-black pageboy was a little out of whack. He must have called her somehow—a button on his desk or something—because she looked like she'd been summoned out of bed and wasn't happy about it.

“Friend of mine,” Lucas Shambrough told me.

I gave her my best oblivious smile and said, “Hello.”

She shoved a hand in her bathrobe pocket and closed on me slowly across the parlor like she was just wandering my way and had no intentions about me at all.

“This is Mako,” Lucas Shambrough told me.

I gave her a smile and a nod.

“Used to be Aurora or something.”

She said, “Isis.”

Lucas Shambrough chuckled and shook his head. “These damn kids.”

She wasn't a kid, though. She had the tats and the studs and the row of bling pierced into her eyebrow, but she looked well into her thirties once you got past the hair and the stuff. She was hard like a gym rat or a meth head, all veins and sinews. I could see it in her forearms, in her calves below her robe. She was taller than I expected, about 5'10" I had to guess. She had weird blue eyes. Too blue. When I glanced her way, she opened her mouth, and I could see the stud in her tongue.

She was attractive in an exotic and dangerous sort of way, but you'd probably be safer having sex with a bobcat. She was far too tightly coiled for affection.

I tried not to pay much attention to her, tried to let on to seem comfortable with her in the room. Lucas Shambrough, however, couldn't help himself. He felt like he knew just what was coming. He smiled at me. He smiled at her. It was about to be a far better day than he'd even dared hope.

“Now about those tires,” he said to me, I guess by way of distraction.

She was close enough for me to smell her. Last night's bourbon. Bedclothes. A little talc maybe off the robe. I'd singled out the bronze I wanted. It was a setter at full point. Maybe eight inches long, and I counted on gripping that dog right at the haunches. I let her get within arm's reach. I grabbed that setter and wheeled. She was pulling her hand out of her robe pocket. I didn't wait to see what she had. I cracked her across the side of the head with the front end of that setter. She staggered back, pitched over a coffee table, and landed facedown on the floor.

I bent low and pulled my .308 out of my ankle holster before Lucas Shambrough could reach for anything. I stepped over and had the barrel in his ear while he was still groping around in his desk drawer.

He went all cool-under-fire on me. I hate that sort of thing.

“Think I haven't had a gun pointed at me before?”

I didn't bother to answer beyond drawing back and hitting him with the pistol. It knocked his Rangers hat off his head and caused him to tell me, “Ow!”

I hit him again, mostly for dramatic effect. Then I jerked him up by his bathrobe collar and hauled him across the room. The girl was stirring by then. We stopped alongside her.

“Kick her,” I told him.

He looked at me and laughed. I swatted him another time with my pistol hand. He laid a foot into her, shoulder height.

“Lower,” I said.

He caught her midsection. This was just the sort of sadistic pastime that Shambrough could get interested in. Then he kicked her again without my asking him to, and she rolled over and groaned.

I reached into her bathrobe pocket and came away with a compact Taser. It was heavy and black and looked like something a proper spook would carry.

“Plans for me?” I asked Lucas Shambrough.

He grinned. I hit him again.

Flora was coming with toast when we reached the foyer. She didn't seem terribly surprised that I was manhandling her boss toward the door at gunpoint. Shambrough reached for a slice of toast as we passed her, so I clubbed him another time.

We went out the door and down the steps. When he tried to kick his hound, I walloped him a good one. That broke the shell a little.

“You fucking piece of…” he managed to get out before I smacked him one more time.

He went down in Larry fashion, just piled up in the yard. I booted him toward the driveway.

“Now that's how you kick somebody.”

He managed to start informing me how goddamn dead I was.

“Cuts both ways,” I told him. “Forget those tires and move on while you can.”

He started gurgling at me, telling me how it was going to be. I didn't stick around to hear it all. There was a fair bit of mucus to it, but I had the drift by the time I'd climbed into my Ranchero and aimed it up the drive.

Out on the blacktop, I called Desmond to find out where he was.

“Jake Town,” he told me. “Plasma TV, but the whole damn trailer's gone.”

“That's one way to do it,” I said.

“Pearl all right?”

“What if I told you I didn't take Pearl to the doctor? What if I told you I drove out to Shambrough's instead?”

Desmond got real quiet.

“Ask me how it went.”

He asked me.

“What's worse than sideways? Upside down?”

Desmond did that thing he gets up to in extremis where he groans and grunts together all at once.

 

NINE

We rendezvoused at some sort of Sonic knockoff near Belzoni on the Yazoo City Road. They didn't even have a Coney Island. Desmond had opted for the corn dog, which, to judge by his expression, he was not enjoying at all. Since there was no curb service—another disappointment—I found him sitting at a picnic table under a ratty umbrella around back. It was conveniently located next to a sweltering Dumpster that was leaking iridescent juice into the lot.

“What the hell's wrong with you.” Desmond said by way of hello.

I shrugged. Didn't know what else to do. “It seemed easier than messing with Larry.”

“Did you go in the house?”

I nodded.

“People say he's got a rhino or a camel in there or something.”

“White raccoon. Half a bear. Lot of shit nobody dusts.”

“What happened?”

I laid it out for Desmond, described the place, the parlor, the conversation. My hopes and dreams going in. Eventually, I got around to the girl.

“Mako?”

I laid her Taser on the table. “Tried to use that on me.”

Desmond picked the thing up, examined it. “Where do you even get one of these?”

“Cute, isn‘t it. Must be how she managed Izzy. Lady in Sunflower, too.”

“How did you get away?”

I described the bronze setter.

“Think she'll live?”

I nodded. “She was coming around before he kicked her.”

“Why did
he
kick her?”

“I might have asked him to.”

Desmond glared at me. He sniffed his corn dog. “How did you leave it with him?”

“He said I was a dead man. Shit like that. You know how they go on.”

“They'll be all over this place looking for you.” He pointed at my Ranchero. “Drove that over?”

I nodded. Desmond groaned.

“Wasn't a crew around or anything. Just him and her.”

“Shambrough hires them as he needs them. Every Delta shithead with a trigger finger'll do whatever he asks.”

Desmond tossed his corn dog into the Dumpster without even getting up. “You always do this. You know that, don't you? Go off trying to straighten shit out and make everything that much worse. Remember that guy with the alligator?”

I'd never live that down. When a Mississippi swamp rat tells you he's got an alligator in his bathtub, you'd probably better take him at his word. You don't need to go marching in to see for yourself.

“Technically,” I told Desmond like I bothered to tell him sometimes, “that gator wasn't in the tub, and that's how he came out like he did.”

Desmond rolled up his trouser leg the way he always rolled it up to show me the scar that gator's tail had left. “You just had to stick your nose in. Shambroughs. Gators. What's the fucking difference?”

“I like to think I'm inquisitive.”

I got the grunty groan again.

“Larry and Skeeter still on it?” I asked him.

Desmond nodded. “Headed down toward Vicksburg with a load. At this rate, it'll take us a week to empty that trailer.”

“Why don't you and me move a load or two.”

“Might as well,” Desmond told me. “Glad you got the orange one,” he said of my Ranchero. “That'll make us easy to spot.”

I followed Desmond out to the catfish pond where the tire trailer was parked. The tarp that friend of Larry's had promised had gotten closer to the trailer. I could see it laying on the ground behind the back tandem wheels.

I looked around the place. Twenty ponds. A bunch of light boxes and paddles for aerating. No scraggly bearded friend of Larry's as far as I could tell.

“Seen that boy?” I asked Desmond.

Desmond nodded. “Went off after a tractor part or something.”

“Do we want to tell him to watch himself or just figure he'll be all right?”

Desmond got that look like he was about to explain how I was four kinds of stupid when an Ag Cat went screaming overhead, probably fifty feet off the ground. They were a common sight in the Delta but could still be a little unnerving when you weren't expecting a plane and one came racing low and fast.

“Shambrough flies,” Desmond told me. “You know that, don't you?”

I shook my head. I wasn't up on Shambrough's details.

“Used to be a duster for the hell of it. Story goes he'd load up with Roundup and drop it on people he didn't like. Wipe out their fields to send them a message.”

“Worked, I'd bet.”

“Ruined a few folks.”

“Better than getting shot in the head.”

We managed to fit a good dozen tires in the bed of my Ranchero.

“Who gets them?” I asked Desmond.

He had a guy down by Rolling Fork he knew from
inside
(Desmond called it).

“You missed an alimony payment. Spent one night in jail.”

“A cell's a cell.”

Desmond gave my Ranchero a hard once-over. “I don't even want to ride with you.”

“Get in. Shambrough's still picking up his teeth.”

Desmond vented more racket as he slipped into the cab. We kind of made up on the way down south. I asked him about his jailhouse buddy. He'd been
inside
on account of a roadhouse fight. Desmond recounted for me the night they'd spent being under the thumb of the Man. All I had to do was drive and take it.

“Welded some tailpipe hangers on for me.”

“Touching.”

“You got no friends like that.”

“You,” I told him, “but you can't weld.”

Desmond nodded. He said, “Right.”

His name was Ricky, and he was a greasy white guy with a shop back behind his house where he installed tires and mufflers and tailpipes. Did brake jobs in a pinch. It looked like he'd blundered into a spot of transmission work that he regretted. As we pulled in, him and a buddy were either dropping a tranny out of an old Ford Bronco or maybe trying to shove a rebuilt one in.

I couldn't really tell because they were mostly just screaming at each other.

“Push it.”

“I am.”

“No. Push it that way.”

“Won't go that way.”

Then there'd be some clanging and banging. A hammer is generally a poor choice in transmission tools.

Then there'd be a “Fuck it!” or something in a similar vein and one or both of them would light a cigarette.

It took Desmond a couple of minutes to get his buddy Ricky's attention because the tinny radio was playing country music at full volume. Somebody's hound had died or his wife had gone off in his buddy's truck. Maybe with his hound. Or maybe even the hound was driving. I couldn't make it out for all the fiddle and twangy harmonizing.

Desmond finally went over and kicked the bottom of one of Ricky's shoes. The Bronco was on jack stands, and those boys were both on creepers beneath it. Ricky, of course, lurched up in surprise and banged his head on something dead solid that rang. The catalytic converter, I guessed.