Beluga (15 page)

“I know,” Kalil said and laughed. “He came and broke my window.”

The whole crowd at the table found this hilarious. They hooted more loudly than one of the doughy planters at the bar could stand. He was all gut and entitlement. He shoved off of his stool and came waddling over to speak to Kalil and his friends. Me and Desmond, too, I guess.

“Now boys,” he said in that southern way that reliably sets me off, “can't see the need for all this racket in a swanky place like this.”

The Delta Chinese man giggled. He was drinking something with Coke and was loaded enough to find everything, even this planter gasbag, funny.

That man reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. I'd seen this act before. It's gotten common in the Delta with the white privileged class. They'll run into something they don't like—say, a table of drunk immigrant riffraff—and show off their phones as a sign of all the people they might call. Hardheads and roughnecks ready to go, the sorts of guys who'd make Kalil and his friends wish they'd never shown up at the Alluvian bar and made the racket they'd made.

I put my arm around the guy, smiled at him as if I was white, and agreeably pointed, headed in just the way he preferred.

“Hey,” I said and leaned in so I could speak low into his ear. “How would you like a pink cane with daisies shoved up your fat ass feet first?”

He drew back and looked at me. I went on smiling at him. We came to an instantaneous understanding.

“I wouldn't care for that,” he told me. “Wouldn't care for that at all.”

“Then you'd better go on.”

He did, too. Kalil hooted. His Delta Chinese friend giggled.

They shouted out to the barman for another round.

“Dale get arrested?” I asked Kalil.

He shrugged. “I called it in. He took four TVs and two big sets of speakers. Said he was going to throw them in the river.” Kalil turned toward Desmond. “How did he end up driving your shitty car?”

The Delta Canadian started in on a story before Desmond could answer. Something pressing about a gin cocktail he'd had a few years back. That gave us all the out we needed, so me and Desmond made for the door.

That planter I'd just threatened was outside trying to pour his wife into his Riviera. He turned to me like he had some brand of jowly thing to say.

“I'd keep it to myself,” I told him.

They're used to running the world, these planter types. They come from people who got away with just about any damn thing they wanted, people who not that long ago would buy their farmhands and work them to death. Kingly people. Dixie royalty. This homely world doesn't suit them anymore.

That gentleman did the sensible thing. He got in his car and blew his horn as he pulled out past us. He spat out the window toward me and Desmond, his token of outrage. It hit me just then that Lucas Shambrough was a version of the same thing. The son of some fine old Delta planter who was himself a planter's son, and he was keeping up planter appearances in the Shambrough homeplace, which was sprawling and eccentric and going doggedly to seed.

I felt sure that Lucas Shambrough would sneer at Kalil and his friends as well. Their people had been imported to pick cotton, and they'd gone native and stayed. That meant Kalil's ilk could never quite be proper Delta upper crusty. Not like a Shambrough, anyway. Even a treacherous thieving Shambrough. He wasn't just a thief. He was a snob, too. That's why he could be so vicious. The people he went after didn't necessarily count.

*   *   *

We eased up on Shawnica's house, just in case there were Shambrough henchmen about. But I had come to believe that part of the evil genius of Lucas Shambrough lay in his full appreciation of
eventually.
Larry and Skeeter had to know they'd blundered into some fairly profound trouble and that they were sure to be paying for it one way or another. They had a dead friend now. Their tires were gone. Their lives probably weren't worth spit. It hardly mattered where they were—in the lockup or not. The people who wanted them dead would get to them wherever they might be. So now they were left to sit around waiting for it to happen.

I knew if I was either one of them, I'd be having an ordeal. But that, I guess, was the beauty of Larry, and even Skeeter a little. We found them watching a cooking show and eating icebox fish sticks on Shawnica's sofa.

They couldn't even see me when I knocked on the screen door, but Beluga just told me, “Come on in.”

The cooking show they were watching didn't require anybody to cook. The people on it just had to argue with each other for half an hour. They seemed to be quarreling about tomato sauce when I stepped over and switched off the set.

“You know your buddy's dead, right?”

Larry went bereaved. He kept eating his fish stick, but he ate it with his head low and chewed in an inconsolable sort of way.

“Shambrough,” I told them.

Skeeter and Larry nodded. Larry said, “Figures.”

“And that girl he's using is looking for you.”

They nodded again. This was something they knew, too.

“And when she finds you,” I said and glanced at Desmond.

He picked it up from there. “She's got this thing for killing folks a little at a time. We saw that catfish boy.” Desmond shook his head.

“Heard he drowned,” Skeeter said.

“Dead going in or near it,” Desmond told him.

“And you guys just sitting here watching TV,” I said. “Anybody could come up.”

“What do you care?” Larry asked me.

“I'm going to hit him,” I told Desmond.

I thought he'd tell me not to, but Desmond just said, “Well, all right.”

I was still drawing back when Larry dropped to the floor in a heap.

“What do you think that schoolgirl would do with him?” Desmond asked.

“Not much sport to Larry, is there?”

That's when Shawnica came in from the back—she'd been working on her broken nails—to give me and Desmond and Larry and Skeeter one emphatic “Uh-huh.”

I don't think any of them quite understood what sort of peril they were in. Partly because they were not the sorts to plan ahead for things. They were all of them accustomed to doing whatever impressed them at the moment as just precisely what they'd like to do. Consequences didn't enter into it. They had impulses they were perfectly happy to act on as if they were actual sound ideas.

That's how Larry and Skeeter usually got indicted and why Shawnica would get in fixes that she'd routinely come to Desmond to straighten out. Talking to them about the future was worse than talking to a child. You could have a more productive conversation with a collie. The future was generic and uninteresting to them. It was just what followed after they had done what they wanted to do.

“Do you know who Lucas Shambrough is?” I asked all of them generally.

Shawnica was bored before I was halfway through. Skeeter nodded. Larry told me, “Tire guy.” He started in on another fish stick. “So he's still pissed about that boy with the broken leg?”

“You tell them,” I said to Desmond.

“What's that for?” Shawnica asked Desmond, pointing at his cane. “You do know it's pink and shit.”

Desmond nodded. “Hurt my knee. Saw Kendell at the doctor's. Why are you fighting with him? He's just trying to help.”

Shawnica wagged an index finger at Desmond by way of contradiction. She was the final judge of who was helping and who wasn't. “He don't talk to me like that.”

“The man's a Baptist deacon,” I said.

“Didn't see you there.” Shawnica wagged a finger at me and that was that.

Desmond was as flummoxed as I was. They were all three used to meeting trouble as it came and couldn't be persuaded—even by two beat-up people and another one thoroughly dead—that this was an entirely different class of upset. Larry seemed to think he just needed the chance to explain what had gone wrong, how everything had been an accident and a foolish misunderstanding.

“Damn boy went and got up under the truck,” Larry muttered. Now it was all Bugle's fault.

So me and Desmond decided just to appreciate the danger for them and asked them if they'd like to live it up in the Alluvian Hotel for a week. That they understood, but we still had to stash them somewhere for a couple of days while the blues tourists cleared out of the place.

“Pearl likes company,” Desmond told me.

I'd been afraid he'd say something like that. I'd imposed on Pearl's hospitality before with a couple of Delta swamp rats, and she had succeeded at civilizing them a little. Pearl had a gift where it came to people. She was the anti-entitled planter. Pearl treated everybody exactly the same. If you had ears she could pour prattle into, she didn't care what color you were.

Larry was messing with the TV remote and even managed to turn the set back on before I snatched the thing away, took the batteries out, and told them all, “We've got to get you out of here to give us time to straighten this out.”

“When?” Shawnica asked me.

“Right now.”

“To the hotel?” Skeeter wanted to know.

“Day after tomorrow was the best we could do. We'll put you up at Pearl's until then.”

Shawnica's hands found her hips. “That bony white woman you live with?”

“Yeah.”

Shawnica did that thing she does with her neck sometimes. She must have picked it up from a rooster. It's always followed by a decisive “Nuh-uh.”

 

FOURTEEN

Pearl saved us a lot of grief with her gold-plated cable package. Her husband, Gil, had been the TV nut, and Pearl had just left everything as it was. She was hardly the sort to park herself in front of the set and watch, but she turned it on when she got up and let it play throughout the day. I didn't know she had two hundred channels, including all the premium stations, but Larry discovered it almost straightaway.

He told me and Desmond, “This'll work.”

We weren't even in the middle yet of giving Pearl the lay of the land. Shawnica wasn't helping any. She wouldn't let me talk to Pearl without coming in behind and over top of me to tell Pearl how none of this was her idea. She was all sassy about it, too, the way Shawnica likes to be. Then she stepped over to the refrigerator and started poking around inside.

“You know witness protection?” I asked Pearl.

She nodded and told me, “No.”

“They're people the criminals want to get at, the ones who saw a crime or something.”

“What did
they
see?” Pearl asked me.

I heard Desmond mutter,
“Iron Chef.”

“They saw somebody get knocked on the head,” I told Pearl. “The police'll sort it out, but they need a place to park for a couple of days.”

“Here?” She didn't say it like I would have said it. She said it like I'd just told her the queen and prince consort were passing through the Delta and hoped to hole up for a little while at her house. It was an optimistic
Here?
A grateful
Here?

Pearl reached up and fooled with her hair, not that she could have done much good since she'd put her curlers in it already. She was wearing her housecoat and her ratty slippers that once had cat faces on them or something. Now there were two beady eyes between them, and one serviceable ear.

“I should dress,” she told me.

Just then Shawnica held up a plastic container with something purple and green inside it.

“Miss lady?” she said.

“Trifle,” Pearl told her. “You have all you want, sugar.”

Me and Desmond tried to warn her off. We shook our heads at her, anyway, but Shawnica peeled off the top and went hunting for a spoon. She'd almost even eaten a little before the smell impressed itself upon her. That item might have been trifle once, six or seven months ago. That was the trouble with Pearl's refrigerator. Archaeological cuisine.

Skeeter and Larry had found some soft-core porn. I could tell by how quiet they'd gotten. Out-and-out pornography doesn't require so much attention as the half-cooked semimodest brand. It calls for sustained hopefulness. They were watching a spot of congress. We could hear the moaning a little. They were willing it to get more lurid than it was.

“Is this all right, Pearl?” I asked her. “Two nights?”

She laid a hand to my arm. “Those boys in there, don't they look about Gil's size?”

Every man looked Gil's size to Pearl. She was sure to go into Gil's closet and fit Larry and Skeeter into Gil's trousers, Gil's sport coats, his suits. It was the Jewish mother in her, and she was Presbyterian. So you didn't get brisket. You got a seersucker jacket from Pearl and pleated pants.

My phone rang just as I was feeling like me and Desmond had accomplished something, had bought a little time until we could get our Shambrough problem in hand. At that point I didn't care if the whole business ended with Lucas Shambrough in the back of Kendell's cruiser or underneath a swamp somewhere. That went double for the ninja schoolgirl assassin. I couldn't see how this world needed her.

So I had a moment of good feeling about what we were up to, most especially once I looked at the caller ID and saw it was Tula Raintree.

“How'd you get this number,” I said to her, giving it back just like I'd gotten it.

She laughed about like I'd hoped she would. “Sorry,” she told me. “I was caught in the middle of something, wrangling a couple of shitheads.”

“The Lord's work.”

I stepped out on Pearl's back porch for a little privacy. I hoped maybe Tula was coming off shift and seeking me out for company. The truth was a little different the way the truth too often is.

“Got some guy here. Says he knows you.”

“What guy?”

“We caught him throwing TVs in the river.”