Beluga (22 page)

“Think she was following them or just ran across them in the Walmart?”

Larry was sitting on one of Kalil's sofas with a hand on his puffy eye.

“Did you and Skeeter go anywhere before the RadioShack and the Walmart?”

Larry thought for a moment and then listed a good half-dozen other places. In Indianola. In Moorhead. In greater Greenwood as well. There wasn't a ninja assassin on the planet who wouldn't have gotten wind of them.

“You realize the people looking for you would sort of like you dead,” I said to Larry.

He gave me his
whatever
shrug.

“We could just drive him over to Shambrough's and put him out in the yard,” I suggested to Desmond.

Desmond groaned and said, “Shawnica,” just like I knew he would.

*   *   *

When we couldn't figure out what else to do with him, we decided to take Larry with us. He was clearly going to be a hazard for any decent civilian to keep. Either you'd get a visit from a ruthless girl assassin or Larry would sprawl on your sofa eating microwave popcorn and watching Spike TV at full volume. It was one of those lose-lose situations, so we packed him into Desmond's Escalade and headed straight for the Indianola Sonic to settle Desmond's nerves.

Once the tray was fixed to the driver's door and the girl had brought our iced teas, me and Desmond started explaining to Larry how he would be spending the coming days while he held his cup to his puffy eye and did a fine job of not sniveling.

“Can we go see Skeeter?” he asked us.

“We'll call first,” I told him. “See what kind of shape he's in. Might not be the best place for you and me to show our faces.”

“Oh, right,” Larry said like he'd forgotten about the whole handcuff and Jasper thing. “They got chicken fried steak here?” he asked me and Desmond.

That was the fundamental trouble with Larry. Nothing made a special impact on him. A ninja schoolgirl assassin and chicken fried steak were of equal interest to Larry, and you couldn't really count on him staying focused on the one once the other had popped into his head. I wasn't sure what Desmond and I could do with him beyond keep him in the car. We couldn't have him watch our backs when we were tangling with that Shambrough. Larry would forget what he was up to and start wondering about curly fries or clouds.

Desmond's phone rang. He was still using Barry White.

“It's Kendell,” he told me.

“Just play dumb. See what he knows.”

Larry started chattering about muskrats or something.

“Zip it,” I told him.

Desmond answered the call. He barely got out “Hey.”

Kendell's not a yeller ordinarily. He's too Baptist and deliberate for that, but he uncorked some high feeling Desmond's way. The racket even caught Larry's attention.

“Did what now?” Desmond asked. He was awfully good at dumb.

More high-velocity talk from Kendell.

“I've been trying to get Dale and K-Lo straightened out. I don't know anything about it.”

Kendell dropped a couple of octaves, but Desmond glanced my way and shook his head to let me know that Kendell was still hot.

“Where now? Greenwood?”

He listened some more. Kendell was as close to barking at Desmond as Kendell ever got.

“Who did that?”

Kendell cranked it down now that he was on the details.

“They catch her?”

Kendell talked some more. He didn't sound too anxious to sign off until he'd fully filled Desmond in.

“Jasper's that buddy of Dale's, right?”

Kendell explained some more.

“What do you want me to tell Nick?”

Kendell had some ideas.

“He'll never go for that. Larry might.”

Desmond listened some more.

“What surgery?”

Kendell elaborated.

“But he's going to be all right?”

Kendell rattled on. That was about as much talk as I'd ever known Kendell to spill out in one sitting.

“Yeah, a little. With the lazy eye. What's he got to do with this?”

Kendell clearly had an expansive idea about that Hoyt and his sparkly colleague. Desmond heard him out, just threw in the occasional “Uh-huh.”

“I'll tell him if I see him,” Desmond informed Kendell. “You know Nick. If he beat down Jasper, he had good reason to do it. I wouldn't have hung around either. Cops get crazy about shit like that.”

Kendell, being a cop, had to try to straighten Desmond out a little. He was right in the middle of it when the girl came with our food. She was hopelessly chatty and was prattling about everything she'd brought, which prompted Larry to point at Desmond and tell her, “My man's on a call.”

Desmond shouted, “Kendell,” a couple of times into the phone. “Lost you,” he said and hit the
END
button to switch the damn thing off.

“If Kendell's anywhere around here,” I told Desmond, “he'll know just where to find us.”

Desmond plucked up a relish packet and shook it like he always did. Four times and then he flicked it with his finger before he tore off the front right corner.

“I'm eating my Coney Islands,” he said, “and I'm doing it right here.”

So Desmond and Larry ate late-lunch hot dogs—there's no chicken fried anything at the Sonic—while I nibbled a little at a Sonic burger and kept an eye out on everybody around us. Once you've been attacked in a Walmart by a sparkly giggler and a hulking guy with too many teeth shopping for thread, then the world looks less congenial to you as a general thing.

“Wonder if she eats,” I said as I was looking around the Sonic lot.

“Who?” Desmond asked me.

“Ninja.”

“Everybody eats.”

“She's all muscle and veins and sinews and shit. She might just get by on venom.”

“I'm having lunch back here,” Larry told me. “Don't want to be thinking about her.”

“I'm just saying she's not like us.”

“She ain't like anybody. When did you last beat a guy half to death with a tennis racket? Maybe she's some little guy in a dress.”

“No,” I told Larry. “There's a girl in there somewhere. The question is, what do we do about her? And what do we do about Shambrough?”

“Can't they pick her up for Skeeter?” Desmond asked me.

“I don't know if we can wait until then.”

“Think she was even trying to kill him?” Desmond wanted to know. “She beat up Izzy and that woman, too. They're all broken to pieces, but they're still here, and Larry's guy down in Belzoni proves she knows the difference. Wouldn't Skeeter be dead if that's how she'd wanted him?”

“I don't know,” I said. “She might be saving Larry for that.”

That prompted a spasm from Larry. “It wasn't nothing but tires!” he told us. “How in the world's that something to get dead over?”

I let Larry snivel for very nearly an entire minute. He made me and Desmond understand that he didn't want to die.

“I ought to tell Tula something,” I said to Desmond.

“What's going on with you two?” he asked me.

“I get her thinking she likes me a little and then I go and fuck things up.”

“Yeah,” Desmond decided. “You ought to tell her something.”

He gave me his phone, and I went with it over to one of the picnic tables and perched on it. The one back in the slash pine hedgerow where you couldn't see a thing and nobody had a clear view of you. It didn't mean I couldn't still hear Desmond telling Larry to shut up or smell the fryer oil exhaust from the massive Sonic vent. But it was a little private, as the Sonic went.

I was planning on what to say and just coming to the realization that I didn't know Tula's number. It was in my phone, and my phone was still over at the Greenwood PD. So I was irritated about that when a gentleman came to join me. He didn't have any food with him, but he had thought to bring a shotgun. The barrel was rusty, and the stock looked like somebody had driven framing nails with it. This was not a man who gave a happy damn about his guns.

“Get up,” he said.

I turned to look at him. I was sitting on the table with my feet on the bench.

“I'd be killing you now, but somebody wants at you first.”

He was whiskery, and his dungarees were slick from wear and filth. He had too many teeth, and the bulk of them were turned sideways.

“You a Hoyt?”

That stopped him a little. “Maybe.”

I went to shove Desmond's phone into my pocket, and that fellow jumped a half foot into the air.

“Easy,” I told him.

He didn't like that much. He jabbed me with the end of his barrel. “Come on.”

“Can't I pick up my lunch?”

“What the hell do you think?”

“I think I paid for it already.”

He poked me again. “Come on.”

“There's probably enough for you.”

“Got the gun here, don't I? I'll eat the whole damn business.”

“Oh,” I told him. “Right.” I eased up off the table and stood on the concrete slab.

He poked me again and grunted.

“Easy now. Let's you and me go to the window and pick it up.”

I stepped toward a gap in the pine trees, didn't wait for him to talk. He came behind me, shotgun leveled still.

“Might want to drop that a little,” I told him. “Don't want people to think what they'll think.”

That seemed sufficiently reasonable to him. He lowered the barrel and went all casual like he was coming off the skeet range, and that was really all I required.

The trick to this sort of thing is commitment. That's my theory, anyway. I always go in full bore, as hard as I can. I never pull a punch, and I exploit every opening. You can't be both wailing on a guy and worried that you're hurting him. It's best to be decided that hurting him is what it's all about.

So I whipped around on that Hoyt, held down his shotgun barrel with my left hand, and flattened his nose with a straight right to his face. It's the sort of punch that usually causes a man to forget just what he's up to. He's suddenly blind and in too damn much pain to care about you anymore.

That Hoyt let go of his gun as he reached for his nose. It hit the cement and broke in about six pieces. I can't imagine the thing would have even fired. The lone shell in the breach was rusty, too, but I couldn't let that stop me, so I throttled him some more. He took a few wild swings before I caught him low and high and low, which earned the noise I like to hear when I'm having to scuff up a guy.

In keeping with my practice, I hit him one time further, a left to the jaw that sent that Hoyt sprawling onto the picnic table. I dragged him all the way up and left him there, took his trigger assembly with me just in case he came to with more gumption than I had to suspect Hoyts had.

“Get her?” Desmond asked me.

I showed him my chunk of shotgun. “They're coming at me from all over.”

“Who?”

“Another Hoyt.”

Larry went twitching like his head was on a swivel. “Where?”

I country pointed nowhere much with my nose.

Larry whimpered a little. “Don't never want to see another tire.”

“I'd say it's like the zombie apocalypse,” I told them both, “if I thought that was fair to zombies.”

 

TWENTY

We loaded that Hoyt up and took him with us over Larry's objections. Larry thought we ought to kill him. He thought I should kill him, anyway. And he thought I should kill him over on the picnic table where he wouldn't have to see it.

I shoved that Hoyt into the wayback with Desmond's spare tire by way of saying no.

We taped him good, me and Desmond did. Desmond always had plenty of tape. But for duct tape, Desmond's mother's house would have long since fallen to pieces, and the Geo Desmond had sold to Dale had a blue duct tape interior because Desmond was hard on upholstery and tape was close to Kevlar in Desmond's view.

The roll in the Escalade was red and made that Hoyt look decorative. We'd backed up as close as we could to the slash pine hedgerow and the picnic table, but some of the Sonic clientele couldn't help but see what we were up to—pitching a grimy, unconscious fellow into the back of Desmond's car and binding him up at the wrists and ankles, covering his mouth as well. They just kept on eating like we were a typical Sonic sort of thing.

“Where to?” Desmond asked me.

It was midafternoon, and we needed some sort of hideout.

“Remember that place down by Mayersville?”

“At the landing?”

That was it. I nodded. Me and Desmond had gone down to pick up a settee from a guy in a trailer near Mayersville. We discovered he'd bugged out and had done us the kindness of leaving his sofa in the yard, where his chickens had taken it over and had fairly well spoiled the thing. We took a snapshot of it and left it there.

After that, me and Desmond dawdled. We rode up to a place called Miller's Landing that was hard by a bend in the river. There was a fine old rambling house out there somebody had refitted. It had a new metal roof and what looked like new windows. The siding had been painted. There was a lake next to the property. An old guy was fishing there. He was jolly and caramel colored and wearing a coolie hat. It was about as big around as a trash can lid.

He saw us standing at the plank fence looking at that house.

“Ain't home,” he shouted. “Ain't never home.”

We went over to where he was sitting.

“Who owns it?” I asked him.

“Folks from up north. Think they said Cleveland or somewhere. Thought they'd come in the winter or something, but it ain't really no better down here.”

“Nice place,” Desmond told him.

He spat and allowed, “It's all right.” Then he pulled up his stringer to show us a carp he'd caught, a tubby old thing with whiskers. It must have weighed ten pounds.