Beluga (28 page)

Tula fetched a foot-long piece of two-by-four she'd been using for a doorstop.

“Come on,” I told Larry. I led him out on the back stoop.

“I'm hungry, man.”

“In a minute.”

I went at the hinge of Larry's left cuff with Tula's board for a backstop. I drove that screwdriver right through the fitting, and the pin came flying out.

“The stuff's crap,” I informed Larry.

Tula had parked behind me, leaning against the jamb. “Didn't say Shambroughs weren't tight.”

Once CJ had gotten liberated from his bedroom, I let him bust off Larry's other cuff that Larry tried to snivel about.

Tula made us omelets while I called Desmond, who in turn called Kendell. We heard cars out front soon enough. Shawnica didn't bother to knock, she just came charging right on in.

She saw me. She saw Larry. She told us both, “Uh-huh.”

She was so happy her brother was safe and alive that she didn't even hit him hard enough to make her stick-on nails fall off.

“What did you bring her for?” I asked Desmond on the sly.

“Because,” he explained to me, “she told me she was coming.”

Shawnica was admiring Tula's decor by then. She was eyeing the front room, anyway, while telling Tula, “Well, all right.”

CJ appeared to find Shawnica mesmerizing. What with her sparkly nails and her clattering bracelets and her high-volume approach to conversation, there was an awful lot (if you didn't know her) to be mesmerized about.

“Hey, little man,” she finally told CJ once she'd noticed him gawking at her. “Come on here.” She opened her arms to him, picked him up, and held him on her bony hip as she passed into the kitchen. It was the single most normal and motherly thing I'd ever seen Shawnica do.

I must have glanced at Desmond with stark wonderment on my face.

He grunty groaned my way and told me, “See.”

Larry was busy informing Kendell what that Shambrough and his ninja schoolgirl assassin had gotten up to along with what they'd clearly hoped to be about, so all I had to do was wait until he finished and tidy up the facts for Kendell a bit.

In the meantime, I asked Desmond, “How did you leave it with Pearl?”

“She's out in the car,” he told me. “Asleep.”

“Why didn't you just drop her home?”

“I was driving all over looking for you. Come out and you were gone.”

“Hoyts,” I told him. “Six or eight of them. The one with the shovel mattered.”

“Was ours in the bunch?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And they took you straight to Shambrough?”

I nodded and jabbed a thumb at Larry. He was in the middle of describing to Kendell all the basement trouble we'd been in.

“So there's some Hoyts we need to scuff up,” I told Desmond, “a ninja assassin we need in jail, and a Shambrough I'd like to kick around the yard.”

Larry was all for visiting vengeance on the bunch of them right then, but Kendell wanted to get the proper paperwork and arrange for suitable backup. Kendell was always a wait-until-daylight sort of guy.

I was too tired to care and even a little hungry by then. We all had eggs. We all had toast. We sat at Tula's kitchen table. Pearl finally wandered in around midnight and found us sitting at the dinette.

“I must look a fright,” she told us. She was as right as she'd ever been. She looked like somebody had grabbed her by the ankle and dragged her through the yard.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“I think I fell in the bushes a little.”

“You okay?” Tula asked.

Pearl nodded. “That man startled me.”

“What man?”

Pearl country pointed. “Had a whole bunch of teeth.”

Desmond beat us all outside. He just went sailing across the front room, down the steps, and into the yard with me and Kendell and Tula behind him.

There wasn't anything to see, but Desmond held up his hand to stop us all from talking. It turned out there was something to hear up the side road just west of Tula's house.

I know cars well enough to recognize a carbureted Chevy V-6 grinding. Plenty of spark but not enough gas.

“It's that damn Biscayne,” I said.

Kendell was the only one of us who had a gun, but we were all pretty well armed (even Tula) with unchecked indignation. If these were the Hoyts who'd snatched me and Larry, they'd need more than a camp shovel and a 20-gauge in seven pieces to hope to hold us off.

We just followed the grinding. Up the road and around a hedgerow. Hoyts were spilling out of the Chevy by then like yellow jackets from a hole in the ground. The ones who could run were bolting, including the boy who'd smacked me with the shovel. Kendell played his flashlight on the pack of them. I saw mine and tore out after him.

Goodloe was sitting behind the wheel pumping the accelerator.

“Hey, buddy,” I told him as I ran past.

He looked flabbergasted to see me. I had to think people they delivered to Lucas Shambrough rarely saw the light of day again.

The boy I was chasing couldn't manage much running. That pack and a half a day wouldn't let him draw the air he needed, so soon enough he began to flag and I closed on him and a cousin or something. They turned to meet me when they heard me coming and got into the spirit of the thing. They didn't have a folding shovel between them, but one of them had a pocketknife, and the other one, my shovel boy, went to pick up a stick in the road that turned out to be a copperhead.

“Shit!” he told us. He had it by the tail and threw the damn thing at me.

I think I screamed about like Pearl would have. I don't care for snakes.

That got them laughing. They seemed to believe a guy afraid of a reptile wasn't a proper candidate to beat them both the hell up.

So they got bold and came at me, with one knife between them and enough teeth for four adults.

First I kicked the snake aside. He was aggravated by then and gathered up in a coil at the edge of the road to strike at anything handy. When the Hoyt with the knife came jabbing it at me, I caught his arm under mine, wheeled around, and flipped him over. I wasn't aiming to drop him right onto that snake, but that's where he ended up. Then he screamed kind of like Pearl would have as it struck him a half-dozen times.

The other one told me, “Shit,” again. That might have been all he had. He appeared uncertain if he should keep up the charge or turn around and run. That was all I needed to catch him. I lacked a shovel but had my fist, and I slugged him twice.

“Hit me with a damn shovel,” I reminded him.

“Weren't personal!”

“Sure seemed it.” I hit him again.

Pounding Hoyts and people like them isn't terribly satisfying. Though this boy didn't pile up like Larry would have, he wasn't about to become enlightened. He wasn't going to come around to the view that he shouldn't hit people with shovels. He'd been charged to do it by a Shambrough and blood relatives together, so it wasn't like he could have kept from it even if he'd wanted to.

“Come on,” I told him and grabbed his shirt collar.

“What about him?” he asked me of the envenomated Hoyt on the road.

“He can come, too.”

“I'm bit,” that one told me.

“Then you'd better come on before you start swelling.”

He got to his knees. “Won't nobody help me?”

“Snake's coming back,” I told him.

That sparked him some. We didn't gain on him until we were nearly to the car.

Desmond and Kendell and Tula had all of the rest of those Hoyts corralled by then. There were eight of them altogether, including my two. Three of them seemed to be women. Marginal females, anyway. They had higher voices and longer hair, but they were as rough and homely as the men. Even the one our Hoyt kept referring to as “my bride” looked like she had some Hoyt in the woodpile. She had bad Hoyt hair and a bad Hoyt nose and smelled just like a muskrat.

When she opened her mouth to yell at Tula and threaten her with a beating, she revealed a lot more snuff-stained gums than teeth.

“Honey,” our Goodloe kept saying to her the whole time that she raged.

Once she'd barked out, “Fucker!” Tula popped her good. Just gave her one flush on the chin with a vigor I admired.

It didn't seem to faze that woman. She pointed at Goodloe as she informed Tula, “I was talking to him.”

“This one's snakebit,” I told Kendell.

He had his radio on his belt, so I thought he might order up a rescue squad truck straightaway, but Kendell was always his thorough self, no matter the circumstance.

“A snake, you say?”

“Copperhead,” I told him.

The bit Hoyt had dropped to the road and was moaning. “I'm swelling up!”

“Where did it bite you?” Kendell wanted to know.

“Every damn where.”

“He kind of landed on it,” I said.

“You kind of made me.” He groaned some more.

“Heat of battle, you know?” I said to Kendell.

“And that one?” he asked me of the Hoyt I had in hand.

“Hit me with a shovel. Knocked me cold. All of them here put me and Larry in the trunk of that damn car. Crime enough for you?”

Kendell guessed it was. He keyed his radio mic and raised the Greenville dispatcher.

“Captain still over at Shambrough's?” he asked, but the dispatcher couldn't say.

“Saw his cruiser,” I told Kendell. “Some kind of diplomat?”

Kendell made his sour face, blew a breath, and nodded. “Thinks he can talk most anything smooth.”

“So he was upstairs with Mr. Lucas while she was downstairs working on us.”

“What can I tell you? They keep voting him in.”

“He know anything about police work?”

“About twice as much as Pearl.”

We walked those Hoyts over to Tula's yard and had them all sit in a row. There wasn't much to do while we waited for the cruisers and the ambulance other than listen to the snakebit Hoyt raise a fuss and chat about this and that.

“Heard about something with Jasper,” Kendell told me. “Some dustup over in Greenwood.”

“He's always knocking into shit. You know how that goes.”

“Tripped, did he?”

I didn't have to say yes. I didn't have to say no. I just had to look at Kendell and smile.

Pearl came out once she'd heard us. Shawnica followed her with CJ.

“Might want to stay up there,” I told Pearl.

So she came straight down toward the road.

“He all right?” she asked of the bit Hoyt.

I nodded. “Bad clams or something.”

The rest of the Hoyts were all sitting in a row. Pearl took her time looking them over.

She soon said with delight, like I'd figured she would, “Goodloe, is that you?”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

The captain came out with the cruisers and the rescue squad. He was all brass and martial finery and cologne. I'd never laid eyes on him before, but Desmond knew him well enough.

“Greer,” he told me. “Went to school with him. Hasn't ever been worth a shit.”

He was slick, though. I had to give him that. It didn't surprise me to learn that he came from a family of funeral home directors. He had that bittersweet eulogizing way about him like he knew where you hurt and precisely how much, and he was feeling that way as well.

Kendell introduced us. “This is Nick Reid, sir.”

Captain Greer—his name was Riley—extended his hand while still looking at Kendell.

“Lucas Shambrough had him and that boy there”—Kendell nodded in Larry's direction—“imprisoned in his basement when he was talking to you upstairs.”

Captain Riley had a tight smile for news such as that. He nodded sharply, turned and finally looked at me.

“Imprisoned,” he said. He still wasn't prepared to think such a thing of a Shambrough. His people had probably been paid in full for burying Shambroughs for years.

“Shackled to a wall,” I told him. “You see a girl roaming around the house?”

“Brunette?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Plaid skirt.”

“Might have passed through the foyer,” he said.

“You know those beatings you're looking into?”

He knew just what I meant. He nodded.

“Her,” I said.

Riley showed me his teeth. He turned and showed them to Kendell. “Just a child,” he said to Kendell. Then he turned and said it to me.

“Naw.” That was Desmond. He'd glided over.

“How you?” The captain said it like he couldn't begin to figure how Desmond hadn't been taken by heart failure or a stroke. He eyed Desmond up and down in a leisurely and disapproving sort of way.

“Wants folks to think she's not but a girl, but she beats people up, and your buddy, that Shambrough, he watches and jerks off.”

You'd have thought Desmond had told the captain that Jesus was a cannibal.

“No!” Captain Greer told us all. “I'm knowing Shambroughs all my life.”

“Ain't no count,” Desmond assured him. “Been making a mess of this place for years.”

The captain wasn't the sort inclined to take the word of a civilian, so he gave Kendell a chance to contradict Desmond, but Kendell let him down.

“Bad seed,” Kendell said. “We've been looking the other way for too long.”

Captain Greer sputtered a little. Hauling Lucas Shambrough in was bound to be socially unsavory.

Nobody said anything for about half a minute. It turned out the captain had a grunty groan, too, that he finally uncorked. “See what Lucas has to say for himself?” He laid it out as a suggestion.

“Right,” Kendell told him, “but let's do it with a warrant.”

The captain checked his watch. “First light,” he said.

“What if they bug out?” I asked him.

Kendell and Desmond both chimed in on that. I got a decisive “Won't” and an emphatic “Uh-uh.” They agreed that wasn't a thing a Shambrough would do.