Beluga (29 page)

“What about her?” I asked. “Ought to at least sit on the place.”

The captain couldn't be immediately sure that was a bad idea, so I pressed the advantage and told him. “Me and him and Officer Raintree.” I pointed at Desmond. “Out on the road just keeping track of who goes in and out. Nothing happens until Kendell shows up with the warrants.”

“Where's your badge?” the captain asked me.

“Used to be a cop,” Kendell told him.

That prompted some kind of aphorism about
used to be
and
shoulda coulda.
As tough as it was, I think I even managed to smile through that.

It turned out the captain was one of those guys you just had to wait out. He didn't need everything done his way. He just had to seem in charge. So once we'd paid sufficient deference to his rank by saying nothing, Captain Riley Greer told Kendell, “All right.” Then he shook hands all around, even with Desmond, who smiled while he compressed a bone or two.

Once the Hoyts were tidied up and hauled off, both the snakebit one and the rest, Shawnica and Pearl volunteered to stay behind at Tula's with CJ, and Larry proved keen to protect them, so we let him stay as well. Kendell went off to Greenville to catch a few winks at the station house and wait for a decent hour to call a judge.

For my part, I got to spend another night with Tula after a fashion. Tula and Desmond, anyway, in Desmond's Escalade.

We parked out past the commissary building on the Geneill Road where me and Desmond had first stopped when he'd showed me Shambrough's place. The floodlights were all still burning, and there were three or four vehicles in the drive.

I'd let Tula have shotgun with Desmond up front, so I was obliged to hang over the seat back like a kid.

“Who do you figure's down there?”

“Cronies,” Desmond told me.

“Cronies?” Tula asked him before I could get it out.

Desmond looked at her. He looked at me. “Cronies,” he told us again.

“Like who?” I asked him.

“Her, probably,” he said. “How bad did you leave her?”

“Two hard rights. Larry wanted to brain her with her hammer.”

“Wanted
you
to brain her.” Desmond knew Larry.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Punching seemed enough.”

Tula just listened, looking back and forth between us. She let the chat fall off to nothing before she jabbed her thumb my way and said to Desmond, “Is he any count?”

“I'm sitting right here.”

Desmond eyed me in the mirror. “Mostly,” he told her.

“Mostly?” I said.

“Dependable?” Tula asked.

Desmond thought about that one. “On time and all, if that's what you mean.”

“Trust him with your life?” she asked him. She looked at me while she did it.

Desmond laughed. “About every third day.”

“Tell her about that swamp rat,” I suggested.

Desmond's hand went immediately toward the scar on his calf.

“Not the one with the gator,” I said. “The other one. Guy down by Yazoo with the Thompson.”

“That gun jammed,” Desmond told me.

“I didn't know that.”

“True enough,” Desmond said. He turned to Tula. “He might have got all shot to pieces. Didn't.”

“Just tell her I'm good in a fix and all right the rest of the time.”

Desmond eyed me in the mirror again. “What he said. I guess.”

The lights never went out down at Shambrough's, and nobody came or went. No cronies got dispatched or sent for. Only Shambrough's hound made a racket. About every half hour or so it would bark and bay for a minute or two but seemed to know enough to stop before the boot or the bullet came.

At around three, I switched places with Desmond so he could stretch out in the back. Or tumble over, anyway, and snore. Tula was dozing against her door by then, so it was just me sitting and looking. The moon was down. Even Shambrough's browbeaten hound was asleep.

Tula groaned and shifted my way. She grabbed my arm by the wrist and raised it, slipped in underneath, and laid her head against my chest.

“A Thompson, huh?”

“Full magazine. Guy didn't know from gun oil.”

“Brave man.”

“Fool sometimes. Don't want to keep that from you.”

“You haven't,” she told me.

She stayed where she was anyway and went back to sleep.

*   *   *

We were all awake and ready for Kendell by the time he showed up. Ready for coffee, anyway, and Kendell being a decent Christian had brought some. Being a cheap, decent Christian he'd brought it from home, where he and his wife drank flavor crystals. I dumped mine when I slipped off around the derelict commissary to relieve myself.

The captain was bringing the warrants.

“Thought he ought to,” Kendell told us.

“He still think it's all a big misunderstanding?” Tula asked him.

Kendell nodded.

A couple of other cruisers rolled up to join us soon enough. The sergeant from the Alluvian men's room was driving one of them, and a beefy guy I'd never seen before but was happy to have along racked a round into his shotgun as he rolled out of his sedan.

“Bound to know we're up here,” Tula said.

She hadn't bothered with her uniform. Just jeans still for her, but she'd carried her service piece along and dropped the clip to check it.

“This'll go quiet,” Kendell told us. Told himself, I think, a little as well. You had to admire the way people cling to pedigree in the Delta. Lucas Shambrough would be polite and go easy because that's just what Shambroughs did. They were all so convinced of it I even let myself be convinced of it a little.

The captain finally showed up around eight. He had the paper, but he still lacked the conviction. He was wearing a different brassy uniform and a fresh dose of his piney cologne.

“Let me try this,” he said mostly to Kendell.

“Try what?”

“Go down. Have a private word.”

“Just you?”

He tugged at his uniform jacket and gave a curt nod.

“Don't like it,” Kendell told him.

“Mind's made up. I'm going down.”

“They've got a body on them already,” Kendell said.

“We don't know that.”

“We sort of do,” Desmond told the captain.

He wasn't the type to tolerate counsel from some blubbery Delta local who wasn't remotely a Shambrough or anything close.

“I'm going down,” the captain said. He added just generally, “As you were.”

So we stood around like we had been and watched him ease down the drive in his cruiser.

“Might go all right,” the sergeant said, the one from the Alluvian men's room.

Kendell looked like he thought differently. I know me and Desmond did. Desmond went fishing in his Escalade and brought his rifle out. It was a .30-06 that Desmond could hit any damn thing he pleased with. Desmond only raised it when he wanted something dead.

“Who all's down there?” That from the beefy officer with the shotgun.

Tula told him, “Don't know. Haven't seen anything but the dog.”

There'd been nobody in the yard. Nobody on the drive. I couldn't even remember a car passing by, and we were kind of on the way to the truck route. It felt like anybody who could steer clear of us already was.

We saw Captain Greer get out of his cruiser. We watched the hound close on him and cower. Only Kendell had proper binoculars, so he told us what was going on once the captain had slipped under the canopy of Lucas Shambrough's massive live oak trees.

“Knocking,” he said.

Then nothing for a bit.

“Knocking,” he told us again. “Here we go.”

“Little black woman?” I asked him.

Kendell shook his head. “The man himself. Looking up here.” Nothing for a quarter minute from Kendell. Then he lowered his binoculars and told us all, “Inside.”

“How long?” Tula asked.

“I'll give him ten minutes. Maybe fifteen,” Kendell told her.

It turned out we didn't have to wait nearly that long. Kendell was explaining to his officers just how he wanted them deployed when me and Desmond heard a
pop
from down around Shambrough's house.

The cops all missed it, huddled and talking cop strategy and all.

I glanced at Desmond, who nodded the way he does.

“Gunshot,” I said.

Kendell clammed up and wheeled. “Where?”

I pointed toward Lucas Shambrough's pile of a house.

“You sure?”

We all heard the second one.

I told Kendell, “Yeah.”

They went scurrying to their cruisers. Kendell told me and Desmond, “Stay here.”

They were hardly into the driveway before we heard a flurry of shots. Pistol fire, it sounded like, in lethal concentration.

I pulled two .45s from my duffel.

“I'll go down and around,” I told Desmond.

“I'm going to plug up the drive,” he said.

So I found myself on the near end of the bean field I'd run through with Larry just the night before. There wasn't any cover to speak of out there, but everybody sounded a bit too occupied already to trouble with the likes of me. I ran down and around and came out at the bottom of the Shambrough lot, not twenty yards from where me and Larry had crossed the yard and escaped.

The gunfire had flagged a little by then. I still heard the odd shot. Definitely pistol rounds. Ground floor, as best I could tell. Not the cellar at least.

Then I heard Kendell barking out, “Police!”

I crawled across the yard, leery of crossfire, and got joined by Lucas Shambrough's hound, who wriggled when he saw me. “You again!” he might as well have said for all the prancing and licking he did.

“Come here, boy,” I told him and shifted him behind me. About the last thing I wanted to do was get revved up and shoot a dog.

I heard the squeal of what proved to be a sash in a jamb. A second-floor window slid open, and the ninja schoolgirl assassin—in a denim shift—came crawling out over the sill. She tossed some kind of machine pistol down onto the lawn, hung for just a moment, and then dropped straight to the ground. She didn't even roll when she hit but just crouched and staggered a little. Then she went scrambling for her gun as Tula came out over the sill.

I had a fistful of hound scruff in my left hand and my .45 HK in my right. Just as that girl reached for her gun, I squeezed off three quick rounds. They kicked up dirt all around the thing and caused the creature to raise up.

When she saw me, she seethed about like a child might. I half expected her to stomp her feet.

“Hey, sugar,” I said.

She bent. I fired. Another dirt explosion.

By then Tula had done her hanging from the sill, had found a spot she liked, and had dropped her lanky self onto the ground. I thought maybe she'd just pull her piece on the ninja and corral her the conventional way, but Tula wasn't in the mood for anything as civilized as that. I couldn't be sure what had gone on inside, but I could see that Tula hadn't liked it by the way she dove at that schoolgirl assassin just like a cornerback might. She was laid full out when she hit the girl, rammed into her torso with her shoulder. The force served to pile the both of them up on the ground.

It seemed an even battle at first. They rolled and tussled and grunted. Then Tula caught that ninja with the heel of her hand square on the bridge of her nose. The blood fairly squirted from both her nostrils, which made everything slicker and a hell of a lot more grisly. The sight of her own blood made that ninja madder than she'd been. She loosed a shriek of rage and went at Tula with every kung fu thing she had.

She worked free and got up. Tula got up, too. They'd forgotten about firearms by then and were just going at each other. The ninja schoolgirl was bleeding all over her shift. She went stalking toward Tula and then whipped around and tried to fell her with a kick, the sort of kick Dale would have visited on Desmond if Dale had even a scrap of talent. The ninja assassin knew just what she was about. The trouble was that Tula did, too.

Tula dodged and ducked. She caught the ninja with a punishing blow to the throat. The ninja came back with an elbow. Tula blocked it with her forearm and then shoved down the ninja schoolgirl's head and delivered a knee to her brow. The creature stumbled back, but Tula kept right on her. She delivered a sweeping kick of her own to the ninja schoolgirl's knee. It staggered her further, and then Tula came through with a sweeping roundhouse right that was such a thing of glorious leverage and intent that I was wishing I'd thrown it before it even connected.

The dull thud of Tula's fist on that ninja schoolgirl's jaw was so powerful and concussive I think I felt it in my feet.

Mako/Isis—whoever she was—piled up like Larry might have. Tula dropped on top of her like a good warrior should and rained down a few more blows.

“Hey!” I said.

She kept on punching.

“Enough!” I told her with volume.

When she didn't stop, I finally fired a shot into the air. That snared her notice. Tula glared my way like I just might be next. I had a nose she could flatten, a throat she could punch, a jaw she could slug and shatter.

“Dead or in jail?” I asked her.

Ninja schoolgirl looked lifeless by then. Tula was straddling her with her fists clinched still. She studied the creature's battered face. She stood up and told me, “Done.”

I walked over to where she was standing. I did it slowly and in stages because I know from experience it can take a few minutes to get unprimed from a fight.

“You okay?” I asked from just out of arm's reach.

Tula nodded.

“What happened in there?”

“She shot up the place.”

“The captain?”

“Ducked behind a couch or something. Hit in the arm. Foot, I think.”