Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (2 page)

Desmond shook his head and grunted.

I shaded my eyes for a good look around. We’d been riding along the swamp bank for three-quarters of an hour and had seen one old leathery black guy fishing with a bobber and pole and a kid pushing a bike with a flat tire and no seat. No county four-by-fours. No state police prowlers. No bug-encrusted crew-cab Chevys from the fleet they keep at Parchman.

“Maybe Kendell heard it wrong,” I said to Desmond. “People talk a lot of junk. Maybe nobody went anywhere. Try Rejondo?”

Desmond sighed and nodded. He didn’t have much use for the boy. Rejondo was Desmond’s sister’s son, and he worked as a guard at Parchman. He sold yard statuary as a sideline and wore godawful cologne. It smelled like a piña colada a Tri Delt had already thrown up.

We drove straight to Parchman, and I pulled up to the guardhouse. I recognized the guy inside. We’d repossessed his bedroom suite. Bedstead. Nighstands. Bureau. Dressing table. The whole outfit. His wife had made him buy it all, and then she’d run off with a Tunica pit boss. He’d been happy enough to see us come and haul the stuff away. We’d ended up having a beer with the fellow sitting on his back porch steps.

“Hey, bud,” I told him as we rolled up to the gate.

He squinted at me, came out of the guardhouse, and had a look at Desmond as well. “She come back,” he said. “Told you she would. Made her buy her own damn dresser.”

We all had a laugh.

“What you need?” he asked.

“Heard you lost one out by Beulah,” I said.

He nodded.

“Went in the bayou or something?”

“That’s what I’m hearing.”

“Find him?”

He shrugged. “Ain’t my end of things.”

“You know his nephew?” I jabbed a thumb Desmond’s way. “Rejondo?”

That fellow nodded. He checked a clipboard with his roster on it. “On at eight,” he told us. “Probably home.”

“Thanks.” I shifted into reverse. “Hope everything works out with the missus.”

“Won’t,” he assured me and went back in his guardhouse to plop onto his stool.

Rejondo lived maybe eight miles from the prison. He had a couple of acres on 49 down by Sumner where him and his girlfriend shared a manufactured home in the middle of the property which was otherwise occupied by cement birdbaths, assorted secular lawn statuary, and a three-foot-tall cast-concrete version of Jesus sitting on a stump. It was popular in churchyards and family plots all over the Delta, probably because it was cheaper than a tombstone and very much in the spirit of the place. The Lord and Savior taking a load off. Desmond called it “Shiftless Christ.”

We pulled up to find Rejondo out in his yard talking cement donkeys with a woman. She was a wide white lady in stretchy velour pants with her hair piled up on her head and a Salem between her lips. Me and Desmond threaded our way through the birdbaths, the geese, the deer, the gnomes, the peeing boys, the praying hands. We drew up short and waited while Rejondo conducted business.

That woman wanted a bulk discount on a pair of cement donkeys. Rejondo was of the view two didn’t constitute a bulk.

“What do you even do with one of them?” Desmond asked me in a Desmond baritone whisper, which meant people could probably hear him in cars along the road.

“You put your goddamn geraniums in them,” the wide white woman told us. She didn’t even turn full around to do it or take the cigarette out of her mouth.

That woman offered Rejondo half of what he was asking.

“Got more in them than that,” he told her.

She went up, and Rejondo gave the impression of coming down. But there was the stocking fee to consider, the yard-art tax, the hauling charge. Every time she thought she had him, they’d be lurking where they’d started. Then he gave her a break on delivery—knocked a ten spot off.

“Thirty usually,” he told her, “but they’ll do it for twenty.” He eyed us across the way.

“Bring them right now?” she asked him.

“Follow you home,” he said.

“Figures,” Desmond muttered.

That wide white woman swiveled around to take the two of us in. We didn’t appear to inspire much donkey-delivery confidence in her.

She shook her head. She flicked her butt. She told Rejondo, “I guess.”

“Boys?” Rejondo said and pointed at that pair of cement donkeys.

I looked at Desmond. He shrugged. That was Rejondo all over. He’d calculated we’d come for something from him, so he’d get his something first.

That’s how we came to be hauling cement donkeys for a wide white woman in a Suzuki. She spent the whole time we were carting her purchases over to my Ranchero squeezing herself under the wheel of her Samurai. Rejondo gave us some cardboard to protect the paint on my Ranchero bed. He chucked a box at us, anyway, that we could flatten or not.

“Where do you live, ma’am?” Rejondo asked the woman.

She pointed at her headliner and told all of us, “Memphis.”

I was just beginning to sputter when she went on to explain that, for donkey-delivery purposes, she had a weekend place near Grady.

Rejondo stepped over to my Ranchero just as me and Desmond were settling in.

“Here about that Boudrot?” he asked.

We nodded.

“I’ll get on the horn and try to have something for you when you get back.”

When Desmond finally spoke, we were about halfway to Grady. He shook his head and said, “Ain’t this some shit?”

Naturally, we toted that woman’s donkeys all over what passed for her yard. She had a miniature windmill in it already, a canopied glider, a wishing well, a lawn tractor with a broken front axle, a flatboat on a trailer, and I think I counted three derelict barbecue grills. In her defense, it was hard to find a spot cement donkeys might improve. They ended up in her front yard either side of her stoop.

By way of thank you, that woman told us, “Don’t be looking for no tip.”

We were barely out of her driveway when Tula called me.

“Got something you’ll want to see,” she said.

“Right now?”

“Yep.” Then she shifted away from her phone to tell somebody, “Why don’t you back the hell on up.”

Tula was out by the river, off Highway 1 just north of Legion Lake, about halfway between Beulah and Rosedale. By the time me and Desmond arrived, Kendell was on the scene as well, along with a no-neck deputy I knew only by reputation. He was a bad one to tap on folks with his nightstick as a first resort.

There were maybe a dozen civilians as well—neighbors and passersby—who’d gotten wind of calamity and had swung over to have a look. They were all gathered in a sun-baked patch of open ground between a ratty trailer home and one of those corporate tractor sheds, a steel and tin monstrosity about the size of an airplane hangar.

An EMT truck pulled in just behind us, so me and Desmond walked over toward Tula and Kendell in the company of a couple of techs who were arguing over what constituted a college football fumble and kept at it—barking back and forth about whose damn knee was down—until Kendell plugged the pair of them up by saying one time, “Hey!”

That’s when me and Desmond saw the body. A white guy in his underwear. Maybe forty and on the stout side. His head was a sticky bloody mess, and he had what looked like a wooden chair leg jammed into his chest.

“Stole his car,” Kendell told us. “Yellow Gold Duster with lifters and mess.”

“Who?” Desmond asked, and Kendell pointed us to Tula.

She was squatting by the corpse taking photographs. She rose as me and Desmond approached. The mineral stink of gore was thick in the air, and what bugs there were had gathered.

“Show them,” Tula said to her no-neck deputy colleague who used the tip of his nightstick to lift a shirt off the ground. Green and gray stripes, like an awning. Baggy, scratchy twill. Parchman garb.

THREE

“Why are we even here?” Desmond wanted to know.

We were parked by then with Tula and Kendell in what passed with the Greenville PD for an interrogation room. It had been somebody’s office once. They’d left a credenza in it and had brought in a stout steel table and a half-dozen plastic chairs. There was a sheet of knotty plywood where the one-way glass should have been and boxes of files stacked head high full across the back wall.

“Whatever you got up to with that Boudrot—” Kendell started.

“Didn’t get up to nothing
with
him,” Desmond said.

“Fine.” Kendell settled back and showed us his palms. “All I’m telling you is we don’t care. You did what you did.”

Tula wasn’t entirely on board with that, which she made plain in a glance.

“You tell him,” Desmond instructed me.

“Tell him what?”

“About that gator of his and shit.”

“Gator?” Tula asked us.

I didn’t quite know where to start, so I wound all the way back to where it began. “Percy Dwayne Dubois owed on a TV. Instead of handing the damn thing over, he hit me with a fireplace shovel. They took my Ranchero, him and his wife. Pearl’s Ranchero at the time. And somehow the wife and the baby and the car all ended up with that Boudrot.”

“Somehow?” Kendell asked me.

“I wasn’t ever clear on why. I guess that Boudrot liked the car. Liked the wife a little too. Took them to a place he had down by Blue Hole.”

“Burned down, didn’t it?” Tula asked. It was more of an accusation than a question.

I nodded. Desmond shifted and groaned.

“A lot of fire in his life for a few days there.” Kendell gave us that smile of his that looks primarily like a wince.

“Meth houses, you know,” Desmond told him. “Damn things go up all the time.”

“You didn’t help?” Kendell asked, looking from me to Desmond.

“Could have been more careful probably,” I allowed.

Tula, as it turned out, had a snort for that.

“Kind of tangled with him, didn’t you?” Kendell asked us. He tapped on that Boudrot’s booking sheet. “Concussion. Broken collarbone. Thirty-two stitches altogether.”

I glanced at Desmond, and he was the one who nodded and said, “Scuffed him up. He sort of made us. Knife and all. Right?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“We figure he’s coming after you,” Tula told me and Desmond. “That’s what we’re hearing out of Parchman anyway.”

“We heard he’d been stewing,” I said. “Doubt he’s the sort to let shit go.”

“Crazy fucker,” Desmond added. “Don’t need to be after you to kill you. Guy with the chair leg in him didn’t do nothing but own a car.”

“Any idea where he might be headed?” Kendell asked us.

We shrugged.

“Does he know where to look for you two?”

We shrugged again. Who were we to say what that Acadian fuckstick knew.

“And the gator?” Tula asked me.

“Used to feed people to it once he’d whacked them into chunks. Down by Yazoo, back in the national forest. That’s what we heard anyway.”

Once me and Desmond were out of the station house proper and heading for my Ranchero, Desmond said, “Got to tell those boys right quick. Give them a chance to see him coming.”

“In a yellow Gold Duster with lifters and mess? Shouldn’t be much of a chore.”

“Might ought to start with Dale,” Desmond said.

Dale had been an overmuscled pinhead cop back when we’d steered him to that Boudrot. Now he was a flabby pinhead civilian working for K-Lo like we did.

“And let’s hit Rejondo’s on the way back,” I suggested. “See if he turned up anything.”

He hadn’t. He claimed to have tried to. Rejondo told us about the phone calls he’d made to various of his Parchman buddies who didn’t among them seem to know squat. An inmate was loose—they’d heard that much—and he’d stirred up some sort of trouble.

“Killed a guy already,” Desmond informed him. “Needed his clothes and his car.”

Rejondo took a moment to seem sorrowful on the corpse’s behalf before saying to me and Desmond, “Help me a second here, how about it?”

Desmond headed for my Ranchero and left it to me to tell him, “Nope.”

We arrived back at the Indianola shop to find K-Lo irritated. Not uncommonly irritated, but just standard-issue ill. He was standing out front on the sidewalk polishing off a Pall Mall.

“Where the hell you been?” he barked our way.

Before we could even begin to tell him, Peabo came out of the store with a couple of questions for K-Lo. Peabo was six foot eight with the physique of a silo and the intellect of one as well. He had a knack for repo largely because he was comprehensively fearless, chiefly due to the fact he didn’t have the good sense to be scared.

Peabo’s hobbies were fishing and getting tattooed. As a giant pale-white guy, he made for a fine canvas. He’d just see stuff in the course of a day and run off and get it inked. He had a sunset over a pecan grove across his right shoulder blade. A Willys Jeep on his left forearm. A sturgeon on his biceps. The face of some girl he’d met at the auto auction on the back of his right hand. There were hounds all over the place—across his torso and down his legs—along with Peabo’s aunt Judy’s tabby cat, Buster, who occupied one entire calf.

Peabo had come out with his usual brace of questions for K-Lo: Would he get overtime if he worked past five and why exactly not?

K-Lo told him, like he always did, “No, dammit,” and, “Because.”

Peabo raised his big pink hand and rubbed his shaved head with it. He said to K-Lo, “Well, all right,” which was what he always said.

“Where’s Dale?” I asked Peabo. Since they were both big, hulking white guys, they kind of hung together.

“He was out back yesterday.”

“We’re sort of looking for him now.”

Peabo shrugged and then asked K-Lo if he worked past five tomorrow could he maybe draw that overtime he wasn’t drawing today.

Dale was in the toilet down the hall past K-Lo’s office. The room was barely big enough for the commode and the sink, and a well-fed cat could have walked under the door. Dale stayed constipated from supplements and muscle enhancers and usually just leafed through his latest copy of
Muscle Pro
for a quarter hour. Then he’d flush and come out to tell everybody in earshot, “Didn’t do no good.”

I heard him flip a page over. “Hey, Dale,” I said.