Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (21 page)

“Two rooms,” the clerk informed me. He tapped his laminated rate card again. “Triple A?”

I shook my head.

“One thirty.”

“How about a hundred?”

The ledger was closed already, so he yanked it off the counter entirely.

“Fine. One thirty.” I fished out my wallet.

“And no pets.” He pointed toward Barbara. “Even with … clothes.”

I came into the lot with two keys. I gave one to Percy Dwayne for him and Luther and Eugene. I kept the other for me and Desmond and (as much as I hated it) Dale.

“Paid retail,” I told them. “Use all the towels, and don’t pick up shit.”

As it turned out, they didn’t truly need that sort of instruction from me. Our rooms were next door to each, down at the far end by a weedy lot and a Dumpster. The first thing those boys did was crank up the TV. They found an episode of
T. J. Hooker
down the dial, tuned it in. The installment was mid-shootout. Bullets were flying. Music was thumping. William Shatner was emoting at full pitch.

I went over to tell them to crank the thing down and found Luther and Percy Dwayne stretched out buck naked on the beds. Somebody had yanked off Barbara’s old T-shirt, and she was rolling around on a pillow. Eugene was in the shower. Steam was boiling out of the bathroom. I heard him hoot and swear as he slipped in the tub and took the curtain rod to the floor.

Luther and Percy Dwayne both said just, “Hey,” as I stepped into the room.

I suddenly couldn’t locate the gumption to give a happy damn about them. I handed over the slate-gray coveralls I’d bought for them at the Walmart and fresh underwear as well.

Luther and Percy Dwayne’s neighbor popped over soon enough, and me and Desmond sat in our room and listened to the yelling and the threats.

Dale had claimed our bathroom. He’d taken the phone book in with him. The sound of Dale riffling pages was the only human noise he made. Everything else he got up to could have been the work of a cow.

“Got any matches?” I asked Desmond.

“Air strike probably wouldn’t help.”

We heard Luther and the fellow from the room on the other side yelling at each other about what they might get up to, the brawl they might have, and the harm they might do if they could even begin to stir themselves to fight.

I stood up and peeled off my nasty clothes down to my clammy undershorts. I tore the tags off my new coveralls and slipped them on. They were scratchy but clean and smelled like dye.

“I think I’d rather wait in the car,” I told Desmond.

He grunted and followed me to the door.

“You’re not going to change?”

I pointed at the coveralls I’d selected especially for Desmond. They were slate gray like the rest of them but about the size of a weather balloon.

“Things make me look chunky.”

“Give them a try.” I stood at the door and waited.

Desmond stripped down to his shorts and stepped into his coveralls. Dale started whistling what sounded like a Sousa march from the toilet.

Desmond zipped his coveralls shut. He turned full around to model them for me. I saw what he meant. They made him look plumper. Wider through the beam and rounder in the front.

I kept it all to myself and told him, “Looks all right to me.”

Desmond seemed inclined to debate the matter. There was a mirror on the far wall that he eyed himself in. But then Dale groaned and went pure feedlot. We could hear the splashes from where we were. Me and Desmond didn’t so much leave that room as escape it into the dawning.

Instead of just sitting in the car, we went for a ride around greater Columbus, Mississippi. The place was all shopping plazas and burger joints on the outskirts and vacant storefronts in the heart of town. They didn’t get much traffic in downtown Columbus along about half past five in the morning, so me and Desmond alarmed a deputy just by driving past his cruiser. He could have been Dale’s little brother for all his doughy bulk and smarts.

We were just in front of the Lowndes County courthouse when he pulled us over. There wasn’t much me and Desmond could do but groan at each other and sigh.

That deputy had his pistol in hand by the time he closed on us. His flashlight was up at his shoulder. He played the beam of it in on me and Desmond in our matching coveralls.

“Who you supposed to be?”

Desmond reached for his wallet. Desmond was big enough and black enough to know to avoid all sudden motion, but Deputy Dale junior was far too antsy for anybody’s good.

“Uh-uh,” he said and raised his service revolver. He pointed it at the pair of us.

That’s hardly the kind of thing I can tolerate with grace. I’d been a cop myself. I knew to aim my gun at people who needed shooting. You didn’t bring your barrel to bear on two guys just sitting in a car.

“Put that away,” I told that boy. “We haven’t done a thing.”

He keyed his mike with his flashlight hand and called his buddy Gary in.

“Out,” he said and motioned with his pistol for us to join him at the curb.

We rolled out of the Escalade and let Dale Junior herd us to the sidewalk. Desmond had an old sun-faded county sticker on his windshield. The deputy played his light beam on it.

“Sunflower County. Where the hell’s that?”

“Delta,” Desmond told him.

“Well now,” Deputy Dale Junior said, “that ain’t nowhere around here, is it?” Deputy Dale Junior keyed his mike again. “Gary, where the hell are you?”

Gary came back entirely as static.

“We going wait on him,” the deputy told us.

“Wait on him for what?” Desmond said.

The deputy pulled a face to let Desmond know that the very last thing he wanted was lip from a big Delta nigger in coveralls. It’s a law-enforcement look that still prevails in the South. All you have to do to provoke it is be black and say anything.

“You got a plan, Homer?” I asked him.

That got him off Desmond right quick. He pointed his flashlight and gun both my way.

“I’m searching this damn car,” he said.

“On what grounds?”

“Who you? Fucking Matlock?”

We had a shotgun in the Escalade we’d taken off those CashPoint boys and God only knew what else was in there. With six grown men—and two of them Duboises—there was sure to be incriminating detritus.

“You’re going to need a warrant,” I told him.

“Like hell,” he said and came my way.

Thinking back, I probably taught that deputy a valuable lesson in policing. Chiefly: Don’t let some mouthy wiseass in coveralls make you forget what you’re about.

He laid the bore of his pistol against my gut, and I took that gun away from him. It wasn’t a plan on my part. I hadn’t laid a trap. I’d been well trained in both the army and at the police academy. If I got threatened with a gun and was close enough to lay hands on it, I knew how to flip the thing around and make it end up with me.

So he had that pistol—a Remington revolver—until I shoved my finger in the trigger guard and wrenched it out of his hand. Then he was on the bore end, and I was looking at the hammer.

He didn’t do anything for a couple of seconds. They must not have trained their cops up much in Columbus, Mississippi. He reached for his Taser but only in a slow halfhearted way.

Desmond just told him, “Uh-uh,” and took that away from him too.

A city cruiser pulled onto the main drag a few blocks east of where we were standing. Gary, we had to figure. There was the real chance this whole business would go even further sideways and probably go there fast.

Deputy Dale Junior swallowed hard. He’d half raised his hands by then.

I was hardly at my sharpest, and I couldn’t think just what to do. Fortunately, Desmond came up with an out.

“We’re federal,” he said.

The deputy was anxious to believe it. That was the sort of news that meant he might just live. He nodded in a twitchy way and sucked air through his mouth.

“Bureau,” Desmond informed him.

“Tell him.” I pointed at the cruiser.

“Gary?”

“Yeah.” I tapped on his mike.

He keyed it. “You there?”

“I see you,” we heard through his belt speaker.

“These guys are federal.”

“Under cover,” I told him.

“They’re under…,” the deputy was saying when Gary’s cruiser rolled up to the curb and lurched to a rocking stop.

Gary popped out. He was wiry and was sporting some sort of Flowbee haircut, the style of do a man would have instead of a girlfriend or a wife. His uniform shirt was oversized and fit him like a jumper. He pulled his gun as he approached us.

Deputy Dale Junior told him, “We’re good.”

“Don’t look good,” Gary said.

He lurked a little ways off, pointed his gun at nothing much. Besides us, the town was entirely vacant. I could just hear the clatter of a train down to the south.

“They’re FBI,” Deputy Dale Junior told Gary.

“They show you badges or something?”

“We’re under cover,” I said.

“Doing what?” he wanted to know.

Since I wasn’t quite sure what we were doing, I decided to leave that one to Desmond.

“Got yourselves a gunrunner,” Desmond told those boys.

“Where?” Gary asked him.

“Right here in the county,” he told them.

“Ain’t Dewey, is it?” Gary asked Desmond.

“Not at liberty to say.”

“You got paper or something?” Gary asked us. “Ain’t like we can just take your word.”

Deputy Dale Junior exhaled and deflated a little. Gary didn’t just have bad hair. He was officious too. His colleague knew it well enough, and we were finding it out.

“Under cover,” I told him. “We’ve been on this guy for a year.”

“Give me a number. I’ll call somebody.”

“Don’t work that way,” Desmond said.

“I’m all right with it,” Deputy Dale Junior announced.

“You would be.” Gary spat. He still had his pistol in hand and looked half inclined to aim it.

Me and Desmond said what we needed to say between us in a glance.

“All right,” I told Gary. “I’ll give you the number, but you make the call on a landline from the precinct house.”

Gary spat again and nodded. I reached into my coverall pocket and fished out my billfold. That seemed to satisfy Gary that we were all heading in the right direction. He holstered his pistol and stepped over my way. With my free hand I grabbed a fistful of Gary’s mop of Flowbeed hair and slammed his face against the door rail of Desmond’s Escalade.

Gary grunted one time and lost his will to be upright. I let him down easy by his collar.

“This fucking guy,” I told Deputy Dale Junior. “Can’t let him spoil a full year’s worth of work.”

Lucky for us, Deputy Dale didn’t have much use for Gary. “Still lives with his mama,” he said. “Always doing shit like this.”

“We’re taking our boy down today,” Desmond said it lowly and on the sly to let Deputy Dale Junior know this was privileged information. “Can’t have any trouble from him.” He poked at Gary with the toe of his boot. His smock of a shirt was all bunched and out of place, but Gary’s layered hair was sitting just right.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Might need more than that,” Desmond said to Gary.

Desmond fished a fresh roll of duct tape out of the spare tire well of his car, and we instructed Deputy Dale Junior in proper trussing technique.

“For your country,” was all we had to say.

He’d heard enough of that sort of thing from gasbag nimrods in D.C. to leave him open to acting on it once he’d heard it from Desmond and me.

We helped Deputy Dale Junior lay Gary out on the backseat of his cruiser.

“We’ll make sure,” I told him, “you get properly cited once this whole gunrunning shit goes down.”

“That’d be all right. I kind of was thinking I might sort of aim for the Bureau.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Desmond said.

A call came in for Desmond just then, and we heard a snatch of “Satin Soul” from Desmond’s Escalade.

“I guess we’re on,” I told Desmond.

He nodded and gave me a neck noise. Desmond told Deputy Dale Junior, “Stay frosty,” as he climbed into the car.

We left him there on the sidewalk, eased out into the empty road.

“Stay frosty?”

Desmond showed me the screen of his phone. Kendell was who had just called.

We rode in silence for a few minutes.

“Here’s a question for you,” I finally said to Desmond. “You figure we’re going to hell or Parchman?”

Desmond told me, “Yeah.”

TWENTY-ONE

There was something close to a riot underway at the motor lodge by the time we got back to pluck our colleagues free. Dale had stopped up the toilet in our room and had gone to see about a plunger. Since the little guy who ran the place did all the toilet plunging himself, he’d came back to the room with Dale and had gotten an earful from his lodgers on the way. They were offended by all the racket Percy Dwayne and Luther were raising. Eugene was wandering the property by then looking for a cigarette machine. He had Barbara with him all decked out in her new Kyle Petty T-shirt.

They were what we saw first when we pulled into the lot.

“Is there some kind of rule?” Eugene asked me straightoff. “Now we got to call her Kyle?”

“No,” I told him. “What are you up to?”

“Can’t find the cigarette machine.”

“When did you start smoking?”

“Hell, way back. Quit for a while. Starting in again today.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Nervous,” he told me.

I figured that Boudrot was the root cause. The closer we got to him, the edgier Eugene grew. Out of all of us, he was the one who’d seen that Boudrot operate over time and up close. He knew what the man could do to people and how very much he enjoyed it.

“We’ll get you a pack somewhere,” I promised him.

That’s when the yelling ratcheted up. The little brown desk clerk was screaming at Dale about how badly he’d plugged up the toilet. Apparently, in Pakistan you always break up a massive stool with a stick, which was not the brand of activity Dale had ever contemplated. You sit on the ring. You flip through a magazine (a phone book in a pinch). You do your business. You flush. You go out of the bathroom and warn off your loved ones.