Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (24 page)

“Tony Franciosa. Played a blind detective once.”

“A blind detective?” Lance asked Desmond. It didn’t ring a bell with either of them.

“Had a dimple like that.” I pointed at Curtis. “I’m just saying he doesn’t look local.”

We stood there in silence for a moment, watching Curtis go on sleeping.

“Do I look local?” Lance finally asked me.

“You mean,” I said back, “from earth?”

Lance cackled and tugged on his tube top. He picked up a half-empty liter of Popov vodka from the floor beside the bed. The top was already off, so all he had to do was pour it.

Curtis didn’t even wake up in the local way. He stayed where he was and got soaked through with spirits before he told us in just a flat and regular voice, “All right.”

Even after that, he just laid there for a while. He turned over on his back and looked up at us. He rubbed his eyes. He dozed and woke.

When Curtis spoke again, all he said was, “What?”

“Who were they?” Lance asked him.

You had to admire the efficiency of it all. Curtis didn’t bother to pretend he didn’t know what Lance had come for, and Lance didn’t let standard-issue backwoods fury get in his way. This was more in the way of a transaction. Freak to freak was the sense I got. A handsome boy in a trailer above a gully probably had to go every which way.

“Lucy brought them,” Curtis said.

Lance told me and Desmond, “Women!”

“They had some shit in mind for me I didn’t want to do.” I had to imagine Curtis probably said something like that a lot.

“So you brought them to me?” Lance asked with an air of wounded disappointment.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Curtis told him and reached out a hand like he was seeking absolution.

Lance told Desmond, “Hit him,” and Desmond did.

I have to think that was all part of the process for Lance and Curtis, and Desmond knew enough of Lance to do just what he asked. There certainly wasn’t any whining from Curtis. He had a punch coming, and he knew it.

“I guess we’ll need to find them,” he said to Lance as he finally threw back his sleeping bag and rolled out of his bed.

Curtis picked a cigarette up off the floor, a stray Chesterfield laying against the baseboard. It was only torn and broken in a couple of places. Curtis mended it with his fingers. Lance produce a lighter and lit it.

“Coffee?” Curtis asked Lance.

“On the way.”

Curtis got dressed after a fashion. He wore a yellow belly shirt with
E TU?
screen printed on it and a pair of clam diggers that were still primarily white. The sort with a rope for a belt and calf buttons shaped like anchors. The Reeboks without any laces confused the whole effect.

Lance wanted Curtis up front with him, so me and Desmond rode in the back. Lance told Curtis about some waistcoat he’d seen on the Bravo channel.

“With lapels,” Lance said.

“They work?”

“Stunning!” By now Lance had his left foot out the window. “And big buttons. Bone, it looked like.”

Curtis said, “Oh my.”

I’d barely started looking at Desmond in a meaningful sort of way before he made it plain he had a snort for Lance and Curtis both.

We stopped for coffee at a Kangaroo mart. Lance parked against a far curb where he pumped Curtis for details.

“It was some guy Lucy dated and a cousin of his. They’d heard about all the shit you had.”

“From you?” Lance asked him.

Curtis shook his head. “Lucy handed them off to me because she knew I could get them in your house.”

“Where are we going to find them?”

When Curtis made like he was about to shrug, Lance smacked him hard. It was more of a slap than a punch, but he caught Curtis flush on the cheek and left the outline of his hand there.

“Lucy knows,” he said.

“She working?”

“Probably.”

“Bear with me,” Lance told me and Desmond as he drove us away from the Kangaroo Mart and back down the road the way we’d come.

Lucy worked at a sawmill. She was perched in a puny shack up above the scale, which gave her the perfect vantage point to see a Hummer coming. Worse still, it was a yellow Hummer, so we couldn’t hope to go unnoticed.

The woman had to know who was in it and suspect what he’d come about, so she went ahead and radioed up a few of her lumberyard friends to meet us. Roughnecks in hardhats, all four of them, and those boys were armed with log pikes. They stood four abreast by the truck scale looking surly and pissed off.

They appeared to think Lance would draw up short before he ran them over, but what was the point of having a big yellow Hummer if you couldn’t run roughnecks down? Lance never so much as touched the break. He caught three of them flush with his bumper and threw his door open to clip the fourth and knock him over. Then he leapt out right onto that boy’s midsection. Lance jumped up and down like he was a bratty child on a settee.

I told Desmond, “Man, it’s tough over here.”

By then Lance had shifted to give hell to the other boys he’d hit. That was a bit more of a challenge since they were largely under the Hummer, but Lance managed to drag one mostly out and make an example of him. Lance threw what qualified as a violent hissy fit.

“That’s right, honey,” he kept saying as he jumped up and down on a burly guy in a nasty T-shirt. Then he pointed at the scale house and told the Hummer windshield, “Get her!”

“Talking to us, isn’t he?” I said to Desmond.

Desmond made a neck noise.

“I don’t want to get arrested in Alabama,” I told him as I threw open my door.

“You coming?” Desmond asked Curtis.

He shook his head and said, “I’m all right.”

We crossed the truck scale and climbed the steep steel stairs to the scale house door. A woman I had to take for Lucy was by herself inside. We eyed her through the door glass. She was a woman of some girth with strawberry-blond hair and no end of freckles. She was built like a doorstop—shapeless and dense—and she was waving a claw hammer at us.

“Go on!” she shouted.

I tried the door. It didn’t have a proper bolt to throw, just one of those knobs with a privacy latch like you’d install in your bathroom. There was a hole in the knob on our side. I knew I could unlatch it through that.

“You got a toothpick?” I asked Desmond.

He always had a toothpick. Desmond went feeling through his pockets.

“I kill you!” Lucy told us. She waved her hammer around with such vigor she just about knocked herself in the head.

“Get her!” Lance shouted from the front Hummer bumper. He was bouncing on a third guy by then.

“I don’t think I like his tone,” I told Desmond.

He groaned and offered me a cellophane-wrapped peppermint toothpick.

“We’re coming in,” I told Lucy. “Might as well put that hammer down.”

She made a feral noise back in her throat and did some more hammer brandishing. That scale house was puny to start with, and the door opened in, so I could tell that we’d all be right there in the same puny spot together.

“Come on!” Lance shouted from down at the Hummer.

“He’s pushy,” I told Desmond. I didn’t need to unwrap that toothpick. I just shoved the entire business in the doorknob hole. It popped the button on the far side. I pushed the door full open, and Lucy got so worked up and brandished that hammer with such violence that she finally succeeded at hitting herself in the forehead.

“Ow. Shit!” she said.

I took half a stride and grabbed the hammer handle. I yanked the thing out of her hand.

“Come on,” I told her.

“I kill you!” She swatted at me with the hand she wasn’t nursing her forehead with.

I looked to Desmond for help, but there wasn’t room for him in the scale house. I managed to work my way behind Lucy and shove her toward the door. She smacked at the door frame. She slapped at Desmond.

“I kill you!” she told him as well.

Desmond gave her one of his gentle, openhanded shut-the-fuck-up blows. It rang her bell enough to make her docile for a time.

He walked her down the scale house stairs. I could hear enough radio chatter to know that we needed to leave that sawmill straightaway if we had any hope of getting out.

“Better go,” I shouted down to Lance.

He looked winded from jumping on roughnecks. He gave over those fellows on the ground so he could wag a finger at Lucy. He had Desmond put her in the backseat, and then Lance shouted up at me, “Come on!”

“Jesus, man, I’m coming,” I told him.

He backed the Hummer up and whipped it around. I had to sprint to the back door and jump in before Lance, who was revving that Hummer engine, could tear out of the yard.

“You’re welcome,” I told him.

Lance shot me a wink in the rearview. “Don’t be like that, honey,” he said.

“I kill you.” Lucy was training her animosity exclusively on Curtis now.

“Who and where?” Lance asked her.

She pinched her lips together and shook her head.

“These boys’ll do you all kinds of wrong,” Lance said of me and Desmond. “They’re from goddamn Mississippi, and not even nowhere nice.”

Lucy was a spitter. She hit Lance’s headrest.

“Tell her,” Lance said to Desmond.

“Delta,” Desmond rumbled at Lucy. “We’ll do any damn thing.”

I hadn’t really ever considered what people elsewhere thought of the Mississippi Delta. I knew it had a reputation for being hardscrabble and damned, but that was prevalent among the residents of hill country Mississippi. I didn’t know they’d have a Delta opinion in Alabama at all. Then Lucy went and gave us a look like me and Desmond were both assassins. She calmed right down. She even reached over and wiped her spit off the headrest.

“Sorry,” she said.

Desmond winked my way. This was a Delta virtue I’d never even suspected. It was a help, in the general course of things, if people thought you’d make them dead.

“Why you want to steal from me?” Lance asked Lucy.

“Didn’t,” Lucy told him. “Those boys come to take my shit.”

“So you helped them take mine instead?”

That seemed to capture the thrust of the thing well enough. Lucy nodded. Lucy told Lance, “Yeah.”

“How are we going to get it back?”

“Ask him.” She pointed at Curtis.

“I don’t know them boys,” Curtis said to Lance. “She brought them over. It was all like I told you before.”

“You took them to his place,” Lucy snarled and indicated Lance with her lumpy forehead. That hammer had raised a welt that was going more purple by the minute.

“They wanted to party,” Curtis said to Lance. “They would have tore me up.”

Lance didn’t appear to doubt him. He nodded like a man who guessed Curtis would have been pulling splinters from his lower intestinal tract.

“So you took them to Curtis. Curtis took them to me. I got that,” Lance told Lucy. “Where are we going to find them right now?”

“Pooky’s probably,” Lucy said. “Only place I ever seen them.”

“Who we talking?”

“Big one’s J.J. Little one’s Odell.”

“They got people around?” Lance asked Lucy.

“Not that I know about.”

“Watch that Odell,” Curtis told us. “That little fucker’s mean.”

Curtis showed us a human bite mark on his shoulder. It was angry red and the teeth had broken the skin in a couple of places.

“What was that for?” Lance wanted to know.

Curtis shook his head. He shrugged.

“Up on your shots?” I asked him.

That raised a cackle out of Lance. He wagged a finger at me. “Aw,” Lance told me, “honey.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Pooky’s looked about like it had to. A low cinder-block roadhouse with no character at all. Weeds were growing everywhere they could. A prickly thicket was fairly strangling an abandoned harrow near the ditch, and the hollow core of a pile of tires at the far corner of the building was overflowing with beer cans and trash.

The door of the place was standing open. There was one state-body truck and two muddy little coupes parked nose in out front. Instead of music pouring out the door there was Fox News morning banter and the intermittent clack of billiard balls.

Lance parked at the far end of the building. Since the windows were all painted over, there was little chance that we’d been seen. Even in broad daylight and even in a yellow Hummer.

“Let’s hear it,” Lance said to Lucy.

She didn’t need any more prompting than that. “Melvis must have sent them. You know how he gets.”

Curtis turned out to have a snort for Melvis. “Figures,” was all he said.

“They knew all about you,” Lucy told Lance. “The guns and the weed and shit. Nothing special. A couple of hicks. Cousins, I think, or something.”

“Knives? Guns? What?”

“The little one has a hunting knife. A big one.” Lucy described a blade about the length of a paint stick. “Likes to whip it around and shit. Other one had some kind of pistol but no telling what he’s got now.”

That was true enough, given all the guns they’d stolen.

“Live around here?” Lance asked.

Lucy nodded. “Motel down toward Eutaw. Work in timber most of the time. Got a wild hair or something, I guess.”

“I guess,” Lance said. “Which of them’s theirs.” He pointed at the vehicles in the lot.

“Blue one,” Lucy told him.

That was the muddier of the coupes.

“Look back there,” Lance said to Desmond. “Wonder Bar in the box.”

Since Desmond had precious little room to maneuver there on the backseat, I did the swiveling for him and found the pry bar straightaway.

“Probably hadn’t been home yet,” Lance informed us. “Take a look.” He pointed at the muddy blue coupe. He was clearly talking to me.

“Pop it?” I asked him.

“Yeah, honey,” he said, like he was talking to a toddler or a goat. “He ain’t from the Delta, is he?” Lance asked Desmond, the implication being that Delta natives popped trunks as a matter of course.

“Give it to him,” Lance pointed at Curtis.

“Think I can manage,” I told him.

I was getting a feel by then for Alabama where everything you got up to and everything you didn’t was a test of your manhood and your local standing.