Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (27 page)

Desmond pulled back out into the road. We had another half mile of scoured concrete, chewed-up buildings, and splintered trees before we crossed out of the tornado zone into untouched Tuscaloosa.

Desmond eased over into a service station so I could ask a big guy in surgical scrubs where a fellow could get a decent plate of ribs in Tuscaloosa.

“Where you from?” he asked me.

I told him, more or less.

“Then Archibald and Woodrow’s.” He explained where to turn. “Send all the Yankees to Dreamland. It’s like goddamn Disney World.”

Archibald and Woodrow’s was a clapboard shanty with a brick smokehouse attached. There was hickory smoke pouring from the chimney and the smell of charred pork in the air.

I fished three twenties out of my wallet and held them up. “Who wants it?”

Dale grabbed first.

“We’re going to run see Tula. That’s the deal,” I told them all as they were bailing from the Escalade.

“Leaving her,” Eugene said of Barbara and clambered over the seat and out.

“But you’re coming back, right?” As he talked, Percy Dwayne checked himself in my sideview mirror. “I mean, we all get to fuck him up some, don’t we?”

I lied and told him, “Sure.”

“Where?” Desmond asked me. He was a checking a map on his phone.

“Kicker and Tenth.”

He found it. “Back that way.”

Desmond dropped his phone in the cup holder and gave me a thorough look up and down. All this riding around was getting my sailor suit a little wrinkled.

“What?”

He shrugged. He groaned. “You wearing that?”

TWENTY-SIX

Desmond turned onto Kicker off Fifteenth, and we rode past the junction at Tenth. Desmond didn’t slow down. We only reconnoitered. That was easy enough since the neighboring eight or ten blocks was tornado blighted. There’d been houses up on the rise to the south, and there were pieces of some of them left. Three or four were even habitable. One had a demolished carport. One a blue tarp on the roof. And one was down to Tyvek and tarpaper but still had cars parked in the yard. The trees were all splintered and wind-blasted. Big oaks just trunks anymore with stubby, fractured limbs that had some autumn foliage on them. I saw more than one tree with siding or roof tin snagged in its busted branches and crooks.

“Water oaks,” Desmond told me. Trees were one of Desmond’s things. “They call them druid oaks around here. Call the whole place Druid City.”

“How do you know so much?” I had a fair idea of what Desmond would tell me before he did.

“Had a girl from here a while back.”

“Figures.”

“She was living in Greenwood. Homesick, you know. She talked me half to death on Tuscaloosa.”

We passed under a cross street, beneath a shabby fractured bridge.

“Did it ever used to be anything?”

“Better than this,” he told me.

We pulled into the parking lot of what had been a big brick church. The wooden steeple had gotten unscrewed by the wind, wrenched off and dropped into the churchyard. It lay on its side all busted to pieces. The sanctuary was awaiting demolition. It had a chain-link fence around it. The near wall was cracked and half buckled. The graveyard was littered with roofing shingles and colorful scraps of hand fans.

“Driving past this stuff every day can’t do anybody much good.”

Desmond grunted. He nodded. He pointed. “See her?” he asked me.

I looked to where he was pointing, back in the direction we’d come. Beyond the bridge we’d passed under and up on that storm-ravaged hill that had once been a suburb. There were people standing on a cul-de-sac we’d gone by coming down. Three or four of them. I might have had early-afternoon glare to contend with, but I had no trouble seeing my calypso-coral Ranchero parked by the curb.

“Yeah,” I told Desmond. “I see somebody.”

“I think one of them’s her,” he said.

“Tula?”

Desmond nodded.

I shaded my eyes and looked again. There was one person standing apart from the others. “That one out there?”

Desmond nodded.

I squinted and looked again. “Wearing a skirt, right?”

Another nod. Odd though since Tula wasn’t the skirt-wearing sort. I mentioned as much to Desmond.

“Might have put her in it,” Desmond said. “That Boudrot being a kink and all.”

So Desmond made me think about all the possibilities I’d decided to leave unconsidered. From the moment I knew that Boudrot had nabbed Tula clear through to standing in that church lot, I’d not let myself dwell on the untoward stuff that Boudrot might get up to. He was a puny rat terrier of a guy, hinky and dangerous in his way, with straight-to-video movie star looks if you could take your actors stunted. But I’d only ever known him to brutalize men, and that’s what I’d decided he’d get up to. A woman like Tula he’d want to romance, and that sort of thing takes time.

I’d decided he’d need probably three full days before he told himself, “Fuck it,” and went at Tula like the beast he was.

Tula was barely twenty-four hours in as I stood there squinting at her in Tuscaloosa. Her skirt hem shifted in the light autumn air as she stood on that cul-de-sac in that storm-scoured suburb.

Together me and Desmond watched Tula raise her arms above her head and wave them at us.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out. The call was coming from her phone.

“Yeah.”

It was that Boudrot on the other end. “You looking?” he asked me.

“You know I am.”

The line went dead, and me and Desmond watched the guy we took for that Boudrot. He looked like a child from where we were as he left the boys he’d been standing with and stepped over toward Tula. He must have told her to put her arms down, because that’s just what she did. Then he raised an arm himself and pointed at the side of Tula’s head. She suddenly dropped in a heap onto the ground and was already piled up on the pavement before the sound of the pistol shot reached me and Desmond where we stood by that ruined church.

I didn’t know what to do, could hardly believe I’d seen what I saw. That Boudrot and his crew got into my Ranchero. Two in the cab and one in the bed. Off they went onto Kicker and up out of sight. We only heard the squeal of the tires after they had vanished.

“No,” was all I could manage.

“Come on.” Desmond was half in the Escalade.

I imagined Tula’s son without a mother. I heard in my head what Kendell would say, shot through with the flinty disappointment he had a talent for. I did that thing where I wondered what life would be like if Tula and me had never met. If she’d never pulled me over and written me up for speeding. If I’d never made it my sole romantic purpose to wear her down. Now I’d piled her up on a barren road in storm-blasted Tuscaloosa. Even there in that littered church parking lot, I already couldn’t live with myself.

“Come on,” Desmond said.

I moved. I climbed in. We went tearing out of that church lot, under the shabby overpass, and back up Kicker to that cul-de-sac. The whole business took us maybe a minute and a half, and I remember wondering at all the people around us going on with their regular lives. A woman had been gunned down in the broad October afternoon in a city in Alabama, and nobody seemed to have noticed it but us. It was like we were operating in a different dimension from the regular world at large.

Desmond whipped into the cul-de-sac. Barbara bounced around in the way back. I could hear her clawing for purchase on Desmond’s rubber matting. Desmond stopped by a power pole so snug to the curb that I almost couldn’t get out. Some guy had recently put up a Day-Glo flyer with tabs fluttering across the bottom. He was offering mandolin lessons. Two people had torn off his number. I remember wondering how you’d come through here and think about shit like that.

Desmond got to her first. He was in full glide, but I was hardly trying to keep up with him. I didn’t think I had the nerve to see Tula dead, bloody in the road.

Desmond shook his head. “Not her,” he told me.

I didn’t believe him at first. “What?”

Desmond pointed. I finally brought myself to glance down at the body. I saw a muddy sneaker and a tattooed calf.

“Blew half her head off,” Desmond said.

Even disfigured and bloody, she didn’t look like Tula at all.

I was too relieved to be disgusted. “Who you figure it is?” I asked Desmond.

“Prison girlfriend probably.”

One of the cars that passed by on Kicker was a Tuscaloosa police cruiser. It went down under the overpass, and we saw brake lights at the church.

“Come on,” Desmond said. Not that he needed to. We were both heading back to the Escalade by then.

Desmond zipped around the cul-de-sac, turned south, and raced over the rise. He went left on Fifteenth and kept on going, finally eased off at a road that led into the university arboretum.

“We need a think,” Desmond told me.

I was perfectly fine with that. I needed to stand up and breathe for a minute or two while I contemplated the savage harm I intended to visit on that Boudrot. Then I wondered if he’d just keep toying with us until he ran out of people to shoot and so finally got down to Tula proper and made me lose her all over again.

I’d only been to an arboretum once. That one was a forest with signs on the trees, hardly the sort of place we rolled up to in Tuscaloosa. Their arboretum was an old golf course that they’d largely let grow wild. The clubhouse windows were boarded up, and the golf cart shed was empty. We parked directly behind the first tee box. The fairways was knee-deep with weeds. People were strolling along the cart paths, most of them with their dogs.

“This is a hell of a thing,” Desmond said. He climbed out and went around to get Barbara.

When she hit the ground, an English setter came over to tell her how do you do. A pug soon joined them. A beagle. Some kind of curly-haired retriever. They all sniffed Barbara’s spotted T-shirt while she squatted and tried to pee.

She would have been the strangest sight out there but for a girl across the way. She had dreadlocks, was wearing what looked like a kilt and a grimy tie-dyed wife beater. So she would have been conspicuous already if she hadn’t been walking a goat.

“Like some weird dream,” Desmond said.

I nodded. I told him, “So far.”

We wandered over to a sand trap with pine trees growing in it. Barbara followed us partway before she got distracted by the goat. She’d probably never seen a whole one. Eugene used goat chunks for gator bait. She went straight up and had a good snout-to-snout with the creature. It was long eared and spotted and seemed, for a goat, vaguely aristocratic. The creature had little use for a hound in a T-shirt and communicated as much by grunting that way goats will and lifting its snout in the air.

Its owner was a lot less haughty. She told Barbara, “Moo, goddammit.”

“Call Boudrot?” I asked Desmond.

“I guess.”

“What do you figure he’s up to?”

Desmond shrugged.

“I thought maybe he’d meet us to get his money, and we’d kick the shit out of him.”

“Yeah,” Desmond told me. “But when’s it ever as easy as that?”

“Got a string of bodies on him. I can’t see him back in Parchman.”

“Naw,” Desmond said. “One way or another, he’s done.”

End times for that Boudrot fit right in with everything I had in mind.

“Call him,” Desmond said.

I pulled up Tula’s number. That bloodthirsty little fucker was laughing when he answered the phone.

“How do you like me now, brother?” he wanted to know.

“You’re a funny little twitch,” I told him. I knew that Boudrot hated getting reminded he was an abject runt.

“Ain’t all that little,” he said. “Ask your girlfriend.”

“Put her on. I will.”

“Can’t,” he told me. “Got a mouthful right now.” He laughed. He added, “Ooohhh, baby.”

I just stood there and took it. He made rutting noises. He pulled away to have a laugh with a lackey. I glanced at Desmond, shook my head and waited.

“She’s a pistol,” that Boudrot finally said. “I don’t know but I should keep her.”

“So you don’t want your money?”

“That’s the shit of it, isn’t it. I do want it, brother. I do.”

“Then work it the fuck out,” I told him, “before the cops get all over you. Not but so many people a man can shoot, even in Tuscaloosa.”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“Trying hard not to.”

“Where are you?”

“Standing here looking at a goddamn goat and talking to you.”

He laid the phone aside again and told his buddies what I’d said. They laughed like guys who were hoping to keep unshot for a little while longer.

I pointed down the fairway we were overlooking and asked the girl with the goat, “What’s down there?”

“A lake,” she said. “The dogs swim in it.”

“Straight down that cart path?”

She nodded.

I told that Boudrot, “Here’s how it is.”

That got his attention the way it was meant to. You can only float along with head jobs like that Boudrot until they start dithering on you. Then you have to take charge and let them know you’re done with their nutty shit.

“Listen,” he started.

“Uh-uh,” I told him. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get here or we’re gone.”

“The fuck you say. I’ve got your—”

“You’ve got shit. World’s full of women.”

By then Desmond was looking at me like I was giving him powerful gas.

“Maybe I’ll do her right now.”

“See you,” I told him. I waited. I waited some more.

I heard that Boudrot exhale. “Let’s do it then,” he said.

“You know where the arboretum is?”

“The what?”

Desmond showed me the map on his phone. I gave directions to that Boudrot once he’d come up dry with his lackeys who weren’t nature lovers, I had to guess.

“Old golf course,” I told him. “Walk straight down the cart path off the parking lot. There’s a lake at the far end. We’ll do it all there.”

“You ain’t running nothing,” that Boudrot sputtered at me.

“Bring her along if you want your money.”

That was just the kind of talk that Boudrot had a taste for. I knew his work. He knew ours. We didn’t respect each other exactly, but there’s a certain pleasure attached to dealing with people who deliver on what they promise. We knew that Boudrot was bloodthirsty enough to gun down about anybody, and he was aware that me and Desmond had pulled a trigger or two ourselves.