Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (29 page)

“Go on,” he told me. “I’m all right.” Desmond showed me his lumpy forearm.

I just had to follow the sound of that Boudrot. He was visiting hard talk on Barbara. I heard her bay a couple of times. From sheer joy, I had to think. For man or animal, there’s nothing quite so sweet as retribution.

I walked across the dam and up a root-ruptured cart path. I didn’t want to arrive on the scene too soon and cut short Barbara’s fun.

I finally found the two of them back in some piney scrub that had once been a sand trap. Every time that Boudrot twitched, Barbara took a little skin.

“Do something with him,” that Bourdrot told me.

“Her.”

He whined. She bit.

“Call her off.”

“She’s part of that pen of dogs you shot. Was it … yesterday?”

Shooting dogs was like breathing for that Boudrot. If he could have shrugged at me, he would have.

“Get him,” I said, not that Barbara needed egging on.

That Boudrot squirmed and Barbara laid full into him all over. I’d seen hounds go after foxes and rabbits like that but never an Acadian fuckstick from Cut Off, Louisiana.

I made him beg me to get her off him, and I let it go on for a while.

“All right,” I finally said as I grabbed Barbara by her back legs. She turned to snap at me couple of times before she settled down. Then she whimpered once and licked me. I told her, “Stay,” and for some reason she did.

I eased over to where that Boudrot was and pointed my Kimber at his forehead.

“Let’s see if mine’ll go off,” I said as I pulled the trigger. That Boudrot shrieked like a maiden aunt. I showed him the clip in my other hand and then caught him hard across the jaw with that heavy .45.

Barbara wanted me to kill him. I sure wanted to kill him too, but I also had a nagging need for that Acadian fuckstick to suffer. I’d decided he’d do more of that in Parchman than six feet under ground.

So I made an executive decision, but I didn’t tell that Boudrot. I took Barbara aside and explained it to the hound.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Me and that Boudrot and Barbara met Tuscaloosa SWAT as they swarmed toward us over the dam.

“DOWN!” If they all said it once, they said it a dozen times.

I grabbed Babara and took her to the ground with me. Those boys were all Kevlared and helmeted up. They were primed to shoot something, and with hair-trigger cops, a dog will always do.

I left that Boudrot to fend for himself. He was all dog bites and busted bones and parted skin. He just stayed where he was and launched into a tirade. He seemed chiefly disappointed in the state of Alabama as a fit place to get up to the sort of mischief he tended to be about. He was partial to the Delta, out by Greenville most especially, and he rattled on in a mucousy way about the failings of Tuscaloosa until a couple of SWAT boys closed hard on him and slammed him to the ground.

Another pair charged over to see to me.

“Go easy on the dog,” I told them.

“Shut up,” one of them suggested as he crushed my neck with his knee.

There’s a reason people don’t like cops, and it’s chiefly cop inflicted. They too often operate with the attitude “I’ll treat you like shit until word comes down I shouldn’t anymore.”

These guys were accomplished at that sort of thing. They gave me a pretty rough time. I’d thrown down my pistol as soon as I’d laid eyes on those boys, and I only had two pockets and not a thing in either one. So there was nothing to find, but they kept searching until I was scuffed up all over.

Then one of them fetched my gun off the ground while the other one jerked me upright.

“Maybe you ought to…”

I was going to suggest they put some kind of leash on Barbara, but the SWAT boy at my elbow wasn’t feeling suggestible. He leaned in and hissed, “Shut up, dirtbag.”

If anything, they were treating that Boudrot worse, and he had actual broken bones. I drew some consolation every time that Boudrot screamed.

They walked us along the weedy fairway to the parking lot. When I’d cluck to keep Barbara coming, one of those cops would shake me hard.

There was an armored truck, like a minibus, parked in with a bunch of squad cars. I could see Tula talking to what looked like a captain alongside three guys laid facedown on the gritty asphalt. Two of them were Boudrot’s lackeys. Desmond was the third.

When we reached the lot, one of my guys handed my pistol to the captain. The other one gave him the spotted T-shirt he’d pulled out of my waistband.

The captain held it up by the shoulders for inspection.

“Moo, goddammit,” he said.

“You all right?” I asked Tula.

The guy on my elbow jerked me and look prepared to escalate until his captain told him, “Cut him loose.” He pointed at Desmond. “That one too. Let’s make some sense of this.”

That fellow pulled out a big tactical knife and sliced off my Flex-Cufs. I was still standing there rubbing my wrists to get the blood flowing when Tula slugged me.

She had a hell of a punch, and I wasn’t looking for it, so I didn’t dodge or shirk. I just stood there and took it flush on the jaw. I saw stars and tasted iron and half wanted to drop down on my knees and cry.

“Ow!”

“Where the hell have you been!? And what the hell’s that?” She had my sailor suit in mind.

Both fair questions. I should have been armed with decent answers. Instead I just said, “It’s complicated.” And I was meaning to tell her how.

But Tula exhaled hard through her nose and drew back and hit me again.

“Quit it.”

“That little asshole could have killed me.”

“We knew he was waiting on us,” I told her.

“You didn’t know shit,” she said back.

Desmond had been cut loose as well and was lifting his wet self off the ground by then.

“And you took your sweet time,” Tula informed us both. Then she spat with the sort of vigor K-Lo would have found beguiling.

I looked to Desmond for some help.

He turned and said to Tula, “Yeah. I guess. All right.”

She didn’t do a thing but stand there.

“Why don’t you hit
him
?” I asked her.

“I don’t sleep with him,” she said. “You either. Probably. Now.”

That got everybody’s attention. The cops all looked at me and Tula. That Boudrot wheezed at us through his broken nose. Even his lackeys on the ground had a chuckle between them about it. The one with the dislocated kneecap was handy, so I kicked him one time hard.

“I’m sorry,” I told Tula. “We ran into some trouble, what with Luther and them. For what it’s worth, I didn’t know what I’d do back there when I thought he’d shot you.”

“Shot who?” the captain asked.

“Some girl.”

“And you saw it?”

I nodded.

“You too?”

Desmond nodded.

“Everybody goes,” the captain announced to his officers. They gathered all of us up.

“Her too.” I pointed at Barbara. When the captain balked, I said, “Hell, she caught him.”

Tula said, “I’ll get her.” Then she asked us, “Where’s the rest of your crowd anyway?”

“Over at a rib place somewhere.” That was the best Desmond could do.

“Shack,” I said the captain’s way. “Next to some sort of car lot.”

“Archibald and Woodrow’s,” the captain said. “Take them with you. Pick them up,” he told one of his officers. A tubby blond boy with a toothpick in his mouth.

Tula caught me sizing up the state of my Ranchero as me and Desmond followed that officer to his four-by-four.

“You and that damn car,” she said. She troubled herself to spit again.

*   *   *

Naturally, we rolled up on a brawl at that rib place in Tuscaloosa. Luther and Percy Dwayne had gotten into it with a trio of frat boys. Big guys. Athletic scholarships probably. Strapping and clean-cut and very likely decent and dumb. Untutored certainly in the ways of Delta cracker trash. That was easy enough to see straightaway because Luther and Percy Dwayne were flogging those boys to a fare-thee-well.

Luther was beating one of them with a galvanized bucket while Percy Dwayne was kicking at a second one and half standing on the third one. That boy was trying to crawl under a flatbed truck, but Dale—who wasn’t otherwise fighting—kept pulling him out by the ankles and telling him, “Naw.”

Our cop asked us, “Yours?”

“I guess,” Desmond told him.

“You’ve got two minutes to crank them down, or I’ll have to call it in.”

Eugene saw us first. He was watching the fun while gnawing on a rib bone.

“Hey,” he said. He jerked his head by way of pointing toward the barbecue joint. “Ought to get you a slab. Them boys know what they’re doing.”

“Ribs and chopped and every damn thing,” Dale told us as he pulled that crawling frat boy out from under the truck again.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

Luther left off swinging his bucket long enough to say, “Got all mouthy with us.” He drew our attention to the boy Percy Dwayne was kicking. “Him especially.”

“Yeah,” Percy Dwayne said. He caught that boy in the backside with some sort of half-cocked judo stomp.

“Going to have to leave it,” I told them all, “or he’s going call his friends.”

I think that was the first notice any of them had taken of that city police four-by-four.

“Where’s Barbara?” Eugene wanted to know.

Desmond told him, “Tula’s got her.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Those frat boys became an instant afterthought. Our crew shifted across the lot toward the Blazer.

Percy Dwayne jabbed a thumb toward the restaurant. “They probably want you to pay them something. I think we kind of broke some stuff and shit.”

*   *   *

I tried to discourage that police captain from interrogating our crew. I told him they hadn’t seen anything, had served as ballast mostly. I just didn’t want them describing what we’d been up to the past day and a half, all the mayhem we’d been a part of from Arkansas to Alabama. It turned out I didn’t need to worry. Those boys mostly giggled and ate nabs.

Cops are provincial anyway. The locals were fixed on all the trouble that Boudrot had made in Tuscaloosa. Tula directed them to a trailer up by Holt where she’d been held. It had been where the dead girl lived, Boudrot’s prison girlfriend and a local exotic dancer who me and Desmond had seen him shoot right in the head. Tula told her story to the captain and some detective with a soul patch. Then me and Desmond took turns telling our version of events to those two as well. We knew which stuff to leave out and which items to skip over. We just hit the Boudrot atrocities and left everything else unsaid.

“Whose goddamn navy you in?” soul patch finally asked me. He shut his notebook. Wafted aftershave my way. Adjusted his nutsack and added, “Huh?”

We rode back over to the arboretum in a couple of Tuscaloosa PD prowlers. The boys and Barbara all piled in the Escalade with Desmond. Tula was still angry enough at me to make like she’d ride with them until she sat in that Cadillac for long enough to get a full dose of the stink. The thing reeked like a locker room on wheels. That was enough to send Tula over to my Ranchero.

“See you back home,” I told Desmond.

“Going to order my new Escalade in Greenwood.”

What could I tell him other than, “All right.”

We were well west of Tuscaloosa, on the far side of Reform, before Tula finally melted a little. I took it anyway for melting.

She punched me in the arm and said, “Gotta pee.”

As we approached Columbus, she grew both teary and irritated. I tried to apologize for taking so damn long to reach her, but it wasn’t about that anymore. With the Boudrot tension and the Boudrot danger finally overcome and lifted, Tula was letting her wall-to-wall anxiety go.

She came over the console to lay against me. Once we’d finally reached Columbus, she pointed out a Hampton Inn hard beside the four-lane.

“Let’s stop,” she said.

Me and Desmond, of course, had created a Columbus problem for ourselves.

“Sort of need to blast on through here,” I told Tula. “You don’t really want to know why.”

She could guess well enough. Tula laughed for the first time. I stopped in Starkville instead where we holed up for a day.

TWENTY-NINE

Kendell has the good sense to know precisely what he doesn’t want to hear and who he doesn’t want to hear it from. Usually that takes the form of explanations and excuses from cracker trash, but sometimes me and Desmond qualify for Kendell as well.

When we got back from Alabama and finally caught up with him, Kendell showed me and Desmond the palm of his open hand. Whatever we thought we had to tell him, he knew he didn’t want to know it.

Me and Desmond ended up paying Luther, Percy Dwayne, Eugene, and Dale a flat fee for what they decided to call “professional services.”

We reminded Eugene we’d rescued him from an Arkansas jailhouse in a derelict shopping plaza, and we refreshed Percy Dwayne on the trouble we’d spared him at the hands those Greer brothers, but that only served to get me and Desmond told by the two of them, “So?”

We paid them out of the cash we’d taken off that Boudrot back when he was a meth lord instead of a fuckstick on the run. They wanted twice as much as we gave them, so we negotiated.

Desmond snorted while I told them, “No.”

Tula got counseling. Kendell made her. It was in the Washington County P.D. regs or something. After a couple of sessions, she was madder at the shrink than me, so I guess it worked. I developed a new appreciation for therapy anyway.

Pearl came back from Memphis and cooked me a casserole first thing. Green beans and cheddar and mushroom soup, canned tuna and water chestnuts. All of it crusted over with crumbled Wise potato chips. How it came out of the oven stale already was one of Pearl’s culinary secrets I hope to never know.

That Boudrot got indicted all over. He stood trial in Alabama. Plead out in Mississippi. They brought him from Tuscaloosa in a jailhouse van so he could get properly scolded and sentenced in a Delta courtroom. We didn’t bother to go and hear any of it but decided instead to wait outside. They had the van parked in a side lot, and we just stood where we could see it. Me and Desmond. Tula and Kendell. Dale and Luther and Percy Dwayne. Eugene had come clear up from Yazoo, and he’d brought Barbara with him. She was going shirtless for the occasion and appeared to be well healed.