Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (3 page)

“Yeah.”

“Got some news.”

“All right.”

“That Boudrot, the one you arrested…”

“Who?”

“Guy with the meth. You know.”

“Oh, right.”

“He ran off from a work crew. Still loose, as far as we know.”

“So?”

“Talk is he’s coming after folks. Everybody that did him wrong.” I let that sink in for a moment. “Running buddies mostly but probably you too.”

“That little fucker?”

“Killed one guy already.”

“I guess I’m all right,” he told me. “Got an AK under the bed.”

Then he slid his
Muscle Pro
under the door, opened to an oily veiny woman in a bikini. She had massive deltoids, purple eye shadow, and the neck of a lumberjack.

“What would you do with something like that?”

“Outrun it, I hope,” I told him.

FOUR

Tula already had plans to go see a cousin of hers in Baton Rouge, a guy with a couple of kids the age of Tula’s own son, C.J. I decided to swing by and try to make sure she took her boy and went.

She poured us each a glass wine, brought out some cashews, and we parked together on her sofa.

“So?” she said.

“Hasn’t turned up?”

Tula shook her head.

“Kill anybody else?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

Tula took a sip of wine and eyed me hard. “Tell me about the money.”

Me and Desmond had never spoken to anybody about the money. I have to think now it was mostly because we’d been raised that in this world you needed to earn everything you got or it probably wasn’t worth having. We might have worked for that cash a little but not in any ordinary way.

“He had this closet in the back of his house,” I told Tula. “That place down by Blue Hole. The cash was all in there. Three, maybe four hundred thousand.”

She shook her head and invoked the Lord.

“We’d promised all those boys they’d get a cut.”

Tula shot me a sour look.

“Not that I’m blaming them,” I assured her. “But the money wasn’t going to get left there, and what else were we going to do?”

“Where’s yours?”

“Pearl’s basement. Desmond’s too.”

“How much?”

“I think me and Desmond split about half. The rest went to Percy Dwayne Dubois, his nephew Luther, and a couple of swamp rats. They’ve all burned through it by now.”

“Not you?”

“You see how we live. I bought Pearl’s Ranchero. Desmond bought his Escalade. Got his mother to a doctor. We lend out a little every now and again.” I shrugged. “I’ve tried to feel bad about taking it, but…” I gave her a wince and a shrug.

Another snort from Tula, but it was more contemplative than emphatic, like she couldn’t quite figure how she might feel about taking that money either.

“All right then.” Tula got up from the sofa and shouted toward the back of the house, “C.J., let’s eat.”

“What’s for supper?” I asked her.

“Depends,” she said. “Where are you taking us?”

We ended up at Lilo’s where we had steak and shoestring potatoes and where me and Tula even danced a little. Near the end there, when the band was playing “The Tennessee Waltz” for about the fourth time, my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I wouldn’t have bothered with it if it hadn’t turned out to be Desmond calling twice. Once was usually nothing special. Two times always meant “Oh, shit.”

Somebody had busted into K-Lo’s store again. That was not so uncommon a thing. By the time I got there, K-Lo had very nearly left off swearing. A car had driven into the front glass, which was the usual technique. Then the perp had passed five minutes looking for cash and merchandise worth stealing. This fellow had broken into K-Lo’s office—had kicked in K-Lo’s lauan door—and had made off with K-Lo’s .38 revolver and K-Lo’s twenty-gauge shotgun. He’d also busted K-Lo’s pencil cup, which K-Lo was livid about.

“Shit,” K-Lo told me as he showed me and Desmond the pieces of what had been a cheesy Graceland mug.

When I finally got Desmond off to the side, I asked him, “Why’d you call me on this one?” K-Lo had break-ins like most of the rest of us had gas.

Desmond motioned for me to follow him back out to the front of the store where he showed me a piece of the twisted aluminum channel the glass had been in. It looked to have dragged along the fender of the car that had busted the window. Desmond pointed out some yellow paint.

“Him,” Desmond said.

“He hasn’t got the only yellow car around.”

Desmond chuffed the way a bear might and told me another time, “It’s him.”

We knew we’d find out for certain soon enough. K-Lo had installed surveillance cameras after he’d had his front glass broken out a solid dozen times. His underwriter had insisted on it, and K-Lo had squawked about the price, but he’d finally called in a guy from Jackson to come out and do it up right. K-Lo had four high-resolution cameras and a DVR in a hardened cupboard, so the ritual was that we’d sit down with whichever deputy finally arrived and show him precisely who’d gotten up to the crime we’d called him about. You could usually make out the tag number. You could always make out the fools.

I can’t say why thieves on the lowlife circuit never seemed to get the word that everybody who broke into K-Lo’s got arrested straightaway. They just kept coming, and we kept sending the law to snatch them up. Worse still, aside from the guns, there was hardly anything worth stealing, and you could get firepower in the Delta almost anywhere.

K-Lo kept talking about putting up roll-down shutters, but that felt a little too much to him like a hoodlum triumph. So he put off buttoning the place up tight, and the thieves kept on breaking in.

One of the new Indianola female deputies got the call that night and came out. A big girl named Wanda.

Wanda took some photos of the damage with her phone and started in on her report while K-Lo switched on his computer and cued up the surveillance footage. We watched black-and-white video of the rent-to-own storefront for about a quarter hour at quadruple speed.

We’d seen enough of this sort of footage to know what the method usually was. Some guy, almost always in a hoodie, would walk up to the front double doors and jerk on the handles a time or two. He’d see that the throw bolt was plated over, which ruled out a saw or a torch. I don’t know why they never went around to the back. You could buck open
that
door with your hip.

That Boudrot must have made up his mind back down the road in Leeland or somewhere, because that yellow Gold Duster he was driving just appeared at full tilt and rammed straight through the glass. That Boudrot climbed out of the car and actively looked around for cameras. He followed the co-ax over to the unit in the corner. He smiled up at us, ran his palm along the side of his head to slick back his greasy hair. Then he pointed his finger at the lens and made like to shoot it out.

“Look familiar?” Wanda asked us.

“That’s the boy that broke out of Parchman,” I said.

“The one today?”

“Yep,” Desmond told her.

We eventually watched Guy Baptiste Boudrot climb back into his stolen Plymouth and wave as he backed out into the lot.

*   *   *

We didn’t know where Percy Dwayne Dubois might be, but we had a pretty fair idea where we could find his nephew. Luther sold oxy out of a roadhouse down near Yazoo City. He’d spent his cut of the Boudrot money on a new Ford diesel truck, had gone in with a cousin on a steakhouse that had closed, and had pissed away whatever was left on lizard boots and big belt buckles. Luther had gotten away from the drug trade for maybe eight months tops.

He’d worked for years out of a place called Tootie’s, down toward Yazoo in the middle of nowhere much. We pulled in to find it had changed hands and was Lurleen’s anymore.

Tootie’s had always been strictly a cracker roadhouse, the sort of place Desmond would just have to walk into to end up in a fight. So I went in alone, stepped inside to discover that Tootie’s had been renovated and transformed. It was still a jackleg roadhouse with a chipboard bar, a bunch of mismatched tables, a row of booths against the back wall with more duct tape than vinyl. The jukebox was blasting out some shitty Eddie Rabbittesque country song, and the patrons were dancing and smoking and drinking Bud tallboys all at the same time. But there was a bouquet of flowers at one end of the bar—gladiolas mostly—and I spied a patron eating something. It looked like an honest to God order of ribs served on an actual plate.

There’d been no food at Tootie’s. There’d been no gladiolas. And the bartender had looked like Popeye after the meth had taken hold. Now there was a girl behind the bar, and not one of these girls you had to squint at to help convince yourself she was an actual female. This one had on a tube top and was justified to wear it. She had a smart spiky haircut and a sunburst tattooed around her navel. Each of her stubby fingernails was painted a different color. She could well have been an art student who’d wandered way off the interstate.

“Hey, sport,” she said when she saw me.

The girl slapped an actual printed cocktail napkin down on the bar. According to what I read on it, Lurleen’s was a lounge. I noticed the chipboard bar was now under about six coats of marine varnish. “What’ll it be?” The bartender smiled at me. She had what looked like all her teeth.

“Bud, I guess.”

She jabbed her thumb toward a half-dozen beer cans on a shelf. “There’s better if you want it,” she told me.

Damned if there wasn’t—and no more skunky Iron City like Tootie used to drink. I ordered up a Molson and asked her, “Where’d Tootie get off to?”

The girl behind the bar put a finger to her temple and made a dumb show of blowing out her brains.

“Jesus,” I told her.

“Unlucky in love,” the bartender said.

“We’re talking the same Tootie, right?” I tried to approximate Tootie’s bulk, stretched out my arms and puffed up my cheeks.

She nodded. “He had a girl in Jackson. I hear she threw him over.”

Then I couldn’t help but think of Tootie in the altogether. Many folds and tufts and hanging bits like an overstuffed Chesterfield couch.

“You ought to ask Lurleen,” the bar girl told me. “They were cousins.”

She pointed, and I glanced. Lurleen was sitting in Tootie’s old spot down at the end of the bar. She was sipping a diet Pepsi straight out of the can with a soda straw. Lurleen had a pile of yellow hair, less a beehive than a termite mound. She had a ledger open before her and was toting up some figures. No matter how she twitched and swiveled, her hair never let on that she’d moved.

I eased down the bar to speak to Lurleen. I was standing next to her a good half minute before she left off with the bookkeeping and looked up.

“Hey, sugar,” she said.

“Just heard about Tootie.” I gave her my wince of condolence.

“Can’t never tell what’s going on in here.” She tapped her sternum with a blood-red lacquered nail.

“I’m looking for a fellow named Luther Dubois. Used to be kind of a fixture in this place.”

She laid her pencil down and eyed me hard. “You the law?”

“No, ma’am,” I told her and snorted, tried to look offended.

“Why do you want him?”

“Just need to tell him a thing.” I had the poor sense to add, “It’s personal.”

Lurleen had a hell of a pinched smile, which she treated me to for a good quarter minute.

“A boy busted out of Parchman,” I informed Lurleen. “He might be after Luther.”

She eyed me again in a comprehensive way and must have decided that I was all right.

“Got a regular office anymore,” she said and pointed into the depths of the lounge. “I’ll buzz him.” She reached for a doorbell button at the end of the bar.

Luther’s office was hard by the crapper, in a ratty little room where Tootie used to keep his busted furniture. Tables and chairs the patrons had wrecked that Tootie kept meaning to fix. Luther opened the door about the time I reached it. He grinned when he saw who it was.

“Shit howdy,” Luther told me and gave me a shake and awkward hug. “Where’s that nigger of yours?”

I drew a deep breath and country pointed in the general direction of the lot. “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

Luther laughed. He told me, “Fuck.”

He stepped aside to let me pass into his office, followed me in and shut the door. The place was tidy and clean. Luther might have sold oxy, but he had a certain sense of style. Luther had a desk with a copy of
Barely Legal
open on the blotter and nothing else. There was a straight chair just beside the desk for “clients” (Luther told me), and he had a map of something or another taped onto the wall.

“Park it,” Luther said as he slipped out of his blazer. He’d put the thing on just to answer the door.

Luther was wearing a proper suit. Proper except that it was purple and shinier than a regular everyday business suit should be.

“How the hell you been?” he asked me. “Figured you’d own an island or something by now.”

“You and Lurleen some kind of item?”

Luther glanced around like he wanted to be certain there was nobody in his office but us. Then he shrugged and told me, “Got its perks.”

I think he mostly meant the room we were in and the blind eye to his business.

“That’s some pile of hair on her.”

“Comes right off,” he said. “She leaves it sitting by the sink.”

Luther took a tug on his Rolling Rock pony, and I knocked back the rest of my Molson.

“Got some bad news,” I finally told him. “That Boudrot busted out.”

“Fuckstick?”

I nodded.

“They’ll round him up, won’t they?”

“Haven’t yet, and he killed a guy already.”

“Shit!” Luther got up and did a little stalking, though there wasn’t truly much of anywhere to go. “Who?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Civilian. Needed his car.”

“Where do you figure he’s headed? Away from here, right?”

“That’s what we were hoping, but then he broke in at K-Lo’s.”

“Looking for you boys?”

“Made off with a couple of guns.”

“I don’t like the sound of this.”

“Us neither. That’s why we’re here.”