Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (8 page)

That’s the law enforcement way. Short of an outright manhunt—the kind with federal agents and troopers and guardsmen and helicopters—cops just do their usual stuff and wait for criminals to be stupid. It’s a solid bet on their part, but that Boudrot would need to be stupid fast. He was amped up on rage and vindictiveness and doing such accelerated harm that a day in his life would be like a week for any other miscreant.

Just as Tula signed off, Desmond and Luther came out of the service station with something chicken fried on biscuits.

Luther jabbed a thumb toward the storefront. “Guy in there knows Eugene,” he said.

“In jail in Arkansas,” Desmond told me. “Couldn’t remember if he stole something or maybe just burned something down.”

“In for a stretch?”

They both shrugged.

“Where in Arkansas?”

“Eudora. Just across the river.”

“We going?” I asked Desmond.

It was Luther who spoke. “A man heading home to that kind of mess needs to know what he’s going to find.”

I probably stared at Luther like he’d just dropped down from the heavens. Desmond gave him a hard once-over too. We weren’t accustomed to Luther suggesting we do the decent thing or even knowing exactly what the decent thing might me.

“What?” he asked us.

“Eudora,” I told him. “How do we get there?” I asked Desmond.

He pointed north and grunted. That was the trouble with being backed up to the river. It was always a hike to the nearest bridge.

Dale was awake by the time we all climbed into the Escalade while Barbara the coonhound was asleep stretched full across the backseat.

“She’s getting grease on shit,” Luther announced.

Desmond gurgled back in his throat.

“I’ll get it all cleaned,” I told him.

“You right.” He started the engine and eased into the road.

“Where are we going?” Dale asked from the way back. He hadn’t sat up or anything. He was still stretched out where we’d tossed him after Desmond had laid him low.

Luther, who’d shifted Barbara enough to clear him a spot by the passenger door, laid an arm along the seat back and said to Dale, “Eudora, Arkansas.”

Dale was quiet for about a half mile. When he spoke again, he said, “Why?”

I think Dale must have dozed off shortly after that because he didn’t seem to hunger for an answer. We were on the bridge just south of Greenville when the concrete seams woke him up. He sat up enough to look out the rear window and see we were over the river. Then he laid back down and asked in a general way, “We ever eating or what?”

There’s not much to see in Arkansas. There’s a delta on that side of the river too, but the well water on the Arkansas side runs to spoiled and brackish somehow. They grow peanuts and keep cows. They’ve got nothing like the scale of farming that’s routine on the eastern side. There are trees and goats and pastureland and not the first speck of soybeans or cotton.

Barbara got antsy near Eudora, so we stopped in the gravel lot of some business that looked to be a combination propane works and café. You could bring in your tanks and get them filled on the north side of the structure. Judging by the scent from the range hood, you could get gastric distress down south.

That café had a big weathered menu attached to the front siding, a sheet of plywood on which somebody had painted a catfish (as it turned out) and a half rack of ribs in a puddle of sauce. There was something called angel slaw available as a side, in addition to
EVERY DAMN KIND OF FRITTER!
and
WHITE BREAD IF YOU WANT IT.

The aroma was enough to bring Dale entirely out of the way back.

“Lord, look,” he said as he studied the menu. “Who’s going to front me some cash?”

It ended up being me. Luther didn’t let out money as a rule, and Desmond hated Dale, so Dale knew to wander my way. I was standing over by a weedy patch where Barbara was making her business.

I fished two fives out of my billfold and shoved them Dale’s way.

Desmond was still digesting his chicken-fried thing, but Luther guessed he could eat again, so him and Dale went into the café. They were gone for maybe two minutes before Dale came back out trailed by a man he was planning to fight in the lot.

I was still over with Barbara. She was feeling fragile, I guess. Not confident enough anyway to just squat and get things over with. She was circling and sniffing and shivering a little. She’d look up at me every now and again and whine. Desmond was on the phone to his Pentecostal girlfriend. He was trying to explain what he was up to without actually telling her anything. So we weren’t in any position to intervene on Dale’s behalf, and Luther hadn’t even bothered to come outside.

Dale and the fellow who’d followed him out had some words there in the lot.

Dale said, “The hell I did.”

That fellow told him, “Shit.”

Dale had something else on his mind and was casting around for the appropriate inflammatory language when the gentleman who had followed him out knocked Dale down with a punch. It wasn’t a cinematic punch or even a bottom-of-the-ticket bloated heavyweight haymaker. The guy just lurched at Dale and hit him. I guess most anywhere would have hurt given that Dale had been beaten fairly thoroughly just the night before.

He went down like his bones had all dissolved at once. The guy who’d punched him said, “Shit,” again and spat. His buddy was just coming out the door to see the fight by the time it was over.

He glanced at Dale. He asked his pal, “You want dark meat, right?”

The guy who’d punched Dale told him, “I guess,” and the two of them went back inside.

Desmond had missed the whole thing. His back was to the action, and he was comprehensively preoccupied trying to explain to his Pentecostal girlfriend what exactly had carried him all the way to Arkansas.

I caught Desmond’s eye and pointed. He turned around to see Dale piled up in the lot. The last Desmond knew Dale had gone in to buy a bag full of greasy lunch, and there he was tipped over and semiconscious out in the parking lot.

“Got to go,” Desmond told his Pentecostal girlfriend. He listened to her for half a minute and then added, “Yes, praise Him.”

He shoved his phone in his pocket and looked to me for an explanation, which is to say Desmond showed me his upturned palms as he said my way just, “Huh?”

“I hate to call it a fight.”

“He just went in, didn’t he?”

I nodded. Barbara whimpered. Dale snorted up a puff of gravel dust.

“Guy punched him once.”

“How do you piss off anybody that quick?” Desmond asked me.

I’d known Dale too long by the then to be qualified to say since he’d been a source of low-level antagonism for me for years. I couldn’t remember if he’d chafed me the moment I’d met him or just very shortly thereafter.

Luther soon came out and explained it all to us. He was eating a catfish sandwich, which was shredded cabbage and about a half pound of fried fish between two slices of Texas toast. He took a bite. He chewed. He walked over to Dale and poked him with the toe of his snake-skinned boot.

“How the hell did he do it?” I asked Luther.

Luther jabbed his thumb toward the café-propane place. “Razorback fan,” he told us. “Dale had a thing to say.”

“You get him some lunch?” I asked him.

That was the sort of thoughtful gesture that didn’t occur to Luther naturally. He looked at me like I’d asked him if he’d laundered Dale’s undershorts.

“I’ll go,” I told Desmond. “Otherwise, he’ll just start pissing and moaning again.”

Desmond grunted and nodded. He instructed Luther to help him drag Dale to the car. Luther aired an objection or two about it before Desmond caught him on the cowlick with his open hand.

So I stepped inside the café on a mission just to get Dale some ribs, and without any provocation on my part, that Razorback fan got wolfy with me.

“Guess you want some too,” was the first thing I heard.

Like Dale, he’d probably been muscular once but had fallen down on the upkeep. He was wearing a sky-blue dress shirt that he’d cut the sleeves off of, better to show off his Chevy tattoo on his left biceps and the scar from his polio vaccination (I guess) on his right.

“Some what?” I asked him.

He had a chuckle with his buddies. There were two of them sitting with him at a picnic table.

“Yeah, sugar,” the lady behind the counter said. She was caramel-colored and had her hair all up and wrapped in a rag. I had to think she passed her life stinking of week-old fry grease and resenting the slights she must have suffered from the clientele.

“Ribs, I guess,” I told her. “And all the trimmings.”

“Half a rack?”

I nodded.

“You know what,” the guy with no shirtsleeves said. “Asshole.”

I don’t mind getting called an asshole once I’ve actually been one. If I go into a house to repo a washer or take a sofa out from under Grandma and the family wants to vent about it, they can call me whatever they please. I’m not proud of that work, and I’m convinced this world’s increasingly stacked against decent industrious people of low pedigree. So when “asshole” or “fuckwad” comes my way, I consider it the price of doing business.

But in a café in Arkansas when I’m only putting in an order and haven’t been up to the first little thing to get called an asshole about, somebody’s going to have to do a bit of explaining.

“Did I hear you right?” I said to that fellow.

He tightened up as best he could underneath his Chevy tattoo. He shifted his toothpick and grinned. “Asshole,” he said. He nodded.

“You sucker punch a sack of shit, and you think you’re Sonny Liston?”

He was grinning now. He set his toothpick on the napkin dispenser.

“How long on that order?” I asked the woman behind the counter.

“Five minutes.”

I told that boy, “Let’s go.”

So out we came into the lot. All four of us. Desmond was leaning against his front grill enduring prattle from Luther who very nearly stopped talking when he saw us step into the lot. He still had a few points to make with Desmond about proper catfish-frying technique, but he turned his attention to me and my posse while he said what he had to say.

Dale was out of sight in the Escalade by then, and Barbara’s head was hanging out the window.

“They ought to blow up all these goddamn bridges,” the fellow with the Chevy tattoo told me. “Keep you Mississippi trash over where you belong.”

He’d squared up on me by then and was making and unmaking his fists. He appeared to be looking for the chance to catch me with one of his lunging punches. I guess he thought, being Dale’s friend, I’d probably fight like Dale. That was hardly the case given my long-held fighting philosophy of always being first and never taking pity. I’d learned the hard way that going easy on a guy out of some tender human feeling was almost sure to cost you in the end.

So I went ahead and made my move. I waited for him to smirk at his buddies, and once he’d turned his head just slightly, I kicked him in the crotch. Hard and with full follow-through, like I was punting from the end zone. He tooted through his nose and bent forward. I swung on him with a right. Caught him flush and put him down.

One of his buddies said, “Fucker,” so I laid into him as well.

The third one held up his hands and showed me his palms. He smiled my way. He told me, “Hey.”

I very nearly eased off and relaxed, but then he went reaching for something, so I charged him and butted him over. I kicked him like hell once he was down. He had a pistol in his back jeans pocket, a little .25 caliber semi. It only held four rounds. You might kill a house cat with it if it was in your lap and you took dead aim.

I held the thing up and showed it to Desmond.

We liked our guns large and our calibers considerable. Desmond shook his head and told me, “People’ll buy any damn thing.”

Those boys were all twitching and groaning in the gravel at my feet. I pointed at the café and told Desmond and Luther, “Got to get Dale’s ribs.”

Luther shouted my way, “Can I kick them?”

Those boys were surely about to wish those bridges had all been blown to bits. I shrugged, reached for the screen door pull. “Do what you want,” he said.

Luther yipped and yodeled with cracker joy. “I like Arkansas after all.”

NINE

The Eudora, Arkansas, jailhouse had been a Big Lots once. It was off in a corner of what used to be a sizable shopping plaza. That store had been broken up into office space and modest shop fronts, and about half of them looked like they’d gone the way of the mother ship. Law enforcement, however, always loves a recession. There were new Crown Vic cruisers all over the place. People who’ve given over thieving for honest employment in boom times often find themselves laid off when things get tough and get back in the game.

If Eudora was much like Indianola—and it looked the same sort of spot, just smaller—the cops usually had an idea of who to pick up before even the choice goods got fenced. In terms of rank criminality, Eugene qualified as a sort of Eudora local. He’d shared with me and Desmond his crackpot theory of who had jurisdiction over what, and we’d been unable to shake Eugene from his abiding conviction that Mississippi was a sanctuary for thieving lowlifes like him.

Eugene primarily robbed Arkansas churches. “Shit, man,” he’d explained to us once, “they almost all unlocked.”

He’d started out stealing the bright brass liturgical bric-a-brac, but he’d soon discovered there wasn’t much of a going market for it. So he’d shifted his focus to pews and chairs and altar tables and pulpits. At least he could tear that stuff down into lumber if he couldn’t unload it whole.

Eugene drove a big junky truck he’d welded together from three or four other vehicles. During our first run-in with that Boudrot, me and Desmond and Luther had ridden around enough in Eugene’s truck to recognize it straightway over at the far end of the parking lot. It had been left in what passed for the Eudora PD’s impound yard, which was a weedy patch of shattered asphalt with two tractors and a backhoe in it along with Eugene’s jackleg state body truck. The bed was piled with stainless-steel tables.