Ranchero (11 page)

“Uh-huh,” Desmond told him.

“In a fight?”

“Naw,” Desmond told me. “I hear he was asleep. Think somebody bet him he wouldn’t.”

“Damn. People around here and their knives,” I said, and looked as directly at Luther as I could manage.

“I ain’t never stuck nobody but him,” Luther said, “and he flat told me to.”

“Hmm.”

“You were bad back then,” Luther told Desmond. “Don’t guess I was much better.”

“But we’re all fine now,” I offered, “which is how we ended up here.”

Desmond pointed out a house, a little square thing with purple siding and wooden goose wind vane driven on a stake into the yard. He kept going and swung around the corner, did a four-point road turn, and parked.

“Where did he want it?”

“Porch was all he said. Front one, I guess. What time is it?”

“About ten of twelve,” Desmond told me.

“I’ll carry it over. Think we’re all right here?”

Desmond wasn’t so sure. He sized up the houses in the vicinity and selected one with gladiolus in the yard and a rocker on the porch.

Desmond climbed out of the Geo, went up and knocked on the door. A tiny, gray-haired, nut-colored lady showed up behind the screen. I watched Desmond gain her permission to back his Geo into her drive. He gave her three dollars and told her we worked for the CIA.

Once we’d backed in and were set where we could see down the road through her shrubbery, she brought us out ice water and told us about her brother’s wife, who was cleaning out her brother’s bank account and making her brother’s life a torment. She wondered what the CIA might have to say about that.

At ten after noon precisely, I left the car and walked over to Calvin’s. Unlike on Main Street in downtown Webb, there wasn’t anybody about. A cat crossed the road ahead of me, and a dog barked at me from a window. I don’t suspect I’ll ever feel so lily white again.

There wasn’t any Calvin around. Wasn’t any Dubois. Just me and my sack of newsprint cut up to look like dollar bills.

I climbed Calvin’s steps and listened at the door. The house sounded empty to me. I set my bag on the porch decking, opened the neck, and arranged all the twenties to show. Then I rolled the sack shut, left Calvin’s porch, and returned to Desmond’s car.

“Now what?” Luther wanted to know.

“We wait for Percy Dwayne or … somebody.”

“Then what?”

“I get Pearl’s car back. Beat up your uncle a little. You go back to your office. Me and him go back to work.”

“Nobody goes to jail?”

“I can’t see how that would help.”

“Well, you’re all right then,” Luther told me, “for somebody from somewhere else.”

A good half hour passed before we saw anybody.

“Right there,” Desmond said, and he pointed at a lanky kid walking up the street.

The guy was glancing all over while trying to seem to be looking at nothing much. He stopped in front of Calvin’s house and made the worst fake phone call I ever hope to see a human make. It was somewhere between Vicksburg dinner theater and a middle-school Thanksgiving play.

He laughed and hooted and looked one last time up and down the road before he dashed up onto Calvin’s porch, nabbed the sack, and dashed back off it.

He unrolled the neck and took a long, hard look inside. I held my breath a little until he’d rolled the neck back shut and set out down the street. From the constipated way he moved, he appeared to have been instructed that he damn well better not do anything to draw attention to himself.

He was walking away toward the head of the road, and we just watched him there at first until he left the pavement and climbed a hill through a patch of scrub and saplings. Only then did Desmond wheel out into the street and roll up to the end of the block where he let me out of the car.

“We’ll go around,” he said, and left me to follow the guy on foot.

I went up the scrubby hill, paused at the top, and found myself looking at the back of a makeshift church. The place appeared to have started as warehouse before it got sanctified. I saw a flash of shirt as that boy with the bag ducked around the far corner.

I could hear him before I saw him. This time he was making an actual call.

“Got it,” he said. “I’m here.”

Then he got talked at for a bit. I took a peek at him around the corner of that warehouse church.

“Aw’ight,” he said, and listened.

“Weren’t nobody anywhere.”

He got talked at some more. Instructed, I guess.

“Be there in five,” he said.

Then he crossed the road, cut through a lot, and I just stood and watched him from the corner of the holiness warehouse.

When Desmond came rolling up, I pointed to show him where to go. I crossed the road and entered the lot, passed through to the next block over, and saw that boy with the sack go in some manner of half-assed restaurant.

It had a Royal Crown Cola sign in the window. The whole place was painted chartreuse. I could smell the fry oil before I saw the hand-lettered box bottom taped to the door.
CATFISH
, it read.
CHICKEN. RIBS
.

Desmond pulled up, and him and Luther climbed out of the Geo. I told them, “Stay here,” and tapped on my chest to let them know this thing was mine.

I’m not quite sure what I expected to find once I’d opened the door and gone in. Maybe that Dubois. Maybe that Vardaman. Maybe even the both of them with their stinky kid. Instead I got the Webb cartel eating catfish nuggets and drinking Pepsis. Calvin had the prime seat over in the corner, and he was looking in the sack when I came in.

Calvin had found his first stack of newsprint just as I entered the place.

Even in a dashiki and sitting down, Calvin proved capable of nearly dismantling the kid who’d brought him the sack. He punched him. He kicked him. He flung him to a colleague, who punched him and kicked him and tossed him around some more. Then he noticed me.

“This you?” Calvin asked me, pointing at the sack.

I nodded.

“Then we’ve got a problem.”

“Don’t see how.”

“Your asshole owes me. He says you owe him. That means you owe me. See it now?”

“What’s between you and him is between you and him. All I know is that shithead stole my car. Where is he?”

“Fuck you, Homer.” With that, Calvin started fishing from the sack neat bundles of fake cash and throwing them at me. One at a time, and with considerable leisure and toothy smirks all around. They bounced off me and dropped to the floor. Then he balled up the empty bag and threw that, too.

“So?” he said.

“My wallet’s in the car,” I told him. “I’ll be right back, and you and me’ll settle up.”

I don’t know if they thought I was spooked and intimidated or they just didn’t give a shit, but they let me walk out of there. I went straight to the Geo and pulled the shotgun out, grabbed a fistful of shells, and shoved them in as Desmond and Luther watched.

“Everything okay?” Desmond asked.

I nodded and told him, “Peachy.”

Luther wondered if, while I was in there, I’d pick him up an order of ribs.

I stepped inside and told those fellows, “Now then.”

I wasn’t angry. I don’t believe I was even much in the way of agitated. I’d just reached that point where I was through doing things like I’d done them before. Everybody stopped eating, and Calvin wiped his fingers on a napkin. He smiled like a man who’s seen the wrong end of a shotgun once or twice.

“Can’t shoot us all,” he told me.

“I can sure as shit try.”

There were six of us in there altogether, not counting the boy who’d brought the bag and the woman over at the Fryolator.

“You two might want to clear out,” I said, and they welcomed the chance to do it, while the guy to Calvin’s immediate right, who was big and looked dead stupid, started groping for whatever gangster hardware he had shoved in his pants.

I took a quick step toward him and tapped his forehead with the shotgun butt. He said some version of “Umph” and dropped face-first to the table.

The three other colleagues started squirming, and I told them all, “Stay put.”

Two of them did, but one of them bolted for the door. I heard him run into Desmond and Luther together and at once. From the sound of it he got put down hard and then tap-danced on with vigor.

“You,” I said to Calvin, “come here.”

Calvin had been watching entirely too much cop-show television. He had the lines down, though I can’t quite say how he’d ended up in a dashiki. He seemed confused about where his heritage and his methamphetamines met. But he knew what to say, and he stayed right in his chair and said it.

“I’m happy enough,” he told me, “where I am.”

It was almost like he thought I lacked the nerve to change his mind. If he’d caught me a few months earlier, I might have let it go, would have probably figured his taste in outerwear was punishment enough. At that moment, though, I’d lost my talent for accommodation.

The nexus between Aw-fuck-it and I-don’t-give-shit is a beautiful place to be. I could see that in an instant because I’d lost all sense of consequences. I was right there with Calvin exclusively, needing from him what I needed, and it didn’t matter to me if I shot him or beat him or took him out for brunch.

I didn’t particularly want him dead, but if Calvin got that way, I wasn’t prepared to worry much about it.

That sort of attitude tends to come off a fellow like a scent, and Calvin knew enough wanna-be gangsters to recognize the difference. For appearance’s sake, however, he needed to let me hit him once. I settled on a fist this time instead of K-Lo’s shotgun butt, caught Calvin square in the jaw, and sent him tumbling onto the floor. One of his buddies eyeballed me so that I gave him the gun butt instead.

“On the floor,” I told the last one, who still had his wits about him.

He went down stomach first on that nasty rolled linoleum—all grease and grit and years of stark neglect—and I relieved him of what turned out to be a knockoff Desert Eagle.

I drew open the slide and the whole thing fell apart. Made in North Korea or somewhere. There were two bullets in the clip and more rust on the works than you’d find on most backyard grills.

“What kind of thug are you?” I asked him.

Beyond calling me “sir” and making apologetic noises, he didn’t appear to have much interest in what kind of thug he was.

“Go on,” I told him, and I shouted out the door so could pass untapped on and get away.

“You want to give me a hand?” I said to Luther, who poked his head into the place and came fully inside once he was sure it was only me left standing.

“We’re taking him,” I said of Calvin.

“Okay,” Luther told me, but he went straight behind the counter to collect his takeout order of ribs. He ate a couple in the process and sang the praises of them, came over, and wiped his greasy hands on Calvin’s dashiki as we were lifting him up.

It turned out Calvin had a Steyr TMP under his dashiki, the 9-mm machine pistol. The thing knocked against me when I picked him up. He was wearing it on a strap, and it was all cocked and loaded. Oiled and cared for. Babied, even. When I handed it over to Desmond, Calvin actually stamped his feet.

“Bad day, bubby?” I asked him.

He spat on the ground much in the style of K-Lo’s lovely wife.

I doubt the engineers who’d designed Desmond’s Metro (not that I’m sure there were any) ever imagined there’d be much need for your standard Metro owner to load up three of his full-sized colleagues and drive them all over the place.

Given the way Desmond’s driver’s seat was backed clean off the rails, there wasn’t much for Luther to do but sit on top of Calvin. Calvin raised a considerable fuss about that.

He got all drug-lordy on us, asking us all those questions kingpins ask. Did we know who he was? Did we know who his friends were? Did we know what they could do to us?

Luther removed one of Gil’s tap shoes and beat Calvin on his cowlick until Calvin grew meek and finally shut up.

“Where’s Percy Dwayne?” I asked him

“Cocksucker owes me money.”

“Five thousand dollars? Bullshit. You’d never let him in that deep.”

Calvin didn’t say anything, just grunted and looked sullen.

I glanced at Luther, who smacked Calvin cowlick again.

“Two thousand! I sold him a car.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “because I kind of sold him a car yesterday, too.”

“Wasn’t driving nothing when I saw him.”

“When was that?”

“Afternoon. Three. Maybe four.”

“He coming for the other three thousand?”

“Taking it to him. In dope.”

“Is Percy Dwayne going into business?” I asked him.

“Seems so,” Calvin told me.

“And you don’t mind?”

“Shit kickers down yonder? I don’t give a damn.”

“Did you know about this?” I asked Luther.

He shook his head. “Percy Dwayne slings it sometimes. Usually after that wife of his has had enough of his laying around.”

“Where are you meeting him?” I asked Calvin.

“No damn where,” he told me. “Ain’t no money. Sure as shit ain’t going to be no dope.”

“Don’t you want your car back?”

Calvin shook his head.

“Wasn’t yours to start with?”

Calvin grunted.

“Well, there’s going to be a meeting,” I told him. “Money or no money, so where are we going?”

“Why the fuck should I tell you any goddamn thing?”

Luther tapped Calvin on top of his head because the moment impressed him as fitting.

“Ow!” Calvin said. “Quit it!”

“Where are you meeting him?” I asked.

Calvin went sullen. Luther tapped him again.

“Greenwood,” he told us. “Over at the Sonic.”

Desmond had only been drifting and whistling until then, but he came awfully close to squealing with delight.

TWELVE

So back down the Emmett Till Highway we went, riding low and chugging along as fast as four cylinders could take us. All I know is we were lucky that the Delta is dead flat or we’d have met every incline by bailing out to push.