Ranchero (22 page)

“I get it,” I told Desmond. “He’s a runt.”

Sometimes people explain themselves to you without uttering a word. You can know who they are and what they’re made of by looking at them once. I developed a knack for that sort of thing on the PD in Virginia. A civilian would be telling me one thing with his mouth while the rest of him was telling me something else.

Guy was mad he wasn’t six foot two, and he expected the world to pay him for it. You could tell it by the way he held himself. You could tell it by the way he screamed, by how he snatched the pistol from the fellow who’d shot Desmond and began to beat him with it while Dale just looked on.

Everything Guy did was ripe with violence and recrimination. And Percy Dwayne was right: He did look a little like a movie star. Mostly because his head was bigger than it needed to be.

He looked to me like a furless Ewok. He was swarthy. Maybe tanned. I couldn’t really tell which from where I was. He had his hair slicked back, and he was dressed in the way a fellow like him would think was flashy. He held himself like a rooster on a planet full of hens.

The violence for him, the ghastly, evil bullshit he got up to, was all just compensation for the lifts he needed in his shoes.

He didn’t just hit that no-neck once. Guy put him on the ground, and then we watched him beat him with his pistol well after he was down, probably after he was already in a coma. Guy just kept whacking him until he was raising blood and giblets both.

The only move Dale made was to back up and keep clear of the splatter. He never so much as twitched to suggest he was tempted to intervene.

“Do him,” Percy Dwayne suggested.

The thought had more than crossed my mind already. We’d flushed him out like we’d wanted, and I could have gunned him down with ease. But there was something about Guy that told me I just wouldn’t be satisfied if all I did was put him in the ground. He’d get the chance to rot there soon enough. He impressed me as the sort who needed to rot a little topside first.

“Shooting’s too good for him,” I told Percy Dwayne. “I think I need Guy in Parchman for a while. They’ll know what to do up there with a fellow who looks like a movie star.”

Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Yep.”

The thing about Guy was that he couldn’t seem to get unmad. You’d think a man who’d just beaten a musclehead probably clean to death with a pistol—and not just a couple of blows in the full blush of righteous rage but in a leisurely, attenuated frenzy—would know at least a passing moment of reflection and regret. Even a monster like Jeffrey Dahmer must have paused every now and again, maybe elbow deep in gore, to ask himself, “What the fuck am I up to?”

Guy wasn’t even that sensitive. He was simply pissed the way some people are redheads or left-handed.

He finally left off beating his no-neck and flung the Glock onto the ground. He had Dale take his shirt off so he could swab the splatter with it. Then he threw that down too and stalked into the house. We could hear him yelling and banging around in there for a bit as well. When he came back out, he had a few choice words for Dale.

Guy grabbed the Chinese AK out of Dale’s hands and fired it like a madman. Straight up in the air. Down into the ground. Swept it along the levee. We couldn’t get low enough to feel safe.

He finally emptied the clip and threw the whole damn gun into the woods. He yelled a little more and kept on yelling as he circled around the four by four and climbed into the Ranchero.

I heard that beautiful rumble as he turned the engine over, watched him briefly in the clearing before he reached the trees.

“She look dirty to you?” I asked Desmond, who knew a filthy car when he saw one.

He loosed a mournful snort and told me, “Sure does.”

Dale got so busy mourning and poking his colleague with his foot that he didn’t see me coming until he’d felt the M4 muzzle in his back.

“Jesus!” was all he said once he’d looked over his shoulder and seen me.

“Moonlighting, Dale?” I asked him as I took his service pistol out of the waistband of his sweats, the very gun I’d taken from his wife not forty-eight hours ago.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

Dale nodded. “But I ain’t done it.”

“Didn’t stop it, either.”

Dale started whining about how hard it was to make a living and how he didn’t actually want to be doing what he’d gotten up to, but Guy was a crazy bastard and you couldn’t just up and quit him.

Dale seemed to be figuring if he told me he couldn’t stand to go to Parchman, I might gun him down just to save him the bother, but if I didn’t gun him down, he’d end up locked away for years. It was a bad spot for a fellow to be in, especially a fellow as dumb as Dale who had to labor to weigh out all the possibilities.

Desmond and Percy Dwayne had joined me by then. “Why don’t you watch him,” I told Desmond. “I’ll go in and see what’s what.”

I handed him Dale’s 9 mm and Desmond hit him with it.

“I don’t like getting shot,” Desmond told Dale.

Dale told Desmond, “Ow!”

Me and Percy Dwayne went inside. This house wasn’t like the other places. It was furnished and homey, and there were three Mexicans at the kitchen table weighing out the meth they’d made.

They could just as well have been making tamales to sell to the restaurant trade. The house was that clean and orderly, and none of those three boys looked like users. They even got a little jolly once we’d convinced them in broken Spanish that they weren’t about to be dead.

We took the drugs in a gym duffel. I figured we might have use for them, and I told those Mexicans to clear out. Then me and Percy Dwayne went back out to join Desmond.

“That yours?” I asked Dale of the Tahoe in the yard.

He nodded.

“Not anymore.”

I gave it to the Mexicans, told them to drive Dale home. We trussed him up with a length of clothesline and loaded him in the way back.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I told Dale. “Don’t talk to anybody. We’ll find you in a while.”

He nodded. He was hardly having the week he’d hoped to have.

Those three Mexicans piled into the four by four and headed down the track. Me and Desmond and Percy Dwayne carried Dale’s dead colleague into the house. We left his bloody Glock on the floor right beside him.

We didn’t light this one, left it just like it had been. We crossed back through the soybeans with their agrichemical stink. Blue sky. High clouds. An acrobatic Ag Cat on the horizon.

TWENTY-THREE

Eugene was finished. I didn’t need Luther to tell me that. Eugene was like a child who sits down in the trail and won’t go on. He was drained and spent, and I let him uncork a litany of every damn thing he wouldn’t do no matter how I tried to make him.

“Fine,” I told him. “You and him go on home.”

Tommy hadn’t even started to tell me what I couldn’t make him be up to, but I had to think him and Eugene were on the same page.

“Sure about this, boss?” Luther asked me.

I nodded. “It doesn’t matter anymore. There’s nothing they can say. Nobody they can tell. Send them back to the swamp. We’ll find Guy’s hunting lodge without them.”

“Well, you’re welcome all to hell.” Eugene didn’t quite have indignation down, but he made a decent show of being offended.

“Your choice,” I told him. “I can’t help it if you miss your cut.”

“What cut?” Eugene asked me.

“What do you think’ll become of that money if we leave it to the cops?”

“Fuckers’ll steal it,” Luther declared.

And Desmond added, “Fuckers will.”

“He’s up by Blue Hole,” Eugene announced. “And I don’t go unless I drive.”

So it was lumpy backroads all the way over from Louise to Anguilla, up through Booth and Grace and over to Addie and then down on the Blue Hole road. I quizzed Eugene along the way to find out what we might run into. From what I’d seen of Guy and what I could believe from Eugene, the man ran too hot to be careful. That’s why he’d had to leave New Orleans at a sprint.

He was throttled up all the time and didn’t know how to dial it back. He was his own security force, couldn’t trust anybody else to do the job. Neal was just a living gun rack who fetched him shit and took abuse. That could work to our advantage. Guy didn’t have a loyal crew, just boys getting paid to hang around and suffer his abuse. Guy seemed to have decided he was too notorious for anybody to touch him, so famously crazy that nobody would have the stones to take him down. Burn a few houses maybe but never seek him in his lair.

Blue Hole was one of those cutout lakes that the river had left when it wandered. It was a tiny one as those things go, maybe forty acres at most. The terrain around it was all marshy except for a half mile or so of compacted silt between the lake and the river. The land was thick with cypress and cottonwoods, and Guy’s was the only structure for miles.

He had a gate with an intercom halfway down what proved to be his driveway and a run of fencing either side that simply petered out in the scrub. It was just the sort of half-assed compound a psychotic Acadian fuck stick would build. You walked around a little one way or the other and you were in.

We got to where we could see the roofline before we stopped to make some sort of plan.

“One thing,” I said after we’d decided who’d go where and how. “It’d be a lot better if we didn’t have to kill him.” Of course, I was talking to Percy Dwayne. “You can scuff him up if you need to, but short of making him dead. We’ve got to look out for your wife and baby. They’re in there somewhere, too.”

We all went in, even Eugene and Tommy. They weren’t laying back if there was money involved. We spread out and slipped up from tree to tree, from grassy hummock to hummock.

It was moccasin country and gator terrain, so we had a lot to think about. The Ranchero was parked up under the house. There was a truck in the yard and a Blazer, and even before I could see him, I could hear Guy screaming at somebody about something.

The house was up out of the swamp on stilts, and the deck wrapped full around it. It was little short of palatial compared to Eugene’s. A Mississippi version of a chalet.

Guy wandered into view. He was stalking along the deck, circling the house and talking on his phone. He was pissed, of course, but I couldn’t quite make out who he was pissed at or why. He was wearing just briefs, black Calvins, and he had a green bath towel draped around his neck. He didn’t have any muscle with him. Just him in his underwear, strutting around like he was bulletproof.

Every time he wandered out of sight, I moved a little closer until I was twenty yards or so from the south end of the place. Guy came around again, still irate. He was yelling at a plumber. He’d been in the shower—washing the blood and the giblets away, I guess—when the drainpipe had backed up. He kept wondering if that plumber had ever been ankle-deep in shit.

As propositions go, that one seemed pretty likely to me, but Guy couldn’t get an answer he was happy with. So he barked a little louder, which apparently was his lone method and technique.

Me and Desmond were the first ones under the place, which was about where our plan gave out. You couldn’t really plan on storming a house you’d never laid eyes on before and calculate how to keep yourself from getting blown to pieces. So we were just standing there trying between us to work up the adrenaline to go up and in, when Percy Dwayne and Luther joined us by the pilings and started to press us on the plan we didn’t have.

Then we all heard that Vardaman’s voice, a little muffled from upstairs, and me and Desmond had to sit on Percy Dwayne to hold him where he was. Luther, his nephew, kicked him a little, which wasn’t terribly helpful.

Eugene and Tommy were stuck behind a cypress tree and had decided they were comfortable a good fifty yards from the house, particularly once they’d spotted us all wrestling under the decking. We very nearly had to cut off Percy Dwayne’s air to calm him down. It helped when Guy got on the phone again since he was loud and strenuous about it. We were able to convince Percy Dwayne that Guy couldn’t likely rage on the phone and ravish Sissy all at once.

Guy was yelling at a second plumber. The first one must have blown him off, evidence of the limits of being furious all the time. It only barely works on people in your actual employ. The razor-sharp Japanese blade tends to help, along with the willingness to use it. But some jobber over in Yazoo City with plenty of other plumbing to fix?

The more I listened to Guy, the lower he fell in my esteem. He was one note only. There wasn’t a wise or subtle thing about him.

“He’s an idiot,” I told Desmond. “Just a hothead with no brakes.”

Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Yep.”

Because the drain was backed up, nobody could use the toilets in the house. This proved to be a special problem for Neal, Guy’s pumped-up bodyguard. It turned out he’d built his muscles at the general expense of his bladder.

We heard him on the deck, clumping along. While Guy kept circulating and yelling, Neal headed for the stairs that went down toward a swampy eddy behind the house. He had a Tec 9 hanging on a strap around his neck and a Sig Pro in a holster on his hip. He also had such an urgent need to take a leak that he was entirely oblivious to us lurking behind the pilings.

Lucky for us, the stairs were a straight run down from top to bottom, and Neal stepped off the last tread with his back to us and wandered out to the edge of the marsh to pee. Guy was still yelling overhead, which was helpful.

He was a do-you-know-who-I-am sort of guy in a place where nobody gives a happy shit who you are. It was a tough go for him. Most Delta plumbers don’t need a meth-slinging Acadian fuck stick to help them make their nut. Guy was learning that the hard way and taking his sweet time doing it.

So there wasn’t any mystery where Guy was from one second to the next. Neal had whipped out his shriveled member and was poisoning the swamp when I gave Luther the nod, and he slipped out with his Taser. Guy was on the far end being irate when Luther went down on one knee like a big game hunter and fired his darts right into Neal’s back.