Red Grass River (29 page)

At the last door on the left she heard him. He was saying something about seeing Bobby in a dream. She didnt know if he was talking about his dead brother or the sheriff or somebody else. She didnt care. She took out the .44 and swiftly opened the door, stepped inside and closed it behind her.

The room was dimly illuminated by a small bedside oil lamp turned down low. They were lying naked on the bed, his back to the door, the bedsheets in a tangle at their feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw her and then saw the gun in her hand. His mouth opened but he made no sound.

“Who is it?” the woman said. She sat up with her face to the door and in a quick glance Laura saw that her hair was short and blonde and that she was pretty.

She strode quickly to the bed and put the pistol muzzle against John Ashley’s forehead and forced his head back into the pillow and said, “Give me one good reason I ought not to shoot you here and now, you no-count whore-mongerin son of a bitch.” She cocked the hammer.

His good eye fixed on her. He was trying to affect indifference but she knew him too well to be fooled. He was scared—she could see it in his eye, in the pale tightness of his mouth. She wanted to laugh, she suddenly felt so good, but she kept her aspect deadly serious the better to preserve the mood and her authority.

“I aint got no good reason,” he said.

“I’ll give you a reason,” the blonde said quickly. “He loves you.”

Laura looked at the woman whose stare was strange and unfocused. “Who the hell asked—”

John Ashley grabbed her wrist with one hand and clapped his other hand tightly over the cocked hammer so it could not fall as she squeezed the trigger. She tried to pull the pistol free but he locked both hands tight and yanked her off balance and onto the bed. She punched at him with her free hand and cursed him and he rolled over on top of her and straddled her stomach and she shouted, “Get offa me—
get off!
” and vainly bucked and writhed and tried to unseat him. He wrested the revolver from her and eased the hammer down and Loretta May’s hands scrabbled over his shoulders and her arms locked around his neck and she said, “Get
offa
her before you squash her!” With a hard choking tug backward she pulled him off Laura and he went tumbling to the floor. He scrambled away from the bed on all fours and got to his feet and stood with his back against the wall and the gun in his hand as Laura sat up and rubbed her wrist and glared at him like she might come at him yet. Both of them were gasping for breath.

“You damn crazy woman,” John Ashley said.

“You hush, John Ashley,” Loretta May said sharply. “It’s no way to talk to the woman you love.”

“The woman I love was ready to blow my damn brains out, is what she was—”

“Goddamn right I was, you cheatin, lying son of—”

“
Hush
now, the both you!” Lorreta May said, reaching out and finding Laura’s back and then scooting up beside her. She put her arms around Laura’s shoulders and said, “It’s all right now, honey, it’s all right.”

And then suddenly Laura was crying—crying hard with her face in her hands—and Loretta held her closer and rocked her gently and crooned, “There now, baby, there now, dont you cry. It’s no need to cry, it’s no need. Everything’s better than you know. It is, it is.”

Laura’s unlaced brogans had come off in the struggle, and one of the overall straps had slipped off her shoulder to expose a breast and even as she wept she became aware of the soft warmth of Loretta May’s naked breasts against her arm. She snuffled and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and turned to look at Loretta May and saw the strange lack of focus in her eyes. And even as the realization came to her she said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you—? I mean—”

“She’s blind, for chrissake,” John Ashley said. “Cant you
see
?”

Laura stuck her tongue out at him and then said to Loretta, “Are you
really
?”

“As a damn bat, honey. Aint you never knowed anybody blind before?”

“Uh-uh. You been blind since always? Since you was borned?”

“No. Just since I was ten.”

“You
used
to could see till you was
ten
year old?”

“Used to could.”

“And now you cant see
nothin
? Nothin at
all
?”

“Well. Nothin you can put your hand to.”

“But thats…it must be so awful
dark
all the…you poor…that’s just
terrible
!” Laura said. And broke out crying again. She pulled Loretta May to her and kissed her on the forehead and hugged her around the shoulders.

Loretta May stroked Laura’s hair and kissed her cheek and they hugged more closely still and Laura caressed Loretta May’s bare back and kissed her perfumed shoulder and then each of her eyes in turn. She looked into her sightless eyes a moment and then kissed her quickly and lightly on the lips.

Loretta May smiled and brushed at Laura’s tears with her fingers and put her fingers to Laura’s mouth and whispered, “I always known why you love him. Now I see why he loves you.”

Laura smiled against Loretta May’s fingers and took a fingertip in her mouth and rolled her tongue on it and then blushed brightly and grinned and Loretta May grinned back at her and put a hand to Laura’s face and kissed her full on the mouth. And Laura held the kiss. And then they were kissing deeply and with tongues and Loretta pushed down the other of Laura’s overall straps and lightly touched her breasts. They kissed and tentatively put their hands to each other in Loretta May eased her hand down Laura’s taut belly and playfully wriggled her fingers into her public bush and Laura’s eyes came open wide and she pulled back slightly in Loretta’s embrace and the two women faced each other and burst into giggles like mischievous schoolgirls.

“You know what?” Lorretta said. “We forgettin somethin.” She put her hand over her eyes like a sun visor and turned her head in one direction and then the other, as if she were scanning the horizons. “Wherever he’s at.”

Laura looked at John Ashley still standing with his back to the wall. He’d put the pistol aside on a chair and was smiling. He bore an erection as sizable as any she’d ever seen on him. It was nodding in time with his heartbeat like an approving bystander. She laughed
and shook her head and said, “He’s over there with that ugly thing all swole up and pointin at us like it aint seen a nekkid woman in a year.”

He looked down at himself and said, “I dont know it’s so ugly.”

“How you, ah, feel about this, Johnny?” Loretta May said, lightly it to her and grinned at John Ashley.

“I feel like everbody’s gone to a hell of a good party,” John Ashley said, “and I aint been invited.”

The girls tittered. “Poor boy feels left out,” Laura said.

“Well now, you one-eyed gator skinner,” Loretta May said, “maybe you wouldnt be left out of nothin if you just quit bein way over
there
and got your outlaw ass on over
here
.”

His grin widened the more and he bounded for the bed with his bobbing erection pointing the way like a compass right and true.

One of their informants brought the news to Twin Oaks. He’d heard it from a West Palm Beach cop who got it from some Miami cops just a couple of days before.

The corpse had been weighted by something heavy tied to its neck by quarter-inch cord. Whatever the weighting object had been—a concrete block, a section of scrap metal, a limerock boulder—it had to have been rough-edged because the action of the current’s steady tugging on the body had eventually severed the cord where it rubbed against the anchor. The body had then carried downstream and floated up near the mouth of the river at Biscayne Bay and in front of the Royal Palm Hotel where it was spotted by a guest taking an early morning stroll. The police were summoned and they pulled it out of the water and even though the dead man was eyeless several of the cops recognized him as Gordon Blue.

Much of his face bore small dark pocks about the size of bulletholes, particularly around the empty sockets. The cops figured them for burns. The body was conveyed to the city physician who surmised that the victim had been dead at least a week. He found that several fingers on each hand were broken and that the victim’s scrotum had suffered severe trauma. “The man went through some goodly pain before he went in the river,” the informant told the Ashley Gang. “And he went in still alive. The doc said he died of drowning.”

The Ashleys figured it was most likely Bellamy’s doing. The question was why. If Bellamy didnt like the deal with them why take it out on Gordy? Hell, if Bellamy didnt like the deal why even bother to
shake on it? If he’d intended to crawfish why make the first payoff as he already had?

“What we gone do about this, Daddy?” Ed said.

Old Joe knocked his pipe against a porch post to dislodge the dottle and then put the stem in his mouth and blew the remaining ashes from the bowl. “Nothin,” he said. “We dont
know
it was Bellamy—not for a fact, we dont. And even if it was, it dont look to have nothin to do with us. Bellamy’s holdin to his end of the deal, so we’ll hold to ours. I dont know why he’d do Gordy such as he did but I figure it for somethin personal between them.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Frank Ashley said: “Gordy was our friend.”

Bill Ashley snorted. “He was a lawyer. A lawyer aint nobody’s friend.” The late afternoon light played off his spectacles and made them look like circles of tin.

John Ashley glared at him. “You do best when you do like usual and keep you mouth shut.”

Bill turned his glinting lenses toward him but said nothing.

“Quit now,” Old Joe said. “You both right. He was our friend and he was a lawyer and sometimes I wasnt real sure when he was being the one and when the other. But it was his choice to do business with them Miami sumbitches. I always told him he oughten to truck with them—some you heard me tell him. But he always said he knew what he was doin. Well, he took his own chances is what he did and we had nothin to do with it then and we dont now. And thats the end of it.”

Shortly thereafter John Ashley made a delivery of Old Joe’s bush lightning to a new customer, a man named Goren, who operated a fish camp on the Peace River just east of Wauchula in brandnew Hardee County barely two months old. Goren had been informed he could get booze at a better price from the Ashleys than from the Arcadia moonshiners he’d been dealing with for the past year, and he sent word to Old Joe that he could use twenty cases a month if the Ashleys could see fit to get him off the hook with the Arcadia dealers. They were some pretty rough old boys and he didnt want them to get mad at him for quitting them. Old Joe told Goren he’d settle the matter with the Arcadians, but it would be a month before he’d have a sufficient store of hooch on hand to make the fish camp’s first delivery. He promised that thereafter the hooch would come around as regular as the moon. He said his boy John would deliver the first load to
ensure that everything went all right and that Goren was satisfied with the stuff. Goren said they had a deal. He was impressed that Joe Ashley would take so much trouble for such a smalltime customer. Old Joe said he treated all his customers the same whether they bought a thousand cases or just one jug. He then sent Clarence Middleton to apprise the Arcadians of Goren’s switch in hooch suppliers. The Arcadians didnt like it but knew better than to make an issue of it. And now John Ashley was delivering the Wauchula fish camp’s first load of Old Joe’s hooch.

The camp stood on a stretch of riverbank in the deep shade of live oaks hung thick with Spanish moss. A dozen small boats were tied up at a trio of piers jutting into the river. Ten yards back from the river was a bait and tackle shop set on six-foot pilings and engirt by a wide planked deck with rough-hewn tables and benches. Goren’s two Negro workers were quick to unload the truck and store the cases in the bait shop’s backroom next to Goren’s tiny living quarters. The fishing camp fellas were good old boys and all of them were excited to have John Ashley in their midst. John accepted their invitation to have a short one with them before heading back and they sat themselves at one of the long tables on the portion of deck overlooking the river. As the fish camp owner poured a round of Old Joe’s shine a school of mullet broke the surface of the river like silver shards of a bursting mirror. The men were just raising their glasses to one another’s health when police cars came roaring down the shell drive and cops with shotguns came running out of the flanking trees yelling, “Hands up! Get your fucken hands up, you sons of bitches!”

His first thought was to dive over the railing into the river. But he knew the cops would open fire and there were too many of them to miss and that would be all she wrote. Either that or they’d get in one of the ready boats and go out and pluck him from the water before he was halfway to the other bank. So he stood up with the others and raised his hands high as the cops closed in and Goren whispered fiercely, “We dont know no Ashley, none of us, got that, boys?” The others nodded and grinned, their faces bright and unable to hide their excitement at this adventure of a police raid and John Ashley in their midst.

There were a dozen or so Hardee County deputies in the raiding party and some of them shoved the fishcamp men up against the wall face-first and frisked them while others went into the bait shop and found the cases of hooch. The deputy who patted down Ashley relieved him of the .45 in his waistband and called, “Sheriff Poucher, right
here!” The sheriff came over and examined the pistol and then looked at John Ashley as though he might smile at him. He said, “You the one brought the shine in?”

John Ashley said he sure as hell was not, he was just passing through and thought he’d stop and see if there was aught to drink at this camp and there was, and he was just having a short one with the fellas is all. The sheriff asked what he was doing with the .45. He said it was for protection, a present from his uncle who’d fought against the Hun to defend the American way of life and freedom for all. He told the sheriff he was a sewing machine salesman and he’d heard that south Florida roads were bad for bandits and he was afraid of being robbed on the road. He’d sold every machine in his truck between Fort Lauderdale and Avon Park was why the truck was empty and why he had a fat roll of money in his pocket. He said was on his way home to his wife and three little children in Tampa who he’d sorely missed these past few weeks on the road and couldnt wait to see again. The sheriff nodded as though seriously considering this explanation and then, asked his name. “Murphy, sir,” John Ashley said. “Art Murphy.”