Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (5 page)

That Boudrot had sliced up Patty’s bedclothes, her pillows, her nappy stuffed donkey. She’d had a bolster with a Bible verse on it—the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life. It was in the sort of scraps and tatters only a madman or an enraged bear would make.

“Did she see him?” I asked Kendell.

“Heard him,” he said.

“What did he say?”

“Sang,” Kendell told us.

“Sang what?” Desmond asked him.

“Patty wasn’t too clear on that. She was in the freezer by then.”

Again we followed Kendell. He led us through the kitchen. The cabinet doors had all had glass in them, but it was shattered on the linoleum now. The microwave was in the sink. The refrigerator had been laid over. There was busted crockery and flatware all over the place.

Kendell opened a door that gave onto the cellar steps. We followed him down. The basement was half cement and half dirt. Somebody had hit rock and given up. There wasn’t anything down there but a shelving unit made of rough-milled poplar and, off in a corner, an old chest freezer. It didn’t appear to be plugged in.

“She was in the kitchen when he kicked the front door in. She said she threw open the back door and ran down here, got in the freezer and waited.”

“Wanted him to think she’d run outside?” I asked.

Kendell nodded. “Must have worked.”

Kendell walked us out to Patty’s car shed. Once he’d finished with the house, that Boudrot had torn it up as well. He’d sliced up the upholstery in Patty’s Chevy Biscayne. Front and backseats. He’d stomped on the hood.

“That boy’s gotta be amped up on something,” Desmond said.

“I sure hope so,” Kendell told us as he played his flashlight beam on a pen at the back of the lot. There was something that looked like a mound of hide laying on the ground.

“What the hell is that?” I asked him without venturing over to see.

“Patty’s goat,” Kendell told us.

“Did you send somebody after Dale?”

“Tula.”

“I thought she was going to Baton Rouge.”

“We decided to put that on hold.”

That didn’t thrill me any. I certainly didn’t want Tula hurt, but mostly I didn’t want her around to see what me and Desmond might get up to once law enforcement had failed to run that crazy Boudrot to ground.

I knew they’d do the usual stuff that local police seem to favor—visit that Boudrot’s old haunts and talk to that Boudrot’s old buddies, swamp rats and lowlifes and Acadian blood kin who would tell them collectively shit. They’d only find him by chance or once somebody had wounded him or killed him. It wasn’t like any civilian would have the stones to turn him in. The chances seemed good that he’d be loose until me and Desmond tracked him down since we knew everybody he’d probably go after and we knew exactly why.

“What if he goes for Tula like he went for Patty?” I asked Kendell. “You’ve got to figure Dale’s what brought him.”

“She can handle herself.”

Kendell seemed surer of that than I was. This wasn’t a cracker traffic stop. That Boudrot was out for blood, and judging from Patty’s goat, nobody and nothing was safe until he went back to Parchman or into the ground.

“He still driving that yellow Duster?” Desmond asked.

“She never saw the car. Didn’t hear him pull up.”

“And he was singing?” I said to Kendell.

“Some zydeco thing, she thought.” As Kendell led us back around the house, he told us, “I think she was a little too rattled to listen.”

Patty was recovered enough to be indignant by the time we reached her.

“You!” she said and threw her oxygen mask my way in a fashion that wasn’t strictly Christian in the traditional sense.

“You all right, Patty?” I asked her.

“Germaine’s dead!” she said as she sloughed off her blanket and blubbered a little.

Kendell leaned in and told us, “Goat.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to Patty. “Must have been that guy Dale put away.”

“Sorry!” Patty told me and spat on the ground. “And he’s no better.” She was talking about Desmond who just dropped his head and exhaled instead of bothering to reply.

There wasn’t anything we could say to her. You didn’t placate Patty with talk. The only way me and Desmond could make her happy was to burn in hell together. Patty’s was a hateful and vindictive sort of faith. She was happiest being righteous and wishing suffering on the wicked, and the wicked usually seemed to be everybody who wasn’t her.

“The sweet Lord saw me through,” she told us. “He put me in that freezer.” She shook her head. “Dale,” she told us, spat the name out. “This is all him and you.”

It galled me to hear myself lumped in with Dale, even if it was coming from Patty. Me and Desmond could get up to some stupid business, but we were sensible most of the time while Dale was just a nimrod in the regular course of things.

“Anything in there with Dale’s address on it?” Kendell asked her.

“Something he might have seen?” I said.

She was about to say no but she took a moment to think about it and said to us, “On the magnet. You know. When Dale had his business.”

Before he’d taken work with K-Lo, Dale had tried to farm himself out as some kind of private eye. He’d been a state trooper and a county cop, but mostly he was a juiced-up weight lifter with all the sound investigative instincts of a raccoon. That didn’t stop him from hiring out to look for runaway spouses mostly, the sort to owe on mortgages and child support and a couple of trashed sedans. The trouble was Dale had a talent for menacing the wrong folks, wailing on cousins twice removed, innocent colleagues of one stripe or another, and never quite laying his hands on the boys he’d been hired to go after.

So Dale tended to stay in bad odor with his customers and with Delta cops as well. Through the run of his business, Dale got brought up on charges more often than he got paid. But that didn’t keep him from having some of the trappings of a successful business, like pocket calendars, notepads, and refrigerator magnets. The magnets had Dale’s picture on them. His phone number. His address.

I went back in Patty’s house with Kendell. We could see where the magnet had been. There was a space right above Patty’s cottage cheese coupon and right below Patty’s daily affirmation.

“That was two houses ago for Dale, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Think so,” Kendell told me.

“Wonder who’s living there now?”

*   *   *

We followed Kendell over—me, Desmond, and Luther—in Desmond’s Escalade. On the way, Luther told us about a pair of boots he had his eye on.

“Boa constrictor or something. Seen them on TV.”

“Live it up,” I told Luther. “Make it easy on that Boudrot. I think even Dale could find a guy in boa constrictor boots.”

That shut Luther up for almost five whole minutes before Luther got going on a shirt he’d had his eye on. “Be-fucking-spoke,” he told me. He dredged some phlegm and said, “That’s right.”

The guy in the house where Dale had lived two addresses back was sitting in his yard when we pulled up. He was in his underpants. It wasn’t much of a house. A shack, more like it. Dale had only rented it month to month. He just knew Patty would take him back, so he hadn’t much cared where he lived or how graciously he did it. Dale had decided he’d be forgiven because he had no idea at all of just what sort of Christian his wife was. She wasn’t in it for the forgiveness. Brimstone was more her thing and after she’d caught Dale naked with a bottle blonde from Clarksdale, there was nothing even Jesus Himself could do to make that right.

The guy in the yard didn’t know the first thing about Dale. He knew nothing of Patty. He had little cuts all over him from the sort of knife sharp enough to lay you open from just a touch.

It helped that he was drunk, helped him anyway. That Boudrot wasn’t the sort you’d want to get sprung on you sober.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked us.

His TV was screen-down on the sidewalk. His sofa was halfway out the front door. There were articles of clothing all over the place. Shirts and blue jeans and undershorts. Kendell walked over and played his light on the boy so he could assess the damage. The cuts were all clean and shallow, seeping a little at worst.

“That all you got?” Kendell asked him

“Ain’t that enough?” he said.

That boy moved like he wanted to stand up.

“Stay there,” Kendell told him. “Got somebody coming to patch you up.”

“I’m all right.” He shifted and one of his slices gaped open.

“Got to give it to the fuckstick,” Luther announced. “He knows how to sharpen a knife.”

“Got any beer?” the boy in his undershorts asked us.

I glanced toward his house and said, “Let’s see.”

Me and Desmond went in. We had to move that boy’s ratty sofa to do it and stepped inside to find a front room that looked like a landfill under roof. Everything that could be upended was, and the windows were all busted out.

“What the hell’s he on?” Desmond asked as we soaked in the destruction.

“Getting even’s probably enough to charge him up.”

“If he’s doing this to people he’s got no call to hurt, you’ve got to figure he’ll go flat wild on us.”

We hadn’t come right out and talked about hunting that Boudrot down. I’m sure it had been in the back of Desmond’s mind like it had been in the back of mine from the moment we’d found out he’d jumped in the swamp and gotten away from his keepers. We’d seen what that fool could get up to. We’d watched him beat a man to death with a pistol, an employee who’d irritated him and who’d only marginally deserved a punch. That Boudrot had throttled the boy into gravy, kept hitting him after he was dead, and then had taken him apart like a fryer and fed his pieces to a gator. We’d only heard about that last part, but it sure fired the imagination.

Me and Desmond didn’t just know that Boudrot on paper, the way Kendell and Tula did. He was a madman on a mission, and the mission appeared to be us. It seemed sensible, instead of sitting and waiting, that we ought to go after him.

“So?” Desmond said.

“I guess we need to find Dale.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And then Percy Dwayne and the rest of them.”

“Right.”

“Then we ought to go get that asshole.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. What about Kendell and Tula?”

“One way or another,” I said to Desmond, “Tula’s going to Baton Rouge.”

By the time we got back outside, the EMT techs had come and were examining the victim in the lighted bay of their truck. Kendell was at the bumper suffering a disquisition from Luther on the assorted virtues of worsted wool.

“Do something with him,” Kendell told us both.

Desmond pointed at his car.

Luther knew he was beaten but that didn’t keep him from muttering about gabardine as he walked across the weedy lawn and climbed into the Escalade.

“Same as the other?” Kendell asked us of the house.

“A little less Jesus, but yeah. Has Tula checked in?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Went out to that place Dale’s renting near Moorhead. No sign of him.”

“He’s got some girlfriend in Jackson. Probably over there with her.”

“Dale?” Kendell asked me with appropriate skepticism. Dale had no charm, and ever since he’d given up the steroids, he didn’t have a physique to speak of either, unless you counted lumps of flab in unexpected places.

“Hey!” the cut-up boy from the yard shouted from the back of the rescue squad truck.

“Think you can find him?” Kendell asked us. He glanced toward the busted TV in the yard. “Like … soon?”

“Yeah,” Desmond said.

“Hey!”

“Bring Tula in,” I told Kendell. “Let her go to Baton Rouge.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“Let her get C.J. safe down there. Me and Desmond’ll see to that Boudrot.”

“Hey!”

“Should have finished him the first time,” Desmond said.

I gave him my usual look. The two of us had had this quarrel before.

Usually Kendell would have chimed in with how he didn’t want to hear about lawlessness. He’d throw up his hands and shake his head, make a point of walking away. This time, though, he stayed where he was and said to us, “Maybe you should have.”

A guy dead from a chair leg and a couple of houses laid to frenzied waste can have a way of reordering a man’s priorities. Even a man like Kendell.

“Make her go,” I said to him. “And it has to come from you.”

“Hey!”

Kendell nodded. He said to me, “All right.”

“Hey!” that cut-up fellow shouted again. This time I headed for him. “I’m talking to you!” he said.

I mounted the bumper and stepped inside the bay where one of the techs was cleaning and suturing a cut on that fellow’s arm while the other played a game on his phone with near Talmudic devotion.

“What?” I asked that boy. His underpants were staggeringly filthy in the bright truck light.

His bottom lip curled like he might cry. “Where’s my goddamn beer?”

SIX

We ended up waiting for Dale at K-Lo’s. If we didn’t know where his lady friend lived, it stood to reason that Acadian fuckstick wouldn’t have any idea either. Luther passed the time trying to get in touch with Percy Dwayne Dubois, which meant he used all our phones to call lowlifes and blood kin and see if he could get any of them on the line. He couldn’t, as it turned out—the practical downside of universal caller ID. They didn’t want to talk to Luther, and they didn’t know from us.

K-Lo was emphatically unhappy. He was still mad about the damage that Boudrot had done to his storefront, and he seemed upset in a general way that he had hothead competition. K-Lo preferred it when he was the only loose cannon in greater Indianola, the one guy in a sputtering rage for no good reason at all.

“Can’t last,” I told him. “That Boudrot’s wound too tight.”

“I too am wound tight!” K-Lo informed me. He went all proper and vaguely foreign when he got excessively irritated.

“He’ll blow a gasket or we’ll catch him,” I told K-Lo.

Desmond nodded. “This kind of bullshit never lasts.”

K-Lo spat. He was an accomplished spitter. Even better at it than Kendell. More enthusiastic anyway.