Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (6 page)

“He’ll go somewhere he ought not to be,” I assured him, “and somebody’ll plug his sorry ass.”

K-Lo liked the sound of that. He smiled my way and said. “Let’s hope.”

So me and Desmond and K-Lo stood together hoping in front of the store while Luther (we thought) kept trying to track down Percy Dwayne on the phone. It turned out he was playing blackjack on Desmond’s Motorola, which Desmond noticed before I did and gave Luther a slap about.

He staggered Luther. “What!”

“Give me that,” Desmond told him as he took back our phones. “Where’s Dale anyway?” he asked K-Lo.

K-Lo plucked a Pall Mall from the flattened pack in his shirt front pocket. He shrugged. He shook his head.

“Tell him we’ll be back,” Desmond said and then told me and Luther, “Let’s go.”

We drove straight to the Sonic where they thought they weren’t quite open until Desmond pulled in, blew his horn once for service, and then informed them through the speaker they were more open than they knew.

“I’m thinking we go back and pick up Dale,” I said. “Take him with us down to Yazoo and round up Eugene and Tommy.”

Desmond and Luther could agree about one thing. Neither one of them wanted Dale in the car.

“We’ve got to look out for him. The man’s let himself go. He’s in no shape to look after himself.”

They still weren’t persuaded we needed to suffer his company and haul him around.

“So he gets cut on a little,” Luther said. “Maybe he’s got it coming.”

“If that Boudrot goes at him,” I assured Luther, “he’ll turn Dale into gator-sized chunks.” I let that sink in and then asked Desmond, “You ready to let that happen?”

Desmond grunted. Desmond fingered his relish packet. “Not if you say it like that.”

Luther whined and grunted.

“What exactly did Dale do to you?” I asked him.

“Said I was shoplifting,” Luther informed me with no little indignation. “I might have stole all manner of shit, but I ain’t never stole nothing that way.”

That was the leading trouble with Luther’s ilk. They were all criminal shitheads with standards, and you’d tie up with them if you accused them of something lower than they’d do. Of course, it was always hard to know exactly what they’d consider lower.

“He take you in or just wail on you?” Desmond wanted to know.

“Both!” Luther told him. He was still indignant about it.

Dale was on the loading dock when we got back to K-Lo’s, and he was looking awfully rough, even by Dale’s standards. He had a black eye and a puffy lip. He was showing a colleague his stitches as me and Desmond came out the back door with K-Lo and into the loading bay. Luther was back in the Escalade trying to track down Percy Dwayne.

“Come here,” K-Lo told Dale. He pointed at us. “Listen to them.”

The new Dale was a slight improvement over the old juiced-up, weight-lifting Dale, but not enough of an improvement to make Dale sensible and savory. Back when he was fit and musclebound, at least we could covet Dale’s physique, but now he was just a pile of flab, and we had some of that already.

“What?” Dale asked us.

“That Boudrot’s on the warpath,” I told him. “Looking for you.”

“Fine by me,” Dale said, but when he tried to grin, he winced. The inside of his bottom lip was all black and brambly with stitches.

“What happened to you?” Desmond asked him.

“Got in it with a boy.” Dale shrugged the way he always did, like getting beat to a bloody pulp was a manly sort of thing to do.

“Talk to Patty?” I asked him.

“Naw.”

“That Boudrot went to her place first.”

Dale didn’t get alarmed exactly, but he finally displayed some genuine human interest. “Didn’t hurt her, did he?”

I shook my head.

“She hid in the freezer,” Desmond told him. “He tore up every damn thing in the house.”

“Then that’s one fucker that’s done for.” Dale pulled a face and winced again.

“Come on with us,” I told him. “We’re going to hunt him down.”

Dale shouted across the way to K-Lo, “Boss man?” He pointed at me and Desmond.

K-Lo shrugged by way of excusing Dale for the day, and then K-Lo spat. That was about as close to a “Yeah, go ahead,” as you’d ever get from K-Lo.

Naturally, Dale wasn’t pleased to see Luther in the Escalade.

“Shit,” Dale said when he laid eyes on him. “Ain’t got no use for this dirtbag.”

“We need him,” Desmond told Dale in the low, rumbling declarative way that Desmond had of ending debate before it ever started.

“Shotgun,” Dale said.

I’d expected as much. I shrugged and said, “Go on.”

So I rode in the back with Luther as we headed south toward Yazoo. The plan was to locate Tommy and Eugene back in the swamp in the national forest. They’d given that Boudrot up when we were hunting him down before, and it stood to reason he probably knew it somehow.

“You might call Patty,” I suggested to Dale.

He got all shirty at the suggestion. He turned half around to tell me he guessed he knew who he ought to call when.

That must have been the first good look that Luther got of Dale, because that’s when he chose to ask him, “Who beat the living shit out of you?”

Dale’s initial impulse was to reach over the seat back and take a swipe at Luther. Luther dodged and Dale hit me. I would have popped him back, but the swipe itself had pulled a few of his stitches, so he was hurt already without any help from me.

Tommy and Eugene had a place they sort of shared in the national forest, which was chiefly massive cypress bog and reptile habitat. They had a house up on stilts made out of most anything that had come to hand. Lots of road signs for siding and bits of sheet metal from sheds they’d taken apart. Actual ownership of the lodge, as they called it, was disputed and unsettled. That worked well enough as long as they were both sober or both drunk. When just one of them got loaded, the other one always tried to steal the place. They had some kind of deed they kept shut up in a cupboard, and the sober one would trot it out to try to make the drunk one sign.

We left the highway at Silver City and went down through Midnight and Louise, got gas at Spanish Fort, and then headed straight into the forest. Desmond tensed up behind the wheel. Luther got a little antsy as well. Delta boys weren’t used to standing trees in any concentration. The national forest was all that was left of what the entire Delta had once been. A heavily wooded thicket, swampy and marshy by turns. The Delta had mostly been cleared for farming, canals cut and swamps drained. There was nowhere much to find leafy canopy overhead. You had to come clear to the national forest just to go into the woods.

“Dark in here,” Luther said.

Desmond made a neck noise.

Dale was from Little Rock and wasn’t generally the sort to much care where he was.

“I might ought to been there. I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Patty and how if he hadn’t cheated on her with a string of tramps from Memphis to Meridian, then the two of them might have been sharing a roof, and he could have locked horns with that Boudrot.

Nobody cared, particularly Desmond and Luther who’d moved on to how little they liked being in the woods.

We passed the big sheltered corkboard with the map of the forest on it and the specimen cypress just down from it surrounded by rail fencing.

“You know where you’re going?” Dale asked Desmond.

Desmond told Dale a form of “Yeah.” It came out sounding like “Shut the fuck up.”

“There’s the pipeline.” I pointed.

Desmond and Luther nodded. We all remembered that thing as a landmark from before.

“There it is.” Luther pointed to a track off to the left.

Desmond turned in. He did it gingerly and at a crawl. “Ain’t got no four-wheel drive,” he told us. “Switch went out or something.”

I couldn’t blame Desmond for leaving that particular repair undone, given his love for hard roads and civilization.

“Muddy up there.” I pointed. “This is probably far enough.”

We climbed out and the bugs descended on us. The chemicals kept them at bay in the open, but back in the woods they were thick in the air and hungry. Gnats and flies and mosquitoes—we were all wearing a layer of them straightway.

We did what most sane people would do. We got back in the Escalade.

“Don’t usually need nothing,” Desmond said as he rooted through his console after something with Deet in it. He turned up four tubes of Cruex and a roll of antacids.

“Try this,” Luther told us. He stuck his hand down his shirt. He swabbed his armpits for some stink and then rubbed his fingers across his face. That was enough to convince us we’d rather be carried off by the mosquitoes, so we bailed back out of the Escalade and into the buggy woods.

Eugene’s place was maybe a quarter mile ahead. Dale charged along the track, and me and Desmond and Luther followed at enough of a distance to guarantee that any snake Dale stepped on would have just him to bite. Dale reached the clearing and was waiting there swatting flies while I was still slogging out way up through the woods.

“I don’t hear any dogs,” I said. Ordinarily, Eugene kept a half-dozen hounds. He was a fanatic coon hunter and didn’t think anything of tromping through the big woods in the middle of the night.

“You been out here lately?” Luther asked me.

“Been three years probably.”

“Maybe he moved.”

“Or died,” Desmond said.

It was hard to tell at the corner of his yard if the place was abandoned or not. The thorny thicket that bordered Eugene’s yard was as full of snagged shopping bags and impaled pouch chew boxes as it had been the first time me and Desmond had dropped in on Eugene. The same junked cars were still clotting up the lot along with a muddy Nova that looked like it hadn’t seen the highway lately. No tags. No stickers. No nothing. And two of the tires were flat.

There was a paper sack full of paper sacks floating at the edge of the bayou that lapped at the pylons holding up Eugene’s house, but no fresh garbage that we could see. Nothing in the yard or in the swamp that looked the least bit recent.

Desmond pointed at the soft ground to the right of where we were standing. Tire tracks, and they looked like fresh ones.

“Might just be off running around,” Desmond said.

“Maybe. Who’s going up?” I asked.

Dale told me, “Hell, I will.”

Eugene’s place was so slapdash and rickety that we all couldn’t go up at once. One guy on the swamp-rotted stairs at a time and one on the jackleg cantilevered walkway. The house would probably hold us safely enough, but there wasn’t any chance of us getting up there in numbers all of a sudden.

“Hold on,” I told Dale and shouted out for Eugene.

Luther chimed in behind me with a “Hey here, buddy.”

I thought I heard some kind of whimper but laid it off to the swamp and woods. There were all kinds of creatures around us making every variety of noise.

“Go on,” I said to Dale.

Dale bent over with a chorus of grunts and groans and made of show of producing a .38 he carried in an ankle holster. He spun the barrel to check his load and then tried to spit in a manly way, but his stitches confounded him, and Dale ended up just dribbling down his shirt.

“Just shout down what you find,” Desmond told him.

Dale nodded and dribbled again.

Then he climbed to the landing, paused for breath, and headed up to Eugene’s deck proper.

“Probably off in Arkansas stealing shit.” That was Luther’s suggestion, and I stood there hoping to hell he was right and fearing that he wasn’t.

I’m not much of a believer in things being too quiet or feeling somehow all wrong. I like to go by what I see, but something definitely felt off at Eugene’s. The place was too damn quiet.

Eugene’s door was standing open to judge from the way Dale peered in through the screen.

“Hey,” he said. When he heard nothing back, Dale turned our way and shrugged. He knocked on the door rail and said, “Hey” again. Another shrug. Dale checked his .38 load again. “Going in,” he told us.

From inside, and almost immediately, we heard from Dale, “Sweet Lord!” The screen door swung open violently, and Dale came lurching out and laid hard against the deck rail. It’s a wonder it didn’t give way and drop him at our feet.

“What?” I asked him.

“A human lives here?”

“Any sign of Eugene?” Desmond shouted up.

Dale shook his head. “Just all his shit.”

“Busted up?” I asked him.

“Hell,” Dale said, “who can tell?”

Luther had set out toward the stairs by then. “I’ll go.” He was wiry and light, and the whole place only vibrated some as he climbed.

Luther pushed his way past Dale and drew the screen door open. “You coming?”

Dale nodded. He dribbled again and followed Luther inside.

Me and Desmond could hear just the noise of Luther and Dale talking back and forth. Not the words, only the racket. Desmond pointed toward the swamp.

“What’s that?”

There was sure enough something floating. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, not from down where we were. I was about to call for Luther when he came out of the house on his own.

“I don’t know,” he shouted down. “Looks like shit, but it always did.”

“What’s out in the water?” I asked him and pointed.

Luther followed the deck around the side of the house and over toward the bayou. He was fifteen feet above us and so could see what we couldn’t see.

“Dog,” was all he said.

SEVEN

Dale moved around to join Luther. He was holding on to the railing. The whole platform was shaking now. Dale and Luther looked like they were riding a swamp rat parade float down the street.

“Yep,” Dale told us, by way of confirmation. “Dog all right.”

“What kind?” I asked them.

Luther turned our way and shook his head. “Coonhound.”

Me and Desmond said together, “Shit.”

Desmond followed me across the yard. Around the thickets anyway and hummocks of fescue, and past the junked overgrown Ford station wagon and the partly disassembled state-body truck. The dog pen was still and quiet. I stopped short once I could see it. Desmond came up beside me.