Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (7 page)

“He didn’t, did he?” I said. “Shit, man, they’re just hounds.”

“Once you’d kill a guy for a Plymouth,” Desmond told me, “I guess you’ll do about anything.”

We went over together. Being Eugene’s, it wasn’t a proper pen. The kennel was made from roofing tin and road signs. The “fencing” was mostly pallets on end. The dogs were white and liver colored. I don’t know how many Eugene had, but there were six or seven of them in a pile. Shotgunned, from the looks of them.

“That fucker,” Desmond said.

We were out to get that Boudrot already for what he had done and was doing to people, but things took a turn once we’d gone back there and found that pile of dogs. People did wretched things to other people all the time, but a guy who’d shoot down a bunch of hounds—a guy who’d killed a goat already—had surrendered any claim on mercy. Unlike with humans, a dog never quite knew what he’d signed on for in this life. I can’t imagine a hound ever woke up thinking,
I guess I’ve got it coming.

“He’s a dead man,” I told Desmond.

“Reading my mind,” he said.

Just then that pile of dead dogs quivered and shook. Me and Desmond fairly levitated. I circled around to what passed for a gate and let myself into the pen. I whistled. I called. Nothing.

“Say something,” I said.

“What?” Desmond asked me, and the pile quivered again. Desmond stepped back. “Damn,” and I heard a distinct whimper from the heap.

“Got a live one, and it’s hearing just you.”

“What do you mean?”

That raised another quiver. I didn’t see that I had much choice but just to dive on in and start sifting. They were big hounds and bloody. I dragged the top two off to the side by their back feet. Pulled another one away and was reaching for a fourth when the leg that I grabbed on to twitched and quivered. The pup let out a yelp.

“What are you doing?” Luther wanted to know. Him and Dale were up on the end deck looking down on us at the dog pen.

“He shot them,” I said. “Probably with the shotgun he took from K-Lo’s.”

Luther, to his credit, got indignant straightaway. He might have been a roadhouse oxy dealer and lifelong Delta cracker, but he’d about as soon shoot his mama as a hound.

“That son of a bitch,” he shouted to us. “I guess we’re chewing him all to hell now.”

Dale didn’t get it. He’d probably been one of those kids who just killed stuff for sport. Frogs and lizards. Ants by the thousands. A kitten if he could lay his hands on one.

“What’s the deal?” Dale asked.

“He shot the damn dogs,” Luther told Dale. He said it in the spirit of explanation and instruction, like he harbored hope that Dale had misunderstood the circumstances and would get properly enraged once he’d come to grips with things.

Dale just said, “Yeah.” The “So?” was implied.

Luther looked our way and pointed at Dale.

“We know already,” Desmond told him.

I reached back into the dog pile and brought out the survivor. She was a runt and bloody all over, but little of it turned out to be hers. She’d gotten skinned by a few shotgun pellets across the ridge of her back, but she must have been shielded by the rest of the pack as they took fire and fell onto her. I couldn’t help but picture that Boudrot standing at the makeshift fence, leaning in over one of the pallets firing point-blank at those dogs.

I handed the live one out to Desmond who took her but held her at arm’s length. Desmond didn’t have much use for dogs. It wasn’t Dale’s strain of indifference but rather a healthy fear of the creatures by having more a few turned loose on him.

“Why don’t you rinse her off. See where she’s hurt?”

Desmond looked at me like I’d asked him to make me a pair of shoes.

“Just dip her in the water,” I told him and pointed at the bayou. So there I was trying to marry Desmond’s natural fear of canines with his thoroughgoing distaste for swamps.

I attempted to get Luther to come down, but he didn’t want to mess up his clothes. Dale, for his part, couldn’t figure why we didn’t finish the job, just kill the live dog and leave them all to the gators and coyotes.

“They’ll pick them clean,” he told us. Then he started making noises about lunch.

I was going to explain to Dale that it was only half past ten, but I decided instead to go with, “Shut the fuck up.”

“Just keep her there,” I said to Desmond. “I want to make sure she’s the only one.”

I shifted the rest of the dogs around. There were eight of them altogether, including the lone hound that had lived. I left the pen and took that creature from Desmond, carried her down to the edge of the swamp, and rinsed her off in the brown water. She was complaining all the while.

Luther and Dale came down from the house to stand by the swamp and watch me.

“What are you going to do with it?” Luther asked me.

I hadn’t quite decided, but I knew one thing. “Can’t leave her here,” I said.

Luther surprised me by making noises like he could stand to have a dog, a companion to sit in his truck and wait for him while he was doing business at Lurleen’s—hardly a fit pastime for a hound but maybe better than Eugene’s pen. As Luther was talking, that wounded creature licked me on the wrist. A long, slow lick that she undertook as she rolled her eyes up at me. If a dog could ever tell me, “Thank you, brother,” that hound was doing it then.

She was as clean by then as the swamp was going to make her, and I could see that she’d gotten away just skinned raw along her spine. There was a spot on her back where the shot took the fur off, and it was seeping a bit.

“Look in the shed,” I told Luther and pointed at what appeared to be a glorified pile of lumber with a rusty corrugated roof. “See if there’s any grease in there. Maybe a shovel.”

Luther came out with an ancient pint of some manner of machine grease and a garden shovel with the handle busted three quarters of the way up. I spread a little of the grease on that hound’s raw skin, which she seemed to like a lot less than the swamp bath I’d been giving her. She swung her head around to lick my hand and gnaw on it a little too.

“Let’s bury the rest of them,” I said.

Dale told us all, “Shit. Let the gators do it. I’m going back to the car.”

That’s exactly what he did, swatting bugs as he went, which left us little choice but to talk about him.

“Why’s he with us again?” Luther asked me.

“Because that Boudrot wants to cut him up.”

“Yeah,” Luther said. “And?”

I looked to Desmond for support, but he just pointed at Luther. “I’m kind of with him anymore.”

“We’ll use him for bait if we have to.”

Desmond snorted. He picked up the shovel and started digging a hole.

The deeper the hole got, the more it filled up with iridescent bayou seepage. The whole business began to feel less like burial and more like makeshift disposal. I had to guess Dale had a point about the bayou wilderness taking care of its own.

We buried those shot dogs anyway. Me and Desmond took turns digging while Luther comforted the surviving hound. Comforted her in his fashion anyway. He didn’t touch her or anything. His clothes were clean, and he didn’t want to get any swamp dog on them. So he just told that hound, “Hey, you,” every now and again and made clicking noises with his tongue.

I asked Desmond to say something Pentecostal over the dog grave when we’d finished. He didn’t want to at first. He quoted me a nugget about the beasts in the fields. But I kept at him, told him anyway, “For fuck’s sake,” a time or two. Either Desmond thought better of his misgivings or got tired of hearing from me because he finally mumbled a strain of doxology over that muddy ground.

Then he turned right around and pointed at the surviving hound over by Luther.

“Don’t want no grease on my upholstery,” Desmond announced. “Wrap her up or something.”

That job fell to me, and I climbed up to the platform Eugene’s house was perched on, pulled open the screen door, and went into a place that looked like it had tornado damage.

I stuck my head back outside to ask Luther, “This looks normal to you?”

He shrugged. He nodded. “Eugene ain’t so tidy.”

I called down to Desmond, “Place is busted all to hell.”

Inside I was surrounded by the residue of that Boudrot’s rage. He was hard on end tables and knickknacks. That stuff all looked like it had been through a chipper or some industrial pulverizer. The pitch of anger required to destroy household furnishing as thoroughly as that Boudrot did had to approach primeval.

The fuckstick had left a few of the heavy pieces pretty much where they’d been, but he’d been thorough about demolishing everything else. I didn’t see any trace of human carnage, just filth and squalor mostly. I went poking around in the back of the house, looking for any trace of Eugene. That took me into his bedroom. I wouldn’t have wrapped the body of Satan in Eugene’s filthy sheets. The place smelled of socks and mildew, but at least there was no sign that blood had been spilled.

I had a heck of a time finding something clean enough to even wrap a coonhound in. I finally located a Barbara Mandrell T-shirt in the back of one of Eugene’s drawers. It didn’t look like it had ever been worn, though it was half rotted through at the seams. It looked pretty sporty once I’d finally gotten it on the hound.

“I’d do her,” Luther informed me. I hoped he was speaking of Ms. Mandrell.

I had to carry the dog. She wasn’t too feeble to walk, but she gave every sort of sign that she’d never worn a T-shirt before. Left on her own, she’d drop to the ground and bite at the thing and whimper.

Dale wasn’t in Desmond’s Escalade by the time we got back to it.

“Don’t guess we can leave him,” Desmond said, though he looked ripe to be contradicted.

“Blow the horn,” I suggested.

Desmond did and Dale yelled at us from off in the viney scrub.

He was having a sit-down, as it turned out. Dale had helped himself to the stack of spare Sonic napkins in Desmond’s console and had scrounged up a copy of
JET
from underneath Desmond’s passenger seat.

“Let’s go!” Luther shouted.

“Hold on.” Dale was still fastening his trousers by the time he lurched into view.

He’d used all of Desmond’s napkins, which Desmond wasn’t pleased about. Then he tossed the copy of
JET
at Desmond and told him, “You goddamn people.” Right after that, he told me, “I ain’t riding with no damn dog.”

I had to suspect a successful evacuation, even out in the woods, had a psychological effect on Dale. Made him confident and pluckier than he had any cause to be.

Desmond turned his head my way. He was leaving it to me.

“Aw, go on,” I told him.

Desmond wheeled and swung on Dale. He caught him on the jaw Dale had scuffed already, and Desmond knocked the fool clean out.

“Now we’ve got to pick him up.”

Desmond grunted and grabbed Dale’s feet.

“Come help,” I told Luther.

“I got a thing,” he said and pointed at his back.

I put the hound down, and she collapsed immediately.

“She had like sisters and shit, didn’t she?” Luther asked. “On TV and everywhere? One of them played like the banjo or something. And one of them played the piano.”

The hound whimpered some more and gnawed at her shirt.

“Yeah,” Luther told us, “I guess I’d do them.”

As we tumbled Dale in the way back, Desmond shot me a look at the tailgate.

“Oh, all right,” I told him. “You can’t hit Luther too if you want.”

EIGHT

By the time we got out of the forest, we were all pretty sorry we’d come. I finally had a cell phone signal again. Three missed calls from Kendell and two messages from Tula. Desmond stopped at a service station over by Big Eddy. Him and Luther went in to get something to eat while I stayed out with Barbara and Dale. There was so much groaning from the way back and whimpering from the hound that I had to leave the Escalade and wander the lot before I could hope to hear Tula.

In her messages, she just said, “Call me,” so I did.

“Where the hell have you been?” She had that tone about her she got sometimes when me or her son or some man somewhere was on her last nerve.

“Down near Yazoo. Looking for a guy. Phone won’t pick up much down here.”

“Why’s Kendell all over me about going to Baton Rouge?”

I knew where the pique was coming from now. It wasn’t anxiety about my safety. She was steamed that I had meddled.

“Do what?” That was my typical stall, and Tula was close enough to me to know it.

“What did you say to him?”

“Now wait a second.”

“What did you say?” She’d gone all low and determined, talked like she was gnawing on her phone.

“That Boudrot’s running wild,” I told her. “We just buried some dogs he killed. I don’t know how I’d live with myself if he ever got his hands on C.J.”

“Wouldn’t be a problem,” Tula assured me. “I’d fucking cut your heart out.”

I didn’t really know what to tell her back beyond, “Okay. Yeah. Well.”

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said. “I’m going to take him to his aunt’s, but I’m coming straight back, and you don’t get to say shit about it.”

“Take the dog too,” I told her. It was a beagle mix we shared. I’d ended up with him when his owner had screwed his plane into the ground.

That failed to strike Tula as meddling. She said, “All right.”

“Going today?”

“Right after school. I’ll be back tonight.”

“Tomorrow would probably be—”

“Tonight.” She was gnawing her phone again.

“Okay. Fine. Tonight. But check in, will you?”

She made a noise like she might.

We settled out and got back to normal after that. She and Kendell were doing what cops usually do, which is waiting for some fresh enormity to happen. This wasn’t much of a whodunnit. That Boudrot had killed a guy, had stolen a car, had trashed a few of houses, and now he’d wandered out of their jurisdiction and mowed down a half-dozen dogs. They’d put out their bulletins and raised their alarms and were waiting for him to get nabbed on the roadways or pop up doing additional mischief. Otherwise, they were keeping to their routines as if that Boudrot was just another thug.