Ranchero (17 page)

What I mean to say is, I got sloppy. It’s hard to be looking out all the time, particularly when you know you’re being dogged by a troglodyte like Dale. When I didn’t see his cruiser on the street in front of Pearl’s, I just parked the truck with two wheels in the ditch and headed for the driveway.

I was ten yards up it when Dale came out from behind a camellia bush. He was wearing a bandage on his head that looked like a sanitary napkin, and he was in street clothes, which for Dale meant a velour track suit. This one was maroon with navy piping, and it made Dale look out of place there in the middle of Pearl’s driveway. He would have been more at home in the Short Hills Mall or an Olive Garden anywhere.

“Texas my ass,” Dale said.

“Hey, Dale,” I told him.

“Where’s your shovel, little man?”

I showed him my empty hands.

Dale had a sap in his waistband. He pulled it out and waved it at me, tossed it into the yard.

“Just me and you. Let’s see who goes down now.”

By then I was actively sifting through my options. High on my list was running down the street as fast as I could manage. The track suit notwithstanding, Dale was anything but fleet. I’d seen where the sap landed, and that was a possibility, but what if I hit him with it, and it only made him madder? A sap’s all right, but it’s not in the league with a Dubois fireplace shovel.

Dale was hoping for a fight. He was so juiced and built that I had to doubt a human fist could hurt him. There was a small chance he had a glass jaw and I could put him down, but I didn’t want to get taken apart trying to find it out.

So I was looking for a tool, anything stout I could poke or pummel him with. There was a cement deer in the neighbor’s yard, but I doubted I could pick it up. I glanced down the road the other way. Just garbage cans and recycling bins.

I knew he wouldn’t be much of a puncher. Dale was too musclebound for that. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t crush me into a powder, and I found myself actively trying to calculate which hospital was closest—in case I needed something set or sewn.

Dale began dancing on his toes and telling me, “Let’s get it on!” I flashed on Dale and Patty, perched together on their sofa, watching far too much Spike TV.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

I figured on being all elbows. I’d break his nose like Tommy’s. I’d try to catch him in the throat, kick him in his shriveled testicles if it came to that. I would have preferred to pull a thorn from his paw, but that didn’t seem to be an option.

So I went through all the usual prep for getting myself beat up, was trying to get psychologically set for the pain, but Dale kept distracting me. He was the sort who had to talk his way into a fight.

Dale felt compelled to tell me about my upcoming destruction, the hurt he’d rain down on me, the blood he’d cause to flow. I watched him shadowbox in a bid to loosen up his veiny arms and listened to him talk about pieces of me he meant to pulverize. The effect was more in the way of boredom than intimidation.

I was five seconds away from just bum rushing the guy. I figured I might as well fly all over him and see what that accomplished, and I was cocked and poised and primed to spring when Dale began to jiggle and drool. I thought the steroids had finally gotten to him and he was having some kind of stroke or that maybe there was such a thing as a too-dumb-to-live seizure.

He stayed on his feet and just wiggled around, all spastic and galvanic, until he finally toppled over on Pearl’s cement drive and broke his fall with his forehead. Only then did I see Luther, who’d been eclipsed by Dale’s bulk. He was standing there on the driveway with his yellow Taser in hand, attached to Dale by the darts in his back and the wires that ran out of them.

Luther had caught Dale in the trapezius, a slightly left of center shot. He gave a recreational pull on the Taser trigger just to see Dale flop a little on the drive.

“Never did much care for baseball,” Luther told me.

“He’s bleeding,” I said.

It was worse than that really. Dale was sluicing blood onto the driveway. Dale groaned and rolled around enough to earn another jolt.

“We ought to take him somewhere,” Luther said, and I was picturing some pullout on the roadside, but Luther had the emergency room over in Greenville in mind. So we wrestled him into the back of the truck and drove him west toward the river. We set Dale off by a dumpster where they threw out medical waste. Then Luther went in and made out like he’d just strayed across him and some other shiftless sorts had dropped him off.

“Bad cut,” Luther told me once we’d got back on the truck route. “I think I saw his skull.”

“He’s a tough one,” I said. “Dale’ll be all right.”

You would have thought the previous two days would have taught me how fragile people are, how things can be going along just fine and then you’re down and bleeding. But I was moving the other way with it. The great surprise to me was how tough and resilient people tend to be.

You club them, you punch them, you stick them, you shoot them, and they just hang around. It doesn’t really seem to matter what they have to live for—wives and children, a favorite hound, a momma at the home place—people just keep on going out of pluck or habit or spite.

Who the hell knew? I found myself thinking it was all a little inspiring.

“He’s going to be pissed,” Luther assured me.

“Only gear he’s got.”

EIGHTEEN

Desmond rolled up early and tried to come in the apartment, but the stockyard bouquet kept him on the landing. He just opened the door long enough to tell us all that he was there.

“Where are we heading?” Desmond asked me once I’d slipped outside.

“Not sure. The Braves lost. I couldn’t get Eugene to talk any sense.”

I told Desmond all about Dale and how he’d be looking now twice as hard.

“Kind of a tough few days for him,” Desmond said, and we stood there being sympathetic for very nearly a half minute.

According to Eugene, Guy the diabolical meth lord didn’t have what he’d call a regular home. He had houses and trailers all over where Mexicans cooked drugs for him, along with a couple of hunting camps and some sort of warehouse up near Batesville, but Eugene was of a mind that he rented that out.

“What I’m saying,” Eugene told me, “is Guy ain’t so easy to find.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m hearing. If you had to find him, how would you do it?”

“Call him maybe until he called me back.”

“So call him.”

“Phone’s in the bayou,” Eugene told me. “It knew his number. I don’t.”

“All right. So what if you can’t call him?”

“I’d look at his places and maybe ask his Mexicans.”

“What do they know?”

“Maybe nothing, but sometimes they hear shit.”

“First stop?”

“Probably his house out by Fitler. I drink Pepsis with the boys down there. Ain’t but kids. Two wetbacks. White guy’s a meth head.”

“I’ve got an uncle on Baconia Road,” Percy Dwayne piped in. “It’s down around there, too. If Sissy’d decided she’d had enough of Guy, that’s probably the first place she’d go. Can we swing by for a minute? It’s right on the way.”

I nodded, couldn’t really see the harm.

We took off in the truck with Desmond and Luther following us in the Geo. Eugene took some crazy route back through the countryside. He crossed a few main arteries, but he’d never ride on one. He had a real knack for finding the raggedest thoroughfares in the Delta. I spent half my time airborne since there weren’t any seat belts about. Eugene had the steering wheel holding him down. The rest of us weren’t so lucky.

“What have you got against asphalt?” I finally asked him.

Eugene just laughed and turned by a wheat field. I caromed off the roof of the cab.

“He ain’t legal,” Tommy said.

“You’ve got a tag,” I told him. “I saw it.”

“Yeah, well,” Eugene said, “that ain’t exactly mine.”

“So you’re hauling around what? Ephedrine and ether? On a stolen tag? Ever hear about those killers who get caught from parking tickets?”

“That’d be some shit, wouldn’t it?” Eugene said, and then added, “I’m careful where I park.”

Just then we met a state trooper in a turn not big enough for us both. We crowded him out, and he went off the road and mired up in a makeshift rice paddy—a ditch full of water with a foot and half of Delta mud underneath.

It didn’t take a psychic to see what Eugene was thinking. It was along the lines of “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

As he stomped on the gas, I reached over and threw the shifter into neutral, which Eugene got all wide-eyed and incredulous about.

“We run,” I told him in a low, hissed whisper, “and every one of his buddies’ll be scouring the Delta for us. Can’t just leave him here like nothing happened.” I paused to come up with likeliest story I could. “We’re going to pick up tractor tires. We’re sorry as hell for what we did.”

It was something to watch. Three Delta hoodlums trying to be contrite out of handcuffs. That’s a thing you don’t get to see just every day. I took the lead a little there at the first because that trooper was hot and didn’t much care who he barked at. He was fairly low wattage, even by state trooper standards, so I just had to shuffle and scratch and let the ire all boil away. At least Eugene and Tommy and Percy Dwayne were all gifted at looking pathetic.

That trooper was a Magnum, T. E., his tag said, and he was chafed about how some people drive, he told us.

“I was fooling with the radio,” Eugene allowed. “Lord I’ve learned my lesson now.”

I could see Desmond’s Metro well back down the road. He’d been following us at a considerable distance. Otherwise he and Luther would have been buried in Eugene’s dust.

He’d stopped where he was and just sat there idling, waiting. I saw Luther get out of the car. I watched Desmond pull him back in. Not gently, but quick and hard. Doubtless Luther had seen some Tasing prospects in our bit of bother.

We just had K-Lo’s shotgun, which I had permission to have, but it was laid out on the floorboard looking a little too ready to go, and I didn’t want to find myself quizzed about it. The object here was to keep that trooper thinking about himself and not worrying about us and what we might be up to.

“I’m sure we can pull you out,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t.”

The boys all mumbled like they wouldn’t among them object to doing what’s right.

“We been hauling tires,” Tommy said without anybody asking.

“Tractor tires,” Percy Dwayne added. “Running empty right now.”

T. E. Magnum looked from one to the other. He seemed to think we were all simple, and before Eugene could tack on something impertinent himself, I said, “Go get your chain, Buddy. Got one in the bed, don’t you?”

Eugene nodded and said, “Use it sometimes. You know. For tractor tires and such.”

They were a sight with their suit coats and all. They didn’t look like they had sense enough to get hired hauling anything. Fortunately, though, T. E. Magnum was a preening fool himself, and he was worried chiefly about getting Delta mud on his uniform trousers. So I told him to climb on into his cruiser and we’d take care of the rest.

I got stuck hooking the chain to the chassis because Pearl hadn’t insisted on me any of Gil’s clothes. I was wearing the sort of grungy togs a fellow could get muddy in. Nobody said as much, but I’d still be standing there with that chain in hand if I’d waited for somebody to offer to do what I ended up doing myself.

“Think you can drive?” I said to Eugene, and he climbed in under the wheel. “Don’t go until I tell you.”

“Right, Chief,” he said, and laid hard on the gas.

T. E. Magnum didn’t have to do a thing but try and avoid whiplash. Eugene jerked him out of that rice field as nice as you please. It might have been easier on his cruiser if he’d had the chance to shift out of park, but Eugene only dragged him about ten yards or so.

He finally stopped and backed up enough for me to unhook the chain, and I got between T. E. Magnum and the tag on Eugene’s truck and went about apologizing as tediously as I could manage. When I got to the part about my daddy being laid up and sick, that trooper got bored, gave me a finger wave, and raced away toward Desmond. He would have put Desmond in the ditch if Desmond hadn’t been sitting still.

“You’re about the worst liars I’ve ever seen.”

They weren’t troubled or offended.

“Don’t need to lie much,” Tommy said.

Eugene ground the gears and got us going. “That’s why we’re way back here.”

I’d been thinking about it wrong. Eugene and Tommy, even Percy Dwayne, were the sort who either went scot-free or got brought up on charges. Clean away or caught. There wasn’t any middle course where you had to talk yourself out of trouble. People knew what you did or they didn’t. Somebody had sworn out a warrant or not. It had a kind of integrity to it and couldn’t really get much simpler.

So I didn’t say anything else to Eugene about taking the local blacktops. I just braced myself against the cab roof and tried to keep from levitating.

NINETEEN

Percy Dwayne’s uncle on Baconia Road lived with a woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt. The house was hers. The dachshunds were hers. The clutter in the front yard was hers. The Nissan was hers. The toolshed was hers. The self-propelled Toro was hers. Every damn nickel they collected so they’d have two to rub together came due to a job she hated but showed up to every day.

To hear it from her, Percy Dwayne’s uncle didn’t do a blessed thing, which explained why he didn’t point out to us everything that was his.

“Go on, tell them what’s yours,” the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt insisted.

Percy Dwayne’s uncle drew on his Pall Mall. He grinned and told us, “Nothing.”

That wasn’t strictly true, not anymore. Percy Dwayne had remedied that. Just the day before he’d brought his uncle and the woman who wasn’t his aunt a forty-two-inch plasma television. They were watching it when the uncle opened the door and let us into what wasn’t his house.