Ranchero (21 page)

He grinned at me and spat my way. “Go on with you. We done pulled the ladder up.”

I raised the M4 and fired a short burst straight up through the decking. It was crap wood to start with and saturated from the swamp, so the planks did more showy disintegrating than I’d anticipated. Beyoncé up top was suitably impressed.

The other two came out to see what all of the racket was about.

They were swamp rats as well. I guess the brothers and the Mexicans weren’t so keen to work back in the bayou, so it was just five of us white boys eyeing each other through a hole in the platform.

“What the hell you doing?” one of the fellows from inside asked us.

“Put the goddamn ladder down,” Percy Dwayne told him, and he decided for big-swinging-dick effect to let off a shotgun round.

Lucky for us, the underside of the decking was so soft that most of those rubber pellets just embedded and stuck. But a few of them went bouncing and zipping around, both under the deck and above it, which made us about as excited as we could stand at the moment.

“Damn, man,” Beyoncé said. “Them things sting.”

Percy Dwayne was more than ready to lord it over his brethren, so he raised K-Lo’s shotgun and would have fired again if I’d not stopped him. I shoved my finger behind his trigger and called up, “Ladder. Now.”

They dropped it down for us, and we climbed up, but that platform hadn’t been engineered for six legitimate adults. It sagged and swayed so much that I sent Percy Dwayne and those boys down. That shack was like a treehouse kids would build with scraps. They’d been working off a hot plate inside and packaging the stuff out on the back edge of the deck. They’d set up a board for a table, had a kitchen scale and a Tuffy tub full of Baggies. It was all crystal and felt like maybe two or three pounds altogether. Enough to keep the local tweakers happy for a while.

“He ain’t going to like this.” That was Beyoncé talking.

“Probably not,” I said, and I spilled some gas out of the generator and lit the deck on fire.

This place didn’t explode like the first one or burn hot and quick like the second. It smoldered from all the damp and raised a cloud of blue-black smoke. I climbed down, and one of the inside boys said, “You going to kill us now?”

“How’d you get in here?”

He pointed at a flatboat over on the weedy bank.

“Go on,” I told him. “I don’t need you dead.”

They took their sweet time getting the thing in the water. It had a little trolling motor on the back, and they fumbled a fair bit before they got the battery hooked up.

That gave them time for one of them to tell me, “He’ll cut your fucking heart out.” Not as a threat so much as a scrap of prognostication.

They got out maybe thirty yards before they fired upon us with a rifle they’d had squirreled away in the boat. The bullet hit one of the pilings, and the whole structure quivered and shook.

“Why don’t you give them one,” I told Percy Dwayne. That was all he needed to hear.

Those rubber pellets came swarming at them out the barrel of K-Lo’s Beretta, and those boys couldn’t find the water fast enough.

Too bad for them they’d left their trolling motor running, and as me and Percy Dwayne crossed the plank bridge to get out, we could hear them blaming each for the boat taking off and beating about in the swamp.

Desmond had left his stump and returned to the car. He was leaning on the front fender and complained to me of being famished and weak. He’d been in consultation with Eugene, and they thought we were maybe thirty minutes from the Yazoo Sonic. That’d be like crossing the street anywhere else.

Desmond told me all this in a dry and tactical sort of way. It was coming on mid afternoon by then, and my plan, which had been loose and vindictive, was finally solidifying. I knew, though, I’d need Desmond at full strength to help me see it through.

“All right,” I told him. “But get takeout. And I don’t have any money.”

“I want a corn dog,” Percy Dwayne said to Desmond, “that nobody throws on the ground.”

“You’ll come find us,” I said to Desmond, and then turned to Eugene. “Tell him where we’re going to be.”

“You’ve burned three of them already,” Eugene said. “Don’t you think that’s enough? Must have got back to Guy by now.”

“I want the best one. There must be one that’s better than the others. One he’s a little sentimental about.”

“First one, maybe. Been running the longest. Up around Louise.”

Then Desmond and Eugene had one of those take-the-branch-road-and-turn-at-the-grain-bin conversations before Desmond set off toward Yazoo, and Luther and Tommy drew lots to see who’d ride in the bed of the truck.

Luther won the cab, and on the way to Louise, he had more than a few things he wanted to wonder aloud about. Now that we were all in the shit with this crazy bastard Guy, Luther was hoping he could get me to lay out the future for him. Nothing long term, maybe just the balance of the afternoon.

“You’ve got a plan, right?”

I nodded. Truth be told, it was more of a trajectory than a plan.

“You’re trying to bait him out?”

That was good, too, so I nodded at Luther again.

“Don’t forget Sissy and PD,” Luther said. “Got to figure out where they’re at.”

I nodded again. “Sissy and PD,” I said.

“And what about the money?” Luther asked me. “He’s bound to have piles of it somewhere.”

“Yeah,” I said and asked Eugene, “Where does the cash end up?”

“See, now you’re getting into shit I just ain’t supposed to know.”

“Not supposed to know or don’t know?” I asked him.

And Eugene made the kind of face that either meant he knew where the money was or he’d eaten a spoonful of earwax. “Tell me one thing for sure,” Eugene said.

“Okay.”

“You’re going to kill him, right?”

“Could well come to that.”

“Has to,” Eugene told me. “That fellow just has to get dead.”

“All right,” I said.

Eugene looked left and and right like he was fearful of being overheard.

“Got a room where they count it and pack it up,” he said.

“Where?”

“Guy’s got a place over by the river, up around Blue Hole. That’s where all the money ends up. Somebody’s there all the time.”

“Does he live there?”

“Sometimes. As often as any. It’s kind of a hunting lodge back in the swamp.”

“So once he gets nervous, that’s where he’ll end up?”

“I suppose,” Eugene told me, “but he’s not the nervous sort.”

“Let’s see what we can do about that,” I said.

TWENTY-TWO

We were nearly to Louise when Eugene directed Percy Dwayne back onto Rainbow Road and then off it down a track by a catfish farm. A dozen rectangular ponds covering maybe fifteen acres each. They had their aerators all running—paddlewheels shoved in the water to churn it around and sweeten it up so the fish wouldn’t suffocate.

“Park it up there.” Eugene pointed to a tractor shed beyond the last pond, and Percy Dwayne pulled in among what looked like a graveyard of tractor implements. Disk harrows and cultivators, middle busters and spreaders. There was a massive combine rusting off to one side.

“Where’s the house?” I asked Eugene. He pointed. This time we’d be wading through soybeans. I could see the sun glinting off a weathered roof just beyond the field.

“Me and you,” I told Percy Dwayne. “And don’t squeeze off shit unless I say.”

“Hear you, boss,” Percy Dwayne told me, and off we went into the soybeans with Luther left behind to make sure Eugene and Tommy wouldn’t bug out.

We didn’t have to worry about reptiles this trip or any living thing. That field had lately been dusted with pesticide or fertilizer or something. The alkaline stink felt like it was drilling a chemical hole in my brain.

“Don’t know how I’m going to get all the way over there without breathing.”

“What’s your trouble?” Percy Dwayne asked me.

“You don’t smell that?”

He took a breath so deep it would have sent me straight to the ICU. He shook his head. “Just Delta air,” he told me.

I distracted myself from the stink along the way across by checking and rechecking my clips. I kept counting forty rounds, which I took as a sign I was going unscathed, and I was feeling strong and steady until the gunfire started.

It sounded like somebody was shooting at us, that we were downrange of the muzzle anyway, but there weren’t any rounds flying by us as best I could tell.

I’d been shot at before by soldiers and civilians, so I knew what it sounded like when somebody was dialing you in. Bullets sing in the air, and when Percy Dwayne and I squatted to listen, we weren’t hearing anything but the report.

“Go on?” he asked me.

I nodded. “But stay low.”

Of course, that served to make the chemicals that much more undiluted. After another fifty yards, I was half hoping I’d get shot in the head.

There was a silty waste at the fair edge of the field that we scooted across bent low. It ran into a half-assed levee the tractors had pushed up. The thing was maybe five feet tall and meant, I had to guess, to keep the creek beyond it out of the soybeans when it rained.

There’d been a break in the firing, but it picked back up just as we gained the levee. We could both feel the impact as each round struck the dirt. A
thump
and a low vibration. Somebody was taking target practice. We worked down to the left where there were scrubby trees to serve for cover, and I peeked up over the top just as another shot rang out.

There were two guys firing. No-neck endomorphs in track suits. The one with the gauze around his head was Dale.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I knew he was dumb, but I figured he was clean.”

Dale was firing what I could tell by the clatter was a Chinese AK knockoff. The eastern bloc ones let go with an intimidating
clunk,
but the Chinese ones sound sort of like a Chinese car door slamming. It’s all snap and rattle and imprecision. They don’t aim worth a damn, and the recoil tends to break them apart over time.

I motioned for Percy Dwayne to ease up and join me. “Seen them before?” I asked him. The one without the AK was firing what looked to be a Glock. “The one with his head wrapped up is a cop.”

“New to me,” Percy Dwayne told me. “When Guy showed up at Eugene’s and took your car, he had a big blond boy with him. Neal or something. Not either one of them.”

I watched as Dale and his buddy let go with a half-dozen rounds, aiming high on the levee where it tapered thin like they were trying to blow a hole clean through. We moved a little further left where the thing was more of a hedgerow than dyke. I glanced back to see that Desmond had already made it over from the Sonic. He was carrying a Sonic sack, red and greasy from the chili, and he was doing his Desmond glide across the field. I was trying to wave him off to the side as those guys opened up again.

I saw Desmond clutch frantically at himself. He performed a pirouette and toppled straight over into the soybeans. I was already scrambling out of the trees and running low across the silt waste when Desmond stood up out of the greenery and waved me off. He kept coming, but he held his right arm as he did, had a hand to the massive hock between his elbow and his shoulder.

“Some fucker shot me,” Desmond said as he reached us and pitched his bulk to the ground.

He was bleeding a little between his fingers. I had him take his hand away, and you could see the shank of the bullet sticking out of his bicep.

“The Glock,” I told him. “Too far away to go through. You’re lucky it wasn’t the AK.”

“Who the hell are they?”

“Take a look,” I said.

Desmond eased around where he could get eyes on those boys. “Is that Dale?”

I nodded. “I’m going to pull this bullet out,” I told Desmond, and he explained to me six ways from Sunday exactly why I wouldn’t.

That fell in the category of treatment, and Desmond didn’t like getting nursed. He wouldn’t ever get stitched, wouldn’t sit still for vaccinations, had an almost mortal fear of peroxide and rubbing alcohol. The scuffing up never bothered him; it was the doctoring that did him in.

“Bullet’s got to come out.”

Desmond shook his head. “Leave it for now.”

“Where’s my Coney Islands?” I asked him.

Desmond motioned with his nose toward the soybeans. “Dropped the bag,” he told me. “Kind of landed on it.”

As he talked, I pinched that bullet between my forefinger and thumb and plucked it out of Desmond’s arm as nice as you please.

“Gawd!” He said it out of reflex. I couldn’t have hurt him much.

The wound was a little weepy, but it wasn’t really bleeding.

“Hmm,” Desmond told me as I handed him the bullet, his version in this circumstance of “thank you very much.”

“So what’s the deal?” Percy Dwayne asked.

But before I could speak, I heard it and knew instantaneously what it was.

“Listen,” I told them both.

A baritone rumble, deep and smooth. I caught a glimpse of the thing piecemeal through the trees. Tropical pink. Polished chrome. It rolled into the clearing unobstructed for a couple of seconds until it got eclipsed by a homely four by four parked out in the yard.

“Damn,” Desmond said. “That’s a hell of thing.”

“Isn’t it though?” Percy Dwayne told him.

“You shut up,” I advised Percy Dwayne. “We wouldn’t be here but for you.”

He went sheepish to the extent that Delta trash can manage to seem contrite.

“Who do you see?” I asked him.

Percy Dwayne peered through the foliage with concentration and intent. “No Sissy. No PD,” he said, “but that’s Guy.”

Me and Desmond shifted for a better view and found Guy giving his no-necks hot-headed, psychotic shit. He was in a swivet about something. About his meth houses burning, I guessed. We couldn’t exactly hear what he was saying, but it was easy to see that Guy was a fellow who could lay on some scathing abuse.

Anybody with eyes could tell what his trouble was right away. He was one of the wee people. I couldn’t have said at the time how tall he was exactly, but he was a head and a half shorter than the guys he was yelling at. They might have been thick and looming, but they weren’t exactly giants.