Ranchero (8 page)

“Mostly,” I told her. “Me and Desmond work together. We’re sort of into anything people stop payment on. Probably electronics primarily these days.”

“And you used to be a policeman?” she asked me, which came as an appreciable shock to Luther, whose interest in Pearl’s décor quite suddenly drained away.

I nodded. “Up in Virginia.”

“That must have been interesting.”

“Wears on you after a while. You don’t see people at their best.”

Luther handed Pearl plates to help her serve and sang the praises of his jacket. He told her me and Desmond had been quick to admire his shoes. That delighted Pearl, who never got awfully much feedback on her insisting. People usually took stuff from her to shut her up. Me, I mean. I don’t think anybody else much bothered with her.

Pearl made us hold hands and say grace. I peeked around while we were in the middle of giving thanks. It was the oddest sort of dinner party I ever hope to attend and got stranger once Angie had begun to quiz Luther on the details of his career.

Luther claimed to be an entrepreneur, a facilitator, and gadget mogul. Luther, it seems, had invented a pecan cracker that worked with a carriage bolt and a rubber band.

I’ve got to hand it to him, Luther could just about pass for decent and proper and seemly. He gave the impression of being civilized there at the dining table until he pulled out his pack of generic cigarettes and shook one out for Pearl.

“Take it outside,” I told him, and he looked at me stricken and shocked that there could be a place where a fellow couldn’t light up at the table and then crush his butt out on the dab of casserole he’d left.

“Out,” I said.

Luther decided instead he’d be better off helping Pearl clear.

Pearl and Luther eventually went back to pilfering through Gil’s wardrobe while me and Desmond and Angie stayed at the table and drank weak coffee.

“Did Pearl tell you about Gil’s car?” I asked.

“What car?”

We all walked outside to the car shed, and I opened the doors on the empty bay. Angie looked a little shocked to see the state of it. Not that it was empty but that it was tidy and all but antiseptic.

“Wow,” she said. “I don’t guess Pearl was ever in here.”

“Gil had a Ranchero,” I told her. That was news to Angie. “Must have been his baby. It was all buttoned up in here.”

“Where’d it go?”

I told her the whole story. I didn’t polish it up, and I just laid it out like it happened, even the parts that made me look foolish and irredeemably rash.

The nut of it was that I’d made a binding pledge to Pearl to bring Gil’s Ranchero back just like I’d driven it away, and I explained to Angie how it didn’t matter if Pearl wanted it back or not and if it ever left the car shed bay again. The point was I’d sworn an oath, and I intended to fulfill it.

Angie turned to Desmond and asked him, “Is he always like this?”

Desmond nodded, told her, “Pretty much.”

“Might take a few days,” I told her.

“Okay,” was all she said.

Just then Luther popped out of the house in a pair of Gil’s immaculate coveralls, which he was wearing under a double-breasted suit coat. The shoes he had on now had taps on the toes as well as the heels.

“Gil tapped?” I asked Angie.

Angie shrugged. “Didn’t know that, either.”

Pearl followed Luther out. She looked about as pleased as I’d ever seen her. Luther’s enthusiasm at getting something for nothing was serving as an elixir for Pearl. Of course I couldn’t help but wonder how Gil was making out in the churchyard by now, if he was only rotating or had achieved full Mach 2 spin.

“Did you tell him about the officer?” Pearl asked her niece.

“The one you hit,” Angie said to me. “Dale?”

I nodded.

“He came by a couple of hours ago looking for you.”

“Just him?”

She nodded.

“How was he?”

“His head was all wrapped up. Otherwise, just big and dumb.”

Luther had gotten busy putting on his own spontaneous fashion show. He was twirling around in the driveway, raising clatter with his taps. He kept inviting us to admire his suit coat and the way it draped and hung.

“Tell you the truth,” Luther said while picking a speck of lint off of his sleeve, “I wouldn’t ordinarily much like getting snatched and hauled up here. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

“Indianola,” Pearl informed him.

“But I’ve got to say,” Luther went on, “this thing is sort of working out.”

NINE

I can’t say I had a legitimate plan, but I did have an idea. Pearl dug up a couple of pairs of scissors, and I left Desmond and Luther in her kitchen cutting dollar-bill-sized sheets out of her accumulated newspapers. Luther had gotten into Gil’s dress hats by then and was wearing a Dobbs fedora, the kind with the jaunty feather in the band that made the work seem festive and gay.

For my part, I conscripted Angie to drive me to the shopping plaza in her car, just in case Dale and his buddies were out there laying for the Geo. I had her park up between the dollar store and the KFC and wait for me while I walked down to K-Lo’s and slipped up from the rear.

Everybody who worked for K-Lo knew how to get in the store without the responsibility and bother of a key. K-Lo had gone cheap on his back metal door, so if you knew just where to pry it, there was play enough to ease the bolt entirely from the keeper.

The thieves K-Lo was plagued with of late didn’t bother with the back. They usually drove up on the sidewalk and rammed the front doors in.

I figured K-Lo would be drunk and out on the sales floor somewhere. I had a reasonable fear that K-Lo might have gotten his shotgun loaded before he went about the business of loading himself. That wouldn’t have taken long because K-Lo couldn’t hold his liquor. He drank almost every night. Always Armagnac and Coke in a Solo cup on ice, and he’d get stewed straightaway and all at once.

I thought maybe he was playing the radio at first, but it turned out he was singing, and he was doing a fairly remarkable imitation of der Bingle’s “Swinging on a Star.”

I was just about stunned, to be honest, because K-Lo didn’t fraternize. We got to see him fight with his wife, but that was incidental. K-Lo didn’t ever confide in us, wasn’t the sort to tell us a thing. He was just the guy who gave us scraps of paper and sent us out into the Delta, railed at us with devastating surgical skill whenever we made him unhappy, paid us once every two weeks without fail, and stayed behind when we went home.

I only knew for certain that K-Lo loved a dollar and refused to eat Chinese. I hadn’t really imagined the man could sing.

My job was to take his shotgun before K-Lo noticed me. He was parked out on a settee, the one he couldn’t sell or lease because it was uglier even than the worst sort of Delta trailer trash could stand for. It had skirting and tufts and buttons, and the fabric was hideous plaid, all married in a way to make for universal homeliness.

I came up slowly, silently, picked my way through the store, and the closer I drew to K-Lo, the better his Bing Crosby got. He had the croon and the burble down cold, and his timing was damn good, too, for a hotheaded Lebanese American living on a bayou in Leland.

“You could be better than you are.”

He’d left his shotgun leaning on the sofa back, stock wedged behind a cushion and barrel to the ceiling.

I grabbed the barrel and drew the thing to me.

“You could be swinging on a … SHIT!”

K-Lo saw me, leapt to his feet, and went scrabbling for his gun, but he wasn’t even looking where he’d left it, just scratching around any old where as he blistered me with abuse.

“Calm down,” I said. “It’s just me.”

K-Lo studied me for a moment and then recalibrated so he could lace me for a solid minute with a personalized tirade. Ronnie the tattooed felon might have wept, but I’d already had a character-building day.

K-Lo dropped down hard on the ugly settee, and I circled around and sat beside him. Neither one of us said anything for about a half a minute until I broke the ice with, “Mean Bing.”

K-Lo nodded. “He had pipes.”

“How’s Dale?”

K-Lo shrugged. “Some stitches. He’ll be okay.”

“And Patty?”

K-Lo shook his head. “Pissed,” was all he told me.

K-Lo took a draw on his Armangac and Coke. “Found my TV yet?”

I shook my head. “But we’re on it.”

Just then a ghetto-fabulous Mazda pulled into the shopping plaza. The aftermarket grille alone was worth more than an engine rebuild, and I could have spent two weeks in Cancún on the price of the free-spinning wheels. The driver turned off his headlights, and that coupe cruised through the lot.

The shopping plaza was empty. Half the storefronts were vacant due to ongoing Delta retail strife, and the ones that were still occupied had long since closed for the night. That Mazda rolled into a corner, deep in shadow, and everybody got out. Three at least. Maybe four. Over from Greenville, I figured, where the lowlives there had probably run out of places to rob.

K-Lo hadn’t been hit in nearly three months. That was almost an unprecedented stretch.

“Come on,” I told him. I led K-Lo back toward his office as I checked the shotgun load. K-Lo had slammed in six rounds of rubber buckshot—good for driving off bears or anarchists. I ejected one to look it over.
RIOT READY
, the casing read.

“When did you get these?”

“Week or so ago. I’d just as soon make them sorry as dead.”

“Hmm,” I said in just the way that Desmond would have said it. Riot Ready rubber buckshot felt to me at the moment like a means of high-velocity therapy.

I left K-Lo in his office and went out the back door. I circled around to the retail side of the place. There were three big, strapping black kids and one wiry older guy whose job apparently was to wonder why nobody was doing what he’d asked them to do. They had a wonder bar and a hacksaw. A come-along, a pair of bolt cutters.

K-Lo had long since sprung for a titanium plate on the door gap, so there wasn’t anything to pry or saw, nothing to draw or cut. Those boys might as well have brought a sugar spoon.

The trouble was with the wiry guy. He loved his Mazda too much. The tried-and-true way into K-Lo’s was to just drive through the front glass. Then you grabbed what you could, rolled your car out, and headed back to Greenville. Nobody ever got away with more than about a thousand dollars of goods, but they kept just making the same Godawful mess.

Me and Desmond had once tried to convince K-Lo to leave a TV on the sidewalk. A kind of thug offering to help to keep his plate glass in tact. K-Lo hadn’t done it. He thought it wasn’t manly. K-Lo was big on manliness. He was Mexican that way.

If I waited around for a crime scene, I feared I’d be there half the night since those fellows didn’t have among them the tools or apparently the smarts they needed to get in. For my part, I had Riot Ready loads and some frustration to work off, so I decided I wouldn’t wait for an actual crime. I decided this would be about me.

“Fellows,” I said, and before any of them could draw out whatever thug-life pistols they were packing, I aimed that shotgun barrel just over their heads and squeezed off a load. Once they’d lit out for their Mazda coupe, I leveled that Beretta and fired again. I didn’t want to blind them after all.

I was taking a lesson from Desmond. Rubber buckshot was just my way of scuffing those fellows up. From the fuss they raised, I could tell I was making capable work out of it.

I kept firing until they’d all piled in the car and left the lot. I could hear those rubber pellets zipping and bouncing all over the place.

It was purely exhilarating, and by the time they were out of range I was probably hearing about half as well as Dale. So I didn’t know Angie was racing up until she’d pulled into the lot.

She’d heard the shots from over by the KFC and had driven right toward trouble instead of sitting or driving the other way. I knew if I owned an Acura and had a career, I’d be deaf to a lot of things. In particular gunfire at a deserted shopping plaza.

I screamed at her I was fine. We walked together around to the back door, where K-Lo met us with a ball-peen hammer. Aside from his shotgun, it was all he had to ward off burglars with.

I tried to introduce him to Angela Marie, but K-Lo was far too agitated for even marginal civil discourse, which left us to stand there in the stockroom and watch K-Lo be upset.

“They won’t be back,” I told him.

“More where they came from,” K-Lo said.

He then retired to the sales floor to plop down on the homely plaid settee. We followed him. Angie insisted. This was her first exposure to K-Lo. I didn’t see him sad and drunk too often. I was accustomed to irate.

He looked up at us. He was nearly in tears. “They took my cat,” he said.

“His cat?” Angie asked me.

“Bobcat,” I told her.

“He had a bobcat?”

“Stuffed.”

K-Lo was weeping by now in a near-hysterical Middle Eastern sort of way.

“Somebody broke in three months ago and stole it. Meant a lot to him.”

K-Lo had started in on a kind of ululation. It was part der Bingle and part, I guess, atavistic Lebanese.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to K-Lo. “Did I just drive those fellows a ways?”

He nodded.

“Did I just keep them from breaking in here and busting your place all up?”

Another nod.

“Now don’t you feel like you owe me a little something?”

K-Lo just looked at me. Owing wasn’t really his game.

I bulled on ahead. “Here’s what I need—three hundred dollars in twenties, and this shotgun for a day or two. Maybe all your Riot Ready shells.”

K-Lo winced. He muttered to himself. After a great long while, he nodded. He left me and Angie on the sales floor while he went back to get the cash.

K-Lo gave me all the twenties he could scare up in the petty-cash lockbox. Not quite three hundred dollars, but close enough. The shotgun shells he just pointed me to. Then he plopped down heavily in his chair like he was weary and spent from having been all saintly.