Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (15 page)

Junior’s place had a proper root cellar out in the backyard by a ramshackle shed. It had been dug out by hand and then walled around with planks like a mine shaft. There were dusty jars of preserves down there from God only knew when. Just them and our canvas surplus duffel.

“Want them all?” Desmond asked me.

“I guess. How are we for ammo?”

He dragged the thing over to the block of sunlight below the open cellar doors. Desmond unzipped the bag, poked around, pulled out three full boxes of bullets and one that looked like about a third spent.

“If that won’t do it, it shouldn’t get done,” I told him.

We swung back by the chicken place to pick up the boys.

“Where to?” Desmond asked me.

“Can’t you track her phone or something?” Luther wanted to know.

“I can’t,” I told him. “Think Kendell can?” I asked Desmond.

“Probably. Maybe.”

Desmond called Kendell and did quite a lot of listening.

“He’s on it,” Desmond said once he’d tossed his phone back into the cup holder.

“What’s he want us to do?”

“He knew better than to say.”

We ended up taking a kind of spontaneous vote on where we ought to go. Dale figured he’d head to Jackson if he was that Boudrot, but we didn’t put any stock in that.

“And him with a hostage?” I asked Dale. “Lot of cops in Jackson.”

Luther and Percy Dwayne were all for Vicksburg.

“Steak place down there,” Luther told me. “Some buddy of that Boudrot runs it.”

“Thought it was his cousin,” Percy Dwayne said.

Eugene chimed in from the way back to tell us all, “Naw.”

Eugene had actually worked for that Boudrot in the meth cooking business. He’d hauled chemicals and Mexicans in his jackleg state-body truck.

“Boy at the steak house did time with him. They beat some guy near to death and got a couple of years in Rayburn.”

“Know him?” I asked Eugene.

“Been to his place once or twice. Steak’s all right.”

“Think that Boudrot might go there?” Desmond wanted to know.

Eugene shrugged. “Only friend of his I ever heard about.”

We didn’t have any better options. “Vicksburg, I guess,” I said to Desmond.

We all pumped Eugene for Boudrot details on the way down Delta. It turned out the guy who ran the steak place was an Acadian fuckstick too. He sounded to be a notch or two down from Boudrot volatility.

“He got shot or something,” Eugene told us. “Eased off with shit after that.”

“What if we snatch that boy?” Dale suggested. “Make some kind of swap?”

I’d never heard a good idea out of Dale, so I was ready to dismiss this one until Desmond grumbled in an approving sort of way.

“Really?” I asked him.

“Might could work,” he said.

“Why would he care?”

Desmond shrugged. “Prison buddies. You know how they get.”

That sure put an unsavory image in my head.

“That Boudrot,” Eugene informed us, “don’t give a happy damn about nobody.”

Luther and Percy Dwayne chimed in with, “He don’t.”

On the way to Vicksburg, Luther and Percy Dwayne and Eugene all reached a consensus that the Boudrot we were after was a southern Delta sort of creature.

“Up Delta for prison maybe,” Luther said, “but down Delta for everything else.”

“He got any houses left?” I asked Eugene.

“I think you burned them all down,” he told me.

“Aside from this place in Vicksburg, anywhere you remember him hanging out?”

Eugene passed a half minute in fairly deep study. “Oh yeah,” he said. “My house sometimes. Liked to shoot stuff off the deck.”

“The way they tell it,” Percy Dwayne started in, “he kind of tore your house to pieces.”

“How bad was it anyway?” Eugene asked me and Desmond.

We hadn’t truly gotten past the hounds with Eugene. That had seemed like trouble enough.

“Kicked your door in,” I told him. “Sliced up your sofa. That big cabinet? The one by the window? He pushed it over on the floor.”

“I kind of did that,” Eugene said. “And I seem to recall I tore up the couch.”

I waited for an explanation, and Eugene didn’t disappoint.

“Got a new knife,” he told me. “Bottle of Ancient Age.”

“Did you happen to kick your door in?” I wanted to know.

He didn’t seem to believe he had.

Kendell checked in when we were nearly to Vicksburg to share with us how little he knew. Tula’s phone was shut off, as best as anybody could tell.

“The man’s no fool,” Kendell told me. “Where are you headed?” he wanted to know.

“Vicksburg. Going to check on some prison buddy.”

“Desmond too?” Kendell wanted to know.

“Yeah.”

“He tell you about his trouble down there?”

“What trouble?” I glanced at Desmond. He didn’t squirm exactly, but he twitched.

“Had a girlfriend a while back. She’s got a bunch of brothers and cousins angling to kill him.”

“Haven’t heard about her.”

“Ask him,” Kendell suggested. “I’ll call you when I hear something.”

“Girlfriend in Vicksburg?” I said to Desmond.

Boy did he have a snort for that.

The way Desmond explained it, she was a Purdy, and they were a large clan down in Vicksburg.

“Went out with her twice maybe,” Desmond said. “Found out she wasn’t right.”

“Nuts?” Luther asked him. Luther had a nose for trouble, and he was sensing some ahead.

Desmond nodded. He showed us a scar on his neck.

“She get a new knife too?” I asked him.

“Fingernails,” Desmond told me.

“What did you do to her?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know. His nose for trouble rivaled Luther’s.

“Nothing. Took her dancing. She’s just wired the wrong way.”

“You dance?” I asked Desmond. I knew he glided everywhere he went, but I’d never known him to do it to music.

“Sometimes.”

“Big fat white girl?” That was Dale. “That’s all you coloreds seem to want.”

Me and Desmond knew Dale well enough to hardly hear him anymore.

“White girl all right. A little dumpy,” Desmond allowed.

Luther and Percy Dwayne and Eugene as well were all on board with dumpy.

“Plush,” Luther told us. It turned out that was the word his Lurleen used about herself.

“So who’s mad at you?” I asked Desmond.

“Her brothers. Her cousins. Whole pack of them, I guess.”

“Why?”

“She told them all kinds of fool stuff. Said I made her do things … you know … in the bed.”

“What things?” Luther and Percy Dwayne were halfway to the dashboard.

Desmond gave them a look. “Bunch of shit I’d never do.”

“Like what?” Luther asked.

“Hit him,” Desmond told me.

“I tied a lady up once,” Eugene said from the way back. “She wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Somehow Dale was reminded of how very much he’d like the steak, and he chimed in from the backseat to tell us all about it.

After that we passed a dozen miles in relative silence. We were somewhere between Belzoni and Midnight when Desmond got back to his girlfriend’s brothers. “If they get wind I’m in Vicksburg, we’re going to have a mess.”

“What kind of mess?” I asked him.

“The one with the eye patch,” Desmond said, “ought to be locked up in Whitehaven. Rest of them are just mean and stupid, you know, in the regular way.”

“Big?”

“Like Dale.”

“Stupid like Dale?”

“I heard that,” Dale told me.

“Yeah,” Desmond said. “But with muscles. Dale’s just fat.”

“Heard that too.”

“If we only go to the steak place, talk to that Boudrot’s buddy, what are the chances we see any of them?”

“Purdys all over,” Desmond said. “They kind of know my car.”

“So she’s recent?” I asked him.

“Remember when I told you I was helping my cousin with his shed?”

I recalled a week there a year or so back when Desmond had been scarce and shifty. “Her?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Didn’t want to tell you.”

“So you knew she was trouble.”

“Had a sense,” Desmond said. “Couldn’t help myself.”

“I like a woman who’s all half cocked and shit,” Luther informed us over the seat back.

“Is Lurleen a wildcat?” I asked him.

Luther moved some spit. He nodded. He told me morosely, “No.”

FIFTEEN

Damned if it wasn’t a semi-fine restaurant down on the far end of Vicksburg. Past the casino barges. Beyond the renovated downtown. The place had a half-assed view of the highway and the bridge over the river. It had a proper neon sign. The restaurant was just called Ricky’s. It looked like it had been a diner or a meat-and-three-spot once.

There were only a couple of cars in the lot. It was around four thirty by then, and Ricky’s apparently didn’t offer a Golden Corral–style buffet. It seemed to hold itself out as a swanky sit-down place where you ordered off the menu and you gave the waitress a tip.

“Where’d he get that damn cow?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

It was a fair question. There was a massive steer on the roof of the restaurant. It looked to be fiberglass. It glowed all over, had some sort of light inside.

“Texas probably,” Luther informed us. “They got shit like that all over.”

Percy Dwayne just nodded. Now if anyone ever asked him about that steer, he’d say it was from Texas because that’s what he’d been told by his nephew who didn’t have any better idea where it came from than he did. In my experience, that was the usual pedigree of facts in the Delta. If a man made a confident declaration, then whatever he’d said was probably true. Of course, nobody knowing anything was the abiding chink in the process.

“We all going in?” I asked in a general way.

Everybody but Barbara nodded. The hostess seated us at a big round table in the back.

“Boss here?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“I’d like a word.”

I could see across to a service window. She went over and raised him there. Ricky was wearing a chef’s tunic and a Saints cap. She talked. She pointed. He looked. He told her something brief and curt and sent her back our way.

Dale and the boys had finished off our entire basket of breadsticks by then. Luther waved the empty basket at the hostess as she approached and told her, “Hey.”

She ignored him and came straight to me. “He’s a little busy right now. Maybe after you eat.”

I saw Ricky the chef cross past the service window. He’d stripped down to just a T-shirt now.

“Kitchen,” I told Desmond. “I’ll go around back.”

Desmond went gliding off toward the service window while I headed out the door. I circled around at a jog past the Dumpster and intercepted Ricky about halfway to his truck. He spun around and tried to bolt back into the restaurant, but Desmond was coming out of the kitchen by then.

“Just hold on,” I told him.

He had a look of desperation we weren’t accustomed to inspiring. He was sweaty and twitchy, panting like a lapdog. He had on proper chef pants and green plastic clogs, a
RICKY’S
T-shirt with a likeness of his plastic steer on the back. He looked a lot more like a chef than a felon, but he was sure acting like a lowlife for us.

“I ain’t got it,” he told me. Then he turned to Desmond and informed him, “I ain’t.” After that he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the tiniest guns I’m sure I’ve ever seen. “I told you next week, and you said it’d be all right.”

“We’re not them,” Desmond said.

Ricky told us, “Like hell.”

He pointed his tiny pistol at Desmond. That was exactly the wrong thing to do. Desmond had been shot twice that I knew of and hadn’t suffered much for it either time. Consequently, the sight of a gun barrel pointed his way had an eccentric effect on Desmond. His impulse was to glide on over and make it point somewhere else.

That’s exactly what he did with Ricky. The man might have been a Parchman grad who’d done real time for assault, but he sure didn’t look an awful lot like a killer. He certainly didn’t behave like one. He was still only threatening to pull the trigger when Desmond took away his puny gun.

Ricky broke down. He wept and drooled. He begged us to let him take off his trousers because he’d bled already on his other pair and these were the last clean ones he had.

“Just don’t break anything,” he told us. “Can’t do no cooking in a cast.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

He cowered as I closed. Cowered more anyway. He was already pretty much in a sniveling crouch. He just got a little smaller and shakier.

“We’re not here for money,” Desmond said.

“Don’t bust up the place.” Ricky was blubbering and pleading with us by now.

“We’re here about that Boudrot you bunked with,” I told him.

He looked from me to Desmond and back to me. “Guy?” Being the Acadian fuckstick version of the name, it came out as a mucousy “Geeee?”

I nodded. Desmond nodded too.

“You ain’t down from Memphis?” he asked us.

We both shook our heads.

“Shit,” Ricky said. He turned off the spigot and stood upright more or less like a man. “I thought you was them.”

“Them who?” I asked him.

“Some fucker with his finger in every damn thing. Making me buy his lousy meat.”

“Making you how?” Desmond asked him.

Ricky motioned for us to follow him past the Dumpster. At the side of building he pointed toward a row of shiny new windows.

“Three of them with ball bats. Busted every last window out.”

“Wail on you too?” I asked him.

He pulled up his T-shirt. Ricky was wrapped around the torso. “Broke four ribs. Kidney hurts like hell. Don’t know what they did to that.”

The decent human in me didn’t care for this sort of thing, and me and Desmond together could make for about one upstanding citizen between us. I looked at Desmond. He looked at me.

We embraced our civic duty by telling each other, “Well, shit.”

“Expecting them today?” Desmond wanted to know.

Ricky nodded. “And I ain’t got their money.”

“How much?” I asked him.

“Two thousand a month.”

“Sounds steep.”

“Sure to put me out of business in a month or two,” Ricky told us. “How damn stupid is that?”