Beluga

by Rick Gavin

“Can we go back?” he finally asked me.

  “It’s all you can eat,” Tula told him.

  “And she’s paying,” I said.

  “You come on then,” that Hoyt said to me, and I followed him to the steam table.

  “My people,” he told me as he reached into the rib pan with his bare nasty hands, “been working for Shambroughs since way back.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Used to be planters. A few of them still are, but past a couple of tractor drivers, they don’t need us anymore. Mr. Lucas is something different. Not the sort to plant a crop.”

  “What do you do for him?”

  That Hoyt licked his fingers in a hygienic way before reaching into the fritter pan for a fistful of stale fritters.

  “Nothing strictly proper,” that Hoyt informed me, “but me and mine stay away from the worst of it. We’ll do a little collecting or maybe—”

  I held up my hand to stop him. “Save it,” I said and pointed at the table. “She’ll need to hear it, too.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  I nodded.

  “She going to run me in?”

  “Tell us what we need to know and she won’t.”

  He loosed a breath and nodded. “Get a plate.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Don’t need to be. Pile it up.” He pointed at the hotel pan, just a quarter full now of ribs. “Before that fat boy gets here.”

  I grabbed a plate. I piled it up. I followed that Hoyt back to the table.

  He was one of those guys who, once he’d decided to do a thing, did it full out. He told us everything he could possibly dredge up and think of about the Shambroughs. It took him a quarter hour to even arrive at Mr. Lucas. There were other Shambroughs he chose to set the table with instead. Uncles mostly and a cousin or two who’d put Hoyts to honest use back before the laser-guided tractors and the mechanical picking machines.

  “Dirt farmers. That was us,” our Hoyt said. “Times changed. Shambroughs changed. Some of them, anyway.”

  “What’s he into mostly?” Tula asked him.

  “Mr. Lucas?”

  We all nodded. Even Pearl. She found delving into other people’s bone-filled closets about as fascinating as anything on earth could be.

  “Hard to say.” That Hoyt reached for the hot sauce and doused his ribs with it. “People pay him. I know that. For one thing and another. He only usually calls us out when somebody won’t or can’t.”

  “Pay him for what?” I asked.

  “No trouble, I guess. Because when they don’t pay, they get a mountain of it.”

  “Who pays him?” Tula asked.

  “Slew of folks. Clean up to Memphis. Clear down to Baton Rouge.”

  “Sounds like standard-issue protection,” I said. “They pay or get beat up, burned out.”

  “Hardly ever gets that far,” our Hoyt said. “We just jostle them a little and point a gun or two their way. That’s usually enough to shake something loose.”

  “What do you know about Larry’s tires?” I asked him.

  That Hoyt shook his head. “Don’t know about no tires, but Mr. Lucas is a bad one for making off with all grades of shit.” Then even that Hoyt turned toward Pearl and was quick to tell her, “Sorry.”

  “So he’s collecting protection,” Tula said, “and stealing every stinking thing.”

  Our Hoyt nodded and shoved his empty iced tea glass my way. “I like the sweet,” he told me.

  I pointed at Larry. He looked like he wanted to tell me he didn’t fetch tea for any damn body, but Desmond made an authentic fist, and Larry hopped up from the table.

  “What about that girl?” I asked our Hoyt. “Black hair. Tattoo.” I pointed to my neck and then picked up the Taser I’d confiscated and showed it off. “Hers.”

  “Seen her once,” that Hoyt said. “She’s out of Louisville or somewhere. I heard Mr. Lucas say one time that folks never saw her coming.”

  “Does he use her much?” Tula asked.

  That Hoyt nodded. “Hard cases, I guess. And him and her got this thing.”

  “What thing?” I asked him.

  “You know.” He then made an altogether vulgar dumbshow in a bid to describe sex to us. He used his greasy hands. He flopped his tongue out while he panted.

  Larry showed up in time to see it. “Hell, buddy. It’s only tea.” He set the tumbler down with a show of distaste and retired to his chair across the table.

  “I think we’ve got it,” Tula told our Hoyt. Then she pointed at Pearl by way of instruction.

  Somehow that Hoyt knew just what to do. He told Pearl, “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “She ever killed anybody that you know of?” I asked him.

  “Heard stuff,” he said.

  “Lately?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got people around Belzoni. Talk down there about a guy.”

  “Catfish pond,” I said.

  I got another nod from our Hoyt.

  “Who are we talking about?” Tula asked me.

  Me and Desmond described what we had seen down by Belzoni. Tula had heard a little of it on her radio, but she hadn’t run up on Kendell long enough to get caught up.

  “Her?” she asked us.

  We nodded.

  “Would Shambrough go with her?” Tula asked that Hoyt.

  He was quick to nod. “Mr. Lucas likes to watch.”

  “Does he help?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Sometimes. I don’t know.” That Hoyt tossed a scoured rib bone onto his plate. “The way I hear it, he likes to be over in the bushes, tugging on that thing.”

  We got another dumbshow, a vivid demonstration of the sort of self-pleasure Lucas Shambrough got up to when his ninja schoolgirl assassin got busy scuffing somebody up. The tongue came out. He panted some more. We all turned out to have grunty groans.

  At least when he finished that Hoyt knew to turn to Pearl and say, “Sorry, ma’am.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tula was the one who decided to leave Kendell out of it for the moment. We reconnoitered in the lot, me and Tula and Desmond, while Pearl and Larry and our nasty Hoyt got takeout from the Feast of Peking. They’d all agreed they needed hideout food if a hideout was where we were headed. Pearl was more than a little worried about the crockery that might be on hand, and I’d already promised her we would stop for napkins and toilet paper and Sanka.

  “Anybody been out to Shambrough’s yet?” I asked Tula. “Just for a conversation?”

  “Last I heard, they’re working up to it. Those people have a lot of juice around here.”

  Desmond laughed. He’d been in the Delta all his life, but even he was hard-pressed to make much sense of the sway that Shambroughs held.

  “They ain’t been nothing forever,” he said, “and here they are still getting their way.”

  “I saw her in his house,” I told Tula. “The ninja schoolgirl’s living with him. Doesn’t sheltering a fugitive count for something?”

  “So that was you in there cracking heads.”

  I gave her my best contrite look.

  “If I tell my boss she’s out at Shambrough’s, he’ll ask me how I know it,” Tula informed me, “and then he’s sure to have me pick you up. We’ve got to let it play out. The captain’s a Delta boy. He’s going to do things exactly the way people do them around here.”

  “I hear that,” Desmond said. “Been trying to tell him.”

  Desmond and Tula looked at me like maybe I was the cause and source of all the upset and the carnage.

  “I’m a straight-line kind of guy,” I said. “No harm in going from here to there.”

  “Should have hit her a little harder” was all Tula could trouble herself to tell me. “Then Shambrough wouldn’t have anybody to … uh … watch.”

  We needed a plan. Me and Desmond had a way of committing to make a plan. Occasionally we even sat down and attempted to devise one. We’d usually get a step or two in and then decide to improvise. Consequently, our plan w
as always we’ll do what feels right for us at the time.

  So when Tula asked us, “What now?” me and Desmond glanced at each other.

  “We’ve got a base of operations in mind,” I told Tula.

  Desmond added, “Right.”

  “We’ll get them safe.” I pointed toward the Feast of Peking doorway. “Give Kendell some time to investigate. That was what he wanted from us. He might have evidence enough off that boy in Belzoni to get a warrant by now.”

  Tula shook her head and told me, “Nope.”

  “Maybe Skeeter, then,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Too soon.”

  “Izzy and that Sunflower woman?”

  “Enough for a conversation,” she said. “That’s all we’ve got for now, and the captain’s going to have it but, like I told you, in due time. He’ll get Shambrough into the station house, probably with his Memphis lawyer.”

  “So me and Larry have got warrants out on us while everybody else is going clean?”

  “Stop whining. You hit a cop,” Tula said. “What the hell did you figure would happen? I’d take you both to jail for your own good, but that’d leave Desmond out here alone.”

  Just then Pearl and that Hoyt came out of the restaurant arguing about some TV lawyer. Not one on a show but the guy with the hair on the mesothelioma commercials. Pearl had decided he was a Christian sort, which our Hoyt was actively resisting.

  “Not alone enough,” Desmond told us.

  Tula checked her watch. “Got to pick up CJ. Check in when you can.”

  “We’ll be way out in—”

  She raised a hand to stop me. “Don’t want to know. I could still get the order to pick you up.”

  Then she was off to her cruiser, a Grand Marquis that was slightly too dusty for Kendell. She whipped out onto the truck route, heading west toward Greenville and the river. Me and Desmond stood in the lot and watched her go.

  We didn’t see much point in making our Hoyt ride in the wayback anymore. Pearl sat between him and Larry on the backseat and chattered indiscriminately about all varieties of piffle. That Hoyt threw in every now and again while Larry just sat and sulked.

  “Can we run by and see Skeeter?” Larry finally asked us.

  “Where did they take him?” I asked Desmond.

  “Greenville likely.”

  “Swing by and then down to Mayersville?” I suggested. “I’d kind of like to see him myself. Maybe that ninja schoolgirl said something to him while she was beating him half to death.”

  “Think Shambrough was in there watching?” Desmond asked me.

  That was enough to raise a grunty groan.

  We parked across the road from the Greenville hospital because there were cruisers in that lot as well. Me and Desmond prepped Pearl. The plan was to send her in to ask after Skeeter, but beyond “Heard a guy once call him Hank or Howard,” Larry didn’t know Skeeter’s given name.

  “I thought he was your friend,” I said to Larry.

  “Parchman friend,” he told me.

  Pearl had gotten it in her head that Skeeter had been injured in a tennis accident.

  “Forget the racket,” I told her, but she couldn’t seem to do it and stayed confused about what Skeeter had been up to in the Walmart.

  “I’ll go with her,” our Hoyt finally said.

  “You’ll just keep on going,” Desmond told him.

  “You got my gun,” he said and tossed his head toward the disassembled 20-gauge in the wayback. “Used to be Daddy’s. Ain’t like I’m leaving it here.”

  Short of holding his hound or his mother hostage, we didn’t guess we could do much better.

  “Go on,” I said. “See if you can get on his floor. Find out if they’ve got a cop on guard. I doubt it, but you never know around here.”

  “All right,” our Hoyt said, and him and Pearl climbed out of the car together. They crossed the street and rounded the magnolia trees by the foyer.

  “His name might have been Henry,” Larry told us. “I think he’s from Dyersburg or somewhere up there.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Henry from Dyersburg.”

  “Or that might have been some other guy.”

  Desmond was troubled. I could tell. Anybody with ears could tell. He had a particular way of breathing when something was nagging at him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what exactly was up, so I ignored him for a while. Then he got a little louder like a dog will when it’s ready to be fed.

  We’d been sitting about ten minutes before I finally asked him, “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Desmond said, his usual preamble. “Seems a little off. That’s all.”

  “Off how exactly?”

  “Wasn’t Dyersburg. It was Blytheville,” Larry said.

  Desmond just breathed some more.

  “What seems off?” I asked him.

  “That Hoyt was coming after you and him, right?” Desmond asked me and jabbed a thumb Larry’s way.

  I nodded.

  “Skeeter probably, too.”

  “Probably,” I told Desmond.

  “And here we’ve sent him in there, just with Pearl, so he can check on Skeeter.”

  “Ironic.”

  “Is it?”

  “We’ve got his shotgun.”

  “You even think it was his daddy’s?”

  Larry reached over the seat back and picked up our Hoyt’s shotgun stock. It was all dinged and scarred like it had been tossed around for years and even recently battered about half to pieces.

  “All tore up,” Larry told us.

  That was Desmond’s method. I’d start out satisfied, and he’d steer me into doubts and sensible misgivings.

  “Just wondering what he’s up to,” Desmond said.

  “Why has he got to be up to something?” I asked him.

  “Because he’s a Hoyt,” Desmond told me.

  “I don’t know from Hoyts.”

  “That’s right. Didn’t you scuff one up at the Walmart?”

  I nodded.

  “Cousin of his. Isn’t that what he said?”

  I nodded again.

  “But he’s put that completely out of his mind. Now you and him are buddies.”

  “We’re going in, aren’t we?” I finally said to Desmond.

  Desmond unbuckled as he told me, “Yeah.”

  Me and Desmond climbed out of the Escalade, and Larry shifted up under the wheel.

  “Stay right here,” Desmond told him, “until you get run off.”

  Larry had gotten too busy adjusting the seat and sizing up the radio dials to pay proper attention to Desmond, who reached in and gave him a pop. “Right here.”

  Larry whined, “You always hitting.” He rubbed his head. “The both of you, always hitting. Like that does anybody any good.”

  I followed Desmond into the main hospital reception area. There was a cop I’d never seen before back in a corridor behind the counter. He glanced at me and Desmond as we entered but then went straight back about his business. If the local PD was looking for me because of my dustup with Jasper in Greenwood, I didn’t get the feeling they were looking for me hard. That was the virtue of the Delta. They all knew Jasper, too.

  I didn’t see Pearl at first, but I heard her soon enough. She was over in a corner of the waiting room, parked next to a woman on a couch. It turned out they were former garden club friends who’d fallen out of touch, and now here they’d run into each other at the hospital in Greenville out of the blue and all.

  They had almost more catching up to do than Pearl could find the breath to manage.

  “Pearl?” I said.

  She introduced me to her friend, Minnie, and started in on an exhaustive explanation of who exactly Minnie was. I waited for a gap—it came right after news of Minnie’s remarkable green thumb with Heritage Beauty roses—when I said, “Excuse me, but did you find out anything about Skeeter?”

  Pearl nodded. “He’s on eight.”

  “And your … friend?” I asked a
s I looked around for some sign of that Hoyt.

  “Goodloe went to make a phone call,” Pearl told me. She pointed in the direction of the combination gift shop and café.

  “Goodloe,” I muttered to Desmond as we headed for the shop.

  Goodloe wasn’t in the gift shop. He wasn’t in the adjacent café either. I found the pay phone back down the slip of a hall that led to the public toilets. No Goodloe. I checked the men’s room. Just an orderly on break. I described our Hoyt to him.

  “Like he climbed out of a ditch. Teeth all sideways.”

  He shook his head. “Saw a guy with an eye patch out back smoking.”

  I thanked him anyway and went over to join Desmond by the elevators. “Skeeter’s on eight,” I told him.

  A reception lady was saying to both of us, “Sir,” by then. We ignored her. Me and Desmond were good at that, like we’d just popped in from Albania and didn’t speak the English much.

  “Sir.”

  The doors finally opened, and we entered the car with a candy striper pushing a cart freighted with flower arrangements. She was a bubbly teen volunteer who was having a blessed day. She told us all about it on her way up to seven.

  “Cancer floor,” she informed us in a whisper. “They’ll be needing prayers from you and you.” As she spoke she poked first me and then Desmond in the sternum. Then she winked and licked her pouty lips. She was probably all of fifteen.

  “Bye now,” she said as she rolled her cart off the elevator. She gave us a backwards wave.

  Then we were at eight. Desmond stuck his head out of the car and looked up and down the hallway.

  “Just a nurse down there,” he told me.

  He stepped into the corridor, and I followed him. We went off in the direction that would carry us away from the nurses’ station, and we peeked into all the rooms as we passed. Most of the doors were standing half open, so there wasn’t much of a challenge to it. We had to open a few. Desmond played the orderly, and he only walked in on one sponge bath. We finally found Skeeter at the far end of the hall.

  He didn’t have a roommate. The bed near the door was empty and crisply made. Skeeter was over by the window looking like a man who’d been little short of murdered outright with ground strokes. He was swollen and bandaged and wrapped and plastered. He had probes and drips and a tube down his throat. He was unconscious and breathing in a regular way, but he looked awful bad.