by Rick Gavin
“She did that?” Desmond couldn’t believe it. Skeeter looked like he’d been set upon by a quartet of longshoremen.
“With some kind of metal racket. Not even a pricey one.”
“What sort of man could tug his junk to that?”
“That Shambrough bloodline must be getting awfully thin.”
Then we heard a groan. Not from Skeeter but from behind the bathroom door. It was across the room, past the far bed. It was shut entirely. The toilet flushed, and when we didn’t hear any wash-up water in the sink but instead saw that door straight swing open, I think we both knew who’d be coming out.
“Oh,” our Hoyt said when he saw us. “Hey.”
“Ribs go through you?” I asked him.
“I’s just”—he held up a copy of the Trading Post—“kind of looking for a truck.”
“Who’d you call?” Desmond wanted to know.
That Hoyt went profoundly perplexed. He tilted his head and squinted like he couldn’t imagine what Desmond meant.
“Who,” I said, “Goodloe?”
He shook his head a little like we had him confused with somebody else. Somebody who might have used a phone, while he most assuredly hadn’t.
“Hit the fucker,” I suggested to Desmond, who was already making a fist.
He sailed on over that way he does, just gliding across the floor, and put himself between our Hoyt and the hallway.
“All right now,” that Hoyt told him mostly. “Might have dialed, but weren’t nobody home.”
“Dialed who?” I asked him.
He started a shrug, and that’s when Desmond slugged him. If you let them, guys like that Hoyt could tell you nothing for days on end.
“Hey!” he snapped at Desmond, who, in a display of contrition, drew directly back and slugged that Hoyt again.
“Shit!” he told us and covered up. “Called a guy I know.”
“And told him what?” I asked.
“Weren’t nobody there.”
Desmond caught him in the kidneys this time. It served to crumple that Hoyt and drop him. He piled up on the floor the way Larry likes to.
Desmond looked down at him with conspicuous disappointment. He shook his head and told me, “People anymore.”
That’s just when the hallway door eased open enough for a nurse to stick her head in. She looked over at me and Skeeter, took in Desmond and that Hoyt, and then appeared to decide we were more of a problem than she could manage.
She just said, “Well,” and drew back out again.
“Let’s go before she finds a cop,” I told Desmond.
“And him?” He pointed at our piled-up Hoyt.
“I’ll get him. You get Pearl.”
I reached down and grabbed that Hoyt by the collar of his shirt. As I lifted, the collar gave way and left me with a handful of poplin and our Hoyt heaped up once more on the floor.
So we grabbed him each under an arm and hoisted him off the floor. He made out to be invertebrate there for a second.
“Walk,” I told him and twisted a finger for emphatic effect.
He whimpered a little and told me, “All right.”
There was an actual cop at the nurses’ desk by the time we got into the hallway.
“Go on,” Desmond told me and pointed at the stairwell door. “I’ve got this.” He struck out down the hallway, gliding along and largely blocking me and that Hoyt from view.
That Hoyt complained all the way to the ground floor. He had hip troubles he told me about and a hernia that needed doctoring but he didn’t have the scratch. He just prattled on and on and made me stop at every landing so he could catch his breath.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up and see how that works?” I finally told him down on three.
“You’re hard to like,” that Hoyt informed me. Then he dredged and spat. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he wasn’t outdoors yet. I didn’t hit him only because I didn’t want him to pile up.
We came out on the backside of the building. We spilled out first into a hallway and then exited through a steel security door and set off an alarm. I was spending as much time looking back behind us as I was looking where we were going, just waiting for cops or troopers or something to come spilling out in pursuit.
So I wasn’t paying quite the attention that I should have paid to just exactly where we were heading as we passed the assorted hospital Dumpsters and skirted around the ambulance bay. I was kind of following our Hoyt. He seemed to be heading for the road. He had pluck all of a sudden, and energy. He was scooting along pretty good. I was just happy I wasn’t having to drag him.
We were out on the far edge of some kind of emergency room parking lot when I finally woke up to the fact our Hoyt was running me into trouble. I’ve got to hand it to him. He made it look random, and then I finally saw the car. It was a Biscayne with the finish gone. Dull blue with no shine at all to it, and a vinyl top that had rotted to tatters and was shedding its yellow stuffing.
It had more people in it than even a Biscayne ought to hold. Packed three across the front and four across the back. A couple of them looked a little to me like women. One of them stuck her head out a back side window.
She waved in that Hoyt’s direction and told him, “Hey!”
Her hair was matted. She had no chin to speak of. The teeth I saw were all turned sideways.
It was a little like running headlong into a hornets’ nest but for the fact that those Hoyts were far too chunky to come swarming out of that sedan. It turned out they didn’t need to. They’d deployed a skirmisher.
I heard him behind me. He must have been hiding himself down between cars. He was adenoidal and a little wheezy, maybe sixteen years old. He delivered the first blow as I turned. He had a camp shovel like soldiers use. It must have been authentic surplus judging from how it hurt like hell. I nearly got an arm raised before he coiled and struck again.
He caught me right on the side of the head, and I collapsed just like Beluga. I kind of remember somebody airing the Hoyt variety of “Uh-huh.”
TWENTY-THREE
I don’t guess you’ve really lived until you’ve come to in the trunk of a car. Worse still, the trunk of a Biscayne owned and operated by Delta Hoyts. They seemed to store their excess wardrobe in it. Coveralls, I had to guess, from the zippers and the stink. There were quarts of motor oil as well because that Biscayne was a burner. I was getting the full treatment from the fumes seeping into the trunk.
Or rather, we were getting the full treatment. I found my companion with my foot, and I would have shot straight out onto the road but for the trunk lid keeping me in.
“Who’s that!?”
Nothing. Not even a groan.
I probed with my foot. My feet really, since they were taped together. My wrists were taped behind me, but they hadn’t bothered with my mouth. Their sedan was raising such a racket, any noise I might have raised could hardly have competed with it. If they had a muffler on the thing, it was bound to be mostly holes.
I shoved whoever was in there with me with my feet again.
“Hey,” I said. Still nothing.
I decided it was a body. Not Desmond. I knew that for certain. He probably wouldn’t fit in a Biscayne trunk, and I couldn’t imagine Hoyts could muster the gumption to lift him.
I finally heard a groan that wasn’t one of mine.
“Hey,” I said.
More groaning. I shoved the guy some more.
“Quit it!” was what I finally heard.
“Larry?”
He told me, “Beluga.”
“Great.”
“What the hell’s all this?” he asked me.
“Hoyts have got us,” I told him. “They pull you out of the car?”
“Don’t know,” Larry said. “I was just listening to tunes. Some fucker hit me with something.”
“A shovel,” I said.
“I think I’m bleeding,” Larry informed me. “This hasn’t been much of a day.”
On the contrary, it had been quite a day. It had started with a homicide and seemed about to end with two, and there’d been a solid quartet of assaults right there in the middle. It had been a signal day, all right, but I kind of knew what Larry meant.
“Smells like bears been living in here or something,” Larry said. “Where are we going?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“Shambrough’ll be there. You can figure on that.”
“Girl of his probably, too.”
“Going to kill us, aren’t they?”
“I would.”
“Dying’s bad enough without him jerking off.”
I thought of our Hoyt’s dumbshow, of his cracked tongue hanging out.
“I can’t breathe,” Larry told me.
That wasn’t quite right, but I knew what he meant. There was plenty of air. The trouble was that all of it was tainted. The clothes stink was just unpleasant. The true problem we had was with the exhaust.
“We keep going,” I told Larry, “that girl won’t have to kill us.”
“That’d be all right,” Larry allowed. He was already slurring his words.
I kicked him. “Larry.”
He mumbled a little.
“Larry. Stay awake.”
I kicked him some more but just got the occasional grunt from Larry. Then I didn’t get anything no matter how hard I hit him. I was fighting off drowsiness myself. I tried yelling at those Hoyts, but they probably couldn’t hear me over the clatter. I don’t imagine they would have done much but yelled back and hooted and hollered. Lucas Shambrough had deployed them after Larry, I had to figure, and they were bringing him in along with me for a bonus. There must have been a certain amount of triumph in that for those Hoyts.
I thought I heard them laughing. What with the racket, I couldn’t be sure. All I know is, I started dropping off and starting back awake. Then I was having a dream that I was sleeping in a baby cradle. It was big enough for me and my dappled pony, Frank. I was explaining to Frank how a barcode scanner worked but got distracted once I’d discovered that Frank was eating a carrot in bed. We had a rule against that. A firm rule, I told him. Frank kept chewing his carrot. Then he gave me a horsey look I didn’t like. He kicked me twice.
When I woke up, I was out of the trunk and on the ground behind the car. I was lying on my back and looking up at Hoyts gathered all around me.
“Wake the fuck up,” one of them told me. He looked a little like our Hoyt. A little like Frank my spotted pony as well.
He kicked me in the ribs and laughed.
I saw his teeth and thought, Oh. Right.
Some more of them kicked me but not hard enough to keep me from dozing off. I was aware of the clatter as they hauled Larry out of the trunk and tossed him down beside me.
Larry said, “Ow!”
I laughed and told him, “Yeah. Ow.”
Then I slept some more, and I only woke up because my arms were hurting. I thought at first I was still lying down somewhere, but it turned out I was standing up. The light was low and gloomy. The air was dank. The place smelled like last year’s laundry hamper. My wrists were cuffed at about shoulder height, and I was sagging so that my weight was about to tear my arms clean off.
That’s quite enough to wake a guy up, even from CO2 poisoning and the well-aimed boots of a pack of Hoyts.
I stood full upright as best I could, though I was a little shaky still. As my eyes focused and adjusted, I could see I was in a basement. The view just confirmed everything my nose had already told me. It was a damp, seepy basement. A cellar really. Dug out for a furnace and a bunch of dusty bottles on shelves. Neglected preserves, they looked like to me. Miserly light came in from grimy transom windows. I counted four of them.
Larry spit up a little, and that harnessed my attention. He was three or four feet down the wall from me and shackled just like I was. It was hard at that point to imagine that this had all started because of some tires.
“Hey,” I said.
Larry grunted. He vomited in earnest. All over his shirt. All over his shoes. All over the cement floor. It was hard to feel anything but pity for him, but I managed nonetheless.
“This is your mess,” I told him, “Beluga.” I said it with as much scathing contempt as I could muster, given my circumstances.
Larry looked around. Squinted and blinked. My eyes were adjusted to the gloom by then. I could see off in a corner a moth-eaten hunk of taxidermy. A beaver or a groundhog. I couldn’t tell which, but I couldn’t miss the fact that it was albino.
“Where are we?” Larry asked.
“Shambrough’s,” I told him. “Lair of the white worm.”
“The what?” Larry was frantic now.
“We’re fucked,” I said, by way of clarification.
We were both locked up in two pairs of regular handcuffs with one bracelet attached to our wrists and the other U-bolted into the wall. It was an ancient brick wall, and the bolts had been sunk deep into the mortar joint. My left bolt wouldn’t move a bit, but the right one had the merest hint of play.
“Try to move your arms,” I told Larry.
“Can’t,” he said. “Locked up.”
“Try,” I told him. “See if you can move those bolts.”
He made a halfhearted effort and then went pouty. “That damn Bugle,” he said. “He didn’t have no business under that truck and getting himself run over.”
“I’m going to say this once,” I told him. Then we both heard creaking from upstairs. All we could see overhead was floor joists and what looked like cypress plank sheathing. The house was stout and well built. We were probably hearing somebody walking, but there was so much wood between us and them, we couldn’t be sure of that.
Silence followed, so I told Larry, “None of this is that boy’s fault. You didn’t start on time because you were late.”
“I had … complications,” Larry said.
“Right. We wouldn’t be down here if you could do any damn thing like it ought to be done.”
“Skeeter mostly,” Larry told me.
Out of impulse I tried to hit him, but my handcuffs held me back. Larry grinned when he saw what I was up to.
“He was supposed to pay that boy off.”
“With money you didn’t give him.”
“Well now, let’s be clear. You and Desmond didn’t get it to me in any hurry.”
Now it was our fault. That was enough to prompt me to discover I could kick him. My legs were free to go where they wanted, so I caught Larry in the thigh.
“Hey!” he shouted and craned to get away as best he could since he wasn’t able, like usual, to drop to the floor in a heap.
“Your doing,” I told him. “If that girl doesn’t take you out, I will.”
“Now, boys.”
I don’t know where he came from. He might have been lurking in a corner all along. Over behind the stairs that led up into the house proper or just beyond the boiler, back behind his albino beaver. He might have come down while we were fighting. All I know is he was suddenly there.
Lucas Shambrough had on proper clothes. As it turned out, he was a chino and a sockless loafer guy, so I wouldn’t have liked him even if I hadn’t known reason to detest him already. He was wearing a button-down oxford shirt, freshly laundered and creased. He was shaved and coiffed. Presentable. He stood just out of kicking range.
“So,” he said. He looked us over, Larry in particular. “Mr. Beluga LaMonte. So nice to finally see you.”
Larry looked like he was hoping to find a way to pass through the solid brick wall behind him. Anything to get away from Lucas Shambrough, who had creepy about as down as a human could ever hope to get it.
“You, sir,” Shambrough informed Larry, “have made a terrible mistake.”
Larry pulled one of his victimized faces in a bid to let Lucas Shambrough know that mistakes were something that happened to him, not the sorts of things he got up to. Shambrough didn’t appear to take his meaning or even
try.
“Your friend told us what you did. Chapter. Verse. Whole damn thing.”
“What friend?” I asked him.
Shambrough didn’t even glance my way. “I’m not talking to you.”
Since Larry couldn’t find a way to seep into the wall, he asked Shambrough, “What friend?” as well.
“And my friend Bugle is going to have a limp. His doctor all but promised that.”
When Larry started in on how that boy had no business under the trailer, Shambrough took a quick step his way and hit him once. It wasn’t a punch. It was an open-handed slap. The sort of blow you might get if you’d offended a dowager at the opera. That didn’t keep Larry from whimpering and informing Lucas Shambrough that he was a little goddamned tired of getting hit.
Naturally enough, that got him hit again. Another slap. It was either Shambrough’s preference or he didn’t know how to make a decent fist.
Larry looked around at the floor like he had designs to pile up on it, but given his restraints, he could only manage an ungainly squat.
“She’s dressing for you,” Shambrough told us. He looked my way. “Especially you.”
I rattled my handcuffs. “Not very sporting.”
“No,” Lucas Shambrough allowed with a smile. “It’s not.”
Then he stepped backward into the gloom and climbed the steps up to the landing. We got a burst of light from upstairs as he opened the basement door. Then gloom again as he shut it.
“This ain’t right,” I heard Larry say.
It qualified as borderline sniveling, which made for helpful aggravation as I worked to further loosen my right-hand bolt, going at it like you’d go at a tooth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Larry just whined and pouted, and he was so accomplished at that sort of thing that I found I could draw off of Larry for fuel.
I even provoked him a little when I feared I might flag. “Think Skeeter spilled it?” I asked him.
Larry exhaled like a man who’d been asked to balance the federal budget. “Probably,” he said. “He’s like that. And it was all his idea.”
That gave me a spark, and I went at that bolt until it was truly wiggling. An eighth of an inch to either side, enough to make me optimistic.