Beluga

by Rick Gavin

  “That damn Skeeter,” I said.

  Larry was all over that in a second. He cataloged for me all the times that Skeeter had disappointed him by being unreliable and shiftless. “I don’t know,” Larry said. “Can’t figure people sometimes.”

  He was like spinach for Popeye. The more pitiful Larry got, the harder I went at that bolt. Soon it was a quarter inch to either side, and I could hear the mortar going sandy.

  “That guy in Belzoni,” I said to Larry. “Probably told them all kinds of shit, too.”

  “Yeah.” Larry exhaled. “Probably. I should have figured he might all along.”

  A half inch either side, and I could feel the cement going to rubble. I pulled at that bolt. It came a little. I worked it and jerked again. The threads were barely holding, and then the place lit up as the door upstairs swung open. I stopped what I was up to, pressed my back against the bricks, and made to look quite thoroughly restrained.

  For his part, Larry swallowed hard and said just generally, “Shit.”

  She’d gotten dressed, all right. A tartan plaid wool skirt with knee socks and a crisp white blouse with a middy collar. A mixed metaphor as fashion goes, like Robert the Bruce at sea.

  It sounded like her shoes—the shiny patent leather schoolgirl sort—had taps on them by the way she clicked on the stairs and then clicked on the concrete as well. She had clamps in her hair and was wearing horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them. She’d left in the eyebrow studs and the nose jewel. She couldn’t do much about the tattoo.

  She was an unsettling sight. I’ll give her that, and you didn’t have to be shackled in a cellar to recognize it, though the shackling and the cellar together probably didn’t hurt.

  Lucas Shambrough followed her into the basement carrying what looked like her luggage. It was one of those old-timey leather suitcases with straps. The thing appeared heavy by the way he was hauling it. Even he’d spiffed up some, had put on a blazer and could have been taken for her father, especially in that cellar where the light was gloomy and low enough for her to look a little like a child.

  “Aw, hell,” I heard Larry say. He was very nearly blubbering, and that girl hadn’t even visited on him her sweet attention yet.

  Shambrough set her suitcase down. The contents jangled when it hit the concrete as if the thing was loosely packed with railroad spikes. Larry warbled a little. I felt sure he was thinking of all the shiftless enterprises he wouldn’t have the chance to fuck completely up now that he was about to get agonizingly dead.

  Lucas Shambrough found sawhorses, stacked one on top of the other, back in an unlit corner. He dragged them out and set them up and hoisted that suitcase to rest upon them.

  “Good?” he asked the ninja assassin.

  She nodded. She removed her lensless glasses and handed them to him. He shoved them in his blazer pocket and backed up a step or two.

  “You’re not going to be back there pleasuring yourself, now are you, Mr. Shambrough?” Most wankers don’t like you to know what they’re up to. It drains the thrill out of it somehow. You had to hand it Lucas Shambrough, though. He was a different kind of fish.

  “Not just yet,” he told me. “I’m not so keen on the … preliminaries.”

  I heard Larry mutter, “Preliminaries.” Then he warbled a little more.

  “Gentlemen,” Shambrough told us. “Lady.”

  With that he took his sockless self over to the stairway and climbed upstairs, threw open the door, and shut it loudly behind him.

  “Mako, right?” I asked her. I doubted I could soften her up with chat, but you couldn’t ever say for certain. It was worth a try.

  She walked over to stand in front of me. She inspected me up and down. Then she delivered some kind of dire knuckle punch directly below my rib cage. It was surgically placed and had the odd effect of deadening both of my legs at once. If I could have fallen down, I would have. Instead I dangled by my wrists, scrambling all the while to get my feet back underneath me.

  She watched me like you’d watch a cockroach struggle once you’d speared him with a pin. No outward sign of satisfaction. Just curiosity. Once I’d managed to get back on top of my legs, she turned toward her old-timey suitcase.

  Larry glanced my way. He made a noise in his neck that sounded like a rusty hinge. She troubled herself to look at Larry but couldn’t be bothered to punch him.

  I heard her humming softly as she undid her suitcase straps and opened the thing. This sort of business must have been the delight of her existence. I guess it took her back to childhood somehow. That was about the only way I could explain the outfits. Now, instead of being the victim, she was the one delivering the blows.

  She sorted through the contents of her suitcase just like a little girl might pick through her pocketbook. She seemed to favor blunt instruments from what I saw. She had assorted hammers. Claw and ball peen. A mason’s rubber mallet. She had a length of what looked like an ax handle and a piece of rebar for hard cases, I had to guess. She must not have missed her Taser, since me and Larry were tame for her already.

  Once she’d settled on the mallet, she turned and tapped it on her palm. It was the sort that was full of shot, probably about the size of BBs. I could hear the clatter of them as she closed on me and Larry.

  Larry said, “Aw.” It came out mostly spit.

  For my part, I tensed and coiled as best I could and worked my ever loosening bolt. Back and forth. Back and forth. She couldn’t hear me for all of the squirming. Larry’s shifting feet on that gritty concrete floor, supplemented by his whining, was enough to cover any racket I might raise.

  She stood before us looking from me to Larry and back to him, trying to decide who she ought to brutalize first. She was slow and deliberate about it. I imagine she enjoyed Larry’s quivering, just judging from how she toyed with the mallet and didn’t do anything else for a while.

  “He’s too easy,” I finally told her. “Ready to be in a pile on the floor.”

  She took two quick steps over and hit me with that damn mallet in the armpit. I never would have thought to hit anybody there, but it hurt like hell. I clinched and grinned. I managed to tell her just, “Ouch.”

  She seemed intent on saving me for later. They knew Larry was the tire guy, and he must have been slated to get some special treatment. A long, slow round of pain, not that Larry needed any sort of lesson or instruction. He’d just been up to his usual shiftlessness, and no beating could alter that.

  She moved over and stood in front of him, which left me to figure what kind of shitstorm I’d be into with Shawnica if I let Larry get all busted to pieces before I took the ninja assassin out. I knew if Larry got damaged while I just hung there and watched, Desmond’s life going forward wouldn’t remotely be worth living. Since me and Desmond shared nearly everything, I had to guess we’d share that, too.

  I grabbed my bolt and yanked it. It nearly came entirely out.

  “Sugar,” I said.

  She looked at me. All of her muscles tightened, and her neck vein bulged.

  “I’ve got kind of an itch.”

  She turned back to Larry and held up her index finger so as to let him know, “One second.”

  She took a hard step toward me that way she was prone to. There was nothing girlish about it. I could tell me and her were from the same school. She went full out, just like me.

  So it was a collision. Her coming hard to deliver another blow with her mason’s mallet. Me closing my right hand around that bolt and jerking it from the wall. I just kept going, swept down, and caught her a punch square on the jaw. I’ll always treasure the look she gave me, ripe with snarling anger but touched with wholesale surprise.

  I hit her flush, bolt and all. Even still, she didn’t go down. She staggered back toward Larry, though, and he wrapped his legs around her. He closed on her right at the midsection and squeezed with all he had.

  “Push her this way,” I told him.

  He wrenched her around in my direction, and
I hit her with my bolt hand again. It was a solid right to the chin, and she couldn’t do much about it now. I grabbed the mallet from her before she could drop it out of reach.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  Larry preferred squeezing.

  “Let her go!”

  He finally turned loose, and she piled up on the concrete just the way Larry would have. I heard her head hit the cement. She was sure to be out for a while.

  I beat on my remaining bolt with that mason’s hammer. The mortar went gritty and then crumbled, and I pulled the thing free in short order. Then I went over to work on Larry.

  “Do her first,” he told me.

  “She’s out.”

  “Best time for it.”

  “What? Just brain her with this?” I held up the mallet.

  Larry nodded. “She was ready to do it to us.”

  “Well,” I said as I knocked Larry’s right-hand bolt loose, “that’s the difference between her and us.”

  “I’ll do her,” he told me.

  I knocked his left-hand bolt loose. The two of us stood there over her with our shackles and our hardware.

  “Then we go up and get him,” Larry told me, eyeing the basement stairway.

  “Here.” I gave him the mallet.

  Larry even raised it with half-committed intent. He looked for a second there like he was meaning to crush her skull, but he couldn’t bring himself to deliver the blow.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he finally allowed.

  “And we’re not going up after him,” I said. “Got no idea who might be up there with him.”

  Larry nodded. “So what, then?”

  I pointed at one of the windows. We had to climb up to reach it. The sawhorses and the suitcase worked. I wriggled out first and then pulled Larry through. We were at the back of the house somewhere. It was full dark by then. There was moonlight shining down on the soybean field beyond the house. We were in a spot where the floodlights bathing the yard didn’t quite reach.

  “Try not to rattle,” I whispered to Larry. I showed him how I’d caught my bolts and my handcuff chains up in my hands.

  “Didn’t we do this already?” Larry asked me.

  Jasper and the Greenwood precinct house seemed like a week ago.

  I pointed toward the soybean field. “Straight into a row, and just keep going.”

  “Right,” he told me.

  That’s just when Shambrough’s hound came wandering up. Instead of barking, he was wagging. He walked over to me squirming. I loved him up a little.

  “Friend of mine,” I explained to Larry.

  “He coming with us?”

  “If he wants.”

  He even did for a little ways. We crossed the yard running and keeping low and plunged into the field. The soybean plants were about thigh high and so didn’t really hide us. I kept waiting for a rifle crack, but we didn’t hear a thing. Just our breath and feet on that black, loamy soil.

  Halfway across, I paused to look back. The house was all lit up, every window illuminated, and floodlights on what looked like a fleet of vehicles parked out front.

  Even from halfway across that soybean field, I recognized a county cruiser.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We came out on a blacktop hard by a silage bin. We could hear a semi downshift on the truck route to the west, so that’s the direction me and Larry took. When cars came by—and only two did—we got clear of the road and hid since we didn’t know if we’d been missed back at Shambrough’s and he’d sent Hoyts to find us.

  Otherwise we just walked, and Larry told me everything he would have done to that ninja schoolgirl assassin if he’d known the leisure for it.

  “She’d have been hanging up there on that wall. Wouldn’t have liked that much.”

  He described in detail the brand of slow agony Larry clearly was too decent to put anybody through. I let him talk. I knew how he felt. We’d been persuaded we were doomed and so had been obliged to face all our regrets in life, our missed opportunities, our considerable unfinished business. There’s a lot of remorse attached to meeting with cause to think you’re about to be dead. The actual being dead is probably the least of it.

  So when Larry exhausted himself of plans for that girl, we didn’t say much for a while. It took us nearly an hour to even reach the truck route. I could see to the west in the vapor light a couple of silos covered in vines.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I know where we are.”

  A scant half hour later, we were in front of Tula’s house. Her car was in the driveway. Her new bay window was in the frame. It was still smudged around the edges where it had been wrangled into place. I saw the top of CJ’s head as he dashed across the front room.

  “Around back,” I told Larry.

  We went to the door off the kitchen, where I knocked.

  I heard Tula tell CJ, “Go to your room.”

  I knocked again. “It’s Nick,” I said.

  She still showed up with her service piece leveled in our direction. She flipped on the outside light. She threw the bolt and let us in.

  I didn’t know what I was going to say until it came out of my mouth. “Why aren’t you out looking for me?”

  She eyed our handcuffs. The bolts attached to them.

  “Desmond and Kendell are on it,” she told me. “I had other stuff.”

  “Other stuff? They were going to kill us.”

  “I didn’t know that. Nobody knew where you went. Desmond said he came out of the hospital and the two of you were gone.”

  “That would have made me worry,” I said. I was sounding, even to me, a little more put out than I’d intended. The camp shovel and the shackles and the mason’s hammer all had something to do with that.

  “Who says I wasn’t worried?”

  Tula opened the cabinet door over her refrigerator where she kept her pistol and her bullets.

  “You didn’t look it,” I told her.

  She laid her hand to my face. “You do it your way,” Tula said. “I’ll do it mine.”

  “Sorry,” I told her. “Having kind of a day.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Shambrough’s,” I said.

  She pointed at the cuffs and bolts. “He did this?”

  “And her,” Larry chimed in.

  “Ninja assassin,” I said to Tula by way of elaboration.

  “He got a dungeon or something?” she asked us.

  Larry nodded vigorously.

  “Cellar,” I told her, “with bad mortar.” I showed her the thread end of one of my bolts with the grit still clinging to it.

  “What was going on down there?” Tula asked us.

  “It was all about making us dead,” Larry told her, “any damn way she might think of.”

  Tula was doubtful. Shambroughs didn’t get up to such as that. She looked a little searchingly at me.

  “That’s about right,” I said.

  “I grew up with Shambroughs,” Tula told us. “Even knew Mr. Lucas a little. He grew cotton. Flew a crop duster. Just a planter like everybody else.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “he’s kind of wandered off the farm.”

  “Got something to eat around here?” Larry asked her.

  “You just had Chinese,” I said.

  Tula pointed at her wall clock. It was quarter after nine. “That was about five hours ago.” She plucked up one of my dangling bolts and gave it a good once-over. “Guess we ought to do something about this.”

  She had kind of a ladies’ tool collection in the cabinet beside the stove. A hammer. Two screwdrivers. A pair of cheap Chinese pliers. A hacksaw you couldn’t have cut fishing line with.

  “This is going to be a challenge,” I said Larry’s way. The hammer and the screwdriver seemed the best candidates. “Got a board somewhere?”

  Tula fetched a foot-long piece of two-by-four she’d been using for a doorstop.

  “Come on,” I told Larry. I led him out on the back stoop.

  “I
’m hungry, man.”

  “In a minute.”

  I went at the hinge of Larry’s left cuff with Tula’s board for a backstop. I drove that screwdriver right through the fitting, and the pin came flying out.

  “The stuff’s crap,” I informed Larry.

  Tula had parked behind me, leaning against the jamb. “Didn’t say Shambroughs weren’t tight.”

  Once CJ had gotten liberated from his bedroom, I let him bust off Larry’s other cuff that Larry tried to snivel about.

  Tula made us omelets while I called Desmond, who in turn called Kendell. We heard cars out front soon enough. Shawnica didn’t bother to knock, she just came charging right on in.

  She saw me. She saw Larry. She told us both, “Uh-huh.”

  She was so happy her brother was safe and alive that she didn’t even hit him hard enough to make her stick-on nails fall off.

  “What did you bring her for?” I asked Desmond on the sly.

  “Because,” he explained to me, “she told me she was coming.”

  Shawnica was admiring Tula’s decor by then. She was eyeing the front room, anyway, while telling Tula, “Well, all right.”

  CJ appeared to find Shawnica mesmerizing. What with her sparkly nails and her clattering bracelets and her high-volume approach to conversation, there was an awful lot (if you didn’t know her) to be mesmerized about.

  “Hey, little man,” she finally told CJ once she’d noticed him gawking at her. “Come on here.” She opened her arms to him, picked him up, and held him on her bony hip as she passed into the kitchen. It was the single most normal and motherly thing I’d ever seen Shawnica do.

  I must have glanced at Desmond with stark wonderment on my face.

  He grunty groaned my way and told me, “See.”

  Larry was busy informing Kendell what that Shambrough and his ninja schoolgirl assassin had gotten up to along with what they’d clearly hoped to be about, so all I had to do was wait until he finished and tidy up the facts for Kendell a bit.

  In the meantime, I asked Desmond, “How did you leave it with Pearl?”

  “She’s out in the car,” he told me. “Asleep.”

  “Why didn’t you just drop her home?”