Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “We figured that would get Davis in solid with Bell, just in case we need him later,” Marvel said. “Now, the real question is, When can we dump Ballem and Hill?”

  “Right away,” I said. “We’ll start working on it tonight.”

  “How’re you going to do it? The state cops could take a while with those books.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You just be ready to move.”

  EVERYTHING WAS rushing together.

  We got up early the next morning, drove to Greenville, and mailed sets of LuEllen’s murder photos to Ballem and Hill. We’d give them a chance to stew over the photos, and then LuEllen would call them. Using her best phony southern-belle accent, she would say that she had been on the hill, making landscape photographs, and that she’d seen Harold’s body and the shooting of Sherrie. She wouldn’t want to send a white man to the electric chair for killing a Negro, she’d say, but she would, if they didn’t quit and leave town.

  “How’re we going to convince Ballem? He wasn’t even there.”

  “Hill’s his errand boy. Everybody in town knows it. When he sees the pictures, he won’t argue. Not right away. He might go looking for the photographer later, but the first thing he’ll do is quit. Just to keep things quiet, so he can maneuver. When he does that, we’re outa here,” I said.

  We were back in Longstreet before noon. The marina operator told us that Hill had been there and had asked after us but hadn’t left a message.

  “I heard that you and him had a misunderstanding sometime back, outside the Holiday Inn,” the marina man said.

  “It cleared up,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, you take care,” he said, spitting in the river.

  We cut the boat loose and headed downstream again, looking for Sherrie’s body. As we passed the animal control complex, we could hear the ooka-ooka-ooka of the vacuum pump, working the death box.

  Late in the afternoon, a couple of miles above Victoria Point, LuEllen took the binoculars down from her eyes and pointed out over the water.

  “Over there. Yellow.”

  “Another float?”

  “Doesn’t look like a float. Looks like it’s stuck on a tree.”

  Sherrie’s body was hung up on a dead cotton-wood sweeper near the Concordia Bar Light.

  “Jesus,” LuEllen said as we drifted up. The smell of decaying flesh was overwhelming. I had intended to tangle the body in a wad of heavy monofilament fishing line and tangle the line in some brush, to anchor it, but in the end, neither of us had the stomach for the job. Instead, we calculated the distance the body lay above the light and turned back upriver.

  “We’ll call it in as soon as we get back,” I said.

  The run back upstream was depressing.

  “How come we keep getting people killed, Kidd?” LuEllen asked.

  “You keep asking, and I keep telling you: We don’t,” I said. “They get themselves killed. We’re just unlucky enough to be around when it happens. Harold knew what he was doing.”

  “How about Sherrie?”

  “I won’t take the blame,” I said. “Hill’s a fuckin’ psycho. Period. It’s not us. It’s them.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” she said. And after a minute: “The money we took from City Hall—I think we’re going to have to give it back.”

  “What?”

  “When we were over at Marvel’s house, she mentioned a couple of times what they could do with the money. Give some of it to the family of the kid that got shot—they’ve got a couple of more kids—or give some of it to Harold’s family. She was talking like the money belonged to all of us.”

  “Huh.” I’d planned to keep it.

  “The point is, everybody knows our faces. And they know what we’ve done. Some of it, anyway. And so far you’d have a hell of a hard time proving that anybody else has done anything wrong. If we take expenses out—she’d expect that—and give them the rest and they spend it, then we’ve got something on them. I like Marvel, all right, but she’s a politician.”

  “I see,” I said. And I did, sour as the taste was.

  A COUPLE OF MILES below the Longstreet landing a sleek glass bass boat was goofing along the shoreline. One man was on the back deck; the other, on the bow. When I first saw them, I assumed they were casting. I didn’t immediately look closer because a tow had rounded the bend above us, pushing a string of barges. The first priority on the river is to avoid the tows; they can’t stop in time to miss anything that they’re close enough to see.

  We took the tow down the right side. When we cleared it, the bass boat was arrowing out from the shore on the other side, to intercept us.

  “That’s fuckin’ Hill,” LuEllen said. She put the glasses on the bass boat. “And that’s St. Thomas up front. Bet they were looking for the bodies.”

  There was no chance of running—the Fanny was a pig, and the bass boat was carrying a big 115-horse Mariner outboard—but I pushed the throttle full forward. If we could fend them off long enough to get to the marina, they’d be limited in what they could do.

  Ten seconds later they were on top of us, throwing off a fat, curling wake, the outboard’s normally deep roar climbing toward a scream. Hill stood at the bow while St. Thomas sat behind the wheel, maneuvering to come beside us. Hill was shouting something, but with the two motors and the sound of the water breaking under the hulls, I couldn’t make it out. I waved him off and kept drifting right, away from the bass boat.

  When Hill saw that I wouldn’t voluntarily let him come aboard, he shouted something back to St. Thomas, then stepped up to the edge of the bow casting-deck and crouched, one hand on the low gunwale to steady himself, ready to leap aboard the Fanny. He had a lump on his hip under his white short-sleeved shirt and when his shirt flapped in the bow wind, I could see flashes of gun-metal blue.

  The Fanny had a rail all the way around and her deck was a foot higher than the low-riding bass boat’s. Coming aboard could be tricky.

  St. Thomas, his brow wrinkled in concentration, brought the bass boat six feet from the Fanny, then edged closer. I stepped away. He bored in again. This time, I flipped the wheel toward him, and the distance between the two hulls went from six feet to nothing. The bass boat was faster and more maneuverable, but the Fanny was bigger. If the two hulls hit, the bass boat would fold like a beer can. Anything caught between the two hulls would be crushed. St. Thomas flinched.

  Hill had been tensing to jump. When I cut in, St. Thomas almost jerked the boat out from under Hill’s feet. He staggered, swayed, caught himself, and screamed something either at Hill or at me, his face red with rage.

  They came back in. This time they came an inch at a time. St. Thomas was watching me now, instead of the boat. If I moved the wheel, he was right with me.

  Hill put his hands up to grab the rail and LuEllen was there, facing him across the rail. She’d cracked the boat’s emergency kit and was pointing an emergency flare gun at Hill’s chest from no more than three feet away. Hill reached back and I thought for a second that he was reaching for his pistol. LuEllen must have thought so too, because the barrel of the flare pistol drifted up until it was leveled at Hill’s eyes. They stared at each other for a beat, then two, LuEllen’s face as hard as a chip of flint, before St. Thomas flinched again. He took the bass boat to the left, paced us for a moment, then accelerated away, hotfooting it back toward the marina.

  “Guess Hill wanted to keep his face,” LuEllen said laconically, as she climbed up on top. “Wouldn’t know why.”

  HILL WAS WAITING on the dock when we came in. St. Thomas was up toward the top of the levee, hurriedly walking away. There were a half dozen people around, messing with boats, talking, coming and going. We nosed in, coasted, bumped, and LuEllen tied us off.

  Hill walked down the dock and yelled up at me: “What the fuck you think you were doing?”

  “What the hell were you doing?” I called back. “I thought you were going to sink us.”

  He was operating in the k
ind of blind rage that infects psychotics when they’re countered. His hand went to his hip, but he wasn’t actually far enough gone to pull the pistol with witnesses around. “I’ll get you, computer man,” he screamed. “I’ll be looking for you.”

  LuEllen was watching him climb the levee when I dropped down to the lower deck. “Computer man?” she said.

  “Somebody’s been doing research,” I said. “If they found out I do computers and suspect I’m with Marvel, then they may have put together the whole thing: the state having their books, John coming in, everything.”

  “Time to leave,” she said.

  “Soon,” I said. “We’re close.”

  LATE THAT NIGHT we got the City Hall money out of the engine compartment, agreed that seventeen thousand dollars was about right for expenses, and took the rest of it to Marvel’s friend’s house in the country.

  “We took expenses out,” I told Marvel, handing her the package. “There’s eighty-three thousand left. You can’t give it back. That might jeopardize the case against Dessusdelit and St. Thomas, and there just wouldn’t be any explanations.”

  “We’ve got some things we can do with it,” she said. “Thank you… I mentioned to John that I thought the money should be for all of us, but he said it was yours.…”

  John, who was lounging in an easy chair, shook his head. “It ain’t right,” he said. “You two are working an angle somewhere, but I can’t figure what it is.”

  I shrugged. “You could just give us credit for a selfless act.”

  He looked at us for a moment, then said, “Nah.”

  BACK ON THE BOAT I called Bobby:

  Will tell John/Marvel about Harold body. Will call cops anonymously and give them IDs. Will tell John/Marvel you found body reports in data searches. Please back up if John inquires.

  He came back:

  OK. But need long talk soon.

  He was getting nervous, thinking about friends and loyalties. I answered:

  Yes. Tomorrow, day after. Soon.

  THE NEXT MORNING I phoned the Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department. Posing as a reporter for a Memphis television station, I asked a couple of airweight questions about bodies pulled from the river. A woman had been found, a deputy said, but hadn’t been identified. There’d be no further comment pending an autopsy.

  I called another meeting at the country place.

  “It’s about your friends, the ones you’ve been looking for,” I said cautiously, talking to Marvel on the telephone.

  I went to the meeting alone, LuEllen shying away again. John and Marvel showed up at the rendezvous, tense, expectant.

  “What? What?” Marvel asked as I came through the door.

  “It’s about Harold and Sherrie. I think they’ve been found,” I said. “They’re dead.”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, sinking onto a couch. John stood beside her, a hand on her shoulder. He had an odd look on his face: I wasn’t fooling him, not entirely.

  “Bobby called. He’s been doing a data search… and he found that the Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department has pulled a couple of bodies out of the river near Rosedale. A man and a woman. Both black. The man was dressed like you said Harold was. The woman, I don’t know… they said a yellow blouse.…”

  “It’s them,” Marvel said. She was dry-eyed, but on the thin edge of an explosion. “She was wearing yellow; her mama told us that.”

  “We’ve got to let the cops know; we’ve got to bring it back to Longstreet,” I said.

  “What do you want us to do?” John asked.

  “I want you to get Marvel… or somebody… down there and identify the bodies. Tell the deputies you heard it on the radio. Find out how they were killed. Tell the deputies what you suspect—that Harold had gone to visit Dessusdelit—but tell them you don’t know why. Tell them that Harold had some information about this political scandal that’s going on. That’ll put a lot of pressure on Dessusdelit.”

  “All right. I can do that,” Marvel said. Her fingers were dug an inch deep into the tough fabric of the couch arm.

  “I’ll go with her,” John said. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re getting ready to leave. We’re about done, but I’ll tell you what. You better get back here quick if Brooking Davis and Reverend Dodge are going to elect you to the council. Hill and Ballem will most likely quit this afternoon.”

  “What’d you do to them?” she asked.

  “Squeezed them,” I said.

  “With Harold and Sherrie?” she asked.

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt, but some people got hurt anyway. We’re using Harold as a little extra encouragement for Hill to leave, above and beyond the computer material. That’s all.”

  She was no longer sure of me, and her face showed it.

  “If you manipulated Harold…”

  “You know what happened to Harold,” I said harshly, “because you sent him. We aren’t playing fuckin’ Ping-Pong here. We’re ruining some people’s lives, and they are hard people. They’ll fight back.”

  “If I’d known…”

  “Nobody can know,” I said. I looked at John. “You keep her close. Hill, Ballem, and the others, St. Thomas, are in a pressure cooker. Hill’s a psycho. I can’t predict what he’ll do.”

  I stopped at a supermarket on the edge of town and stocked up with sandwich meat, bread, soup, pasta, cereal, and milk for the run upriver. When I got back to the boat, LuEllen was waiting. So was Dessusdelit.

  “MR. KIDD,” she said as I stepped aboard.

  “Miz Dessusdelit. What can I do for you?”

  “You know about our troubles?”

  “Yes, after our talk… and I was at the meeting.…”

  “Our animal control officer, Duane Hill—”

  “I know him.”

  “He believes you have something to do with it, that I’ve been a fool with these tarot readings, with the crystal ball.”

  She sounded like a magnolia, her voice slow and dreamy, something out of a Tennessee Williams play, like Blanche.… And she was pleading.

  “That’s bullshit, if you’ll pardon the expression. You know about my history with Hill?”

  “I believe there was some kind of confrontation on the river.”

  “It goes farther back than that. He attacked me, for no reason at all, outside the Holiday Inn. He was drunk. Actually he called LuEllen a rather unacceptable four-letter word, which I won’t repeat, and I was forced to respond. There was a fight, and he lost. Then Mr. Bell intervened and sent him on his way. Ever since then he has been watching me, and yesterday he tried to run us down with a speedboat and board our yacht. I believe he was carrying a gun. Personally, Miz Dessusdelit, I think he’s crazy.”

  “He says you’re in league with a local Communist, a Negro woman—”

  “Miz Dessusdelit, I don’t know what to say, other than the man needs treatment. I don’t know anybody in this town, other than you and a few people I’ve encountered casually. And frankly Hill frightens me. He’s crazy. He’s so crazy that LuEllen and I are leaving. Because of him.”

  She thought it over and then said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I wish I could help you, but we’ve got to go.”

  She thought for a moment more, then sighed and said, “Once more with the cards?”

  We weren’t set up to cold-deck her. I don’t even know what cards we would have planted. As far as I was concerned, she was in a box, and there was no way out. But LuEllen, standing behind me, poked me in the spine, and I nodded at Dessusdelit.

  “All right.”

  In the cabin I got the deck from the Polish box, unwrapped it from its silk binding, and handed it to her.

  “I still don’t know how far to trust you, Mr. Kidd,” she said, still with the dreamy expression.

  “Then don’t trust me,” I said harshly. “You know that tarot spreads are artificial constructs. So let’s skip the spread. Pull out four cards and lay them dow
n: past, present, future, and final outcome. You can do your own interpretation if you like. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

  A spark showed in her eyes as she stared across the table at me. “Yes,” she said. She shuffled the deck seven times, then spread it across the table. Her hand hovered for a moment and pulled a card.

  “Past,” she said, and flipped it over.

  The Devil. A man with a goat’s head and horns and bat wings, with a man and a woman chained to his throne. Usually interpreted as bondage to base emotions—greed, for example, or the urge to personal power.

  “Present,” she said, and flipped the second card.

  The Nine of Swords. A woman sitting up in bed, weeping, nine swords racked on the wall behind her. She’s suffering great losses of all kinds, as are people who are important to her. All of it’s accompanied by great anguish. Dessusdelit nodded.

  “Future,” she said, and flipped the third card.

  The Ten of Swords. The body of a man on the ground, with ten swords protruding from his back and neck. Final ruin.

  “Final outcome,” she said. Her hand paused at one card, but she stopped without turning it, moved to another, paused again, and flipped it over.

  The Tower of Destruction. The lightning bolt striking the tower.

  “My old friend,” she said weakly. “I’ve seen it a lot lately.”

  I reached forward and turned over the card she’d almost chosen. The Sun. A card of success.

  “You almost chose this card. Why didn’t you?”

  “I… don’t know,” she said.

  “You made a choice in the recent past that perhaps led to these problems you’re experiencing. That’s reflected in this choice, isn’t it?”

  She was silent for a moment, staring unseeingly at the cards, then nodded.

  “I made the choice,” she said.

  It was as close as anyone would ever get to a confession. Hill and St. Thomas had killed Harold and Sherrie. But Dessusdelit had made the call. The mayor got shakily to her feet and started toward the door. LuEllen, solicitous, asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Dessusdelit said.