by Rick Gavin
“You’ve burned three of them already,” Eugene said. “Don’t you think that’s enough? Must have got back to Guy by now.”
“I want the best one. There must be one that’s better than the others. One he’s a little sentimental about.”
“First one, maybe. Been running the longest. Up around Louise.”
Then Desmond and Eugene had one of those take-the-branch-road-and-turn-at-the-grain-bin conversations before Desmond set off toward Yazoo, and Luther and Tommy drew lots to see who’d ride in the bed of the truck.
Luther won the cab, and on the way to Louise, he had more than a few things he wanted to wonder aloud about. Now that we were all in the shit with this crazy bastard Guy, Luther was hoping he could get me to lay out the future for him. Nothing long term, maybe just the balance of the afternoon.
“You’ve got a plan, right?”
I nodded. Truth be told, it was more of a trajectory than a plan.
“You’re trying to bait him out?”
That was good, too, so I nodded at Luther again.
“Don’t forget Sissy and PD,” Luther said. “Got to figure out where they’re at.”
I nodded again. “Sissy and PD,” I said.
“And what about the money?” Luther asked me. “He’s bound to have piles of it somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said and asked Eugene, “Where does the cash end up?”
“See, now you’re getting into shit I just ain’t supposed to know.”
“Not supposed to know or don’t know?” I asked him.
And Eugene made the kind of face that either meant he knew where the money was or he’d eaten a spoonful of earwax. “Tell me one thing for sure,” Eugene said.
“Okay.”
“You’re going to kill him, right?”
“Could well come to that.”
“Has to,” Eugene told me. “That fellow just has to get dead.”
“All right,” I said.
Eugene looked left and and right like he was fearful of being overheard.
“Got a room where they count it and pack it up,” he said.
“Where?”
“Guy’s got a place over by the river, up around Blue Hole. That’s where all the money ends up. Somebody’s there all the time.”
“Does he live there?”
“Sometimes. As often as any. It’s kind of a hunting lodge back in the swamp.”
“So once he gets nervous, that’s where he’ll end up?”
“I suppose,” Eugene told me, “but he’s not the nervous sort.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” I said.
TWENTY-TWO
We were nearly to Louise when Eugene directed Percy Dwayne back onto Rainbow Road and then off it down a track by a catfish farm. A dozen rectangular ponds covering maybe fifteen acres each. They had their aerators all running—paddlewheels shoved in the water to churn it around and sweeten it up so the fish wouldn’t suffocate.
“Park it up there.” Eugene pointed to a tractor shed beyond the last pond, and Percy Dwayne pulled in among what looked like a graveyard of tractor implements. Disk harrows and cultivators, middle busters and spreaders. There was a massive combine rusting off to one side.
“Where’s the house?” I asked Eugene. He pointed. This time we’d be wading through soybeans. I could see the sun glinting off a weathered roof just beyond the field.
“Me and you,” I told Percy Dwayne. “And don’t squeeze off shit unless I say.”
“Hear you, boss,” Percy Dwayne told me, and off we went into the soybeans with Luther left behind to make sure Eugene and Tommy wouldn’t bug out.
We didn’t have to worry about reptiles this trip or any living thing. That field had lately been dusted with pesticide or fertilizer or something. The alkaline stink felt like it was drilling a chemical hole in my brain.
“Don’t know how I’m going to get all the way over there without breathing.”
“What’s your trouble?” Percy Dwayne asked me.
“You don’t smell that?”
He took a breath so deep it would have sent me straight to the ICU. He shook his head. “Just Delta air,” he told me.
I distracted myself from the stink along the way across by checking and rechecking my clips. I kept counting forty rounds, which I took as a sign I was going unscathed, and I was feeling strong and steady until the gunfire started.
It sounded like somebody was shooting at us, that we were downrange of the muzzle anyway, but there weren’t any rounds flying by us as best I could tell.
I’d been shot at before by soldiers and civilians, so I knew what it sounded like when somebody was dialing you in. Bullets sing in the air, and when Percy Dwayne and I squatted to listen, we weren’t hearing anything but the report.
“Go on?” he asked me.
I nodded. “But stay low.”
Of course, that served to make the chemicals that much more undiluted. After another fifty yards, I was half hoping I’d get shot in the head.
There was a silty waste at the fair edge of the field that we scooted across bent low. It ran into a half-assed levee the tractors had pushed up. The thing was maybe five feet tall and meant, I had to guess, to keep the creek beyond it out of the soybeans when it rained.
There’d been a break in the firing, but it picked back up just as we gained the levee. We could both feel the impact as each round struck the dirt. A thump and a low vibration. Somebody was taking target practice. We worked down to the left where there were scrubby trees to serve for cover, and I peeked up over the top just as another shot rang out.
There were two guys firing. No-neck endomorphs in track suits. The one with the gauze around his head was Dale.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I knew he was dumb, but I figured he was clean.”
Dale was firing what I could tell by the clatter was a Chinese AK knockoff. The eastern bloc ones let go with an intimidating clunk, but the Chinese ones sound sort of like a Chinese car door slamming. It’s all snap and rattle and imprecision. They don’t aim worth a damn, and the recoil tends to break them apart over time.
I motioned for Percy Dwayne to ease up and join me. “Seen them before?” I asked him. The one without the AK was firing what looked to be a Glock. “The one with his head wrapped up is a cop.”
“New to me,” Percy Dwayne told me. “When Guy showed up at Eugene’s and took your car, he had a big blond boy with him. Neal or something. Not either one of them.”
I watched as Dale and his buddy let go with a half-dozen rounds, aiming high on the levee where it tapered thin like they were trying to blow a hole clean through. We moved a little further left where the thing was more of a hedgerow than dyke. I glanced back to see that Desmond had already made it over from the Sonic. He was carrying a Sonic sack, red and greasy from the chili, and he was doing his Desmond glide across the field. I was trying to wave him off to the side as those guys opened up again.
I saw Desmond clutch frantically at himself. He performed a pirouette and toppled straight over into the soybeans. I was already scrambling out of the trees and running low across the silt waste when Desmond stood up out of the greenery and waved me off. He kept coming, but he held his right arm as he did, had a hand to the massive hock between his elbow and his shoulder.
“Some fucker shot me,” Desmond said as he reached us and pitched his bulk to the ground.
He was bleeding a little between his fingers. I had him take his hand away, and you could see the shank of the bullet sticking out of his bicep.
“The Glock,” I told him. “Too far away to go through. You’re lucky it wasn’t the AK.”
“Who the hell are they?”
“Take a look,” I said.
Desmond eased around where he could get eyes on those boys. “Is that Dale?”
I nodded. “I’m going to pull this bullet out,” I told Desmond, and he explained to me six ways from Sunday exactly why I wouldn’t.
That fell in the
category of treatment, and Desmond didn’t like getting nursed. He wouldn’t ever get stitched, wouldn’t sit still for vaccinations, had an almost mortal fear of peroxide and rubbing alcohol. The scuffing up never bothered him; it was the doctoring that did him in.
“Bullet’s got to come out.”
Desmond shook his head. “Leave it for now.”
“Where’s my Coney Islands?” I asked him.
Desmond motioned with his nose toward the soybeans. “Dropped the bag,” he told me. “Kind of landed on it.”
As he talked, I pinched that bullet between my forefinger and thumb and plucked it out of Desmond’s arm as nice as you please.
“Gawd!” He said it out of reflex. I couldn’t have hurt him much.
The wound was a little weepy, but it wasn’t really bleeding.
“Hmm,” Desmond told me as I handed him the bullet, his version in this circumstance of “thank you very much.”
“So what’s the deal?” Percy Dwayne asked.
But before I could speak, I heard it and knew instantaneously what it was.
“Listen,” I told them both.
A baritone rumble, deep and smooth. I caught a glimpse of the thing piecemeal through the trees. Tropical pink. Polished chrome. It rolled into the clearing unobstructed for a couple of seconds until it got eclipsed by a homely four by four parked out in the yard.
“Damn,” Desmond said. “That’s a hell of thing.”
“Isn’t it though?” Percy Dwayne told him.
“You shut up,” I advised Percy Dwayne. “We wouldn’t be here but for you.”
He went sheepish to the extent that Delta trash can manage to seem contrite.
“Who do you see?” I asked him.
Percy Dwayne peered through the foliage with concentration and intent. “No Sissy. No PD,” he said, “but that’s Guy.”
Me and Desmond shifted for a better view and found Guy giving his no-necks hot-headed, psychotic shit. He was in a swivet about something. About his meth houses burning, I guessed. We couldn’t exactly hear what he was saying, but it was easy to see that Guy was a fellow who could lay on some scathing abuse.
Anybody with eyes could tell what his trouble was right away. He was one of the wee people. I couldn’t have said at the time how tall he was exactly, but he was a head and a half shorter than the guys he was yelling at. They might have been thick and looming, but they weren’t exactly giants.
“I get it,” I told Desmond. “He’s a runt.”
Sometimes people explain themselves to you without uttering a word. You can know who they are and what they’re made of by looking at them once. I developed a knack for that sort of thing on the PD in Virginia. A civilian would be telling me one thing with his mouth while the rest of him was telling me something else.
Guy was mad he wasn’t six foot two, and he expected the world to pay him for it. You could tell it by the way he held himself. You could tell it by the way he screamed, by how he snatched the pistol from the fellow who’d shot Desmond and began to beat him with it while Dale just looked on.
Everything Guy did was ripe with violence and recrimination. And Percy Dwayne was right: He did look a little like a movie star. Mostly because his head was bigger than it needed to be.
He looked to me like a furless Ewok. He was swarthy. Maybe tanned. I couldn’t really tell which from where I was. He had his hair slicked back, and he was dressed in the way a fellow like him would think was flashy. He held himself like a rooster on a planet full of hens.
The violence for him, the ghastly, evil bullshit he got up to, was all just compensation for the lifts he needed in his shoes.
He didn’t just hit that no-neck once. Guy put him on the ground, and then we watched him beat him with his pistol well after he was down, probably after he was already in a coma. Guy just kept whacking him until he was raising blood and giblets both.
The only move Dale made was to back up and keep clear of the splatter. He never so much as twitched to suggest he was tempted to intervene.
“Do him,” Percy Dwayne suggested.
The thought had more than crossed my mind already. We’d flushed him out like we’d wanted, and I could have gunned him down with ease. But there was something about Guy that told me I just wouldn’t be satisfied if all I did was put him in the ground. He’d get the chance to rot there soon enough. He impressed me as the sort who needed to rot a little topside first.
“Shooting’s too good for him,” I told Percy Dwayne. “I think I need Guy in Parchman for a while. They’ll know what to do up there with a fellow who looks like a movie star.”
Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Yep.”
The thing about Guy was that he couldn’t seem to get unmad. You’d think a man who’d just beaten a musclehead probably clean to death with a pistol—and not just a couple of blows in the full blush of righteous rage but in a leisurely, attenuated frenzy—would know at least a passing moment of reflection and regret. Even a monster like Jeffrey Dahmer must have paused every now and again, maybe elbow deep in gore, to ask himself, “What the fuck am I up to?”
Guy wasn’t even that sensitive. He was simply pissed the way some people are redheads or left-handed.
He finally left off beating his no-neck and flung the Glock onto the ground. He had Dale take his shirt off so he could swab the splatter with it. Then he threw that down too and stalked into the house. We could hear him yelling and banging around in there for a bit as well. When he came back out, he had a few choice words for Dale.
Guy grabbed the Chinese AK out of Dale’s hands and fired it like a madman. Straight up in the air. Down into the ground. Swept it along the levee. We couldn’t get low enough to feel safe.
He finally emptied the clip and threw the whole damn gun into the woods. He yelled a little more and kept on yelling as he circled around the four by four and climbed into the Ranchero.
I heard that beautiful rumble as he turned the engine over, watched him briefly in the clearing before he reached the trees.
“She look dirty to you?” I asked Desmond, who knew a filthy car when he saw one.
He loosed a mournful snort and told me, “Sure does.”
Dale got so busy mourning and poking his colleague with his foot that he didn’t see me coming until he’d felt the M4 muzzle in his back.
“Jesus!” was all he said once he’d looked over his shoulder and seen me.
“Moonlighting, Dale?” I asked him as I took his service pistol out of the waistband of his sweats, the very gun I’d taken from his wife not forty-eight hours ago.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Dale nodded. “But I ain’t done it.”
“Didn’t stop it, either.”
Dale started whining about how hard it was to make a living and how he didn’t actually want to be doing what he’d gotten up to, but Guy was a crazy bastard and you couldn’t just up and quit him.
Dale seemed to be figuring if he told me he couldn’t stand to go to Parchman, I might gun him down just to save him the bother, but if I didn’t gun him down, he’d end up locked away for years. It was a bad spot for a fellow to be in, especially a fellow as dumb as Dale who had to labor to weigh out all the possibilities.
Desmond and Percy Dwayne had joined me by then. “Why don’t you watch him,” I told Desmond. “I’ll go in and see what’s what.”
I handed him Dale’s 9 mm and Desmond hit him with it.
“I don’t like getting shot,” Desmond told Dale.
Dale told Desmond, “Ow!”
Me and Percy Dwayne went inside. This house wasn’t like the other places. It was furnished and homey, and there were three Mexicans at the kitchen table weighing out the meth they’d made.
They could just as well have been making tamales to sell to the restaurant trade. The house was that clean and orderly, and none of those three boys looked like users. They even got a little jolly once we’d convinced them in broken Spanish that they weren’t about to be dead.
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We took the drugs in a gym duffel. I figured we might have use for them, and I told those Mexicans to clear out. Then me and Percy Dwayne went back out to join Desmond.
“That yours?” I asked Dale of the Tahoe in the yard.
He nodded.
“Not anymore.”
I gave it to the Mexicans, told them to drive Dale home. We trussed him up with a length of clothesline and loaded him in the way back.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I told Dale. “Don’t talk to anybody. We’ll find you in a while.”
He nodded. He was hardly having the week he’d hoped to have.
Those three Mexicans piled into the four by four and headed down the track. Me and Desmond and Percy Dwayne carried Dale’s dead colleague into the house. We left his bloody Glock on the floor right beside him.
We didn’t light this one, left it just like it had been. We crossed back through the soybeans with their agrichemical stink. Blue sky. High clouds. An acrobatic Ag Cat on the horizon.
TWENTY-THREE
Eugene was finished. I didn’t need Luther to tell me that. Eugene was like a child who sits down in the trail and won’t go on. He was drained and spent, and I let him uncork a litany of every damn thing he wouldn’t do no matter how I tried to make him.
“Fine,” I told him. “You and him go on home.”
Tommy hadn’t even started to tell me what I couldn’t make him be up to, but I had to think him and Eugene were on the same page.
“Sure about this, boss?” Luther asked me.
I nodded. “It doesn’t matter anymore. There’s nothing they can say. Nobody they can tell. Send them back to the swamp. We’ll find Guy’s hunting lodge without them.”
“Well, you’re welcome all to hell.” Eugene didn’t quite have indignation down, but he made a decent show of being offended.
“Your choice,” I told him. “I can’t help it if you miss your cut.”
“What cut?” Eugene asked me.
“What do you think’ll become of that money if we leave it to the cops?”
“Fuckers’ll steal it,” Luther declared.
And Desmond added, “Fuckers will.”