by Rick Gavin
By way of thank you, that woman told us, “Don’t be looking for no tip.”
We were barely out of her driveway when Tula called me.
“Got something you’ll want to see,” she said.
“Right now?”
“Yep.” Then she shifted away from her phone to tell somebody, “Why don’t you back the hell on up.”
Tula was out by the river, off Highway 1 just north of Legion Lake, about halfway between Beulah and Rosedale. By the time me and Desmond arrived, Kendell was on the scene as well, along with a no-neck deputy I knew only by reputation. He was a bad one to tap on folks with his nightstick as a first resort.
There were maybe a dozen civilians as well—neighbors and passersby—who’d gotten wind of calamity and had swung over to have a look. They were all gathered in a sun-baked patch of open ground between a ratty trailer home and one of those corporate tractor sheds, a steel and tin monstrosity about the size of an airplane hangar.
An EMT truck pulled in just behind us, so me and Desmond walked over toward Tula and Kendell in the company of a couple of techs who were arguing over what constituted a college football fumble and kept at it—barking back and forth about whose damn knee was down—until Kendell plugged the pair of them up by saying one time, “Hey!”
That’s when me and Desmond saw the body. A white guy in his underwear. Maybe forty and on the stout side. His head was a sticky bloody mess, and he had what looked like a wooden chair leg jammed into his chest.
“Stole his car,” Kendell told us. “Yellow Gold Duster with lifters and mess.”
“Who?” Desmond asked, and Kendell pointed us to Tula.
She was squatting by the corpse taking photographs. She rose as me and Desmond approached. The mineral stink of gore was thick in the air, and what bugs there were had gathered.
“Show them,” Tula said to her no-neck deputy colleague who used the tip of his nightstick to lift a shirt off the ground. Green and gray stripes, like an awning. Baggy, scratchy twill. Parchman garb.
THREE
“Why are we even here?” Desmond wanted to know.
We were parked by then with Tula and Kendell in what passed with the Greenville PD for an interrogation room. It had been somebody’s office once. They’d left a credenza in it and had brought in a stout steel table and a half-dozen plastic chairs. There was a sheet of knotty plywood where the one-way glass should have been and boxes of files stacked head high full across the back wall.
“Whatever you got up to with that Boudrot—” Kendell started.
“Didn’t get up to nothing with him,” Desmond said.
“Fine.” Kendell settled back and showed us his palms. “All I’m telling you is we don’t care. You did what you did.”
Tula wasn’t entirely on board with that, which she made plain in a glance.
“You tell him,” Desmond instructed me.
“Tell him what?”
“About that gator of his and shit.”
“Gator?” Tula asked us.
I didn’t quite know where to start, so I wound all the way back to where it began. “Percy Dwayne Dubois owed on a TV. Instead of handing the damn thing over, he hit me with a fireplace shovel. They took my Ranchero, him and his wife. Pearl’s Ranchero at the time. And somehow the wife and the baby and the car all ended up with that Boudrot.”
“Somehow?” Kendell asked me.
“I wasn’t ever clear on why. I guess that Boudrot liked the car. Liked the wife a little too. Took them to a place he had down by Blue Hole.”
“Burned down, didn’t it?” Tula asked. It was more of an accusation than a question.
I nodded. Desmond shifted and groaned.
“A lot of fire in his life for a few days there.” Kendell gave us that smile of his that looks primarily like a wince.
“Meth houses, you know,” Desmond told him. “Damn things go up all the time.”
“You didn’t help?” Kendell asked, looking from me to Desmond.
“Could have been more careful probably,” I allowed.
Tula, as it turned out, had a snort for that.
“Kind of tangled with him, didn’t you?” Kendell asked us. He tapped on that Boudrot’s booking sheet. “Concussion. Broken collarbone. Thirty-two stitches altogether.”
I glanced at Desmond, and he was the one who nodded and said, “Scuffed him up. He sort of made us. Knife and all. Right?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“We figure he’s coming after you,” Tula told me and Desmond. “That’s what we’re hearing out of Parchman anyway.”
“We heard he’d been stewing,” I said. “Doubt he’s the sort to let shit go.”
“Crazy fucker,” Desmond added. “Don’t need to be after you to kill you. Guy with the chair leg in him didn’t do nothing but own a car.”
“Any idea where he might be headed?” Kendell asked us.
We shrugged.
“Does he know where to look for you two?”
We shrugged again. Who were we to say what that Acadian fuckstick knew.
“And the gator?” Tula asked me.
“Used to feed people to it once he’d whacked them into chunks. Down by Yazoo, back in the national forest. That’s what we heard anyway.”
Once me and Desmond were out of the station house proper and heading for my Ranchero, Desmond said, “Got to tell those boys right quick. Give them a chance to see him coming.”
“In a yellow Gold Duster with lifters and mess? Shouldn’t be much of a chore.”
“Might ought to start with Dale,” Desmond said.
Dale had been an overmuscled pinhead cop back when we’d steered him to that Boudrot. Now he was a flabby pinhead civilian working for K-Lo like we did.
“And let’s hit Rejondo’s on the way back,” I suggested. “See if he turned up anything.”
He hadn’t. He claimed to have tried to. Rejondo told us about the phone calls he’d made to various of his Parchman buddies who didn’t among them seem to know squat. An inmate was loose—they’d heard that much—and he’d stirred up some sort of trouble.
“Killed a guy already,” Desmond informed him. “Needed his clothes and his car.”
Rejondo took a moment to seem sorrowful on the corpse’s behalf before saying to me and Desmond, “Help me a second here, how about it?”
Desmond headed for my Ranchero and left it to me to tell him, “Nope.”
We arrived back at the Indianola shop to find K-Lo irritated. Not uncommonly irritated, but just standard-issue ill. He was standing out front on the sidewalk polishing off a Pall Mall.
“Where the hell you been?” he barked our way.
Before we could even begin to tell him, Peabo came out of the store with a couple of questions for K-Lo. Peabo was six foot eight with the physique of a silo and the intellect of one as well. He had a knack for repo largely because he was comprehensively fearless, chiefly due to the fact he didn’t have the good sense to be scared.
Peabo’s hobbies were fishing and getting tattooed. As a giant pale-white guy, he made for a fine canvas. He’d just see stuff in the course of a day and run off and get it inked. He had a sunset over a pecan grove across his right shoulder blade. A Willys Jeep on his left forearm. A sturgeon on his biceps. The face of some girl he’d met at the auto auction on the back of his right hand. There were hounds all over the place—across his torso and down his legs—along with Peabo’s aunt Judy’s tabby cat, Buster, who occupied one entire calf.
Peabo had come out with his usual brace of questions for K-Lo: Would he get overtime if he worked past five and why exactly not?
K-Lo told him, like he always did, “No, dammit,” and, “Because.”
Peabo raised his big pink hand and rubbed his shaved head with it. He said to K-Lo, “Well, all right,” which was what he always said.
“Where’s Dale?” I asked Peabo. Since they were both big, hulking white guys, they kind of hung together.
“He was out back yester
day.”
“We’re sort of looking for him now.”
Peabo shrugged and then asked K-Lo if he worked past five tomorrow could he maybe draw that overtime he wasn’t drawing today.
Dale was in the toilet down the hall past K-Lo’s office. The room was barely big enough for the commode and the sink, and a well-fed cat could have walked under the door. Dale stayed constipated from supplements and muscle enhancers and usually just leafed through his latest copy of Muscle Pro for a quarter hour. Then he’d flush and come out to tell everybody in earshot, “Didn’t do no good.”
I heard him flip a page over. “Hey, Dale,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Got some news.”
“All right.”
“That Boudrot, the one you arrested…”
“Who?”
“Guy with the meth. You know.”
“Oh, right.”
“He ran off from a work crew. Still loose, as far as we know.”
“So?”
“Talk is he’s coming after folks. Everybody that did him wrong.” I let that sink in for a moment. “Running buddies mostly but probably you too.”
“That little fucker?”
“Killed one guy already.”
“I guess I’m all right,” he told me. “Got an AK under the bed.”
Then he slid his Muscle Pro under the door, opened to an oily veiny woman in a bikini. She had massive deltoids, purple eye shadow, and the neck of a lumberjack.
“What would you do with something like that?”
“Outrun it, I hope,” I told him.
FOUR
Tula already had plans to go see a cousin of hers in Baton Rouge, a guy with a couple of kids the age of Tula’s own son, C.J. I decided to swing by and try to make sure she took her boy and went.
She poured us each a glass wine, brought out some cashews, and we parked together on her sofa.
“So?” she said.
“Hasn’t turned up?”
Tula shook her head.
“Kill anybody else?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
Tula took a sip of wine and eyed me hard. “Tell me about the money.”
Me and Desmond had never spoken to anybody about the money. I have to think now it was mostly because we’d been raised that in this world you needed to earn everything you got or it probably wasn’t worth having. We might have worked for that cash a little but not in any ordinary way.
“He had this closet in the back of his house,” I told Tula. “That place down by Blue Hole. The cash was all in there. Three, maybe four hundred thousand.”
She shook her head and invoked the Lord.
“We’d promised all those boys they’d get a cut.”
Tula shot me a sour look.
“Not that I’m blaming them,” I assured her. “But the money wasn’t going to get left there, and what else were we going to do?”
“Where’s yours?”
“Pearl’s basement. Desmond’s too.”
“How much?”
“I think me and Desmond split about half. The rest went to Percy Dwayne Dubois, his nephew Luther, and a couple of swamp rats. They’ve all burned through it by now.”
“Not you?”
“You see how we live. I bought Pearl’s Ranchero. Desmond bought his Escalade. Got his mother to a doctor. We lend out a little every now and again.” I shrugged. “I’ve tried to feel bad about taking it, but…” I gave her a wince and a shrug.
Another snort from Tula, but it was more contemplative than emphatic, like she couldn’t quite figure how she might feel about taking that money either.
“All right then.” Tula got up from the sofa and shouted toward the back of the house, “C.J., let’s eat.”
“What’s for supper?” I asked her.
“Depends,” she said. “Where are you taking us?”
We ended up at Lilo’s where we had steak and shoestring potatoes and where me and Tula even danced a little. Near the end there, when the band was playing “The Tennessee Waltz” for about the fourth time, my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I wouldn’t have bothered with it if it hadn’t turned out to be Desmond calling twice. Once was usually nothing special. Two times always meant “Oh, shit.”
Somebody had busted into K-Lo’s store again. That was not so uncommon a thing. By the time I got there, K-Lo had very nearly left off swearing. A car had driven into the front glass, which was the usual technique. Then the perp had passed five minutes looking for cash and merchandise worth stealing. This fellow had broken into K-Lo’s office—had kicked in K-Lo’s lauan door—and had made off with K-Lo’s .38 revolver and K-Lo’s twenty-gauge shotgun. He’d also busted K-Lo’s pencil cup, which K-Lo was livid about.
“Shit,” K-Lo told me as he showed me and Desmond the pieces of what had been a cheesy Graceland mug.
When I finally got Desmond off to the side, I asked him, “Why’d you call me on this one?” K-Lo had break-ins like most of the rest of us had gas.
Desmond motioned for me to follow him back out to the front of the store where he showed me a piece of the twisted aluminum channel the glass had been in. It looked to have dragged along the fender of the car that had busted the window. Desmond pointed out some yellow paint.
“Him,” Desmond said.
“He hasn’t got the only yellow car around.”
Desmond chuffed the way a bear might and told me another time, “It’s him.”
We knew we’d find out for certain soon enough. K-Lo had installed surveillance cameras after he’d had his front glass broken out a solid dozen times. His underwriter had insisted on it, and K-Lo had squawked about the price, but he’d finally called in a guy from Jackson to come out and do it up right. K-Lo had four high-resolution cameras and a DVR in a hardened cupboard, so the ritual was that we’d sit down with whichever deputy finally arrived and show him precisely who’d gotten up to the crime we’d called him about. You could usually make out the tag number. You could always make out the fools.
I can’t say why thieves on the lowlife circuit never seemed to get the word that everybody who broke into K-Lo’s got arrested straightaway. They just kept coming, and we kept sending the law to snatch them up. Worse still, aside from the guns, there was hardly anything worth stealing, and you could get firepower in the Delta almost anywhere.
K-Lo kept talking about putting up roll-down shutters, but that felt a little too much to him like a hoodlum triumph. So he put off buttoning the place up tight, and the thieves kept on breaking in.
One of the new Indianola female deputies got the call that night and came out. A big girl named Wanda.
Wanda took some photos of the damage with her phone and started in on her report while K-Lo switched on his computer and cued up the surveillance footage. We watched black-and-white video of the rent-to-own storefront for about a quarter hour at quadruple speed.
We’d seen enough of this sort of footage to know what the method usually was. Some guy, almost always in a hoodie, would walk up to the front double doors and jerk on the handles a time or two. He’d see that the throw bolt was plated over, which ruled out a saw or a torch. I don’t know why they never went around to the back. You could buck open that door with your hip.
That Boudrot must have made up his mind back down the road in Leeland or somewhere, because that yellow Gold Duster he was driving just appeared at full tilt and rammed straight through the glass. That Boudrot climbed out of the car and actively looked around for cameras. He followed the co-ax over to the unit in the corner. He smiled up at us, ran his palm along the side of his head to slick back his greasy hair. Then he pointed his finger at the lens and made like to shoot it out.
“Look familiar?” Wanda asked us.
“That’s the boy that broke out of Parchman,” I said.
“The one today?”
“Yep,” Desmond told her.
We eventually watched Guy Baptiste Boudrot climb back into his stolen Plymouth and wave
as he backed out into the lot.
* * *
We didn’t know where Percy Dwayne Dubois might be, but we had a pretty fair idea where we could find his nephew. Luther sold oxy out of a roadhouse down near Yazoo City. He’d spent his cut of the Boudrot money on a new Ford diesel truck, had gone in with a cousin on a steakhouse that had closed, and had pissed away whatever was left on lizard boots and big belt buckles. Luther had gotten away from the drug trade for maybe eight months tops.
He’d worked for years out of a place called Tootie’s, down toward Yazoo in the middle of nowhere much. We pulled in to find it had changed hands and was Lurleen’s anymore.
Tootie’s had always been strictly a cracker roadhouse, the sort of place Desmond would just have to walk into to end up in a fight. So I went in alone, stepped inside to discover that Tootie’s had been renovated and transformed. It was still a jackleg roadhouse with a chipboard bar, a bunch of mismatched tables, a row of booths against the back wall with more duct tape than vinyl. The jukebox was blasting out some shitty Eddie Rabbittesque country song, and the patrons were dancing and smoking and drinking Bud tallboys all at the same time. But there was a bouquet of flowers at one end of the bar—gladiolas mostly—and I spied a patron eating something. It looked like an honest to God order of ribs served on an actual plate.
There’d been no food at Tootie’s. There’d been no gladiolas. And the bartender had looked like Popeye after the meth had taken hold. Now there was a girl behind the bar, and not one of these girls you had to squint at to help convince yourself she was an actual female. This one had on a tube top and was justified to wear it. She had a smart spiky haircut and a sunburst tattooed around her navel. Each of her stubby fingernails was painted a different color. She could well have been an art student who’d wandered way off the interstate.
“Hey, sport,” she said when she saw me.
The girl slapped an actual printed cocktail napkin down on the bar. According to what I read on it, Lurleen’s was a lounge. I noticed the chipboard bar was now under about six coats of marine varnish. “What’ll it be?” The bartender smiled at me. She had what looked like all her teeth.