Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels)

by Rick Gavin

  “Get a real one or don’t bother.”

  “Ain’t got no bullets in it.”

  “Only a fool points an empty gun at a fellow.”

  “Like I told you,” Ricky said, “I got reformed.”

  He fished an envelope out his freezer. “Here’s their money. I’ve just got eight hundred.” He offered the envelope to me.

  “Just buy us all dinner,” I told him. I jabbed my thumb toward the front of the house. “And those boys can eat.”

  “So what’s going to happen?” Ricky asked us.

  “You expecting them now?”

  “Any time now,” Ricky told me.

  “We’ll make them wish they stayed in Memphis,” Desmond said.

  It wasn’t a plan exactly, but as strategies go it was all right. We decided not to tell Eugene or Percy Dwayne or Luther. We didn’t even have to discuss not telling Dale. Me and Desmond were debating what to arm ourselves with from the duffel in the Escalade when a Grand Marquis wheeled into the lot and short-circuited the discussion. Two big guys in shiny suits climbed out and headed for the door. The three of us watched from the service window.

  “Them?” Desmond asked.

  Ricky sighed and nodded. “Must be.”

  They both had pistol bulges. Silk ties. Gold watches and rings. I could imagine the cologne before I had to actually smell it.

  “Want to talk to them any?” Desmond asked me.

  I’m sure he knew I’d tell him, “No.”

  One of the problems with Dale is he has antenna. He knows trouble when he sees it, but he lacks the instincts and the sound sense to know what he should and shouldn’t get up to. So when those two mokes came into the restaurant proper and blew past the hostess without a word, Dale noticed the way the leading one shoved that girl aside with his forearm. He knew he didn’t like it much and that it spoke poorly of those fellows.

  Dale shoved his chair back and told those gentlemen both at once, “Hold on here.”

  Back when Dale had all his muscles, passed his evenings lifting weights and dining on supplement milkshakes with anabolic steroid chasers, it might have been enough for him to say, “Hold on here.” You couldn’t be sure that wasn’t a prison-yard physique he’d cultivated. Even a couple of buff guys with pistols from Memphis might be tempted to tread with some care.

  But Dale’s muscles had all gone to fat in strange places, so the Memphis thug with the sandy hair, the one who looked like a gym-rat surfer, advised Dale, “Sit down, tubby,” without even giving him more than a glance.

  Of course, Luther and Eugene and Percy Dwayne weren’t about to have Dale’s back. Dale had far too much of a shithead history to hope for a fellow to throw in with him. Those boys were busy spooning cheese dressing and Bac-O bits over their shredded lettuce salads. They weren’t about to give up dinner to help Dale.

  “Hey!” Dale shouted at those two guys from Memphis.

  They were nearly to the kitchen door by then, but surfer thug didn’t like Dale’s tone enough to make a detour to Dale’s table.

  Dale was primed to mouth off to the guy and looked to be putting some hard talk together when surfer thug arrived at Dale’s table and knocked Dale over with one punch.

  Me and Desmond watched from the service window.

  “Brass knuckles?” I asked.

  Desmond nodded. “Got them out of his coat pocket. Sure didn’t need that shit with Dale.”

  “I might rethink this,” I told Desmond. I hung my eight-inch skillet back up on the pot rack. I took a ten-incher down instead.

  “Look,” Desmond said.

  I went back to the window. Luther and Eugene and Percy Dwayne were dividing up Dale’s salad.

  The only other customers was an elderly couple down front, and they didn’t appear to think anything that went on in the back of the place was their business. Better that they should look out the window and snipe at each other instead.

  Those two Memphis thugs pushed on into the kitchen where they came upon me and Desmond and Ricky and a couple of Mexicans who helped Ricky out. A wiry one who washed the dishes and a dumpy one who cooked. They were accustomed to making themselves scarce and disappeared behind the range.

  “So?” the thug with the dark hair and the porny mustache said to Ricky.

  The sandy-haired surfer thug sized up me and Desmond. He drew back his coat flap so we could see his pistol. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Me and Desmond aren’t like Dale. We’ve got no appetite for preambles. I glanced at Desmond. He glanced at me. We went at those boys hard.

  When I hit the sandy-haired one with my ten-inch skillet, you’d have thought we were at Churchill Downs. That pan rang as clear and true as a starting bell. That boy considered being unconscious long enough to allow me to reach in and pluck his pistol free. I thought I might have to point it at his colleague, but Desmond had glided over at full speed and was raining blows on him.

  Unlike Dale, Desmond knew how to throw a punch with all of his weight behind it, and that other thug had hardly lifted his fists before he was out on his feet. His nose was flattened and bleeding. Desmond had laid him open at both eyebrows. I watched as Desmond lowered his aim and caught that fellow in the gut.

  The blond one moaned, so I kicked him.

  “Want some of this?” I said to Ricky.

  He looked from one heap of thug to the other and shook his head. Maybe he was reformed.

  Ricky finally asked me and Desmond, “Now what?”

  It was a fair question, and we hadn’t worked out all the details. In truth, we hadn’t worked out any details at all.

  “We beat them or they beat you,” Desmond explained to Ricky.

  “Fine,” he said. “I get all that. But what happens after you leave?”

  “Hey.” That was Luther from the service window. “Our damn steaks ready yet?”

  Luther took in the boys from Memphis piled up on the kitchen floor. Me and Desmond had laid their guns on a cutting board next to the mushrooms that Ricky’s assistant had been slicing before he’d evaporated. Luther eyed the pistols, went back to the thugs.

  “That one put Dale down.” He pointed at the sandy-haired one.

  “He all right?” I asked.

  Luther glanced back into the restaurant to take a visual reading on Dale. Then he swung back our way to give us a shrug like he didn’t quite know and couldn’t bring himself to care.

  “I’d go on and cook Dale’s rib eye,” Luther suggested to Ricky. “If he can’t handle it, we will.”

  Ricky said something in Spanish to his helper who came out of hiding and approached the stove.

  Me and Desmond dragged those two Memphis enforcers out the back kitchen door. We spoiled their shiny suits in the process what with all the floor grease and the grit. It only seemed proper and decent to turn the hot hose on the pair of them after that. Ricky must have used it to clean his range-hood filters with.

  The water that came out of it was tepid at first but scalding shortly thereafter. Once their clothes got wet and steaming, those two gentlemen woke up and did some impressive shrieking and scrambling before we saw fit to shut off the water.

  “You’re fucking dead,” were the first words out of the porny mustache guy’s mouth.

  Desmond glided over for an editorial session. He popped the guy two good times hard by way of saying, “Think again.”

  The sandy-haired surfer dude must have been the brains of this particular brace of no-necks.

  “What do you want?” he asked us. He didn’t bother with bristling and threats.

  “What the hell you doing way down here? You don’t have business enough in Memphis?”

  The surfer thug shrugged. “Tough times,” he told me. “Think we like it? Hell of a drive for us.”

  “Who do you work for?” Desmond wanted to know.

  Porny mustache guy told him, “Fuck you.”

  He must have been fooled by Desmond’s girth and monumental stature, wasn’t prepared to believe that
Desmond was about as quick as a cobra. Desmond wheeled and caught porny mustache guy with a spinning backhand to the jaw. That guy collapsed straight onto the muddy ground in an ungainly heap. There was an elbow here and a wingtip there. A tie knot and pinky ring.

  “Don’t mind him,” surfer thug told us in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “Chief’s sister’s kid.”

  “Got it,” I told him.

  Desmond said, “So you’re the brains?”

  “I guess,” he said. “Here anyway.”

  I jabbed my thumb toward the restaurant. “You’re putting him out of business.”

  He nodded. “I guess they were thinking we’d pull out four or five large, and that’d be worth all the miles.”

  “Isn’t,” Desmond told him.

  “How much you getting?” he wanted to know.

  “Only steak worth a shit in the whole damn county. Think you’d want to live on Arby’s?” I asked him.

  “So you eat here?”

  We nodded.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Times might be hard,” I told surfer thug, “but they can’t be that hard. Take him.” I pointed at his colleague who was moaning and wriggling a little now. “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back.”

  “Chief might not like that?”

  “You want us in Memphis?” Desmond said.

  Surfer thug hesitated, so Desmond kicked his partner as a kind of visual aid.

  “I’ll talk to the chief. You boys make a lot of sense.” He poked the porny mustache guy with the toe of his loafer. “Hey, Larry.”

  Larry groaned, rolled over, and made a sort of career out of standing up.

  “Think I can get my gun back?” Surfer thug asked. “Ex-wife gave it to me.”

  I nodded in an altogether reasonable way. “If you don’t mind carrying it up the road in your colon.”

  That qualified as advanced logistics for sandy-haired surfer dude. He gave the proposition some thought before he told me, “Keep it.”

  They both took off their suit coats and trousers out in the parking lot and left Ricky’s steak place in just their shirts and briefs. Ricky came around from the back to join us as we watched them head up the road in their Ford sedan.

  “They won’t be back,” I told him.

  “Hungry?” Ricky asked us.

  “Wouldn’t say no to a couple of rib eyes,” Desmond said.

  “Got anything they didn’t sell you?” I asked.

  “Tenderloin,” Ricky told us and held his finger and thumb three inches apart.

  “Ruin his,” I said and nodded Desmond’s way. “I’ll take mine rare.”

  As Ricky left us, I heard Desmond’s Barry White ringtone from his pocket. He fished out his phone.

  “Kendell,” he told me. He raised the thing to his ear. “Yeah.”

  Kendell talked for about a quarter minute before Desmond told him, “Hold on.”

  He turned on his speaker and held the phone so I could hear Kendell too.

  “Say it again.”

  “Got the phone company on the case. Thing doesn’t even need to be on. They went through Columbus half an hour ago. Looks like they’re headed for Tuscaloosa.”

  SIXTEEN

  Dale had lost a tooth. Not a real tooth but a crown he’d paid good money for, so he was crawling around on his hands and knees when me and Desmond came into the restaurant. There were maybe three other tables by then, in addition to our gang in the back corner, and the other diners made it plain to me and Desmond as we passed that they’d come for a steak and some bad cabernet and not the shit show our boys were putting on. They said it all with frosty glares, but they said it plain enough.

  So there we were both saving Ricky’s restaurant and driving his customers away.

  “Get up,” I told Dale.

  He showed me the stump where his crown had been before he went down.

  I pointed at his chair. He sat.

  Desmond dipped into the kitchen to pick up the pistols we’d left there and get Ricky out so we could have a word.

  “Ever know that Boudrot to have business in Tuscaloosa?” I asked Eugene.

  He was working on something. It turned out to be gristle that he dribbled straight onto his plate.

  Ricky had arrived in time to see it, and he told us sadly, “Memphis beef.”

  “Alabama?” Eugene asked me like I’d figured he probably would.

  I nodded. “‘Roll Tide’ and all that.”

  “Naw. Stuff in New Orleans. Baton Rouge, I think. Never heard nothing about Alabama.”

  I turned to Ricky. “Looks like Guy is headed for Tuscaloosa. Any idea why?”

  Ricky thought on it for a half minute and then snapped his fingers at us. “This girl used to visit him in Parchman. I think she was from over there.”

  “What girl?” Desmond asked.

  “We were locked up with her brother. She used to come over to see him and got to know Guy. They went conjugal after a while.”

  “Got a name?” I asked him.

  He didn’t. “Wasn’t much to look at. Hard miles on her, but you can’t be too picky in Parchman.”

  “What happened with her brother?” Desmond asked Ricky.

  “Out. Beat a guy cripple. Did ten years. Back on his chopper by now.”

  “What was his name?” I asked Ricky.

  “Bobbie something.” Another shrug. “I kind of steered clear of him.”

  Just then the hostess carried over steaks for me and Desmond, which snagged the regard of Dale and Eugene, Luther and Percy Dwayne too.

  “What the hell’s them?” Eugene asked.

  “Fillet,” Ricky told him.

  “Can I get one?”

  I cut mine in half and forked a portion onto my bread plate. I offered it to Eugene.

  “Might have cooked it,” he said to me by way of “thanks a bunch.”

  A couple of boys came in along about then. Whiskers and dungarees and greasy seed caps. One of them had a word with the hostess while the other one just looked at us. Looked at Desmond, I have to guess now. He slapped his buddy on the arm to get him focused on Desmond too. Then they appeared to change their minds about dining and went out just like they’d come in.

  “Know them?” I asked Desmond.

  He shook his head.

  “You?” I said to Ricky.

  “The big one’s Fred or Frank or something.”

  “Fred or Frank what?” I asked him.

  “Purdy,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” Desmond told us, and he was gliding already toward the door before he’d finished talking.

  “What about my tooth?” Dale wanted to know.

  Eugene grabbed my baked potato.

  “Can’t we get pie or nothing?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

  “Nick’ll buy you a tooth,” Desmond called out to Dale. He’d reached the door and held it open for us.

  I drove our crew out ahead of me. They complained the whole way to the lot.

  “I’m already buying a Cadillac,” I told Desmond.

  “So what’s an incisor?” he said.

  We’d just piled into the Escalade—all of us but for Eugene who’d lifted Barbara out of the way back to let her pee in the steak house lot—when Ricky came out with a pastry box.

  “Shortcake,” he told us, “for the road.”

  There were general hosannas from the backseat. Ricky reached into to shake Desmond’s hand and then mine, and that’s when the Purdys swarmed up from every damn direction they could.

  The two who’d come into the restaurant were sitting across the way in their truck, and Purdy Neons and Purdy Geos, even a couple of Purdy Fiestas came flying into the parking, bouncing across the skirting.

  Desmond told the bunch of us, “Hold on.”

  With that he dropped his Escalade into gear and left the steak house the way, I had to think, nobody had left the steak house before. We roared across a weedy patch and down through a ditch toward the blacktop. A Purdy tried
to head us off in an orange Wrangler. He came at us off our right flank, and Desmond nudged him with the bumper. It didn’t take much to lay that trifling piece of shit right on its side.

  “Aw,” I heard from Luther. “They going to be stirred up now.”

  And I was going to say to him, “Now!?” but Percy Dwayne set up a fuss instead.

  All the bouncing had wrecked the whipped cream on the shortcake Ricky had supplied us, and Percy Dwayne treated the mess in the pastry box like an authentic catastrophe.

  “Look at this,” he fairly wailed, and he showed his seat mates the carnage.

  “Fucking Purdys,” Luther said.

  We had Purdy’s coming at us like star fighters on the road. We’d gotten on the blacktop just in time, but they were all turning around wherever they could and chasing behind us.

  “You sure you didn’t hack her up and throw her in the river?”

  “Didn’t even get any regular sex.”

  “What kind of sex did you get?”

  “Rather not say.”

  I didn’t press him since Desmond was doing about ninety by then.

  Vicksburg is rather confining. The city is chiefly down by the river with bluffs above it where all the batteries were during the Civil War. Desmond raced up Washington Street to Clay and swung east up out of the city proper. He’d managed to put enough distance between us and the Purdy posse—those four-cylinder heaps they drove could barely hold fifty going up hill—to let us pull off the road at the battlefield without any Purdys seeing us.

  The park was closed. It was just past sunset. A chain was up beside the gatehouse, and Desmond rammed right through it. The busted chain came whipping around and cracked the back side window with enough force and racket to distract Dale from his missing tooth.

  He took his finger out of his mouth long enough to tell us, “Shit.”

  “I was kind of hoping to trade this in,” I told Desmond.

  “Might still,” he said and hit a speed bump at somewhere north of forty. Desmond was the only one wearing a seatbelt, so the rest of us levitated. Fortunately, the lid of the pastry box was shut because Ricky’s shortcake had to be getting close to soup.

  Desmond pulled into an overlook with an obelisk and cannons. He left the engine running but shut off all the lights.

  “Road just go around?” I asked him.