by Rick Gavin
“Well now,” one of the city cops said.
He was awfully proud of himself. Him and one of the park rangers had hauled our duffel down the stairs, and they dropped it clanking before us as he spoke.
“What’s all this?” he asked us.
Me and Desmond were accomplished at telling police nothing at all. I’d been a county cop in Virginia, so I knew all the dodges firsthand. Desmond had them down by instinct and disposition. We’d been in enough trouble together to know how to weather the sort of bluster that cops were inclined to get up to once they thought they had us cold.
One of the Vicksburg boys had us doing a dime in Parchman right off the top.
Desmond gave him a neck noise, but that was as far as he would go.
Percy Dwayne had a different strategy. He’d probably been cuffed and zip-tied more times than I could count. He liked to latch on an absolving explanation and just ride it until either it was dead or he was free in the world again.
“Ain’t even ours,” he told those cops while dipping his head toward our duffel. “Took it off those boys.”
“Like hell,” a Purdy chimed in.
“Couldn’t do much else,” Percy Dwayne said in a more-in-sadness-than-anger sort of way.
Desmond swung around my way to steal a glance.
I shrugged.
“They was after him,” Percy Dwayne told the three cops that had gathered before him. A city policeman. A trooper in his cocked campaign hat. A park ranger in twill so wrinkled and baggy he should have been hanging off a garbage truck.
“Why?” The trooper was taking the lead.
“Used to date one of them, didn’t you?” Percy Dwayne asked Desmond.
“One of them?” the city cop said and sneered as he pointed at those Purdys.
They objected faster than Desmond ever could.
“Aw hell no!” they shouted out like some aggrieved cracker chorus.
Then the one with the eye patch up and declared, “He used my sister hard.”
“What does that even mean?” the trooper asked.
I was being careful not to look him full in the eye. I couldn’t say but that the trouble I’d had with A. P. Benbow at the barracks had followed me clear to Vicksburg and would do me in at last.
“You know,” that Purdy told him, which didn’t appear to lead to enlightenment in any significant way.
“His sister?” that trooper said to Desmond.
“Saw her once or twice,” Desmond said.
“Tied her the fuck up,” that Purdy brother told us all.
“That right?” The Vicksburg cop was getting interested now.
“Only way she’d have it,” Desmond informed him.
“Like hell.” The Purdy brother tried to stand up but got shoved back down. His Purdy colleagues grumbled.
“Wasn’t even real rope,” Desmond explained. “Wrapped in velvet and shit.”
“Caught him beating her,” the Purdy brother with the pitiful aim said.
“Ain’t never hit a woman,” Desmond said.
“But you’d tie one up,” the trooper reminded him.
“Not before her. And not after,” Desmond said. “That was all her kink. I just like them naked and upside down.”
Luther and Percy Dwayne both said, “Amen.”
“Whipped her,” the Purdy brother declared.
“She asked me to,” Desmond explained. “Damn thing was made out of foam.”
“Where’s your sister now?” the trooper asked the Purdy brother.
“Houston. With some boy.”
“Like him?” The trooper pointed at Desmond.
That Purdy spat and blew a breath before he told him, “Yeah.”
“Here’s a thing I want to know,” that shabby park ranger told us all. “What the hell’s that dog doing in a shirt?”
* * *
There wasn’t a lot for us to be up to after that beyond giving those guns to the Purdys. As pastimes go, we went at it with concerted energy. It helped that we had a gaudy assortment of firearms in the duffel. Those cops would pull out a Steyr or our M1A, our 93R, our Heckler & Koch, and all our regular pistols too, and those Purdys just couldn’t seem indignant when we insisted they owned them.
Ours were finer firearms than probably any Purdy had ever had in hand to judge by the revolver the eye patch Purdy had been firing all over the place. Consequently, those Purdys couldn’t help but admire them and probably covet them a little. I had to imagine they were thinking ahead to when this spot of trouble got sorted and they could haul off their bag of guns as they left the jailhouse all free men. That must have been what kept them from raging against us because they didn’t put up much of a fuss.
“That one there like to mow us down,” Percy Dwayne said and pointed at the Purdy brother.
He couldn’t trouble himself to bark back how he’d never done any such thing. Instead he just sat there looking like the sort of hard man who might just use a machine gun.
“Shot out all our windows,” Percy Dwayne said. “Went half wild. Even shot up his own damn car.”
The cops all looked at that Purdy brother. He was so deep into being a machine-gunning bad-ass that all he could do was spit.
“Might even have shot a buddy of ours,” Luther chimed in, sounding teary.
“What buddy?” the trooper asked.
I called Dale’s name. “Used to be a trooper up by Indianola,” I said.
That did it. That trooper snatched that Purdy brother up off the curb.
“What did you go and do?”
“Nothing!” He was finally wising up. “We just kicked him around a little.”
“Where?”
That Purdy brother was so confused about where he was he couldn’t say. Traveling in a Riva Lada was probably a lot like riding in a blender. You were so busy trying to stay between ditches that you hardly knew where you were going and surely couldn’t tell where you’d been.
“Back where we came in,” I told the trooper.
“Show me,” he said. “You two.” He pointed at me and Desmond and escorted us over to his cruiser.
As he was helping Desmond into the back, that trooper asked him, “Was she worth it?”
Desmond had hardly changed his mind since earlier on when I’d put the question to him. He dropped hard on the seat, made a noise in his neck, and said, “I’m still thinking mostly no.”
EIGHTEEN
Dale wasn’t shot. It was hard to tell if he’d been roughed up or not because he’d gotten kicked around so thoroughly for the past day and a half that he was a mess before those Purdys ever reached him.
He was crawling around the gritty lot where we’d left him, looking for another crown. Dale had a disposable lighter to help him see, but it was so hot he could barely hold it.
When we pulled in, the first thing Dale said to that trooper was, “Shine your high beams over this way.”
That trooper opened our doors for me and Desmond but let us struggle out on our own. He squinted at Dale, pitched his head like a dog might, and gave Dale a thorough once-over.
“That you, Magnum?” he finally said.
Dale stopped scouring for his tooth and had a good look instead at the trooper. I doubt he could see awfully much for the headlights.
“Who wants to know?” Dale was his usual cavalcade of charm.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Dale didn’t like the sound of that. He glared full into the high beams and embarked on the chore of getting up.
That trooper turned and said to me and Desmond, “He was the one with the muscles, right?”
“Wife left him,” I said. “Kind of went in a tailspin. Out of work for a while. Quit lifting weights. Couldn’t afford to juice anymore.”
“Had plenty of beer money, looks like,” that trooper said.
Dale informed him, “I heard that.”
Dale was full on his feet by then with his bulk illuminated in the high beams.
“Hate
to see you like this,” the trooper told him, and he sounded even to mean it.
Dale shaded his eyes. “Who the hell is it?”
“Tucker.”
That was enough to get a desolate grunt of recognition from Dale.
“Hey, sarge,” Dale said as he tidied up his clothes. “Didn’t mean for it to come to this, but shit’ll do what it does sometimes.”
“You drunk now?”
“No, sir.”
Dale was stumbling on his words, but that was likely due to the finger he kept plunging into his mouth. He had two nubs now and felt the need to touch one of them about all the time.
“Another crown popped out. Watch where you walk.”
Sergeant Tucker unholstered his flashlight and played the beam of it across the pavement.
“Where’d you lose it?”
Dale would have told most people, “How the fuck would I know?” He must have held that sergeant in special esteem because he told Tucker almost politely, “Right around here, I think.”
Soon enough that Trooper had freed up me and Desmond, and we were all crawling around in the lot. You’d have thought a molar would be conspicuous in among the grit and pebbles, but we were a good quarter hour finding it. It looked like half a kernel of corn. It was dinged and dented where somebody—Dale figured a Purdy—had stomped on it.
“Those fuckers,” was all Dale said.
“Took a shot at you, didn’t they?” I asked him.
Dale had been shot at so much and beaten down so often that he had to pause to think if he’d, in fact, been actively fired on lately.
“We heard it,” Desmond told him.
“Oh, right,” Dale said. “After you left me…” He did some glaring for effect. “The ugly one with the patch. Pistol of his just went off.”
Dale didn’t seem too interested in what had happened to the rest of us, or most of the rest of us anyway. He took his finger out of his mouth long enough to ask me and Desmond, “Barbara all right?”
We nodded.
“Barbara?” the trooper asked us all.
Dale gave him a finger-choked, “Dog.”
“Funny name for a dog.”
“She’s a Mandrell,” Dale informed him.
Sergeant Tucker chewed on that one for about a quarter minute before he adjusted his campaign hat and said, “All right.”
Trooper Tucker seemed decent enough. That was my impression anyway, so I consulted Desmond with a glance, and he nodded that way he does when he’s giving me the go ahead. We’re like that, me and Desmond. Often a look and a twitch is enough.
“We’ve got kind of a problem,” I said to the sergeant.
He turned his full attention on me in a no-fucking-kidding sort of way.
“This here,” I said and gestured in the general Purdy direction, “isn’t it.”
It must have seemed like trouble enough to him because he got interested in a hurry at the prospect of me and Desmond being deeper in Dutch elsewhere.
“I guess you heard about the guy who escaped from Parchman.”
The sergeant nodded.
“And the girl he’s got?”
Tucker nodded. “County cop. It’s on the wire.”
Desmond pointed my way. “His girl,” he said.
“His cousin’s with the PD up there.” I pointed at Desmond and called Kendell’s name. The sergeant was acquainted with Kendell.
“We’re working with him,” Desmond said.
“Deputized?” he asked us and then looked us over hard. I’m sure we didn’t appear to be fit law enforcement material at that moment.
It was Dale who said, “Yeah.” He’d even pulled his finger out to do it. “That Boudrot’s headed for Alabama. Probably over there already. We’re supposed to bring him back.”
“You’re bounty hunters?” Tucker asked us.
I could tell he was groping for some way to be accommodating, but he needed a traditional, orthodox slot he could shove all of us in. Bounty hunting was semirespectable in the country anymore. There was even a pack of knuckleheads with a TV show.
“That’s right,” I told him.
“Kendell gave us a paper,” Desmond said.
“And those other boys?” Tucker asked us.
“They’ve got history with that Boudrot,” I said. “Know his habits and stuff. We need them along to help us smoke him out.”
We were winning him over. I could tell. He lapsed into a study. Scratched his chin and looked at nothing.
“What do you mean that hound’s a Mandrell?”
“You know,” Dale told him. “Those sisters. The blond ones. Barbara and Betty or something.”
Desmond followed up with an account of the carnage we’d come across back at Eugene’s dog pen in the swamp.
Sergeant Tucker looked moved by the idea of what some people’ll do to dogs. That’s what I thought anyway until he told us, “She played the banjo or something, didn’t she?”
“Who?” Dale asked him.
“That Mandrell,” the trooper said in a wistful sort of way like he was remembering his first car or his prom.
It didn’t take nearly as much explaining as it should have to get us loose. Not just me and Desmond and Dale, but the rest of the crew as well. It was only once those Purdys saw Luther and Percy Dwayne and Eugene getting cut from their zip ties that they decided to raise a fuss about the guns we’d said they owned. Naturally, it was too late by then. Those cops had all decided, the way cops do, who they’d like to see locked up and shut away for what exactly and who they didn’t much mind running free.
To Sergeant Tucker’s credit, he’d required a telephone conversation with Kendell before he would let us go. Kendell must have vouched for us emphatically enough, because that sergeant spent the bulk of his energy being down on Purdys after that.
Those Purdy boys raged and hollered and threatened. They most especially wanted harm to come to Desmond, but they had enough hard things to say about all the rest of us as well to ensure they’d be sitting in the Vicksburg lockup for a while.
One of the park rangers even gave us enough Visqueen to cover the hole where that Purdy’s ricochet had busted Desmond’s back passenger window. Then we had to suffer the quarreling among Percy Dwayne and Luther and Dale about who’d sit next to the plastic and for how long. Luther even tried to worm his way into Eugene’s way back before Eugene made noises against him like he was ready to come to blows.
“Don’t be a stranger, Dale,” Sergeant Tucker shouted as we were heading out of the lot toward Union Avenue.
Dale made the sort of noise he had to make with half a hand shoved into his mouth.
“What happened over there?” Luther asked us. It seemed next to a miracle to him that we were leaving unarrested while those Purdys were in a fix.
“Found my tooth,” Dale told him and showed the thing to Luther.
“What are we going to do now?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know. He held up his hands and showed them to me. “I ain’t fighting that crazy fucker with just these.”
“We’ll find something,” I told him. I wasn’t about to go at that Boudrot empty-handed either.
“Damn straight.” I think they all said it together.
“Tuscaloosa?” Desmond asked me.
“Shouldn’t we talk to Kendell first?”
Desmond knew we should and nodded, but he wasn’t about to do it himself.
“Your turn,” he said. “If you use my phone, he’ll start yelling before you even open your mouth.”
I fished Desmond’s phone from the cup holder, found Kendell’s number, and placed the call. Sure enough, he answered in a full-fledged dudgeon.
It mostly boiled down to Kendell asking three or four times, “What in the world are you boys up to?”
“It’s me,” I said once I’d found a spot for it.
“They cut you all loose? Even the Duboises?”
“Yeah. It turned out those Purdys were running around with a whole bag full of guns.”
<
br /> Kendell had seen our duffel, knew our practices and methods.
“Big green thing?” he asked me.
“Might have been.”
“What have you got left for that Boudrot, just in case he won’t come easy?”
“The love of Jesus and about fifty knuckles.”
“I know a guy in Columbus. He owes me.”
I picked up Desmond’s gazetteer off the floorboard, which was actually my atlas that Desmond had helped himself to like usual and never given back. I was flipping through the thing to find the county we were racing through, I asked Kendell, “Heard anything else from that Boudrot?”
“Not directly,” Kendell said. “Techs are on him. He hit Tuscaloosa about an hour ago.”
“Where exactly are we?” I asked Desmond.
He pointed straight ahead. “Jackson in maybe half an hour.”
“Never had a girl in Columbus, did you?” I asked Desmond.
He gave the question more thought than I’d hoped for before he told me, “Nope.”
NINETEEN
Dale needed to eat again, and he started talking about some chicken that he’d had once in a place near Jackson.
“Kind of on the way,” he told me. “Out by Bradie.”
“Didn’t you just have a steak?” I asked him.
“My tooth came out,”Dale said. “The first one.”
“I guess I need an ATM,” I told Desmond. “We’re going want a pile of money.”
“For chicken?”
“Guns mostly. Chicken a little too.”
Desmond grunted. “I know that place Dale means.”
“You too?”
“We get a bucket for the car, maybe we don’t have to stop anymore.”
I knew that was a fantasy, given our crew. We had five bladders with five different calibrations. Six if you counted Barbara’s, though she was the least trouble of the bunch. Except that—according to the boys in the back—Barbara broke powerful wind.
“Money first,” I said.