by Rick Gavin
“Yeah,” I told Desmond. “I see somebody.”
“I think one of them’s her,” he said.
“Tula?”
Desmond nodded.
I shaded my eyes and looked again. There was one person standing apart from the others. “That one out there?”
Desmond nodded.
I squinted and looked again. “Wearing a skirt, right?”
Another nod. Odd though since Tula wasn’t the skirt-wearing sort. I mentioned as much to Desmond.
“Might have put her in it,” Desmond said. “That Boudrot being a kink and all.”
So Desmond made me think about all the possibilities I’d decided to leave unconsidered. From the moment I knew that Boudrot had nabbed Tula clear through to standing in that church lot, I’d not let myself dwell on the untoward stuff that Boudrot might get up to. He was a puny rat terrier of a guy, hinky and dangerous in his way, with straight-to-video movie star looks if you could take your actors stunted. But I’d only ever known him to brutalize men, and that’s what I’d decided he’d get up to. A woman like Tula he’d want to romance, and that sort of thing takes time.
I’d decided he’d need probably three full days before he told himself, “Fuck it,” and went at Tula like the beast he was.
Tula was barely twenty-four hours in as I stood there squinting at her in Tuscaloosa. Her skirt hem shifted in the light autumn air as she stood on that cul-de-sac in that storm-scoured suburb.
Together me and Desmond watched Tula raise her arms above her head and wave them at us.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out. The call was coming from her phone.
“Yeah.”
It was that Boudrot on the other end. “You looking?” he asked me.
“You know I am.”
The line went dead, and me and Desmond watched the guy we took for that Boudrot. He looked like a child from where we were as he left the boys he’d been standing with and stepped over toward Tula. He must have told her to put her arms down, because that’s just what she did. Then he raised an arm himself and pointed at the side of Tula’s head. She suddenly dropped in a heap onto the ground and was already piled up on the pavement before the sound of the pistol shot reached me and Desmond where we stood by that ruined church.
I didn’t know what to do, could hardly believe I’d seen what I saw. That Boudrot and his crew got into my Ranchero. Two in the cab and one in the bed. Off they went onto Kicker and up out of sight. We only heard the squeal of the tires after they had vanished.
“No,” was all I could manage.
“Come on.” Desmond was half in the Escalade.
I imagined Tula’s son without a mother. I heard in my head what Kendell would say, shot through with the flinty disappointment he had a talent for. I did that thing where I wondered what life would be like if Tula and me had never met. If she’d never pulled me over and written me up for speeding. If I’d never made it my sole romantic purpose to wear her down. Now I’d piled her up on a barren road in storm-blasted Tuscaloosa. Even there in that littered church parking lot, I already couldn’t live with myself.
“Come on,” Desmond said.
I moved. I climbed in. We went tearing out of that church lot, under the shabby overpass, and back up Kicker to that cul-de-sac. The whole business took us maybe a minute and a half, and I remember wondering at all the people around us going on with their regular lives. A woman had been gunned down in the broad October afternoon in a city in Alabama, and nobody seemed to have noticed it but us. It was like we were operating in a different dimension from the regular world at large.
Desmond whipped into the cul-de-sac. Barbara bounced around in the way back. I could hear her clawing for purchase on Desmond’s rubber matting. Desmond stopped by a power pole so snug to the curb that I almost couldn’t get out. Some guy had recently put up a Day-Glo flyer with tabs fluttering across the bottom. He was offering mandolin lessons. Two people had torn off his number. I remember wondering how you’d come through here and think about shit like that.
Desmond got to her first. He was in full glide, but I was hardly trying to keep up with him. I didn’t think I had the nerve to see Tula dead, bloody in the road.
Desmond shook his head. “Not her,” he told me.
I didn’t believe him at first. “What?”
Desmond pointed. I finally brought myself to glance down at the body. I saw a muddy sneaker and a tattooed calf.
“Blew half her head off,” Desmond said.
Even disfigured and bloody, she didn’t look like Tula at all.
I was too relieved to be disgusted. “Who you figure it is?” I asked Desmond.
“Prison girlfriend probably.”
One of the cars that passed by on Kicker was a Tuscaloosa police cruiser. It went down under the overpass, and we saw brake lights at the church.
“Come on,” Desmond said. Not that he needed to. We were both heading back to the Escalade by then.
Desmond zipped around the cul-de-sac, turned south, and raced over the rise. He went left on Fifteenth and kept on going, finally eased off at a road that led into the university arboretum.
“We need a think,” Desmond told me.
I was perfectly fine with that. I needed to stand up and breathe for a minute or two while I contemplated the savage harm I intended to visit on that Boudrot. Then I wondered if he’d just keep toying with us until he ran out of people to shoot and so finally got down to Tula proper and made me lose her all over again.
I’d only been to an arboretum once. That one was a forest with signs on the trees, hardly the sort of place we rolled up to in Tuscaloosa. Their arboretum was an old golf course that they’d largely let grow wild. The clubhouse windows were boarded up, and the golf cart shed was empty. We parked directly behind the first tee box. The fairways was knee-deep with weeds. People were strolling along the cart paths, most of them with their dogs.
“This is a hell of a thing,” Desmond said. He climbed out and went around to get Barbara.
When she hit the ground, an English setter came over to tell her how do you do. A pug soon joined them. A beagle. Some kind of curly-haired retriever. They all sniffed Barbara’s spotted T-shirt while she squatted and tried to pee.
She would have been the strangest sight out there but for a girl across the way. She had dreadlocks, was wearing what looked like a kilt and a grimy tie-dyed wife beater. So she would have been conspicuous already if she hadn’t been walking a goat.
“Like some weird dream,” Desmond said.
I nodded. I told him, “So far.”
We wandered over to a sand trap with pine trees growing in it. Barbara followed us partway before she got distracted by the goat. She’d probably never seen a whole one. Eugene used goat chunks for gator bait. She went straight up and had a good snout-to-snout with the creature. It was long eared and spotted and seemed, for a goat, vaguely aristocratic. The creature had little use for a hound in a T-shirt and communicated as much by grunting that way goats will and lifting its snout in the air.
Its owner was a lot less haughty. She told Barbara, “Moo, goddammit.”
“Call Boudrot?” I asked Desmond.
“I guess.”
“What do you figure he’s up to?”
Desmond shrugged.
“I thought maybe he’d meet us to get his money, and we’d kick the shit out of him.”
“Yeah,” Desmond told me. “But when’s it ever as easy as that?”
“Got a string of bodies on him. I can’t see him back in Parchman.”
“Naw,” Desmond said. “One way or another, he’s done.”
End times for that Boudrot fit right in with everything I had in mind.
“Call him,” Desmond said.
I pulled up Tula’s number. That bloodthirsty little fucker was laughing when he answered the phone.
“How do you like me now, brother?” he wanted to know.
“You’re a funny little twitch,” I told him. I
knew that Boudrot hated getting reminded he was an abject runt.
“Ain’t all that little,” he said. “Ask your girlfriend.”
“Put her on. I will.”
“Can’t,” he told me. “Got a mouthful right now.” He laughed. He added, “Ooohhh, baby.”
I just stood there and took it. He made rutting noises. He pulled away to have a laugh with a lackey. I glanced at Desmond, shook my head and waited.
“She’s a pistol,” that Boudrot finally said. “I don’t know but I should keep her.”
“So you don’t want your money?”
“That’s the shit of it, isn’t it. I do want it, brother. I do.”
“Then work it the fuck out,” I told him, “before the cops get all over you. Not but so many people a man can shoot, even in Tuscaloosa.”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“Trying hard not to.”
“Where are you?”
“Standing here looking at a goddamn goat and talking to you.”
He laid the phone aside again and told his buddies what I’d said. They laughed like guys who were hoping to keep unshot for a little while longer.
I pointed down the fairway we were overlooking and asked the girl with the goat, “What’s down there?”
“A lake,” she said. “The dogs swim in it.”
“Straight down that cart path?”
She nodded.
I told that Boudrot, “Here’s how it is.”
That got his attention the way it was meant to. You can only float along with head jobs like that Boudrot until they start dithering on you. Then you have to take charge and let them know you’re done with their nutty shit.
“Listen,” he started.
“Uh-uh,” I told him. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get here or we’re gone.”
“The fuck you say. I’ve got your—”
“You’ve got shit. World’s full of women.”
By then Desmond was looking at me like I was giving him powerful gas.
“Maybe I’ll do her right now.”
“See you,” I told him. I waited. I waited some more.
I heard that Boudrot exhale. “Let’s do it then,” he said.
“You know where the arboretum is?”
“The what?”
Desmond showed me the map on his phone. I gave directions to that Boudrot once he’d come up dry with his lackeys who weren’t nature lovers, I had to guess.
“Old golf course,” I told him. “Walk straight down the cart path off the parking lot. There’s a lake at the far end. We’ll do it all there.”
“You ain’t running nothing,” that Boudrot sputtered at me.
“Bring her along if you want your money.”
That was just the kind of talk that Boudrot had a taste for. I knew his work. He knew ours. We didn’t respect each other exactly, but there’s a certain pleasure attached to dealing with people who deliver on what they promise. We knew that Boudrot was bloodthirsty enough to gun down about anybody, and he was aware that me and Desmond had pulled a trigger or two ourselves.
“I’m going to tell you what’s happening,” that Boudrot said. “Half an hour. You be at that lake.”
“Got it,” I told him and hung up before he could keep explaining to me everything I’d already told him that we’d do.
“So?” Desmond said.
“Doing it here,” I told him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was probably a four- or five-acre pond in between an old par three tee box and an overgrown green on a hilltop. The water was low, and the pond was stump riddled over by the dam end. There was a clearing on the near side that sloped straight down to the bank, a grassy ramp the dogs made use of while their owners stood and chatted.
We’d seen plenty of cars in the arboretum lot but not terribly many people until we got our first view of the lake. That’s were everybody was.
“This’ll work,” I told Desmond.
It was a happy accident really. There was a solid dozen civilians down there and probably twice as many dogs. Too many witnesses for even that Boudrot to get homicidal in front of. He wasn’t the sort who’d think to bring enough bullets to mow everybody down.
Barbara quivered and warbled as we headed down the hillside toward the water.
Desmond checked the clip of Lance’s TEC-9. He shoved the gun down in his waistband. Desmond’s shirt was baggy enough so that he almost looked unarmed. Massive and menacing certainly but not ripe to shoot the place up. I’d gone for a Kimber .45. It had come oiled and loaded out of Lance’s bag and had enough weight to crack a skull.
Barbara stopped to gaze at the lake and yodel. She looked up at me and Desmond. If she could have spoken, she would have told us both, “Get me out of this nasty shirt.”
She licked me in gratitude when I started pulling at the collar. Barbara gave a hard shake once she was entirely shirtless. The wounds on her back had mostly scabbed over. She was only seeping a little.
“Go on then,” I said.
She spun around twice and lit out for the water.
“Where?” I asked Desmond.
Desmond was a natural master of open-field strategy.
“I’ll get back behind those bushes there.” He pointed at a lush bit of leafy scrub growing on the dam. “You mix in with the folks.”
I held out my arms in a looking-like-this? sort of way. They probably didn’t get too many seamen at the pond.
“They’ll just thank you for your service,” Desmond told me.
So we split up. Desmond followed the cart path that curved around toward the dam while I walked down the foot trail toward the bank of that stumpy pond. Barbara was nose to asshole with some ugly wire-haired dog that looked only mostly Airedale. He had a head shaped like a doorstop but the ears of a basset hound.
Most of the people were on their phones. A few had their earbuds in and made it clear they were preoccupied listening to their music or something. I soon found out why. There was a woman down there laying for a victim like me. If I’d not been actively worried about that crazy Acadian fuckstick cresting the hill above the pond and shooting me in the head, I might have noticed that woman earlier and seen her for what she was. A plague and a torment and a sack of ceaseless tedium in a skirt.
“Hey, sailor,” she told me.
“Ma’am.”
“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me. What you doing way out here?”
I pointed at nothing the way Tupelo Curtis would have. “Got this thing,” I said.
It didn’t matter. She was finished listening before I’d even started. She was one of those creatures with no proper use for her ears. They were something to hang her earrings from and to rest her glasses on.
“My Larry’s in the Coast Guard,” she told me.
“Oh yeah?”
I’d judged her straightaway and had made my decision about her. I’d eased around to put her between me and the crest of the hill I’d come down. She probably wouldn’t stop a bullet entirely—she was too bony for that—but the chances seemed good that she could slow one down.
“He’s in Budapest,” she said.
“Larry?”
“My boy.” She plucked up a fold of my white sailor’s top. She rubbed the material like she was a tailor or some GSA functionary.
“What’s the Coast Guard doing over there?” I asked her.
“Oh, silly,” she said as she tugged at my tunic. “He’s on some kind of leave.”
I caught a few of the other people glancing my way with what looked like pity leavened with relief. They clearly didn’t want to be me, but they could still feel sorry for me.
“Constantinople.” She was tidying up my collar now. “That’s what it used to be.”
“Right.” I eyed the hilltop. It was like waiting for a Cherokee war party to show up in silhouette on the ridge line.
“Him and that wife of his,” she said. “New one. First one, died, you know?”
“Sorry to hear it.”<
br />
I tried to spy Desmond, but he was well concealed behind a big viney clump of shrub. It looked like a blend of wisteria and honeysuckle.
“Killed in a wreck,” she said. “Drunk, if you ask me, but nobody asked me.”
“Sad thing.” I told her. “Which one’s yours?” I made a show of taking in the canines swarming about. Eight or ten of them were running around on the grassy slope. The rest were in the water, or down at the edge of the pond anyway. That’s where Barbara had ended up. She wasn’t swimming exactly, but she’d flopped in the shallows and was wallowing and rolling around.
That lady shook her head and informed me, “I’m allergic. Just come out to walk.”
“Don’t want to keep you from it,” I told her.
I watched some guy come over the hill. Not our Boudrot. Some willowy sort with a French bulldog behind him.
She kept pawing at my sailor top. “My Larry’s in the Coast Guard.”
I told myself some version of, “Uh-oh.”
Just then a black retriever came over to rub his nasty wet self against me. He was a leaner, the way some dogs are. He pitched himself against my knee and gazed up at me with his tongue hanging out as if to say, “Hey, buddy. Sorry for the mess.”
His owner came over to save me from him. Some student type, and she pulled out an earbud in order to tell me, “Whoops.”
I paid her back by tipping my head toward my friend and saying, “Her Larry’s in the Coast Guard.”
Right on cue, that woman said, “Budapest,” as she closed on the girl with the lab.
Earbuds wouldn’t save her now. She glared at me like I’d given her ebola.
Then I heard Desmond make a neck noise over in the shrubbery. I glanced his way and then back to the hilltop, and that crew was already there.
It was hard to miss that Boudrot, as puny as he was. He had a couple of colleagues with him, a pair of beefy guys with bad haircuts and bellies hanging over their jeans. Cons, I had to figure, that Boudrot had run with back in Parchman. He wasn’t remotely the sort to have any unconvicted friends.
Tula was standing between them. There wasn’t any question about it this time. She was in her civvies. Jeans and a sweater that was stretched and pulled and sagging like she’d been dragged around and mussed up. Even still, I could tell she wasn’t scared. Furious, more like it, and anxious for a chance to put all that fury to some use.