Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (14 page)

He shook his head and told me, “Martha.”

“Don’t you even say her name!” Uncle Flo shouted our way. “Best damn squeeze I ever had.”

“You stole
his
girl?” Luther asked. He was out and standing by now.

“Wife,” our Greer confessed. “I was kind of gone on applejack.”

“Your aunt?” Dale asked him. There were lines Dale drew when it came to women, and apparently fooling with uncles’ wives was a fairly bright one for him.

For Luther too, to judge by his squawking. “She as old as him?” he wanted to know.

Our Greer hung his head and nodded. “I told you,” he said. “Applejack.”

“Maybe you can work all this out later,” I suggested to Uncle Flo.

He spat just like his brother had. “Ain’t so sure,” he said.

I could tell by the neck noises Desmond was making that he was building toward a conniption. The longer he got to study his car, the worse he felt about it. If I let him reach the point where he got indignant enough, somebody would have to die or at least suffer monumentally.

Desmond was sure to sail up onto the porch and grab whichever Greer was handy and pitch him around the property until he was fit for stew. If Desmond had any energy left after that, he’d go get the other one, and there weren’t enough muskets and Buntline revolvers around to even slow him down.

“I’ll get you another one,” I told Desmond, and I jabbed my thumb toward his Escalade.

“New off the lot,” Desmond said.

“All right.”

“Loaded.”

Me and Desmond still had most of the cash we’d taken off that Boudrot the first time around. We kept it in a toolbox on a shelf down in Pearl’s basement. I had to figure I had four or five Escalades worth of money left.

“You’re on your own for rims,” I told him.

“Using these,” Desmond said and pointed at one of his current gleaming, faceted specimens. “Ain’t nobody shot them yet.”

“Keep all them down here,” I said to Desmond as I moved toward the porch riser.

Dale made a move to come with me, but not a strident, decisive one. So all Desmond had to do was raise a hand and tell him, “Naw.”

“You got Percy Dwayne Dubois in there somewhere?” I shouted up to those Greer brothers as I mounted the stairs.

“Who the hell wants to know?” Uncle Flo trained his revolver on me.

“I do, shithead.” I cleared two risers.

“Far enough, buddy.”

The sight of that Buntline pointed my way just made me hotter still.

“Lower that damn thing.”

Uncle Flo chose otherwise. I heard the hammer click as he drew it back, like tumblers in a lock.

I’d had plenty of guns pointed at me through the years, in law enforcement and repo and even out in the natural world. A fellow with a gun usually felt like he was obliged to point it at something. If you’d shown up to arrest him or reclaim his Xbox, it might as well be you.

The worst thing I could do was stop or show even a hint of wavering. I couldn’t let the likes of Uncle Flo cow me with a gun.

“I’m going to shove that thing right up your ass.”

Among the threats I could have selected, that turned out to be a poor choice. I couldn’t have known about Uncle Flo’s history of hemorrhoids and various anal calamities. So I didn’t imagine that he’d be especially sensitive about what got shoved and where. For me, it was just something to say. There’s a world of places a Buntline revolver won’t fit with ease or grace, and a man’s bunghole is surely one of them.

Then I heard our Greer yell, “Don’t!”

And damned if Uncle Flo didn’t pull the stinking trigger. I heard the hammer hit the pin with a dull thunk. Then I just stood there and waited to die, but beyond the thunk nothing really happened. Uncle Flo, as it turned out, went around with an empty chamber for safety’s sake, and the hammer just happened to come down on it after the several shots he’d fire. It was just dumb luck. That’s the only thing that spared me. I was maybe four feet away from him. He would have been hard-pressed to miss.

I didn’t give that fool the chance to squeeze the trigger again. I took the last two stairs in one bound and yanked the gun out of Uncle Flo’s hand. It was shortly thereafter that I got to hear all about his rectal troubles because I kicked him so hard in the ass that I sent him sailing off the porch. There wasn’t any shrubbery to break his fall. He landed on an ancient wheelbarrow carcass and a chunk of tractor tire.

“Hell, man,” I shouted down his way, “what are you thinking?”

He just stayed where he was and whimpered. I turned and hurled that Buntline revolver out into the weedy side yard.

That Greer’s daddy opened his mouth like he had a thing he wanted to tell me.

“Shut up,” I said.

He reconsidered.

“Where’s Percy Dwayne?” I asked him.

Whatever they’d been planning on, he knew it was all over.

“In here,” he told me, and I followed that Greer’s daddy into the house.

The place smelled like the inside of brogan in July, and the rooms were all piled up and heaped with clothes and junk and human litter. The whole place looked like the sort of nest a rat would build on a dare.

That Greer led me down his dingy hallway to what proved a closet door. He had a ladder-back chair cocked under the knob that he kicked out of the way. He flung open the door. That closet was in the shape of the rest of the house. There was one bare wire hanger left on the rod. Everything was down on the floor, including Percy Dwayne who was curled up asleep on about a foot and a half worth of junk.

“What’s the story here?” I asked that Greer.

Percy Dwayne groaned and turned his back to us, snored a little.

“Stole from us.”

“He steals from everybody.”

“It was shit we couldn’t have stole.”

In my experience with Percy Dwayne, he had an unerring sense of stealing shit people simply couldn’t have stole.

“You going to bring him back?”

“You really want him?”

“It’s Flo mostly. I’d have just kicked him around and left it at that.”

“You can kick him around now if you want to. I can give you a few minutes.”

But all the spark had gone out of the enterprise by then.

I poked Percy Dwayne with the toe of my boot. He groaned and stretched and rolled.

He looked at me. He eyed that Greer.

“Come on,” I said.

Percy Dwayne yawned and kneaded a shoulder kink. He asked me finally, “Why?”

*   *   *

We left our Greer at his daddy’s house to help nurse on his uncle who was sitting up by the time me and Percy Dwayne came out onto the porch. I got a dose of news straight from Uncle Flo about his various posterior complaints.

“Anything broken?” I asked him.

“Hell, I don’t know.”

If Uncle Flo had said he was all right, I think I would have kicked him a time or two just because. Instead I let “I don’t know” and a tender backside get him off the hook.

Me and Desmond and Dale and Luther and Eugene and Barbara and Percy Dwayne all piled in Desmond’s Escalade and backed out of the yard at breakneck speed. That wasn’t normally Desmond’s way, but he’d moved on to his new car already.

“I’m thinking yellow this time around. You know, that creamed corn color they’ve got.”

I didn’t know what to say for a few seconds there. “We talking Cadillacs?” I finally asked him.

Desmond nodded. “Black’s all right,” he said. “But awful hot in the sun.”

He was flat racing along the gravel road that led from the Greer farm to the blacktop. Rocks were pinging off the fender wells and dust was boiling up all over.

“Act like you still love her a little,” I told him.

“Can’t,” Desmond said back. “Don’t.”

We arrived at the junction by the blacktop in pretty much a full skid.

“What’s with him?” Percy Dwayne asked of Desmond. “And where are we going anyway?”

I swung around and told him over the seat back, “You’re welcome all to hell.”

He took a few seconds to consider what he might need to be grateful about. “Them?” he finally asked me and did a spot of country pointing. “I’d have gotten loose whenever I wanted.”

“They had you shut up in a closet.”

“They didn’t mean no harm,” Percy Dwayne insisted.

“One of them tried to shoot him,” Luther said.

“But for an empty chamber,” I told Percy Dwayne, “I’d be dead.”

Percy Dwayne gave that some thought as well. He seemed to believe he ought to say something sympathetic and compassionate, but he was too much of a thieving lowlife cracker to know what that might be. “Yeah,” he finally said my way. “Well.”

Desmond short-circuited the niceties directly after that. “Boudrot’s out,” he barked at Percy Dwayne without letting his gaze stray from the road. A good thing since we were roaring down the blacktop toward the truck route at about ninety.

“What Boudrot?”

“Fuckstick,” Luther told his uncle. “Run off from a road crew.”

“So?”

Eugene piped in from the way back, “Killed all my dogs.”

“What’s that then?” Percy Dwayne pointed with his nose at Barbara.

“She’s shot too, just not enough.”

“Whatever went with the Mandrell sisters? They in Branson or somewhere?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

“Hit him,” me and Desmond told Dale in two-part harmony.

Dale grinned and then winced because of his bruises and laid-open places. He drew back and punched Percy Dwayne in the ear.

We came out on the truck route over by Leland between Lusco’s and the Kermit the Frog Museum.

“Where are we going?” Desmond asked me.

That was a fair enough question, and I was working on an answer when my phone buzzed in my pocket. That’s when I got the voicemail from Tula. It was nearly three hours old.

“Which way?” Desmond wanted to know.

“Call Kendell,” I said.

“What’s up?” Desmond asked me.

“I think Tula found Boudrot.” I played her message for Desmond.

Desmond was trying to reach Kendell when a call came buzzing in on my phone.

I checked the screen. “It’s her,” I said. I answered the call, said, “Hey.”

There was only car noise there at first and shitty country music.

“Hey,” that Boudrot finally told me, “fucker.”

FOURTEEN

Now the cops got profoundly interested. That’s the galling thing about police. They seem to hold back their fury and passion when just civilians are involved, but once an officer is in peril there’s hardly anything they won’t do.

“He’s got Tula,” was about all Desmond needed to say to Kendell.

“Let me make a few calls,” Kendell told him, and he was off the line.

“Got your girl,” that Boudrot had told me.

He was just guessing, as it turned out. Of course, I’d jumped right in and confirmed for him that Tula was something special to me. I’d described to that Boudrot in detail the way I’d take him apart if he caused her any harm.

He’d cackled. He had a heck of a cackle, an evil genius sort of thing. “Thought so,” he’d said and had added, “Catch you later.”

He’d cut me off in the middle of another animated threat. I’d been stewing ever since. I couldn’t help but figure I’d ratcheted up the danger on Tula. It didn’t help that Percy Dwayne was keen to tell us everything about that Boudrot that his wife had told him after that Boudrot had nabbed her a few years back.

“Sissy says he’s a hound,” Percy Dwayne informed us. “Always drinking them energy drinks. Got this Red Bull hard-on all the time.”

Knowing Percy Dwayne, I imagine he thought he was being helpful. He probably felt sure he was telling us stuff about that Boudrot we needed to know. So I didn’t hit him or even turn around and bark at him. I was consoled, to the extent I could be, by what I knew of Tula. She was just the sort of creature who’d snap a Red Bull hard-on off.

“Bag still at Junior’s?” I asked Desmond.

He nodded. “Get it?”

“Yeah.”

Junior was related to Desmond’s mother in some complicated fashion I’d never quite puzzled out. He was a cousin by marriage or a step-in-law. I was only certain that he had a storm cellar where me and Desmond sometimes stored our accumulated armaments. We had a big duffel full of guns that I used to keep in my car shed apartment until Pearl saw me fooling with it one day when she showed up to drop off a cobbler.

She was such a helpless prattler that I knew she’d talk about it at canasta or garden club or ladies’ circle at the church. Then word would travel, like word does, through various family trees, until it reached some shiftless far-flung lowlife down a branch somewhere, and I’d come home one day to find me and Desmond comprehensively unarmed.

So now we shifted that bag of guns around like an unpapered refugee. Since we wanted to keep Junior’s cellar a secret, we stopped at a chicken place in Web. We bought those boys a bucket to keep them busy and left them there at the restaurant. Me and Desmond rode over on our own to pick our duffel up.

“Tula’ll be all right,” Desmond told me on the way. “She won’t even be scared. She’s a hard case.”

I think I managed some nodding. “I let him know she’s my girl. I should have known better than that.”

“He won’t hurt her.” Desmond was just gassing now. “Sure won’t kill her,” he said. “He wants us, and he won’t get us if he does a thing to her.”

“Happy coincidence,” I told Desmond. “I sure as shit want him back.”

Junior was home, of course, playing some game on his TV. Desmond had set him up with a repoed plasma and a PlayStation we’d confiscated, so now Junior both collected disability from some vague lumbar complaint and sat around killing zombies and Nazis all day.

Desmond knocked on the door screen, and Junior told us (pretty much like he always did), “I ain’t said nothing to nobody.”

“Good,” I told him through the screen wire.

Desmond opened the door and headed straight back into Junior’s kitchen. We kept a key hidden in a cabinet Junior never cleaned or used. I stood there and watched Junior cut an undead Nazi colonel in half with a Thompson submachine gun.

“So sometimes they’re zombies and Nazis both?”

Junior looked at me like I was stone-cold fool. He gave a little snort and said, “Yeah.”