Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (25 page)

I rolled on out of the Hummer and eased over to that coupe. I had to pass before the open roadhouse doorway to get to it, but the balls kept clacking and the morning Fox News crew kept being irate about something. I squatted behind that filthy little Nissan and waited, but nobody came out of the place.

The Wonder Bar didn’t prove to be much help because the trunk lid was clothesline-wired shut. The latch had been punched out a great while ago, judging from the rust, and some anal-retentive hoodlum had thoroughly lashed that trunk lid down. I had to think the swag would be in there. Otherwise they would have just done a loop through and left it at that.

I didn’t have anything to cut the wire with, so all I could do was unwind it. That didn’t sit too well with Lance, who kept hissing, “Honey!” my way. I’d hold up a finger to buy me a minute and then wait to get honeyed at again. I was starting to have mixed feelings about Lance. He was part good old boy, part disco diva, part Victorian dancing master.

I stayed busy unspooling the clothesline wire while Lance kept pestering me about it. When I’d finally worked it all loose and lifted the lid, the hinges made a hellacious squawk. One of them was bent, and it moaned so that a guy came out of the roadhouse. He’d emerged partly to see what the racket was but partly as well to pee.

“Hey, champ,” he told me. “What’s doing?”

He wandered over my way. He was unzipping as he came. I glanced toward the Hummer and saw Curtis shaking his head. Whoever this fellow was, he wasn’t one of ours.

“Trunk’s busted,” I told him.

He was reaching in to pull out his member about the time he passed me. He walked a stride or two beyond the Nissan bumper and started sluicing into the lot.

“Toilet broke?” I asked him. I shrugged toward Lance and awaited instructions.

“Ain’t one,” that fellow said.

I could see a big faux-leather bag in the trunk. The zipper on top was busted, and the thing was laid half open. Lots of gun metal and pharmaceutical bottles. Plenty of Cryovacked weed.

“Do I know you?” my peeing buddy asked me.

“Naw,” I told him.

“Know that ain’t your car.”

It seemed to me like an ill-considered approach to say something provocative to a stranger while you were draining your bladder. If I were going to accuse a guy of messing with a car that wasn’t his, I’d be ready in case he decided he wanted to do something about it.

I had time to enter into a sort of consultation with Lance and Desmond. I shrugged in their direction. Lance drew a finger straight across his throat. Desmond pitched his head in that way that usually meant, “Go on and hit him.”

It didn’t quite seem fair. Then the guy turned to me so I had to watch him shake.

“Want to tell me what the fuck you’re up to?”

“Go on and zip,” I said.

“When did I start working for you?” He spat. He grinned.

I grinned right back. “So long.”

I slugged him hard.

He went down like he’d been pitched off the roof. His belly spilled out from under his shirttails, and I could see the handle of a pistol shoved in the waistband of his jeans. I had to think it would take him a quarter hour just to draw it out. I tried to pull the thing, but I couldn’t budge it.

Lance left the Hummer with Desmond and came over to join me by the Nissan.

“Would you look at that.” Lance pointed at the guy I’d slugged. “He’s not even put away.”

Lance stooped down and carefully tucked away that fellow’s privates. Most of them anyway but for a flap of skin he snagged in the zipper when he did that boy the courtesy of closing his blue jeans up.

Me and Desmond twitched and convulsed. We couldn’t help ourselves.

“That ought to give him something to remember us by,” Lance said. He glanced in the trunk. “Yep. All mine.”

Lance reached into the bag and drew out a TEC-9. He fished around for a loaded clip and found one. He slapped in the clip, jacked in a round, and tossed the gun at Desmond.

“Shoot them if I say.”

Then Lance struck out for the roadhouse door. He was a sight going away in his tube top and his plaid shorts and leopard flip-flops. He had a bit of a prance to the way he moved, especially now that satisfaction was at hand.

“Doubt he even needs us,” I told Desmond.

Desmond grunted as we followed.

“Don’t shoot shit,” I added.

Desmond had a snort for that.

It was so hard to keep up with how much trouble we were in already that I was holding it in my head as just “a lot.” I had to think shooting up an Alabama roadhouse would only compound all our problems. There’s only so much of a toxic mess we could hope to make and skate.

“Why don’t you stay out here?” Desmond said.

“Yeah, right,” I told him and went in.

I’ve been inside more shitty roadhouses than I can even begin to count. Through the mid-South and the deep South, and I worked a month in Ohio once where I passed evenings in some of the most run-down, bedraggled taverns I’ve ever seen. But I had never come across a more disreputable and slovenly excuse for a place of business than Pooky’s.

There was a trash can full of greasy paper plates and beer cans hard beside the door. There looked to be about as much trash on the floor as there was in the barrel itself. The place stank of grease, spilled beer, and cigarettes. I wasn’t half a yard inside before I was sticking to the cement floor.

It was dark but for the TV screen and the light over the pool table.

“Help you?” a guy said from behind the bar. It sounded more like a threat than an offer.

“You Pooky?” Lance asked him.

“Maybe.”

“Might want to get the fuck out.”

The fellow who maybe was Pooky produced a ball bat from behind the bar. He slapped the business end on his fleshy palm, which got a rise out of Lance. Probably not the rise Pooky had hope for. Lance giggled and stomped his feet.

“Wrong,” Lance said and glanced at Desmond who leveled his TEC-9 at a Fox News blonde and blew up the TV.

Now the three boys at the pool table were paying full attention to us.

One of them was wearing a uniform—deep green twill—like a janitor or a plumber might. Lance pointed his way.

“You,” he said. “Go.”

That was not the sort of talk that fellow had any reason to want to hear twice. He set his beer down on the pool table rail, made a few cowardly noises to the fellows he was leaving. Something about his wife and his daughter and his need to go on living.

“Go on then,” the little one told him as he pulled out the knife we’d heard about.

It was a massive shiny thing with plenty of facets to catch the light. Unless he was hoping to deflect bullets with the blade, I don’t know why he bothered.

“Hello, boys,” Lance said. “Know why I’m here?”

The big one laid his cue on the table. “Thirsty maybe.”

He went reaching for something.

“Uh-uh,” Desmond said his way.

There in the gloom, I think Desmond intended to make enough racket with that TEC-9—beyond the racket he’d already made destroying Pooky’s television—to discourage that boy from pulling out whatever pistol he had tucked away. Desmond was primed to shoot our Boudrot but not some stray Alabama pinhead, but somehow in racking that gun around, he hit the clip release by mistake.

His full banana clip dropped out of the slot and went clattering across the cement floor. Desmond made his “uh-oh” noise. He tried to corral the thing but kicked it. Lucky for us, those boys at the pool table were so used to being unlucky that they didn’t straightaway see the mishap for what it was. Instead we all just stood there for about a quarter minute looking at each other.

“What are you holding?” Lance asked me out the side of his mouth.

I didn’t have shit. I told Lance, “My breath.”

“Hey,” I heard the little one say to the big one. Then he pointed at us with his knife.

He must have been the brains of the duo. He seemed to suspect we’d screwed up somehow. He didn’t know how exactly. He’d heard all the racket from Desmond and only knew that him and his buddy weren’t actively getting shot.

“Come on, then,” he told us. I guess just to see if we would.

His partner muttered something at him, and the two of them quarreled there for a bit. That gave me occasion to ease up toward a stool by the roadhouse wall. Not a metal upholstered bar stool but a rickety oak one. That suited Pooky’s.

I heard the little one tell the big one, “Pull.”

The big one was reluctant. “He’ll shoot me,” he said of Desmond.

“Dropped his bullets.” That boy with the knife was too observant for his own good. “Go on,” he told his partner, and his partner reached back for his gun.

Now I was wishing I’d shifted aside that fellow’s belly out in the lot. His was just a .22, but that was better than a bar stool.

Lance stayed with the script while he could, even though his supporting cast had failed him.

“The way I hear it,” Lance said, “you boys made off with some shit that wasn’t yours.”

“Ain’t done it,” the puny one told him. “Hell, princess, we ain’t never laid eyes on you.”

“I remember you,” Lance told him. “Don’t see a damn munchkin every day.”

That sure did it. The puny one appeared to have no patience for getting reminded that he was puny.

“Fucker!” he said to Lance and then told his partner, “Pull, dammit!”

The big one brought his gun out. He juked and cringed like he was sorely afraid of getting shot. Desmond just had one bullet in the chamber, and he let that one fly. It dug into the block wall between those boys. You can’t really aim a TEC-9, and I don’t think Desmond was hoping to shoot anybody anyway.

He certainly wasn’t hoping to get shot in return or sliced open by a runt. The big one leveled his pistol at Desmond.

“Better know what you’re doing,” Lance suggested.

Truth be told, that boy didn’t look like he’d known much of anything for a while.

There weren’t too many options left for me. I just about could only do what I ended up doing. I had ahold of that bar stool by the legs and flung it at those boys. I followed hard behind it, and Desmond glided over from where he was. The idea was to get on top of that big one before he could squeeze off a round. That was Desmond’s job. He was on the flank for it. I had to take care of the little mouthy one with the hunting knife.

Lucky for me, those boys had thrown their pool cues on the table. I grabbed one up and started swinging.

The little one called me, “Fucker!” now.

He tried to close on me. His blade was long, but it was no match for a pool cue, so I caught him once on the shoulder and once just above his ear. That only made him madder.

He gave me a louder “FUCKER!” and came charging at me through the blows. He got close enough to be a danger to lay me open, but I just let his momentum carry him past me, and then I wailed on him from behind.

I finally caught him flush on the cowlick. The thud even made Lance say, “Oooohhh.”

I heard the knife hit the cement floor. It was followed straightaway by its owner. I wheeled around to help Desmond, but he’d managed to smother the bigger one by then. He had him in one of those Desmond bear hugs. That boy’s pistol was down at his side, but that didn’t keep him from firing the thing. He had no more sense than that.

He squeezed off four or five rounds straight into the concrete floor. It was a wonder a ricochet didn’t drop him and Desmond both together. Those bullets were singing all over the place. Me and Lance both flopped down flat, and the floor in Pooky’s was only barely fit for well-shod feet.

“Sweet Lord,” I heard Lance say. “I’m throwing all this away.”

I knew instantly he meant the tube top and the black watch tartan shorts. My brand-new coveralls were built for abuse, but that slab felt like a fly strip, so I knew I’d be throwing them away as well.

The large boy ran out of bullets, and me and Lance pried ourselves off the cement. We watched as Desmond flung that fellow around. That was his preference in a fight. He’d punch who he had to, but he’d always rather toss a cracker pinhead if he could. Pooky’s was perfect for that. No end of hard surfaces to bounce that boy off of.

“All right,” Lance said once he’d finally decided Desmond wasn’t about to wear out. “Let him be.”

Desmond pitched him one last time against the back block wall, and we all watched as that boy sank to the nasty slab floor with a groan.

“Who put you up to it?” Lance asked him.

That boy had started dumb and had gotten addled. He tried to raise a hand, but it was stuck to the floor.

“Was it Melvis?”

“Who the fuck’s asking?”

We all turned around to see who was talking at us now. The voice was high and phlegmy, a little on the wheezy side. It seemed to have come from a guy over by the roadhouse door. He was sitting in the shaft of light just aslant the open doorway. A bony old coot with stringy white hair and an oxygen tank on his lap. He had a tube running under his nose and a cigarette between his lips. He was parked in a wheelchair, appeared to be wearing just a housecoat.

“Goddammit, Melvis,” Lance shouted at him and went tearing across the place. He lost his flip-flops early on, and he hit Melvis at a dead run. Lance knocked the wheelchair over sideways, and the oxygen tank went bouncing and ringing across the floor.

Judging from the hard things they said to each other as they grappled like jungle cats, I got the impression Lance and Melvis had a volatile history between them.

The bartender told the both of them, “I’m calling the damn
po
lice.” Then he threw an empty vodka jug at them. It was plastic. It just bounced.

“Jesus,” I said to Desmond.

He sighed and told me, “Alabama.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Desmond drove us back to Lance’s house in the yellow Hummer, mostly because his hands had never touched the roadhouse floor. Worse still for Lance, Melvis must have lived with a half-dozen cats. The man had shown up nappy with cat hair, and Lance had functioned like a human lint brush. Lance was so sticky from lying down on the floor that most of the fuzz on Melvis had transferred once the two of them had grappled and rolled around.