Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (28 page)

“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.”

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.

That Boudrot looked the whole crowd of us over. It took him a while to pick me out. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have picked me out. Some guy in sailor whites? He finally laughed and pointed, and those buddies of his had a good hoot about it as well.

He left Tula and those boys on the hilltop and came sauntering down toward me. He tried to saunter anyway, but his gate was too damn short, so he bounced more than he meant to and came faster than he would have liked.

Larry’s mother was easing back my way just as that Boudrot closed. They both reached me at about the same time.

“Shit howdy,” that Boudrot told me. “Look at you.”

“Larry’s in the Coast Guard,” Larry’s mother said.

That Boudrot treated her to his shut-the-fuck-up glance and grabbed a handful of my top, a fair clump of chest hair too. “You look like a faggot,” he said.

A few of the dog owners heard him and took the kind of offense that civilized people take. They made disapproving faces at that Boudrot, but he wasn’t remotely the sort dialed in to give a happy shit.

“He’s in Budapest.”

“Shut it, sister,” that Boudrot told her.

I tried to steer her away, but she was no more the sort to get steered than that Bourdrot was the sort to get chastened.

“Constantinople,” she managed to get out before that Boudrot swung on her with his open hand.

You probably could have heard the racket of it way up in the deserted clubhouse. She went down without further commentary, just laid down on the ground. The civilians around looked torn at first between being appalled and grateful. Since they were fundamentally civilized, they went with appalled in the end.

One of the guys said into his phone, “Gotta go,” and stalked directly over. Big guy. Linebacker type.

“Don’t,” I told him, but it didn’t help.

That Boudrot pulled out a pistol, a shiny Smith & Wesson. He caught that boy on the jaw, never hesitated at all. The skin parted. The blood gushed. That fellow staggered back and stumbled. Before that Boudrot could wind up and hit him again, he sat down on the ground.

Now there was general consternation.

“Ya’ll go on,” that Boudrot said, and he waved his pistol to help them decide. It seemed to do the trick.

There was a lot of dog calling and frantic noises. While all those people moved away across the hillside from me and that Boudrot, it wasn’t like they were going to leave their dogs behind. The dogs, of course, didn’t seem too alarmed by the runty guy with the pistol, so they just kept darting and playing the way they’d been before.

“Where’s my money?” that Boudrot asked me.

“I’ve got it.”

“I don’t fucking see it.”

“It’s around.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Desmond’s bush was doing some shaking. Not I’m-trying-to-signal-you shaking but something closer to there’s-a-hornets’-nest-in-here.

“Where?” that Boudrot asked me and poked me on the breastbone with the barrel of his gun.

“Girl first.”

He laughed. He didn’t sound happy.

“Up in the car isn’t it?”

I gave him a shrug.

“Or it ain’t anywhere,” he said. “Burned through it, didn’t you? You and all them boys.”

I guess I grinned a little more than I should have. That Boudrot raised his pistol a foot from my head and pointed the bore of it at my right eye. It was just the sort of move I’d seen from him earlier, back on that hilltop off Kicker.

“Didn’t I tell you it’d all end up like this?”

I made like I couldn’t say, but I did sort of remember that Boudrot yelling at me and Desmond in the courthouse. The bailiffs wrestling with him and him still screaming about how we were as good as dead.

“Your money’s up there,” I said and pointed with my cowlick mostly toward the hilltop while I waited for Desmond to go on and shoot that Boudrot somewhere or another.

I looked toward his bush. The limbs were lurching and pitching. Then Desmond started singing out. In agony, it sounded like. That Boudrot heard the racket, and me and him watched the bush together as Desmond came fighting through it and flung himself into the pond.

“Ants!” he shouted. He ducked under the water and came up swatting himself all over. The dogs that hadn’t been gathered up yet all stopped where they were and barked. Even Barbara. Desmond went wild scraping ants off himself, big red ones from what I could see. His TEC-9 was either back in the bush or down with the golf balls and the eight irons.

I probably would have told myself, “Uh-oh,” but that Boudrot said it for me. He still had his pistol pointed at my eye. I turned my head enough to see Tula between those lackeys on the hilltop.

“Wasn’t ever about the money,” that Boudrot said and pulled the trigger.

I think I just had time enough to wish I was wearing something else. I doubt Popeye would have wanted to die in a sailor suit on a derelict golf course in Tuscaloosa. I sure had things I’d rather be doing and garden spots I’d yet to see.

I remember going rigid as the pistol hammer fell. I heard the dull metallic thud and waited for the explosion. Waited a little further. Waited a bit more. Then I stopped squinting and looked at the gun. That Boudrot broke out laughing.

That was twice in a day I’d been on the business end of an empty chamber.

“Next one’s for real,” he told me, but we didn’t get that far.

I shoved his wrist aside and grabbed him like I’d been trained in the army. He screamed when I dislocated his shoulder, just grunted when I broke his arm. He didn’t make much racket at all when I busted his nose with a Glasgow kiss. I tossed his Smith & Wesson in the pond.

He’d given over entirely to whimpering by the time he staggered out of my reach. I caught a glance of Tula up on the hilltop stomping one of those lackeys’ knees. He pitched and over and collapsed. Even from where I was, I could hear his pitiful shriek. She slugged the other one and bolted. He had too much gut to catch her. He didn’t even bother to chase her and, what with all the people, failed to pull out his gun.

“Fucker!” that Boudrot informed me. It came out primarily as nose blood.

Barbara had wandered from the lake by then. She jabbed my knee with her snout, and then—being a hound and all—she got distracted by a scent.

She alerted, that way hounds will sometimes, and she closed hard on that Boudrot. She sniffed his trouser leg for a good quarter minute and then chuffed once like a bear.

I was about to advise that Boudrot to either run or drop and cover, but he chose the first one before I could even speak. He was holding his bad arm with his good hand, and his nose was dripping all over his shirtfront as he struck out across the dam with Barbara hard behind him. She’d surge up to bite the back of his thigh, let him run some and close again.

There wasn’t much doubt she knew just who he was. When a guy mows down your littermates—point-blank with a shotgun—there’s little chance you’ll forget him. Even if you’re just a hound.

I went over to see to Desmond. He was still wallowing around in the pond.