Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) by Rick Gavin Read Free Book Online

Desmond didn’t just know that Boudrot on paper, the way Kendell and Tula did. He was a madman on a mission, and the mission appeared to be us. It seemed sensible, instead of sitting and waiting, that we ought to go after him.
    “So?” Desmond said.
    “I guess we need to find Dale.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And then Percy Dwayne and the rest of them.”
    “Right.”
    “Then we ought to go get that asshole.”
    “That’s what I’m thinking. What about Kendell and Tula?”
    “One way or another,” I said to Desmond, “Tula’s going to Baton Rouge.”
    By the time we got back outside, the EMT techs had come and were examining the victim in the lighted bay of their truck. Kendell was at the bumper suffering a disquisition from Luther on the assorted virtues of worsted wool.
    “Do something with him,” Kendell told us both.
    Desmond pointed at his car.
    Luther knew he was beaten but that didn’t keep him from muttering about gabardine as he walked across the weedy lawn and climbed into the Escalade.
    “Same as the other?” Kendell asked us of the house.
    “A little less Jesus, but yeah. Has Tula checked in?” I asked him.
    He nodded. “Went out to that place Dale’s renting near Moorhead. No sign of him.”
    “He’s got some girlfriend in Jackson. Probably over there with her.”
    “Dale?” Kendell asked me with appropriate skepticism. Dale had no charm, and ever since he’d given up the steroids, he didn’t have a physique to speak of either, unless you counted lumps of flab in unexpected places.
    “Hey!” the cut-up boy from the yard shouted from the back of the rescue squad truck.
    “Think you can find him?” Kendell asked us. He glanced toward the busted TV in the yard. “Like … soon?”
    “Yeah,” Desmond said.
    “Hey!”
    “Bring Tula in,” I told Kendell. “Let her go to Baton Rouge.”
    “She can take care of herself.”
    “Let her get C.J. safe down there. Me and Desmond’ll see to that Boudrot.”
    “Hey!”
    “Should have finished him the first time,” Desmond said.
    I gave him my usual look. The two of us had had this quarrel before.
    Usually Kendell would have chimed in with how he didn’t want to hear about lawlessness. He’d throw up his hands and shake his head, make a point of walking away. This time, though, he stayed where he was and said to us, “Maybe you should have.”
    A guy dead from a chair leg and a couple of houses laid to frenzied waste can have a way of reordering a man’s priorities. Even a man like Kendell.
    “Make her go,” I said to him. “And it has to come from you.”
    “Hey!”
    Kendell nodded. He said to me, “All right.”
    “Hey!” that cut-up fellow shouted again. This time I headed for him. “I’m talking to you!” he said.
    I mounted the bumper and stepped inside the bay where one of the techs was cleaning and suturing a cut on that fellow’s arm while the other played a game on his phone with near Talmudic devotion.
    “What?” I asked that boy. His underpants were staggeringly filthy in the bright truck light.
    His bottom lip curled like he might cry. “Where’s my goddamn beer?”

 
    SIX
    We ended up waiting for Dale at K-Lo’s. If we didn’t know where his lady friend lived, it stood to reason that Acadian fuckstick wouldn’t have any idea either. Luther passed the time trying to get in touch with Percy Dwayne Dubois, which meant he used all our phones to call lowlifes and blood kin and see if he could get any of them on the line. He couldn’t, as it turned out—the practical downside of universal caller ID. They didn’t want to talk to Luther, and they didn’t know from us.
    K-Lo was emphatically unhappy. He was still mad about the damage that Boudrot had done to his storefront, and he seemed upset in a general way that he had hothead competition. K-Lo preferred it when he was the only loose cannon in greater Indianola, the one guy in a sputtering rage for no good reason at all.
    “Can’t last,” I told him.