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

“That Boudrot’s wound too tight.”
    “I too am wound tight!” K-Lo informed me. He went all proper and vaguely foreign when he got excessively irritated.
    “He’ll blow a gasket or we’ll catch him,” I told K-Lo.
    Desmond nodded. “This kind of bullshit never lasts.”
    K-Lo spat. He was an accomplished spitter. Even better at it than Kendell. More enthusiastic anyway.
    “He’ll go somewhere he ought not to be,” I assured him, “and somebody’ll plug his sorry ass.”
    K-Lo liked the sound of that. He smiled my way and said. “Let’s hope.”
    So me and Desmond and K-Lo stood together hoping in front of the store while Luther (we thought) kept trying to track down Percy Dwayne on the phone. It turned out he was playing blackjack on Desmond’s Motorola, which Desmond noticed before I did and gave Luther a slap about.
    He staggered Luther. “What!”
    “Give me that,” Desmond told him as he took back our phones. “Where’s Dale anyway?” he asked K-Lo.
    K-Lo plucked a Pall Mall from the flattened pack in his shirt front pocket. He shrugged. He shook his head.
    “Tell him we’ll be back,” Desmond said and then told me and Luther, “Let’s go.”
    We drove straight to the Sonic where they thought they weren’t quite open until Desmond pulled in, blew his horn once for service, and then informed them through the speaker they were more open than they knew.
    “I’m thinking we go back and pick up Dale,” I said. “Take him with us down to Yazoo and round up Eugene and Tommy.”
    Desmond and Luther could agree about one thing. Neither one of them wanted Dale in the car.
    “We’ve got to look out for him. The man’s let himself go. He’s in no shape to look after himself.”
    They still weren’t persuaded we needed to suffer his company and haul him around.
    “So he gets cut on a little,” Luther said. “Maybe he’s got it coming.”
    “If that Boudrot goes at him,” I assured Luther, “he’ll turn Dale into gator-sized chunks.” I let that sink in and then asked Desmond, “You ready to let that happen?”
    Desmond grunted. Desmond fingered his relish packet. “Not if you say it like that.”
    Luther whined and grunted.
    “What exactly did Dale do to you?” I asked him.
    “Said I was shoplifting,” Luther informed me with no little indignation. “I might have stole all manner of shit, but I ain’t never stole nothing that way.”
    That was the leading trouble with Luther’s ilk. They were all criminal shitheads with standards, and you’d tie up with them if you accused them of something lower than they’d do. Of course, it was always hard to know exactly what they’d consider lower.
    “He take you in or just wail on you?” Desmond wanted to know.
    “Both!” Luther told him. He was still indignant about it.
    Dale was on the loading dock when we got back to K-Lo’s, and he was looking awfully rough, even by Dale’s standards. He had a black eye and a puffy lip. He was showing a colleague his stitches as me and Desmond came out the back door with K-Lo and into the loading bay. Luther was back in the Escalade trying to track down Percy Dwayne.
    “Come here,” K-Lo told Dale. He pointed at us. “Listen to them.”
    The new Dale was a slight improvement over the old juiced-up, weight-lifting Dale, but not enough of an improvement to make Dale sensible and savory. Back when he was fit and musclebound, at least we could covet Dale’s physique, but now he was just a pile of flab, and we had some of that already.
    “What?” Dale asked us.
    “That Boudrot’s on the warpath,” I told him. “Looking for you.”
    “Fine by me,” Dale said, but when he tried to grin, he winced. The inside of his bottom lip was all black and brambly with stitches.
    “What happened to you?” Desmond asked him.
    “Got in it with a boy.” Dale shrugged the way he always did, like getting beat to a bloody pulp was a manly sort of thing to do.
    “Talk to Patty?” I asked