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

him.
    “Naw.”
    “That Boudrot went to her place first.”
    Dale didn’t get alarmed exactly, but he finally displayed some genuine human interest. “Didn’t hurt her, did he?”
    I shook my head.
    “She hid in the freezer,” Desmond told him. “He tore up every damn thing in the house.”
    “Then that’s one fucker that’s done for.” Dale pulled a face and winced again.
    “Come on with us,” I told him. “We’re going to hunt him down.”
    Dale shouted across the way to K-Lo, “Boss man?” He pointed at me and Desmond.
    K-Lo shrugged by way of excusing Dale for the day, and then K-Lo spat. That was about as close to a “Yeah, go ahead,” as you’d ever get from K-Lo.
    Naturally, Dale wasn’t pleased to see Luther in the Escalade.
    “Shit,” Dale said when he laid eyes on him. “Ain’t got no use for this dirtbag.”
    “We need him,” Desmond told Dale in the low, rumbling declarative way that Desmond had of ending debate before it ever started.
    “Shotgun,” Dale said.
    I’d expected as much. I shrugged and said, “Go on.”
    So I rode in the back with Luther as we headed south toward Yazoo. The plan was to locate Tommy and Eugene back in the swamp in the national forest. They’d given that Boudrot up when we were hunting him down before, and it stood to reason he probably knew it somehow.
    “You might call Patty,” I suggested to Dale.
    He got all shirty at the suggestion. He turned half around to tell me he guessed he knew who he ought to call when.
    That must have been the first good look that Luther got of Dale, because that’s when he chose to ask him, “Who beat the living shit out of you?”
    Dale’s initial impulse was to reach over the seat back and take a swipe at Luther. Luther dodged and Dale hit me. I would have popped him back, but the swipe itself had pulled a few of his stitches, so he was hurt already without any help from me.
    Tommy and Eugene had a place they sort of shared in the national forest, which was chiefly massive cypress bog and reptile habitat. They had a house up on stilts made out of most anything that had come to hand. Lots of road signs for siding and bits of sheet metal from sheds they’d taken apart. Actual ownership of the lodge, as they called it, was disputed and unsettled. That worked well enough as long as they were both sober or both drunk. When just one of them got loaded, the other one always tried to steal the place. They had some kind of deed they kept shut up in a cupboard, and the sober one would trot it out to try to make the drunk one sign.
    We left the highway at Silver City and went down through Midnight and Louise, got gas at Spanish Fort, and then headed straight into the forest. Desmond tensed up behind the wheel. Luther got a little antsy as well. Delta boys weren’t used to standing trees in any concentration. The national forest was all that was left of what the entire Delta had once been. A heavily wooded thicket, swampy and marshy by turns. The Delta had mostly been cleared for farming, canals cut and swamps drained. There was nowhere much to find leafy canopy overhead. You had to come clear to the national forest just to go into the woods.
    “Dark in here,” Luther said.
    Desmond made a neck noise.
    Dale was from Little Rock and wasn’t generally the sort to much care where he was.
    “I might ought to been there. I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Patty and how if he hadn’t cheated on her with a string of tramps from Memphis to Meridian, then the two of them might have been sharing a roof, and he could have locked horns with that Boudrot.
    Nobody cared, particularly Desmond and Luther who’d moved on to how little they liked being in the woods.
    We passed the big sheltered corkboard with the map of the forest on it and the specimen cypress just down from it surrounded by rail fencing.
    “You know where you’re going?” Dale asked Desmond.
    Desmond told Dale a form of “Yeah.” It came out sounding