Ranchero by Rick Gavin Read Free Book Online

opposed to the sort who flings off his diaper and shits on his own sidewalk.
    I released the clip from that fellow’s pistol and threw it over the house. I flung the gun itself into a kudzu patch at the end of Longstreet Street.
    “Hey,” I said to Desmond, “you know a place called Tootie’s?”
    Desmond nodded as “Satin Soul” struck up in his pocket. He fished his cell phone out. “You again,” he told me, and tossed the phone my way.
    Then he went back to scuffing up the neighbor, who, truth be told, was already about as scuffed as he needed to get.
    “I thought I was supposed to call you,” I said by way of hello.
    “Wrinkle,” Percy Dwayne told me. “Make it about twelve thirty.”
    “I haven’t decided if I’m going to make it at all.”
    Then Percy Dwayne got earnest. You can always tell when a cracker has gone all grim and sincere because they start by way of preamble with some version of “Listen, buddy” and say it almost like an intimate whisper to make you pay attention.
    My Dubois’s choice was “Hey here, sport,” and I fell silent as a courtesy while he told me everything I’d do and why.
    Five thousand in twenties in a sack on the front porch of some shit hole up in Webb, where they tend to specialize in shit holes. I doubted money in a sack on a porch up there would linger for very long.
    Percy Dwayne was still a lot less particular about what I’d get in return. Gil’s Ranchero. Somewhere. Sometime or another.
    “All right,” I told him. “Around twelve thirty.”
    “You’re doing it then?” he asked me.
    “I guess. You’ve got me by the short and curlies, don’t you?”
    “Damn straight,” Percy Dwayne told me.
    “I’ll get to the bank in the morning. Half past twelve in Webb.”
    Percy Dwayne hooted with cracker delight. He dropped the connection hard like he’d bounced my Motorola off a wall.
    Desmond tossed his fellow my way. He landed cringing at my feet. He looked a lot like I’d looked a little earlier in the day.
    Desmond got us lost briefly in the bowels of Creekside Estates. We got turned around coming off Longstreet Street, took bad turns at Stuart and Hooker, and ended up on Lee Boulevard, the grand drag of the place.
    I was reminded of Richmond’s Monument Avenue. That appeared to be the model, anyway, but instead of statues of Confederate luminaries on horseback, Creekside Estates had live oaks down the middle of the road, and about every other one was rigged with a block and tackle and had a car engine dangling from it.
    “Like Christmas,” Desmond said.
    “Or end times,” I suggested.

SIX
     
    Tootie’s was about what you’d expect a Tootie’s to be, particularly out in the countryside in Mississippi. It was an unpainted cinder-block roadhouse with—at only a little past six—a parking lot full of muddy pickup trucks.
    There was no sign I could see, which caused me to ask Desmond, “You sure this is the place?”
    “Oh yeah. Tootie’ll be sitting at the end of the bar drinking an Iron City and smoking one of those stinking cherry cigars.”
    “Think Luther’s in there?”
    Desmond shrugged.
    “How are we going to do this?”
    “No we to it. You’re going to do it. I’m too black to go in Tootie’s. Not much chance I’d come out of there alive.”
    “Really?”
    Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Cracker squared.”
    “What’ll they do to me?”
    “Sell you a beer for four dollars and, if Luther’s around, about anything else you might need.”
    “What do I need?”
    “Get some Oxy. Dicker with him. Luther loves that.”
    Desmond parked about as far away as he could get and still be on the property, well over where the lot ended and a weedy patch of stray junked cars began.
    I’ve never been one of those guys who moves with ease through the human stratosphere, don’t have a knack for talking to a farmer like a farmer or a mechanic like a mechanic. It doesn’t matter who I get thrown in with, I’m always just my middling