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“If he did, me and you don’t know shit. Larry needed money, and we made a loan. Shawnica’s brother and all that. We didn’t ask him any questions.”

  “He won’t buy it,” Desmond told me.

  “Might if it’s all we give him.”

  We eased our way into Greenville proper practicing what we’d say. It had been the grandest of Delta towns back when the cotton went out on the river and the steamboats called in a regular sort of way. It was still beautiful with its wide boulevards and massive live oak canopies if you squinted and managed to close off the rot and the barrenness of the place. The churches were still operating. The storefronts were half empty. What had once been sprawling hotels by the levee were more plywood than glass these days.

  I was hoping I might run into Officer Raintree and let her get a look at me uncited and unarrested. When I’d rolled out of bed, I’d put on better clothes just on the outside chance that I’d be racing along somewhere and she’d come up behind me. She wasn’t around, though. The culprits pew was empty in the hallway. We found Kendell at the desk he kept in the squad room. He didn’t use it much, preferring to be in his cruiser out on the prowl. He wasn’t looking to hit his twenty and retire. Kendell was keen to make earthly improvements, while me and Desmond, in this instance, were doing what we could to nudge things the other way.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Not here.”

  There were only a couple of clerks around and one tubby lieutenant I saw sometimes at the tamale hut in Greenwood. Kendell stood up and motioned for us to follow him. We went not just into the hallway but out of the building and back to the street.

  “What’s Larry into?” That was for either of us to take.

  I gave Kendell my best blank shrug.

  Desmond said, “Shawnica’s Larry?”

  Kendell applied to Desmond a hard once-over before he nodded sharply once.

  Then Desmond shrugged and looked at me.

  I said to Kendell, “Best ask Larry.”

  We were poor thespians. Kendell exhaled and said, “All right.” He stepped to his cruiser and opened the driver’s door. “Follow me over,” he said.

  “We’re fucking awful,” I told Desmond once we’d climbed in my Ranchero. “You especially. Shawnica’s Larry?”

  “Ain’t like there’s only one Larry around.”

  Kendell headed out Washington toward the truck route.

  “Where the hell’s he going,” I said.

  Desmond just shook his head. We followed Kendell east on the truck route and then north on 61 all the way up to the town of Cleveland, about thirty miles altogether. Then Kendell turned back east on Route 8 and whipped in at the Bolivar County Medical Center, where we parked alongside him in the lot.

  I climbed out from behind the wheel, pointed at the building, and said to Kendell, “Izzy?”

  He nodded. “Got beat half to death.”

  “You thinking Larry did it?” Desmond asked him.

  Kendell shook his head. “I’m thinking Larry’s next.”

  Kendell talked us onto the proper floor, not ICU exactly but close enough. The nurse at the desk, a brittle woman in a sky blue cardigan, gave Kendell the stink eye. She didn’t appear to have any use for cops.

  “Washington County,” she said and looked us over like we’d come from Lapland and were dressed in reindeer fur. “Stay here.”

  She went down the hall and ducked into a room, came back shortly and told us, “Five minutes.” She walked us down to the door she’d just come out of and tapped her wrist to make us mindful of the time as we walked in.

  It was a double room. There was a greenish guy in the bed nearer the door. He had drips going in and oxygen, and he was about as dusty sage as a human can get. He looked at us as we crossed toward Izzy’s bed over by the window. He said something, I had to think, by the way he clouded up his oxygen mask.

  My first impression of Izzy was that he was cleaner than I’d ever seen him. They’d shaved off all his hair just to stitch up his head. He had a cast on one leg, and it was up in traction. His left wrist was broken. His right wrist, too, and a bunch of fingers judging from the plaster and the splints. Both of his eyes were black. He had stitches along his jawline and some kind of drainage tube coming out of a hole in his chest.

  “Sweet Lord,” Desmond said at the sight of him. It was about the only thing fitting to say.

  Izzy grinned at us, revealing a couple of broken teeth.

  “Who did this?” I asked. I directed the question at Kendell, but Izzy volunteered an answer that I couldn’t begin to make out. Part toothlessness and part Percocet. He laughed and drooled in closing. Then he tried to scratch his nose and about clubbed himself unconscious. Izzy’s twitchy nervousness didn’t blend well with narcotics.

  “They found him like this in the road.”

  “Where?” Desmond asked.

  “Out by Laughlin,” Kendell told us. “Mile or two from his place.”

  “Somebody toss him out of a car?” I wanted to know.

  “Eventually,” Kendell said.

  He pulled a notepad out of his back pocket. He flipped it open and read out injuries like they were menu specials. “Sixty-seven stitches. Eight broken fingers. Two broken wrists. One fractured forearm. A leg busted in two places. One broken foot.” Kendell reached over and uncovered what I’d taken for Izzy’s good leg. “A bunch of busted teeth. Collapsed lung or something. Cop I was talking to couldn’t say.”

  “What’s this got to do with Larry?” Desmond asked.

  “Getting to that,” Kendell told him. That was the stickler in Kendell. You couldn’t hope to hurry him up. He did things in the order he saw fit. “The cop that found him asked Izzy to describe who did it. The boy can draw a little, so he took down the details and went ahead and made a sketch, too.”

  Kendell pulled a lone folded sheet of paper from his front shirt pocket and handed it to Desmond. He opened it up, looked at it, handed it to me. It was a girl of some sort in what looked to me like a prep school uniform, right down to the socks and shiny patent leather shoes. She had short black hair. Nose studs. Eyebrow rings. A tattoo on her neck. The drawing made her look petite.

  I held up the sketch so Izzy could see it. “She did this?”

  Izzy nodded. Izzy told me, “Eeahh.”

  “Who’d she have with her?”

  Izzy shook his head.

  “Just her,” Kendell told us. “She chatted Izzy up at the grocery store. Asked him for a ride. Checkout girl remembered her, said that was pretty close.”

  “Still don’t see what this got to do with Larry,” Desmond said.

  Kendell was ready now. “That’s all she wanted from Izzy. Wanted to know where Larry was.”

  “Izzy wouldn’t tell her?” I asked Kendell, eyeing Izzy’s battered body up and down. “Or Izzy didn’t know?”

  “Told her what he could. Must have sent her over where Shawnica used to live.”

  “Place in Sunflower?” Desmond asked.

  Kendell nodded. Shawnica had moved out six months back. Fight with the landlord. Fight with the neighbors. She was a bad one for quarrels and hard feelings.

  “What happened over there?” I asked Kendell.

  He consulted his pad. “Mrs. Ruth Marie Messick. She’s in the ICU in Ruleville.”

  “Same shit?”

  “Same shit,” he told me.

  Me and Desmond eyed each other. Kendell saw us do it. He just stood by and waited. Kendell was awfully gifted at that sort of thing.

  “Think Ruth Marie Messick knows where Shawnica went?” I asked Desmond.

  “Doubt it.”

  “Fifty-three-year-old white woman,” Kendell said. “Not even conscious yet.”

  “What the hell’s that girl want with Larry?” Desmond asked like he couldn’t imagine the answer.

  “That’s kind of what I was hoping to know,” Kendell told us both.

  He stood there waiting, giving us time to break. I don’
t know why we didn’t.

  “This girl have a car?” I asked Kendell.

  “Does now. Ruth Messick’s Dodge.”

  “We’d better find Larry,” Desmond said. “No telling what he’s up to.”

  Desmond sold it a little too hard. Kendell told us both, “Yeah, right.”

  The nurse in the sky blue sweater came back and jabbed her thumb toward the hallway.

  Back in the lot, Kendell said to us both, “I don’t care much about Larry. He gets what he gets. It’s plain to me he’s mightily pissed somebody off. But this kicking the shit out of folks between here and him, that’s going to stop one way or another.”

  What could we do but nod and mumble?

  “Bring him in,” Kendell told us. “You hear me?”

  We did. We nodded.

  Me and Desmond were leaning against the Ranchero tailgate as Kendell drove away.

  “Don’t say it,” Desmond told me.

  “We need a shiftless ex-con in-law policy. Don’t you think?”

  Desmond grunted.

  “We probably ought to start with Shawnica.”

  “And tell her what?” Desmond asked me.

  “Ninja schoolgirl assassin on the loose. It’s something she ought to know.”

  “I’d almost like to see those two go at it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Almost.”

  * * *

  The clinic where Shawnica worked was just south of Indianola. If I’d had a dog, I wouldn’t have taken him into the place on a bet. A fellow who thought Shawnica was a good choice for reception wasn’t likely to know the first thing about veterinary medicine.

  I parked in the shade and stayed in the car, sent Desmond in alone. He was gone for a good ten minutes before they both came out together. Shawnica was wearing a lab coat covered in, I guess, cat hair, and she was in something far more incendiary than her usual rage, which made it an apocalyptic, end-times sort of thing.

  “What’s this SHIT?” she was yelling at me as she stalked toward my car.

  I climbed out. There wasn’t a thing to do but stand before her and take it. You had to hand it to Shawnica. She knew how to pitch a fit.

  She waved her arms and sniped at me in that sassy voice of hers. She told me back everything Desmond had just finished telling her in the clinic. Somehow the whole bloody business was our fault.

  “We’ve got to sit Larry down,” I told her, “and figure out exactly who he pissed off.”

  “Who is this bitch?” Shawnica asked me. “She don’t want to be finding me.”

  “Got a gun?” I asked.

  Shawnica told me, “Ha!” She pulled a knife out of her pocket. Springloaded. A mother-of-pearl handle. It opened with a wicked metallic click. She whipped it around so close to my chin I could feel the air of the blade.

  “All right” seemed appropriate, so that’s what I said. “How about Larry?”

  “He’s got one of those little guns,” she told me.

  “A derringer?’

  Shawnica nodded. He didn’t even have that anymore.

  “Did they go to Belzoni this morning?”

  “Hell,” she told me, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want to stay somewhere else until we figure out what’s what?”

  Shawnica gave me one of her primal sneers, folded her knife shut, and went back inside.

  Me and Desmond just stood there and watched her go.

  “Fiery,” Desmond told me like it was something he admired.

  “Your church girlfriend got any of that?”

  Desmond thought for a moment. “No.”

  SEVEN

  We rode all the way to Belzoni, found the trailer still untarped. There were tires gone from it. That was obvious to us, so we figured Larry and Skeeter were down Delta making sales calls.

  “That ought to be enough,” I suggested to Desmond, “to keep them out of harm’s way for now.”

  “Who do you figure she is, a girl like that?”

  We’d been chewing on the matter in the car. Desmond couldn’t wrap his mind around that brand of sadistic violence from a woman. He was old-fashioned that way, I guess, and believed women were better than men. More honorable and decent, less likely to go off. Maybe even squeamish and retiring.

  “Might have been some guy in a wig,” he suggested.

  “And a skirt and knee socks?”

  “Why the hell not. It’d be throwing us off. Here we are all looking for a girl.”

  We went riding around that catfish farm in search of Larry and Skeeter’s buddy, but there wasn’t any sign of him either, so we headed back toward home.

  “I’m just wondering who sent her,” I said to Desmond once we were back on 49. “Or him.”

  “It’s not like we can say what kind of shit Beluga’s been up to,” Desmond allowed. “Maybe he pissed somebody off before we ever heard of those tires.”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you try him again?”

  Desmond had been dialing Larry all along and just getting the “mobile caller is unavailable” message.

  “Ringing,” he told me. “Larry?”

  I could hear the squeak of a voice on the phone.

  “Where are you?”

  More squeaky chatter.

  “You’re breaking up.”

  No squeak.

  “Larry?” Desmond shook his head.

  “Where is he?”

  “In a fucking Chevy,” Desmond told me. “That’s all he got out before I lost him.”

  I dropped Desmond back at Kalil’s place so he could pick up his car. It was about quitting time by then, so Kalil was into the Armagnac.

  It never seemed to relax him much. His anger just got more scattershot and appreciably less coherent. He’d go from vilifying deadbeats to pitching a fit about crows in his yard. Then he’d complain about the dodgy components in Korean televisions. It was all bilious and hotheaded but didn’t really amount to much.

  This evening he came out into the lot to yammer at us. He was mad already before Desmond said we’d get to his invoices tomorrow. Desmond told him we’d been tied up with a buddy at the hospital and tried to leave it at that, but Kalil got off on the cost of insurance for him and his employees and something he’d read about a woman who’d gone in for a nose job and ended up getting a kidney taken out.

  “Well, all right,” I told him and tried to climb into my car, but Kalil had another insurance horror story to share with us. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite remember what it was.

  He kept sipping at his go cup and making the odd agitated comment. He was talking to us. He was talking to himself. He didn’t seem to notice that me and Desmond were having a side conversation.

  “I’m going to go arm up,” I said. “Meet you at Shawnica’s in about an hour.”

  “Bring one for me. Momma’s got the PPK. Lent the Steyr to a cousin.”

  “So you’ve got nothing?”

  “Nothing I’d want to depend on.”

  Kalil had started singing. He was wailing out “Lullaby of Broadway” as we pulled into the street.

  * * *

  Pearl had a serving of casserole for me. She came out to the driveway when she heard me pull in. She’d found that casserole in her freezer, back behind the sherbet and underneath a pie crust.

  “Didn’t even know it was there,” she said.

  It wasn’t in a proper container, one with a lid, anyway. The plastic wrap was just laying there. The casserole had ice all over it. There was something green in it and something brown in it. Something yellow in it, too.

  “Just zap it,” Pearl suggested.

  I gave her my usual “All right” and threw the stuff into the sink as soon as I’d walked in my apartment.

  The more defrosted that casserole got, the less like food it looked. You had to figure the woman in my life who was always giving me dinner would have to be the woman in my life who couldn’t cook a lick.

  My apartment above Pearl’s car shed was just a big room with a
full bath off the back. I had a bed and a sofa and a twenty-inch TV, plus a drop-leaf dinette table I could make into something grander if I ever felt the itch to throw a dinner party. Mostly I just piled mail on it. I tended to eat over the sink.

  There was an attic space behind a knee wall on the south end of the building, and I kept most of my weapons back there in a big canvas duffel. I crawled in and pulled that duffel out so I could sort through what I had. I couldn’t quite say how much firepower might be needed for a ninja schoolgirl. The evidence was she liked her instruments blunt. She’d not plugged anybody yet.

  I set aside a couple of pistols and an air-cooled M-4A1 that I’d traded a spanking-new Fryolator for. I had a little Bersa .308 I carried sometimes in an ankle holster, and that seemed like a sensible option given who we were dealing with. It was small caliber but still more firepower than a tattooed girl with a club. By the time I’d packed up what I needed and loaded all the clips I could find, I was beginning to smell Pearl’s casserole. Raccoon, I figured. Or maybe goat.

  Desmond was already parked outside Shawnica’s house when I got there. The front door was shut. The lights were low. There didn’t appear to be anybody home. It was late spring twilight, and the mosquitoes were swarming, so we sat in Desmond’s Escalade with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner running.

  That was one of the leading troubles of the Delta, as far as I could tell. When it was hot, it was too damn hot. When it was cold, it was windy and bitter. When the temperature was tolerable, the bugs made for misery. Lovebugs and mosquitoes mostly, biting flies every now and again, and in such concentrations there wasn’t enough DEET on the globe to keep them away.

  I got in complaining about the mosquitoes. Desmond had heard it all before. He let me talk. He even watched me like he was listening to me. I finished. He gave a little nod and said, “Heard from Kendell.”

  “They catch her?”

  He shook his head. “But they found that woman’s car. Lady beat up over in Sunflower. It was parked at the IGA on Highway 1, over there by Greenville.”

  “Isn’t that where she picked up Izzy?”

  Desmond nodded. “Kendell figures she drove in from somewhere. Parked in the lot. Picked up Izzy, rode with him, tore him all to pieces. Took his car to Sunflower and beat up that woman there. Drove her car back out to Greenville to get the one she’d come in.”