Beluga Read Free Page B

That’s how we met. For a couple of months there, after we’d taken all that meth kingpin’s money, me and Desmond were men of leisure, up to nothing in the middle of the day. It was all right for the first few weeks, but it wore poorly after a while. We were like kids out of school for the summer, hating the classroom but bored half to death.
    So we started showing up back at the shop where we’d worked and getting in the way. Kalil, who runs the place, tolerated us for a bit. It’s a rent-to-own store, and he let me and Desmond hang around the showroom and harass all the guys who were actually working until a call came in one day, probably about a year ago now. Kalil had sent Ferris out to repo a stove, just him alone with his ratty Ford Ranger and a hand truck. We didn’t like Ferris. Nobody liked Ferris. His girlfriend would even come by to belittle him two or three times a week. He was a bony, tattooed fellow with his eyeteeth missing and no experience with a bathtub or a comb.
    Every time he introduced himself he said, “Like the wheel, goddammit.” It didn’t matter the circumstances. He would have said it to the pope.
    â€œGot him in a closet,” Kalil told us and handed Desmond a scrap of paper with an address scribbled on it.
    â€œWho’s got him?” I asked.
    Desmond studied the address. “Down below Moorhead?”
    Kalil nodded. “Lawtons.”
    â€œWhich Lawtons?” I asked him, and Kalil just flattened his lips and shook his head.
    â€œThey’ll feed him to their pigs,” Desmond said.
    It was a real possibility with those Lawtons. The good side of the family wasn’t prosperous exactly, but they were decent and reliable. When they got behind on payments, you knew there was nothing else they could do. The bad Lawtons were mean and sorry and didn’t care who found it out. They were all cousins or something—the good and the bad—and spent holidays together. There would reliably be a picnic ham and most usually an assault.
    Desmond waved the scrap of notepaper. “Who?”
    Kalil hated to tell us. “Oscar.”
    â€œGive it back to him” was my suggestion.
    â€œSend one of them,” Desmond suggested to Kalil.
    We all looked at Kalil’s staff on hand. They were sitting on the homely sofa Kalil could never sell. With the tufts and the skirts and the Chesterfield buttons. They weren’t, as a group, inspiring. I knew the boys on either end. They’d get put in a closet, too. The ones in the middle were entirely new to me, but Desmond was acquainted with one of them.
    â€œWhat about him?” Desmond asked and pointed at the boy he knew.
    â€œSome fool went after him with a Garden Weasel. He’s still a little gun-shy.”
    â€œWe don’t even work for you anymore.” I knew that was a last resort when I said it.
    â€œMaybe you miss it,” Kalil suggested. “Or maybe you ought to find out.”
    â€œIt’s a stove?” Desmond asked him.
    And there we were, right back in it again.
    We drove over in my Ranchero and parked it back beyond a hedgerow, well out of gunplay range. The good Lawtons lived in a Lawton compound that backed onto a rice field. They had dirt instead of grass and a couple of cannibalized sedans, but their place overall was a shade more neat than not. The bad Lawtons lived in a domesticated landfill. They just went to the doors, both front and back, and pitched out whatever they’d decided didn’t belong under the roof anymore. That might be last night’s pizza boxes or a dinette chair.
    When we peeked around the trees, we spied a county cruiser parked in the Lawtons’ yard. Parked, anyway, behind a harrow and some sort of busted seeder. The driver’s door was open, and Kendell was sitting under the wheel.
    He saw us, too.
    â€œCan’t leave it alone,” he shouted out our way.
    We went over to him crouching low since you