Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) Read Free Page A

shovel. They took my Ranchero, him and his wife. Pearl’s Ranchero at the time. And somehow the wife and the baby and the car all ended up with that Boudrot.”
    “Somehow?” Kendell asked me.
    “I wasn’t ever clear on why. I guess that Boudrot liked the car. Liked the wife a little too. Took them to a place he had down by Blue Hole.”
    “Burned down, didn’t it?” Tula asked. It was more of an accusation than a question.
    I nodded. Desmond shifted and groaned.
    “A lot of fire in his life for a few days there.” Kendell gave us that smile of his that looks primarily like a wince.
    “Meth houses, you know,” Desmond told him. “Damn things go up all the time.”
    “You didn’t help?” Kendell asked, looking from me to Desmond.
    “Could have been more careful probably,” I allowed.
    Tula, as it turned out, had a snort for that.
    “Kind of tangled with him, didn’t you?” Kendell asked us. He tapped on that Boudrot’s booking sheet. “Concussion. Broken collarbone. Thirty-two stitches altogether.”
    I glanced at Desmond, and he was the one who nodded and said, “Scuffed him up. He sort of made us. Knife and all. Right?”
    I nodded. “Yeah.”
    “We figure he’s coming after you,” Tula told me and Desmond. “That’s what we’re hearing out of Parchman anyway.”
    “We heard he’d been stewing,” I said. “Doubt he’s the sort to let shit go.”
    “Crazy fucker,” Desmond added. “Don’t need to be after you to kill you. Guy with the chair leg in him didn’t do nothing but own a car.”
    “Any idea where he might be headed?” Kendell asked us.
    We shrugged.
    “Does he know where to look for you two?”
    We shrugged again. Who were we to say what that Acadian fuckstick knew.
    “And the gator?” Tula asked me.
    “Used to feed people to it once he’d whacked them into chunks. Down by Yazoo, back in the national forest. That’s what we heard anyway.”
    Once me and Desmond were out of the station house proper and heading for my Ranchero, Desmond said, “Got to tell those boys right quick. Give them a chance to see him coming.”
    “In a yellow Gold Duster with lifters and mess? Shouldn’t be much of a chore.”
    “Might ought to start with Dale,” Desmond said.
    Dale had been an overmuscled pinhead cop back when we’d steered him to that Boudrot. Now he was a flabby pinhead civilian working for K-Lo like we did.
    “And let’s hit Rejondo’s on the way back,” I suggested. “See if he turned up anything.”
    He hadn’t. He claimed to have tried to. Rejondo told us about the phone calls he’d made to various of his Parchman buddies who didn’t among them seem to know squat. An inmate was loose—they’d heard that much—and he’d stirred up some sort of trouble.
    “Killed a guy already,” Desmond informed him. “Needed his clothes and his car.”
    Rejondo took a moment to seem sorrowful on the corpse’s behalf before saying to me and Desmond, “Help me a second here, how about it?”
    Desmond headed for my Ranchero and left it to me to tell him, “Nope.”
    We arrived back at the Indianola shop to find K-Lo irritated. Not uncommonly irritated, but just standard-issue ill. He was standing out front on the sidewalk polishing off a Pall Mall.
    “Where the hell you been?” he barked our way.
    Before we could even begin to tell him, Peabo came out of the store with a couple of questions for K-Lo. Peabo was six foot eight with the physique of a silo and the intellect of one as well. He had a knack for repo largely because he was comprehensively fearless, chiefly due to the fact he didn’t have the good sense to be scared.
    Peabo’s hobbies were fishing and getting tattooed. As a giant pale-white guy, he made for a fine canvas. He’d just see stuff in the course of a day and run off and get it inked. He had a sunset over a pecan grove across his right shoulder blade. A Willys Jeep on his left forearm. A sturgeon on his biceps. The face of some girl he’d met at