Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “I gotta think,” I said. “We can’t just let it go.”

  “OK, but please, please, we don’t tell Marvel or John what happened. We don’t tell anybody. This is for us, man.” She was looking up at me and it occurred to me how small she was. “An investigation would drag us out in the open.”

  “For us.” I threw an arm around her head and tightened up in a wrestler’s headlock. She wrapped her inside arm around my waist. Not your basic Gone With the Wind clinch, but it felt right.

  “Bobby will talk to them, tell them he called us.”

  “So we tell them that we went out to Dessusdelit’s house, saw no sign of Harold’s car, so we just kept going,” LuEllen suggested. “We looked around for a while, checked animal control, but there just wasn’t anything to see.”

  “Jesus.” I ran my hand through my hair. There was an impulse to go out on the bow, take off the lines, and head south. That was impossible now.

  LuEllen looked at me closely. “Kidd, sometimes you have these… impulses… to do the right thing. You’ve got to keep them under control. There’s not a goddamned thing we can do for Harold or that woman. Nothing that would be worth going to prison for.”

  “I’d better call Marvel.”

  “What for?”

  I shrugged. “To start working both ends against the middle.”

  MARVEL WAS frantic.

  “I don’t know,” I kept saying. I suggested that she and her friends start hunting for Harold’s car.

  “You don’t think he’s hurt?”

  “You know these people better than I do,” I said, a sour taste in my mouth.

  “All right. We’ll get people out looking. Maybe I ought to go over to Dessusdelit’s house, confront her—”

  “No, no. Don’t do that. If they have done something with Harold, you could be in trouble. Especially the way they’ve got the cops fixed. The best thing is, find him. Find his car. Figure out what happened. But don’t do anything to derail the plan. If worse comes to worst, and something happened to him, it’s more important than ever that we take the town.”

  It occurred to me that none of us was using the words killed, murdered, and dead. It was if something happened… if he’s hurt.…

  The day dragged by. Marvel launched her search, while LuEllen processed her film and began printing.

  “You want something to weep about, look at these,” she said when she came out of the bathroom/darkroom. She was printing on RC paper to cut the wash time, and the prints were still soft and damp. She laid them out on the table like grotesque place mats.

  The killings were graphically portrayed, as real as anything I’d seen from Vietnam, Beirut, or Salvador. She laid them out in sequence, from the time Hill and St. Thomas came out the door carrying Harold’s body to the instant when the murder gun hit the river. If LuEllen had been a newspaper photographer, she’d have had a Pulitzer locked up.

  “Christ, it could be out of the thirties; even the people look the same. Hill’s got that haircut, those short-sleeve shirts.…”

  You couldn’t quite see the pores in Hill’s face when he pulled the trigger on Sherrie, but close enough. If the photos ever got into court, they’d send the two men to the electric chair.

  LuEllen slumped in a chair. “I’m feeling pretty bad for a cowgirl.”

  LuEllen had processed both the negatives and the prints wearing vinyl gloves, and I carefully avoided touching them, even when they were dry. Photo material is notorious for picking up and preserving fingerprints. When I was done looking at them, we sealed the prints inside a plastic garbage bag and taped them to the underside of a drawer.

  Marvel called every hour or so. Finally she decided she had to see us. We’d meet at the Holiday Inn, at John’s room, in an hour.

  She and John were waiting when we arrived.

  “Not a fuckin’ thing,” she said, pacing the room. “Can’t even find his car. What do you think?”

  “He wouldn’t go off by himself?”

  “No, of course not,” Marvel said angrily.

  “Then… I think… he may be dead.”

  She stopped, looked at John, and a tear ran down her face. “I think so, too,” she said. “They couldn’t just grab him and let him go later.…”

  “No.” I turned and looked at LuEllen, and her face was like a rock.

  “Oh, God.” Marvel sighed. She was standing close to John, and he slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed her.

  Jesus, I thought, these people trust us.

  WITH NOTHING MORE TO SAY, we left Marvel to continue her search and made a pro forma stop in the bar. Bell, the city councilman, was sitting at a table with a pretty, freckled blonde. He raised a hand to us, and LuEllen waved, but we turned away, found a corner table, and ordered.

  “What’s next, boss?” LuEllen asked with a light overlay of sarcasm.

  “Just keep cranking,” I said. “But now we’ve got to put a little extra on Hill and St. Thomas. Dumping the machine isn’t good enough anymore.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, now serious. “When I mess with you, things seem to turn violent. Before that time in West Virginia, I don’t know if I’d ever seen a killed person.”

  “It’s not us, not me—”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “I’ve got to believe it,” I said.

  We talked for twenty minutes, through two drinks. Two is about as many as I can take before my lips start going numb. We paid, and LuEllen waved again at Bell. Bell nodded back, tipped up his glass, finishing a drink, and dug in his pocket for cash.

  We were halfway across the parking lot when two car doors slammed with the kind of aggressive impact that makes you look around. Duane Hill was there, drunk, with St. Thomas on the other side. They each had a longneck beer.

  “Hey, artist fuckhead,” Hill yelled, wandering toward us.

  “Keep walking,” LuEllen said.

  But I had the two drinks in me and, instead of walking, slowed down and stopped. Hill swaggered across the parking lot from his van, St. Thomas a step or two behind him. Two guys in broad-rimmed hats and cowboy boots had been sitting on the hood of a pickup down the lot. Now they hopped down and sidled over to watch.

  “Where’s that old bitch Trent? You trade her in on some younger cunt?” Hill asked.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” LuEllen said in a tone of pure ice. For a second Hill stopped, nonplussed. He was a brawler, tuned to danger, and he heard it in LuEllen’s voice. He didn’t know quite how to take it.

  “Gonna let the pussy do your talking?” he said after a minute, trying to recover. He was about fifteen feet away. He half turned to the two onlookers, to catch their reaction to this witticism.

  I gave him my best southern smile and got my right foot planted, slightly splayed to the right. The most dangerous man in a fight is the one who likes it the most. Watching him, I decided he’d be a grappler; he’d come storming in and try to throw me, rather than punch.

  “I do hang around with nice-looking women,” I said. “Mrs. Trent said you mostly hang around with some guy named Arnie.”

  The words hung in the air for a moment; then I leaned a little to the left, peering around him at St. Thomas, and shook my head. “Can’t say I like your taste, Duane. He ain’t got that much of an ass on him.”

  One of the cowboys let out a happy “Whoa,” while Hill bellowed something unintelligible, dropped his beer, and charged, his head down, his hands out, and his legs churning. I was ready, my right foot grounded, and I whip-kicked him with my left foot, catching him on the side of the face. He went bellydown on the parking lot, landing on the blacktop like a racing driver. The fury climbed on top of me, the image of the killings, and I punted him once in the ribs, and again, as he rolled away, then pivoted toward St. Thomas. St. Thomas was an older guy, out of his fighting days. He wasn’t moving, but Hill was trying to get up.

  “What’s going on here?” We all turned, and Bell was striding across the parking lot.


  “Your town thug decided to beat me up,” I said as Hill got slowly back to his feet. His nose and upper lip were bleeding heavily, the blood glistening on his teeth and dripping down his chin. He wanted to come for me again, but his ribs were holding him back. Every time he moved, the pain flared in his eyes; I’d give odds that I’d cracked a couple of his ribs.

  “What about that, Duane?” Bell demanded.

  One of the cowboys, with the insouciant lack of fear that seems to mark the breed, cleared his throat. “Duane sure started it,” he said cheerfully. “Called the young lady there a real bad name.”

  Bell looked us over again and then nodded. “Y’all go home and sober up,” he said. “Fightin’ in a parking lot doesn’t do credit to anyone. And Duane, I’ll see you at City Hall tomorrow, ten o’clock sharp. Now git.”

  Hill, snarling, turned away, still favoring his ribs. Bell watched him go, then nodded at LuEllen, gave me a measured look, and headed toward his car, where the blonde waited with folded arms.

  “Goddamn, this country is goin’ to hell in a handbasket,” one of the cowboys said, taking a hit from his beer bottle. He looked me up and down, taking in my artist’s getup and beard. “Somebody’s gone and taught the fuckin’ hippies how to fight.”

  THE NEXT MORNING Marvel asked if we could meet her at the farm home of a friend, out in the country, well away from the river and the prying eyes of Longstreet.

  “It’s safe and quicker than Greenville, and nobody will see your car,” she said. “Half an hour?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  LuEllen again decided to stay with the boat, away from new faces.

  “You gonna be here when I get back?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said gravely. “I’m not leaving until we find some way to grease Hill and St. Thomas.”

  MARVEL’S FRIEND’S NAME was Matron Carter, a plain, cheerful woman with short hair and good moves. She was shooting basketballs at a netless hoop hung on the side of a swaybacked, free-standing garage when I pulled into her yard. Marvel’s car was around back, next to a vacant chicken coop. A rusty forties-style power mower appeared to be permanently parked in knee-high grass under lilac bushes at the edge of the yard, and a pear tree and a half dozen aging apple trees marched in military file down the edge of an overgrown field.

  “They’re waiting for you inside,” the woman said, dribbling the ball as she talked. She faked one way, turned the other, and popped a fifteen-foot jump shot.

  “Nice shot,” I said.

  “Do it for a living,” she answered, running down the ball. Marvel told me later that she was a gym teacher at Longstreet High School and coached the girls’ basketball teams.

  The house was tired but comfortable. I went through the back door, through a kitchen, and into a small living room, where Marvel and John were sprawled on a broken-down couch.

  “Harold’s dead,” Marvel said. She stopped me in my tracks.

  “You found him?”

  “We found his car. At Wal-Mart,” she said wearily. “And he’s gone. I can feel it. The motherfuckers took him someplace and killed him.”

  Tears started running down her face, and John said quietly, “They go back to when they were babies. They were raised together.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. I was gripped by the temptation to tell them the truth but instead blurted, “We need the FBI in here.”

  “I don’t,” John said sharply. “I’ve had some problems with those boys. And we’ve still got to take this town. That’s the main thing.”

  “Maybe Harold is OK. Maybe he had to take off for some reason,” I said fatuously. I wandered over to a window and looked out. Matron Carter was pumping a wrought-iron water pump and drinking from the spout as the water surged out of the ground. In the dappled sunlight in the yard she looked beautiful, not plain. “Maybe they scared him and he took off for Greenville or Helena.”

  “And left his car at Wal-Mart?” John asked.

  Marvel, turning in John’s arms, shook her head. “No. He’s dead. I can feel him… gone.”

  There wasn’t much more to say. Marvel insisted that we keep the takeover rolling.

  “Matron will be the second appointee to the council if we bring this off,” Marvel said. She’d be the third.

  “Can she do that? If she lives out here, outside the city…”

  “This is her folks’ place. They’re gone, dead, and nobody lives here anymore. Matron lives in town.”

  “OK. You can name who you want, that’s your call. I’m more worried about John and your contacts at the capitol—”

  “Don’t worry about that. I talked to an old friend of Harold’s, one of the black caucus guys. I told him Harold was missing and that it was connected to our deal. This guy is smart; he knows something’s going on, and he’s helping. I’ll take the fucking books to the governor’s man and bring back so many cops it’ll look like a convention. And one way or another, on my mama’s grave, we’ll find Harold.”

  “Then we’ve got to set up John’s part,” I said. “We’ve got to get the bridge scam going. Get the rumors started.”

  “I’ll start now, from here, on the phone,” Marvel promised. “Two hours from now everybody in town’ll know there’s a rich drug dealer down here snapping up land for the bridge.…”

  “The more I think about it, the more this sounds like bullshit,” John said. “The goddamn pin-striped suit and the car and the hair—why’n the hell would they believe some strange nigger from Memphis?”

  “Same reason there are a million con men working the world and making money,” I said. “Greed. You’re going to offer them something for almost nothing; they’ll have to show you some money, but that’s it. They don’t have to give it to you, just show it. They don’t have to put up a cent until the bridge is coming in. By that time, the profit’ll be guaranteed.”

  “A wonderful thing, greed,” Marvel said. “Where would we be without it?”

  John rubbed her head. “Fuckin’ Commie,” he said.

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the boat, LuEllen was slumped in a deck chair with two bottles of beer and a glass, looking glum. A crumpled newspaper lay at her feet.

  “Get a beer,” she called as I came aboard.

  I got one, climbed up on top, and sank into the chair beside her.

  “Pretty bad?” she asked.

  “Pretty bad,” I said.

  “Is John gonna do his act?”

  “Yeah.”

  She squinted up at the city beyond the levee, the brick buildings, the peaks of Victorian mansions beyond. “The place looks like a museum,” she said. “It’s hard to believe this is all happening.… Look what I found.”

  She handed me the newspaper, folded to an editorial. The headline said LONGSTREET, AN ISLAND OF PEACE.

  “Makes you giggle, huh?” she asked sourly, tipping her bottle up.

  THE LONGSTREET RUMOR mill was as efficient as Marvel had said it was. She made her calls and sat back, while John drove around town, made several trips out to the supposed bridge property, and talked to an engineer about soil and perc tests. Bobby phoned again on a voice line.

  “I just got a call on our phone cutout about the bridge,” he said. “Archibald Ballem.”

  “The attorney.”

  “Right.”

  “Did he buy it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I got pissed and refused to answer questions. I wanted to know where he got his information and told him the whole thing was secret. I warned him that spreading the information might damage the prospects for construction. He tried to cool me off. I don’t think he’ll be calling back.”

  “Keep monitoring the number anyway,” I said.

  I CALLED JOHN with the news. “They’ll be coming,” I said. “Be ready.”

  John got a second call two hours later. Archibald Ballem, a local attorney, wanted to talk to him and to bring along a couple of business associates. I thought it would be Dessusdelit
and maybe St. Thomas. It was St. Thomas all right, but Ballem opted for muscle instead of brains; Hill was with them.

  “They all sat real close to me,” John said later. “You could feel the threat. They were pushing, and they talked about it in advance.”

  The meeting, John said, started with the politely inadvertent racism that southerners fall into when they want something from a black: talk about basketball, break dancing, and hip-hop. St. Thomas liked it all, to hear him tell it.

  After the chitchat Ballem put the question, What about the bridge? John asked, “What bridge?”

  Ballem said, “We’re all businessmen here and civic leaders. Mr. St. Thomas is one of our prominent city councilmen, and I’m the city attorney, and Mr. Hill is a city department head.…”

  That got them down to it. Permits would be no problem. Zoning could be arranged. All for the future financial progress of the city of Longstreet. “Would there be any space for more investors, Mr., ah, Johnson?”

  There might be… but I’ll have to talk to my friend in Memphis.…

  “They bought it all right,” John said. He was with Marvel and Brooking Davis, and I could hear them talking in the background. “They were so hungry they were drooling on my fuckin’ wing tips.”

  “OK. So do a little back and forth. If they don’t call you, you call them to check on things. Talk about a Delaware company. They know about Delaware companies.”

  “I already started hinting about money. Let them know that they won’t get in cheap, that the project’s too big.…”

  “Anything about Harold?” I asked.

  “No, and there’s something else… let me put Marvel on.”

  She took the phone and said, “Something else, I can’t stand it. There’s a rumor that Harold went off to Memphis with Sherrie. I don’t believe it for a second.”

  “Is she missing? Sherrie?” I was afraid the fraud was audible in my voice. If it was, she didn’t hear it.

  “Can’t find her,” Marvel said. “I was supposed to warn her against going to work, but I was with John, and shit… I forgot. Fuck me, I forgot.” There was a tone of finality in her voice, with an undertone of bitter anger.