The Devil's Right Hand

by J. D. Rhoades

  There was a ripping sound, like the sky being torn open. A bright white bolt like a lance of flame leaped from out of the darkness and struck the Bradley. The boxy metal shape seemed to bulge outward for a split second before erupting in flame from every opening. The concussion knocked him flat on his back. He lay there for a second, staring stupidly at the sky. He saw metal hatch cover cross his field of vision, whirling across the sky like a UFO. Then he heard the screams. They were burning, but he couldn’t get up. His limbs refused to respond to any command that didn’t involve curling up into a ball. He could hear himself screaming as well. There was another white flash...

  He jerked upright in the seat, panting like a distance runner. He flinched as a white tree of lightning arced across the sky, followed by a sharp detonation of thunder. It had started raining again. Keller put both hands on the wheel and waited for his heart to stop pounding. He started the car and drove away.

  There was a crowd at the graveside, listening to the preacher’s words with the pinched, stoic expressions of people that had been expecting bad news and soon expected to hear worse. The cemetery was well-tended, bordered by woods on two sides and the small white church on another.

  Everyone gave a wide berth to the big man in the brown suit. He stared down into the open grave in silence as the preacher intoned the last few words of the service. A few of them looked at the diamond and ruby rings on his fingers and noted the cut of the expensive suit, but no one made comments, at least in his presence. The man had not been a part of their lives for years, but his reputation for random and vicious fits of temper was still legendary.

  When the preacher’s voice trailed off into a nervous mumble, the big man looked up and looked at him. His eyes were hidden by tinted sunglasses, but after a moment, the preacher looked away

  and cleared his throat. The big man turned away without a word and walked off towards the line of beat-up cars and trucks in the gravel parking lot. He paused a moment to brush the dust from the cuffs of his pants and opened the door of a large brown 4 x 4 pickup. Letters across the top of the dark-tinted windshield said “INDIAN OUTLAW”.

  He got into the truck and sat down, leaving the door open. The truck’s oversized wheels raised the pickup off the ground high enough that the man’s snakeskin boots dangled a few inches from the ground like a child’s in a grownup chair. He waited.

  The group at the graveside had broken into smaller knots, discussing the weather, the tobacco crop, and everything except the recently deceased. After a few minutes, a young man detached himself from the congregation and walked over to the truck.

  “Hey,” the young man said. There was no reply.

  “Any news on who killed Daddy?” the big man said finally. The Lumbee accent made the last word come out as “diddy.”

  The younger of the two brothers shuffled his feet in the coarse gravel. “Sheriff said they ain’t got no leads.”

  “Shit,” the big man said. He spat on the ground next to his brother’s foot. It was an insult that would have resulted in knives being pulled on anyone else.

  “Ain’t no need to get pissed off at me, Raymond.” The younger man whined. “I ain’t...”

  “Someone knew Daddy had a lot of cash. Got any idea?”

  The younger man shrugged. “I guess the Meskins knew. Daddy paid ‘em off ever’...”

  Raymond swung his legs into the truck. “We’ll go talk to them, then. Get in.”

  The younger man looked back at the safety of the crowd. “Get in the truck, John Lee,” Raymond said. “I ain’t gonna tell you again.” John Lee took a last look at the church and sighed. He got in the truck. He slumped unhappily in the seat as Raymond pulled away from the church. “I gotta drop by the club,” Raymond said. “Then we’ll go see what these Meskins can tell us.”

  Interstate Highway 95 stretches 1,970 miles, a gray and black river of asphalt that flows from Miami to the Canadian border. Everything moves on the highway. Truckers ferry livestock, produce, cigarettes, clothing, lumber, bricks, cars, anything that can be shipped in a flatbed or trailer. Tourists stare blankly out the windows of cars, motor homes and SUV’s,as they traverse the flat, empty spaces between entertainments. Salesmen study the mile markers for signs that they’ll reach their next meeting in time. And, inevitably, drugs and money move on the highway. The FBI, the DEA, and a variety of local law enforcement try to interdict the tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana stuffed into the backs of pickups and the wheel wells of compact cars. They catch a few, but mostly they only succeed in angering the African-American and Hispanic drivers that they stop in disproportionate numbers.

  Raymond’s club, the 95 Lounge, was visible from the highway, but a curious traveler had to go a mile up to a little-used exit and double back on a narrow country road to reach it. There was little reason for them to; the club was not advertised on any of the thousands of billboards that grew along the roadside. There was no Texaco nearby, no Cracker Barrel restaurant, no McDonald’s or Burger King. The only people who would take the trouble to find their way there were those who knew its real business.

  Raymond and John Lee pulled up in the parking lot of the club. It was a low cinder block building painted a dull purple and black. The words “95 LOUNGE” were clumsily hand-painted on the front and side of the building in green and white Day-Glo letters. There were no windows. A neon sign beside the peeling wooden door announced that the 95 Lounge was “open”. There were a couple of battered cars in the parking lot and a new 18-wheel truck.

  They entered the club, stopping for a moment to let their eyes get used to the gloom. The only illumination was provided by a dim fluorescent light behind the bar and a Budweiser sign on the far wall. There were several large booths along that wall. A fat man in a polyester shirt with his name embroidered over one pocket was seated in one of the booths. A skinny woman with bleached blonde hair was seated in the booth on the same side. She was whispering something in his ear. As John Lee stared, her hand slid beneath the table and into the fat man’s lap.

  “You see somethin’ you interested in?” a voice said.

  John Lee turned. Billy Ray, the club’s manager, was standing behind the bar. He had a malicious grin on his broad copper-colored face.

  “Darlene’s busy right now, but I don’t reckon that trucker’ll take too long,” Billy Ray said. “You can have sloppy seconds.”

  “Shut it, Billy Ray,” Raymond said. “John Lee and me got stuff to do.” The smile disappeared from the man’s face. He sullenly went back to polishing the bar.

  John Lee looked back at the couple, who were disappearing out the back door. There was a broken down trailer in the back, he knew. John Lee had never discussed his brother’s businesses with him, but he knew the rumors. It was said that some of Raymond’s female customers were working off their drug debts in that trailer. John Lee swallowed nervously and followed his brother into the office behind the bar.He sat across the desk from Raymond in a rusted straight-backed chair with a tattered cushion. Raymond flicked his desk lamp on. “You got a pistol?” he said to John Lee.

  John Lee shook his head. He felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Naw,” he said. “I got my deer rifle at home.”

  Raymond grunted. He turned his office chair around and fiddled with the large, old-fashioned safe behind his desk. With a click, the black door swung open. Raymond reached in and pulled out a large object wrapped in cloth. He set it on the desk and unwrapped it. John Lee stared down at a huge long-barreled revolver that gleamed in the dim light.

  “Raymond,” John Lee said, “What you planning, man?”

  “You and me,” Raymond said, “We’re gonna find out who killed our Daddy.”

  “The Sheriff--”

  “Don’t give two shits about a dead Indian. You know that, and I know that. Anyone goin’ to take care of business, it’s us. Just like Lowrie.”

  John Lee, like all Lumbee, knew the name. Henry Berry Lowrie was the Lumbee equivalent of Robin Hood, an o
utlaw who had taken to the swamps in the 1800's against the Confederate Home Guard and later against the Federals to avenge the murder of his father and brother and the oppression of the Lumbee by whites.

  John Lee couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol. “You think it was them Meskins?”

  “I don’t know,” Raymond said. “But I aim to find out. And you’re coming with me.”

  “I ain’t never killed nobody before, Raymond.”

  Raymond sighed as if this was some admitted failing on his brother’s part. He picked up the gun and stuck it in his waistband.

  “Okay,” he said. He reached into the safe again and pulled out another pistol, a stubby, ugly automatic. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round before handing the gun to John Lee. “You take this one and back me up. This is your duty, too, little brother. Now let’s go.”

  As they walked back out into the deserted bar, Billy Ray called out to Raymond. “Our friend called,” he said. “Our southern friend.”

  Raymond stopped. “What’d he say?”

  Billy Ray cast a glance at John Lee. “I told him you were at your Daddy’s funeral. He said to give you his sympathy.”

  “Yeah, right,” Raymond said. Paco Suarez didn’t get to be the biggest supplier of cocaine on the East Coast by giving himself over to the softer emotions. “He calls again, tell him I’ll get back to him as soon as I take care of some family business,” Raymond said. “C’mon, John Lee.”

  They drove for about thirty minutes, with John Lee providing monosyllabic directions. After they got off the main road, the roads grew narrower, but the scenery never changed. They passed field after field of crops growing thick and fat from the dark rich earth where a shallow sea once rolled. Corn, beans, corn, tobacco, tobacco, beans, tobacco. Houses weathered to the same gray as the topsoil stood among the fields, next to metal tobacco curing barns that gleamed and shimmered in the baking sun. Some landowners had given up the precarious living of farming; those fields grew rows of metal house trailers with postage-stamp-sized dirt yards and old tires thrown up on the roof in a forlorn hope of keeping the roof on in a tornado.

  They finally pulled into a narrow dirt driveway that ran between a double line of rusting single-wide trailers. About halfway down the line on the left, there was a break in the regular spacing of the trailers. The soil in the gap

  thus created had been denuded of grass and pounded flat by years of trampling. A group of young Latino men sat playing cards at a picnic table under a spreading live oak in the middle of the common area thus created. They looked up warily as the truck pulled up. One of them stood and walked over to the driver’s side window.

  “You know who I am?” Raymond said.

  The man nodded. He was short and broad, with a dark-brown pockmarked face and a thin Fu Manchu mustache. He looked to be in his mid-forties, in sharp contrast to the other, younger men. He spoke formally, like a man who had learned his English in school rather than on the street. “We were sorry to hear about your father,” he said in his heavy accent.

  Raymond looked the man up and down. His eyes flickered to the other men who were beginning to gather around the truck. Still others were coming out of the trailers.

  John Lee cleared his throat. “Hey, Raymond,” he said. “Maybe we better--”

  “Shut up,” Raymond replied. He turned back to the man by the truck window. “Y’all know anything about who mighta done it?”

  “‘Ey, bitch,” one of the men piped up from the crowd. He stepped forward. He was massively built, with ropes of muscles straining the arms and chest of his t-shirt. His arms were covered with elaborate gang tattoos. “We already talk about all this to th’ cops,” the tattooed man said. “Why we got to answer you?”

  “I say anything to you, greaseball?” Raymond snapped. There was an angry murmuring from the crowd around the truck and the circle of men tightened. John Lee tried to slide down in the seat.

  Raymond made a sudden movement and the long-barreled pistol was in his hand, pointed at the chest of the man by the window. The man flinched slightly, then straightened and looked Raymond in the eye.

  “There is no need for this,” he said. He turned slightly, back towards the man who had spoken, and rattled off a long sentence in Spanish. His eyes never left Raymond’s face. There was a high-pitched angry reply. The man by the window responded sharply, then added something with a sly grin. There was a ripple of nervous laughter from the crowd. The tattooed man’s face grew dark with anger, but he turned away and stomped off.

  The older man turned back towards Raymond. “I was the one who found your father’s body,” he said. “The rest of the crew,” he gestured at the men around the truck, “Was with me. We always go in together in my truck. No one here killed him, I am sure of it. We all leave work together the night before, and we all go in together the next day.”

  “Somebody knew he had a lot of cash on him,” Raymond said.

  “That was our pay,” the mustached man said. “We were going to get that money the next day anyway. If one of us stole it, he would be stealing from the rest of us, and from our families back home. No one here would protect him for stealing that.”

  Raymond thought that over for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So who else might’ve known about the money?”

  The man thought for a moment. “There was a man who came looking for work, “ he said finally. “An Anglo.” He smiled thinly at Raymond. “I didn’t like him.”

  Raymond ignored the jibe. “You get a name?”

  The man shook his head. “No. He talked with your father, not me. I told your father afterwards I didn’t like his looks. He laughed and said he wasn’t hiring anyway. He had a full crew. He took down the man’s name and phone number, but that was just to get rid of him.”

  “Anyone else know him?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation. “He said he was a friend of Julio’s,” the mustached man said.

  Raymond looked around. “Which one’s Julio?”

  There was another stirring in the crowd and the men looked at each other. “He’s the one who just left,” someone said. “The one you call greaseball.”

  “Go get him,” Raymond said. No one moved. Raymond pulled back the hammer on the big revolver. Someone detached himself from the back of the crowd and hurried off.

  In a few minutes, the tattooed man came stalking back, a can of beer in his right hand and a sneer on his face.

  “This feller who came looking for a job,” Raymond said. “You know him?”

  Julio shrugged. “I don’ know, man,” he said. “I know a lot of people. How come you askin’?”

  “Because I think that might be the man that shot my Daddy. And if he is, I mean to kill him for it.”

  Julio’s face split in an ugly grin. “Well, shit, vato, whyn’t you say so in the first place? Yeah, I knew him. I met him in the joint. Little guy. Name of Dwayne somethin’.”

  “You tell him Daddy carried a lot of cash?” Raymond’s face bore no expression, but there was a dangerous note of tension in his voice.

  The grin left Julio’s face. He raised his hands in front of him, as if to push away the trouble he saw coming. “Whoa, man,” he said. “This Dwayne fucker, man, he said he was needing some cash when he got out. I tol’ him I don’t know for sure, but I was working for an old man who paid in cash an’ I was going back when my ninety days was up. Thass all I said.”

  Raymond thought for a minute. He looked at the mustached man. “You,” he said, “Would you recognize this Dwayne guy if you saw him again?”

  The man looked unhappy, but nodded slightly.

  “All right then,” Raymond said. “Get in the truck.”

  There was another rustle and murmur in the crowd. The mustached man didn’t move.

  With his free hand, Raymond reached into the pocket of his suit and pulled out a roll of bills. “You need work, now that Daddy’s gone. I need somebody who can eyeball the sumbitch and tell me if he’s the
right one. You’ll be gone a couple days, then you’ll be right back here.”

  The man’s eyes went back and forth from the roll of bills to the gun in Raymond’s other hand that remained pointed at him. “Always it is the same,” he murmured. “Plomo o Plata.”

  “What?” Raymond said.

  The man looked up at him. “Silver or lead,” he translated. “Always the same choice.”

  Raymond nodded. “That sounds about right.”

  The man sighed. “The money first,” he said.

  Raymond thought for a second. “Half now, half when you show me.”

  The man hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders. “All right. But I need to leave it here.”

  Raymond smiled and tossed him the roll of bills. The man turned and motioned a slim young man with a ponytail out of the crowd. The two conferred for a moment in Spanish, then the mustached man handed the bills to the man with the ponytail, turned and walked to the passenger side of the truck without looking back. John Lee opened the door and slid to the middle of the seat as the man got in. Raymond started the truck and began backing out. The crowd of men watched him go.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes before John Lee spoke up. “I’m John Lee,” he told the man. “This here’s my brother Raymond. You here from Mexico long?”

  The mustached man smiled without humor. “Oscar Sanchez,” he said. “And I am from Colombia.”

  “Well ain’t that a coincidence.” Raymond’s smile was equally humorless. “Some of my best friends is from Colombia.”

  Sanchez sighed and leaned back in the seat. He closed his eyes and appeared to go to sleep.

  “How much we get?” DeWayne said. He was standing by the window of the tiny motel room, occasionally using the barrel of his pistol to nudge the curtain aside enough to peer out into the parking lot. Except for their truck, the lot was empty.