Free Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) by Rick Gavin Page B

appeared to be looking for the chance to catch me with one of his lunging punches. I guess he thought, being Dale’s friend, I’d probably fight like Dale. That was hardly the case given my long-held fighting philosophy of always being first and never taking pity. I’d learned the hard way that going easy on a guy out of some tender human feeling was almost sure to cost you in the end.
    So I went ahead and made my move. I waited for him to smirk at his buddies, and once he’d turned his head just slightly, I kicked him in the crotch. Hard and with full follow-through, like I was punting from the end zone. He tooted through his nose and bent forward. I swung on him with a right. Caught him flush and put him down.
    One of his buddies said, “Fucker,” so I laid into him as well.
    The third one held up his hands and showed me his palms. He smiled my way. He told me, “Hey.”
    I very nearly eased off and relaxed, but then he went reaching for something, so I charged him and butted him over. I kicked him like hell once he was down. He had a pistol in his back jeans pocket, a little .25 caliber semi. It only held four rounds. You might kill a house cat with it if it was in your lap and you took dead aim.
    I held the thing up and showed it to Desmond.
    We liked our guns large and our calibers considerable. Desmond shook his head and told me, “People’ll buy any damn thing.”
    Those boys were all twitching and groaning in the gravel at my feet. I pointed at the café and told Desmond and Luther, “Got to get Dale’s ribs.”
    Luther shouted my way, “Can I kick them?”
    Those boys were surely about to wish those bridges had all been blown to bits. I shrugged, reached for the screen door pull. “Do what you want,” he said.
    Luther yipped and yodeled with cracker joy. “I like Arkansas after all.”

 
    NINE
    The Eudora, Arkansas, jailhouse had been a Big Lots once. It was off in a corner of what used to be a sizable shopping plaza. That store had been broken up into office space and modest shop fronts, and about half of them looked like they’d gone the way of the mother ship. Law enforcement, however, always loves a recession. There were new Crown Vic cruisers all over the place. People who’ve given over thieving for honest employment in boom times often find themselves laid off when things get tough and get back in the game.
    If Eudora was much like Indianola—and it looked the same sort of spot, just smaller—the cops usually had an idea of who to pick up before even the choice goods got fenced. In terms of rank criminality, Eugene qualified as a sort of Eudora local. He’d shared with me and Desmond his crackpot theory of who had jurisdiction over what, and we’d been unable to shake Eugene from his abiding conviction that Mississippi was a sanctuary for thieving lowlifes like him.
    Eugene primarily robbed Arkansas churches. “Shit, man,” he’d explained to us once, “they almost all unlocked.”
    He’d started out stealing the bright brass liturgical bric-a-brac, but he’d soon discovered there wasn’t much of a going market for it. So he’d shifted his focus to pews and chairs and altar tables and pulpits. At least he could tear that stuff down into lumber if he couldn’t unload it whole.
    Eugene drove a big junky truck he’d welded together from three or four other vehicles. During our first run-in with that Boudrot, me and Desmond and Luther had ridden around enough in Eugene’s truck to recognize it straightway over at the far end of the parking lot. It had been left in what passed for the Eudora PD’s impound yard, which was a weedy patch of shattered asphalt with two tractors and a backhoe in it along with Eugene’s jackleg state body truck. The bed was piled with stainless-steel tables.
    “Looks like Eugene found a kitchen somewhere,” I said as we rolled up on the thing.
    Desmond and Luther and Dale all told me together, “Methodists.”
    “Surely not around here. Look at that