Dirtbags (2 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t go getting paranoid about the money,” said London. “I got asshole food suppliers up to here who go out of their way to squeeze me, say I owe them money. I bounce one check, and everybody loses their minds. Threatening to cut me off, stop deliveries and whatnot. I need you to keep your head. When the coast is clear, we’ll settle up.”

“This won’t be a problem, Tom,” Calvin said. London recoiled as if goosed, and Calvin immediately realized his mistake. “No problem at all, Mr. London.”

“Here’s seven hundred dollars,” London said, leaning sideways on the sofa to reach into his pocket. He pulled wrinkled bills from his wallet and counted them out. “Use it for travel and expenses. I’ll take it against what I’ll be paying you.” London handed over the cash, then looked at it before pulling a bill from the stack. “Make that six-hundred fifty dollars. I forgot I have to stop at the store to pick up mushrooms and coconuts for service tonight. This goes against the total.”

“Of course,” Calvin said. The dog’s hair came off its neck into his fingers. He wiped it against the couch. The dog didn’t seem to notice, as if his fur falling out were something natural, like rain or the setting sun. “I understand.”

“This will be the last time we see each other for a while,” London said. “The less we’re seen together, the better. If you have questions about anything, ask them now.”

Calvin said nothing.

London handed him an envelope. “This is the return address from the last correspondence we had. It’s from a methadone clinic south of Dallas. Probably the place you’re most likely to find her. She’s got family up there, so . . . ”

“I’ll find her.” Calvin looked him straight in the eye. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

“I won’t.”

“Just do me one favor,” Calvin said.

London arched his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Be sure to tell all your rich friends about what I done for you.”

“Beg pardon?” London rubbed at something that may or may not have been in his ear. “Come again?”

“Your rich friends,” Calvin repeated. “You know, in case they ever need something taken care of in the future. Make sure you recommend me, okay?”

London’s mouth dropped even further. He stood from the couch and crossed his arms.

“Will there be anything else?” London asked.

Calvin wanted a glass of water. Cigarette smoke bothered him and made him thirsty, and he’d run dry since London lighted up the first time. But he sensed the urgency in the room and thought it best to dismiss himself, rather to buy a bottled water or soda at the convenience store up the road. He stood and thought for a moment he heard the dog growl.

“Nothing I can think of,” he said.

“Tom?” came a dry, withered voice behind them.

Calvin turned and drew a breath, one he wasn’t quick to exhale. Reyna London stood in the hallway, her hair askew and asunder, makeup not removed from the night previous, and a luxurious yet tattered bathrobe barely held together by a satin belt. Her face bloated and pale, rendering her nearly unrecognizable. She didn’t appear to see past two feet in front of her. “Tom, is someone there?”

“Go back to bed, honey,” he answered. “We’re almost done.”

“What are you doing?” she croaked. Calvin had never seen her like this. He was more accustomed to her in too-small pencil skirts and hair pulled into a tight bun, quickly and efficiently directing her daily duties, whatever they may be. He would refer to her as
a shadow of her former self
, had she not suddenly seemed thirty pounds heavier than he remembered.

“Go back to bed,” London told her. “I’ll be finished in a minute.”

She turned and faced the bedroom, but didn’t move, just wavered there a moment. Calvin figured everyone else fancied things fine enough and moved to dismiss himself.

“Remember,” London said, “don’t overthink it. You ain’t reinventing the wheel. Easy money. You’ll be doing me a big favor.”

Calvin nodded. He wanted to say more. He still wasn’t sure about Reyna and what she would or wouldn’t hear. He extended his hand to shake London’s, but he’d already set about lighting another cigarette and couldn’t be bothered. Calvin put his hand in the pocket that held all the money and waved with the other, then set about letting himself out the door.

“Who was that?” Reyna called from the hallway. “Who’s here?”

“Nobody,” her husband said. “Nobody you need to worry about.”

Once returned to his car, Calvin yanked the money from his pocket. It was more than he’d seen in quite some time, all there in one place. His fingers fumbled a bit as he counted it, which he did three times, and all three times found it to only come to six hundred twenty-five dollars.

2

Phillip Krandall remembered Holly Jordan. Pretty girl, long dark hair, smile like some chick on a raisin commercial or something else all-natural that only pretty girls were asked to do. Thin as a rail and slow to develop, but when she developed . . . boy howdy. She came out of nowhere. As a freshman, she slithered silently in and out of classrooms, and when she came back from summer vacation their sophomore year, slither no more.

Never had anyone appreciated alphabetical order more than Phillip who sat behind her through high school and took the time to map every follicle on the back of her olive-skinned neck, to study the contours, draw constellations from each freckle to the other. Had they spoken? She’d once asked to borrow a pencil and, after she got too hot for her own good, copied answers from his papers. Once she rode in a car full of meatheads who pulled over to beat the tar out of him and, best Phillip could recall, didn’t bother to stop nobody, just fiddled with her hair while he hollered for help.

That was then. Now she was a bunch of photos on a social media site. Somewhere down the line, she’d found a boob job appropriate, and Phillip wondered if that was before or after she had the kids. He clicked around and found the asshole in charge of fathering them and nearly spit his energy drink across the computer screen.

“Are you kidding me?” Phillip choked. The dude was big. Corn-fed. Nearly every picture had him half-in, half-out of his mammoth pickup truck. He had one of those goatees folks grew to hide things. Reflector sunglasses. Grin: shit-eating. In pictures with his wife, he would swing a meaty arm around her, and Phillip wondered if she feared she would be eaten.

Phillip wanted her to look sad. As if life after leaving Lake Castor for the big city of Richmond was pure, utter turmoil. As if her tit work were nice and she’d been the belle of the ball once, but those days were over. Maybe her husband, Joe Bob Whosit, was big time down at whatever feed store or square dance, but every night she tucked those ungrateful brats of hers into their beds, then before retiring herself, crept outside to sneak a cigarette and a honest-to-goodness cry. That big dude, huffing and puffing away, grunting like a buck hog as he thrust himself inside her, her holding her breath for fear of suffocating beneath him, longing for some boy she once knew in high school but who never had the courage to say hello . . .

Phillip’s hand moved to his thigh. He hitched a thumb over his belt while his forefinger traced a circle near his midsection. Across the room, his cat lazily stretched and yawned and looked at him with an eye pointing fingers but went back to sleep anyway.

He clicked through vacation photos of her and the family at the beach. Kids swimming, kids building sand castles, kids burying Joe Bob Shitkicker. Kids doing everything but getting washed out to sea where they belonged. By the time he finally found a good enough picture of her in a bikini, it took all he had to rub the image of the children out of his wretched brain, but that didn’t even take long. She’d given birth to two of the little bastards but must’ve worked like the dickens to get back to fighting weight. But there she was: Fifteen years later if she was a day, but man, what a fifteen years it must have been.

He’d always known she would be the first he killed. During their junior year, she had Calculus during first period and would be in Mrs. Churchill’s class. Day after day, month after month, he planned to walk to the far side of the school with a bag full of enough ammunition to take out a small deployment, then put one in her head. That’s how the whole thing would start.

Not because he hated her. No, if that were the case, there was a long line of people who would have sufficed. The varsity quarterback. The grease-headed thug who waited for him after school every day. The guidance counselor who refused to mind his own business. No, he would have shot Holly Jordan before the others not because he hated her, but rather because he loved her and wanted to spare her the agony of living through the horrible carnage he had planned for the rest of their classmates. Shooting her first would have been an act of mercy.

His mind flooded with what could have been and what would never be, and that damned rage filled him again. He stared at the picture of her in the bikini and did his level best to get back in the mood, but all he saw was the redneck she married. The kids they had. The life they lived, happily or otherwise, but with nary a mention or thought of him, as if he never existed. Phillip grabbed the box of Kleenex next to his computer screen and hurled it at the wall where it bounced benign and landed in the corner.

When the knock came on the door, Phillip had been sulking for God knows how long, and the fury mounted to something nasty, and he knew, without a doubt, that the person on the other side of that door would be the absolute, number one last person in the world he needed to see. But they would not quit pounding so, in a huff, he stormed off to answer the door.

There stood Calvin Cantrell, a neighbor six units over and a guy he’d gone with to high school. For reasons all his own, he had no cause to love or hate the man, but there wasn’t much to keep him from hitching a fist into his face, neither. Nothing, save his own small frame and lack of inclination to do so.

“How can I help ye?” Phillip asked.

“Did I catch you when you was busy?” Calvin asked.

“Never too busy to stop someone from beating my door off the hinges,” Phillip said. “So again, how can I help ye?”

“I’d like to have a word.” With that, Calvin let himself into the trailer and past Phillip who, being the smaller of the two, could little object. Phillip became suddenly aware of the state of his trailer, the sole possession for the sole heir of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Krandall, long gone to Glory. He had little to show from the paycheck of a fast food fry cook, except for an honest-to-goodness library of graphic novels and multi-player, first-person shooter games. That being said, his sofa was a beanbag. His coffee table was an overturned cardboard box, taped up good and sturdy. His linoleum floor was his trashcan.

“Come on in,” Phillip said. “Kick off your shoes.”

Calvin smiled wryly. He seemed to consider sitting on the beanbag but remained standing.

“I don’t get many visitors,” Phillip said, deadpan. “I ain’t sure if I’m supposed to offer you something or another.”

“I won’t be long,” Calvin said. “I want to talk to you about something, and you may or may not be up to talk about it.”

“Sounds like a doozy,” Phillip said. “Perhaps coffee is in order.”

He stepped around a wood-paneled partition that came up only so-high, and suddenly he was in his kitchen. He popped a pot of stale coffee into the microwave and found a clean enough cup, then another, which he rinsed from the tap.

“You know me, and you know I ain’t never done nothing to you,” Calvin said.

Phillip shrugged. “No, Cantrell, you’ve always been a decent sort to me. I’ve appreciated your kindness a time or two.” He wished the coffee would hurry along. The coffee or Calvin’s point. “But something tells me you aim to change all that.”

Calvin hitched his jeans and used his hands a lot while he talked. “Listen, I got a good deal coming up. A good thing going on, and I think a guy like you could really help me.”

“If this has anything to do with volunteering on some politician’s campaign, you can count me out,” Phillip said. “I saw you running around door-to-door for old Judge Menkin, and I want no part of that. Half the doors in Lake Castor would just slam on my face. No thank you.”

“It has nothing to do with that,” Calvin said. “Nothing at all. I was fired off that campaign anyway, so I don’t have nothing to do with them.”

“How the hell do you get fired from a volunteer job?” Phillip asked. “Basically, someone is deciding that they’re better off without a guy who is working for free. You’d have to be pretty bad at your job if they won’t even let you do it for free.”

Calvin’s face darkened. He balled up his fists, and his shoulders crowded up in front of him. “I ain’t talking about that mess with Judge Menkin,” he growled. “I’m trying to talk to you about something else.”

“Fine,” Phillip said. The microwave beeped. Phillip poured himself a cup and motioned to Calvin.

Calvin didn’t acknowledge; instead, he launched into his pitch. “Look, I got to drive out to Dallas and do something for somebody. Something bad. Something . . . 
permanent
.”

“I’ve noticed you have quite a flair for the dramatic,” Phillip said. “Like that fuss you made with the neighbor lady over that tree.”

“That wasn’t me made the fuss,” Calvin snapped. “That was her. She’s upset because that tree on our lot shits needles and pinecones all over her yard, and she’s always bellyaching at me and Rhonda to cut it down. It costs damn near three hundred bucks to get someone to cut it down, and it was there long before we moved here. And she gets so huffy about it, which makes me likely to do it even less. I mean, it’s no wonder her husband had a heart attack. If I was married to her, I’d eat nothing but butter and pray the good Lord made it nice and quick.”

“It ain’t her fault,” Phillip said. “They say her husband used to beat on her.”

“Well, he didn’t beat on her hard enough, in my opinion.”

Phillip poured Calvin the cup of coffee and handed it across the partition. Calvin accepted it, but set it on the floor at his feet. “I’m sure you didn’t come over here to discuss Miss Rachel and your pine tree.”