Dirtbags (25 page)

Calvin didn’t say a word.

“Oh, he doesn’t know, does he?” Shackle smiled. The same grin she saw him get when he took the hairpin curve up on Creechville at fifty-five or better. Same smile he got when he brought her home some to go from Hunan's after they got downgraded to a C. “This will be news to him? Well, Mr. Cantrell, allow me to bring you up to speed. Me and your wife have been getting after it. I mean, we haven’t in a while, but when we were . . . let’s just say we’ve had to hose off the bed a time or two. One day, we went at it so hard, I thought I was having a heart attack. You remember that, Rhonda? I mean, you got yourself a little jackrabbit here.”

Rhonda rolled her eyes. “Will you please shoot him, Calvin?”

“No, I don’t think I will.” Calvin relaxed the gun. “I’m actually enjoying this. Go on.”

Shackle took a deep, sad breath. “It’s true. We were going at it one day behind Grundy's Food Stores and my chest seized up. I couldn’t move. I thought that was it. I mean, there I was, with my pecker inside your wife, hollering and carrying on about how I never should have took up cigarettes, and she’s screaming at me to keep going, don’t stop, just a few more seconds. She never took me out of her the whole time. She actually got off on it, I think.” He exhaled. “You got to watch this one. She’s trouble.”

“Are you finished?” Calvin asked.

“Oh, not quite. You see, I could go all night.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Just ask your wife.”

Calvin smiled. His head ticked to the right as if a mosquito had bitten him. He put a bullet in the back of Shackle’s head. The deputy stood still a moment, until the rest of his body got the message and crumpled where he stood. Calvin put another into him. Then another.

***

Rhonda stared across the room at her husband. He looked back at her as if she were a math problem.

“He makes twenty-five-thousand dollars a year from the city and god knows how much from Bubba,” she said. “I figured you’d at least want his name in the hat.”

Calvin wasn’t running on much more than she was. They were both gassed. Where Calvin was physically battered, her shit ran more emotional. The ordeal at Big Jack’s had taken a lot out of her. Not the dancers. She was never horribly fond of the way her co-workers had treated her, but she hated to watch him die. Big Jack had been sweet. He’d always looked out for her. She comforted herself knowing that, for him, it had been quick.

But as soon as Calvin punched that knife into his throat, the other girls went apeshit. What started as a couple of old friends dropping by to smoke a joint and pass around a mirror lined with blow turned quickly into a free-for-all. While Calvin cut away at the big guy’s throat, Sinnamon screamed and bellyached while Passion ran for the door. Calvin cut her off with a shot to the head, but that left wailing, shrieking Sinnamon.

Calvin had already calculated aloud the difficulty of moving Big Jack to the bedroom, so Rhonda imagined most of the fight already sapped before it had even begun. At first, Calvin seemed to want to negotiate with Sinnamon, as if he half-expected to coax her into whatever position he had dreamed up for them. Anything to keep from having to haul her to and fro. That slight, indecisive moment put a spark of prayer in the woman’s eyes, and she made her move. In the snap of a finger, she went from terrified shrieking to terrifying battle cry and charged Calvin, knocking him sideways.

But she didn’t run. She pounced atop Calvin, knocking the gun from his hand, and she went for his eyes with those fingernails. He held her claws at bay, but she got a knee into his groin and sent him moaning and clutching himself. She ripped one of the shoes from her feet and swung the stiletto heel at Calvin, narrowly missing his throat, his chest, and then his right hand. He reached out for the gun, but grasped at nothing.

Rhonda watched Big Jack. His giant maw turned up to a smile. The last thing him hearing before Calvin tore into his throat that yes, she was finally happy. She was with someone who treated her right. They were on their way up, she and Calvin, and that, after years of shitty living, she could see the light. It was a lie, sure, but Big Jack heard those words and smiled because he cared for her.

Then her husband ripped out his throat.

The battle below her went largely unnoticed because she knew the difference between what her last memories of the man could be and, more importantly, what they
should
be.

When Calvin had finished up with the stripper, he shook Rhonda by the shoulder, then shook her again when she didn’t respond.

“Honey,” he said, “I can’t heft this girl by myself. I’m going to need your help getting her into the trunk.”

Rhonda kissed her fingers and put them to Big Jack’s lips. She left him where he was and grabbed Passion by the legs. Most of the blood, Calvin told her, was his. The other one had put up quite a fight and after they had moved Passion to Deputy Shackle’s apartment, he had nothing left in the tank, so he used the gun instead.

At Shackle’s, Calvin carved the number with him still in the hallway, right where he fell. Rhonda watched a daddy longlegs bounce around a corner of the ceiling. When Calvin finished, he stepped into the living room and watched her a moment before saying, “We should go. I’m hungry.”

“You’re getting lazy,” she said sleepily.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re just leaving him there in the hallway. Her on the bed. You did the same at Big Jack’s.”

“Yeah, so?” He tapped his fingers on the wall.

“You used to like the art of it all,” she said. “You used to say you were doing something great. Like all those famous ones.”

“Yeah,” he said. He opened the door, but didn’t leave just yet. “Ain’t you been reading the blogs? Ain’t you been looking at the papers? I
am
one of the famous ones now. Everything I do is art.”

21

Rather than deal with the disappointments of having an attuned bullshit detector, Rhonda Cantrell figured it good and well to simply shut it off. This way the men around her could maintain some semblance of intrigue and importance, rather than come off like the whiny gasbags they often had a tendency to be.

It was a skill she learned dancing at the 809 where, if she ever took note and focused, there wasn’t a single human being worth a glass of water should they suddenly catch flame. It was a skill she honed working at the restaurant, where everyone was out for himself or herself and never looked past the shift before them. And it was a skill she practiced sitting in the kitchen of that farmhouse they’d found on the edge of town, Bubba Greene zip-tied to the chair at the head of the dinner table and Calvin carrying on like he was at a job interview.

Bubba Greene sat across from him and scowled. This wasn’t the type of hand a fella like him was often dealt.

“What if I don’t need any killing?” he asked.

Calvin had talked this over with Rhonda already. “A man like you always needs killing.” He gazed flitted around the room. “And it looks to me, there ain’t no one around to handle that killing for you no more.”

“Beg pardon?”

Calvin brought his face inches from Bubba. “You appear to have a couple openings.”

“I think you watch too much TV,” Bubba said.

Rhonda trained the gun on him and kept an eye out for funny business. Bubba looked to her once or twice, almost as if he expected her to help him out of the fix he was in. No, Rhonda thought, you made your bed. Now you have to lie in it.

They’d gotten the jump on Bubba. Sure, he’d armed himself to the teeth and holed up in one of his houses he'd owned. One he kept for the girls when they needed to get away from a jealous boyfriend or worse, an angry father. He locked each door and window and barricaded himself in his house, completely unaware that they were already inside.

First thing they did was get him out of there. Things had heated up quite a bit in Lake Castor, but Calvin still found it possible to maneuver the back roads after dark. With Bubba unconscious, he loaded him into a stolen pickup, and they rode back to a farmhouse on the county line, just past where folks kept a lookout for him.

Bubba didn’t like it none when he came to and found himself bound to that chair at the dinner table, nor did he like it when he found out what Calvin had in store.

“I heard some people say you was Dixie Mafia,” Calvin said. “Some people say you’re a connected fella.”

Bubba burst into laughter. “Dixie Mafia? What the dog-eared hell do you know about the Dixie Mafia?”

“I know what I know.”

“Is that right?” Bubba looked to Rhonda. “Your fella here is quite a piece of work.”

“Shut up,” she said. She offered him a better view of the gun in her hand.

Bubba turned back to Calvin. “Dixie Mafia,” he muttered. “Son, you should know there ain’t no such thing as Dixie Mafia. Not no more. And when there was, there weren’t none around here.”

“Because you run them off?”

“There are lots of stories that go around about me,” Bubba said. “It was never up to me to inform folks they had the wrong impression. You see, a bad reputation is enough to keep me from having to do a bunch of killing.”

Calvin studied him, squinting. He opened his eyes wider and grinned. “Bullshit,” he said. “You almost had me. I bet if we went to the pines out behind the 809 and dug in any one spot, we’d find somebody or another, and I’d bet even more that you had them put there. Everybody knows it.”

“If everybody knows it,” Bubba said, “then why ain’t the cops digging out there? Because it’s all bullshit. I ain’t done half the things folks say I’ve done.”

Calvin stepped away from him. Bubba looked quickly to Rhonda. She had nothing for him.

“Don’t you have enough of your own people to kill?” Bubba asked. “Why do you need my help with any of that?”

“I do.” Calvin turned to him again. “Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of folk I could kill. We had a neighbor lady who raised hell over some dumb shit time and time again. I would love to jam a knife in her heart. A couple guys from high school who made sport of me a time or two. I know where they hang out after work. I’d have no problem shooting both of them in their faces.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“But that kind of killing is beneath me.” Calvin sighed. “I’m looking at the bigger picture.”

“And what
is
the bigger picture?” Bubba asked. “Killing young couples in the woods? Strippers?” He looked to Rhonda. “Killing Big Jack?”

Rhonda’s face flushed. She looked away. The gun in her hand seemed suddenly lighter.

“No,” Calvin said. “What I do is art. And up to now, I’ve been performing that art for free. Making a name for myself. But now, I’d say I’ve gotten pretty good. It’s time to show I can use my art to fit into today’s society. For the first time in my entire life, I have a set of skills, and I’d like to demonstrate that I can use those skills—that
art
—to contribute to society.”

He stepped behind Bubba and put his hands on his shoulders. In his ear, he whispered, “I’m ready to be commissioned.”

Rhonda wasn’t used to seeing Bubba speechless. Normally quick with the wit, the old man had nothing. He looked around the room and appeared quite uncomfortable with Calvin’s location.

“Are you going to give me a name?” Calvin asked.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Someone you want killed.” Calvin kneaded Bubba’s shoulders. “Give me a name and consider it done. Problem is, since I’m known as the Couples Killer, I’ll have to find someone to lay alongside them after I kill them, but that’s honestly the least of my concerns.”

“You’re crazier than a shit-house rat,” Bubba said.

“Maybe,” Calvin said, “but I’m still going to need a name.”

“I can’t help you. I don’t need anybody killed.”

Calvin sighed. He rounded the chair and stood in front of Bubba. Bubba stared back defiantly. Calvin balled his fist and shook it, readied it, then worked up the nerve a bit before punching Bubba in the cheek. Rhonda didn’t imagine it turned out quite how Calvin pictured it, as he ended up more hurt than Bubba. Calvin winced and gripped his hand with the other hand.

“Jesus Christ,” he yelped.

“I been punched in the face many times in life,” Bubba said. “And by bigger shits than you.”

Calvin wouldn’t give up. “You’re going to give me a name,” he said. Instead of using his own fist again, he looked around the room for something blunt. He opened a kitchen drawer and fussed through a few things, shoving stuff this way and that. Finally, he found a rolling pin. Smiling, he gripped it with one hand and popped it into the palm of the other. “Last chance.”

“I don’t get it,” Bubba said. “Just kill who you want. Why do you need me to tell you to kill someone?”

“You’re going to give me legitimacy,” Calvin said. “People are going to see what I done for you, and I suspect they’ll want my services. My art.”

“No one in their right mind will—”

Calvin walloped him in the face with the rolling pin. Bubba’s head jerked backwards as he certainly felt that blow. Calvin got him square in the nose. Blood trickled freely from one nostril.

“You son of a—”

Calvin hit him again. This time, in the kneecap. The left one. A hollow, dead thud. Bubba jerked to and fro in the chair. Calvin gave him another, same place.

“Goddammit! Stop hitting me!”

Calvin didn’t. He put another in Bubba’s nose.

“Are you going to give me a name?” he asked. He popped him again in the forehead. The skin opened and purple fluid rushed forth. Rhonda looked away.

“Yes!” Bubba shouted. “Yes! Dammit, I’ll give you a name. Just quit hitting me with that damned rolling pin.”

Calvin took a step back. He held his weapon at the ready. “And . . . ?”

Bubba panted for breath. He looked to Rhonda, then back at Calvin. He must have taken too long, because Calvin reared back with the rolling pin and Bubba quickly spat, “Tank Tillotson.”

“Tank Tillotson?” Rhonda rolled her eyes. “The crank dealer?”

Bubba nodded. “That’s the one.”

“That’s a big fella,” Rhonda said.

“You didn’t say the guy was supposed to be a certain size,” Bubba said. “You just said I had to name him.”