Richmond Noir (10 page)

Then Reggie was pulling me up and had his arm around my waist and we were moving. We couldn’t exactly run but I was skipping furiously. It didn’t make any sense that the dog had jumped into the water. I couldn’t believe it would make it across the river, and even if it were strong enough, the current would take it much further down than where we’d been spotted. It would never catch us in time. All that logic did little to ease the incredible measure of fear pounding inside of me.

We stayed on the path through the forest, more or less. I felt my legs being ripped by shrubs and branches as we stumbled along, made blind by terror and adrenaline. I couldn’t hear anything; I was breathing too hard.

The trees cleared away once again and there was still another hundred or so yards to the car. We could see Derby already at the car with the trunk open, throwing whatever he’d managed to grab inside. He slammed the trunk and then jumped behind the wheel. Instead of bringing the car to us, he sat inside and screamed from the window, “Come on! Hurry up!” I really didn’t want to keep him waiting.

Reggie got me to the door, opened it, and all but threw me in. Then he jumped in next to me, not even bothering to run around the car to sit shotgun. The vehicle started moving before Reggie got the door closed.

“Roll up the fucking windows!” Denby was screaming.

Reggie and I both looked toward the trees. If we could have rolled up the windows with a handle we would have. But all any of us could do was put our finger on a button and wait for it to come up at its own pace. The monster of a dog was moving full speed from the black of the trees. It had a savage way of running. I could see dirt hiking up from where its claws were tearing the earth. The lights in the parking lot showed us that the animal’s thick fur was reddish-brown and, even with the water it had just swam through matting down most of it, already beginning to puff back out. Its tail had a peculiar way of curling. Its face, which I could barely see, was stretched back across its teeth. We couldn’t see its eyes.

Denby put the car in reverse and we swung back wildly. By the time he shifted gears again we heard the dog smash into the back of us and felt the car dip with its weight. It clawed against the metal and started crawling forward. We screamed at Denby to start driving. He did. The dog was on the roof of the car then. The tires made a horrible sound as they went over the train tracks we’d passed to get to the docks. Then Denby came to a sharp stop. Reggie and I almost kissed the windshield with our foreheads. The dog didn’t have any windshield. It went flying in front of the car. Denby stomped on the pedal. We heard a piercing whine and felt the car thud viciously over something much larger than a speed bump. I turned in my seat and looked back out the window. The dog lay very still in the street. It still looked huge.

“What the hell just happened? Does someone want to tell me?” Denby was yelling from behind the wheel.

The brothers began talking over one another heatedly, each with his own theories. I sat quietly for a moment, trying to catch my breath. I felt like I had asthma. I needed a bellows shoved down my throat. We didn’t realize we could put the windows down until we were halfway to the brothers’ house. My shirt was soaked in sweat. It dawned on me I only had one of my crutches.

I wasn’t very vocal during the ride home. The brothers were doing enough talking. I was trying to wrap my head around what we’d just witnessed. A girl running around in her underwear next to the river. Sure, it was warm enough. So what about Cujo? More importantly, what about the guys who’d sicced him on the girl? The thought put a miserable taste in my mouth and I didn’t know how many drinks it would take to get it out. I wanted to take my throbbing foot and throw it out the window.

“Sorry about the fishing rod, guys.”

“Did the dog rip the throat out of that chick? What the hell do we do now?” Reggie was leaning forward, clutching the seat.

“I don’t know what all we can do. Call the cops, I guess.”

Maybe the body would still be there. Maybe both bodies.

“Do you think they got a good look at us?” Reggie asked.

“No shot in hell. No way. Not from all the way over there,” Denby said.

I thought briefly about how easy it was to run into somebody you didn’t want to see in Richmond. An asshole, an ex-girlfriend, a murderer. The city could be awfully small.

We turned into Oregon Hill. We’d been driving very fast up until then, but when we came to where the neighborhood started, Denby pulled it back to a crawl. I couldn’t make up my mind about whether this was the adrenaline leaving him or because he realized we were coming back into Oregon Hill. I would’ve felt safer driving around Richmond in the car or, even better, out of the city altogether, but I kept my mouth shut. It was very late by then. A few kids passed us on bicycles as we got out of the car. The bars were closed. We stood still until they rode off the block.

The living room held a large collection of DVDs and a flat screen on the wall. The television was a gift from their mother. Several framed posters of horror flicks hung on the walls. I sat on the leather sofa and took out a cigarette and lit it. It didn’t taste right in my mouth. I put it out in one of the empty beer cans on their glass coffee table. The room was cold, even in the summertime. Denby sat next to me on the sofa and Reggie took a seat in the corner of the room. We all stared at the floor or the wall or our shoelaces but avoided looking at each other. No one had anything to say, so we just sat there in the silence. Then we heard the kitchen door open. Reggie and I looked at Denby, as if it were his responsibility to lock the door. My eyes were all but bulging out.

Heels were clicking on the wood, followed by heavy boots. Ebone walked into the room. Her legs looked very nice in heels. Behind her was a black guy with a shaved head, a low-hanging gold chain, and wrists about as thick as my neck. He was only about seven feet tall.

“You really should lock your door, boys. I wouldn’t exactly rate this as a safe neighborhood,” she said. Her smile had as much venom as a King Cobra.

“This isn’t really the time, Ebone,” Denby started.

“I’m here to get that bag off of you, Denby. That’s why I brought Maurice here. I hate to get nasty but you know how I am when I don’t get what I want. I guess I’m spoiled.”

I stood up. “Now listen here, you crazy—”

Maurice took a step toward me. I sat back down. Ebone laughed.

“What the hell are you going to do? You don’t even have two crutches,” she sneered. “Tough guy on one foot.” She turned back to Denby. “So? Where is it?”

“Ebone, we already had this talk. I got nothing for you. If anybody should have anything for another body, it oughta be you. You swindled me, remember? Where do you get off?” I could tell he wanted to sound hard, but with the recent course of events and the present size of Maurice, his voice was strained and borderline soft. Though I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge.

She came up close to Denby and played with his ear. “You’re really gonna hold that against me, Denby? I thought we were friends?” she purred.

“Maybe if you make right.”

“I tried to do that earlier tonight. You didn’t seem to like my deal then.”

“Discounts are out, Eb.”

“Well …” She started walking away from him then. “I guess you and Maurice are going to have to play. I really think you’d have liked playing with me better though, Denby. We had fun once.”

Maurice walked further into the room. I grabbed my crutch, almost holding it as if it were a bat. It’s what I had a mind to use it as.

From behind Ebone we heard the door open again. Everyone froze and turned, looking toward the hallway leading into the kitchen.

Ebone started to back into the living room with us and came to stand next to Maurice. Two men walked into the room. One of them was very thin with a flat ugly nose and a trucker hat. The other was taller but had a beer belly that stuck out from under his white T-shirt and a full reddish beard. The thin one held a crutch he didn’t need that looked very familiar to me. The tall one had a gun in his hand.

“We havin’ us a party?” the thin one asked. He smiled and showed us his bad teeth. He raised the crutch. “I think you lost something.”

“Hey, neighbor, now isn’t exactly the best time …” Denby said.

No one seemed to care about Denby’s schedule.

“Normally, we don’t like to meddle, even if we do see folks we don’t particularly like to see in our neck of the woods, ain’t that right, Greg?”

“What, you mean niggers, Walt?” Greg, the taller one, replied.

“Precisely precise. And hell, we can even respect most anybody who enjoys the sport of fishing. I guess you boys just happened on a bad spot.”

“A little further up by the bridge ain’t bad fishin’,” Greg said.

“Who the hell are you hillbillies?” Ebone demanded. The sound of her voice made me wince. The timing was off too.

Greg motioned the gun at her and Walt barely had time to grab his wrist before it fired. It didn’t stop the shot but it did save her life. Instead, the bullet caught Maurice in the belly. His shirt began to show red quickly and he took a step forward. He made an awful sound. Greg fired two more times at the big man. Neither of these shots missed.

Maurice fell on his face and he was as heavy as he looked. The crash made almost as much noise as the gunshots.

“Jesus H, Greg! What’d you shoot for?”

“I didn’t mean to, but he looked like he was making a move, man!”

“Yeah, cause you shot him!”

“I thought we was gonna to shoot ’em anyway!”

“Yeah, but you was aimin’at her! Be a waste to pop her here. We can play the game with her. She ain’t a bad piece, even she is a nigger.”

I had a bad habit of talking before I thought better of it. Maybe two people getting murdered right in front of me made me act stupid. “Is that what you were doing down there? Playing a game? Siccing a dog on steroids to rip a girl apart? What kind of fucked-up country bastards are you?”

Greg’s face twisted up at that, but Walt just started showing us his teeth again.

“We love our dogs. They get bored just like we do. ‘Cept they can’t drink no beer. Or at least they don’t like it all too much. And I do love to see a girl go for a run. Now, on your feet, gimpy. We gon’ take us a field trip.”

No one had been paying much attention to Reggie. It was a mistake not to pay attention to a man in an outdoorsman vest. No one had seen him unsheathe a machete in the corner of the room. Without a word, he swung it into Walt’s arm. There was a shrill scream, like an elementary school fire alarm. Greg pointed the gun at Reggie but I’d already consented to their previous command and gotten to my feet. I swung my remaining crutch into Greg’s face with all the muscle I had. The bolt I used to adjust the height of the crutch must have hit him right between the eyes. Blood spurted out everywhere and he fell to the floor, clutching his face, dropping his gun.

Ebone started screaming. She ran out of the room as fast as her heels could carry her. Denby scooped the gun up and pointed it at the bleeding men lying on his floor. The two who were still alive.

“Where the hell did you get a fucking machete from?” I yelled. I didn’t mean to yell. It just seemed like the only way anyone could talk at a time like this.

“I dressed as Rambo this past Halloween,” he said.

I got my cell phone out and called the police. My asthma was back.

In minutes there were enough cops at the house to have a parade. They took Greg and Walt to get bandaged up so they wouldn’t stain the backseats of their squad cars. We told our stories so many times it felt as if it were one of the movies in Reggie’s DVD collection. The officers radioed someone to check if the body of a girl or a dog could be found down by the docks. In an hour they got a negative on both accounts but found a lot of blood in the location we’d described. They found all the stuff we’d left behind on the docks as well. They only mentioned the beer. To be cute. They guessed the body of the girl would be found in the river.

The cops gave Reggie some trouble about the machete but relented some when they saw he owned every
Rambo
on DVD and had a life-sized poster hanging in the upstairs hallway. In any event, they took the machete with them. The entire time the police were in the house, Denby was constantly talking and moving around. It wasn’t surprising at first, since that was Denby’s way. Then suddenly it seemed like something more.

“Does Derb seem nervous to you, Regg?” I whispered discreetly to him.

“Could have something to do with all the tree we got in the fridge,” Reggie said under his breath.

I lit a cigarette and began massaging my scalp furiously.

They raided the neighbors’ house and didn’t find anything too peculiar, for an Oregon Hill residence, until they went into the basement. There they found three more dogs in cages, all different breeds, each about as eager to get its jaws on someone’s throat as the one we’d run over. They searched the truck the neighbors owned and found the body of the dog underneath a tarp. Of course, they wouldn’t leave their beloved pet behind. It was identified as a Chow but of considerably greater size than normal. So far the police had everything except the body of the girl. That would turn up. All we could do was wonder who she was.

When asked about the big black guy lying on the living room floor, we just said he was a newly made acquaintance we didn’t know all too well, which was kind of true. That didn’t sit well with them but there wasn’t much they could do about it right then. They found identification on him, took him out of the house, and told us to skip any foreseeable trips.

No one said a word about Ebone. Denby was doing most if not all of the talking by then, which Reggie and I were happy to let him do. I didn’t know why Ebone didn’t come up, but neither did I care very much to add anything else that would keep the police around any longer. I wanted them out almost as bad as the brothers did.

The sun was well upon its ascent by the time they all left. I sat on the leather sofa, leaning forward on my two crutches. My foot hurt, my shoulders hurt, my eyes hurt. But I couldn’t keep my good foot from tapping and my palms from sweating.