Raylan_ A Novel - Elmore Leonard [22]
“While you’re laid up,” Raylan said, “why don’t we see what I can do? It was Cuba Franks, wasn’t it, the shooter? Through using your boys for his felonies? Shot you, you happen to be there. But was Rita brought you here, wasn’t it? Why’d she take off?”
Pervis said, “Why you grillin me when you think you know everything?”
Raylan said, “Remember I told you they’re taking kidneys from people while they’re alive?”
Pervis kept his mouth shut.
“You’re a hard-ass old man,” Raylan said, “but I can respect how you feel. What I don’t want is you goin to prison for taking out Cuba.”
Pervis said, “It’s time I did somethin for my boys.”
He shot the brothers,” Raylan told Art Mullen—the two standing in Art’s office—“while they’re suckin on a bong. Coover’s turn, he’s popped and the glass shatters, got his shirt wet.”
“You noticed that,” Art said.
“His blood turned it pinkish. What’s that remind you of?”
“Angel’s bath,” Art said. “Three kidney jobs in the last few weeks.”
“But only Angel’s offered for sale. I told him, ‘Pray to St. Christopher you get ’em back’ and he came through.”
Art said, “What you’re saying, St. Christopher got Dickie and Coover whacked so Angel wouldn’t have to pay for his kidneys.”
“More or less.”
Art said, “We’re lookin for Cuba Franks, what he’s been doing since his convictions. A year ago he chauffeured for a rich guy owns horses. Cuba Franks, says he’s from Nigeria. Had the job for nine months and quit.”
“Wasn’t making enough?”
“Got tired of putting on his African accent. That’s what Mrs. Burgoyne told us. Harry Burgoyne said, ‘That’s what they do, they walk out on you. Only one African American I’d give high marks to and that’s Old Tom. He died on me.’ ”
“I know why Cuba quit,” Raylan said.
“Our office up there’s still lookin for him. Nine months, he must know his way around.”
“Has friends there,” Raylan said. “You don’t suppose—”
Art said, “Do I suppose he has a friend, a doctor at the transplant center, a woman?”
“Do you?” Raylan said.
Layla’s voice said, “Where are you?”
“I’m about to leave the hills for the four-lane,” Cuba said. “The Crowe brothers left for heaven this afternoon, less they got rules against weedheads. I had to do the old man, since he was in the house.”
“You told me he has a cute maid.”
“Only what I heard. I was never up to the house before.”
“Was she cute?”
“She was too young for that old man.”
“She was cute, huh?”
“I let her go.”
Now silence on the phone.
Cuba said, “She don’t know me and I don’t know her, how we left it.”
“You realize,” Layla said, “if I’d been with you and we could’ve worked it? We’d have six more kidneys in one swoop. Eight,” Layla said, “we throw in Rita. What do you think? Eighty grand.”
Chapter Ten
The Lexington office gave Raylan a partner whether he wanted one or not.
Bill Nichols, fifty-five, half his life a marshal; slim, about five-ten, hair cut short around a tan bald crown. He told Raylan:
“Fourteen I knew everything, shaved my head to become a hundred-and-thirty-pound white supremacist. Before I got any swastika tats, I got tired of getting beat up by these grown neo-Nazis dumber’n stones. I said fuck this and reversed my field, entered a seminary to become a brother, not a priest, a brother. Play softball, or walk around with my hands in the sleeves of the habit thinking of girls. I quit, went to UK, joined the marshals and married my wife, Julie, twenty-seven years now. We have three boys wanderin the earth, good guys, smart, three-point-fives or better. Max teaches English at a school in France. Alex designs book covers for Italian publishers and French, and Tim’s writing his second novel in New York. The first one sold four thousand. I asked him what it’s about, the one he’s writing. He said the subtext is the exposure of artistic pretension. And my little girl, Kate, senior in high school, wants to be a marshal.”
“I’m gonna have to get busy,” Raylan said.
“How long you been married?”
“I’m divorced,” Raylan said. “You ever look for the