Raylan_ A Novel - Elmore Leonard [3]
He let Angel’s BMW roll past the screen door standing open and came to a stop. He’d had the car washed in Somerset and wore a dark suit and tie for this visit, wanting Mr. Crowe to make a judgment about him. In its piece about Stinking Creek, Newsweek called Pervis “Speed” Crowe the top marijuana grower in East Kentucky. Crowe said in the magazine, “Prove it. I run a store for these poor people come up from the hollers with their food stamps. When’s anybody seen me cultivatin herb?”
There he was behind the counter by an old-style scale he used to weigh potatoes, cuts of fatback, the shelves behind him showing sacks of flour and cornmeal. Eggs ten cents apiece reduced to four bits the dozen.
All these stores looked the same to Raylan, the same people coming in to buy necessities, then taking forever to spend ninety-nine cents on an angel food cake, some candy and Kool-Aid for their kids waiting, not saying a word.
A young girl starting to bud sat on cow-feed sacks in her shorts drinking an RC Cola. Raylan had bought Beech-Nut scrap in stores like this when he was a kid, wanting to hurry up and get enough size to become a federal officer, the kind went after armed felons.
The girl on the cow-feed sacks kept looking up at Raylan like she was wondering about him, thinking hard of something to say, until she found a sweet voice to ask him, “Sir, would you think I’m bold to inquire what you do as your job?”
Raylan smiled. “Which one’s the question, what I think or what I do?”
Pervis Crowe, called “Speed” in the magazine, said, “Loretta, don’t you know Drug Enforcement, you see a man wearin a suit of clothes? They come around sniffin the air.”
“You got me wrong,” Raylan said, “I’m marshals service. We go around smelling the flowers, till we get turned on to wanted felons. I understand, Mr. Crowe, you have a couple of boys work illegal trades.”
Pervis said, “You hold warrants on ’em?”
“I did, they’d be gone,” Raylan said. “You wouldn’t see ’em for goin on two hundred and forty months.”
“Where you been?” Pervis said. “I don’t know a judge hands down more’n a few years.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Raylan said. “I wondered if you’re related to the Florida Crowes.”
“From some distance. How they makin it?”
“Doin time or dead,” Raylan said. “I sent one to Starke while I was workin down there. I did wonder, is that Dewey Crowe one of yours? Wears gator teeth and joined that Heil Hitler club? Told me he was from Belle Glade.”
“I mighta heard of the boy,” Pervis said, “but he don’t raise my interest none.”
“Wants you to know he’s bad,” Raylan said, “but doesn’t have it down yet. I’d like to meet your boys.”
“They’re a different stock,” Pervis said. “Wear clean clothes every day and drive Chevrolets.”
“Pickups,” Raylan said, “with a .30-.30 racked in the back window. Otherwise they drive Cadillacs. I wouldn’t mind talking to ’em, though it’s not my reason to stop by. I thought I’d buy a jar and take it down memory lane. I’m on my way to Evarts and on to Eastover, where I dug coal as a boy.”
“You managed to get out,” Pervis said, “before bad habits set in.”
“I was lucky,” Raylan said. “I didn’t mind going to school, found I liked to read stories.”
“Else you’d be wanted for bustin into drugstores,” Pervis said. “Clean out the painkillers and sell ’em to folks want to stay numb, not have to think.”
“You carry those people?”
“The ones grow reefer in their backyard I keep on the books. They sell a crop and pay their store debt with hunnert-dollar bills.”
“Can I ask why they call you Speed?”
He was stringy and stooped in his seventies, wore a hairpiece that wasn’t bad, though Raylan could tell Pervis set it on his head every morning. Had a neat part that was in it forever.