Raylan_ A Novel - Elmore Leonard [33]
Raylan shook his head. “I didn’t think I was aimin.”
“You reacted,” Art said, “like they taught you at Glynco. Shoot first, some dink’s ready to put you down.”
“I’m still not sure what I think of Layla,” Raylan said, “except I wouldn’t call her a dink.”
Art said, “She look like fun to you?”
“If I didn’t already know her game. Yeah, I could have hung out with her.”
“You ever did,” Art said, “I believe I told you, you’d be lying somewhere without your kidneys.”
“Even knowing who she was,” Raylan said, “I came close to losing ’em. I go to arrest her and end up in a bathtub out cold. I was lucky to wake up, you know it?”
“But you aren’t surprised,” Art said. “You’re the law, you expect what you say goes. You’re like an old-time marshal, tells some guy he doesn’t like to get out of Dodge by sundown.”
Raylan was grinning. “You’re talking about that mob guy, the Zip.”
“You think that situation was funny?”
“See, I was to tell him, get out of Miami Beach by sundown? It isn’t like saying get out of Dodge. I gave the Zip twenty-four hours,” Raylan said, “to pack up and hit the road. The next day he’s at the Cardozo havin crab cakes, only a few minutes left of his time, so I know he’s armed. It’s what the man does for a living, brought here from Sicily to shoot some guy and stayed. Bought himself a double-breasted pinstriped suit like Joe Columbo’s . . . Did you know that?”
“He went for the gun,” Art said, “you took it on yourself to shoot him, and got sent to your old Kentucky home most likely for life.”
“Yeah, but I went up two grades,” Raylan said, “after being stuck for seven years. I think somebody upstairs liked me closin the Zip’s file.”
Chapter Fifteen
Otis came out of his house and crossed the yard to where Boyd Crowder and some coal company man in a suit of clothes were looking at Otis’s fishpond: the pond down to barely a foot of water, fish floating dead in a scum of coal dust.
“You know how many years,” Otis said, “it took me to dig this pond, get it to look how I wanted? Stock it with channel cat, bluegill, some shiners? My grandkids used to come over and fish for the fun of it. Hook ’em and throw ’em back.”
Boyd said, “I bet less anybody was hungry. Otis, me and Mr. Gracie here are with M-T Mining? We go out to hear there any complaints. Folks in the hollers bitchin about debris coming down where we been stripping coal.”
Mr. Gracie said, still looking at the dead pond, “All the rocks and soil once the coal’s washed out, it’s got to go somewheres.”
“You don’t care it’s full of acid,” Otis said. “It kilt the stream fed my pond and now all my fish are belly up.”
He watched Mr. Gracie squat down at the edge of the pool, Mr. Gracie saying, “Hey, I believe one of ’em’s still alive. Look at the little fella flippin around in there wondering where the pond went.”
Otis stepped up behind him, planted his boot against the back of Mr. Gracie’s suitcoat and pushed him to throw out his arms and go facedown in the scum-covered pond.
Otis said, “Hard to breathe in there, huh?”
Boyd stopped grinning as Otis turned to him, Boyd saying, “I don’t think you shoulda done that.”
“Forty years in mines,” Otis said, “the whole time yes-sirin these company pimps. Well, not no more.”
In the evening Otis put supper on to boil—potatoes, turnips with greens—but first he sat with Marion while she held her robe closed tight to her chest breathing through her mouth. He gave her a couple of her OxyContins and a jelly glass of clear whiskey she’d sip on for a while. She had black lung from breathing the air, not ever having gone down a mine shaft.
He heard a bulldozer start up, a big diesel, knowing the sounds of the equipment, the dozers and draglines. The wolfhound heard it and got up off the floor. They’d blow charges and push the debris over the side from the strip job up on Looney Ridge. But this sounded close. Who was working in the dead of night?
By the time Otis heard branches breaking, rocks flying through the trees—knowing it was too late to grab Marion and run—a boulder the size