The Devil's Right Hand - J. D. Rhoades [6]
John Lee looked back at the couple, who were disappearing out the back door. There was a broken down trailer in the back, he knew. John Lee had never discussed his brother’s businesses with him, but he knew the rumors. It was said that some of Raymond’s female customers were working off their drug debts in that trailer. John Lee swallowed nervously and followed his brother into the office behind the bar.He sat across the desk from Raymond in a rusted straight-backed chair with a tattered cushion. Raymond flicked his desk lamp on. “You got a pistol?” he said to John Lee.
John Lee shook his head. He felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Naw,” he said. “I got my deer rifle at home.”
Raymond grunted. He turned his office chair around and fiddled with the large, old-fashioned safe behind his desk. With a click, the black door swung open. Raymond reached in and pulled out a large object wrapped in cloth. He set it on the desk and unwrapped it. John Lee stared down at a huge long-barreled revolver that gleamed in the dim light.
“Raymond,” John Lee said, “What you planning, man?”
“You and me,” Raymond said, “We’re gonna find out who killed our Daddy.”
“The Sheriff--”
“Don’t give two shits about a dead Indian. You know that, and I know that. Anyone goin’ to take care of business, it’s us. Just like Lowrie.”
John Lee, like all Lumbee, knew the name. Henry Berry Lowrie was the Lumbee equivalent of Robin Hood, an outlaw who had taken to the swamps in the 1800's against the Confederate Home Guard and later against the Federals to avenge the murder of his father and brother and the oppression of the Lumbee by whites.
John Lee couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol. “You think it was them Meskins?”
“I don’t know,” Raymond said. “But I aim to find out. And you’re coming with me.”
“I ain’t never killed nobody before, Raymond.”
Raymond sighed as if this was some admitted failing on his brother’s part. He picked up the gun and stuck it in his waistband.
“Okay,” he said. He reached into the safe again and pulled out another pistol, a stubby, ugly automatic. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round before handing the gun to John Lee. “You take this one and back me up. This is your duty, too, little brother. Now let’s go.”
As they walked back out into the deserted bar, Billy Ray called out to Raymond. “Our friend called,” he said. “Our southern friend.”
Raymond stopped. “What’d he say?”
Billy Ray cast a glance at John Lee. “I told him you were at your Daddy’s funeral. He said to give you his sympathy.”
“Yeah, right,” Raymond said. Paco Suarez didn’t get to be the biggest supplier of cocaine on the East Coast by giving himself over to the softer emotions. “He calls again, tell him I’ll get back to him as soon as I take care of some family business,” Raymond said. “C’mon, John Lee.”
They drove for about thirty minutes, with John Lee providing monosyllabic directions. After they got off the main road, the roads grew narrower, but the scenery never changed. They passed field after field of crops growing thick and fat from the dark rich earth where a shallow sea once rolled. Corn, beans, corn, tobacco, tobacco, beans, tobacco. Houses weathered to the same gray as the topsoil stood among the fields, next to metal tobacco curing barns that gleamed and shimmered in the baking sun. Some landowners had given up the precarious living of farming; those fields grew rows of metal house trailers with postage-stamp-sized dirt yards and old tires thrown up on the roof in a forlorn hope of keeping the roof on in a tornado.
They finally pulled into a narrow dirt driveway that ran between a double line of rusting single-wide trailers. About halfway down the line on the left, there was a break in the regular spacing of the trailers. The soil in the gap
thus created had been denuded of grass and pounded flat by years of trampling. A group of young Latino men sat playing cards at a picnic table under a spreading live oak in the middle of the common