The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [44]
Even if I had no idea what we were up to.
“Is this a good idea?” I said. “Just hauling around in the truck so’s anybody could spot us?”
Unc looked straight ahead. “You told me Thigpen said nobody cares where we’re hiding. So we’re going to take him at his word. Testing the waters.” He nodded at the road. “So you just drive on over to the trailer. We need to shower, get some clean clothes on.”
“Unc,” I nearly shouted now, “we need to shower? Unc, there’s no time for this. We got to do something. We got to—”
“Drive,” he snapped. “Now. To the trailer.”
I looked at him a second longer, then jammed it into gear, hit the gas.
“You settle down now, boy, or you and I both will be dead,” he said. He turned to me, put his hand on my arm, gripped it until the pain started in on me too much, and I let my foot off the gas a bit.
“You got to know,” he said, “that unless we keep our heads on straight, we’ll both be dead. Do you understand this?” Still he hadn’t let go my arm, and finally I jerked it free of him.
“Do you understand?” he said again.
I could feel my eyes going hot, the back of my neck.
“Huger?” he said, calm now.
“Yes,” I said.
“We keep our heads on straight longer than they can, and we’ll win this thing.” He looked out his window, then back to me. “You blink, you lose. They already made one mistake. Cleve Ravenel did.”
I was quiet, knew he was waiting for me to ask after what that mistake might be. And of course I bit, but only once I’d let a full minute or so of silence go by.
I said, “What mistake was that?”
He held up his hand, the index finger. “Cleve Ravenel took too long coming back with Yandle and Thigpen Saturday. He comes back, says he got lost. But he’s been a member of the club over thirty years now. Since before I made sergeant on the force. He shoots turkey out here, knows every parcel near well as I do. I know this, so when he says he got lost, just for fun I let this finger drag along his front quarter panel.”
“And you come up with mud.”
He turned to me. He smiled. “You were paying attention. A boy after my own heart. Now if you were really paying attention, Huger, you’ll tell me the rest of what happened.”
I thought about what I saw, then gave the steering wheel a slap. “Then you dragged it on the front quarter panel of Yandle’s cruiser. You wiped it off.”
“And?” he said.
“And he didn’t have any mud. So Cleve Ravenel went somewheres Yandle and Thigpen didn’t.”
“Who gives a damn about fifteen-twenty on the SAT when you figure out something like that?” he said, and put his hand down on his leg.
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that funny.
“So Cleve Ravenel slipped somehow,” he went on. “For some reason. He went somewhere he ought not to have gone, because if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been late. Mistake one. And hence why I figured to get Missy Dorcas to scour his garbage can. I never met a pompous ass who didn’t keep all proof of his pomposity. And now we know something about CMS and about Charleston Terminal and about goods.”
“And about LD,” I said.
“None other.”
I looked at him, his mouth straight, a thin line.
I said, “You think Pigboy and Fatback are Yandle and Thigpen?”
“Possibility,” he said. “We’ll find out once we hit mile thirteen on County Road 221. A detail out of the electronic trash heap: CR221, thirteen miles to Pigboy roost. Our first stop after we hit the showers. I don’t know where either of them live, Yandle or Thigpen. But we’ll find out.”
“Are goods drugs, you think?”
“Possibility, too. Whatever it is, it’s crated up in popcorn and sent out by container ship. Maersk Line.” He paused. “But why pack it in popcorn? Why crate it up? You want drugs out of here, you do like everybody else: hire a Puerto Rican out of Miami and load up his Pinto, send him on his way up I-95. Charleston Terminal.” He shrugged, slowly turned to me. “So what was this between you and Miss Dinah? What’s this about you losing an idea?”
I looked at him. “I thought nothing got past you.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Past experience. But apparently a few