Cuba said, “I don’t know you won’t call the law,” and felt dumb saying it; he did. Like a straightman.
“I call and say I want to report some homicides? The man wants to know who this is. I tell him I’m the one’s been scoring dope out of your drugstores, with scripts a doctor writes for pussy.
“I tell the man go look at my picture you got on your wall.” She said, “Honey, Mister was my savior, but he’s dead and me and him are square.”
“You have to love him?”
“Only once a week, when he gets it up. Listen to him gruntin, like he’s pushin his car stuck in the mud.”
“But worth it,” Cuba said. “I understand the old man paid you a hunnert a day, pussy or no pussy. Three years, what’s that come to?”
Rita said, “You can slam a car door on my hand, I won’t tell you where it’s at. All you got left is to cap me. You still won’t know. I don’t have my money, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you do.”
Cuba said, “Hey, we friends, we believe each other, what we say. I already got somethin goin with a fine woman. But I won’t say you don’t tempt me.”
“She’s your girl?”
“We close.”
“She’s white, huh? You one of those think you special get a white chick to fuck you?”
“Blow me,” Cuba said and they both started laughing.
“She’s fine, she’s cool-”
“Has money?”
“That’s what we into, makin it.”
“Drugs?”
“People’s kidneys,” Cuba said to shut her up.
But Rita cT1)
“We sell ’em back the next day.”
“Cool. For how much?”
Cuba said, “Time for me to leave, get far away from here. You better too, you say they lookin for you.”
“I don’t know,” Rita said. “I’ll think of something. Send me a postcard, tell me what you doin, all right?” She kissed him and it wasn’t bad. She knew how.
Rita closed the door after him and locked it, hurried over to Mister, got her face down close to his and heard him breathe. She knew it. You don’t kill this dog with one shot. Rita said to him, “Honey, don’t move. I’m on get you to the hospital.”
K nox County Hospital called the state police and they got on Pervis’s case, called the marshals service to let Raylan know the two guys he had them looking for were homicide victims. Raylan visited the scene, saw Coover and Dickie dead on the couch and the bloodstained carpet where Pervis had been lying. The hospital said a black girl dropped off Pervis and must have left. They didn’t know her name and Pervis refused to identify the girl or the one shot him.
He did tell Raylan, sitting at his bedside, “He left me for dead. Shot me with a round that splintered a rib and messed me up inside.” Pervis raised the arm in a cast. “I broke it fallin down the stairs.”
“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.”
H e 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.
L ayla’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?”
“ cmesfonShe 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.”
