Apeshit Read online

“No badge here. Make it hard to check up on my uncle’s still if I had to worry about arresting myself.”

  Pinky grinned back at him. It was never a pretty thing when he did that. “Speaking of that still…” he began.

  It was about here that the fellow caught on. He took in the cut of our suits and the bulges in our jacket pockets and swallowed. “You from Chicago?”

  I nodded. “Where’s the old man?”

  “Passed on to that great open bar in the sky. Three weeks back, it’s been.”

  “Dead or not,” I said, putting on my ‘this is how it’s gonna be’ voice. “He still owes the boss two shipments.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, fellas. But I do know there’s a more local boss I do have to worry about. Why don’t you take it up with him?”

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s that?” I asked, keeping the steel in my voice and giving it a smart-alecky edge.

  “Old voodoo man who lives out somewhere deep in the swamp. He’s the one killed my uncle. And another man a week or two before that. He moved in and anybody who don’t pay up a portion of their whiskey for him to sell, he curses them. Next thing you know, come the full moon, a pack of dogs sets upon them and worries them down to bones before anybody can say ‘boo’ about it. He’s set himself up as the new boss in town and he’s taking a piece of every working still in five counties.”

  “That so,” Pinky said, pulling Shillelagh out into view.

  The man wiped his palms on his trouser legs. “What do you want me to do? Pay him money and give you free shine? I’d sooner just shut it down, and then where would we all be?”

  “You’d be in the boneyard snuggled up next to your uncle,” I said. “But we’re reasonable men. We don’t work for an unreasonable man. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.”

  “What’s this voodoo man’s name and where can we find him?” Pinky asked.

  “I don’t know his name, boys. Nobody does. And you don’t find him, he finds you and tells you what you owe. If you don’t pay up, he sics them wild dogs on you.”

  “Sure, pal,” I said, getting in his face. “And the Women’s Temperance Union probably keeps this devil-worshipper on the payroll. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  “Nobody,” the man said. He looked down distracted by the picture frame in my hand. “Which one’s you?” I asked.

  He pointed with a finger at one of the two boys. I cracked the picture frame on the man’s head, crumpling his hat and breaking the glass. He whimpered.

  “What’s your name?” Pinky demanded.

  “Tim. Tim Reardon.”

  I cracked his skull one more time. His hat fell to the ground. The frame broke into flinders and left glass in the man’s hair. “You asking us or telling us?”

  “Tim Reardon,” he said again.

  “See how easy that was,” I said. “Now tell us where to find this voodoo man.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, I swear it.”

  I glanced over at Pinky. He jerked his head a little. Far as he could tell, Timmy was being straight with us.

  I dusted some of the glass from his hair and reached down to pick up the man’s hat. I punched it back into a semblance of its former shape and set it back on Timmy’s head.

  “You got two days to arrange a meeting for us. Here’s good. We’ll be staying in the Marmont. No need to call us unless you set up a meeting sooner.”

  I stepped back. Pinky still had the gun on him. “Every bit of this whiskey belongs to the boss. We’ll figure out how much more you owe next time. And don’t try anything funny, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Timmy made it clear that he did in fact know just what was good for him.

  As we stalked toward the Ford, Pinky walked too close to a briar bush and ended up with a good rip in the leg of his trousers.

  “You’ll want to see Betty for that,” the man called out from behind us.

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s Betty?”

  “She does most of the laundry, pressing and sewing needs done in town. She’s not three blocks from the Marmont.”

  Pinky gave him the hairy eyeball. “Regular chamber of commerce, ain’t you, Mr. Reardon?”

  “Just because we have ourselves a situation doesn’t mean a fellow can’t be neighborly, does it?”

  “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Pinky said.

  “Well, gentlemen, all due respects to Chicago, but in Louisiana, we’re always neighborly.”

  “We’ll remember that,” Pinky said. “You just make sure to get your voodoo neighbor out here to meet us.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Reardon never called to say he’d arranged an earlier meet with the voodoo man turned aspiring bootlegger boss, and I spent most of the next day playing cards in Al Killenen’s little speakeasy behind the general store. The sucker got me with a pair of jacks more often than necessary, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad joint. The food was good, the whiskey decent, and the dames not so hard on the eyes as some of the places we’d been sent to do business. Pinky took his pants out to be sewn after hearing from one of Al’s patrons that this Betty was a looker, but came back disappointed. She hadn’t been in; the boy who does her running for her had taken the pants and promised to deliver them within a day or two. Apparently, there’s a whole lot of folks in the town of Rowland who could afford to get their washing done despite the depression.

  When I asked Al about the voodoo man, he clammed right up, “All I know is I buy from anybody else and things get ugly. Spooky ugly.”

  I tried to pry a little more out of him, but he wasn’t giving. “Spooky like a pack of dogs eating Old Man Reardon?”

  His eyelids came down to half-mast for a minute, like he was thinking about calling my bluff, but he folded his hand. “If you know that much about it, you know more than I do, Mister—?”

  “Wally, just Wally.” I tossed a couple of chips out as ante for the next hand. “But you can call me Wally from Chicago, if you want.”

  The other men at the table perked up a bit at that like scared little dogs. One by one over the next few hands, they all got up and cashed out, leaving just me and Al.

  Before he quit the game, he leveled a cautious look my way. “I could get killed for telling you this,” he said. “So I appreciate it if I never told you anything. And appreciate it even more if Chicago looks favorably on my operation without letting the local boys know.”

  “I’m listening. What am I supposed to not hear?”

  “Tim Reardon, the old man’s son,” he whispered. “He’s the voodoo man’s messenger and right hand man. Nobody ever sees the V-man, but they know if they get a visit from Tim Reardon, them hexed dogs won’t be far behind. Reardon’s uncle Renard wasn’t the first they got. Not by a long shot. Them dogs have been feeding on shiners who don’t play the voodoo man’s ball for a couple months now. And speakeasies that don’t buy from him. Truth is, right now we’re all more afraid of the hexes than we are of Chicago—and we’d all rather be on good terms with Chicago than in fear of some crazy swamp wizard nobody’s ever seen.”

  “Anybody ever go looking for him?”

  “A few did. Then their kin had to go lookin’ for them. A couple times that happens and you get people’s attention. Specially old country folk like live out here in Rowland.”

  “Thanks, Al,” I said. “We’ll see if we can get things back the way they need to be.”

  He looked around nervously. “It might be best if you and me not spend much more time playing heads up poker.”

  “A shame,” I said. “I think I was finally starting to get a read on you.”

  He gave me a wavering grin, puffed a time or two on his cigar and shuffled toward the bar.

  Pinky came back shaking his head with that gentle and reluctant grin he gets whenever he talks to the boss. “We’re to put this voodoo man under the boss’s thumb or put him down like a dog,” he told me later when we were in the hotel room.

  I spat out of the window in
to the muggy Louisiana night. “If he shows.” I explained to him what Al had told me.

  “That puts a different spin on it right there.”

  We went back out to Old Man Reardon’s cabin at the appointed time and scratched around a bit, but his nephew never showed up and neither did any voodoo man. We walked the path back into the brush we had seen the first time we had been here and discovered it led—after a maze of muck and low bushes and sprawling, stunted trees—to a clearing out in the deeper swamp with an even dozen more army tents, all of these in good repair and each containing two or three bathtub stills operating at full perk.

  I whistled low and serious through my front teeth. “Timmy’s been holding out on us.”

  “The boss ain’t gonna like this,” Pinky said.

  “Unless he starts getting a bigger piece of the action.”

  Pinky nodded. “Guess Old Man Reardon kept the still up by the house for anyone wants to bust him. Not a bad strategy.”

  We spent another two days in Rowland, scratching our heads and trying not to look like too big of fools when the boss asked why we couldn’t find the voodoo man nor Tim Reardon. We got to where we’d spent so much time combing over that swamp and asking questions around town that we were arousing suspicion. The sheriff sent one of his deputies out just to warn us how Prohibition agents tend to disappear around Rowland and so did people who aroused their interest. Pinky wanted to punch the deputy, but I could tell he held himself back. I promised we’d not be drawing any further attention to ourselves. So long as we could help it.

  “If you can’t help it, we can arrange for somebody to help you help it,” the deputy said before he strutted off.

  I grabbed Pinky by the shoulder before he could follow and clobber the little prick.

  At some point, Pinky’s pants came back and he wrinkled his nose up at them. They were sewed up nice, all the mud washed clean and now they sported a pair of crisp straight creases, extra starch like he likes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, smoking by the window out of courtesy. Pinky’s okay with cigarette smoke when he has to be, when the job calls for it. But I can tell it bugs him, the way he repeatedly pulls out one of his handkerchiefs or another and pretends to blow on it. With that in mind, I try not to make things hard on him when he’s off the clock if I can. It’s just being neighborly, as our missing friend Tim Reardon would say.

  His furry brow went up just a fraction of an inch. “Nothing,” he said. “You need to get any clothes done?”

  “Sure,” I said. I’d only packed two suits, thinking this would be a shorter trip than it was turning out to be.

  We called the front desk and they sent for Betty’s boy to come get pick them up.

  The next two days were uneventful. Quiet drinks and poker in Al’s little pub, increasingly irate chats over the phone with the boss. The biggest thrill was when our suits came back. Pinky, ever the connoisseur, held the pants leg up to his face and breathed in deeply. “Smell yours,” he said.

  I’m not one to get as big a thrill out of such things as fresh laundry as Pinky is, but I humored him. “Some kind of flower,” I said.

  “Bougainvillea. They were growing all over the back of that building.”

  “It’s nice. Maybe I’ll get some perfume that smells like it for Daisy when we get back to Chicago.”

  He grunted at me.

  Next time we went out to Reardon’s, his car was parked in front. It was near to dusk and the man was nowhere to be seen. We went back to the extra stills working in the tents and he wasn’t there. But it was obvious someone had been. The collectors were all empty and the racks of jugs and mason jars were significantly diminished.

  “Did you hear that?” Pinky said.

  “Hear what?”

  There was a rumble of an engine starting up and the chunk of Reardon’s Packard shifting into gear. Me and Pinky shared an almost telepathic glance and instantly we were sprinting through the swampy maze for Reardon’s dilapidated shack.

  And we were being followed. When I heard the barking, I looked back at Pinky. He’d already pulled Shillelagh out. I grabbed for my own weapon. When we got back to the shack, it was full-on dark. I couldn’t hear Reardon’s car anymore, but I could hear that pack of dogs baying behind us. We scrambled for the Model T.

  I began cranking it while Pinky got behind the wheel, his gun leveled in the direction of the howling in the darkness.

  The tin lizzy turned over just as the beasts, gigantic, slavering, mottled mongrels, every one of them, burst out of the swamp and into the moonlight.

  “Go, go, go!” I shouted. There were at least two dozen of them. No way we could put them all down with a couple revolvers and a pocketful of bullets.

  But that didn’t stop us from trying. I spent all my shells firing at shadows and Pinky did the same. He cocked his head to one side as he began to reload. The gunshots had only held them back, not frightened them off, but now the wild dogs did the strangest thing. As a pack, they all tore off in front of the cabin and past the outhouse into the darkness like their tails were on fire. Baffled, I looked at Pinky. He shrugged at me, but he had that look he gets when his intuition kicks in.

  “What do you think?”

  “Not sure,” he lied.

  “Okay, fine. What’s our next step?”

  He said nothing, but squirmed around in his seat as he began to give the T some gas. He reached one big paw behind him and pulled out a dirty black bag of some kind.

  I squinted at it in the darkness. “What’s that?”

  “A warning.” He tossed the thing to me. It felt like it was filled with corn meal and had been sewn with neat stitchwork into the shape of a little man. There were even nice little wooden buttons sewn on for eyes.

  “Our voodoo man lets the dogs kill Reardon, but he’s just going to try to scare us away?” I said. “Something doesn’t smell right about that.”

  Pinky grinned at me like I’d made a joke. “You got that right. You sure you didn’t hear anything, uh, unusual, in all of that?”

  “With all the gunfire and barking, I didn’t hear much beyond the ringing in my ears.”

  He pondered that for a second, as if he hadn’t considered the noise a gun makes before and it was a whole new concept for him. “Suppose so,” he said finally. “So what you want to do?”

  “I say we get some food and ammo, ditch the car a ways up the road and wait here for that sonuvabitch Reardon to come back. Him or the voodoo man, either one.”

  “Works for me,” Pinky said. “But there’s a couple other things we need to do, too.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He told me, and as he did, I figured the smell of that still had got him all screwy, but what he wanted to do wouldn’t really hurt anything, so why not?

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Back in Rowland, the boss yelled at Pinky through the phone for a while, then he yelled at me some. We explained we had it under control.

  “You better.” he said in that gravelly voice of his, then hung up abruptly. We made the arrangements Pinky had outlined, paid our tab at Al’s and made a good show of having been scared out of town. We tucked the Model T away into a side road and covered it over with deadfall branches enough to not be easily seen from the road. We were not-so-comfortably camped out in Old Man Reardon’s decrepit shack by noon. Pinky took a long walk out with a couple of his arrangements out into the swamp and came back empty-handed.

  “No sign of him so far,” I said, dealing us out a hand and tugging at my collar. It fit a little tighter than I liked and we were in the middle of a godforsaken swamp, so I took off my tie and unbuttoned the top button. No way I was wearing my jacket out here in the daylight. I left it hanging on a nail over Old Man Reardon’s boots and looked at my cards.

  “No sign of anything moving in this godforsaken hole, unless you count the swamp critters,” Pinky agreed.

  Long about five o’clock in the afternoon, Reardon’s car skidded to a halt in f
ront of the outhouse and as we watched from the shadows of the cabin a lady jumped out of the passenger seat and ran into the outhouse, slamming the door behind her.

  “Honey,” he called, stepping carefully out of the Packard. Something glinted on a chain at his neck, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

  “You all right?” he hollered, a note of concern in his voice.

  “Fine,” she replied. “Could you have drove here any slower?”

  “On this road, I should have. We about wore out the axles on some of those ruts.” He started walking toward the cabin, then angled off to our right.

  “Be glad I didn’t pull over and make you go on the side of the road,” he yelled over his shoulder at her as he passed our hiding place just inside the cabin door. Pinky and I hunkered down on either side listening to his footsteps trail away. We kept still as Baptists at a barn dance, but inside we were giddy as their daughters.

  “I’d almost have rathered,” she yelled back.

  He got out of the Packard and lit up a cigarette.

  “I’m going back to the stills, Betty” he said. “Join me when you’re able.”

  So Tim and the local laundress were an item, eh? A piece of the scheme clicked into place. Looking at Pinky, I could tell he was way ahead.

  “Which one you want?” he whispered.

  “The dame.”

  “Figured. I’ll go say hello to our fella.”

  He rushed out of the cabin, spattering the cuffs of his new pants with mud as he did. I followed him out and gazed over at the outhouse with its fancy wrought iron handle. It gave me an idea. I trotted softly over to the tent and cut a length of rope from it. Hurrying all the way, I approached the outhouse. There was no sound from inside. I tied off one end of the rope to the door’s metal hoop handle and ran around the little building, stringing the rope along behind me. I pulled it taut when I got back to the front and looped it through the handle just as Betty was beginning to stir inside.

  Sorry, lady, I thought. But you ain’t going anywhere just yet.

  “Tim?” she asked, uncertainly.

  “He ain’t here,” I said. “Why don’t you take a load off and sit a spell?” Sometimes, the things I say amuse myself. Especially when they get the person I’m talking to as worked up as they did Betty. The door vibrated as she slammed into it, but the rope held. She slapped her fists against it and wailed. “Let me out of here, you bastard!”