Ranchero by Rick Gavin

Dale) Luther’s testicles. That was usually the part of a man, Mexican or otherwise, Dale could be relied on to threaten first.
    “I’m watching you,” Dale told Luther, but Luther was smoothing his lapels by then and seemed the sort who’d welcome watching by anyone who’d care to do it.
    Pearl offered Dale the casserole again, and this time he took it and thanked her. So Dale would know a day of supplements and Skoal along with carrots and peas and chicken under a cheese potato chip crust.
    *   *   *
     
    When me and Desmond ride around together, we just climb in and go. There’s no hold up for the one of us while the other gets himself ready, and we don’t usually talk about where we’re going or how we’re going to get there. We just get in the car and figure it out en route.
    That morning the job was to get to Webb and find the house Percy Dwayne had in mind, long before he would expect us to have arrived. Then we could see what was what and maybe figure who was who and decide where we needed to be to keep the whole thing from going sour.
    Luther, however, was a Dubois and didn’t know recon from études. Worse still, he was a clothes horse with an entire wardrobe for the taking, and Desmond and I were long since ready to roll while Luther was deciding what to wear.
    What, after all, does a Yazoo drug slinger wear to a crack house in Webb? Particularly if the visit isn’t attached to standard commerce but is more of a freelance SWATTY sort of thing. He just couldn’t settle on an outfit to suit him, and Pearl was delighted to help him dither because the longer Luther took, the more insisting she could do.
    We let them go on for a bit because Desmond and I had eased down into Pearl’s house and were watching Dale watching the Geo from a block and a half away.
    “Think we can wait him out?” Desmond wanted to know
    “I don’t know. He looks pretty comfortable.”
    Just then Barry White set in from Desmond’s front shirt pocket. “It’s you,” he told me, and handed me the phone.
    I hit the talk button. “Yeah,” was all I had occasion to say before Percy Dwayne, sounding a little rattled, barked out, “Where’s your goddamn charger?”
    “For the phone?”
    “Well, yeah,” he told me in a tone that left me itching to smack him, not that I wasn’t already consumed with those sorts of urges, anyway.
    “It’s here.”
    “That don’t help me, now does it?”
    “Can’t imagine what I was thinking, not leaving it in the car.”
    “How’s this?” Luther asked me from the doorway in his Sonny Crockett linen jacket and a Creamsicle undershirt. Yazoo City Vice.
    “Who’s that?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.
    “Fellow at work,” I told him.
    “He the one bringing you over here?”
    “Yeah. I guess.”
    “Good. You tell him to stay in the car and keep his goddamn mouth shut. And don’t bring that big nigger, that other repo boy.”
    “Why not?”
    Percy Dwayne went irate. “’Cause I said so!” he screamed at me.
    “You’re sounding a little jumpy.”
    “Just show up with the money. Don’t you worry about me.”
    “And my car?”
    “I’ll call you and tell you where to find it. So bring the charger, why don’t you. I’ve just got two fucking bars.”
    “Noonish, right?”
    And it sounded like Percy Dwayne was trying to correct me on the time when he went all garbled and the connection died.
    “He didn’t sound too good,” I said to Desmond. “Didn’t sound good at all.”
    Dale was still sitting up the road by the time Luther was dressed and ready to go, so me and Desmond really didn’t have any choice but to trust Luther.
    “You get the car, drive it down past Dale’s cruiser, and get out on the truck route. Lose him but good. We’ll cut through the back and meet you over by the Sunflower Market, far side near the dumpster.”
    “Keys?”
    Desmond was having difficulty digging them out of his pocket. It was more of a mental than a motor skill sort of thing.