Raylan

Chapter Five

The Crowes were still on the porch, Cuba inside making a phone call, Dickie telling his brother, “All you had to do-Coover, goddamn it, I’m talkin to you. All you had to do was bend your arm, that’s all, pull the trigger and shoot him through the heart. Same with the Negress. Get Cuba to dig a hole, nobody ever sees ’em again.”

Coover looked up at his brother and said, “What…?”

“You’re smokin Daddy’s Own, aren’t you?” Dickie said. “Like smokin rocket fuel. Stick to Bitty’s, Pap named for Mama when she took sick. Member how he’d call her his Little Bitty? He was good to Mama, wasn’t he?”

“ ’Cept he’d come home from drinkin with lovin on his mind and Mama’d throw kerosene at him, set him afire.” Coover grinning. “Old Pap had to quit drinkin fore he stopped beatin her up. Hasn’t had any since, I know of.”

C oming out on the porch Cuba said, “Man, that kitchen’s a rat cafe, find all they can eat. You hear ’em, don’t you?”

“They mostly quiet as mice,” Coover said, and told Cuba, “I’ll give you a hunnert dollars you cook one and eat it.”

“How we did ’em in the ghet-to,” Cuba said to the fool, “was well done, burn off all that hair on his ass. I never cared for rat. You eat a sick one you go to bed with a touch of the bubonic plague.”

“They’re hardly any meat on him,” Coover said. “You can chew his tiny bones. Hell, you can chew him up you take the skin off, it’s the unhealthy part.”

“Get it crispy,” Cuba said, thinking: These hill folk gonna fuck up on the job. He said to the Crowes, “I talk to Miss just now.”

Coover said, “I keep forgettin her name. Lila?”

“Leela,” Dickie said. “Like the song.”

Both fools getting the name wrong. Cuba didn’t correct them. He said, “She wants this next one straight, no reefer business, no people we know givin us the kidneys.” Cuba said, “Listen to me now.” Meaning it. “These next gigs gonna be different. We leave the man in th›

Dickie said, “Leela must be sellin to the broker cheaper’n she could make sellin to the sick person.”

Like he just thought of it. Cuba said to Dickhead, “You use the broker so you don’t expose yourself sellin to the market. See, but you can do one a night, you want.”

Coover said, “She ever talk about doin a woman? Get her in the tub nekked. One with big ninnies.”

“You see ’em floatin in the ice water,” Dickie said, “the nips stickin straight up.”

Cuba said, “I told her about the marshals stopping by. Comin back tomorrow with warrants.”

Dickie said, “We go and hide?”

“She say lay low for a while.”

“ Lay low — ” Dickie said. “Her name’s not Leela, it’s Laylo, ain’t it? Same as the song.”

Cuba went out to the hardpack yard and phoned her on his cell, looking up at trees, clouds hanging over the ridgeline.

“How you doin? You close to the next job?”

Her voice said, “I don’t want to use those guys again, they’re more baggage than porters.”

“You want to cut ’em loose?”

“They know who I am.”

“They still don’t have your name right.”

“Why don’t you find a way to dismiss them,” Layla said. “All right?”