“You fell,” Ross said.
“Fell hell. Fell where?”
“Were felled,” Rudy offered.
Peanut sat up, put a hand to the back of his neck, and moved his head side to side. “Damn it all. My back and my neck hurts. And my chin. Was it Randall? He get behind me?”
“Sarnov,” Ross said as he tossed the vial into the trash can. “Rudy, help Mr. Smoot to his feet.”
“That little commie dick-smoker,” Peanut growled. “I’ll blow his head off.”
Peanut pulled a handgun out from his belt and Ross Laughlin shuddered at the sight of it. All he needed was for this fool to start brandishing a gun, and somebody calling the cops to the building. All that mattered was getting past Monday morning.
“Calm down, Peanut,” Ross soothed. Smoot had always had a temper that was very difficult to get the lid back on. “That’s all, Rudy.”
“Yes, sir,” Rudy said instantly. He took the first-aid kit and left the room, closing the door behind him.
“Put that weapon away,” Ross ordered. “You can’t do anything to Sarnov.”
“That little Lenin-loving queer-”
“Peanut,” Ross said, infusing a hint of fatherly disapproval and concern. “Calling him names won’t help us. Even if what he did was unforgivable.” The lawyer fought back laughter when he remembered seeing Peanut crash-landing on the floor after going through a very expensive coffee table.
“If I’d been paying attention, he’d a got the ass kicking of his potato-drinking life. I’m lucky the glass didn’t slice my damn head off.”
“I guess your coat saved you,” Ross said, lifting the coffee table’s scratched walnut base and setting it away from the glass. Luckily, the wood hadn’t been shattered by the big lummox’s weight. “Unfortunately, my vintage Noguchi wasn’t wearing a leather NASCAR jacket.”
“A three-thousand-dollar coat.” Peanut turned so he could see his backside in the mirror behind the wet bar. “Hellfire!” He tugged off his jacket and looked at the cuts the glass had made in the smooth surface. “Damn,” he bellowed. “My number three’s destroyed!”
His language, more so even than his appearance, had once made Ross’s skin crawl. But over the years, the hick had brought in a fortune. Of all the groups Ross had earning for him, the Smoots made more than all the others combined. And Peanut wasn’t a slouch in the instincts department. He had more street smarts than any criminal Ross Laughlin had ever known. He kept complicated deals in his head, and his mental numbers were never wrong. He had, as best as Ross could figure, a genetic disposition toward criminality. Were the man normal, he could have been successful at any legitimate business venture, but Peanut Smoot couldn’t think about a situation without viewing it through a filter of greed and larceny.
Gun in hand, Peanut started from the room. There was an explosive-temper aspect to the Smoots, which sometimes made problems. They got to a point and they lost it, acting rashly and worrying about the consequences later.
“Peanut!” Ross said sternly. “Listen to me. This is almost over. We need to maintain our relationship with the Russians. If you touch Sarnov, we both know what will happen. We can do profitable business with them for a long time, but if we make a stupid move, they’ll take everything.”
“They’re going to take it all anyway if they can, and this is a test we’re seeing. Those changes to the deal are to see if you’ll blink, and you did. From this day on out, the Russkies are going to be chipping away, taking bigger and bigger bites. If you don’t send them a message back, we’re history anyway. Why didn’t you tell him we’re partners, that I’m not hired help?”
“Because,” Ross said, his mind whirring in search of an explanation Peanut would buy. If only for a few hours, and then it wouldn’t matter. “You just deal with the collateral as we discussed,” Ross told him.
Ross knew that the Smoots were finished. Sarnov had stood over Peanut’s unconscious form and told Ross that the Russians were in for good and that they were taking over the Smoots’ territory and rackets. Laughlin hadn’t argued. In fact, the prospect of Intermat taking over was appealing to him. All of Peanut’s holdings were in accounts Laughlin owned with Peanut. And he had Peanut’s power of attorney in his safe.
“The Dockery part has to be done right. When the time comes, I’ll handle the Russians. We’re partners. Trust me.”
“I do trust you, Mr. Laughlin.”
“Please call me Ross,” Ross said, smiling warmly and placing his hand on Peanut’s shoulder paternally. “We are so much more than mere business partners.”
“I won’t let you down, Mr. Laughlin.”
19
Dixie Smoot just hoped the little bitch tried something. She’d love to see the look on her skinny face when Dixie gave her a good lesson about what happened to people who looked down their noses at other people.
The kid was finally asleep. A little cough medicine in his juice sure took his little foot off the accelerator.
Dixie wasn’t exactly the mothering kind, but she kind of liked the baby. He was cute as a puppy, but kids were all more pain in your ass as not. Not like a dog you can feed and water and leave outside as much of the time as you wanted.
This old trailer was good enough to stay in during hunting seasons, but the coating of dust that covered every flat surface like rust was disgusting. The guys expected Dixie to do the cleaning, but she only did so when Peanut himself told her to do it, and as lightly as she could get by with. Soon as you swept it up, more took its place. Outside, the ground was covered with an inch of the flour-fine silt, and it fell off your shoes onto the linoleum. The TV screen was always murky on account of it, and it got in your hair, your clothes, and under your fingernails so you always felt nasty. It didn’t bother the boys, but nothing bothered her brothers. Well, except Ferny Ernest, the baby. Everybody else called him Click but her. He never came out here to the trailer, because he didn’t much care one way or the other about hunting. He didn’t like poison ivy, chiggers, or snakes, or spiders. The others-Buck and the twins, Burt and Curt-would roll naked in chigger grass and pack their jaws full of poison ivy if they had to in order to slaughter a deer or a turkey or anything else that was made out of meat. During deer or turkey season you couldn’t find a Smoot unless you were riding a buck through the woods.
The land, about 940 acres of woods, clover fields, and water holes, was for hunting. The place was thick with game, and Peanut and the boys spent a fortune on keeping it that way. And Lord help you if you was to get caught poaching on it. People who knew the family would leave a wounded deer they’d tracked there for the buzzards before they’d risk being caught by the Smoots while dragging it off their land.
Dixie worked out at Gold’s Gym. She could bench-press 270 pounds. She spent part of her day in there going from one machine to the other until she was sweating to beat the band. She couldn’t outwrestle her three older brothers, because they were a lot bigger, and stronger than bulls. Buck loved staying bulked up and was proud to say that nobody had ever kicked his ass. Not even when he was a Marine, which he was before he got dishonorably discharged for something he would never tell anybody about. Part of Buck’s trouble was the steroids that kept his face broke out, but he’d always just been mean as hell for no good reason. You couldn’t like Buck if you tried, and that was how he liked it.
Dixie had heard from Burt, who was mad at Buck, that his older brother had been feeling the skinny woman up, saying she asked him to screw her, and that he was going to do just that before it was all over. If you were a woman, you wouldn’t want to spread your legs for Buck, because he couldn’t get aroused unless he was hurting the girl. That was just how he was, and everybody in the family knew it.
Dixie was just as tough as her three older brothers were and smarter than all three of them put together. She didn’t get as much money as the boys, but that was supposedly because they got their hands dirtier. Peanut had always said that planned killings were man’s work. Dixie did whatever her daddy said to, and if he told her to cut somebody up and throw the pieces in the river, she could do it as well as her brothers could. What did testicles have to do with getting bloody?