The Boy from County Hell Read online

  THE BOY FROM COUNTY HELL

  A Jay Desmarteaux Crime Thriller

  Thomas Pluck

  PRAISE FOR THE BOY FROM COUNTY HELL

  “Thomas Pluck’s The Boy From County Hell is raucous and rollicking, just like The Pogues song it adapts its name from. There are echoes of James Lee Burke, Barry Gifford, and Joe R. Lansdale, but Pluck’s book burns hot and bright with its own indomitable punk spirit. Joyous, wild, dark fun.” —William Boyle, author of City of Margins, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, The Lonely Witness, and Gravesend

  “Blistering, violent, and written with Technicolor flourishes that are Pluck’s unmistakable signature. The Boy from County Hell is a hell of a book.” —Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

  “Pluck has crafted a hard-charging thriller that stomps the pedal from page one and never lets up. Crackling with exciting characters and language that pops off the page, The Boy From County Hell is a mad tale of rage, retribution, and no small helping of heart and soul. I loved it.” —Bill Loehfelm, author of the Maureen Coughlin series

  “Wow. The Boy from County Hell by Thomas Pluck is as wild as a night in a cage with an amorous monkey. So smart and tense and relentless. Pluck decides on his premise, and stays true to it until the rowdy end, but the real star here is his control of style, both hardboiled and poetic at the same time. Impressed.” —Joe R. Lansdale"

  “The Boy from County Hell is a harrowing and at times deeply philosophical journey through the heart of rage. Thomas Pluck is our trustworthy tour guide through that undiscovered country. With deft prose and an eye towards redemption and revelation Pluck accomplishes an amazing feat. We find ourselves feeling sympathy for the boy from county Hell” —SA. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of Razorblade Tears

  Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Pluck

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Down & Out Books

  3959 Van Dyke Road, Suite 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  DownAndOutBooks.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Zach McCain

  Visit the Down & Out Books website to sign up for our monthly newsletter and we’ll deliver the latest news on our upcoming titles, sale books, Down & Out authors on the net, and more!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Boy from County Hell

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Friend of the Devil by James D.F. Hannah

  Preview from Velvet Elvis by Greg F. Gifune

  Preview from Person Unknown by Michael Penncavage

  Dedicated to Sarah Bennett Pluck and all my Louisiana friends & fam.

  On the first day of March it was raining,

  it was raining worse than anything that I had ever seen.

  —The Pogues, “The Boys From County Hell”

  Sidney Barton Bennett Jr.

  In Memoriam

  Part 1: Fortunate Son

  But in the course of time the laws of the land were corrupted;

  Might took the place of right, and the weak were oppressed, and the mighty

  Ruled with an iron rod.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline

  1: Opening Riff

  June 11, 1985

  When Evangeline pulled back the hammer on her Colt revolver, the blond armored truck guard stopped looking at her tits. He drew a breath as she dropped the swaddled baby, and his face fell as the doll warbled “Mama,” rolled to its back, and mocked him with its flat blue eyes.

  Evangeline unsnapped his holster and winged his sidearm over the canebrake into the bayou. She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

  Andre popped from behind the raised hood of their wood-paneled AMC wagon with his M16 and high-stepped toward the armored truck as if the narrow gravel road were a rice paddy.

  The bank truck lurched around the station wagon. The driver chanced getting stuck in the ditch. The windshield snowflaked, and the report of an enormous rifle crackled across the water. The truck shuddered to a stop.

  Blondie hit the dirt at Evie’s cowboy-booted feet.

  Shooter Boudreaux was perched somewhere out in the bayou with his personally customized .50-cal, and had punched a hole clean through the truck’s armored glass and the passenger seat headrest. He might’ve been in the abandoned eagle’s nest, or on the rusted-out oil derrick further back. You never knew with Shooter. He earned his name.

  The driver held up his hands, hunched beneath the dashboard for cover. Andre tapped the door with the M16’s muzzle. When the driver crept out, Andre directed him to fall prone next to his partner.

  Evie wiggled a finger in her ear to stop the ringing, then bent to smack her hostage on the ass. “Boys, unbuckle your pants and get ’em down to your ankles.”

  The driver obeyed, wriggling like a worm.

  Blondie blushed. “Darlin’, I ain’t wearin’ nothing underneath.”

  She tugged his Dickies down, the muzzle of her Colt by his ear. He did not lie.

  “You like to live adventurous, don’t you?” She yanked his trousers down to his patent leather boots, then took his handcuffs and tossed them by his face. He knew what to do.

  She backed up to cover him while Andre cuffed the driver. The rear gate of the station wagon creaked open and Pitou and Ti’ Boy crawled from beneath a blanket wearing matching guard uniforms, their long hair netted beneath badged caps, their faces shaved fresh and clean. Ti’ Boy’s shirt stretched over his massive frame. He rolled his pumpkin-sized head on his shoulders to get out a crick.

  Pitou flipped a Randall hunting knife from his sleeve and snipped the guard’s belt loops. He buckled the thick leather belt over his pants, checking the radio, turning up the volume.

  Ti’ Boy’s gun belt would never fit. He pitched the radio into the water and noosed the leather tight around both guards’ ankles. They yelped as the Cajun giant dragged them to the edge of the ditch like a stringer of catfish.

  Andre stepped back, sharp-eyeing the road over his weapon’s iron sights. He about- faced and did the same up the road. He held up a fist and opened his palm. Shooter covered them from afar while Andre dropped the hood of the wagon, turned the engine, and pulled over so the truck could pass.

  Pitou climbed into the driver’s side of the truck and held a slender brown thumb high. Ti’ Boy stepped on the running board and slapped hundred-mile-an-hour tape over the windshield damage. Pitou nosed the truck around the wagon while his giant partner squeezed in, pulling the door shut on the third try.

  The armored truck held the cash receipts from the Angola Prison Rodeo, the Wildest Show in the South. The pride of Warden Burl Calvineau, who had announced his retirement after turning the most violent prison in the country into a profitable, self-sustaining enterprise.

  Evie lowered the hammer on her Colt Diamondback and tucked it in the back of her Daisy Dukes.

  “Please don’t make me go in the water, Miz Calvineau.” Blondie said, squinting up at her.

  Her punch-drunk smile faded. “My name’s Desmarteaux now. You tell my daddy that, when he puts the screws to you.” She took two hundred-dollar bills from the tiny pocket of her shorts and tucked them into his boot. “One’s for your partner. Now get off the road. Don’t want some doodle-bugger running y’all over.”
>
  “What if there’s snakes?”

  Her smile returned. “I wouldn’t worry.” She nudged his tight butt with her boot. “Just whack it with your big ol’ thing.”

  Andre had the wagon rolling before she had the door closed. She tossed the baby doll prop into the back seat. They followed the armored truck. Five miles ahead, Kung Fu Bill waited in a ten-wheeler with ramps to roll the armored truck in the back. Then it was forty miles to the Mississippi border, to an abandoned tire plant where they had welding equipment and explosives to crack the egg and see if the haul was all their inside man said it was.

  “The scam worked better with the boy,” Andre said. Evie squeezed his hand and held it to her heart. They had promised not to talk about the boy until the job was done. They had to stay focused.

  She put his hand on her thigh, and he gave it a quick double squeeze. “We’re going back for him.”

  Their boy would be moved from juvie to the state pen in Rahway in six weeks. They had a friend inside to watch over him, and the cash from this job would finance a hit on the prison transport and bring their boy home. Evangeline’s heart jumped, caught in the dream.

  They hadn’t planned to raise the boy outlaw. He chose that path on his own. Evangeline had decided never to bring a child into this world, but the boy had been a gift. Not from God, but the Devil herself. From whose claws they’d snatched the child and raised him as their own.

  They had the will. They had the guns. And now they had the money. Their boy would live free. Andre’s platoon leader had a good gig across the border, down with the volcanos and pyramids in the jungle, and had invited them to join him.

  They’d be a family again.

  The seat rest beside Andre’s neck exploded, the windshield spider-webbed, and Evangeline’s world went red. Andre shoved her under the dash and cut the wheel hard as a second shot punched through the radio. The wagon crashed through the canebrake and the engine sputtered dead as it sucked water.

  Evangeline howled in pain. She tried to wipe the blood from her eye and gashed her finger.

  Andre rolled out the door with his rifle, his shirt red and smoking between shoulder and neck. He fired short bursts and sidestepped through the cane. “Get out, Evie! He’s firing tracers!”

  Rounds thunked into the wagon’s sheet metal. Evie hit the water and heat roasted her back as the gas tank went up. She swam under and went for the far side. When jobs went to hell, you meet up later.

  The boom of Shooter’s .50 and the tinny cracks of Andre’s M16 still traded fire when her head cleared the surface. Evangeline spat water spiked with oil and salt and pulled herself behind a cypress knee.

  Sirens whooped in the distance.

  Across the water, two cruisers came down the road from opposite directions. A tall sheriff exited one cruiser and his deputies cuffed Andre and shoved him into the back. The parish sheriff was Kane LeFer, a Calvineau family flunky sent to bring her home.

  Shooter shinnied down a tree with his rifle slung across his back.

  Evangeline gritted her teeth and pulled a shard of glass from her ruined eye. Her scream howled over the bayou.

  Sheriff LeFer jabbed a finger toward her hiding spot, and his deputies ran for their cruiser.

  She tied a bandanna over her eye and jogged toward a camp road. It would take the pigs twenty minutes to race their way to this side of the feeder canal.

  A wizened Cajun in a bent-frame Chevy stopped for her thumb. She stuck her gun in his crotch, huddled beneath the dash, and made him drop her at the first honky tonk they found. There she wired another truck and drove to the tire plant after dark.

  The hideout was empty and showed no signs of her crew.

  Her betrayers were elsewhere, divvying up the take while her man rotted in Sheriff LeFer’s parish jail. Surely dangled like bait to bring her back to her evil family.

  She uncapped a hip flask she found in the glove box of the stolen truck, took a slug, then poured the raw moonshine into the wreck of her eye. Her screams echoed off the walls of the abandoned factory and sent pigeons flapping from the rafters.

  Evangeline Calvineau spun the open cylinder of her Colt as hate blew out her heart like an offshore rig unleashing hellfire, and she swore revenge on the men who jailed her man and stole her blue-eyed boy’s last chance at freedom.

  Six brass irises stared back at her one steely eye.

  One bullet for each son of a bitch who needed killing.

  2: Bonnie and Clyde

  Jay Desmarteaux parked the Challenger in front of a bullet-pocked stone monolith, a shrine to ancient slaughter.

  His work boots crunched gravel as he exited the ticking road beast, its purple flake paint scarred and speckled with the corpses of a thousand love bugs. He approached the stone memorial with reverence.

  THIS SITE MAY 23, 1934

  CLYDE BARROW

  AND

  BONNIE PARKER

  WERE KILLED BY

  LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS

  The corners and edges had been chipped off by souvenir hunters. Ghouls had shot the names of the dead thieves and nearly wiped them clean.

  Jay touched the cold stone and thought of his mentor.

  Leroy “Okie” Kincaid was seven years old when lawmen massacred the lovebird outlaws, and he saw their bloody bodies and ventilated Ford V8 coupe paraded through town on the back of a flatbed truck. The civilized folk displayed the corpses in the local pharmacy alongside a soda jerk selling phosphates, as a warning to all who might take arms against the banks who had bled the people dry.

  Men dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood, and women dabbed their scarves. Little Okie sneaked between their legs to stick his finger in a bullet hole in the pretty dead lady’s side like she was Jesus on the cross.

  That was the day I went outlaw, kid. When I saw what my fancy-ass neighbors who smiled in church really were. You remind a square that everything they own can be taken away by a richer man with a pen, and they’ll lap up your blood while it runs down the gutter.

  Jay had met their wrath himself, when he defied the natural order and took a hatchet to a boy who had hunted him and his friends as his rightful prey.

  He extracted his Papa Andre’s war tomahawk from its hideaway beneath the Challenger’s rear seat and slipped it in the hammer loop of his jeans. Then he counted his steps down a ragged path into the woods behind the stone marker until he found an ancient black walnut tree. Scores of initials had been carved into the bark.

  On the far side he dug under the roots with the tomahawk until he hit a large smooth stone the tree had swallowed. He chopped through a tendril and rooted beneath the stone with the hawk’s spike until metal scraped metal. He clawed with his hands, scaring pill bugs and angering a black thousand-legger, then heaved the melon-sized chunk of granite aside.

  The rusted handle of an ammo can poked through the black earth. He cleared the edges, but the roots held its prize dearly. He popped open the lid and got a whiff of old air.

  His folks smiled up at him from the depths of the ammo can.

  A cracked Polaroid glimmered atop a stack of twenty-dollar bills.

  A young outlaw couple posed on the fender of a ’69 Ford Galaxie wagon with fake wood sides next to a man with a devil-red beard over his pocked and scarred face, fading hair tied back with a bandanna. Tall and rangy, Jay remembered the sting of Okie’s fists in the prison boxing ring.

  His partners were practically teenagers. The man had eyes too old for his face, which was shaved clean. Jay hunched like he’d taken an uppercut to the heart.

  Papa Andre was gone, died while Jay was in prison, Mama Evangeline said. The loss hurt worse than the chunk of his liver the bullet had carved out.

  Jay had never seen Papa Andre without his beard. Black hair in a long ponytail, his hatchet in one hand, the other around the young woman’s waist. Skinny and joyful, blonde hair glowing, shorts cut so high the pockets showed, shirt tied snug under her
chest. Mama Evangeline had her arm looped around Okie’s neck, a black Colt dangling from her hand, and her leg kicked over Andre’s lap. Okie’s sparse beard couldn’t hide his grin. His big left hand, always snappy with a jab, was cupped tenderly under her heavy right breast. The copperhead tattoo that wound around Okie’s forearm resembled the asp biting Cleopatra. His other hand held a bank sack.

  Jay stared, taking it all in.

  He’d known them as loving parents and patient mentors. Not sex-crazed outlaws. He turned over the photo. April 29, 1974, in faded blue ink.

  Jay had been three years old. He might have been taking a nap in the back seat of that Ford.

  Okie had told him the location of several grubstake caches while they marked time together in Rahway prison, but this was the only one Jay could remember how to find.

  He gathered the twenties and found a bed of oilcloth. Something heavy inside.

  The old wound in Jay’s gut ached at the thought of holding a gun. He couldn’t shoot worth a damn anyway.

  He unwrapped a slender boot knife with a hilt of rose gold.

  The handle was lignam vitae, a wood brown as earth and hard as stone. Swirled with patterns like human hair, the name Evangeline carved into the grain. With a tug, he bared the greased blade from its darkened leather scabbard. The slim hunting blade looked fit for sliding between a man’s ribs to the heart. The top was sharp half its length, like a dagger. Jay ran the edge along his thumbnail and it sang, leaving a deep notch.

  His mother’s blade.

  Above the hilt in block letters, the blade was signed PITOU.

  He wiped off the grease with the cloth, slapped it into its sheath, and tucked it through his belt. He left a few twenties wrapped in the oilcloth and buried the ammo can as best he could. In Okie’s pantheon of outlaw folklore, it was bad luck to leave a grubstake dry. He put the photo into his work shirt pocket.