Уинстон Грум - Alabama Noir

“I’m not listening,” Romy said, tearing into her pulled pork.

“Iv’ry’s alive, but he’s out $250k in product. All he knows is his coke’s buried somewhere outside Troy until the Meisels can transport it out of Alabama. Iv’ry overheard Tiny and Marcella talking when they shanghaied him. The location of the coke’s marked with a GPS tracker. Won’t be easy for Iv’ry to get to that tracker. Tiny hides it in the knee socket of the prosthetic leg he’s worn since an IED blasted his off during the Iraq War.”

Romy looked up from her plate of food. “A fake leg? That’s it. Take me home. I can’t take another word. Get a dog if you need someone to talk to.”

Bubba’s sciatica was flaring. His discs and joints felt like tectonic plates firing off seismic jolts. “I know you wonder why I need you to scratch me till I bleed, Romy. Maybe you think I need pain so I don’t go numb from booze. But it’s not about feeling. Every time you scratch me I hope those scratches scar, that they don’t fade, even though they always do. You’re the closest my life’s had to a constant. We’re lucky we’ve had twenty-five years, but this friendship’ll get fucked up in the end. Everything does. I’d just like a permanent mark of what you’ve meant to me, something I can carry, after one of us inevitably fails the other.”

He shot both Jack Daniel’s and rose.

“I’m gonna take a leak, then drive you home.” He leaned over and stroked Romy’s cheek. “As for the story, I don’t believe half of it myself.”

Outside, crossing ten feet of asphalt to the bathrooms, Bubba adjusted the pillow still belted to his back. He entered a stall without latching the door and stopped two careful feet short of the toilet to clear his head. He was ready when someone followed. An arm wound around his neck. He felt a knife tear into the pillow, but it couldn’t penetrate the foam to more than nick his spine. He bent forward then launched backward, slamming his assailant into the stall pilaster, just like he’d imagined doing all night. He twisted and grabbed the man’s knife hand. His other arm went across the attacker’s throat, pressing his nape into the steel partition. He bent his knees until the man’s neck rode the pilaster to the metal strike that stopped the stall door from swinging outward. Rising and sinking on the balls of his feet, Bubba sawed the base of the man’s skull against the sharp protrusion. The skin ripped and blood splashed to the tile. The man screamed but was too stunned to fight. One punch and Bubba knocked him out.

“Get him out of here.”

Tiny Meisel, all bald head and leather, stood in the doorway. Two Mexicans in overalls dragged Iv’ry Cole to an idling Audi A7.

When Bubba stepped outside Tiny slapped him to the ground.

“You told that bitch about me and the Sinaloa boys!”

“I just told her a story... I had to tell her something to get her out to these bars!”

“You tell her she’s fine. You tell her you got money enough to treat her right. You tell her you gonna fuck her like no other man ever done. You don’t tell her Tiny Meisel’s taking over Iv’ry Cole’s territory!”

“I... I made the story so ridiculous that Romy doesn’t believe any of it... I could never say that ooh, baby shit to her! She’d never talk to me again...”

“’Ta repedo,” one of the Mexicans said. Tiny agreed.

“My friend believes you’re drunk. Drunk as a fart, he actually just said. I believe that in your intoxicated state you told that woman about Otis to make your own sorry ass look good.”

Bubba trembled. “I told you that if he hid that tracker anywhere it’d be at her studio. I did what you made me do. I brought Romy to their bars. I used her as bait to smoke out Otis and Iv’ry.”

“Honestly, I never would’a thought Dr. Otis Owen had it in him to turn double agent. Like your woman said, he seems squishy as putty. So we thank you, bartender, for smoking them out for us.”

Tiny yanked Bubba to his feet and motioned for the Mexicans to pop the Audi’s trunk. Two bodies lay inside, their gashed throats leaking red smiles.

“This one,” Tiny said, pointing at Otis Owen, “however Iv’ry convinced him to steal back that cocaine and bury it wherever he did — maybe money, maybe a threat — Otis should’a known better. But look at it this way, Bubba: I done you a favor. You don’t have to compete with Otis anymore for that woman’s attention.”

“You never said,” Bubba gasped, “you never said...”

“Now this one,” Tiny pointed at the body of Marcella Meisel, “I didn’t mind her screwing Otis. I just wished she hadn’t enjoyed it so much.”

Bubba’s legs went weak.

“You know what part of your story I liked best, bartender? That last bit, about the fake leg. That was over the top! Far-fetched! Well, guess what?” Tiny whipped out a Glock with a silencer and fired three bullets into Iv’ry Cole’s kneecap. “Now that part of the story’s true! This boy gonna need a new leg!”

The bullets brought Iv’ry roaring back to consciousness. He bolted upright and grabbed his spurting leg. What was left of his knee looked like spaghetti. As Iv’ry opened his mouth to scream Tiny shot him between the eyes. His dreadlocks fluttered as the bullet blew out the back of his head.

“Now give me that goddamn tracker,” Tiny said.

Bubba dug his hands into his empty pockets. Sobriety came over him like an instant eclipse. He remembered the rolls of quarters he’d heaved into the woods.

“I... I didn’t find it... I looked at Romy’s place, but the tracker wasn’t there.”

“What?” Tiny hurled Bubba against the Audi and pressed the silencer to his temple. “We heard you say, Got it! ” He yanked the pen from Bubba’s placket. Hidden inside was a microphone and transmitter. “We heard every word you said tonight! We even heard you hold the bug up to your speaker, smart ass, trying to blast us out of our socks! Don’t lie: at the woman’s studio you said, Got it! ”

“I said it, but you misheard... you misunderstood... Romy said she’d only come out for drinks if I didn’t hit on her, if I kept things platonic, and I said, Got it... ”

The Mexicans began trading agitated whispers.

Tiny staggered back and leaned against a hickory tree. “You just let me kill the only ones who know where that cocaine’s buried...” He stiffened suddenly and aimed the Glock at Bubba, ordering him facedown.

“Do it,” the bartender begged. “Do me that favor.”

Tiny Meisel did something worse than shoot Bubba. With a knife he cut away the pillow strapped to his back. Then Tiny jumped up and down on Bubba’s lumbar region, a half dozen times.

“Three hours,” Tiny said as the bartender curled in agony. “If that GPS tracker’s not in my hand, three hours, you and I and probably these gentlemen, too, gonna sit that masseuse down, and she’s gonna hear a true story. She’s gonna hear why you ain’t the best friend she’s ever had, and why five dead bodies, not three, ended up in this trunk.”

After the Mexicans heaped Iv’ry’s body onto the other two and the Audi peeled away, Bubba limped like a hunchback across the highway, each step a detonation in his spine. At the woods’ edge he lurched onto all fours and threw his hands into the brush where he thought the quarters should’ve landed. If he could find one roll, just one roll, the tracker couldn’t be far.

The more frantically he searched, the more impossible finding the device seemed, until finally Bubba wasn’t searching at all. He was hobbling as fast as he could with his sciatica blazing, telling himself he wouldn’t stop until he reached an ocean, a different country, another world. Instead he quickly reached the woods’ end, where he tripped over a tree root and tumbled down a small hill, rolling upright in a subdivision of new McMansions. It wasn’t the same cul-de-sac he’d driven Romy through, but each yard was decorated with the same message: Let Us Do Your Dirty Work .