X. Atkins - Richmond Noir

Heels were clicking on the wood, followed by heavy boots. Ebone walked into the room. Her legs looked very nice in heels. Behind her was a black guy with a shaved head, a low-hanging gold chain, and wrists about as thick as my neck. He was only about seven feet tall.

“You really should lock your door, boys. I wouldn’t exactly rate this as a safe neighborhood,” she said. Her smile had as much venom as a King Cobra.

“This isn’t really the time, Ebone,” Denby started.

“I’m here to get that bag off of you, Denby. That’s why I brought Maurice here. I hate to get nasty but you know how I am when I don’t get what I want. I guess I’m spoiled.”

I stood up. “Now listen here, you crazy—”

Maurice took a step toward me. I sat back down. Ebone laughed.

“What the hell are you going to do? You don’t even have two crutches,” she sneered. “Tough guy on one foot.” She turned back to Denby. “So? Where is it?”

“Ebone, we already had this talk. I got nothing for you. If anybody should have anything for another body, it oughta be you. You swindled me, remember? Where do you get off?” I could tell he wanted to sound hard, but with the recent course of events and the present size of Maurice, his voice was strained and borderline soft. Though I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge.

She came up close to Denby and played with his ear. “You’re really gonna hold that against me, Denby? I thought we were friends?” she purred.

“Maybe if you make right.”

“I tried to do that earlier tonight. You didn’t seem to like my deal then.”

“Discounts are out, Eb.”

“Well...” She started walking away from him then. “I guess you and Maurice are going to have to play. I really think you’d have liked playing with me better though, Denby. We had fun once.”

Maurice walked further into the room. I grabbed my crutch, almost holding it as if it were a bat. It’s what I had a mind to use it as.

From behind Ebone we heard the door open again. Everyone froze and turned, looking toward the hallway leading into the kitchen.

Ebone started to back into the living room with us and came to stand next to Maurice. Two men walked into the room. One of them was very thin with a flat ugly nose and a trucker hat. The other was taller but had a beer belly that stuck out from under his white T-shirt and a full reddish beard. The thin one held a crutch he didn’t need that looked very familiar to me. The tall one had a gun in his hand.

“We havin’ us a party?” the thin one asked. He smiled and showed us his bad teeth. He raised the crutch. “I think you lost something.”

“Hey, neighbor, now isn’t exactly the best time...” Denby said.

No one seemed to care about Denby’s schedule.

“Normally, we don’t like to meddle, even if we do see folks we don’t particularly like to see in our neck of the woods, ain’t that right, Greg?”

“What, you mean niggers, Walt?” Greg, the taller one, replied.

“Precisely precise. And hell, we can even respect most anybody who enjoys the sport of fishing. I guess you boys just happened on a bad spot.”

“A little further up by the bridge ain’t bad fishin’,” Greg said.

“Who the hell are you hillbillies?” Ebone demanded. The sound of her voice made me wince. The timing was off too.

Greg motioned the gun at her and Walt barely had time to grab his wrist before it fired. It didn’t stop the shot but it did save her life. Instead, the bullet caught Maurice in the belly. His shirt began to show red quickly and he took a step forward. He made an awful sound. Greg fired two more times at the big man. Neither of these shots missed.

Maurice fell on his face and he was as heavy as he looked. The crash made almost as much noise as the gunshots.

“Jesus H, Greg! What’d you shoot for?”

“I didn’t mean to, but he looked like he was making a move, man!”

“Yeah, cause you shot him!”

“I thought we was gonna to shoot ’em anyway!”

“Yeah, but you was aimin’at her! Be a waste to pop her here. We can play the game with her. She ain’t a bad piece, even she is a nigger.”

I had a bad habit of talking before I thought better of it. Maybe two people getting murdered right in front of me made me act stupid. “Is that what you were doing down there? Playing a game? Siccing a dog on steroids to rip a girl apart? What kind of fucked-up country bastards are you?”

Greg’s face twisted up at that, but Walt just started showing us his teeth again.

“We love our dogs. They get bored just like we do. ’Cept they can’t drink no beer. Or at least they don’t like it all too much. And I do love to see a girl go for a run. Now, on your feet, gimpy. We gon’ take us a field trip.”

No one had been paying much attention to Reggie. It was a mistake not to pay attention to a man in an outdoorsman vest. No one had seen him unsheathe a machete in the corner of the room. Without a word, he swung it into Walt’s arm. There was a shrill scream, like an elementary school fire alarm. Greg pointed the gun at Reggie but I’d already consented to their previous command and gotten to my feet. I swung my remaining crutch into Greg’s face with all the muscle I had. The bolt I used to adjust the height of the crutch must have hit him right between the eyes. Blood spurted out everywhere and he fell to the floor, clutching his face, dropping his gun.

Ebone started screaming. She ran out of the room as fast as her heels could carry her. Denby scooped the gun up and pointed it at the bleeding men lying on his floor. The two who were still alive.

“Where the hell did you get a fucking machete from?” I yelled. I didn’t mean to yell. It just seemed like the only way anyone could talk at a time like this.

“I dressed as Rambo this past Halloween,” he said.

I got my cell phone out and called the police. My asthma was back.

In minutes there were enough cops at the house to have a parade. They took Greg and Walt to get bandaged up so they wouldn’t stain the backseats of their squad cars. We told our stories so many times it felt as if it were one of the movies in Reggie’s DVD collection. The officers radioed someone to check if the body of a girl or a dog could be found down by the docks. In an hour they got a negative on both accounts but found a lot of blood in the location we’d described. They found all the stuff we’d left behind on the docks as well. They only mentioned the beer. To be cute. They guessed the body of the girl would be found in the river.

The cops gave Reggie some trouble about the machete but relented some when they saw he owned every Rambo on DVD and had a life-sized poster hanging in the upstairs hallway. In any event, they took the machete with them. The entire time the police were in the house, Denby was constantly talking and moving around. It wasn’t surprising at first, since that was Denby’s way. Then suddenly it seemed like something more.

“Does Derb seem nervous to you, Regg?” I whispered discreetly to him.

“Could have something to do with all the tree we got in the fridge,” Reggie said under his breath.

I lit a cigarette and began massaging my scalp furiously.

They raided the neighbors’ house and didn’t find anything too peculiar, for an Oregon Hill residence, until they went into the basement. There they found three more dogs in cages, all different breeds, each about as eager to get its jaws on someone’s throat as the one we’d run over. They searched the truck the neighbors owned and found the body of the dog underneath a tarp. Of course, they wouldn’t leave their beloved pet behind. It was identified as a Chow but of considerably greater size than normal. So far the police had everything except the body of the girl. That would turn up. All we could do was wonder who she was.