X. Atkins - Richmond Noir

One of the girls, cute, long blond ponytail, said to the sergeant, “I only wish you all were here as much during the day as you are at night. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s GREAT to have you by the park, but then this happens.”

Rachel stared at the girl, inscrutable-cop look on her face, mainly so she wouldn’t have to feel Bobby watching her She didn’t think she was here all that much, anyway. But it was still too much.

“We do what we can to protect the citizens, ma’am,” Bobby told her, and Sergeant Harris, weary, shot him a dirty look. “It’s not safe right now,” he told the girl. “Go inside.”

A bullet pinged against a tree on the hill and Rachel felt that familiar energy surging through her veins, time slowing, colors brightening. Head down, she ran in a low crouch to take cover behind a red minivan, gravel crunching under her feet, Bobby breathing hard behind her.

“You come here at night to see him, don’t you?” he said. “You still sleeping with him?”

From down the hill, a single cry, and then a burst of fire. She could smell Bobby, his sweat an acrid mix of sex and fear, next to her.

“If you know so much—” she started to say.

“Where’s the fucking SWAT team?” someone yelled behind her. From down the hill, silence.

“You’ve been following me,” she said. A woodpecker drilling the tree above them, the whirring of wings.

“Nah, I just wanted to know where he lived. In case he gave you any trouble.”

“What were you planning to do, pay him a visit?”

“Something like that.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Bobby: yeah, good in bed, quick with a joke, but what else? All the hours spent together bored on stakeouts, riding around the city, busting poor jerks for running stop signs. Had she been paying attention to anything these last months? She had spent all those hours looking out the window, letting the sights of the city entertain her like it was TV. I’ve got your back , he was always telling her. Whatever that meant.

Bobby peered behind the van’s rear bumper. “That blond girl? She’s the one he’s fucking.”

“Like I’m supposed to care.” Squabbles: high school again. Nothing from the bottom of the hill, then the sound of cop cars squealing to a halt down there. “Can’t we talk about this later?” Smelling herself now, that familiar sharp odor stronger than any of the spring flowers and damp earth. Who the hell was she kidding?

She looked past the splattered bumper of the van. On the left, quick low motion through the leaves. She turned fast, weapon at the ready: a black cat.

Bobby saying, “Surprised you didn’t know that, all the time you been spending here.” Sweating, urgent. In the side mirror of the van was a face framed in a glass transom, staring out, too dim to see. Rachel kept looking, hearing the rustling of a squirrel rushing through thick leaves and up a tree, her eyes adjusting. It was the girl with the blond ponytail, staring out through her door. Behind the girl, a man approaching. Vaughn. So why hadn’t his car been on the street? Was the Mercedes in the shop again? Situational awareness. It meant being right here, right now, the daily noise of life stripped away. Rachel wanted Vaughn to open the door, just so she could scream at him to get the fuck down, enjoy the startled expression on his face.

The window of the minivan shattered, and a shower of glittering fragments fell to the street. Absurdly, Rachel thought of her wedding day, holding hands with Vaughn, ducking their heads and laughing as they ran beneath a cascade of rice. In the mirror, she could see Vaughn staring out. She wanted him to stay there, forever stuck behind glass, watching. She wanted to be away from him, not caring. From the bottom of the hill, another gunshot exploded.

“I’m going down there.” Already on her belly, inching forward.

“Rachel, they’re drug dealers, who cares, the guys’ve got it covered.” She could picture the dark shapes moving through the cinder-block buildings down there, shadows. Picture herself closer now, uniform ripping on the thorny underbrush, her own breathing quiet, feeling alive, time slowed to that single moment. All those nights wasted up here, peering out at the lights of the city. Hip bones grinding against Bobby’s, his rough neck against her face, their muffled exclamations. That wasn’t wasted. She glanced back at him leaning toward her, looking hurt. She had liked it that he never asked, but now he was going to start. And there was so much, really, she just didn’t want to talk about. In the morning, she knew, she would call her recruiter.

“Jesus, Rachel, get back here.” His hand gripping her arm, a surge of feeling coming through her body. For a moment she paused, hesitated. She couldn’t afford to look back.

Then she pulled away and was moving again, already halfway across the street, her knees scraping against the gravel, heading for the impenetrable tangle of weeds ahead.

Shockoe Slip

Based (loosely) on a true story

1807

It was a tobacco-stain of an August night in Shockoe Slip, so humid a body seemed to drizzle when it moved. Stench from the outhouses on the canal bank behind the hotels and shop fronts and the sweet fug of flue-cured leaf tarred the air. Inside the Eagle Tavern, bourbon whiskey and rouged cheeks shimmering in smoky lantern light raised a man’s threshold for swelter.

The General was down to his last few dollars. He held only a pair of deuces and a single bullet in his hand now. However, his eclipse had been a long time in the making. That it should happen here was ironic. He had been in many worse places.

An army officer since his youth, he had long understood he might perish of thirst in a deep Texas oak thicket or be pierced by an arrow on some damned buffalo plain. Many times over, he could have been gut-shot on the dunes of North Africa. By contrast, no matter how loudly the falls clattered, the bustling banks of the James, in the bosom of Southern plantation hospitality, did not seem an obvious threat. He was forty-three. His weaknesses included whiskey, women, and cards, but even more a liberal constitution, a vivid imagination, and not just a lack but an absolute rejection of caution. These last had once made him a force of nature and a charmer — a man who could lead a horse to water and make it beg for a drink.

The General’s aide-de-camp, Mustafa, sat across the room, measuring the crowd and meditating on the gold medal recently awarded to the General. It hung just out of sight around his neck, like a cursed scarab. Mustafa had followed the General to the United States from Egypt. As the General’s fortunes languished, he watched his behavior grow more erratic. The General, fearless at the worst of times, now drank as if to extinguish a fire and gambled as if to obliterate the past.

Mustafa understood what was eating at him, a man who had battled the longest of odds in the Barbary War and won. He had been biding his time, waiting for the General to figure out a way to set things right again. So abysmal were circumstances at the moment that Mustafa had begun to crave the scorch of bourbon too, a betrayal of his religion and a thing unheard of in his family.

The trial of Aaron Burr had gathered an impressive group of politicians, salesmen, gossipers, and whoremongers to the Virginia capital, at the fall lines of the James. Above the miasma, on Shockoe Hill, not far from Patrick Henry’s church, rose the state’s neo-Roman capitol, designed by President Jefferson. It was both a symbol of the city’s vanity and a beacon of hope to its Episcopal citizenry, who still enjoyed the full cornucopia of humanity’s sins.