Jeff Sherratt - The Brimstone Murders

Sol dusted his hands in an exaggerated fashion, mocking my gloom, which now departed at a fast gallop. Rita hadn’t removed the gun after all. She had kept her word.

“Yeah,” the Deacon said. “A goddamn mouse, imagine that.”

“With a goddamn.38 caliber asshole,” Sol said, “that shits bullets.”

Sol and the Deacon broke out laughing. I laughed too, hard. And it felt good.

We roared up to the Bright Spot Cafe, jumped out of the limo, and dashed into the white clapboard building.

“All right, everyone up against the wall!” Sol strutted around the room, walking tall, flashing his P.I. badge. He waved it around at arm’s length. The Deacon stood next to the wall, in front of the window, holding his gun at his side, pointed at the floor. Cubby stayed with the car. I stood by the door.

Sol wanted to make a dramatic entrance, get the people’s attention, he’d explained earlier.

The same group of men slouched in the cafe, but the girl, Jane, was nowhere in sight. Everyone looked up and started moving slowly to the edge of the room. Everyone, that is, except Ben Moran and his buddy, a new guy I hadn’t seen before.

The new guy was a bear of man, a redneck brute of about forty. He wore no shirt and his hairy, ursine back and chest were exposed beneath his bib overalls. Even while he sat, I could see that Moran’s buddy had to be about six-foot-five, and in a weight contest he’d top a black grizzly. He was no Winnie the Pooh.

The redneck and Moran sat calmly at the table drinking coffee, oblivious to the action surrounding them. Finally, the bear looked up. “Hey, gumshoe. Tell your boy to put his peashooter away before I have to get out of my chair and shove it up his ass.” He spoke with a thick cracker accent.

Ben Moran’s eyes flashed and he said, “Shut up, Buddy.” He said it fast, before Sol could react to the redneck’s comment. “We’re going to have a friendly little chat with these gentlemen. Then we’ll ask them to leave, nice and polite like.” He turned to Sol. “C’mon over and sit down. Have some coffee.” He looked at me; there was a hardness in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. “You too, O’Brien. You can tell me about your plan to buy the Harvey House.”

“The Deacon,” Sol swaggered toward the men at the table, “doesn’t like to be called boy. Makes him real upset, no telling what he’ll do.” Sol then charged the table, got up close to Moran’s pal, and said, “I’m a Jew. Wanna make something out of that?”

Buddy the Bear sprang to his feet and roared back, ready to let fly an amazingly huge fist in the direction of Sol’s face.

Moran grabbed Buddy by the straps of his bib overalls. “Calm down, friend,” he said. Then he turned to Sol. “You too, mister gumshoe. Christ said — ”

“I don’t give a damn what Christ said. I wanna know where the girl is.”

“What girl?”

I walked to the table and answered for Sol. “Dark-haired teenager named Jane.”

“Never heard of her.” Moran turned to the customers lining the wall, the men guarded by the Deacon. “Any of you boys know some girl calls herself Jane?”

I watched their dead eyes as they lied, shaking their heads in unison.

Then I marched to the counter, hopped over it, and peered through the food slot into the filthy, drab kitchen behind the wall. No one was back there. I turned to the waitress who stood motionless, taut, next to the cash register. “You know who we’re talking about. She works here, was wiping tables.”

The waitress shook her head vehemently, but her eyes shifted downward. I followed her glance. Her hand was held out open below the counter; hidden from the group in the cafe. In it she held a small scrap of paper. Quickly, I snatched the paper and jammed it into my pocket.

“Where’s the owner of this place? I want to see the employment records,” Sol said.

“I own it,” Moran said. “Ain’t got no records. Don’t believe in them.”

“Government says you gotta keep records.”

“Government’s got no right poking their nose in my businesses.”

“Didn’t Christ say something about rendering unto Caesar?” Sol said.

“Caesar’s dead-and soon all the Hebrews will be dead too, along with the Roman heathens and descendants of Cain. Dead and gone once the day of reckoning is upon us.” Moran raised his head. “Amen, I say, amen!” I thought I noticed a smirk hiding in his dark eyes under those bushy brows.

The men at the wall joined in, chanting amen and waving their arms as they moved closer to the Deacon.

I came out from around the counter. “In the meantime, you can tell us where the drug center is located.”

Moran lowered his arms; the chanting stopped. His eyes shifted from the men lined up at the wall to the Deacon, then to Sol.

Buddy the Bear slowly hoisted his three hundred pounds of flab and attitude out of the chair. He pinned me with a defiant scowl and then focused on the Deacon. His face had the hue of a hot brick. Any minute he’d explode. Tension filled the room; you could squeeze it with your fingers and it would bleed.

“Hey, boy!” Buddy the Bear yelled at the Deacon.

The Deacon spun around, exposing his back to the men lined up behind him.

Then it happened.

“Get ’em, men!” Moran shouted.

At once all five of the men attacked the Deacon.

Buddy the Bear sprang on the balls of his feet-lightning fast-and pounced on Sol.

One of the guys at the wall pulled a toadsticker from his coveralls pocket, flicked open the six-inch blade, and eyed me cautiously for a split second before he charged, the blade glittering in the light.

The Deacon’s gun clattered to the floor. Ben Moran grunted, pushed his massive bulk out of the chair, and scrambled after the revolver as it slid across the room. He looked up. Cubby, who had silently slipped into the cafe, had his foot on the gun. He wagged his finger. “Sit this one out, old man, before you get hurt.” Moran moseyed back to his table and settled in, an innocent bystander at the Bright Spot rumble.

I stepped back. The guy with the blade flew past me and sprawled on the floor, after he tripped on my outstretched foot. He banged his head on the wall, stuck himself in the leg with his knife, and didn’t get up. He sat there and stared at the blood that started to pool under his thigh. I toyed with the idea of tossing him the washrag that sat on the counter.

The ruckus continued. The Deacon had made short work of the first three guys and now was pounding the last hooligan into hamburger.

And Sol, his jaws clenched, was busy with the redneck. He had the big bear in a hammerlock, thumping the guy’s head on the table.

“Hold it,” Moran shouted. “I think these city folks have had enough.”

Sol looked up. Surprise was written on his face. “Yeah, guess we’re not as tough as we thought.” He dropped the redneck and the guy rolled slowly to the floor. Then with his hand, he made a slashing motion across his neck indicating to the Deacon and me-like a director making a movie- Cut , the fight scene is over.

I strolled to the counter and tossed the rag to Mack the Knife, still on the floor by the wall. The bloody mess was becoming unsightly.

The room became quiet and Moran said in a loud voice, “That girl, the one you called Jane, she just wandered in here, hungry, wanted food.” He nodded. “Gave her some, and she cleaned tables for an hour or two. That’s all I know about her.”

Sol dabbed at a cut on his lip with a napkin he grabbed from a table. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?” he asked.

“You folks come in here throwin’ your weight around, itchin’ for a bruisin’. I figure why spoil the fun?”

Sol looked at me. We both heard the whooping sounds of sirens off in the distance. It sounded like they were converging on the Bright Spot. “Where can we find the teen drug center?” I said to Moran.