Ace Atkins - Dirty South

ALIAS gave me a wild stare over the back of one of the girls and mouthed the word “Freak.”

A few minutes later, an older woman with hair so blond I wasn’t too sure it wasn’t white walked in the door with a group of tired kids hauling guitars and pieces of a drum kit. She pointed out the stage cast in a red light, walked over to the bar, and asked the pierced Brit for the mail.

He handed some stuff to her but didn’t mention me. She had on large black sunglasses in the darkened bar. Long black shirt, tight black pants.

I introduced myself and said I’d like to talk to her about some business in private. Johnny Cash came back on in the shuffle and sang about God havin’ a heaven for country trash.

“I do my business here. You don’t like, then fuck off. This is my place.”

She sat at the bar stool next to me. She was in her late forties or early fifties. She reminded me of Deborah Harry if Deborah Harry lived an even tougher life. She lit a long cigarette.

“Who was Pinky?”

“My mother.”

“No shit.”

“No shit,” she said. “I’ve heard that more GIs jacked off to her than Betty Grable.”

“You must be proud.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“I had one of those posters of Farrah Fawcett. Got me through puberty.”

“You must be proud too.”

“I have guilt.”

She took a long draw of cigarette and nodded about ten times, letting the smoke just float out of the corner of her mouth. Her mouth looked like a shrunken, dead rose. She kept looking over my shoulder at ALIAS. She watched him as she played with her cigarette.

Fred motioned for the bartender. “Watch that kid.”

The bartender nodded.

“The kid’s with me.”

“What are you, into some kind of Big Brother program?” she said. “Get rid of that guilt you got.”

“I heard you could lead me to someone who conned a friend of mine.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Great question,” I said. “I can arrange money.”

“Who sent you?”

“Curtis Lee.”

“Thought he was on the Farm.”

“Got out.”

“I would’ve stayed if I was married to that wretched woman.”

“He loves her.”

“Curtis has problems.”

“Maybe.”

She walked off, spoke to the band for a few minutes, and then returned to the bar. Punks began to fill up the place, all black-T-shirted and pierced, tattoos muraling their arms. Heads shaved. Hair moussed up in impossible directions.

“What do you want to know?”

I repeated the story about Teddy, the kid, and the con. The man with cauliflower ears. She listened.

“How much money did he lose?”

“That’s for you to find out and then tell me who I need to find.”

She shrugged. “How much?”

“Has to come through first.”

“I haven’t run a game in five years.”

I ordered another Coke. She paid for it and I appreciated that.

“Anyone run the big games around here?”

“Used to be this cocksucker named Fourtnot but he died in the eighties. I don’t know. Mostly freelance. Lots of Lotto games. Big cons on old women down at the lake-front. But what you’re talking about is impressive. Good imagination.”

“Not bad.”

She reached out with her long fingers and slowly raked her red nails across my arm.

“Tell your boy to get lost and come with me,” she said.

“Where would you start?”

She flipped her hair back and lit another cigarette. She looked at herself in the mirror, not finding what she was looking for, and mussed her hair with her fingers. “I will. You won’t.”

Her fingers were stained with nicotine and her breath smelled of garlic and mint. She looked at me and sighed. “I want five thousand.”

“Has to come through tonight,” I said.

“I’ll work on it.”

“I need it within a couple of hours.”

She nodded.

“What happened to Pinky?”

“She jumped off the balcony of the Fountainebleau in Miami.”

She stubbed her cigarette into an ashtray filled with peanut shells and walked away.

I DROPPED ALIAS at his mansion a little past midnight. He told me that the place – a Mediterranean Revival number on Pontchartrain with bonsai-looking trees – was going to be plowed under someday and updated with something he’d seen on Deep Space 9 . We walked inside an empty house and I noticed a little spot for him in the living room with a GI Joe sleeping bag and a small CD player. Dozens of rap CDs lay on the floor by his pillow and a couple of discount packs of chips and warm liters of Pepsi. Little indentations from missing furniture spotted the white carpet. Moonlight crept into his paneled French doors from the pool.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

I gave him the number to the cell and watched him as he tucked himself into the blanket and turned his back to me.

I drove back home, hoping that thing from Fred would shake out. Without that, I didn’t have much. Teddy wouldn’t respond to my messages about that dick Trey Brill. I was beginning to lose patience and I was tired as hell.

But as soon as I got close to my warehouse on Julia, I felt something was out of place.

Four cars were parked in broken patterns in front of businesses that had closed up for the night. A black Cadillac Escalade, two red Ferraris, and a green Rolls, all their bright silver rims shining down the stretch of asphalt.

I didn’t turn into the warehouse. I parked down the street and walked.

The convertible top was down on the Rolls. A box of.38 slugs sat empty in the passenger seat. The light to my warehouse burned bright through a huge bank of industrial windows. The small blue door that leads to the second floor was closed.

I slipped a key into the lock and slowly pushed it open with both hands. I reached for the Glock in my jacket. The seventeen rounds waited jacked inside.

Upstairs, I heard Annie’s high-pitched barking. She yelped in an urgent rhythm.

I crept up the stairs and heard a crash in my loft and a couple of men laughing.

I moved forward, my heart skipping pretty damned quickly in my chest. I tried to control my breathing and slip silently to the landing. Annie kept barking, her yips working into a howl.

The huge sliding door had been pushed open and inside about a half-dozen men rifled through my shit. A man with a puckered burn mark across his cheek drank my Jack Daniel’s from the bottle and then spit a mouthful onto the floor. Two of the men were shirtless and muscular, wearing stiff, wide-legged jeans and clean work boots. Gold and platinum in chains hung around their necks and molded into their teeth.

I couldn’t spot Annie.

I slipped my finger tighter on the trigger and backed down the stairs to call the police. My heart began to palpitate, my breathing quick. The man with the burn mark asked for a lighter.

I took another step backward.

I felt the sharp prick of a flat, wide blade in my side.

The knife moved up to my neck.

“Slow down, motherfucker. We waitin’ on you.”

He pushed me forward on the landing while I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket. In the darkness, he hadn’t seen it.

As we entered the large open space of the warehouse, a couple of tool shelves by the window where I kept my field interviews had been toppled. Several VHS tapes – loaded with interviews of people who’d died years ago – lay in piles on the floor.

A short, muscular man in a net shirt walked toward me, his palms open on each side as if waiting to begin prayer. His teeth were platinum and jeweled and he had a red tattoo of a heart that seemed to be live and beating on his muscled chest.