Ace Atkins - Dirty South

His right hand darted to the small of his back and he came up with a snub-nosed.38 that he jammed and twisted in my ear. I was so intent on not moving, I didn’t even notice his feet kicking out my legs.

I fell to the floor. He inched closer with the gun to the bridge of my nose.

“You like scrambled eggs?”

He called ’em “aigs.”

His group ringed me. Their eyes were red and squinted tight and they gritted their teeth while I squirmed.

“What you doin’ with them Paris brothers?” the man asked.

The man with the scar pulled out a book, Catcher in the Rye, from my kitchen table and held a Zippo against its pages. He dropped my book next to the pool of whiskey and I watched its pages curl with smoke.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Annie’s yelps came from inside my bathroom.

The leader knocked me across the face, holding the gun in my ear.

“Teddy’s my friend,” I said.

He laughed at that, his platinum teeth feral and wild. He yanked me halfway off the floor with one hand and an arm the size of my leg. His arm didn’t even tremble as he held me there.

I smelled the fire burning into the book’s musty pages.

“I take it you’re Cash?”

“How you know my name?”

“Luck.”

He let me go. As I got to my knees, I heard the clicking of guns around me. He kicked me hard in the ribs. I tried to breathe but couldn’t. My bones felt like they were made of splintered wood. He thumped my head with the back of his hand. “Who got that money?”

I gasped that I didn’t know. Cash picked up the smoldering book, nodded at my shelf of first editions, and asked if I thought it was too cold in the room. “Need some heat.”

One of the thugs gripped the back of my neck and I could smell his rancid body odor, like that of spoiled milk, seeping through his bare chest. He threw me forward, my head connecting hard with the wood floor. I rolled on my stomach, wheezing and groaning a bit, and reached into my jacket for the Glock.

Two of his boys tackled me and wrestled the gun from my hand. Annie kept yelping. One of the boys let her out and she came running to me, licking my face. I held her close and stayed on the floor.

“Teddy Paris sold out the kid,” Cash said. “You keep out ALIAS’s business. He roll with me now. You hear? Don’t come round Calliope no more. That’s my world.”

I wiped the blood off my mouth and stood, holding Annie’s collar. “Someone conned ALIAS.”

“Ain’t my trouble.”

“If anything happens to Teddy, a detective from NOPD will be coming for you before you can take your morning piss.”

He smiled some more. I got to my feet. Annie stood by me and began to growl.

“You set Teddy up?” I asked.

He laughed and pawed at his chest. His mouth shined in the light.

“We goin’ for a ride,” Cash said.

I could taste the blood in my mouth and my hands shook uselessly at my sides.

“And if I refuse?”

“Then we’ll kill your ass.”

CASH AND HIS ENTOURAGE drove me over the river to Algiers, where they ate greasy sacks of Burger King, traded stories about women they’d done, and passed around joints as fat as rolls of quarters. All this while I waited for someone to put a bullet in my head. I was too tired to be scared. My hands had stopped shaking a few minutes before and I just listened to the river moving past us and the sound of tugs and faint music from the Quarter. The air smelled of sulfur and old dirt.

We were in the dead zone. Nothing but warehouses and vacant shotguns. Rusted cars and spare parts from the World’s Fair in 1984.

Their Rolls, Ferraris, and Escalades ringed me like some kind of old wagon train. Cash was doing business in his car. Someone had built a fire from some driftwood. I kept thinking about my dog. Wondering why such a group of thugs would’ve let me lock her up before coming along.

Cash climbed out of his ride and strutted over.

“You know you used to could ride over the river in a bucket,” I said, growing tired of the silence.

Cash turned to me. I thought I heard him growl.

“It’s true,” I said. “It was like Disneyland; you could pay a few bucks and get a nice view of the city and everything. Those were what I like to call simpler times.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“You want some of your boys to hold me down while you beat me again?”

“You sayin’ I ain’t hard?”

It was so dark that a few of the thugs had turned on their headlights to spot the high grass where we stood.

“I think you’re a pussy who needs help winning a fight,” I said.

Wrong choice of words. Cash pulled off his net shirt and moved in for me. His fist cocked back, eyes wild. He pushed me with his right hand.

I led with my left and connected with his ear with the right. He leapt on top of me and started hammering at my face, but I kneed him in the nuts and he fell off me. I wrapped his bald animal head into the crook of my elbow and I squeezed until he started trying to gasp for air that would not come.

All his boys circled us, drawing their guns back on me.

I let him go.

He stood, started to laugh, and walked to me with a smile. He bent his neck to the side and I heard his spine pop.

I thought I’d gained his respect up until the point he punched me in the stomach.

I fell. I breathed in as hard as I could, feeling the air narrowly pass into me. I noticed all the lights across the river. Everything grew muffled around me.

“Punk?” Cash yelled. “Punk!”

I used a concrete block to find my feet and I wavered in front of him.

I punched for his temple, but he ducked. I tried another shot and he ducked again.

I gave up on boxing and tackled his legs out from him. All of his boys whooped and hollered as he tried to get off his back like a fallen turtle and I wrapped him up in a headlock. I tasted blood and dirt in my mouth.

“We even,” he said. He spit in my face.

“Stay away from Teddy.”

“Stay away from my boy ALIAS,” he grunted.

I let him go and for several moments we both tried to catch our breath. He paced around and talked a little shit about me being a cheater and then moved in close, his eyes wild like he wanted to go again.

“Teddy needs more time.”

“Fuck him,” Cash said. “Teddy tell me that he need more time too. How come his brother paid off that bitch Nae Nae then? Dropped off a goddamned Mercedes truck yesterday. Now does that sound broke-ass? He just wavin’ that shit in my face. That I cannot stand.”

“Who’s Nae Nae?”

“Stay away from ALIAS,” he said, reaching for a shirt a flunky held open for him. As soon as he looped his arm into the fresh silk, he reached out for the man’s joint and took a hit. “Tell Teddy I’m ready to deal.”

His breath expelled into a big fat ganja cloud and then dissolved into the wind.

“He won’t give you the kid.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna let him fall like Dio. Man, that boy had some heart and he dead ’cause of it. Tell Teddy to stay in the city.”

“Teddy didn’t kill Dio.”

“You sure?”

I looked at him.

He sucked on the joint. “Why you fight me? You crazy in the head?”

“Maybe.”

“Ain’t nobody takes on Cash like that.”

I nodded.

He did too. He looked down at his watch. “That dawn come mighty early. Tell Teddy we lookin’ forward to taking him for a ride.”

“What’d you want with me?”

“How ’bout you just stay home tonight?” he asked. “What happenin’ between me and Teddy is our own thing. This shit been comin’ for a long time. He don’t need to come up with that money. You see?”

I left my hands at my side and Cash shook his head like I’d just given an incredibly stupid answer to a very simple question. He ran his fat tongue over the platinum and diamonds in his mouth. His small pit-bull eyes lazy but still intense.