Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

A bolt slid back with a hard clack.

Two men entered the room. One was a thin white guy about her age with slick black hair and the other was an old black man with gray hair. Both carried guns and wore blue blazers and red ties. Radios squawked on their hips.

“C’mon, let’s go,” the black man said. He had freckles and high cheekbones like an Indian. Mean eyes.

“Leave me alone,” Abby yelled. “Where the hell am I? Who the hell are you?”

“C’mon. He wants to see you.”

The black man grabbed the front of her shirt and yanked her to her feet. He twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her into a concrete tunnel. She gritted her teeth in pain – her shoulder screaming loose in the socket – as they marched her through the narrow passageway. The tunnel took several twists through a dozen curves with fluorescent lights beaming overhead.

At the end of another tunnel, the boy opened a side door into an office with dark wood paneling and dimly lit with Tiffany lamps. The shades looked as if they were cut from shards of colorful hard candy.

The black man shoved her onto a brown leather coach.

When she straightened her head, she gazed right into a shadow sitting in a leather chair. He was hard to see. His features were obscured by bright light and smoke from a cigar. She could see the orange glow of the butt and hear his rapid, uneven breath.

“Hello, Miss MacDonald.” His voice country and weathered. Someone who drank too much bourbon and had smoked since he was ten.

She tasted the blood in her mouth and heard the dull sound of locks pinging in the concrete room where they’d kept her. She tried to squint through the hot light.

“You got to be tired,” he said.

Abby could hear her own breath now. Way too fast.

“Haven’t stopped since the death of your parents.”

Abby bit into the side of her cheek and listened.

“Truck stops, cheap-ass motels. Always wondered, why the highway? Why not the beach? Or another country? You like bein’ anonymous? You like blending in?”

Abby felt the blood heating in her chest. This was it. This was it. “What the hell do you want?” she yelled. It was someone else’s voice. Someone stronger.

Above them there was a buzz of laughter and the sound of electronic bells. More laughter. Heavy footsteps.

“We need some help finding something belonging to your father.”

Her duffel bag sat open on his desk and her dirty underwear on the floor. She felt naked and embarrassed.

“You killed them. Didn’t you? You goddamned son of a bitch.”

“Help us find what we need. And let your parents die with grace.”

She saw his hands reach for the bag and pull it from view. The light was so bright that even when she squinted she couldn’t make out his features. A blue halo pulsed in her vision.

“Where does your daddy keep his papers?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You’re just gonna kill me anyway.”

“Nope. I don’t kill little girls. I just make ’em bleed and hurt like hell till they tell me what I want.”

Abby stared down at her hands. She breathed quick, her heart ticking. She began to pray silently again. It was the prayer she’d said the entire way in the car about appreciating every second the Lord gave her.

“Abby?”

She kept her eyes on her hands. She felt the gentle stroke of fingers across the back of her neck.

“Go on,” the man said to someone behind her. “Y’all have your fun.”

Out of the darkness two people walked between her and the man. One was the older black man with freckles. The other was Ellie.

At least it seemed like Ellie. In Abby’s scattered vision, the face and the body were the same. But she looked different and held herself in an unusual way. She even seemed to breathe like another person as she studied Abby with squinting eyes.

“Shall we go get this filthy bitch cleaned up?” Ellie asked.

The door to the security office was closed and I was about to walk back to the lobby when a black woman dressed in maid coveralls sauntered by and jiggled a set of keys in her pocket. She opened the door.

I followed.

The office was tiny with a cheap desk and seascape prints hanging on the walls. Besides the smell of stale cigarettes, you couldn’t tell if the place was ever used. No loose papers on the desk. No bulletin boards. No appointment calendars.

“You know where I can find Humes?” I asked.

The woman jumped as if touched by a live wire. Her face was round and flat. Reddish brown skin.

“Sorry,” I said, my palms outstretched to show I was cool. Didn’t mean her any harm. “Lookin’ for my old buddy Mr. Humes.”

“Shiiit,” she said. She was very old and very short. Didn’t even come up to my chest. “You up to no good.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes, you is.” She smiled. “What you wantin’ Humes fer? He fucked up again?”

I smiled back.

“You gonna kick his ass?”

“Just want to talk to him.”

She looked up at me and studied my eyes. She squinted one eye and then patted me on the arm. “C’mon, he ain’t never in here. But don’t you be tellin’ him how you found him.”

She left the office door open and led me down a long hallway to a metal door by an emergency exit. Hundreds of tourist pamphlets sat in a nearby bin. Everything from Graceland to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.

The woman unlocked the metal door and held it wide open.

“Go on,” she said. “Last door on the left. That’s where he sit at, pickin’ his ass and lookin’ at Playboys.”

I leaned down to the short old woman and kissed her on the cheek.

Ever since the truck stop, Perfect had had the uncontrollable desire to scrub Abby MacDonald clean. She stank. She smelled of body odor and gasoline and coffee breath. She had stubble underneath her arms and probably had long hair growing on her legs. Her eyebrows were unkempt and long cuticles grew over her nails. How could she live like that? How could she even think this was acceptable?

Perfect hated everything about the girl. She hated her greasy dirty-blond hair and her unmade face and her sinewy little body. Probably some kind of runner or athletic freak. Abby wasn’t curvy. The girl didn’t understand that women were supposed to be full and rounded.

In the concrete room, Perfect studied Abby. The way her head hung down in her hands, the mud splattered on her wide-legged jeans, and those awful running shoes. And, God, how she wouldn’t shut up. The little girl kept on crying and calling her Ellie and asking her to disappear.

Perfect, now dressed in hip-hugger cords and a white T-shirt with a sequin heart, moved closer to the girl and watched her cry. Humes sat on top of a blackjack table, a gun on his hip, drinking a cup of coffee. That bastard was waiting for the show to begin. Oh, well, guess she’d have to deliver.

Perfect grabbed a good handful of greasy hair from Abby’s head and pulled her to the stainless-steel tub. She tore the horrible-smelling T-shirt from her body and told her to take off those dirty jeans or die.

The girl kept sobbing but did what she said, lightly pulling them down over her knees, shaking.

Perfect knew the girl was expecting rape or some kind of sexual kicks from them. Instead, Perfect shoved her stinking ass down in the tub filled with scalding water. The girl, just wearing white bra and panties, pressed her back to the wall and covered her breasts with folded arms.

Perfect shook her head, put on a pair of Latex gloves, and lathered up a loofah.

She pulled up Abby’s armpit and began her long overdue cleansing process.

The room at the end of the hall was more than just an additional office. Think Mission Impossible crossed with Dr. Strangelove. At least thirty black-and-white televisions showing various scenes from the casino were arranged along a gray cinder block wall. One had a closeup of the blackjack dealer’s hands and another showed some kind of warehouse where men unloaded an eighteen-wheeler. A narrow desk with microphones and a couple of rolling chairs sat close to the monitors. A coffee mug stamped with the Magnolia Grand logo and a crumpled pack of cigarettes lay on the desk.