Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

A small hand held my face. I opened my eyes to darkness above me. Seeing nothing. Small lips pressed close to mine.

“Shh,” Abby said. I held my body still. Wasn’t hard. I wasn’t sure I could move my toes.

I heard the crunching sound of feet running on old leaves. Branches breaking. Voices. A man and a woman. Too far away to make out the words. Just voices. Connotations from the sounds.

It was night now. Was sure of it. Goddamn, my head hurt, I thought, trying not to move my eyes or budge a finger. Everything moved in the haziness of the worst hangover I’d ever known.

Abby’s arms wrapped around me and pulled me toward her chest. I could feel her breasts against my neck and her nails digging into my skin. Before me was a mouth of a narrow dirt cave. The moon’s gray glow shot through the trees and onto a thick, wet carpet of forest floor.

I moved my arms. Maybe not a cave. A little opening in a hill. A concave mound of dirt and rock that had been eroded into a little burrow. Somewhere a dog would hang out during a storm.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t move.

The voices were clearer now.

All of it coming back. The woman from the casino. A man I knew. A hired gun. The wreck. The blackout. Jesus, how long had I been away?

Abby’s chest rose and fell in quick bursts. She held me even tighter. Her hands coated in wet black dirt. Leaves dissolving back to earth brushing across my face. I suddenly had the thought that this was what it was like to be dead, but awake. I was just getting loopy. I wanted to stay still.

I wanted those fucking voices to go away.

Shit, no gun. No car. No place to escape. Miles and miles of anonymous woods.

I took a breath and felt a groan coming on, the wet plink of rainwater beating some dead kudzu at the mouth of the burrow.

Two black boots appeared.

“I bet they followed the god dang creek,” the man yelled.

The woman yelled back.

He stood there for a moment. Not more than three yards away from my feet. Almost playing with us. Toying. Just make our hearts explode until he stuck the muzzle in the shallow dirt grave and finished it.

I remembered him. I remembered how he’d tried to rape a woman I knew and how he’d tortured an old hermit who was so shy he could barely look you in the eye.

I gripped Abby’s knee.

The rain plinked on a fattened brown leaf again.

The foot disappeared.

The crunch of boot soles on smooth creek bed fading into the distance.

“Do we stay here?” she whispered.

I held my head in my hands and wiggled my toes. They worked.

Sickness. Vomiting on my shirt.

I held my head some more and pushed myself from the muddy hole, with the arm that didn’t hurt, and out into the forest. A million raindrops sliding off trees and across saplings and down into decaying leaves and puddles. Little slivers of moonlight, almost too weak to notice, making the distant surface of the creek look gray. Cold as the air around us.

God, I was soaking.

Abby helped me to my feet. I wiped the puke off my face with my jacket and straightened my back and felt my arms. My left arm hung loose at my side and I felt a numb tingling in my fingers.

We walked. Each step something to concentrate on, until I saw a fat pine. I listened to the flow of the creek and the rain patter. Convinced they were gone, I thrust my shoulder into the trunk and heard a sickening pop – pain shooting through my torso and into my bruised head – until I fell to my knees, biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t howl.

“God. God. God.” Abby was on her knees now, too. She was smoothing the wet hair away from my forehead. She held my head in her hands and spoke some kind of low, mumbled prayer.

“I’m fine,” I said. I moved my fingers and felt the shoulder rotating as it should in the socket. “Used to do that all the time. Always comes out.”

“God,” she said, again.

I got to my feet. Abby watched me from where she squatted and looked at my face for a second. She soon got to her feet, too, and pointed to the road that had ended so abruptly.

She held my hand.

Made me want to lead the way. Made me feel a little stronger than I did.

We walked as quiet as we could. Abby listened. She watched.

She’d probably been in the woods more times than I could imagine. She knew the rhythms of forests from deer hunting with her dad. I was sure of it.

We followed a little gully, once losing my feet and thudding down on my ass, until she showed me the narrow bed filled with reddish pine needles and leaves. She pointed to the crumpled piece of machinery that I used to love spending my Sundays waxing. Chrome that you could smile into.

Apparently the roadwork had only gone so far. It ended over the gully where my Bronco had simply dropped down into its muddy bucket, struck a fat little oak, and slammed to a stop. My front windshield was cracked pretty badly on the driver’s side and the front end was smashed in pretty good, too.

“I’m so sorry, Nick.”

“How far do you think we’re in this place?”

“Couple miles,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, looking back down the road we had traveled. “Let’s follow the edges but keep out of sight. Okay?”

I walked over to the Bronco, feeling pretty damned bad about what had happened to her, not thinking about me or the two psychos that were tramping around the woods looking for us. Nope, just thinking about the old Gray Ghost and wondering if she was salvageable.

I pulled open the passenger door; it rocked open slightly ajar and completely fucked up, and leaned inside.

I grabbed my Army travel bag and for some reason the stupid face plate from my CD changer, like theft was my biggest worry, and opened the lockbox for the papers.

But it had already been opened.

The metal top ripped from the hinges. My CDs were there. My old Ford manuals. My coffee mugs and crap.

I felt her behind me looking over my shoulder. She began to cry.

I snaked back out of the truck.

I felt like crying, too.

Whatever it was, they had it.

LEVI RANSOM WASN’T so scary. He didn’t talk in a whisper or have some kind of weird quirk like rattling off the names of venomous snakes or collect stories of particularly gruesome suicides. He didn’t like to watch videos with little girls wrestling in their panties or have a fetish about smelly feet. Nope. Levi Ransom was just a man. Maybe a cutthroat bastard. Maybe the kind of guy who’d bury you in three southern states if you lied to him. But he also liked good bourbon, cheap drugstore cigarettes, and quick meaningless sex. He had his sex like some ate a damned cheeseburger. Didn’t even taste it, just devoured the whole thing as fast as he could.

When old Jake died, Perfect didn’t have anybody. She’d been stuck at that stupid carnival he was running in Biloxi for almost a week until Levi showed up. She just remembered sitting in that L.S.U. beanbag chair and listening to Ransom run down her options. Most of them sucked. Dancer. Hooker. Back on her own.

But then he asked if she’d come with him to Jamaica that same day. His voice was so damned warm and it was hot as hell outside. Jake hadn’t paid the electricity for the carnival to run and most of the carnies had moved back down to Gibtown or wherever they lived. She had on a dirty tanktop with no bra and red silk panties.

He just kept looking at her legs, waiting for her to decide.

“Beach or shithole city,” he said, opening the door, allowing the hot-ass air that smelled like stale cotton candy to brush into the room.

The next day, he’d mounted her. He pressed her face into a pillow and took about five minutes to do his work. Then, he jumped up and told her to get dressed, talking about steaks and whiskey. She barely had time to catch her breath.