Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

“You want to do this alone?” he asked.

“Could use someone to watch my ass.”

U pulled off his shades. “Cool. Didn’t want to have to tell Abby and her mean-ass cousin how you got it shot off.”

Two girls in sweaty long-sleeve T-shirts and jeans were pulling weeds by a wide marble staircase flanked by squatty palm trees. One was blond, her hair up in a bun, no makeup. The other had red hair pulled into a ponytail and extremely long legs. They were both dirty and grass-stained but I knew from one glance they worked for Cook.

The women were used to spinning on brass poles in air-conditioning, swindling old men into having ten-dollar drinks, and telling tales to customers about dreams they’d never had. I had to laugh. Cook had them doing real work.

We rang the bell and within a minute, the lithe bartender I’d met at the Golden Lotus, the one with short brown hair and a nice stomach, opened the door. She had on an apron and was drying her hands on a towel. I’d really hoped all these women would’ve been hanging out by his pool in bikinis. Not doing manual labor.

“Cowboy,” she said, a tight smile in the corner of her mouth.

“Howdy,” I said. “Cook home?”

She looked over at U and then back at me.

“Don’t make trouble here. He has people, too, you know.”

“No trouble.”

“Just a friendly warning,” she said, tossing the towel over her shoulder and hooking her thumbs into belt loops along her small waist.

“Appreciated.”

She told us to wait in the foyer. We did.

A massive chandelier dripped down from a high ceiling. Big marble statues of naked women eating grapes stood out from the garish red walls. The foyer spread in to an open living room with a sunken pit like the Beatles’s pad in HELP! Zebra- and Cheetah-printed furniture. Class with a capital K.

U nudged me and I looked by a coat rack near the door. In a glass case for all visitors to see, stood three large trophies celebrating second, third, and fifth place in local bodybuilding championships for men over fifty.

I said, “Always wanted to be Mr. Senior Mid-South.”

“Me, too,” U said. “What’s that say, Airport Holiday Inn?”

“Yeah.”

“First class, brother.”

Glass walls covered the entire back half of the house as if it had been built in a cutaway to show the interior. Outside, there was a small wooden deck with iron chairs and a table with a Cinzano umbrella. No women. Damn it.

Wind from the Mississippi made knocking sounds against the huge sheet of glass, and outside I could see small, immature pines bending.

A door opened from the southern edge of the house and I heard some awful post-Eagles, Don Henley music blasting from a far room. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.”

Two more young women followed him, both looking tired as hell, as he began pointing to the black granite floor. “Mr. Clean. All over. Watch the carpets. Don’t even think about getting them wet.”

They nodded but made faces at his back as he passed.

Cook wore tight bicycle shorts, circa nineteen eighty-seven, and this bizarre satin tank top that was just plain disturbing. It really didn’t qualify as a shirt since it darted below his nipples and lotion-tanned chest.

He fluffed up the spikes on his gray head and crossed his arms over his chest in order to make his balloon-sized biceps even larger. A massive leather weight belt covered most of his stomach.

“Five minutes,” he said.

He walked ahead, back to the weight room, with the bad music blaring, and I looked at U and shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give us six… Six would be nice.”

He’d filled the room with rows of chrome Nautilus equipment and several racks of free weights. A back wall of windows overlooked the river, but the others were covered in mirrors. A beefy guy in a Golden Lotus T-shirt lay sprawled on a weight bench while being spotted by a guy who, although bald, could’ve been his twin. The same tanned hide and veined puffy look of a steroid addict.

“Man, this is a hell of a lot better than Saints camp,” U said. “Remember?”

“You mean the junkyard? Hell, yes. Had to drive through all those wrecked cars just to get to practice.”

“You come here to swap little tales, or to talk?” Cook said, sitting his Spandexed ass on a Nautilus machine and working out his neck in a perpetual nod.

“Don’t,” U said, waiting for me to drive a truck through his comment. “Fight it.”

The beefy man benching re-racked the weight with a clanging thud and grunted as if someone had just stepped on his crotch. I wanted to tell him that 315 pounds didn’t really call for a show. But I stayed with U’s plan, holding more comments inside.

Then I decided to get right to it. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were working with Levi Ransom?”

Cook kept nodding yes, until he gave a big grunt, and cranked out a last rep on the machine.

He wiped off his face with a towel and took a sip from a bottle of Evian.

“We’ve been through this. Door is back the way you came.”

“I saw the police report on Mary James and Eddie Porter. Levi Ransom killed them. You were washing money for the Dixie Mafia. What happened, Cook, needed a favor? You needed to flex a little and prove you were a badass?”

“Fuck you,” he said, moving on to a bicep machine for preacher curls. He bent over the bench, almost in a prayerlike pose, and muscled up a bar attached to a pulley system.

“What did Eddie Porter do? Find out about your deal with Ransom?”

He ignored me. I looked around the mirrored room.

U had wandered off. He was talking to the two meatheads. I thought I overheard him giving tips on how to bench more. One of the boys was smiling.

Cook took another sip of water.

“If you’d been straight with me, Loretta wouldn’t have been shot.”

The intensity in his face broke away. His jaw fell slack.

“No one told you?” I asked. “Didn’t figure you to be a true friend of hers anyway.”

Then the son of a bitch really snapped.

I could tell he’d been trying to keep it in. Red-faced and breathing deep lungfuls of air. But after I said “true friend,” his arms darted out and yanked me into a headlock and began pounding me in the face. He only got off two quick jabs to my cheek and forehead before I pulled my head out and twisted his arm behind his back.

He fell to his knees with a high-pitched scream.

The meatheads ran to him.

But U had drawn a gun and yelled for them to stay. It was the type of command you’d give a dog.

They stayed. Cook buckled with intense pain. I wanted to hold him there forever.

“COOL IT,” I said. I spoke as pleasantly as I could to a man I’d brought to his knees with pain. I twisted his arm an inch higher behind his back.

“You motherfucker,” Cook screamed. “Don’t you ever say that, you goddamned cocksucker. Come into my house? I’ll kill your ass.”

I pulled his arm even higher, heard a slight crack, and then let his arm relax about two inches. He grunted; I let him go. He almost fell on his face, but caught himself with the other arm and used the preacher machine to stand.

“They shot her in the chest and left her bleeding on the floor of JoJo’s bar. Nice people. Even set fire to the business that JoJo had run for thirty-five years, man. You know what that means? You know what kind of sweat and patience and hard work that takes? She had to lie on the ground of the bar and watch their whole life burn around her while she waited to either bleed to death or catch on fire. Yeah, Cook, you’re a great friend to her.”

He closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, catching his breath and rotating his arm in its socket.