Ace Atkins - Wicked City

He started out talking about the heat, how it was going to get up into the nineties, and then I responded with something about hoping for more rain. As we talked like farmers, Sykes opened up a plastic briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and began to twirl a pen.

I excused myself and poured more coffee.

“I guess you know why I’m here.”

“To talk about the weather?”

“John Patterson is in Washington.”

“Flew up yesterday,” I said. “It was in the papers.”

Sykes looked down at the blank sheet of paper and then back at me across the dinette. My wife had hung some skillets on the wall, and we had one of those small cuckoo clocks that sounded eight just as he was about to speak.

I smiled and shrugged.

“Mr. Patterson has made statements publicly about us being babysitters.”

“John’s frustrated.”

Sykes looked up. “When no one in town even admits they’ve heard the name Albert Patterson, there are bound to be problems.”

“You might want to start disarming the town first.”

He looked at me.

“Until you strip those gangsters of their pieces, no one in their right mind is going to talk to you.”

Sykes nodded. “We’d have to place the entire city under martial law, and I don’t believe that’s been done since Reconstruction. Governor Persons wants alternatives.”

I nodded and shrugged. I lit a cigarette and sipped a bit of my coffee. From the kitchen window, I saw two elderly women walking through our backyard with shower caps on their head. Joyce helped them up onto the steps of her little white-clapboard beauty shop and greeted them with a smile.

“Did you know old women like their hair to be blue?”

“You men are going to have to trust somebody,” Sykes said.

“That would be nice.”

Sykes put down his pen. He took a deep breath and picked it up again, drumming the point on the blank paper. “Just pass this on. I do not work for Silas Garrett. He’s not a part of this.”

“And what about Arch Ferrell and Sheriff Matthews?”

I watched him. Sykes drew something on the blank pad.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with Mr. Ferrell,” Sykes said.

“You want to tell me a little more, doc?”

“Let’s just say that the attorney general’s office is in complete control of this investigation.”

“What about the town? Are you going to just leave it the way you found it?”

“No, sir.”

“When are you going to really shut it down?”

“We haven’t found anything yet,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

I took another sip of black coffee, emptying the rest, and then washed out the cup, leaving it to dry on a wooden rack. Out in my little shaded backyard, my children played cowboys and Indians in the dirt. Tommy had a pair of those silver six-shooters with caps and blasted and blasted from behind a tree.

“Is it that hard?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Finding what you’re looking for,” I said, grabbing my Texaco ball cap from the counter. “Let’s go. I’ll show you the way.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, MAJOR BLACK BOUNDED THE jeep along a backcountry road, not too far from Seale, and pulled over where I pointed. The road was dirt and endless and covered in a canopy of oak and pecan branches. And soon they were behind me, me leading the way down a little fire road maybe a half mile into the woods, where we came across another dirt road and followed it for a while until I held up a hand and pointed into a clearing. Sykes followed along, swatting branches away from his face, his suit jacket in the car, his suit pants rolled to above his ankles, wingtips covered in red dust. He’d sweated clean through his dress shirt, but Black didn’t show an ounce of perspiration as he squatted down behind a long row of privet bush and waited.

I motioned over to a large barn that had once been painted. The doors had been locked with a long two-by-four and then sealed with a chain and lock. Nearby, two black men in dirty undershirts sat on the hood of a shiny red Buick. One played with a pistol while the other cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. The man with a pocketknife wore a pistol sticking out of his trousers.

“How do you know what’s in there?” Sykes said, whispering.

“You want to ask them?” I said.

Black looked at me and then back at Sykes, who was wiping his brow with his painted tie.

“So this is it?” Black said. It was the most he’d spoken since we’d met. The man stood six foot five and must’ve weighed two-fifty. Standing near him was like being under an oak.

I shook my head. “One of a dozen or more,” I said. “They’ve got slots and horse-racing machines and tables tucked away in most of the county.”

Sykes nodded, his Hollywood hair covered in briars. He picked one out and tossed it to the ground.

We followed the dirt road back and then trailed along the fire road back to the jeep. The cicadas this summer buzzed away like screams in the trees, the heat covering our bodies like a thick wool coat.

“I’d be glad to give the governor the same tour,” I said.

Sykes reached for his suit jacket over the back of the seat and slipped back into it. “You really think he’d be surprised?”

ARCH FERRELL LEFT HIS WIFE’S PONTIAC STATION WAGON at a filling station across the road from the Citizens Bank Building and walked back down Dillingham, back toward the river, keeping a straw hat down in his eyes and not making eye contact with the Guard troops he passed. He walked by the 260 and 261 clubs, the Original Barbecue. From across the road, he could see the weathered and beaten words on the side of a brick building advertising a slave market held on Saturdays that no one had thought to paint over since the Civil War.

Most of the buildings down on this stretch of Phenix City were just old wood-frame clip joints and Bug houses. Some of the joints on this side of town allowed blacks, and Arch passed the men in their out-of-date zoot suits and two-tone nigger shoes and felt dirty just being in their presence when they’d give him a rotten smile and stare. He knew, just fucking knew, that they now recognized him as no better than they were.

Dillingham dipped down at the bridge. Hung onto the riverbank, stuck on the lower level of a storefront, was the Bridge Grocery. He ducked inside the door just as soon as he could. His eyes had to adjust to the light, red bulbs screwed into sockets, making his vision feel like that of an animal. He heard men talking and walked past the horse-racing arcade games and the green felt tables stacked in heaps in the center of the concrete floor. He entered a back room, passing over a creaking wooden floor that almost hung right out over the water, under the level of the bridge. His eyes searched for the part of the floor he’d heard about that could spring loose like that of a stage, rolling a drunk or beaten man out onto the banks, tumbling and rolling and falling out into the Chattahoochee.

Godwin Davis was a portly little man, not even coming up to Arch’s chest. He was bald and fat and had a constant cigar plugged into the side of his mouth. The man had an odor about him, too, of nicotine sweats and vinegar, breath as fetid as moldy cheese.

Arch looked at his own feet, the slotted floor, and stepped around broken poker chips and shards of glass, sandwich wrappers, and empty beer bottles. He was pretty sure the grocery, which hadn’t sold a can of beans since before the war, hadn’t been open since the troops arrived.

Davis grunted something to him, an affirmation maybe, and nodded him into a back room with brighter light, this coming from another red bulb over a little table, where Miss Fannie Belle sat smoking a thin brown cigar and leaning back in a seat. She smiled up at Arch, and Arch looked to Davis, never thinking in a million years that these two could be fifty yards away without trying to kill each other. But allies were tough to find these days, and Arch understood you took what you could get.