Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“He take it?”

“Don’t know. If he did, I’d watch my step.”

Reuben shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve known Lamar since we were ’bout Billy’s age.”

Hoyt looked up and then around the empty room. “You ever seen that cartoon with the sheepdog and wolf where both of them are friends until they punch the morning clock?”

Reuben shook his head.

“See, when that clock is punched and they are at work, they try like hell to kill each other. But then when the sun goes down and they punch out, they are as gooda friends as you ever saw.”

“Which one am I?”

“If you don’t know, then you got more troubles than I thought,” he said. “You let me know what you know about Benefield, you hear?”

Hoyt left with a tip of his hat. Reuben and his boy sat there in silence until dawn cleared and a soft, gray summer morning arrived at the last two chairs in Club Lasso. They could hear nothing but the soft patter of rain against Fourteenth Street and the running of rainwater down the gutters and along the soft slope of the street to the Chattahoochee.

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GO?” JOHNNIE BENEFIELD asked, tucking in his cowboy shirt and slipping into his boots.

“Does it matter?” she said.

Fannie Belle sat in the salon of her empty whorehouse, chain-smoking cigarettes, a pearl-handled.32 on the plush velvet seat next to her. The furniture and lamps in the other room reminded Johnnie of something from the last century.

“They just better not lay a finger on my Hudson.”

“You better worry about more than your car.”

“Once I get Bert, we’re blowin’ this town.”

“Cuba?”

“Does it matter?”

Fannie blew out some smoke and crossed her legs. Johnnie watched her, and walked back upstairs for his clothes and a suitcase he’d packed. She was at the landing when he returned, and she watched him as he slowed his walk and hit the first floor with his boots.

She kissed him hard on the mouth. And he pulled away.

“I got to get Bert.”

“He’s not going with you.”

“The hell you say.”

“He’s got a platoon of soldiers up and around his house. They believe he’s getting ready to split town, and they don’t buy his religious act.”

“Do you?”

Fannie just looked at him, cocking her head slightly to the side, and lit another long cigarette. She leaned her head back, pulling in the smoke, and drew a sweep of her red hair to one side.

“I want something from you before you leave,” she said.

He turned at the front door, suitcase in hand. She whispered into his ear, and her breath was warm and sweet.

“You got to be kidding,” Johnnie said. “You mention me and the Hoyt Shepherd job again and you gonna get me killed. Hoyt Shepherd will drop me in that ole river loaded down with logging chains just as easy as takin’ a mornin’ piss.”

And, with that, he opened the front door and walked out on the old rotted porch and out to the Hornet hid back by some privet bush. He tucked the suitcase into the trunk and turned to the bush, where he started to take a leak.

He heard her walking behind him and he started to whistle.

“Listen, they may not even find you, Fannie,” Johnnie said. “Hell, the Hill Top is two miles from the highway. You’re the only goddang thing out here.”

“Not far enough.”

He zipped up and turned to her, jingling the keys in his hand. The old, rotten Victorian behind Fannie looking to him like a haunted house from a picture show.

“Why do you say that?”

She didn’t say anything, only turned to the north and pointed to the dust buckling and rising from the dirt road. From the looks of things, a mess of cars was headed that way.

“Who else is in the house?”

“Few girls. Them twins. Some more from town that got scared.”

“Get back inside.”

“Why?”

“I said get the fuck back inside,” he said, popping his trunk again and pulling out a Winchester Model 12. “Get your clothes off and put on a robe. Something sexy. Tell the girls to stay in their rooms. I said now.”

Johnnie clenched his jaw, stocking extra shells in his pant pocket and down into the shaft of his pointed boots. He eyed a place up in the turret on the second floor, and looked to see the first flashes of the windshields of the approaching cars.

EVERY CLERK, PROSECUTOR, DEPUTY, AND JUDGE HAD BEEN cleared from the Russell County Courthouse. Only the Guard remained, with Bernard Sykes setting up command in Arch Ferrell’s old office and Sykes’s team from the state attorney’s office already tearing through Ferrell’s personal files and papers. General Hanna’s stepson, Pete – an eighteen-year-old kid working as the general’s personal driver – had taken us through the courthouse and out back to the brick sheriff’s office, where Hanna ushered me down into a basement storage room filled with dozens of cardboard boxes. “These look familiar?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Why don’t you call your buddy Britton and John Patterson down here? It looks like a mess of uncounted votes going back to 1945.”

“They kept them?” I asked.

“Sheriff Matthews may be everything else, but he’ll never be accused of being a genius.”

Thirty minutes later, we found more. In jail cells, we found car batteries hooked to head braces, horse whips, logging chains, and several fat leather belts fitted with silver dollars. Along the worn leather were traces of blood. Some of the cells had been fitted with iron shackles in the concrete, like something out of a medieval museum.

In another cell was a crude little motor that plugged into a wall with a needle and vial at the end. I thought it must be something for junkies and hopheads, but one of the Guard boys who’d been in the Navy said it was for giving tattoos. We wouldn’t know for a while exactly why they’d be giving out tattoos in a jailhouse.

We’d been up all night, and everything seemed foggy and light. Jack Black set a coffeepot on a hot plate. General Hanna had upended Sheriff Matthews’s desk onto the floor, where all his junk was being hustled into cardboard boxes and tagged.

He offered me a cigar like the ones he smoked with Jack Black. I thanked him and pulled out a Kool instead that I smoked with the first cup of coffee. I kneaded my temples with my thumb and forefinger and sat on top of Matthews’s desk, something I’d still think of as Matthews’s desk until weeks later when I had it taken out into the county landfill and burned.

A few minutes later, little Quinnie Kelley was hustled into the sheriff’s office, and I stopped talking with Hanna and Black and introduced Kelley. He still wore his courthouse coveralls and clutched a thick, clothbound book in his arms.

He didn’t shake hands with the men, only laid down the book on the table and said he’d taken it from Bert Fuller’s office shortly after he’d been hurt. He kind of smiled and cut his eyes over to me when he said it.

“I didn’t trust nobody, and I figured that someone might try to burn it up. But people should see it. See the shame of it.”

I opened the book, and it revealed a pasted photo album, the kind you kept for the family, only these were black-and-white pictures of girls. Some of them nude, some clothed. Mostly just of their heads with a little pasted rundown on their measurements, color of eyes and hair, weight, height, any scars or deformities, quality of teeth, and special sexual skills. All of the women had been given numbers.

I looked up at him. “These were girls Fuller arrested.”

Quinnie shook his head. “Y’all are slow. That’s the registry, the goddang book, Lamar. That’s Fuller’s handwriting plain as day right there.”