Ace Atkins - Wicked City

The familiarity of using my first name made me blush a bit, and I turned back to the book and studied the pages and noted the details about where they worked and what they did and various sexual perversions the women were willing to do. In the back pages was a ledger showing amounts owed and earned.

“He got twenty-five percent off every girl.”

I nodded and set down the book.

“Thanks, Quinnie,” I said, shaking his hand.

He reaffixed his Coke-bottle glasses and nodded, and then turned to Hanna and saluted him. Hanna just looked at the odd little man as he passed, and pulled the book over to him and flipped through the pages.

“Urination?” he said. “What in the hell? This is the filthiest, most vile town I’ve ever known. We should just burn it to the ground and let y’all start over.”

“Make sure you skip over my house when you do,” I said.

“How could you stand it?”

“You can’t see what’s hidden under the rocks.”

Jack Black returned to the room and reached for his shotgun he’d left on the desk. “There is some kind of trouble in the county. You ever hear of a whorehouse called the Hill Top?”

I hadn’t.

“There’s been some shooting out there.”

I looked to General Hanna. And he looked over to me and smiled. “You tell us, Sheriff.”

WE PARKED DOWNthe road from the old Victorian, the windshield wipers keeping our view clear, and watched the two lights from the upstairs windows. A dark figure appeared up in the turret and then was gone. The old house was unpainted, with a sagging porch and crooked columns; a red bulb light rocked in the light wind. A couple cars were parked down the road, but it was growing late and raining, and I could barely make them out where we’d parked. Major Black sat at the wheel, with me in the passenger’s seat and Quinnie Kelley behind us. Since we’d left the sheriff’s office, Kelley had talked nonstop, in between the occasional directions out to the Hill Top. His big bug glasses were fogged, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Now, don’t be thinking that I know this place ’cause I’m a customer. I’m a married man.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Quinnie,” I said.

“I mean, I knowed plenty of men who’d gone out here. But, see, the house used to be a place where this old woman lived when we was kids. We called it the Spook House, on account of it looking broken down and all. You know, like a haunted house?”

I nodded and looked over to Black. He wore no expression.

“When that old woman died, me and my brother used to play games outside there, and we’d bet each other that we couldn’t last five minutes in that place. I took the bet one time, and I promise you it was the longest five minutes I ever spent in my life. I walked up to the stairway and, when I reached the bottom step, I felt a cold spot go through me. I’m not saying it was a ghost or nothin’. I’m just sayin’ it scared the piss out of me.”

“What do you say we ride down by the cars?” I asked.

Black cranked the jeep and we bumped along the dirt road, and hit the high beams on a Cadillac coupe and a brand-new Hudson. I’d seen the Hudson before.

“That the one from the other night?” Black asked.

I nodded.

Black killed the engine.

“You wait here,” Black said.

“Hell with that,” Quinnie said. “I ain’t scared.”

“It’s not on account of those ghosts,” Black said.

“I knowed what you meant. But I ain’t scared, just the same.”

Black told him to wait in the jeep, and, if he heard shots, to call it in on the radio. “It’s important.”

Kelley nodded, a serious expression on his face. “Yes, sir.”

We mounted the old creaky steps and knocked on the front door. We heard movement inside and shuffling, and Black knocked again. His shotgun rested in his left hand while he knocked with his right.

There was a window in the top half of the door, but some yellowed lace obscured a good look inside. Black knocked some more and then finally stood back to kick it in.

I held up my hand, moved past him, and tried the knob.

The door opened.

Black grunted and moved inside, calling into the big, vacuous space and twisting his neck up to a wide staircase that stretched far and high along the right wall.

He called out again and then mounted the steps. He pointed me to the parlor and a long hallway that led to a swinging door.

THE WHORE HAD ABOUT BIT THROUGH JOHNNIE’S FINGERS, as he held her tight in the upstairs bedroom, listening to the boots on the wooden landing. She shuffled and cried in his hands but didn’t make a sound, only bit down hard and tried to wriggle free.

There were two more whores down the hall and another downstairs with Fannie.

The door to the bedroom opened, and Johnnie waited there behind it. Through the crack between the door and frame, he saw a big man in a khaki uniform pass and then move out of sight.

As the man walked slow through the room, the young whore tried to twist free. But Johnnie held her there until the heavy boots passed and the rhythmic thumping was gone.

He let out his breath. The damn twisting and gyrating kicking up the pain in his shoulder something fierce. He twisted the whore’s hair into his fingers and pulled out his wet fingers from her mouth.

Into her ear, he whispered: “You scream and I’ll plug you a brand-new hole. You got me?”

The girl nodded.

And then he heard the shot downstairs.

The boots ran back down the landing and then hit the staircase.

“Goddamn,” Johnnie said to the young whore. “That bitch is crazy.”

The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She was doughy fat and white, with brown eyes the size of saucers. “Y’all got a back door here?”

The girl didn’t speak.

Johnnie pointed the gun at her.

“I said, y’all got a back door?”

THE SALON LOOKED TO BE SOMETHING OUT OF THE OLD West. Red velvet couches and heavy oak furniture. Cut-glass whiskey decanters and boxes of cigarettes and cigars. Old-time paintings of fat naked women with red hair and red lips. I passed through the room and followed the long hallway, trying to keep quiet on the wood floors. The hallway seemed to elongate as I walked, hearing Black’s boots overhead and then opening the swinging back door and hearing the crack of a shot.

I dropped to the floor and saw a woman pointing a pistol back down at my head. Before she could take aim, I tackled her to the ground and wrestled the gun free. Someone else in the room screamed, and I pointed the gun to her and she held her hands over her mouth and screamed and screamed, although she tried to stop.

She fell to her knees, and I pulled the woman to her feet and pushed her against the kitchen table.

“What are you doing here? This is my house.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name is Miss Fannie Belle, and if you don’t leave my home immediately I will have you arrested.”

Black ran into the room, his shotgun tucked into his shoulder, and pointed from corner to corner in the room. He held the gun on the redheaded woman.

“Ma’am, just whose Hudson is that parked outside?” I asked.

“It’s not mine.”

Just then, a car horn started honking and an engine started. I ran for the front door and out onto the porch, as the Hudson fishtailed and twisted in the mud and then broke free and shot right for the main highway.

Quinnie ran after the car for a long time, yelling for it to stop, until I lost sight of him.

I walked back into the house and held the women, while Black made a call on the radio for some help. Three girls he found upstairs waited in the hallway, toward the door.