Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“You want to tell me what you do, Miss Belle?” I asked.

I sat down across from her at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette while she and another girl, too old for the pigtails she wore, stared at the floor.

“I don’t work.”

“Then what do you do here?”

“Nothing.”

“Who are these girls?”

“They are my nieces.”

“Even the black one?”

Fannie turned her head and coughed, as if my cigarette smoke had invaded her space. I smoked it down a little more and squinted at her through the haze, reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out the folded piece of paper Jack Black had given me.

I smiled, the cigarette clamped in my teeth. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m kind of new at this.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Reading you your rights.”

“I’m under arrest?”

“You did try to kill me, Miss Belle.”

“You broke into my home.”

“Sorry, I thought this was a cathouse.”

She looked at me and snorted a bit, then reached down and squeezed my knee. I looked up at her and she smiled. “We can work something out, baby.”

I didn’t move, just started to read the paper in my hand.

“You goddamn sonofabitch,” she said, as Black pushed the three girls into the kitchen. I started to finish reading but glanced up again, noticing something familiar about one of the girls.

She looked away as I stared. Black hair and blue eyes, china-white skin. I watched her cross her skinny white arms over a low-cut red velvet dress. She wore a lot of red lipstick, rouge, and she’d taken a heavy black pencil to her eyebrows like a Hollywood actress.

“Didn’t I meet you on the Fourth of July?”

She didn’t answer.

“You were with Billy Stokes,” I said.

TWO HOURS LATER, I SAT WITH THE GIRL IN A BACK BOOTH of Choppy’s Diner. The young girl looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days, the way she scraped the eggs off her plate and cleaned the last bit of it with a piece of toast. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and asked her if she wanted another plate, and she looked up at me from where she’d leaned into the table and shook her head, her mouth full of food.

My arm rested on the back of the booth, a cigarette between my fingers. Jack Black had taken the others to the jail. This one, too scared to talk, didn’t say a word to me, as I drove past the courthouse and took the upper bridge over into Columbus. I had to ask her three times to get out of the car.

“You work for Fannie Belle?” I asked.

She shook her head. Her hair hung down over a face that was so white it looked like it belonged on a porcelain doll.

“How old are you?”

She shrugged.

“You sure you don’t want more to eat?”

She shook her head, her eyes still tilted toward the table but not chewing anymore.

I waited and didn’t speak. The waitress came over and placed the bill on the table, and I put down a dollar and a fifty-cent piece.

“You the new sheriff?”

“That’s what they’re telling me.”

Her hands shook so hard on top of the table that the salt shaker began to bounce and move. She started to cry but didn’t move, even as I put my hand over hers. I gave her fingers a squeeze to reassure her.

She looked up at me and nodded and nodded. “I’m ready. I can do it. Let’s go.”

“Do what?”

Her chin tilted up and she looked at me, confused at what she saw, or didn’t see, in my face. She shook her head and just watched me. The waitress came by once more and refilled my cup of coffee, and I lit another cigarette.

“Coffee and cigarettes are a fine thing,” I said.

“That’s all you want?”

“She speaks.”

“Where’s Bert Fuller?” she asked.

“Still lying in bed.”

“He doesn’t work for you?”

“You were there,” I said. “We’re not exactly good friends.”

“So who’s in charge?”

“The Guard. Town is under martial rule.”

“What’s that?”

“That means the town was so rotten that the governor replaced everybody. I’m the temporary sheriff till they can find someone better.”

She nodded.

“You going to tell me how old you are?”

“Sixteen.”

“Where’s your family?”

She shrugged.

“Where are you from?”

She looked at me and excused herself from the table. I watched her leave for the bathroom, and she returned moments later. She’d washed her face of the makeup, and her hair had been tucked into a ponytail.

“Am I going to jail?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I could use some help.”

“What?”

“Did you see a man inside the Hill Top tonight? The one that drove that Hudson parked out front?”

She nodded.

“You know his name?”

She nodded again.

“But you won’t tell me.”

“They’d kill me.”

“They won’t kill you. We arrested that Fannie Belle woman and we’ll find him. If I could get some help understanding all this, maybe we could arrest a lot more.”

She nodded.

“Did you ever go to school?”

She shook her head.

“How did you end up here?”

She shook her head and looked back down at her hands. I didn’t say anything, just sat there smoking and watching it rain on Eighth Avenue and all the cars roaring by on the wet asphalt. I was thinking of home and getting some sleep when she spoke.

“I wasn’t always a whore.”

“You try to escape?”

“Can we get out of here, please? People are staring.”

I looked around. There was no one in the diner but a fat trucker and his wife in curlers, and they seemed more interested in the chicken-fried steak than us. I shrugged and grabbed my hat.

Soon, we were on a back highway, just driving. The talking seemed to come easier the more we moved out of town, and she bummed some smokes from me and squinted into the hot wind as we rounded our way around Russell County.

“I tried a few times. To leave, I mean.”

I just drove, listening and taking the curves as they came. I noticed a couple houses being built up on Sandfort, not far from where I kept my horses. Just a few years ago, it had been nothing but trees, most of the turnoffs unpaved.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it was like? How I could do those things?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“You want to tell me?”

“Not much to tell.”

“How often did you see Fuller at Fannie Belle’s place?”

“Every night,” she said. “That’s when he came by to get his cut.”

I drove some more and then found a good road, a paved road, and took it, and soon the lights down on Crawford were shining, and I passed the turnoff to my house and Slocumb’s and kept on going to downtown. The service station looked oddly quiet closed up, with only some dim lights over the pumps. I wondered how my father-in-law was making out.

“I can find you a place to stay.”

She shook her head and asked me to take her to the bus station.

“You have money?”

She didn’t say anything.

At the bus station, I gave her a twenty-dollar bill and wrote out my home number. I told her to call anytime.

“I’m no snitch.”

“Wonder who made that call from the Hill Top? Figured it came from inside. Nobody else lives around there.”

She shrugged.

“Bert Fuller will get his due,” I said.

“Did you know he had a pecker the size of a stickpin?”

“Nope.”

“I figure that was why he was so mad.”

I nodded. “It couldn’t have helped.”

IT WAS MIDNIGHT IN THE LIVING ROOM OF ARCH FERRELL’S house, and Madeline had finally gotten some sleep, the baby growing restless inside of her. When Arch knew she couldn’t hear him, he slipped off to the sofa and dialed the number in Texas. He let it ring and ring, in that static connection, all the way over to Galveston. Finally, a man answered, and he sounded as if he’d just been roused from a dream.