Ace Atkins - Wicked City

I headed into a thick, wooded area that bordered a few acres of cleared farmland. Clanton was with us again and staring up at Black.

“You sure are a big sonofabitch.”

“Where’s that path lead?” Black asked him.

“That’s a hog trail. You must not be from the country.”

“I was raised on a farm,” Black said.

The man craned his neck at him and grinned a stupid smile.

“Never seen a hog who could drive a car,” Black said, and motioned down at the twin rutted tracks going over weeds and into the privet bush.

We walked into the woods and Clanton followed, asking if we’d like to sit down and have a discussion. And I asked him what about, still looking down into the mouth of the leafy tunnel, but he just said he’d just butchered a chicken and could fry it up. He said his wife could cook up some field peas, too, if we liked.

“You got family out here?” I asked.

“Just me and my boys.”

“How many boys?”

“Three. They all in town working in the mills. All of them at work, yes, sir.”

The path seemed to be maybe a fire road, and it ran up a slight hill and then disappeared up over the ridge. It was cool and dark in the thickness, a stifled heat, branches underfoot, dead leaves covering the tire tracks. Squirrels up in their nests and birds fluttering from branch to branch under the thick canopy of pecans, oaks, and tall, skinny pines. A few small leaves flitted down high from the ceiling.

I saw a movement up on a little hill, but it was quickly gone.

I stopped and held up my hand to Black. He stopped, too. He readjusted the shotgun in his hands.

“Ain’t no whores in them trees,” Clanton said, smiling to himself and thinking he’d said something really smart.

We crested the hill, and Black motioned his head to farther down the path.

“Is that a barn, Mr. Clanton?” I asked.

He stopped cold and looked to me and then looked deep into the woods. There was another flutter of movement, and I reached for the gun on my hip just as the old man’s lip curled above his gold teeth.

BERNARD SYKES MET BIG JIM FOLSOM AT A CATFISH HOUSE overlooking Lake Martin as the sun set through the pines and a dinner party brought laughter and shrill squeals along the shore of the lake. A band dressed in western duds took a stage decked out in Christmas lights, tuning their guitars and fiddles. Folsom waited alone, downhill on a small weathered dock, wearing a tent-sized seersucker suit. He rattled ice in a bourbon glass as he waved to a couple girls on a speedboat.

“Thought we were going fishing,” Sykes said.

“Come on up,” Folsom said. “I have some folks I’d like you to meet.”

“I’m fine right here, Governor.”

One of the girls on the boat dropped a pair of skis into the water and jumped in after them with the towline. Big Jim lit a cigarette and watched as the other girl in a black bathing suit drove the boat slowly away, making the line tight.

“You want a cigarette?”

“No, sir. Thank you.”

“Don’t call me sir. Call me Jim.”

“I’d rather call you Governor.”

“Call me whatever the hell you like. You want a drink?”

“Little early.”

“It’s never too early for whiskey,” Big Jim said, winking in a conspiratorial way. “You married?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kids?”

“A couple.”

“I have six.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You were in the papers this weekend with your kids.”

“Guess I was,” Big Jim said. “How’d I look?”

“Like you do now.”

Big Jim nodded, pleased with that, and smoked, watching the speedboat zip away, yanking the girl up on skis, taking her for a quick turn in front of the dock for the governor’s appraisal, and then disappearing around a bend in the lake.

“Pussy is gonna kill me.”

“Sir?”

They didn’t talk for a long while, and Sykes tried to look at his watch without the governor seeing him. He’d grown comfortable with the sunset and the gaiety of the dinner party, and that made him more nervous. When Folsom’s driver, Drinkard, came over to the Russell County Courthouse with the invitation, he should have turned it down flat.

“I bet your wife is looking forward to living in the mansion,” Sykes said. The question came out of nowhere, just something to say. “Lot of history. That’s where Jefferson Davis lived right before the war.”

“Let’s skip the bullshit, Bernard,” Big Jim said. Up on the hill, Sykes heard the country band finally strike up, with some women’s cackling excitement. “A man like you needs to think about his future. And I don’t take you for a stupid man. I think you’ve worked long and hard to get where you’ve gotten so fast. What are you, thirty-six? I’m sure you know you probably ain’t on any short list to be on Patterson’s team when he takes office. No matter what you do, he still is going to see you as Si Garrett’s man.”

Sykes recognized the band’s song as “Jambalaya.” And as the music played on, you could see the people dancing on the deck overlooking Lake Martin. The sweet good-time song poured down the hill and spread out and echoed across the water and the soft coves of light and shadow.

“How’s that investigation coming?”

“It’s gonna take time.”

Folsom seemed to grow impatient, standing there on the dock with the two girls in the speedboat gone. He kept on staring around the bend for their return but soon crushed his cigarette under his gleaming shoe.

Folsom rattled the ice in his glass and looked down to Sykes: “You sure you don’t want to loosen that tie a bit, son?”

BLACK SAW CLANTON’S HAND REACH INTO HIS OVERALLS and he coldcocked him with the butt of the shotgun without paying much attention. He reached down into the heap of old man and picked up the little rusted pistol and put it in his pant pocket. I followed along, my.45 out now, and he motioned me to head over to the left and up the ridge. He would circle in the other way. I nodded and crept along the path, feeling my hands sweat on the butt of the gun and hearing every damn sound in the woods, waiting for a crack of a limb or the crunch of boots on the molded leaves.

I crested the hill and saw the barn in the opening. The barn was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, the kind they built before the turn of the century, not just for livestock but to run a business. I skirted the edge of the woods, the sun bright and hard on the tin roof and loading dock built out back. There was another road from the east that we’d missed because it hadn’t been on any map.

I couldn’t see Black but headed that way anyway.

Just as I reached the big door, Black was behind me. I pulled on the lock and chains keeping the barn shut up. The lock was old, tooled for an old-fashioned key.

“You want me to go back?”

He shook his head and suddenly pushed me to the ground and fired off his shotgun twice. Two more shots, pistol shots, pinged over us against the door. Black reached into his shirt pocket for some more shells.

I fired into the tree line three times.

The summer air fell hot and quiet for a minute or two.

Then there were voices and the sound of feet. I started to stand, but Black pushed me back down to the landing just as a shot fired over my head. It was then we heard the pounding from the other side of the door, the sounds of screams and yells and dozens of hands slapping the old, sun-bleached wood, crying out for help.

BLACK YELLED FOR EVERYONEto step back because he was about to shoot off the lock. And when the screams and yells died down, he counted down one, two, three and hit the dead bolt and chain with the.44 from his belt and they fell to the loading dock with a clank. We didn’t move from our hands and knees, opening the big barn doors, a hot, rank smell coming from within like a rotted mouth, and crawled inside, shutting the doors closed. We felt hands on us, on our arms and chests, faces and fingers over our mouths, and I could barely make a thing out as I yelled for everyone to move back, my eyes adjusting to light coming in slats. It all was like a fun house, with partial faces of skinny girls with dark circles under their eyes and bony arms sticking through feed sacks and torn clothes. A few were naked. Others wore satin dresses covered in hay and red dirt, the women bone thin and with mouths parched, begging us for water and something to eat.