Ace Atkins - Wicked City

He spit and leveled the gun before half his head misted with a loud boom.

As he slumped to the ground, Black was there behind him.

The boy I held caterwauled and fell to his knees, crawling to his brother, the old twin, yelling, “Paw-paw. Paw-paw. He’s gone. He’s gone, Paw-paw.”

The boy screamed and held the dead boy’s head against his chest, covering his dirt-stained shirt in fresh blood.

Black looked down at them and shrugged, reaching down for the dead boy’s rifle and holding it just as the old man scrambled up the landing, a gun in his left hand but not raised. Caught by the sight of his two boys, he didn’t even try.

“Drop it, old man,” Black said. “Or I’ll drop your hillbilly ass where you stand.”

Bert Fuller screamed nonsense from the floor of the cockfighting arena. Girls screamed and yelled from down below, the doors full open now, and the mass of them yelling for the outside and the light.

I looked down from the loft at Bert, defenseless in his pajamas and bedroom slippers. Him calling out my manhood.

“Bert, you are a true surprise.”

“Come on, Murphy. Let’s go, you sonofabitch.”

“I’m tired,” I said and threw down a pair of handcuffs I kept in my pocket. “You want me to come down there and do it myself?”

“I do, Murphy. I got you now.”

“Yep, Bert,” I said. “You got me right where you want me.”

I looked over at Black. He’d cuffed the old man and the son behind their backs and tossed them into the same coop as the dead girl.

“You really hate these guys,” I said.

“Got a good reason.”

“Wanna tell me about it?”

“In time.”

It didn’t take much to restrain Fuller, and as I pushed him through the barn door and into daylight I saw the girls all standing by a hand pump and drinking with their hands as the water overflowed from buckets.

I asked the little girl in the man’s shirt her age and she told me she was twelve.

“We have help coming.”

I touched her shoulder and she jumped, running for the woods, moving so fast she lost the shoes on her bare feet.

WHEN LORELEI FINALLY CALLED, IT DIDN’T TAKE TWO SECONDS for Billy to steal his father’s car and drive over the river to find her. She said she’d been staying with a friend, and Billy soon found the friend was a six-foot-tall she-male named Chesty LaRue. They sat in the front yard of Chesty’s little bungalow in a run-down section of old Victorians and beaten houses not far from the river in the old district and watched the children Chesty babysat on her off days. According to Chesty, the off days had been plenty. Billy would never have guessed that Chesty was a man unless Lorelei had whispered it to him, but the more Chesty talked, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking cigarettes in a Japanese robe, Billy could tell he had a mighty strong chin and a heavier brow that most ladies.

“Did I tell you about this one fella who liked me to sit in the corner with a lampshade on my head and say goo-goo?”

“Why he do that?” Billy asked.

“You never really want to know,” Chesty said. “Take this one fella, he liked to be treated like a baby.”

“Maybe he was just feelin’ low,” Billy said. And he looked over to Lorelei and smiled.

“You don’t get it,” Chesty said, adjusting the scarf he wore over his wigless head. “He liked to wear diapers and suck on a pacifier.”

“Good God Almighty.”

“I got some more stories.”

“That’s okay, Chesty,” Lorelei said. “Thanks.”

“You kids want some Coca-Cola?” she asked, just like any other mother on a hot summer day looking out for the neighborhood kids.

They said no thanks. Chesty clutched her robe tight against her chest as she walked, like she had something that would pop out.

“Do her fellas know she’s a boy?” Billy asked.

“Some.”

“Don’t they go crazy?”

“Some like it.”

“Get out of here.”

“I think they don’t feel as bad about bein’ with a man if that man is dressed as a woman. You see what I mean?”

“Not really. I think I’d about fall out if I was with some girl and a big old wiener hopped out of her pants.”

Lorelei laughed and put her finger to her lips, trying to quiet him down. “Chesty has been good to me. Lets me sleep on her couch. She’s fed me and that means a lot, because I know she hasn’t worked in weeks. She’s thinking about moving to Cuba. Apparently, they like boys to be strippers down there, because they’re more reliable than women, and they do all kind of freak shows, too.”

Billy sat back on the steps and watched the dirty children playing in the yard. One big husky boy, maybe four, led three others in some kind of military drill, and when he stopped marching they all tumbled to a stop, about running into each other, and he turned and gave a salute, pulling out a plastic gun and making bang-bang noises.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Lorelei said. “Chesty’s husband is coming back from Korea next week and that doesn’t leave me with much time. You said something about California and that’s fine by me. I think I can get enough up for gas money, and, if you already got your daddy’s car, we can hit the road. Come on, say you will. I can be packed in a New York minute.”

“How long is that?”

“Sure as hell faster than one in Alabama.”

Billy gave her a weak smile. He leaned up from where he sat and watched the kids who had broken up into two different teams and were hiding behind scraggly little trees and pointing plastic guns, some of them in Indian feathers and cowboy hats, and the husky boy in a real military helmet. They made those bang-bang noises for a long time, and Billy was glad for them because they sure as hell filled in those long silences.

Lorelei pulled the black hair from her clear eyes and smiled.

BY THE END OF AUGUST,the blue-ribbon grand jury had handed down more than five hundred indictments against more than fifty crooks in Phenix City. The latest being Clanton, his common-law wife, and their surviving son, who looked at a stretch at Kilby for the rest of their lives or maybe the chair. Jack Black said they wouldn’t know what to do in jail on account of it being so clean.

“Do you think they bathed?”

“I think if they’d seen a bar of soap,” he said, “they would’ve eaten it.”

We made daily trips out to the county dump where the Guard troops would haul roulette wheels and card tables and one-armed bandits and horse-racing machines. They’d back up heavy-duty flatbed trucks and dump the shiny chrome equipment into massive heaps before pouring on diesel and setting fire to them all.

I was always curious about why Black took so much enjoyment in this. It became almost some kind of ceremony for him as he’d light a cigar – usually from a box taken from some hood – and he’d smoke for a moment while the sun went down, before dropping it on the fuel, the whole thing going up in a blue woosh.

He’d stay long after I left home for supper, sitting at a good distance and watching the smoke trail high into the clouds and burn away, a big smile on his face and the ever-present bottle of Jack Daniel’s waiting within easy reach.

WE LOADED DOWN THE EMPTY WOODEN GUN RACK OF THE sheriff’s office a few weeks later. All the guns were new and oiled, their barrels and stocks gleaming in the early-morning light. We had a dozen shotguns, already cut down to eighteen inches for close work, and two Thompson machine guns that I’d bought from the Army surplus store across the river. I’d outfitted the men, for the most part, with long-barrel.38s, but Jack Black preferred having a.44 in hand just in case he had to shoot through an engine block to stop a getaway car. And although the big, hard violence had stopped for the meantime, we were pretty damn aware the fire could kick back up at any moment.