Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“This town is a goddamn mess,” he said. “Why’d you do that, Mr. Murphy? Why’d y’all go and do that?”

JOHNNIE AND MOON SLIPPED BACK OVER THE COUNTY LINE sometime that night. Johnnie had stolen one of those new Dodges, a Custom Royal Lancer convertible with a big ole V-8. He’d seen it on the commercial where they called it having “Flair Fashion,” and with a personality as new as tomorrow’s headlines. The damn dashboard looked like something in an airplane, quick and round, right there before him. Nice two-tone paint job in pink and black, with fat whitewalls, and tight-nubbed fins in back. He popped on the lighter in the dash and told Moon to get his fat fucking feet off the dash ’cause he was acting just like a durn nigger.

Moon grunted and shifted, a shotgun between his legs. Johnnie didn’t think he’d ever seen Moon without the shotgun, almost an extension of his hand as he walked around his still, checking the corn liquor coming out and stoking that fire. That fat sonofabitch was stupid as hell but kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t too sure about Reuben these days. On account of the way he acted when he’d offered up robbing Hoyt Shepherd. He didn’t figure Reuben had gone straight, but maybe he’d gone soft, like he was thinking of getting a job for a living.

That man had been crooked since before the war. Johnnie remembered seeing him take a five-hundred-dollar payday, right there in the back of Hoyt’s Southern Manor, to take a dive on some no-talent wop from Philadelphia who he could’ve pounded into the canvas with one hand.

“You with me?”

Moon grunted.

“If they stop us,” he said, “we just huntin’.”

Moon nodded.

“Listen, you know Veto’s Trailer Park? Right down the road from the Skyline Club and the El Dorado Motel?”

Moon nodded.

“We get in there, get the work done, and we’ll be on our way. We can get rid of the mess somewhere downriver.”

Johnnie’s eyes caught the intermittent flash of streetlights up on telephone poles as he turned down Crawford Road. He looked at a group of soldiers standing and talking in the parking lot of Sam’s Motel and shook his head.

“They make me sick,” he said. “They act like they own the goddamn town. If they didn’t have all those tanks and guns, I’d personally ace them off the goddamn planet.”

The fall air felt good from the open top of the convertible and he took a hit from the pint between his legs. He rolled slow and easy, not caring if they spotted the car because they’d ditch the car sometime later tonight and steal another.

He listened to the radio and turned down the road to Opelika and passed by Kemp’s Drive-In and the Hillbilly Club and turned in to Veto’s Trailer Park, the white lights in the crooked arrow calling them on in.

Moon spit out of the window and broke apart the shotgun, thumbing in a couple shells from the bib of his overalls. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and hoisted his fat ass up out of the Dodge. The whole car flattened down for a moment as he balanced on the door, and then he waddled toward the Airstream, a perfect little stainless steel egg of a trailer, walking with no gun, only a good ten feet of rope in his hand.

“YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAD?”

“No,” Billy said. “I came to see you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not with them,” he said. “Can we go to the office?”

We’d just come back from King’s Row, Billy coming up from the back door to the sheriff’s office and meeting us inside the chain-link parking lot. He was cold and his teeth chattered, standing in a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

He seemed glad we went back to my office, and I closed the door behind us.

“Can I have a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, and I got him one from a pot Jack had made that morning, smelling bitter and burnt.

The kid didn’t seem to notice and drank it down anyway.

“Your dad is getting out tomorrow.”

“You think he killed Mr. Patterson?”

I looked to him, the question coming out of nowhere.

I shook my head. “Why do you say that?”

“I just figured that’s why you brought him in.”

“We brought him in on two counts of running a gambling establishment and a bunch of other charges on violating the liquor laws and having slots.”

“Is he going to jail?”

I shrugged. “He may. How bad is that coffee?”

“Tastes fine to me.”

I sat on the edge of my desk. Billy’s right leg jumped up and down with nerves, reminding me of the way I felt before a fight, wanting to go ahead and get to it.

“What’d you come to see me about?”

He looked out the open window, where you could see down the hill and just make out the lights over the river to Georgia. The night air smelled of rain.

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sure, bud.”

“You remember that girl I was with back in the summer? The one that Fuller tried to beat on.”

“Lorelei?”

“Yes, sir.”

I waited.

“She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere and I’ve been looking everywhere. I think somethin’ bad’s happenin’. I don’t know what. But I think they got her.”

“Who?”

“The people she told you about. She was real scared after what happened at the Rabbit Farm.”

“Who else knows she talked to me?”

He shrugged.

ARCH FOUND HIMSELF AWAKEat three a.m., walking the woods near his house with a whiskey bottle, wandering around the endless acres of pine trees with deep thoughts of Bastogne and those holes that would explode and swell like an open wound and bullets that would whiz by your ear but miss you, as if you were protected by the hand of God. His men buried deep in foxholes, their feet frozen black and purple, the snow mixed with the ash from the broken forest. As Arch weaved in and out of the maze, the fall moon hanging low, full and bright, he lost himself for a moment, half expecting to see his breath crystallize before him. Instead, he stopped, his heart jackhammering in his chest, and took another drink. He decided to walk back to his house for his keys and shaving kit. He stopped for only a moment, Madeline awake now, and kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d be right back.

“Arch?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

But he had already started his car, a new-model Pontiac, and he turned quickly from the gravel and the new boxed ranch with big modern glass windows that let in plenty of light and out onto the open road, the moon a traveling friend as he headed back to the soft glow of Phenix, soon finding the turn to Highway 80 and Montgomery. He lit endless cigarettes and finished the last of the Jack Daniel’s, both hands on the wheel and sweating, hearing only the purr of the big motor and the warm morning air coming in through the windows as he got to Montgomery, quickly cutting south and soon finding daybreak just around Fort Deposit. But it was a false dawn, just purple and black, and in the darkness he watched the Alabama city signs flash by, in minutes and hours or seconds, coming right after one another. GREENVILLE, CHAPMAN, EVERGREEN, CASTLEBERRY, POLLARD, FLOMATON, ATMORE. And soon it was midmorning, and he looked at the scruffy, unshaven face in the rearview mirror before crossing the bridge over Mobile Bay and through the little town of Grand Bay – where he stopped for two cups of coffee, gas, and to use the bathroom – and then over the Mississippi line, hugging the green shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the little beach towns mixed with the big ones, taking him to places he hadn’t been in years, not since becoming county solicitor in ’47, and he crossed through Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and over the St. Louis Bay. It was late summer, and children played on wide green lawns and people sat on wide stately porches built sometime around the Civil War, living in their own world covered in a canopy of ancient oaks disguised in those sloppy beards of moss.