Ace Atkins: Wicked City

He held Billy so tight that the boy’s face had turned a bright bloody red.

I kept my gun on him and looked over to Jack, who did the same.

BILLY FELT FOR HIS CASE FOLDING KNIFE DEEP IN HIS pocket as he was tugged along on the gravel with the gun barrel up in his face. He reached for the knife, making a fist around it, Johnnie too caught up to see him or feel his movements. And with his thumbnail, Billy pried open that old pocketknife made of bone and steel, which had rested in his grandfather’s pocket since before the turn of the century and in his father’s pocket deep in the jungles of the Philippines, and now the old bone seemed to burn in his hand like a fire poker, steady, solid, warm.

He moved the knife to the side of his leg.

And just as Johnnie pulled open the door to the Buick and tried to push him inside, Billy Stokes jabbed that four-inch blade deep into Johnnie’s cheek and the hands freed from around him and went for that sharp pain just as the blasts of shotguns and pistols and the short chatter of a machine gun rattled off like the final, deafening notes of those final sparks that light up the Fourth of July night.

I HELPED BILLY TO HIS FEET. HE WAS STILL TRYING TO breathe, and my ears rang as we moved from the car and Benefield, who was facedown in a puddle. The silence seeming electric and strange, with only the soft, subtle taps of sleet off the motel roof and the hood of the Buick.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

We walked over to Black and stood around Clyde Yarborough, who looked more natural in death than he had in life, curled into a C shape in the gravel. Jack knelt down and drew hard on his cigar. After he got a good burn, he reached over and tapped the ash into the giant O of what had been Yarborough’s mouth.

He leaned in, whispered something in the dead man’s ear, and stood up.

I felt as if I’d intruded on something and led Billy back to my squad car. We were soon met by an excited Quinnie who wanted to know about every shot.

“Ask Billy.”

But Billy shook me off as I touched his shoulder. “Why didn’t you let me kill Benefield? You had no right. You had no damn right.”

WE DROVE WITH THE SUNSETbehind us in that last leg from Birmingham, where we’d just watched Arch Ferrell be acquitted of murder. I can’t say it wasn’t expected. He’d already been acquitted in his vote fraud case, and, if he’d been acquitted in that, the motive fell flat. Fuller had been quickly tried before Arch and quickly convicted in the killing and sentenced to life in prison. And that spring of 1955, as we were headed home from Ferrell’s trial, me and Joyce, and Quinnie in the backseat, Si Garrett was still institutionalized, with little hope of him returning to the state of Alabama anytime soon.

“I just don’t get it,” Quinnie said, behind us.

Joyce was driving. My window was down, and I smoked a cigarette while watching the ribbon of road cut through the countryside.

“It just don’t make no sense,” Quinnie said.

A mile later, he said: “If it don’t beat all.”

When he started to speak again, just as we hit the county line, the sun dropping like a big orange ball behind us in the rearview, I held up my hand. “Quinnie, we get the point. But that man won’t ever hold office or practice law in the state of Alabama. I don’t know what will happen to him. I guess the best we can do to Arch Ferrell is ignore him.”

We rounded the corner into Phenix City, and I flicked my cigarette out the window.

“I just can’t believe it,” Quinnie said.

THAT SUMMER, I FOUND MYSELF IN PANAMA CITY BEACH, Florida, with two local deputies following up on a lead on Fannie Belle. She’d skipped town with charges against her, one of dozens who’d fled Phenix. I wore a light suit, crisp blue, with a white shirt, and I remember all the stares I got from the sunburned people as we rounded the pool with our guns and badges past the tiki bar and raft rentals and found the unit and knocked on the door.

When we didn’t get an answer, the manager knocked again.

A hot wind blew off the beach, around the cool shadows of the first floor facing the parking lot.

The manager knocked again and then tried the key.

The room was empty. A sliding door facing the Gulf was open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. I opened the bathroom and searched inside, only to find a used razor and some wet towels. On the nightstand, I saw an empty gin bottle and a dirty ashtray. Hearing the kids outside splashing around in the pool, that hot putter of wind in the curtains, there was no mistaking she’d been there only moments ago.

You could smell her perfume just as if she stood behind you, waiting to whisper in your ear.

I knew I’d always wonder where she went and what new name she’d taken. I wondered if the new men in her life would ever know anything about her.

The Gulf stretched out green and endless across the summer horizon.

I’D ALWAYS FOUND COMFORT BEING AROUND HORSES. I even liked working with plow mares on my father’s farm, and there was a strong feeling of peace just watching them graze, standing around them and hearing their massive teeth reach into the ground and pull a clump of grass right out of the earth. The farm had been, and continued to be, for the years I remained sheriff, a sacred ground, a place where I could retreat and work. Even when Anne grew older and went off to college and Thomas had discovered cars and girls, I’d go out there alone and feed the geldings their sweet feed and hay, clean out their water tanks and talk to them. They liked to be talked to. It soothed them. It soothed me.

I needed it sometimes. Quinnie was right. Some things you couldn’t wrap your head around.

Bert Fuller didn’t spend life in prison.

He only spent ten years for good behavior and well-placed friends.

In 1965, he’d already been out two days when I heard he planned to return to Phenix City. That was also when I learned of our star witness, Cecil Padgett, and his fate out in Texas – killed when he fell from the open door of a train, not far from the town where the newspapermen said he’d become a drunk.

After the trial, Cecil and I had become friends. I even recommended him for a few jobs, and, later, when John Patterson became governor, replacing Jim Folsom, Cecil became Patterson’s driver.

I didn’t see him falling. I couldn’t imagine it.

I saw Bert Fuller behind him, pushing him from an open door, destroying the man who had destroyed him, and riding the rails, the big locomotive chugging and turning on those hot steel rails, hammering like blood in those veins, all the way back to Alabama.

No one had to warn me that Fuller was coming for me.

I’d dreamed about it for ten years.

AFTER EVERY ELECTION, THE JOB BECAME EASIER. JOYCE helped me run the books and keep the prison kitchen going. Quinnie stayed with me for a short time, but Jack didn’t last a year, trading the slow pace of the new Phenix City for Atlanta, where he worked as a detective for several years. Most of my deputies worked traffic stops and stolen bicycles. We had some real excitement one time when someone was stealing tractors and hauling them away on flatbed trucks. Most of the old racketeers had left for Biloxi or southern Tennessee, where they’d become the foundation of what people later called the Dixie Mafia.

Hoyt Shepherd stayed until he died an old man.

I’d see him every so often at the barbershop.

I broke in new deputies, studied the law all I could, and tried to keep that slow-going pace.

We were in a heat wave when Fuller came back.

I stopped by a halfway house close to the railroad tracks and found him sitting on the floor of the room listening to a Gene Autry 45. He stood, embarrassed, but greeted me with a warm handshake like an old friend.