by Nick Petrie
Now three more people lost, boys Eli might as well have killed himself. He’d imagined his own death, and accepted that possibility, but not theirs. The regret and shame felt like a suit of stones weighing him down, too heavy to move.
Another reason Eli played the guitar: to help him forget.
It wasn’t working now.
He looked out the rear window at the old truck pulled way back out of sight from the street. With the overgrown bushes enclosing the yard, the truck was as hidden as he could make it.
Eli knew that ancient green beast couldn’t stay there. Neither could he. Once the names of the dead became known, and the fact that one robber had managed to make it out with the goods, someone would put the pieces together and figure the fourth. It wouldn’t take long before they came after him, King Robbie or Mad Chester or any of a half dozen others.
He didn’t know what to do next.
Something, he had to do something.
But still he sat. The musty smell of the old couch was a comfort.
He’d left the trash bag full of watches and rings on the floor of the truck. Eli didn’t know what to do with that, either. It was supposed to be Coyo’s job, paying King Robbie his piece, then getting the stuff sold. If anyone could have made that work, it was Coyo.
If Eli tried, he’d probably lose everything. Including his own skin.
Now he was out of ideas, rooted in place like this empty house collapsing in on itself. Leaving Memphis wasn’t a possibility. He was homeless, without people or place, but he’d grown up on those streets, he knew how they worked. The dangers and the sweet spots. Any world outside walking distance might as well have been the moon. But he had to do something.
* * *
• • •
At nine years old, Eli hadn’t been real clear on how things fell apart.
His pops, who already worked a lot, suddenly stopped coming home. Then the police came and put Eli and his mama out of the house, letting them take only what they could carry. They moved into a smaller place, where the floor tilted at unexpected places and the pipes leaked under the kitchen sink.
Eli’s mama had always been fierce, but she took the change hard. Sometimes she paced and raged, sometimes she drifted on the couch watching the silent, flickering TV. Most mornings, Eli had to get himself to school. Most nights, Eli had to find himself supper. His mama didn’t seem hungry.
His big brother, Baldwin, nineteen years old, was living above the corner store where their dad had worked. Don’t worry, he’d told Eli, I got this. Give me a month, maybe two, to sort this out. Your job is to keep it together and take care of Mama. That was when he’d given Eli that guitar. Because their mama loved music.
When Baldwin got shot in the face, something broke inside her. Overnight, she seemed twenty years older. She seemed to curl in on herself, and spent all her time either staring out the window or asleep. She got skinnier by the day. A week after Baldwin died, Eli came home from school and she was cold on the couch with her mouth wide open and the needle still in her arm.
Then Eli’s nana took him in. Coyo came by sometimes, and his nana hugged him a lot. She was a good cook. She checked his homework. It lasted six months, until she had a stroke and died and Eli’s entire family was gone. He was truly on his own.
Later on, Eli pieced it together, or some of it, anyway. Who his pops had really been, and why he went away, and how both his mama and Baldwin had protected him from the hard truth of the family business. The war that had followed. How Baldwin had tried to win it, until it killed him. None of it made any sense.
He only knew that King had ended up on top.
* * *
• • •
Now he forced himself to unlock his fingers on the guitar. To play anything. He started with the first song he’d ever learned, an old murder ballad called “Tom Dooley.” That basic chord progression turned into something he’d been working on, until he got lost in the complex simplicity of the twelve-bar blues.
This was the main use of what Eli called his mathematical part. Music had a logic of its own, and the mathematical part allowed the musical possibilities to open up ahead of the actual song.
In his mind, Eli could braid melodic and harmonic lines together before his fingers ever found the notes, and in that way find the road that best suited the song. All blues was built on the same basic framework, Eli had known that longer than he’d known anything. What made the blues your own were the choices you made along the way. The mathematical part was all about seeing the choices before he had to make them.
As the song raveled out of his calloused fingers, twelve bars at a time, Eli thought about his gig that night and the old men he was lucky enough to play with.
Maybe he could front some goods from that black trash bag to Dupree for enough cash to buy a new guitar. He loved playing the old man’s 1932 National “O”-style resonator guitar, with its steel body and big sound, much bigger than Eli’s old Sears acoustic. Dupree had offered it to Eli more than once, but that just felt like charity. Work was one thing, but charity was something else, and Eli had been doing for himself for a long time now.
If he bought an old National of his own, though, that bigger sound could make him more money on the street, even playing without an amp. He could polish it up, get it shiny, bring in the tourists. Maybe even get ahead, get some money put away.
But he’d still be Eli Bell, playing for tips, slipping from empty to empty, and that shiny guitar would just make him a target. Make it look like he had something worth taking.
Plus anything he gave Dupree would put a target on the old man. Dupree was a friend, no matter the fifty years of age between them. He’d shown Eli a world of kindness. Eli wasn’t going to bring down a beating on him, or worse. Pain and trouble Dupree didn’t deserve. Knowing anything about that trash bag could end Dupree’s life.
No, Eli had made this problem. It was up to him to solve it, too.
He swung through the turnaround, ten fingers moving, the mathematical part racing ahead. The song had started as a slow blues, but picked up speed along the way until it was at the far edge of his control, catching up with the mathematical part, then flying beyond. Like running downhill as fast as he could, lost to the pull of gravity, just trying to keep his feet under him and not plow face-first into that hard cracked concrete.
Then he knew. The mathematical part told him.
If Coyo and the others were gone, Eli had to do for himself more than ever.
Maybe he needed to step into his brother’s shoes. Figure how Baldwin would have done things.
* * *
• • •
Eli walked down to the Wet Spot. It was the only way he knew to get word to King Robbie. He had ten dollars in his pocket and Coyo’s shitty disposable pistol jammed into his waistband, hiding under his untucked T-shirt.
Skinny B’s plan had been to give King and his people a few of those Rolexes, both pay the man his piece and get other people interested in buying. Coyo hadn’t seen a problem with the idea, and Eli didn’t, either.
That was back when Coyo’s wild-man reputation and his history with King would work in their favor, get that deal done. Without Coyo, it meant Eli would have to make things happen. Eli had no rep at all outside of his dead brother and locked-up father and what Eli himself might do with a guitar.
In the world of King Robbie, that was less than nothing.
That was a goddamn negative rep. The opposite of respect.
Although the mathematical part thought it might give Eli an edge.
19
The Wet Spot was a two-story brick box painted the color of vanilla ice cream. Set on a corner, it had narrow buckled sidewalks and cracked streets on two sides, a green-tangled vacant lot for a neighbor, gravel parking in the back. Eli had never been inside.
Metal security grates covered the big front window
s, and a heavy security door stood open at the front, held with a stone. The side windows were bricked up.
It had been a corner store ever since Eli could remember, although it had only been the Wet Spot for a half-dozen years. The name was hand-painted in bold black letters above the windows and on the side around the corner. Beside the windows, in the same dark print, were the words: COLD DRINKS, SOFT-SERVE, GROCERIES, CIGARETTES, CIGARS.
On the vacant-lot side, a wooden stairway climbed to second-floor rooms where Baldwin, ten years older than Eli, had once lived, before it was the Wet Spot. Eli had never been up there, either. His mother had forbidden it.
Now it was King Robbie’s place. Everybody knew it. The Wet Spot was King’s friendly face, with cheap beer and groceries and ice cream for the kids. King’s way of getting the neighborhood on his side. He’d park his big Mercedes right out front, not hiding from anybody.
It wasn’t parked there now.
Eli took a deep breath, climbed three steps to the little landing, and walked through the door.
He saw a long room with a dark wooden counter along the left side and shelves of groceries along the right. One back corner was sectioned off for bathrooms or something. The other corner had a table and chairs and a couch, with a silent TV on the wall beyond it, showing police cars outside of Macy’s. The words across the bottom of the screen said, “Wolfchase Galleria heist, two robbers dead, two missing.”
“What you need, little brother?”
A middle-aged man sat, expressionless, on a high stool behind the metal-topped counter. His head was shaved, the skin bunched in thick wrinkles at the back of his neck. A black laptop stood open in front of him and a weird-looking walkie-talkie squawked softly by his right hand.
He looked, Eli thought with a pang, like what Anthony might have looked like in twenty years, with the same black-framed glasses slipping down his nose, the same broad shoulders, the same thick fingers. If Anthony hadn’t signed on with Coyo and Skinny B. And Eli.
“I’m looking for King Robbie.”
The counterman’s expressionless face remained unchanged. “We got soft-serve, dollar a cone. Drinks in the cooler over there.”
“I got a message,” Eli said. “Man told me to come here and find King Robbie.”
“Well, King’s not here, little brother. Tell me your message and I’ll pass it on.”
“I don’t know,” Eli said. “Man told me to ask for King Robbie himself.”
The man reached down, took a big black pistol from somewhere, and slapped it down hard on the metal countertop. The walkie-talkie jumped. “I’m close enough. And I’m done asking.”
Eli let himself show his nerves and took a quick step back. “Okay,” he said. “The man told me to say he knows he owes King his piece on something happened this morning. Wanted King to know.”
The counterman’s eyes flashed at the walkie-talkie beside him. “What something?”
“I don’t know.” Eli looked at the door as if he wanted to run. Which he did. “He gave me ten dollars to come here and say what I said. That’s all.”
The counterman put the gun away. “Who’s the man?”
“I don’t know, I never seen him before. I was just walking down the street. He pulled over next to me and asked if I knew where the Wet Spot was. I pointed the way, but he wanted me to go, like I said, and talk to King.”
The counterman looked at him, black-framed glasses magnifying his eyes. “What was he driving?”
Eli shook his head. “I don’t know. Janky old car. It was red.”
“Who you with? Pershing Park Boys?”
“Not with nobody,” said Eli. “Tried being a trap house lookout a few years back, but I was no good at it.”
The counterman nodded, recognition dawning. “I thought there was something. You’re Eli Bell, right? Win Bell’s baby brother. You’re starting to look like him.”
Eli’s stomach dropped, a pit opening up. He’d hoped to be just a kid walking in off the street, but the neighborhood carried too much history for that.
The counterman didn’t seem to care. “Okay, Eli Bell, you delivered your message, earned your ten dollars. But I got a new job for you. Easy money. King’s people are out looking for an old green pickup truck with some kind of box on the back, like work trucks have, you know? But made out of wood.”
He pulled a twenty and a cheap flip-phone from under the counter and held them out together. Eli didn’t move. How’d they know about the truck?
“Come on, take it. Talk to your friends, put the word out. There’s a reward, a lot more than twenty dollars. Old green pickup with a wood box on the back. You see something like that, you call me, tell me where it is. My number’s already programmed in.”
Eli kept his face still. “What’s King want it for?”
The counterman slowly shook his head. “Not your business. Just know he wants it.”
That’s when Eli knew he was in bigger trouble than he’d thought. King Robbie was already digging into this thing. Paying him off wasn’t going to be near enough.
The mathematical part began to run the odds, to consider what he knew of King Robbie’s reach and power. What King might already know, what he might learn, and when he’d learn it.
Eli was barely fifteen.
In his world, more than old enough to know he was likely already dead.
The question was, what was he going to do about it?
He’d thought he was making a move by walking into the Wet Spot. His only choice now was to brazen it out, work his negative rep, and play the fool. Everyone knew Eli Bell wasn’t in that life. Leave the truck on the street with the trash bag still in it. Take his guitar and find someplace new to stay.
Maybe Dupree could help. They were playing tonight, no way Eli was going to miss that gig. He could talk to the old man then.
Skipping that gig would be as good as telling the world he’d robbed that store himself.
First things first.
He stepped forward, picked up the phone and the money, then nodded at the counterman and walked out the door.
Twenty dollars was twenty dollars.
He was tempted to get an ice cream cone, thinking it might be his last, but thought better of it.
20
When you’re a big guy, and quiet, most folks figure you’re not that smart.
Dennis Brody kept his mouth shut and let them think what they wanted.
He watched and listened and learned.
Now he drove King’s armored Mercedes like a cruising shark, riding the currents down North Memphis and Frayser side streets, eyes out for that green truck.
They were all looking. King in the back seat, tapping his damn toes, practically vibrating in his seat from the habit he’d been working on for the last six years. Charlene up front with Brody, smoke coming out of her ears at the fact that the white workingman had taken her gun. Made even angrier that he’d touched her.
Everybody knew Charlene Scott was real particular about who she allowed to touch her.
By the time she’d come of age, she’d killed everyone who knew why, everyone but Brody, and he wasn’t telling. Because he’d helped her do it. Because the dead men, her uncles, had deserved worse, every last one of them.
Girl had one shitty-ass childhood, leave it at that.
It’s why Brody and Charlene got along, as much as she got along with anyone. Together, they’d learned how to survive, even thrive, in that furnace of violence and poverty. Brody had his mind and his size. Charlene picked up a gun and got good with it. You learned to be ruthless, to make your own chances, or you died. Some died fast, some died slow. But everybody died.
That lean, ropy character in his work-worn clothes had some big brass ones, Brody had to admit. Not just for taking on Charlene, either. He hadn’t known what she was, and anybody could get lucky once.
Brody would make sure it didn’t happen again.
No, it was the way that workingman, Peter, had sprinted off toward the sound of the machine gun, carrying only Charlene’s pistol, when everybody else, including most police, would have turned tail the other way. Dennis Brody had never seen anything like it.
Only Brody’s mom still called him Dennis. He’d moved her into a nice little house near Overton Park, with a big backyard and a high, strong fence that gave her some privacy and helped her feel safe. He’d told her he ran a bar off Beale Street, which accounted for the cash money and his busy hours. If she believed any different, she didn’t say anything. As far as Brody knew, she’d never been to the bar. She was grateful to be out of the little apartment in South Memphis.
“Turn this bus around, Brody,” said Charlene. “I want to find that white boy and hurt him some. Get my damn gun back.”
“Not now, Charlene.” King’s voice had a crooked edge after all that product he’d been putting up his nose. “We got work to do. That place will be crawling with police, and I’m not getting stuck there. We’ll catch him up later.”
Brody knew King wouldn’t shut down Charlene entirely. He had to let her off the leash sometimes, especially if King didn’t want her to turn around and bite him. The next time Charlene saw that Peter, she’d take him apart, and wasn’t nobody going to stop her. Not when she took something personally.
Charlene liked to start with the ankles and work her way up from there. A few years back, she’d shown Brody a medical book she’d bought, just to learn all the places to shoot a man that wouldn’t kill him. She already knew the spots to kill a man with a single bullet, and was good enough to do it. She’d been practicing for years, on targets and people. Charlene could shoot the legs off a fly from a block away.