by Ace Atkins
“This woman giving us trouble doesn’t want us doing business with you,” Tyler said. “She wants to be your main squeeze.”
“You talking about that Fannie Hath-cock?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s one tricky redheaded bitch,” Sledge said. “She the kind of woman might be sucking your old ding-dong one minute and try and bite the motherfucker off the next.”
“That’s her,” Tyler said.
“OK,” Sledge said, picking up the toothpick again, working a space between his two front teeth. “Yeah? What’s she trying to do to y’all? Working with the local law? Bring that heat on y’all’s country ass?”
“She doesn’t control the law,” Tyler said. “Nobody does. The law is straight. She sent some dumb kid to our farm to spy on our business. After we took care of that, she sent the damn Born Losers Motorcycle Club to come and bust our heads.”
“Y’all look pretty dirty,” he said. “But your heads look OK to me.”
“Our uncle shot one of them in the leg at the Walmart,” Cody said. “And then we drove over their Harleys. Seemed to straighten things out.”
“Well, well, well, boys,” Sledge said, swatting the top of his desk. He started to laugh. “Those boys are gonna be gunnin’ for your asses now. It ain’t gonna end.”
The Pritchard boys nodded together. Sledge smiled, adjusted his straw hat down in his eyes as he leaned forward, elbows on the tables, gold toothpick hanging in the corner of his lips. “And just what do y’all need from me?” he said. “Petticoat Junction might as well be a million miles from Memphis. I don’t have no control.”
Sledge working the shit out of that gold toothpick, thinking on things, trying to do what was best for Goddamn Marquis Sledge, King of the Memphis Mortuaries.
“We know how to cut Fannie Hathcock out of the Memphis pie,” Tyler said. “We can take care of everything you need straight through us.”
“Come on, boys,” Sledge said. “Supply? Demand? I got one hell of a fucking demand. Sometimes you got to work with that devil bitch you know and all that shit.”
“What if you didn’t need her,” Cody said, finally sitting up straight, looking a little blurry-eyed. “Or those boys on the Coast? What if Team Pritchard could meet and beat all y’all’s business needs?”
Marquis Sledge clamped down on that toothpick. Hard to see his eyes with his glasses reflecting those lamp lights. Tyler waited, holding his breath, until he saw the old black man’s face slide into a big, wide grin.
“Hmm,” Mr. Sledge said. “Now, that’s some shit I’d sure like to hear.”
* * *
• • •
Lord have mercy,” Jean Colson said. “That sure was a scene. I’ve never seen so much crying and yelling in my whole life. But truth be known, if something happened to either you or Caddy, someone would have to put my butt in Whitfield and throw away the key. I don’t know how Danita does it, standing there all calm in the kitchen, holding hands and praying. She even took the time to thank me for bringing over that damn chili cheese casserole. That’s a strong woman right there.”
“I know,” Quinn said. “I’ve had to eat that casserole.”
“I know you’re trying to lighten the mood,” Jean said as they drove past Annie’s Soul Food restaurant—known for the best fried chicken in north Mississippi—the old farm supply, and the VFW Hall with the newly installed old Patton tank outside in honor of Quinn’s late friend, Mr. Jim. “You’ve got that dark Army humor like your uncle. But that was a rough, rough scene at the Davis house. Who was that woman they had to wrestle out of the family room and take outside?”
“Ordeen’s sister.”
“Did you talk to all of them?” she said. “The whole family?”
“I did,” he said. “You always start with the family.”
“And who do they think killed him?”
“Momma,” Quinn said. “You know I can’t talk about an active investigation. What kind of sheriff would I be if I started blabbing to my momma about all I’d found out on a homicide? You also don’t want all this garbage in your head. This is some really dirty business.”
“Poor ole Jean Colson,” Jean said, hands placed neatly in her lap as she stared out the window, then brushing at the makeup on her cheek reflected in the window. “Just sit down with your Elvis records and your jug of white zinfandel. Don’t you be worrying about a woman you’ve known for more than thirty years. Even when your son is the only one who can help her out.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“And what have you done so far?”
“Damn it, Momma.”
“I really wish you’d quit using that kind of language, Quinn Colson,” she said. “This isn’t your Ranger barracks where y’all clean your rifles and spit tobacco on the floor. This is a polite Saturday drive with your momma after she’s been trying to comfort a friend in need. I’m not asking you for none of that CSI stuff I see on TV with your black lights and microscopes. I’m just wanting to know are you gonna find out who killed Danita’s baby.”
Quinn swallowed, biting his tongue. He turned on the Jericho Square, a light haze hovering over the downtown. Several vendors had set up by the gazebo. Old men in overalls selling watermelons, tomatoes, and okra. One of them proudly displayed a mess of jams and jellies and Cajun boiled peanuts, advertising their business with a hand-painted sign.
“I don’t think it’s a secret who Ordeen was working for.”
“That woman running that brothel by the highway?”
“Technically, it’s not a brothel,” Quinn said. “It’s a rural gentlemen’s club.”
“And how many gentlemen show up to a place like that?” Jean said.
Jean had a particular kind of dislike for Vienna’s Place, knowing her own daughter had danced in several places just like it in Memphis. There was so much guilt and denial that Quinn never mentioned it. But he fully remembered finding Caddy some years ago dressed in a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit and grinding on men’s laps for tips. Caddy hadn’t forgotten it, either, and freely spoke about it—to their mother’s intense discomfort.
“Who is this woman anyway?” Jean asked. “Fannie Hathcock.”
“An opportunist,” Quinn said, driving with two fingers, heading straight toward his mother’s house on Ithaca Street, his police radio squawking under their conversation. “She took over most of Stagg’s business when he left town.”
“Oh, hell,” Jean said. “Everybody knows that.”
“Before that she ran a little motor court down at the Choctaw Rez,” he said. “Good times for high rollers. Some folks I know in Oxford are pretty sure she works for some bad folks down on the Coast. I’m pretty sure she has some strong political pull with some men in Jackson.”
“Like that repulsive a-hole Vardaman?” she said. “I heard him on the radio yesterday, dithering on about state’s rights and how Mississippi was better off before the Civil War. He said women needed to get back to a more biblical interpretation of their role in society.”
“Folks are betting he’ll be our next governor.”
“Lord help us,” Jean said, playing with the gold cross around her neck. “Sometimes it feels like this state wants to take us back about a hundred years.”
“People do love to bend the Bible,” he said. “Hucksters and insane folks have been doing it for a couple thousand years.”
* * *
• • •
Fannie didn’t like the way the men looked. Or the way the two glanced around at everything in Vienna’s Place except for the topless dancers working the pole, the buckets of cold beer and liquor shots, or the girls in bikinis and lingerie dishing it out and serving it up. She leaned into the railing from the second-floor darkness and looked down at them talking to each other, wishing right now she had Ordeen or Mingo to listen in and let her know just wha
t they were saying. Ever since Vienna’s had been hit last year, she’d been a little skittish, beefing up the boys at the door, watching the TV monitors a little more closely, and carrying a big fucking gun in her Birkin bag.
These two boys had a hard look about them. One was older, with gray hair pulled into a ponytail, and the other skinny and muscled, with a face that looked like it had been carved from stone. They leaned against the antique bar, shooting the shit, looking at all the action but really just watching the money flow around the big, wide-open room. She could see them watch the cash go from the sucker to the waitress, to the bartenders, and then back out to the bouncer and all the way up the spiral staircase to her roost. They’d been there for more than an hour. Each one of them had bought just one beer. Goddamn them. Didn’t they know this was a two-drink-minimum kind of place?
The men spotted each camera in every nook and cranny. They watched the bartender slip the big bills into the safety box behind the bar. They saw the girls smile and giggle and slide tips up their coots. They were pros, watching all the action like kids at a midway.
Fannie was curious, firing up a cigarillo from her Dunhill lighter, blowing out the smoke from up in her perch, thinking maybe she should ask one of her toughs to make sure they didn’t have a gun on them. That was the last fucking thing she needed was another robbery, more girls screaming and yelling, blood on her new carpet and more holes in her vintage bar. Or maybe they were just the law, although no law she knew around in Tibbehah County. Maybe these were some feds who’d come down from Oxford to try to figure out just how Buster White and his boys laundered all that cash in this shithole county. They’d never see it. And even if they raised their badges, turned on the houselights, and shined the light on all that tanned skin, cheap-ass tattoos, and pools of sweat, they’d never find just how the hell everything moved slow, easy, and efficient through Vienna’s. Fannie wasn’t as dumb as Johnny Stagg. Only Stagg would’ve let one of his people keep a fucking leather-bound ledger like some old-time pharmacist.
“Miss Fannie?” Midnight Man said, calling up from the top of the staircase.
She ashed her cigarillo off the railing, down on the head of some old bald-headed fuck from the Delta, dollar bills splayed in his fat fingers like he was Howard Hughes. She turned to look at Midnight Man, barely seeing his face in the dim light.
“Some fellas at the bar want to see you,” he said, in a voice somewhere between a grunt and a whisper. “Don’t like their looks. One of ’em got a ponytail and smells like that old Aqua Velva. That other cowboy-looking motherfucker toting a gun under his T-shirt. I seen that bulge. Want me to go with you?”
Fannie looked down at her packed house and then over at Midnight Man’s big sweating face and nodded. “Come on,” she said. “Get a few more boys to watch that door. Make sure no one gets out of here alive this time. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Midnight Man said, smiling, only his teeth showing in the darkness.
Fannie leaned into her elbows farther, looking down at the floor, studying the man with the hard face, as she sucked on the end of the cigarillo, thinking maybe she’d seen the son of a bitch before. He was one mean-looking SOB in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, a silver belt buckle under a flat stomach. He had long, muscled monkey arms and longish brown hair like men used to wear back in the seventies.
His friend was a good head shorter, in a black V-neck tee and a tacky black leather blazer. Who the hell would wear leather in the middle of the summer? His gray ponytail stretched his redneck face into a tight, bony mask. As she put the cigarillo back to her lips, the taller of the two looked up at her and smiled just a little. Fannie knowing good and goddamn well he couldn’t see her, maybe only spotted that glow of the cigarillo, thinking he was being cute. Maybe he had someone on the inside, explaining how Fannie liked to watch from above.
She turned and headed toward the staircase, making sure she stopped by the office and grabbed her Birkin bag. If either one of those boys decided to get cute, she’d turn each of ’em from a rooster into a hen with two quick pulls of the trigger. Fannie stubbed out the smoke on her desk, circled down the steps, and entered the floor. The working girls parted as she walked toward the bar, pulsing house music blasting from the speakers, as Fannie focused on those two boys, watching their hands, their eyes, the cocky-ass way they leaned back into the bar like a couple of cowpokes.
Midnight Man crossed his huge arms over his stomach, standing by if he were needed. The back of his T-shirt read VIENNA’S PLACE / COLDEST BEER & HOTTEST WOMEN ON HWY 45.
“You boys look a little lost,” Fannie said. “Y’all might want to get closer to the pole. In fifteen minutes, two sweet Southern girls will wrestle for five hundred bucks and the chance to win a trip over to Tunica.”
“Miss Hathcock,” the craggy-faced man said, nodding. “Sure is good to see you again.”
“Sorry,” she said, tilting her head, studying his face. The older dude with the ponytail stood back, grinning, his hands in the pockets of that cheap leather blazer.
“Wes Taggart,” the craggy-faced man said. “This is my buddy, J. B. Hood. Our mutual friend Ray thought we might be of service.”
“Is that a fact?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, unless you can dance nekkid or make me a Manhattan, I don’t have a use for you.”
“We both can tend bar,” Taggart said. “If that’s what you need. But Ray said you’d been having some trouble with some local boys? You know Ray. He likes to keep everything running real clean and smooth. Hates when business gets interrupted.”
“No trouble here,” she said. “Not in Tibbehah County.”
“I guess I was mistaken,” Taggart said, tilting up the bottle of Bud and reaching into his pocket for a thick wad of cash. He had big hands and thick knuckles, like a guy who laid brick or had fought his way in and out of prison. “Best of luck, Miss Hathcock.”
J. B. Hood glanced over at Taggart and shrugged, not touching his beer, completely full and beaded with condensation. His hard little eyes darted around Vienna’s, he nodded as if deciding something, and walked away without another word.
“You mind if I call Ray?” Fannie said. “Make sure we’re free to talk?”
“No, ma’am,” Taggart said, grinning. “Not at all.” He had black eyes and a cruel mouth. On his right wrist he wore a thick turquoise bracelet that would’ve given Burt Reynolds a hard-on.
Fannie stepped back, nodded to Midnight Man, who hadn’t budged an inch, and walked back across the room and then up the spiral staircase. She called Ray on one of her phones and waited ten times before he picked up. “Did you just send Hopalong Cassidy and fucking Gabby Hayes over to Vienna’s?”
“Didn’t know they were coming,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Wes Taggart?” she said. “Fucking J. B. Hood? Who the hell are they?”
“Buster White’s idea,” he said. “Thought you might could use some help since your bikers got neutered. I told them you’d feel different. I guess they didn’t listen to me.”
“What are they?” she said. “A couple of Mississippi guard dogs?”
“Much worse than that.”
“What do they do?”
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“The fuck I don’t,” Fannie said, tapping the top of her glass-top desk with her long red nails. “They were checking out my operation for damn near an hour before they asked to speak to me. I hadn’t been that well inspected since the last time I got a Pap smear.”
“I don’t like them,” Ray said. “And I sure as hell don’t trust them.”
“Then why the fuck are they in my place?”
“Christ, Fannie,” Ray said. “I don’t think there’s a good way to say this.”
“Say it, Ray,” she said. “Christ. Just say it.”
“Those boys are yo
ur new partners.”
12
Two days after crossing paths with Heath Pritchard, Quinn drove twenty-five miles up the Natchez Trace and stopped off at a sacred Indian mound built a few hundred years after Christ. He parked his truck, stretched, and walked over to an empty viewing area, the mound maybe a hundred meters away, a gentle hill covered in green grass in a big old field bordered by a meandering creek. He set a boot onto the low brick wall and lit up the second half of his Undercrown, checking the time, knowing that Jon Holliday would soon arrive from Oxford.
A few cars passed over the next few minutes, kicking up some grit from the roadside. The Trace was a slow place for traffic, a winding road that had evolved from a buffalo trail to a Native American trading path to a route for pioneers making their way from New Orleans up to Nashville. Not far north of here, Meriwether Lewis had checked into an inn on the Trace and taken his own life in the dark wilderness. Quinn had always been intrigued by the story, as Lewis’s family always believed he was murdered. Even from the earliest American times, the wilds of north Mississippi and west Tennessee were full of robbers, rustlers, and thieves. Not that shit had changed.
Quinn tapped the cigar’s ash on his boot heel and watched a red truck pass, then a white SUV, and then two men on touring bicycles. A few minutes later, he looked up to see a black government-issue sedan pull into a space beside his F-150. A tall black woman got out and headed toward him. She had high cheekbones, dark brown skin, and wide-set large eyes. Her hair was big and bouncy, full of natural curls.