“You mean you don’t want to spare none for the track.”
“I’m out here, aren’t I?”
She chewed on the end of her hair for a moment before asking, “Where am I supposed to keep all of this shit?” She indicated her outfit. No pockets; barely any fabric. She spread her legs slightly, giving him another look, wanting to see his expression change again. It didn’t. He shook his head.
“Keep it out. Show the picture around. Let everyone know any working girl who gets in this freak’s car is turning a death trick. You hear me?”
Her breath caught. He’d said he was homicide, but all she’d cared about when she got in was that he wasn’t vice. He asked again if she was listening. She nodded and stared a little harder at the image. “He’s killing working girls?” she said when she was able to find her breath.
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes he lets them go?”
“Sometimes he murders citizens too. But he mostly sticks to ‘low profile targets.’ Do you know what I mean when I say that?”
“No one cares if he does one of us.”
The cop didn’t say anything.
“Why me?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Why did you pick me? You should be talking to Comfort’s bottom girl. She’s the one who runs the track. She can get the word out.” Honey waited for him to tell her that he endangered her by jumping the chain of command because she looked smarter than the other girls. Friendlier and more likely to understand. She listened for the lines Comfort used when he explained why she was destined to out-earn all his other bitches except Chai.
He let out a long breath and said, “Because you look like the girls we find behind the dumpsters.”
She sat staring at him for a long minute. He cracked his window and lit a cigarette, letting her have all the time she needed to picture herself lying lifeless behind a stinking trash bin, bled out and stiff. Dixon offered her a smoke. She shook her head, refusing.
“You’re organic Honey, huh?” he said replacing the pack on his dash. “You keep that self-preservation instinct. Use it out there.” He took one more deep drag. “You need me to drop you?”
“You don’t know nothin’ about The Game, do you? You gonna get me hurt worse than a bad date.” His forehead wrinkled as if he didn’t understand. ‘A bad date,’ she repeated, as if it was self-evident she meant a violent john. When he didn’t seem to be getting it, she said, “Nobody ever drives me home. Especially not no cops. I ain’t s’posed to talk to you.”
“Then you better get going.” He pushed the button on the door handle unlocking the car, but not moving to open her door. Electric chivalry.
She held out a hand. “Forty.”
“A blow job on this block is twenty,” he said.
“Now you think you know something, huh? You kept me longer than it’d take to blow.”
“I have stamina.”
“Not with me. No one has that much stamina.”
He handed her sixty dollars and said, “Buy something to eat.”
Honey snatched the money and let herself out of the car trotting for the end of the alley. She hesitated at sidewalk, glancing over her shoulder. The detective’s car remained where he’d parked. She turned the corner and listened for a moment, waiting for the sound of him driving away. If he left, she couldn’t hear.
She stared at the man in the picture, memorizing what she could see of his face. Dixon didn’t know anything about how she worked and survived. Taking the picture around the block was more likely to get her marked as a snitch than it was to be taken seriously. Still, she figured he might know a thing or two about the kind of people who got off on killing girls like her. She decided to take his word for it that he was looking out for her. Comfort would understand that she was looking out for him by warning them.
She was his golden girl.
• • •
Comfort’s fists left Honey with an ache in her guts that reached up her spine and down into her bowels. She lay on the sidewalk, crumpled up like the detective’s photograph. Chai spit on the picture before kicking her in the crotch with the wedge toe of her platform shoe. Honey’s back arched and her cry echoed against the monolithic brick factory wall opposite the park. Comfort gave her another punt in the guts with his Timberland, silencing her. “You a snitch? You a snitch?” his bottom bitch yelled as she tore up the detective’s business card. She threw the pieces in Honey’s face.
She wanted to tell them she wasn’t. She wanted to say that she was looking out for Comfort’s girls by showing them the picture, but she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs to give volume to her words. She whispered “I’m sorry,” in between shallow breaths.
“God damn right you sorry. Gonna be more sorry if you don’t get correct. You don’t talk to five-oh. You don’t open that mouth except to suck a dick. You feel me?”
“Ye—” Chai kicked her in the stomach as she tried to agree. She nodded.
Comfort said, “You learnin’. You got an hour to get back on the block, or else I’m callin’ up a party. Get some motherfuckers to jump on the train.” He stomped off, leaving Chai to finish explaining what was expected of her.
She squatted in front of Honey and flicked the crumpled up picture at Honey’s face with a dragonlady fingernail. “If you see this iceman, you come to me. I’ll get Comfort and he’ll take care of it. You don’t go to the police for shit, you hear?”
Honey nodded. Chai stood up and brushed the hair out of her face, preening for her return to her man’s side. He wouldn’t tolerate her looking disheveled. She was not his most expensive piece of jewelry, but she was the prettiest. “You got forty-five minutes to get up and earn.” She sashayed away, making sure that the other girls on the block saw she was queen.
Rolling over, Honey sobbed and held her stomach. It hurt so bad she worried she might be bleeding internally—that the two of them might have ruptured something. But she couldn’t go to the hospital. She couldn’t go anywhere except maybe around the corner to the “pharmacy.” L’il Bentley would have something to get her through the night. She’d give him the twenty she’d stuffed in her shoe for an Oxy. It might not get her through the night, but it’d get her back on the track and in the game. She pushed up onto her hands and knees, waited until the cramping and nausea subsided enough to stand on her feet, and staggered off to find the dealer, leaving the picture where it lay. If Comfort or Chai found it on her, there would be no amount of Oxy that could dull what they’d do to her.
• • •
It was days before she could stand fully upright without cramping. Days during which it was a welcome moment to lean over and rest her elbows on the doorframe of a john’s car and ask, “Wanna date?” Still she did it. Pushed through the pain until she’d skimmed enough to afford a pill or two.
She wasn’t earning as well as she had been before the beating. But Comfort didn’t say anything to her about the money or how she looked. While he was always reciting mystical-sounding shit to the people hanging around him, he didn’t say anything to her at all anymore. One of his street soldiers asked why she was looking so used up and he thumped the book he always carried around, The Art of War, like some street corner preacher about to drop the word of Almighty God on an acolyte hungry to be fed the gospel of original pimping. “Once upon a time in China, the Emperor asked General Tso to make all his hos into an army,” he said, holding court. “So the general, he lined all those bitches up and put the Emperor’s favorite in charge. He tell them, ‘turn left,’ and when they didn’t do shit like he said, he beheaded the bitch in charge. What do you think those hos did when he promoted the next one to bottom bitch and said ‘turn left’? I tell you, they turned the fuck left.” He laughed and nodded his head toward Honey. “She was an up-make-you-comer. Look at her now. That’s what happens to snitches and bitches who don’t do what they told.” His golden girl was now his object lesson on how to keep the troops in line. And when she looked at
him hungrily, she was left to starve.
Chai, in turn, was leaving Honey with less of her own money at the end of the night, claiming that it wasn’t Comfort who was going to suffer if she wasn’t working hard enough. Honey was doing the best she could, but as much as it hurt to stand up and even breathe, it hurt worse to fuck. And her increasingly despairing look was driving away the johns. If it wasn’t the sleeplessness caused by the pain, it was surely the physical effects of the painkillers. The Oxy had left her looking pallid, with dark gray bags under her eyes. She tried to compensate with make-up, but she ended up looking... “trashy,” her mother would have said. She was beginning to look like a junkie. Like a whore.
The man behind the wheel of the car looked her over as she asked him for a date, his face turning down with disappointment and contempt. Without a word he goosed the gas and the Mustang lurched off. The edge of the door banged Honey in the temple and she went sprawling to the ground, long skinny legs kicking out instinctively, shoving her out of the way of the car’s rear wheels before they crushed her legs. Before another man left her alone to suffer.
She picked herself up and staggered to the street. She didn’t bother to pull down the tight jersey skirt bunched up over her hips. Another girl on the block laughed as Honey held her stinging face and sobbed. A long purple bruise was going to make her even less attractive. She could already feel the side of her face growing hot, swelling. Although, she didn’t see how that could make business worse.
Another car slid up the block and stopped a few yards away. The girl who’d laughed wiggled her ample hips as she tottered on too-high heels toward the open window. Honey watched as she curved her spine to the side so the john could see both her cleavage and the curve of her bare hip while she set up the deal. She stared, watching the woman twitch her hips, listening to the crack of her cackle as she amused herself with her wit. But she wasn’t opening the door. In a moment, if the john didn’t agree to the terms she offered, she’d shift from flirty to furious. Screaming “faggot” while kicking backward at his car with her heels like a donkey, trying to dent the door or at least scratch the paint so he’d have something to explain when he got home to the missus. Punish him for not helping her make her ends.
Honey glanced at the john. Her heart beat hard in her chest and she lost her breath. He looked like all the others. Goatee, Oakley halfjackets, and baseball cap with a big white B shading his face. His mouth hung open, but not in a way that suggested idiocy. He looked hungry, like someone had just set out supper. He wanted to taste. He was a wolf who wanted gobble the girl up and take her inside himself where she would be his forever like in a fairytale.
Honey thought about her huntsman, Detective Dixon. He told her to call him and he’d come running. He’d barge into the cottage and slay the wolf and rescue the girl.
She thought about Comfort and Chai. The bottom bitch had said to call her and Comfort would descend on the wolf like angry villagers protecting their lambs.
The man nodded and moved his head, indicating the girl should get in. What was her name? Something like Crystal or Quartz... or Ruby! That was it. Ruby—pulled open the door to climb inside.
Honey shouted, “Wait!” Tottering toward the car in the heels that she used to be good at walking in, but had become uncertain as her back had been made weak and crooked, she called out for the man to stop. “How about a double date?” she shouted.
Ruby stuck her hand out the open window and stuck up her middle finger as they drove away. The car slipped off into the darkness, pulling around into the alley. She ran after it. Huffing and out of breath, she rounded the corner in time to see the silhouette of the man pull his hands away from Ruby’s face and lay her limp form gently against the seatback. The red taillights of the car flashed as he stepped on the brake before putting it in gear and then they dimmed and he drove away.
“Wait!” she screamed, knowing he couldn’t hear over the sound of the engine. Honey calling out after, “Not her! Me! Take ME! I’m the one you want!”
She memorized the license plate and make and model of the car. She tried to file away everything in her mind, making sure every detail was there to be recalled, despite the fog of her dulled Oxy mind.
The next time he rolled up the stroll, she would know it was him before she even saw his face. She’d see the car and she would be at his window, smiling and showing him that she was everything he’d ever wanted: the girl next door, the babysitter, his daughter, anyone as long as he let her in the car and took her away. He could do anything he wanted to her, as long as he took her away for good.
Except, of course, she knew he wouldn’t come again. He’d move on to another track in another part of the city. He’d hunted this ground. He’d go looking for a new girl who was fresh and everything he desired. Not her. Not anymore.
She fell to her knees. The concrete dug into her shins and scuffed her skin and added another set of blemishes that tarnished her looks and no one would ever want her again.
Not even a killer.
Maybelle’s Last Stand
Travis Richardson
Maybelle eases back and forth on her rocking chair, slow, but steady, on the front porch of her single room abode. Keeping her cataract eyes on the dusty road ahead, she rubs her arthritic hands together underneath a quilt, trying to keep her fingers agile. A tall man approaches her shack with the setting sun behind his back, silhouetting him. She’s not sure who it is, but he’s white by his swagger and definitely the law because of the gun hanging off the belt on his hip. When he finally reaches the porch, propping his boot on the first step, she can tell it is the devil himself, Sheriff Reed.
Maybelle prays, hoping that her grandson is quiet now. No need to agitate a cowardly lawman. The sheriff takes his hat off, wiping away beads of sweat.
“Howdy, ma’am.”
Maybelle nods, but doesn’t smile. She doesn’t smile for any white man, especially if he’s on her land. Smilin’ and yessirin’ was something her parents did against their will when they were another man’s property. This was hard land that she, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her husband, and her children toiled over to make a living.
“I’m looking for your grandson, Ernest Young.” The lawman wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Ain’t around here.”
The lawman chuckles to himself as if he is dealing with a half-witted child. “That ain’t gonna fly. You’re gonna let me look around here. I don’t need to be askin’, I’m just tryin’ to be polite.”
“What is it that you want Ernest for?”
The sheriff turns and spits on the cracked earth. “We got another dead girl. A white girl. She was raped and then strangled to death.”
Maybelle chuckled and shook her head. “That’s a cryin’ shame.”
“Yes, it is. And I don’t see nothin’ funny about it.”
“She’d be the fourth one now, right, Sheriff? And yet three good men have been hanged.”
“They ain’t good. None of ‘em. They’re rapists and murderers”
“Every one of them?” The lawman wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I suspect it’s a white man.”
“Impossible,” he says too quickly.
“You know, I think you’ve got a little strategy goin’ on here, Sherriff.”
“I don’t care to hear any of your theories right now.”
“Seems the land of three negroes, rightfully given to them by the United States is bein’ taken. Amassed, you might say.”
“Now you best watch your—”
“And sweet little girls seem to be dyin’ every couple of months. So I’m wonderin’ which is it you like more, Sheriff? The flesh of innocent young girls or land?”
The sheriff’s nostrils flare, but fear widens his eyes. “You ain’t to talk to me that way. I’m gonna teach you some manners, nigger bitch.”
He yanks the pistol from his holster. Maybelle’s quilt explodes from under her. Her body rocks back in the chair from the blast. The sheriff drop
s his gun, having brought it only halfway up. He looks at the burning hole and black powder marks around the quilt and then down to his stomach. His pot belly pulses out crimson goo.
Maybelle pushes the quilt onto the splintered porch and stomps out the flame. She takes the heavy, old Colt peacemaker and puts it in her left hand. Shaking her fingers, she feels like she might’ve fractured something.
“Kick like the dickens, don’t ya,” she mutters to the gun.
With both hands, she points the gun at the sheriff’s head. Blood oozes between his fingers from the hole in his belly, dripping into a red pool next to his pistol on the porch steps. Maybelle thinks his face is almost as white as the sheets he and his kind put over their heads some nights when they get the spirit of the devil in them.
“Any last words, lawman? I hear you’ve never had the decency to’ve asked us coloreds that before you lynched ‘em. But I suppose I’m better than you. A whole lot better.”
The sheriff reaches for his gun, but it slips from his bloody fingers.
“They’ll kill you, you and your grandson. Hang ya’ll up by that tree in the front.” He gasps, wincing in agony. He glares at her as mean as a dying man can. “You can’t shoot a sheriff out here, not in these parts.” If he had the strength, he would’ve spit on her porch.
“But it looks like I most certainly did shoot myself a sheriff. See, I’ve been havin’ a dilemma for quite a while now. Either I kill a sheriff, that’d be you,” Maybelle says, pointing the unsteady gun at the lawman. “Or let him live and keep killin’ white babies. Truly it don’t matter ‘cause we get hung all the same.”
She cocks the hammer back with her left hand. Much harder than it oughta be.
“They’ll kill your boy, you know.”
“No they won’t. I can guarantee you that.”
Holding the pistol with both hands, Maybelle pulls the trigger. Sheriff Reed’s brains blast out the back of his head as he falls to the ground. She would’ve never suspected he’d had so much in that dull, perverted head of his. But maybe it’s all putrid meat. Sure smelled that way.
Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3) Page 4