by Ace Atkins
“I want something from you before you leave,” she said.
He turned at the front door, suitcase in hand. She whispered into his ear, and her breath was warm and sweet.
“You got to be kidding,” Johnnie said. “You mention me and the Hoyt Shepherd job again and you gonna get me killed. Hoyt Shepherd will drop me in that ole river loaded down with logging chains just as easy as takin’ a mornin’ piss.”
And, with that, he opened the front door and walked out on the old rotted porch and out to the Hornet hid back by some privet bush. He tucked the suitcase into the trunk and turned to the bush, where he started to take a leak.
He heard her walking behind him and he started to whistle.
“Listen, they may not even find you, Fannie,” Johnnie said. “Hell, the Hill Top is two miles from the highway. You’re the only goddang thing out here.”
“Not far enough.”
He zipped up and turned to her, jingling the keys in his hand. The old, rotten Victorian behind Fannie looking to him like a haunted house from a picture show.
“Why do you say that?”
She didn’t say anything, only turned to the north and pointed to the dust buckling and rising from the dirt road. From the looks of things, a mess of cars was headed that way.
“Who else is in the house?”
“Few girls. Them twins. Some more from town that got scared.”
“Get back inside.”
“Why?”
“I said get the fuck back inside,” he said, popping his trunk again and pulling out a Winchester Model 12. “Get your clothes off and put on a robe. Something sexy. Tell the girls to stay in their rooms. I said now.”
Johnnie clenched his jaw, stocking extra shells in his pant pocket and down into the shaft of his pointed boots. He eyed a place up in the turret on the second floor, and looked to see the first flashes of the windshields of the approaching cars.
EVERY CLERK, PROSECUTOR, DEPUTY, AND JUDGE HAD BEEN cleared from the Russell County Courthouse. Only the Guard remained, with Bernard Sykes setting up command in Arch Ferrell’s old office and Sykes’s team from the state attorney’s office already tearing through Ferrell’s personal files and papers. General Hanna’s stepson, Pete – an eighteen-year-old kid working as the general’s personal driver – had taken us through the courthouse and out back to the brick sheriff’s office, where Hanna ushered me down into a basement storage room filled with dozens of cardboard boxes. “These look familiar?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Why don’t you call your buddy Britton and John Patterson down here? It looks like a mess of uncounted votes going back to 1945.”
“They kept them?” I asked.
“Sheriff Matthews may be everything else, but he’ll never be accused of being a genius.”
Thirty minutes later, we found more. In jail cells, we found car batteries hooked to head braces, horse whips, logging chains, and several fat leather belts fitted with silver dollars. Along the worn leather were traces of blood. Some of the cells had been fitted with iron shackles in the concrete, like something out of a medieval museum.
In another cell was a crude little motor that plugged into a wall with a needle and vial at the end. I thought it must be something for junkies and hopheads, but one of the Guard boys who’d been in the Navy said it was for giving tattoos. We wouldn’t know for a while exactly why they’d be giving out tattoos in a jailhouse.
We’d been up all night, and everything seemed foggy and light. Jack Black set a coffeepot on a hot plate. General Hanna had upended Sheriff Matthews’s desk onto the floor, where all his junk was being hustled into cardboard boxes and tagged.
He offered me a cigar like the ones he smoked with Jack Black. I thanked him and pulled out a Kool instead that I smoked with the first cup of coffee. I kneaded my temples with my thumb and forefinger and sat on top of Matthews’s desk, something I’d still think of as Matthews’s desk until weeks later when I had it taken out into the county landfill and burned.
A few minutes later, little Quinnie Kelley was hustled into the sheriff’s office, and I stopped talking with Hanna and Black and introduced Kelley. He still wore his courthouse coveralls and clutched a thick, clothbound book in his arms.
He didn’t shake hands with the men, only laid down the book on the table and said he’d taken it from Bert Fuller’s office shortly after he’d been hurt. He kind of smiled and cut his eyes over to me when he said it.
“I didn’t trust nobody, and I figured that someone might try to burn it up. But people should see it. See the shame of it.”
I opened the book, and it revealed a pasted photo album, the kind you kept for the family, only these were black-and-white pictures of girls. Some of them nude, some clothed. Mostly just of their heads with a little pasted rundown on their measurements, color of eyes and hair, weight, height, any scars or deformities, quality of teeth, and special sexual skills. All of the women had been given numbers.
I looked up at him. “These were girls Fuller arrested.”
Quinnie shook his head. “Y’all are slow. That’s the registry, the goddang book, Lamar. That’s Fuller’s handwriting plain as day right there.”
The familiarity of using my first name made me blush a bit, and I turned back to the book and studied the pages and noted the details about where they worked and what they did and various sexual perversions the women were willing to do. In the back pages was a ledger showing amounts owed and earned.
“He got twenty-five percent off every girl.”
I nodded and set down the book.
“Thanks, Quinnie,” I said, shaking his hand.
He reaffixed his Coke-bottle glasses and nodded, and then turned to Hanna and saluted him. Hanna just looked at the odd little man as he passed, and pulled the book over to him and flipped through the pages.
“Urination?” he said. “What in the hell? This is the filthiest, most vile town I’ve ever known. We should just burn it to the ground and let y’all start over.”
“Make sure you skip over my house when you do,” I said.
“How could you stand it?”
“You can’t see what’s hidden under the rocks.”
Jack Black returned to the room and reached for his shotgun he’d left on the desk. “There is some kind of trouble in the county. You ever hear of a whorehouse called the Hill Top?”
I hadn’t.
“There’s been some shooting out there.”
I looked to General Hanna. And he looked over to me and smiled. “You tell us, Sheriff.”
13
WE PARKED DOWN the road from the old Victorian, the windshield wipers keeping our view clear, and watched the two lights from the upstairs windows. A dark figure appeared up in the turret and then was gone. The old house was unpainted, with a sagging porch and crooked columns; a red bulb light rocked in the light wind. A couple cars were parked down the road, but it was growing late and raining, and I could barely make them out where we’d parked. Major Black sat at the wheel, with me in the passenger’s seat and Quinnie Kelley behind us. Since we’d left the sheriff’s office, Kelley had talked nonstop, in between the occasional directions out to the Hill Top. His big bug glasses were fogged, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
“Now, don’t be thinking that I know this place ’cause I’m a customer. I’m a married man.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Quinnie,” I said.
“I mean, I knowed plenty of men who’d gone out here. But, see, the house used to be a place where this old woman lived when we was kids. We called it the Spook House, on account of it looking broken down and all. You know, like a haunted house?”
I nodded and looked over to Black. He wore no expression.
“When that old woman died, me and my brother used to play games outside there, and we’d bet each other that we couldn’t last five minutes in that place. I took the bet one time, and I promise you it was the longest five minutes I ever spent in my life. I walked up t
o the stairway and, when I reached the bottom step, I felt a cold spot go through me. I’m not saying it was a ghost or nothin’. I’m just sayin’ it scared the piss out of me.”
“What do you say we ride down by the cars?” I asked.
Black cranked the jeep and we bumped along the dirt road, and hit the high beams on a Cadillac coupe and a brand-new Hudson. I’d seen the Hudson before.
“That the one from the other night?” Black asked.
I nodded.
Black killed the engine.
“You wait here,” Black said.
“Hell with that,” Quinnie said. “I ain’t scared.”
“It’s not on account of those ghosts,” Black said.
“I knowed what you meant. But I ain’t scared, just the same.”
Black told him to wait in the jeep, and, if he heard shots, to call it in on the radio. “It’s important.”
Kelley nodded, a serious expression on his face. “Yes, sir.”
We mounted the old creaky steps and knocked on the front door. We heard movement inside and shuffling, and Black knocked again. His shotgun rested in his left hand while he knocked with his right.
There was a window in the top half of the door, but some yellowed lace obscured a good look inside. Black knocked some more and then finally stood back to kick it in.
I held up my hand, moved past him, and tried the knob.
The door opened.
Black grunted and moved inside, calling into the big, vacuous space and twisting his neck up to a wide staircase that stretched far and high along the right wall.
He called out again and then mounted the steps. He pointed me to the parlor and a long hallway that led to a swinging door.
THE WHORE HAD ABOUT BIT THROUGH JOHNNIE’S FINGERS, as he held her tight in the upstairs bedroom, listening to the boots on the wooden landing. She shuffled and cried in his hands but didn’t make a sound, only bit down hard and tried to wriggle free.
There were two more whores down the hall and another downstairs with Fannie.
The door to the bedroom opened, and Johnnie waited there behind it. Through the crack between the door and frame, he saw a big man in a khaki uniform pass and then move out of sight.
As the man walked slow through the room, the young whore tried to twist free. But Johnnie held her there until the heavy boots passed and the rhythmic thumping was gone.
He let out his breath. The damn twisting and gyrating kicking up the pain in his shoulder something fierce. He twisted the whore’s hair into his fingers and pulled out his wet fingers from her mouth.
Into her ear, he whispered: “You scream and I’ll plug you a brand-new hole. You got me?”
The girl nodded.
And then he heard the shot downstairs.
The boots ran back down the landing and then hit the staircase.
“Goddamn,” Johnnie said to the young whore. “That bitch is crazy.”
The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She was doughy fat and white, with brown eyes the size of saucers. “Y’all got a back door here?”
The girl didn’t speak.
Johnnie pointed the gun at her.
“I said, y’all got a back door?”
THE SALON LOOKED TO BE SOMETHING OUT OF THE OLD West. Red velvet couches and heavy oak furniture. Cut-glass whiskey decanters and boxes of cigarettes and cigars. Old-time paintings of fat naked women with red hair and red lips. I passed through the room and followed the long hallway, trying to keep quiet on the wood floors. The hallway seemed to elongate as I walked, hearing Black’s boots overhead and then opening the swinging back door and hearing the crack of a shot.
I dropped to the floor and saw a woman pointing a pistol back down at my head. Before she could take aim, I tackled her to the ground and wrestled the gun free. Someone else in the room screamed, and I pointed the gun to her and she held her hands over her mouth and screamed and screamed, although she tried to stop.
She fell to her knees, and I pulled the woman to her feet and pushed her against the kitchen table.
“What are you doing here? This is my house.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Miss Fannie Belle, and if you don’t leave my home immediately I will have you arrested.”
Black ran into the room, his shotgun tucked into his shoulder, and pointed from corner to corner in the room. He held the gun on the redheaded woman.
“Ma’am, just whose Hudson is that parked outside?” I asked.
“It’s not mine.”
Just then, a car horn started honking and an engine started. I ran for the front door and out onto the porch, as the Hudson fishtailed and twisted in the mud and then broke free and shot right for the main highway.
Quinnie ran after the car for a long time, yelling for it to stop, until I lost sight of him.
I walked back into the house and held the women, while Black made a call on the radio for some help. Three girls he found upstairs waited in the hallway, toward the door.
“You want to tell me what you do, Miss Belle?” I asked.
I sat down across from her at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette while she and another girl, too old for the pigtails she wore, stared at the floor.
“I don’t work.”
“Then what do you do here?”
“Nothing.”
“Who are these girls?”
“They are my nieces.”
“Even the black one?”
Fannie turned her head and coughed, as if my cigarette smoke had invaded her space. I smoked it down a little more and squinted at her through the haze, reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out the folded piece of paper Jack Black had given me.
I smiled, the cigarette clamped in my teeth. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m kind of new at this.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Reading you your rights.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“You did try to kill me, Miss Belle.”
“You broke into my home.”
“Sorry, I thought this was a cathouse.”
She looked at me and snorted a bit, then reached down and squeezed my knee. I looked up at her and she smiled. “We can work something out, baby.”
I didn’t move, just started to read the paper in my hand.
“You goddamn sonofabitch,” she said, as Black pushed the three girls into the kitchen. I started to finish reading but glanced up again, noticing something familiar about one of the girls.
She looked away as I stared. Black hair and blue eyes, china-white skin. I watched her cross her skinny white arms over a low-cut red velvet dress. She wore a lot of red lipstick, rouge, and she’d taken a heavy black pencil to her eyebrows like a Hollywood actress.
“Didn’t I meet you on the Fourth of July?”
She didn’t answer.
“You were with Billy Stokes,” I said.
TWO HOURS LATER, I SAT WITH THE GIRL IN A BACK BOOTH of Choppy’s Diner. The young girl looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days, the way she scraped the eggs off her plate and cleaned the last bit of it with a piece of toast. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and asked her if she wanted another plate, and she looked up at me from where she’d leaned into the table and shook her head, her mouth full of food.
My arm rested on the back of the booth, a cigarette between my fingers. Jack Black had taken the others to the jail. This one, too scared to talk, didn’t say a word to me, as I drove past the courthouse and took the upper bridge over into Columbus. I had to ask her three times to get out of the car.
“You work for Fannie Belle?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her hair hung down over a face that was so white it looked like it belonged on a porcelain doll.
“How old are you?”
She shrugged.
“You sure you don’t want more to eat?”
She shook her head, her eyes still tilted toward the table but not chewing anymore.
&n
bsp; I waited and didn’t speak. The waitress came over and placed the bill on the table, and I put down a dollar and a fifty-cent piece.
“You the new sheriff?”
“That’s what they’re telling me.”
Her hands shook so hard on top of the table that the salt shaker began to bounce and move. She started to cry but didn’t move, even as I put my hand over hers. I gave her fingers a squeeze to reassure her.
She looked up at me and nodded and nodded. “I’m ready. I can do it. Let’s go.”
“Do what?”
Her chin tilted up and she looked at me, confused at what she saw, or didn’t see, in my face. She shook her head and just watched me. The waitress came by once more and refilled my cup of coffee, and I lit another cigarette.
“Coffee and cigarettes are a fine thing,” I said.
“That’s all you want?”
“She speaks.”
“Where’s Bert Fuller?” she asked.
“Still lying in bed.”
“He doesn’t work for you?”
“You were there,” I said. “We’re not exactly good friends.”
“So who’s in charge?”
“The Guard. Town is under martial rule.”
“What’s that?”
“That means the town was so rotten that the governor replaced everybody. I’m the temporary sheriff till they can find someone better.”
She nodded.
“You going to tell me how old you are?”
“Sixteen.”
“Where’s your family?”
She shrugged.
“Where are you from?”
She looked at me and excused herself from the table. I watched her leave for the bathroom, and she returned moments later. She’d washed her face of the makeup, and her hair had been tucked into a ponytail.
“Am I going to jail?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I could use some help.”
“What?”
“Did you see a man inside the Hill Top tonight? The one that drove that Hudson parked out front?”