Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  “Where is that number?”

  “By the register.”

  He followed me back into Slocumb’s, where I shuffled through some receipts and deposit slips and found a phone number for a man named Padgett. I showed it to Arthur and he nodded.

  I had the phone in my hand and started to dial.

  “I’ve been prayin’ y’all catch the fella that did that to Mr. Patterson,” Arthur said, wiping the sweat off the back of his neck with an oil-stained rag. “I prayed for it since it happened. Figured it’s my town, too. Ain’t that right?”

  “I’M NOT GOING TO LIE TO YOU, MR. PADGETT,” I SAID. “IT’S not a position I’d want to be in.”

  Cecil Padgett was in his late twenties. A slender, handsome man with intense blue eyes and that kind of tanned skin that comes from hard outdoor labor. He smoked and listened to me, sitting on a sofa in the center of an Airstream trailer he shared with his wife. He nodded with everything I said, grounding out his cigarette in a tin can on the coffee table.

  His wife hovered around in their tiny kitchen, pretending to be rearranging dishes but exchanging glances with him until he stopped looking to her.

  “So they might try and kill me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I read about that other fella. Not a good way to go.”

  “He was connected with the rackets. The man who we think killed him probably did it because he switched sides.”

  “Those gangsters probably wouldn’t be pleased with me either.”

  “We would ask that you and your wife stay in a hotel with protection until the trials.”

  He nodded.

  His wife dropped a tea cup and it shattered on the floor. She put her hand to her mouth. I looked to Padgett and he stood, asking if we could get some fresh air. It was night, and we stood out by our cars, the fat ceramic Christmas lights hung over the little canopies set up from all the Airstreams at Tropical Paradise Court in Columbus.

  “Why were you downtown?”

  “We wanted to see a movie,” he said. “I was checking the times.”

  “Did you stay?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “It was a western, and those things always leave me feeling kind of low.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Too many people have to die.”

  I nodded, and reached out to shake his hand and said, “Merry Christmas.”

  He looked past me. From one of the trailers, a fat woman in a big red sweater walked outside, waiting for her little dog to squat and go to the bathroom. Another trailer door opened, and a man threw out a bucket of dirty water, heat steamed up off the gravel. Nearby, Padgett’s ’39 Lincoln sat with the hood open, its engine in pieces.

  “So when do I have to let you know?”

  “When you can.”

  “How ’bout now?”

  “Now is good.”

  “This ain’t about the reward.”

  I nodded.

  “When I read about that fella dying and me not standing up… It’s hard to put into words.”

  “I understand, Mr. Padgett. You’re standin’ up now.”

  “Guess I am.”

  “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  22

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Thomas got duded up in his brand-new Roy Rogers gear, complete with vest, hand-tooled belt with R.R. written in studs, and a deluxe holster filled with a pair of toy six-shooters loaded with caps. He’d already shot at Anne’s cat four times, and that caused a minor break in the peace. But she’d forgiven him and gone on outside after breakfast to try out a pair of white J. C. Higgins roller skates and say hello to a schoolmate who lived two doors down. Santa had also brought Thomas a junior boxing set, and Joyce, as a joke, had bought him a Happi Time service station set that came complete with plastic figures of the attendants who worked the grease rack, platform, and pumps. All this coming as a joke, because he liked to see me work at the station more than sit behind a desk at the sheriff’s office.

  Joyce picked up one of the figures, eyed it, and looked back to me and said, “The fella wears a hat. How come you didn’t wear a matching hat?”

  I’d given her a fourteen-karat watch I’d seen her eyeing at Kirven’s, and she’d bought me a Craftsman electric razor kit. While Anne zipped around in our driveway on new skates and Tommy raised hell in the backyard, I picked apart the kit and placed the contents on the coffee table.

  “You see the mirror plugs in, too,” Joyce said. “It has a small light.”

  I reached behind the chair where I sat, still in my robe, and plugged it in. “Well, I’ll be.” I studied my face in the reflection, seeing Joyce’s chin resting on my shoulder, and she gave me a solid smile.

  “How’d you ever land such a handsome man?” I asked.

  “Lord knows, it was tough,” she said. “So do you like what you see?”

  LORELEI SHOWED UP JUST AFTER WE’D FINISHED UP A BIG Christmas dinner – Jack Black joining us while taking a break from the night patrol – and, as I opened the door, I realized I hadn’t seen her since she’d been found half dead on the rocks. I’d heard she’d left town with Billy but never expected to see the girl in PC again. The surprise must’ve shown on my face, because she stepped back off the landing to the walkway and looked down at the ground, unable to speak.

  The first thing I thought about after I invited her in, her declining and standing there shivering, her breath like smoke, was that her nose and under her eyes reminded me of a fighter with all that scar tissue. There was also a long scar that ran down half of her face that looked as if it had come from a knife but maybe from the sharp rocks.

  “Come on in.”

  She wrapped herself with her arms, wearing nothing but a man’s long dress shirt and pegged blue jeans. “I cain’t,” she said. “Billy’s got trouble.”

  Jack was beside me now. After two more sentences from Lorelei, I nodded, and Jack moved for the car. I took the girl’s arm and drew her inside.

  Just then, Thomas popped up – still dressed as Roy – and aimed his gun at her. She jumped, holding her chest, and I grabbed the end of the barrel and pulled it down.

  “Watch it there, partner.”

  With her head down and under my arm, she moved into the kitchen “Joyce, this is Lorelei. How ’bout some supper?”

  Joyce smiled, her arms elbow deep in suds, and looked back at me. She knew all about the girl. “Please join us,” my wife said.

  Not a minute later, we were in Jack’s car, and I radioed into the office to Quinnie to call in some of the Guard boys.

  “It’s Casa Grande,” I said. “Right off Opelika Road. That place that looks like the Alamo.”

  AN HOUR EARLIER, BILLY HAD DRESSED IN THE MIRROR AND combed his hair back with pomade he’d found in Reuben’s medicine cabinet. He studied his eyes and steadied his hand as he’d practice going for the gun tucked in the small of his back. He’d imagine the skinny figure before him wasn’t him at all but Johnnie Benefield, and he’d wait till Johnnie would ask him about his daddy’s money, Did you bring it?, and Billy would say, Sure, and he’d empty his gun into Johnnie and drop the bastard in the dirt, right in the very place where he’d soiled Lorelei, Billy still seeing that hairy back and slabbed teeth in a jack-o’-lantern’s grin.

  Billy reached for a pack of Luckies and pulled on his daddy’s two-tone leisure coat, covering up the gun at his back, and slipped in some bullets in the pocket. He studied himself again and practiced three times more to make sure the oversized coat wouldn’t be a burden. But it wasn’t a burden at all, and, each time, he saw the image of Johnnie dropping in the reflection behind him.

  They’d come back for the money. He’d known about it for a couple weeks after finally reading his daddy’s letter just outside Memphis. And Lorelei begged for them to never come back, but it didn’t take long before they couldn’t pay for breakfast one morning and that wrinkled letter in his pocket was already feeling like a hundred-dollar bill.

  When they got to the farm, they
found every piece of furniture upside down, his grandmother’s pie safe turned to sticks, dresser drawers turned inside out, and before Billy could get to a hiding place Benefield was there. Benefield put a gun in Lorelei’s mouth and gave Billy a phone number to call when he, as he said, “got his head straight.”

  That Christmas morning, after he’d watched Johnnie Benefield’s taillights fade away down the dirt road, Billy had gone to the outhouse and pulled that knotted rope from the dark hole, six burlap bags tied hard, but pissed and shit on so many times that they’d turned black.

  Lorelei begged him to leave.

  They got as far as Notasulga, and he turned his daddy’s Buick back.

  He’ll find us, Billy had said. Wherever we would go.

  Billy liked what he saw in the mirror, liked the way the coat made him feel bigger, liked the image of the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and, before he walked away, he looked at himself a final time, trying to make his eyes grow slack and sleepy, trying to settle down that jackhammering in his chest.

  THE GANG WAS ALL THERE. JOHNNIE BENEFIELD AND Moon, Clyde Yarborough – just two days out of Kilby on the only charges the grand jury could make – and two nigger boys they’d paid forty bucks apiece to join them. Six shotguns and a pint of Canadian blended sat on the bed. A deck of playing cards and a couple of nudie magazines.

  “Let’s drink to Bert Fuller,” Johnnie said. “May he fuck the jury up the ass!”

  Yarborough garbled out a no, or maybe a hell no, lifted up the bandanna on his face, and spit on the floor.

  “No?” Johnnie asked. “You still blaming him? Well, he still deserves a drink. Everybody deserves a drink on Christmas. And to Phenix City, too! May that beaten old whore rise from the ashes.”

  “I got to take a shit,” Moon said in that high-pitched, little-girl voice.

  Johnnie thumbed back at the toilet in the back. “Moon will make this whole place smell like the elephant house at the zoo.”

  The phone rang and Johnnie answered it, smiling and nodding and cupping the receiver between his shoulder and his ear. “Yes, yes.” He smiled some more. “Billy, I’m so damn glad we’ve come to a fucking civil agreement. You’re a fine young man.”

  Johnnie lay down the receiver and looked over to the two niggers for hire. “You two boys get back to where I need you. Don’t drink, don’t piss, don’t breathe. If the boy comes alone, we don’t need you. But we all know he ain’t got the goddamn sense. If a soul comes along with him, you wait till I raise my hands like this.”

  He raised his hands up in surrender.

  “And you kill every sonofabitch that ain’t me, Moon, or Mr. Clyde here. Understand?”

  Mr. Clyde chortled out a laugh, his black eyes narrow, his breath smelling of dirty ashtrays and onions.

  WE PARKED DOWN THE ROAD, BETWEEN THE OLD HILLBILLY Club and Veto’s Trailer Park, and Jack opened the trunk and tossed me a 12-gauge, lifted another shotgun for himself, and then pulled out the Thompson and fitted on the round clip. He smiled and took a moment to relight a dead cigar in his mouth before slamming the trunk of the new Chevy.

  About that time, another black Chevy drove up behind us and Quinnie got out, dressed in the same lightweight suit I’d bought him in September, with a star proudly pinned to his jacket. “You sure Benefield is in there?”

  “That’s the rumor,” Jack said.

  “Kill the lights, Quinnie,” I said. He’d been so excited that he’d hopped out with the motor running and the headlights on. Pretty soon, two Army jeeps pulled up, four men in each, and I quickly updated them on the situation and what we expected to find.

  “Wait till we see if the boy’s in there,” I said.

  The guardsmen nodded and fanned out back of the stucco-and-tile units behind the big Casa Grande façade. The old motel probably seeing better days when car travel was a novelty, a place where Model Ts huddled up for the night and folks ate chicken dinners Mamma had packed herself. The road sign was missing several white bulbs, had been ever since I’d known the place, no one giving a damn to replace them.

  In the parking lot, we’d spotted three cars. No one on desk duty, the motel closed down during the raids for running whores.

  “Jack, would I hurt your feelings if I told you I hated guns?” I asked. “I never even liked to hunt.”

  “No kidding.”

  “No kidding.”

  “That.45 on your belt loaded?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  BILLY DROVE RIGHT THROUGH THE CASA GRANDE PORTICO and parked right in the middle of the center lot, the stucco-and-tile units fanning out in a U shape. He shifted in his coat, feeling the gun on his spine, and outside let out a deep breath, clouding his eyes. When he popped the trunk, the money still let off an awful reek – even after being repacked – of being deep down in that shitter for months, and the smell about made him want to puke.

  He grabbed the burlap bag, PURINA FEEDS printed on the side, and walked toward the only unit with the lights on in the entire place. He heard the sound of foot stomps and laughter.

  Billy gritted his teeth and speeded up his walk, but, as he did, he tripped and the gun loosened from his back, slipping down his butt and down the leg of his saggy jeans. He stopped, looked around to see if anyone noticed, feeling the gun come to rest on the top of his shoe.

  But as he bent down, the door opened and out walked Johnnie Benefield in a man’s tank top and plaid pants and boots. He was eating an apple and ambled down to meet Billy, who stood up, not moving, that gun sliding over his shoe and down onto the gravel.

  Johnnie just kept chomping on the apple, working it like a wheel in his mouth and then tossing it in the bushes, before shaking his head and reaching down to get Reuben’s pistol.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You brought me a Christmas present.”

  And then he yanked Billy by the neck, slapped the boy hard across the mouth, and tugged him to the door and then threw him in the room, the big bag of money in his right hand. “Man, it’s colder than a Minnesota well-digger’s ass.”

  Billy fell to the floor of the efficiency, looking up into the face of that fat bootlegger Moon. The fat man ate at an orange from a giant fruit basket set in the center of the room. He didn’t say a word, just ate, and then took a drink from a whiskey bottle, warming himself by a gas heater.

  Johnnie turned over the burlap bag and let the money snow out on the bed. He smiled and smiled as Billy wavered to his feet, inching backward to the door, before Johnnie said, “Where in the name of baby Jesus is the rest? This ain’t all of it. It ain’t all by a mile.”

  Moon got off the bed and set the orange on the nightstand with a thud. He unlatched his big overall and let the straps drop, pulling up his flannel shirt and mammoth stomach, telling Johnnie to bring the boy to him. He licked his lips as he used the flat of his hand to test the bed springs.

  “It’s all there was.” Billy’s voice shook.

  “You know, Moon ’bout split your girlfriend in two. He’s hung like a goddamn donkey. But I guess you’ll figure that out.”

  He threw down an apple at Billy’s feet. “Just bite down when it hurts,” he said.

  FROM THE OTHER SIDE, I WATCHED AS TWO NEGRO MEN moved from the shadows on top of two motel units with pistols in their hands and whispered back and forth to each other. We had four of the Guard boys right behind them, two more at the far end of the motor court and two with me and Jack. We told Quinnie to wait by the radio for when all hell broke loose, and the little man’s face turned red with frustration, but he said, “Yes, sir.”

  The guardsmen had the pair of negroes in the sights of their rifles and could drop them in a second. They stood ready.

  But then another door opened at the bottom of the motel’s U and out walked Clyde Yarborough with a big.44 in his hand, looking around the empty motor court. He passed the blue Buick and circled around, eyes darting up to the negros and then back over to us. Not seeing us in shadows, he tilted his head like an
animal.

  That bandit bandanna covered his face as he moved forward, his feet crunching on the gravel lot. It started to sleet, and in the streetlight it looked like sharp little silver pins.

  Yarborough got within maybe ten yards from us when we heard the scream of a child and his head quickly turned. He tucked the.44 back in his belt and yelled and pointed to the negroes on the roof, making noises with his destroyed mouth.

  MOON WAS ON HIM, CRUSHING OUT ALL THE BREATH FROM Billy’s lungs, the last sound being that of a scream, and Billy felt the sick flesh against his leg and the whispering weird voice in his ear, so high-pitched and sugar sweet it sounded like that of a little girl. Moon’s breath was hot and old and smelled dead and cancerous, whispering to Billy, as he was pushed facedown, and calling him his little baby. All Billy could see was Johnnie Benefield laughing at him, sitting across from the iron bed in a chair and smoking a cigarette, coolly taking a sip of whiskey from a bottle. Billy’s face felt as if it was about to explode from blood, unable to breathe or scream but just eyeing Johnnie, wanting to kill him so badly that he ignored Moon grunting on top of him, trying to motivate his weak flesh.

  Johnnie pulled the cigarette from his mouth and said, smelling a pack of hundreds, “Why does this cash smell like assholes?”

  WHEN YARBOROUGH POINTED, THE TWO NEGROES TURNED and spotted us, raising their pistols and squeezing out several shots before the guardsmen opened fire, hitting one direct, the back of his head bursting in the harsh white lights before he twirled and fell from the roof, and clipping the other, who scrambled and tried to crawl back in the shadows, his feet losing the roof tile under him like the shuffling of cards.

  Jack hoisted up the Thompson in his arms and walked dead center into the motor court, calling out for Clyde Yarborough to drop his gun, but Yarborough didn’t hesitate when he saw him, drawing and leveling the.44. The chatter of bullets from Jack’s Thompson raked across him and kept him up in the air, in a marionette’s dance, until Jack let go of the trigger, letting the man twirl and fall in a heap.