Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  Gently, Monique lowered herself from her knee walker, leaving it in the living room—her decoy. She began to scoot herself across the floor, leveraging for speed with her good foot. The wood was smooth as glass, and in her robe she glided like she had wheels. She kept her hand on the cell phone in her pocket so she would not drop it. She jumped when the phone vibrated with a text message—she didn’t glance at it, but she noted the information for a safer time: the phone didn’t call out, but she could text. Soon. Very soon.

  She did not know she could move so fast.

  When she got to the library boxes, she heard a mew. Midnight was way ahead of her—not only hiding behind the boxes, but he had partially opened one of the cabinets where he had probably been hiding since he realized a stranger was in the house. Cats didn’t raise an alarm like dogs: they had sense enough to hide, and expected you to have sense too.

  Midnight brushed and purred against Monique while she nudged the largest box as quietly as she could to make her path to the cabinet door. She had to open the door fully to fit her bulk inside, and for a horrifying instant the physics seemed impossible—but a heavy footfall from the foyer stairs was motivation to find a way to pretzel herself inside the black hole, feet first. She somehow climbed in without bumping herself or making a sound, as if she had always known this moment of stealth would come. Midnight bounded into the cramped space beside her.

  Yes, the cat had been hiding here. She smelled faint cat piss; Midnight’s litter box was upstairs with the stranger. Monique reached through the cabinet door’s slat, tugging at the corner of one of the boxes to pull it as close as she could, a silent slide. He would only see boxes—he might not notice the cabinets. Then she closed the cabinet door gently, gently. Not a sound.

  Hush, baby, Mom used to say, and her voice rang clear in Monique’s head. With the dark cabinet humid from her rapid breathing, her skin slick and dripping with sweat and tears, Monique curled herself the way some part of her remembered, knees to her chin as she lay on her side, eyes closed, caressed by the ever-present THUMP-THUMP, THUMP-THUMP.

  She was calm. So strangely calm.

  Shhhhh. Just hush, baby.

  Hush.

  Terceira

  by Dallas Hudgens

  College Park

  He felt the warmth on the side of his face. It spread down his neck and across his arms, then ran through his torso and legs. Sweet, enveloping warmth, like death should feel if it truly is a herald of a brighter realm. And then the dog bit Finney’s hand, and he realized he was not ascending but lying facedown on a marble bathroom floor.

  The dog scampered away, collar jingling. It was small but had drawn blood from the meat of Finney’s left hand. He sat up, realized he was naked, realized the marble floor was heated, and realized he didn’t know where he was.

  And then he threw up.

  After he’d rid himself of the bile and foam, he flushed the toilet and lay back on the floor. The quiet hum of the overhead lights made his nerves twitch, and the warm tiles were no match for the cold sweat and chills that came over him.

  He had work to do, a flight to catch. He knew the flight was at 3 o’clock. Oscar always scheduled Finney’s runs for Fridays at 3, supposedly the busiest time on the busiest day at the busiest airport in the world: Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson. Finney had made four of these trips so far. This was his last, a $10,000 payment the reward. The way it worked, he dressed as a businessman, checked in for his flight to New York, and took a wheeled carry-on duffel bag through security. Oscar provided Finney with an extra phone for each trip, to be destroyed afterward. When Finney reached his departure concourse, he’d use the phone to text a number that had already been entered. That number went to an airline employee with security access, also on Oscar’s payroll. The employee would text Finney the location of a men’s room inside the concourse where Finney would wait in a specified stall for another text. When it came in, he’d slide the carry-on under the stall door and receive an identical but heavier case in return. Oscar never told him what was inside, but Finney knew it was guns.

  Firearms had always been Oscar’s moneymaker. MAC-10s, SKs, nine millimeters. They were cheap and easy in Georgia, not so much in New York. The gun laws were that different. Finney boarded his flight with the bag and wedged it in the overhead compartment beside laptop cases and overstuffed duffels. Nobody had a clue. His next stop was a parking lot near LaGuardia where he met up with Oscar’s partners and handed off the case. Doing the numbers in his head, he figured Oscar was marking up some of the weapons four to five times above what he was paying for them.

  He tried to breathe and take hold of the moment. He couldn’t remember if it was supposed to be a three count in and six count out, the other way around, or something completely different. Finally, he stood and went to the sink. He washed the dog bite, splashed his face, and slicked back his hair.

  The bathroom opened onto a large bedroom in grays and whites. Light pierced the burlap curtains and hurt Finney’s eyes. A naked woman lay facedown on pale sheets, blond hair tumbling onto her small shoulders, a skinny arm hanging off the side of the bed. She snored loudly.

  Finney found his clothes draped over a chair. He pulled his phone from the suit jacket’s pocket. He’d missed three calls from Oscar, and it was 12:28.

  “Fuck.”

  He couldn’t find the second phone, the one he would need at the airport. Then he remembered leaving it in the trunk of his car with the dummy suitcase after picking up both at Oscar’s office. The problem was, he couldn’t remember where he’d left the car. He had a vague memory of riding with the woman in an SUV the night before. Point A to point B, but he didn’t know where either of those points lay.

  He called Alana instead of Oscar.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Oscar is pissed.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I don’t know where I am.”

  He’d noticed the snoring had stopped. And then he heard the woman’s voice, slow and hoarse: “Johns Creek.” She was sitting up, snorting coke out of her pineapple keychain pendant. He remembered the pineapple.

  “What’s Johns Creek?” he asked.

  “It’s where you are.” And then she shrugged. “I mean, unless you were asking in a more existential way.”

  Alana heard the conversation through the phone. “Jesus, Finney. You’re in Alpharetta. Traffic is shit out there. It’s going to take you at least an hour to get to the airport. You need to leave right now.”

  He pulled back the blinds. A man in khaki coveralls was walking the front yard, spraying chemicals on the grass. The driveway was empty except for a black Porsche SUV.

  “I don’t think I have my car with me.”

  “You rode home with me,” the woman said.

  “Call Oscar,” Alana said. “Tell him everything is fine, that you overslept. Then find your fucking car and get to the airport.”

  The woman walked to the bathroom and closed the door. Finney let the curtain fall shut. He sat down in a chair; a dull pain had settled behind his eyes.

  “I’m moving after I get paid.”

  Alana sighed. “Moving where?”

  He’d thought of a few places recently, but not a damn one of them would come to mind in the moment. “I don’t know. I’m just taking my talents elsewhere.”

  “You don’t need another fuck-up,” she said. “This kind of thing never happened before. Now, it’s every week.”

  He couldn’t deny it. His long run of dependability had reached a horizon, and he’d found nothing beyond that intersection of caring and wanting except a comfortable ditch. Alana could have made a list of his fuck-ups, all similar and rooted in a need to move far away from his current life. The worst to date was almost missing the previous month’s flight to New York. That time, he’d awakened in a hotel room with a gash on his forehead and his wallet, phone, and car keys missing. Oscar had not been happy. And it didn’t matter how lon
g they had known each other—Oscar didn’t tolerate multiple fuck-ups. Finney knew that missing today’s flight was not an option.

  The woman walked out of the bathroom, still naked.

  “Talk to me,” Alana said. “Where’s your mind right now?”

  Finney ended the call, and the woman asked if everything was okay.

  “I need to get to the airport.”

  She offered to call a car service, but he told her he had to find his own car first. She pulled on a pair of yoga pants and grabbed a sports bra and white sweater from the dresser. “I can drive you back to your car.”

  Finney put on his pants and shirt. “I don’t remember where I left it.”

  She walked over, picked up his suit jacket, and checked the label on the inside pocket. “Tom Ford,” she said. “Looks like I brought home a two-thousand-dollar suit with short-term memory loss.”

  The suit had belonged to Oscar—last year’s collection and no more use to him. He’d given it to Finney to wear on the plane trips, filling out the businessman look he felt was required. Finney didn’t see how it mattered but had gone to Oscar’s tailor to have it fitted. He was glad he’d done it. That suit could carry half the load in a conversation.

  “Where did we meet?” Finney asked.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head. Her hair fell perfectly straight at her shoulders.

  “Lenox Square,” she said. “But I have no idea where you parked.”

  Lenox Square shopping mall: a parking lot the size of a war zone. He wouldn’t know where to start looking.

  Over the woman’s shoulder, a framed photograph on the dresser caught his eye—the woman standing beside a smiling man wearing glasses and a leather jacket.

  “Is that Usher?”

  She glanced back. “I sold him a house.”

  Finney felt the blow of a missed opportunity. “I almost worked with him once.”

  He told her he’d briefly run a recording studio in town. She was sitting on the side of the bed, tying an orange pair of Nikes. “You mentioned your short music career last night.”

  It was short, for damn sure. The studio had been owned by Oscar, a throw-in on one of his land deals. Oscar liked to think of himself as a real estate mogul, not a gun trafficker. He put Finney in charge of the studio, and Finney took some online audio-engineering classes and turned out to be a quick learner on Pro Tools and also pretty good at making trap beats on the studio’s old 808. The place was making money and Usher’s producer had booked some time, but Oscar shut the place down and sold the building and equipment to put a down payment on a condo that supposedly had the largest balcony in Buckhead. Finney took the 808 home with him, an unspoken fuck you to Oscar (as if fucking Oscar’s girlfriend Alana wasn’t already enough). It was also then that Finney started thinking about taking his talents elsewhere.

  Finney’s headache wouldn’t back off, and his hand was throbbing from the dog bite. He asked the woman if she had any Tylenol in the house. She told him she didn’t.

  “Has your dog had his shots?”

  She looked at him strangely. “I don’t have a dog.”

  He offered his hand as evidence. “What’s this?”

  “You dropped a fifty-dollar bottle of George T. Stagg bourbon in my kitchen last night. You cut your hand, and then you said, Put it on my bill.”

  He gave the hand a closer inspection. It was a jagged cut, nothing like teeth marks. “Jesus. I thought I saw a fucking dog in your bathroom.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but have you ever had a brain scan?” She offered a weary smile, which loosened a few memories from the night before. The expression might have been unspectacular, but it was genuine and as warm as her marble bathroom floor, and it made him recognize why he had wanted to talk to her in the first place.

  They’d met at a bar inside the mall. He remembered her telling him about her divorce, two daughters who lived with her ex-husband in Charlotte, about her own mother who’d died last year in a small south Georgia house, surrounded by garbage she couldn’t let go of but no visible signs of a family. It took the county’s public administrator six months to find Monica and tell her about her mother’s death. That was her name, Monica. He remembered that. He remembered all those things she’d told him, but he still couldn’t remember where he’d parked the car.

  * * *

  Once they were in Monica’s SUV, Finney began to get his bearings. Traffic lights, strip malls, gated subdivisions, new high schools with perfectly groomed baseball fields. They passed a sprawling limestone compound surrounded by parking lots. A pond with a fountain glittered in the sun.

  “Is that a college?”

  Monica swung her head toward the structure. She was wearing large, square sunglasses. “Kind of the opposite. It’s a church.”

  Finney pulled his own sunglasses halfway down his nose to get a better look. “I honestly thought religion would die before disco.”

  “Well, maybe disco will be resurrected,” she said.

  Soon enough, they hit traffic—three lanes in one direction, brake lights and chrome in an unbroken chain. The sun and pollen washed out the colors of the cars and trees. Everything appeared in a cataract haze.

  The north Fulton suburbs had never been Finney’s stomping grounds. Growing up, he’d lived with his grandmother in College Park, three houses down from the airport fence and one of the east-west runways. His grandmother had taught him to play baseball in the small front yard. They used a bowl of plastic fruit and a sawed-off broomstick. She laid down paper napkins for bases. When the flights would take off and land, they couldn’t hear themselves talk, couldn’t hear the thwack of the apple flying off the stick. The jets rattled the windows, blew away the napkins, and shook his nerves. He could feel their weight and power. They were relentless, every three to four minutes in the middle of the day. His grandmother never minded the planes. She would tell him the guy in row three was a Braves scout and had liked Finney’s swing.

  He asked Monica to stop for coffee. As late as he was running, he still needed help with the headache. He hoped it might wake up his memory too. She pulled into a Starbucks and settled in the drive-through lane, which was at least twelve cars deep.

  “Just pull into a parking space. I’ll go inside.”

  He asked if she wanted coffee, but she took a pass. “I gave up caffeine.” She distractedly rubbed the little pineapple hanging from the steering column as she said it.

  Almost all of the parking spaces were empty, and when he got inside, there was no line at the counter. He was back to the car with coffee in less than two minutes. The drive-through line still hadn’t budged.

  She slung the SUV back on the road and into the slog. It was 12:55 now. Lunch traffic. Oscar called two more times, but Finney waited until he had enough coffee in his system. Finally, he answered and let Oscar open the steam valve a little.

  “What the fuck? Where are you?”

  “Heading to the airport.” Finney made a point to sound as casual as possible.

  “I’ve called you fifteen fucking times. Are you drunk?”

  Finney sipped his coffee and let the question circle the airspace. “The battery on my phone is fucked up.”

  “Are you lying?”

  Finney told him he was not lying.

  “I can’t work with someone I don’t trust, and I’m having a hard time trusting you lately.”

  “I got a slow start this morning. Everything is good now.”

  “You’re slow because all you care about lately is drinking and getting your dick wet.”

  “I make you money, Oscar. I’ve always made you money. There’s something you can trust.”

  Oscar laughed. “I make the money. Let’s be clear about that. You’re like a room service waiter and I own the hotel. You can be replaced.”

  Finney reminded him about the recording studio.

  “That fucking studio,” Oscar said. “You made two nickels running that thing,
and you’ve had a fucking attitude ever since—like you’re some kind of rap mogul.”

  They were sitting at a traffic light amid a large intersection, a baby superstore on one corner and a funeral home on the other. Cradle-to-grave convenience, although it might take a lifetime by car to get from one corner to the next.

  “Don’t worry about today, Oscar. I’m gonna make this run, and you’re gonna pay me, and then we can go our separate ways. I think it’s time.” Finney was surprised the declaration had come so easily. He waited for a reply, but it never came. Oscar had ended the call. Finney didn’t know if he hadn’t heard what he’d said or simply didn’t give a shit. He tossed the phone on the dashboard, leaned back in his seat, and let out the breath he’d been holding. “Fuck.”

  “I know,” Monica said. “This traffic is awful.”

  Finney looked around hopelessly, as if a way out might exist. “I’ve gotta make this fucking flight.”

  “Why don’t you just book a later one?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a meeting.”

  “So change the meeting.”

  It made sense. It’s what a normal person in normal circumstances would do. But those people didn’t wake up on strange bathroom floors or get attacked by phantom dogs. They didn’t work for a man who listened to Nietzsche audio books and kept a full-time tailor on his payroll.

  This was actually the second tailor Oscar had employed. He’d set up the first one with a storefront that carried Oscar’s favorite brands. The boutique’s primary business was laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel that Oscar outfitted with weaponry. A lot of cash went through the store, and the tailor couldn’t help himself. He skimmed two hundred grand to buy a yellow diamond and a Maserati for his girlfriend. Alana, who kept Oscar’s books, discovered the missing money before the cartel noticed. Oscar had to replace the cash from his own pockets. He sent two of his people to kill the tailor and his girlfriend. No bodies were ever found, just the bloodstained Maserati.