Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  “This looks great,” Dave said, fists on his waist as he surveyed the yard. “How much do I owe you?”

  “You got me out of a tight spot with that policeman. I’d say we’re square.”

  “Fair enough.” Dave nodded. “You drink beer? I got some cold Bud in the fridge.”

  “That sounds good.”

  Beer cans in hand, the two men settled on Adirondack chairs that had been arranged on the veranda. Quincy made himself comfortable between Dave’s feet.

  For a long moment, the men sat quietly, while the sounds of the neighborhood went on around them. Cars whizzing to and fro; the snapping of a nail gun as someone worked on a house; an ambulance warbling in the distance. The American flag in the front yard rippled in the autumn breeze.

  “What brought you to this neck of the woods?” Dave finally asked. “You haven’t lived here long. What’s it been, a week?”

  “You don’t miss a thing, do you?” Payne took a sip of beer. He almost coughed at the bitterness of the brew; it was his first drink in eleven years. “Yeah, a little over a week.”

  “I’ve been walking these old sidewalks around here every day for four decades. I don’t need to watch the news to know what’s going on. You live with the dinks.”

  “The what?”

  “Dinks. Means dual income, no kids.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  “Our neighborhood’s full of them. They’re renovating all the old homes. I’m glad to see it, for the most part. Some of these houses had gone to shit. Only thing I don’t like is my property taxes have hit the ceiling, but, well, that’s the price of progress, I guess.”

  “My brother offered me a place to stay,” Payne said. “Meanwhile, I’m helping them renovate their house. I’m also working on starting my own thing too—I’ve always been good with my hands.”

  “There’s always work for a man good with his hands.” Dave took a sip of his beer, burped. “You got any training?”

  “HVAC is my specialty, but I’m versatile.”

  A sudden coughing fit wracked Dave. It was the deep, bone-rattling cough of a long-time smoker. As the man bent forward, hacking, Payne noticed the gold necklace dangling from his neck: from it hung a pendant shaped like a judge’s gavel.

  I can’t believe it, barely a week out of the joint and I’m drinking beer at a judge’s house, Payne thought, and almost felt dizzy at the idea.

  When the coughing episode finally passed, Dave wiped his lips with a checkered handkerchief. “Listen, I oughta have you take a look at my furnace,” he said. “I got a guy who comes out twice a year, in spring for the AC and in fall for the furnace, and he always finds some new way to charge me more money. I’ve been telling Edna we’ve got to find someone else before the guy eats up my whole pension check.”

  “Well, I’m your man,” Payne said, and handed him a flyer.

  Dave skimmed the paper, nodded. “I’ll give you a call, then. I’ll pass the word around to my neighbors too. My word carries some weight here.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir.”

  * * *

  Lisa, the cute lady from the print shop, called Payne a week later. She lived with her mother in a town house on Boulevard. Their washing machine had gone on the fritz and required a new fuse. Payne ran out to Home Depot, came back, and repaired the appliance in less than an hour.

  “It’s so nice to know a man who can fix things,” she said as he was wrapping up. “My daddy was like that. Anytime something in the house was broken, he found a way to put it back together.”

  “I’m glad I could help you.” He tried to keep from appraising her figure, which was even more comely outside of her work uniform. He decided to take a chance. “Do you like coffee?”

  “I do.” She smiled. “Why?”

  “There’s a coffee shop around the corner. I figure sometime soon, you and I can meet there and get to know each other a little better.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Payne could barely suppress his grin as he pedaled his bicycle back home. Joseph was already there. He had the flat-screen television in the living room tuned to the evening news.

  “There was an armed robbery in the neighborhood last night,” Joseph said. “Over on Milledge, three guys in Halloween masks held up a woman at gunpoint. They snatched her purse and pistol-whipped her.”

  “Shit,” Payne said.

  * * *

  Two days later, on a Saturday afternoon that felt like summer, Payne was on a ladder, cleaning leaves out of the gutters on their house, when he saw Malcolm wander outdoors. For a teenager who’d dropped out of school, he was rarely home—though Payne had a good theory about what the kid spent his time doing all day.

  “Yo, young buck!” Payne shouted. “You up for learning how to shoot that rock?”

  “Whatever, dude,” Malcolm called back, but he picked up his basketball and sauntered across the street. “Where you wanna go?”

  They found an outdoor basketball court at a nearby school. Payne had worried that it might be crowded, but there was no one there. Did teenagers play outside anymore?

  “Let’s do this.” Malcolm peeled off his jacket. He wore a Warriors throwback jersey underneath, his bare, noodle-thin arms exposed.

  “You need to hit the gym, son.” Payne stripped down to his own T-shirt. He flexed his thick, muscled arms.

  “You been hittin’ them prison weights,” Malcolm said. “Don’t matter, though, I’m still gonna school you.”

  They played a game of twenty-one. He had assumed the kid was good, but he was better than Payne had thought, with a vicious crossover move and a silky jumper that he could rain down from damn near twenty-five feet. He beat Payne in the first game, twenty-one to eight, and he was barely sweating.

  Payne bent over at midcourt, breathing hard.

  “You need some oxygen?” Malcolm grinned.

  Payne straightened. “Let’s go again.”

  The next game was tighter. Payne had determined Malcolm’s pattern and how to cut it off. And Malcolm couldn’t stop him from muscling close to the rim. Payne won by nine.

  “Tiebreaker, man,” Malcolm said, face flushed.

  “Tell me what you know about the car break-ins,” Payne said. “And the stick-up of that white woman the other night.”

  “You think I had something to do with that?” Malcolm scowled. “You a snitch or something?”

  “Just concerned. Mostly about you. Your future.”

  “What the fuck do you care about my future? You ain’t my daddy.” Malcolm flung the ball at Payne, who caught it. “Play the game, old man.”

  The last game was closely contested. Malcolm unveiled some new tricks; Payne switched his strategy too. They grunted and cursed, sneakers slapping against pavement, while the October sun baked the sweat on their skin and the occasional breeze sent dead leaves swirling across the court.

  Payne won the game by one point, on a twenty-foot bank shot.

  “Fuck!” Nostrils flaring, Malcolm threw the ball against a fence, veins standing out on his neck, and in that one instant, Payne got a glimpse at the kind of errant violence of which the boy was capable.

  Payne retrieved the ball. He wiped perspiration from his brow with the tail of his shirt, flipped the ball back to the kid.

  “You know, you could be All-State,” Payne said. “If you were in school.”

  “Man, whatever. Don’t try to pump up my ego after you won and shit.”

  “Just stating the truth. I was All-State in ’98.”

  “Damn, no wonder.” Malcolm shook his head. “You didn’t play in college?”

  “Played a year at Georgia Tech before I got kicked out.”

  “Kicked out for what?”

  “Being dumb, but thinking I was smarter than everyone.” Payne pulled on his sweatshirt. “I wasted my potential. It’s taken me almost twenty years to get back on the right track.”

  Malcolm laughed. “Right track? You ain’t got shit. You ride around town
on a damn bike and live with them gay dudes.”

  Payne merely smiled. “All a matter of perception, young buck. What’s your story?”

  “Hell you mean?” Malcolm lobbed a shot at the basket. “I ain’t got no story.”

  “You’re adopted. Your folks give you a wide berth since you’ve apparently dropped out of school, and they aren’t sweating you about it too much.”

  “What the fuck they gonna do?” Malcolm cracked a smile. “They can’t make me do shit. We ain’t blood.”

  “How old were you when they adopted you?”

  “Shit, like just a baby, man.” Malcolm deftly dribbled the ball between his legs. “I don’t even remember my birth mom or nothing.”

  “Or your father.”

  “Fuck you think?” Malcolm glared at him, shot the ball. “I ain’t got no real family.”

  “I’m sorry, Malcolm,” Payne said. “But it sounds like your folks have been taking good care of you. That’s got to count for something.”

  Malcolm shrugged. “What about you, old head? What’s your story?”

  Contemplating his words, Payne looked past the kid and off into the distance. In a grassy field beside the school, a little boy and his father were flying a kite, bright red streamers fluttering against pure blue sky. “I took some people’s lives,” he said quietly.

  “Oh shit.” Malcolm stopped middribble. “You popped more than one?”

  “Four. My sentence was for the one the state could prove to a jury.”

  Malcolm sat on top of the basketball as if all the strength had drained out of his legs. Thin arms crossed over his knees, he looked up at Payne, and Payne imagined how this boy might have been at a much younger age, before life had clouded his vision. He regretted that he’d told him the truth.

  But as his nana had liked to say, you can’t unring the bell.

  “They owed me money,” Payne said. “Back in those days, the way I rolled . . . well, that was unforgivable.”

  Malcolm had lowered his gaze to the asphalt. Payne started walking back home. After a moment’s hesitation, Malcolm got up and followed.

  * * *

  On the night of Halloween, while neighborhood kids were trick-or-treating, Payne was in the cellar of Dave’s house servicing the furnace. Dave stood nearby and watched him; his wife Edna was upstairs passing out candy to the visiting children.

  Before taking him into the basement, Dave had revealed the vehicle that he kept covered and stored underneath his carport. It was a 1965 Corvette Stingray coupe, skyblue and in stellar condition. He drove it only a couple times a month, and only on Sundays.

  The finished basement was as meticulously maintained as the rest of the house, and a virtual museum to Dave’s long-time interest in classic Corvettes. Miniature models of the sports car stood in display cases, and photos of his annual visits to the Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, adorned the brick walls.

  Although the Victorian was generations old, a new furnace had been installed fifteen years ago, much to Payne’s relief. He had a lot of experience working on natural gas systems such as this one. After shutting off the furnace, he removed the combustion chamber door and burner cover.

  “Looks to be in fine condition,” Payne said. “I’ll check out the flames and then clean the burners.”

  “Saw you hanging out with that teenage kid a few days back.” Dave sipped beer from a can in an Atlanta Braves koozie. “Looked like you two were chattin’ it up real good.”

  “Man, you really don’t miss any details, do you?”

  “You know what they say, the king has a thousand eyes.” Dave grinned.

  The subtle shift in the man’s tone made Payne pause in his labors. He lowered his hand to the toolbox, wrapped his fingers around the Phillips screwdriver.

  “I want to know what you’ve been talking to my boy about.” Dave still held the beer, but his other hand had slid into the pocket of his denim overalls. “He’s beginning to show some reluctance to carry out his responsibilities.”

  “What’s going on here?” Payne asked. “I just came by to work on your furnace, man.”

  “Do you think I don’t know your history?” Dave’s ice-blue eyes, nested within the bifocals, were slitted like a snake’s. “I’m seventy-eight-years old and ten years retired from the bench, but I haven’t lost a step, friend. I pulled your file the first day I saw you.”

  “The cop who questioned me . . .”

  “Works for me, of course. Malcolm works for me. I’m bringing him along slow, letting him and the boys work their way up the chain, doing small muscle jobs for me here and there. Till you showed up trying to play daddy. I can be okay with that, but on one condition.”

  Payne tensed, grip still on the screwdriver. “What’s that?”

  “You’ve gotta work for me too.” Dave chuckled. “Hey, in a sense, you already are, right? But I want to bring you into my business.”

  “I thought your business was sitting on the bench passing judgment, probably putting away kids like Malcolm for life.”

  “I’m a distributor at heart. I get medicines of choice into the hands of a select clientele of upscale individuals, like many of our fine residents here in Grant Park. Hydrocodone, Valium, Ritalin. Other things. Whatever the customers want. Sometimes to keep the operation running smoothly, I need to send, shall we say, stronger messages to various parties at different points in the chain.”

  “You want me for enforcement.”

  “Like I said before, there’s always work for a man good with his hands. You’re skilled with a knife from what I hear, not afraid to get dirty.” Dave grinned, a joyless expression. “You want to hang out with the kid, you work for me. Actually, that’ll be a bonus, ’cause you’ll work for me whether you want to or not. I’ve got your parole officer on speed dial, friend.”

  Still a prisoner, Payne thought. What kind of fool was I to think I could be set free from the past?

  Dave started coughing, that old smoker’s cough, and as the spasm wracked his frame, Payne lunged at him, raising the screwdriver high. Dave’s eyes widened, and he started to withdraw his hand from his pocket, but Payne brought the screwdriver down with tremendous force, square into the man’s sternum, cracking the plate of bone and puncturing his heart. Dave reflexively squeezed the trigger of the snub-nosed .38 revolver that was half out of his pocket. The gun’s report was like a bomb blast in the enclosed space, and the hollow-point bullet blew through Payne’s upper thigh, causing him to lose his balance and fall on top of the dying old man.

  Shit, shit, shit. The word looped through Payne’s mind in a mad cadence. Shit.

  He heard rapid footfalls thumping across the ceiling. Beneath him, Dave was gasping, his glasses askew on his face. Payne ripped the necklace from around his neck and slowly rose to his feet. Numbness spread through his wounded leg, and a bloodstain oozed across his jeans. He felt no pain yet, but that would come soon enough.

  Dave had breathed his last breath. He lay in a growing pool of crimson, the screwdriver sticking like an exclamation point out of his chest.

  It was the fifth time Payne had killed a man—but it was the first time he’d felt good about it.

  Clutching the necklace in his fist, Payne staggered to the narrow staircase. He was halfway up the stairs when the door at the top flew open.

  Edna was up there, dressed for the holiday in an orange and black dress. “What’s going on down there?” she asked. “Is Dave okay?”

  Payne nudged her aside and got out of there. Darkness had settled over the city, the neighborhood lit with glowing jack-o’-lanterns. One leg dragging, blood dripping from the cuff of his jeans, he staggered along the sidewalks. Kids in Halloween costumes saw him struggling past and screamed in mock terror, assuming he was putting on an act for the holiday, and someone snapped a photo of him with a cell phone.

  He collapsed in the front yard of Malcolm’s house, fingers digging into the cold grass. He struggled to sit up, but the wound was worse than he
had thought. The bullet must have damaged his femoral artery.

  “Old head?” Malcolm’s voice, sharp with concern. The kid bent over him, tears glistening in his eyes. “What the fuck happened?”

  “Free,” Payne whispered, and pressed the necklace into Malcolm’s palm. “You’re . . . free . . . now . . . but . . . I . . . never . . . was . . .”

  The boy looked at the cold necklace in his hand, and through his tears he could make out the unmistakable pendant, the judge’s gavel. A stone loosened in his heart. He held the cooling hand of the man who lay on the ground, and did not let go until the paramedics arrived.

  Kill Joy

  by Sheri Joseph

  East Atlanta

  When I pulled into my driveway near midnight, just off my shift at the Earl, a person was standing at the mailbox. Creeped me out. The street was a sleepy one usually, composed of tidy, two-bedroom brick ranches built in the fifties. Most of the neighbors were elderly. Crime reports, which clustered around streets farther south or closer to the Village, had lately spiked with muggings, carjackings, a pattern of ambushes as people arrived home. But on our street, nothing like that, nothing worse than a stolen lawn mower now and then, the stray kick-in when people were away. If a decoration disappeared off a porch or mail went missing, it was probably only Miss Joy.

  The carport security lights came on as I parked and looked back. The person, who seemed alone and not large or furtive, remained in place. I didn’t see a waiting vehicle, as in the other ambushes reported on the listserv. Getting out with caution, I heard a hoarsely feminine sobbing, a gasping for breath. “Help me,” she wailed, but didn’t step into the driveway, as if an invisible fence blocked the property line. “Call the police. There’s a man. He’s at my house. He’s gonna kill me!”

  “Okay,” I called back, moving up the walk as fast as I could, just wanting to get inside. Had to be Miss Joy, though she didn’t ordinarily speak, not in sentences with words in them. Next door, her house lay in darkness, no car in her drive, no person visible. “I’ll call them. Right away.”

  “Promise!” she shouted. “Oh, please.” So many words, arranged in civilized patterns, with real fear in her voice—why shouldn’t there be a man? Had she run up to me, I might have considered bringing her inside for her safety.