The Fallen

by Ace Atkins

  “What are you thinking about, Caddy Colson?”

  “I can come up with a dozen Bible verses of why I should do this. And a dozen more why I should have patience.”

  “Ain’t no Bible verse about a man like Blue Daniels,” Boom said. “At least not in the New Testament. He’s a wicked, old-school motherfucker.”

  “You sure you know where he lives?”

  “Well,” Boom said. “I know where he stay at. He bailed out this morning. He won’t go home, ’cause if he go to his place, he might wake up shot. He’s staying with a woman named Dynasty Stewart. Dynasty’s sick in the head. She’s a thief. Can’t stop stealing stuff. Goes over to Tupelo and spends all day working the Walmart and shopping mall. Can’t leave Blue alone. Babies his ass.”

  “Just what did he do to you?”

  “See,” Boom said, “it went something like this. I beat his ass at spades one night down in the Ditch. Must’ve been three hundred dollars. Blue don’t like to lose. That little motherfucker come up on me outside Club Disco with a goddamn butcher knife as big as your arm.”

  “And he cut you?”

  “No,” Boom said. “But he said he was gonna gut me like a fish. Told me if I gave him the keys to my truck, he’d let me go. So I took that knife out of his hands and rammed his goddamn head into the door. When I stop, you can still see the dents from that man’s hard head.”

  “Then you let him go.”

  “Yeah,” Boom said. “But Blue wouldn’t quit. I had to leave him with a message not to fuck with me again. I was in no mood to be fucked with that night. You know how you get when you drink, not really seeing the world as it is but the way you want it to be?”

  “I don’t really remember,” Caddy said. “I was a straight blackout drunk.”

  “I guess you’d call me a mean drunk,” Boom said. “I bit that motherfucker’s ear off and spit it into the woods. He must’ve found it ’cause next time I saw him, I saw it was all sewn back together like Frankenstein. But, man, he was pissed. Told me next time we locked horns, he was gonna shoot me.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Shit.” Boom cut his eyes over at Caddy, turning off the Jericho Square and heading due south for Sugar Ditch, big hand on the wheel, cool breeze blowing through the cab. The whole cab smelling of cigarettes and pine air freshener that wasn’t doing its job. Boom drove with his left hand, the right metal appendage down on the gear shift, working it as good, or probably better, than someone with two hands. He smoked as he drove. Caddy stayed quiet, starting to think this was a hell of a bad idea.

  “I can talk to him,” Caddy said. “You can stay out of it.”

  “You think he’s a reasonable man?”

  They slowed and turned off a country road, running down into Sugar Ditch proper, the shanties and shotgun cottages running along that foul little creek bed where the plumbing flowed, heaped with washing machines and car parts, trash, and debris. Place smelled so bad that some of the old-timers said it was almost sweet, giving the decaying district its name.

  “I can try,” Caddy said.

  “No, ma’am,” Boom said. “You asked for my help. And now you got it.”

  Boom drove on up to a little alcove off the dirt road and killed the lights, engine still running. Both of them watching a faded green trailer up on blocks, glowing in the moonlight.

  “What now?” Caddy said.

  Boom reached for the door handle with his good hand and looked to her. “I’d leave it running,” Boom said. “If Blue comes out shooting, run over his ass.”

  11

  “Don’t worry, Ordeen,” Fannie said, her red Italian boots kicked up on her glass desk. “I didn’t call you up here to ream you out. I would’ve done that shit down on the floor. I called you up here to tell me a little more about your friends up in Memphis. The Twins.”

  “K-Bo and Shortbox?” Ordeen said. “They ain’t my friends. I’m just the delivery boy, Miss Fannie. I work for you.”

  “And whatever we talk about in this office stays right here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Above all things, I appreciate loyalty,” she said, reaching for her wooden box where she kept her cigarillos. “You’re as smart and loyal as they come.”

  The stocky black kid nodded, dressed in black pants and a red T-shirt saying VIENNA’S PLACE, the silhouette of a curvy girl in white. A former high school football player who might’ve gone on to bigger things if he hadn’t gotten mixed up with a football coach who preferred showering with children to winning games.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Appreciate that.”

  “You like those boys?”

  Ordeen shook his head. “They mean as fuck,” he said. “Just as soon put a bullet between your eyes as hug you. I ain’t never turned my back on either of ’em. Not that I can tell which one’s which.”

  “You’ve done real good since you came on with me,” Fannie said, choosing one of the stubby cigarillos and lighting up. “You helped me run some stuff with those boys that I’m not real proud of.”

  Ordeen nodded, showing her he understood she was talking about those girls who sometimes came through Tibbehah and made their way up to Memphis or over to Atlanta. He was a good, tough kid who knew how to keep them in line while keeping his damn mouth shut.

  “Mingo said you wanted to know how things look up there, around the wing shop and out back where they detail those cars.”

  “That’s right,” Fannie said, leaning back in her chair, cigarillo loose in her fingers. “The Twins have been down to Tibbehah, but I’ve never seen their operation.” Smoke trailed up into the swirling fan. Downstairs, the dance music pumped, shaking the office floor. It sounded like money.

  “Not much to it,” Ordeen said. “They got the restaurant out front called Wing Machine. Just a couple booths, not many places to sit. You order right there at the register. Those Twins make some mean wings. You better not go peepee after you done ’cause it will fucking tear you up.”

  “I’ll try and remember,” she said. “But what about the back room, facing the alley, where they run the detail shop?”

  “Oh, that,” Ordeen said. “Yeah, I been in there once with Nito. Twins don’t like anyone in that place they don’t know. That’s where they keep their shit and the money. You try not to look around or nothing, keep your eyes straight on the boys even through there’s a mountain of cash sitting right there on the table.”

  “Just sitting out in the open?”

  “They got a counter,” he said. “I figured they count it up and bundle it. I didn’t ask no questions. Truth be known, I wanted to get the hell out of there. Being around that much cash makes me nervous as hell. Especially with what happened to Craig Houston.”

  “I thought the Mexicans cut off his head.”

  “They did,” Ordeen said. “But it looked like the Twins were prepping in case they come back and finish them off, too.”

  “Lots of guns?”

  “Hell yes,” Ordeen said. “I mean, yes, ma’am. They got boys with rifles and shit, walking around like it’s the Old West. K-Box wears two guns on his waist, just ready for that back door to bust open and, pop-pop-pop, start taking out his niggas.”

  “Could you draw it for me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like this,” Fannie said, leaning forward, the deep V-neck of her dress spilling open. Not thinking it was a bad thing to let the kid get a peek at the goodies stuffed in that lacy black bra. She pushed a pad of paper toward him and tossed him a pen. “Like a diagram. Where do the Twins usually work? And where are the doors out the back and into the wing shop?”

  “Hard to remember, Miss Fannie.”

  “Try, Ordeen,” she said. “Do your best.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He started to draw, putting Xs in places for all the armed men he
’d seen. There were a whole lot of Xs by the time he finished up. The bass music kept on pounding the floor beneath them as she took the pad of paper and studied what Ordeen had drawn. For a kid who didn’t graduate high school, he had a real way with drawing. Maybe he could go to architecture school after he got tired of being a titty bar bouncer.

  “What’s that building there?”

  “That’s the detail shop,” Ordeen said. “It’s separate from Wing Machine. The wings is just part of that building. It’s in a strip mall, with a hair salon and another place sells cigarettes and bongs and shit. You want to get your car detailed, you roll around back into that metal building and they get started.”

  “You just roll on in?” Fannie said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Don’t ask questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ordeen said, standing up.

  “And don’t mention this to anyone,” Fannie said, blowing out some smoke. “Whatever happens to those Twins was of their own making. Nobody likes folks who are selfish. Nobody can just up and own Memphis. That’s a good way to get your dick in the deep fryer.”

  • • •

  Blue Daniels, or at least a man Caddy assumed to be Blue, stepped out of the trailer in a white undershirt and dark jeans and started waving around a pistol. Even with the sound of the motor running, she could hear his threats, telling Boom he was some kind of crazy son of a bitch showing up at his woman’s place. Boom put his hands up, stepping back into the dirt road, but Blue, a short black man with gold teeth, was not standing down, moving right for him.

  The gun went from being held down at his leg to pointing right at Boom’s chest, and Caddy didn’t even think about it. She knocked that beat-up truck into gear, hit the lights, and punched the gas. She must’ve knocked Blue Daniels five or six feet.

  As the dust cleared in the headlights, she threw open the door and walked to where Boom was standing over the man. She saw a gun in the road and picked it up, trying to give it to Boom, but he shook her off, making sure she kept it.

  “Not smart, Blue,” Boom said. “I told you to check yourself.”

  “Motherfucker,” Blue said, head lolling, eyes looking hazy in the dust, gravel marks on his bloodied face where he’d landed. “Goddamn.”

  Boom squatted down to look at him. He had big bug eyes and gold teeth, white tank top covered with dead grass, dirt, and blood. He had one ear that looked as if it had been chewed on.

  “I’m gonna kill your ass, Boom Kimbrough.”

  “You been promising that for a long time,” Boom said. “Guess my truck got in your way again.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  Caddy stood back from them, closer to the truck, holding the pistol in her hand, not pointing it but keeping it close and at the ready. She’d already shot one man in her life and she had no desire to do it again.

  “Need to ask you a question,” Boom said.

  “You run me over and now you want to talk?” Blue said. “What’s wrong with you, man? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You were running two girls,” Boom said. “Mexican girl named Ana Maria and a little black girl named Tamika Odum.”

  “What you mean ‘running’?” Blue said, his teeth shining a bright gold in the headlights, lip busted and bleeding.

  “Pimping,” Boom said. “You had those girls down at Cho Cho Porter’s juke last month. She wouldn’t let you inside and you were selling out some time in your truck. Go ahead, man. Go ahead and say I lie.”

  “You gone crazy.”

  “But I don’t lie,” Boom said, stepping up close and laying his big boot on Blue’s chest, pushing him down on the road. A woman appeared from the mouth of the trailer, yelling for them to stop, to leave Blue alone or she was going to call the police. She was screaming and carrying on and seemed to be every bit as crazy as Boom had promised.

  “I’ll call the sheriff,” Caddy said. “Fine by you?”

  “What’d you say those girls’ names was again?” Blue said. “I know a lot of girls.”

  “Tamika and Ana Maria,” Boom said. “A couple of damn kids, man.”

  Blue swallowed and wiped the blood from his face, still lying down in the center of the road, looking up at the big full moon, Caddy, standing back, obscured from his view behind the hot headlights. “They tole me they was eighteen.”

  “So you were running them?”

  “They ask me,” Blue said. “Goddamn. You know I’m in the life, player. Pussy is what I do. Some little girl want to throw it at me, it ain’t something I’m thinking on. I drive them to where they go and get paid.”

  “How much you get paid?”

  “What’s it matter?”

  As Boom stepped down hard with his boot on the center of Blue’s narrow chest, Blue let out a long whoosh of air and started kicking his legs in the air like he was riding a bicycle.

  “How much?”

  “Forty dollars.”

  “Girls were fifteen,” Boom said.

  “I ain’t their goddamn daddy,” he said, spitting out more blood. “They a couple damn hos. Not worth shit.”

  Caddy felt a little nudge somewhere down deep in her chest and she stepped out from behind the lights and ran for him. She kicked Blue hard enough in the ribs that he turned over, his face back down in the dirt.

  “Why you coming at me like this, Boom? You want to eat off my other ear, you sick son of a bitch?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Don’t know, man.”

  “You pimping them,” Boom said. “That means you keep on pimping them until they knocked-up. Or dead.”

  “Aw, c’mon.”

  “Let me call the sheriff,” Caddy said. “I’ll call him right now.”

  “And what?” Blue said. “You tell ’im you call me out and run me down with a truck?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Help me up,” Blue said. “I want to see who you got with you? Who that little white lady? So damn tough. You tough, little girl? You want to play some? Get on down in the dirt with ole Blue?”

  “You move another inch and I’ll bust you fucking wide open, man,” Boom said.

  Boom reached down and yanked the man up by his belt, setting him down on the ground like he was nothing but a bundle of sticks. The sudden movement of it, the big burst of the strength of Boom Kimbrough, threw Blue off and he had a hard time standing and keeping his feet. All bloody, his head swimming.

  “Those girls are gone.”

  “Where?” Caddy said.

  “Don’t know.”

  From down the dirt road, Caddy heard the deep rumbling of a big engine and flashing lights from the front of some kind of truck. A siren sounded, woop-woop, a couple of times, a spotlight beam flashing to where they stood looking down at Blue Daniels. His girlfriend had called the sheriff’s office down to the Ditch.

  “Talk quick,” Boom said.

  Blue looked down the road at the truck stopping, the sound of gravel crunching under boots as someone walked toward them. Caddy saw the tall shadow and heard the voice of Lillie Virgil telling them to all stand still, stay where they are, show their fucking hands. They all did as they were told.

  “I sold them,” Blue said under his breath.

  “What?” Caddy said.

  “I sold their ass to that white lady,” Blue said. “That madam at the truck stop. Fannie Hathcock.”

  12

  “Anyone moves,” Rick Wilcox yelled, “and I’ll shoot ’em right in the pussy.”

  Nobody moved. Especially the old women. Everyone was silent, kneeling in the middle of the Potts Camp bank, hands on top of their heads. It was the next morning, after shooting pool with the boys, and they were at it bright and early. Sixty miles from Memphis, a little town right up on the Holly Springs National Forest
, more than two hundred thousand acres of rolling hills, dense forests, and a good green swatch of Mississippi pines. They had the Kawasakis gassed and ready to go not five minutes from the bank.

  Opie worked the drawers that morning, Wilcox on overwatch, keeping the four tellers and two loan officers honest. Only one customer this morning, an elderly black man in oily coveralls making a two-hundred-dollar deposit. Wilcox told him to put his money in his pocket and get down on his knees. “We’re all gonna make America great again,” Wilcox said behind the Trump mask, unable to resist.

  Opie was quick, maybe quicker than Wilcox, hitting the drawers, and he stayed away from the vault. They’d hit the vault only if they knew it was a target-rich environment. This town wasn’t worth tacking on the time. No Walmart deliveries, no local factory payroll. Amazing what you could find out online.

  Opie tossed the sack over the drawers and vaulted himself up and over the teller’s desk. Wilcox looking at his watch, sixty seconds. Man, he was going to have to hear about that shit all the way back to Memphis. Nobody had done a faster exercise, even during the practice and training phase.

  Cord backed up the truck, this time the boys stealing a nice V-8 Tundra with a crew cab. He and Opie were out the door just as fast as they had entered, Wilcox throwing down a dummy IED, saying that if anyone got up within five minutes, they’d be picking body parts off the walls.

  Opie tossed the black bag in the truck bed and jumped in the backseat. Wilcox rode shotgun, leaving on the mask until they were well clear of the bank. They drove at a steady sixty miles an hour until they got to the turnoff into the forest. A local policeman passed them, hauling ass back toward the bank.

  “How much?” Wilcox said.

  “I don’t know,” Opie said. “Piss-poor. Maybe forty grand. At the most.”

  “Shit,” Wilcox said.