by Ace Atkins
I slipped back into my jacket and motioned to Abby. The band launched into their first song, the lyrics about souls slipping off into the Dark Side.
Chapter 43
PERFECT LEIGH WAS damned tired of waiting. She’d been sitting on her ass in the stinky French Quarter since noon, most of it in some nasty old burger joint where she’d watched this elderly cook ritualistically pick his nose, and now she wanted a little action. She was bored. And that was about the worse thing that you could make Perfect Leigh. When she got bored she got bad. She clicked her nails together. Nice color. Siren. She whispered the words to herself, her tongue flattening on the roof of her mouth, as a cold wind knocked down Royal Street and into the darkened bar.
Where was Jon? She’d gotten off the phone with Ransom thirty minutes ago and he said to go on and get what they needed. But Jon wanted to get the car ready, said they needed good parking as if they were goin’ shopping down at Maison Blanche.
She blew out a long breath, studying the fine curve of her nails in the candlelight.
Bar was called Lafitte’s. It was supposed to be some kind of historic site although it looked to Perfect as if it’d been slapped together with a bucket of concrete and rotten wooden beams. They didn’t have lights; each one of the tables was dim and yellow from little candles. No air-conditioning either. Its tall creaky doors had been propped open to breathe in the night’s snappy cold air.
Finally, Jon sauntered on in from the cold, lanky and determined, and sat across from her. His face nothing but a bearded black grin under his cowboy hat. “What time you got?”
“Almost midnight,” she said, studying the way his mouth formed words. She wondered how he’d say si-ren. “You park in Mississippi?”
Jon didn’t answer. His face pinched in the glow of the table’s candle. Dark circles seemed to grow under his eyes as he leaned close and he played with the rings on his fingers. “Did you see him?”
“He wasn’t there, only the black woman.”
Jon looked back at the open doors and felt at the side pocket of his jacket. Perfect watched his pistonlike leg and the way his jaw chomped on a whole pack of gum. Juicy Fruit. She hated Juicy Fruit. Reminded her of when she was in Biloxi and thirteen and her mother had paid off the pageant’s judge with a visit to Perfect’s room at the Motel Six.
“Why do you care about Travers so much?” she asked, trying to turn her head and not take a whiff of the sickly sweet gum.
“He killed me.”
She again studied his features under the Resistol’s brim.
“Years ago, I died and this man was responsible.”
“You’re insane. I knew you had some quirks but I refuse to work with a real life walking head case.”
A waitress came over and asked if they wanted another couple of Cokes. They said they didn’t, but she paid her a decent tip. Decent. Not enough to be remembered. She looked around the bar and noticed the way everyone ignored them. She’d taken a lot of care to look so ordinary. Didn’t brush her hair or make up her face. Even tried to slack her shoulders a bit so no one could notice her sculpted body.
“Sweet sister, I’m not crazy,” Jon said when the woman walked away. “The man took my holy name of Jesse Garon and my birthright as the brother of E. I died at Graceland one night. All the papers said so. They said I tried to steal E’s Sun God jumpsuit and the police shot me in the heart. They said my blood washed against E’s leather bedspread.”
Perfect listened but she couldn’t think of a response. She felt all the air in the bar heat and turn to vapor before floating away as if sucked into a vacuum.
“It wasn’t me,” Jon said. “It was another True Believer who stole my wallet at the motel. He took all the money I had and thought he could get away with my driver’s license because he, too, had the look. I guess he did. He’s dead. I’m dead. Now I’m invisible. I’m Jon Burrows who floats on the mist and kills people with a talent that the world will never understand.”
“So who are you?” Perfect asked.
“Just a believer on the path.”
His jagged curve of a smile and the soaking smell of puke and Quarter beer from the street was too much already. She wanted to get it done.
“Ready?” he asked, pulling out a cheroot and striking a match against the grain of the rickety table. A breeze buckled off the flagstone walk outside and across her face like a slap.
She nodded.
“And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fell from heaven,” Jon said as he stood and began their trek over several blocks to Conti.
When E shot the holiest of messages to his fans, the ‘68 Comeback Special, He only had a few words of advice to D.J. and Scotty who were backin’ Him up: “Tell it like it is and play it dirty.” It was the first time that E had been in front of a live audience in eight years because of the secret deal He’d made with the government and President Kennedy to make films and help America’s youth. That night in ‘sixty-eight, He couldn’t even sit in the chair with the guitar. All them emotions was bubblin’ up to the surface. It was like that now for Jon; he felt an overwhelming need to kill Travers. Why couldn’t he be there, too? That’s why he was here. On this path.
A few minutes later, he and Perfect rounded the turn of a forgotten section of the Quarter at the place Ransom told them about. JoJo’s. Jon remembered the place from a dream somewhere. The lights were off with only a couple of neon signs burning purple and green in the long, fat window.
A sad old blues song played from the jukebox and floated out the open doors as a couple of men walked out carrying guitars and drums. One had a saxophone. The man with the sax, dressed like a Sun Records daddy in bowling shirt and baggy pants, hugged the neck of a large nigra woman before piling into the van with the others and disappearing down toward the Mississippi River.
“That her?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “If he comes back, Ransom said you could.”
Jon felt for the gun in his pocket. “It’s been a long time, Jack.”
“What?”
“It’s like a surge of electricity goin’ through you when you kill,” he said. “It’s almost like making love, but it’s stronger than that. . . . Sometimes I think my heart is gonna explode.”
“He’s not here yet.”
“He will be,” Jon said. “I sense him.”
“Jon?”
He stopped halfway across Conti. A gaggle of businessmen in crooked party hats and drunker than a herd of goats filtered by them. Jon rubbed his beard, nodding at the neon lights quittin’ in the bar’s windows and the front door beginning to close.
All along the street, the buildings were real dark and vacant and seemed to wrap over him in a curve like in King Creole. Midnight in the French Quarter. Wooden business signs flappin’ from under balconies. Gas lamps burnin’ from a corner restaurant. He reached into his jacket for the pistol and nodded.
They hustled inside the bar, front door unlocked, as they saw the nigra woman turning chairs upside down onto the tables scattered by a stage.
“We closed,” she said, not even turning to look at them.
The woman moved real careful, unlit, and kind of shadowed across the dance floor. Jon walked backward to the door and slid the dead bolt into place with a solid thunk.
The woman slapped another chair onto the table and sunk her hands onto her tremendous hips: “Money gone, you sons a bitches. Got a couple cops about to roll by in two seconds, so you best get yo’ trashy asses back to Bourbon Street.”
Jon struck a match to his cheroot.
The jukebox glowed green and scattered twirling patterns across Perfect’s face and the woman’s. He hung back and waited for Perfect to begin the show. He watched through random spots in the glass for Travers.
Perfect walked four steps forward. The gun inches from the big woman’s heart. “No money,” she said.
The big woman nodded in the darkness, her face crossed with the knowin’.
“Your brot
her,” Perfect said. “Where is he? We’re not leavin’ till you tell us.”
“Well, then I’ll be cookin’ y’all breakfast,” she said. “ ’Cause I don’t know. Why? He owe y’all some money, too? If you see him, tell him he still owes me from nineteen sixty-five.”
Jon clamped the cheroot between his teeth and blew smoke into the green light. Funny twirling patterns of color and grayness passed over his eyes.
Perfect pressed a gun into the woman’s ribs and the woman held still. She glanced at Jon’s face and then returned her gaze to Miss Perfect. She nodded slowly and pressed her palms flat upon a barroom table. Leaning. She kept nodding.
“Okay,” she said. “I got you. . . . But what you want Clyde for? He’s a sick man.”
Perfect ground the gun into her ribs. “Where is he? Where in Memphis? You give us an address, we have someone check it out and we’re out of your life. All right?”
“Okay,” the woman said. “Okay.”
“Where is he?” Perfect screamed. Then she looked over at Jon and the woman and shook her head like the whole dang situation made Miss Perfect sad. “I’m way too good for this,” she said.
The woman gave Perfect a good ole once-over from the shoes to her uncombed hair. She shook her head like Perfect wasn’t fit to spit-shine the bar’s toilets. “Sister, I don’t know what your man got on you, but you need to get your trashy country ass out of the big city. It’s showin’ all about you.”
Perfect gritted her teeth and rammed the handle of that old Colt she was carryin’ into the woman’s stomach, making her drop to her knees and start coughin’.
“I ain’t trash,” Perfect screamed. “Now where is he?”
Jon knew time was short. Answers had to come.
He knelt down and whispered, “Ole woman, where is he?”
Perfect grabbed Jon by the edge of his collar and yanked him away, “This is mine. Go outside!”
She pushed the gasping woman onto her back and began knocking beer bottles and half-filled glasses to the floor. Perfect kicked the jukebox, stopping some sad blues song cold, and walked over to a row of black-and-white photos of people Jon guessed were famous singers. She started cracking the glass frames with the butt of her gun. A bunch of ’em came crashing down and Perfect kicked and skidded them in jagged pieces across the floor.
She yelled again, “Where is he?”
The old woman got to her feet and smoothed her dress over her hips. Jon wandered over to the two, big ole roughshod doors and looked out the window. No one. Dead street. He crossed his arms across his chest and looked at the floor.
“We know he’s in Memphis!” Perfect said, walking real quick like across the wooden floor and aimed the gun straight at the woman’s forehead. “You have two seconds.”
“Sister, you trip on power. Don’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“Think it brings you out of that backward upbringin’?”
“Shut up!”
“Look at you, gun in hand. Greasy-ass boyfriend. No five-hundred-dollar shoes can change what you are. You left the country but that pig shit sure stuck to you.”
Miss Perfect looked down for a moment at some fancy shoes she’d been wearin’ since Memphis, her mouth forming a big O.
She jumped a step back in surprise before she shot that big ole nigra woman right in the chest.
The woman reeled backward, knockin’ down and crackin’ chairs as she fell. Her scream deep and throaty and seemed to shake the whole dang bar. Everything vibratin’ around Jon’s head.
His head jammin’ and heart jackknifin’ in his chest.
Perfect looked down and admired the gun in her hand. She watched the fallen woman, loose and bleedin’ on the floor, and started to grin. She didn’t know she had it in her.
“Miss Perfect,” Jon yelled. “We didn’t come for that. Dang, you screwed us all now. We ain’t got squat.”
He ran to the window and looked outside. All right. They hadn’t worn gloves and he didn’t know what kind of gun she’d used or who owned it. This wasn’t a hit. You set a dang hit up real different. If he’d killed Travers tonight, his gun would come back to a crack dealer in south Memphis.
“Miss Perfect. Miss Perfect.”
“Let’s go.”
“We can’t. That your gun?”
She nodded.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it.”
Jon’s leg started aheavin’ and jumpin’ right where he stood until he ran over to the long wood, Mardis Gras beads drippin’ down from glass rack like a fancy curtain. He plucked a couple bottles of gin and whiskey from a row of booze and started pourin’ all over the place. Over the scarred ole bar and the floor and the jukebox and even the old nigra woman who lay still on the floor.
“Goddamn,” Perfect screamed. “What the hell are you doin’?”
“Savin’ your skin, woman.”
He kicked the backdoor with the heel of his boots. His mind racin’ back in time to a day locked away in his soul. Mamma wasn’t breathin’ either. Mamma wasn’t breathin’ either.
“It’s all clean,” he said, tossing the cheroot onto the bar and watching a bluish-yellow blaze kick up and begin to smolder and burn in the wood. A poof of air sucking from the room.
A couple of them old, dusty-as-hell photos began to crack and fall as if the old woman’s scream had awoken them dead singers one last time.
Jon yelled to Perfect to follow: “Last train to Memphis, sister.”
As the smoke gathered and flames grew, the jukebox sputtered and crackled to life one last time. Its weak lights pumped and dimmed with a scratchy, slow-moving 45 record that seemed to mirror that of a weak woman’s heart.
Chapter 44
I HEARD THE SIRENS about halfway across Canal Street while I walked toward Royal and back into the Quarter. I’d left Abby at my warehouse, locked up tight and watching reruns of Josie and the Pussycats, after I got the call from Loretta that she was closing up. I’d hopped a streetcar and was even planning on seeing if Loretta wanted to get a cup of café au lait down at DuMonde — it was that kind of cool night — and talk about the things that we couldn’t discuss around JoJo. But as soon as I rounded the turn in a swift jog down Conti and saw the smoke surging above the high rooftops, I felt my stomach drop from me and my throat clench. I broke into a full run down the crooked sidewalk and past the all-night bars and executive strip clubs.
Outside, there were two fire trucks and an ambulance. Two hulking firemen were lashing their hoses to a hydrant when I yelled that there was someone inside. I didn’t even see their reaction as I kicked in the two big Creole doors, the battered wood breaking away as if paper, and running inside. The smoke was so thick and bulging, blackened and coiled, that I dropped to my knees and squinted into the room lit by the orange flames eating away the walls and crawling live and blue on the brick in a crisscrossed scrawl.
I saw a hand.
I crawled for her, almost touching her fingers, when three men pulled me away. I saw two others picking up Loretta and dragging her from the building. She wasn’t moving.
In the clearing of tearing eyes, ragged and stinging, I saw the blood across her dress.
I crawled away from the men trying to give me oxygen and ran to her as they loaded her into the ambulance and sped away. I ran after the ambulance for a few blocks, coughing in spasms, until I bent over and tried to steady my breathing with my hands on my knees.
The ambulance screamed, lights twirling and scattering on the old buildings, all the way to Decatur and heading to Charity.
I ran back to JoJo’s and a fireman confirmed that’s where they’d taken her.
I stood at the bar for a moment watching the smoke pouring from the broken plate glass window and snaking from the broken twin doors. Dozens of firefighters held firm, washing the fire down as it continued to eat away the chairs, tables, jukebox, bar, and vintage photographs and posters. All that heat. The heat felt like a sunburn across my fa
ce where I held myself. Paralyzed.
The sound of cracking. Brick buckling.
I turned to find a phone.
But he was already there.
JoJo watched his business of thirty-five years curl and bend with that pressure and heat. His expression dropped and froze as I watched someone that he didn’t know tell him about Loretta. As I walked to him, he saw me.
JoJo turned his back and got into his Cadillac, speeding away.
Abby and I found JoJo a little after 3:00 A.M.. at Charity Hospital. I’d picked her up, worried they’d head over to the warehouse next. He sat in an anonymous room full of dozens of vending machines and scattered tables and chairs sipping coffee from a paper cup with an old teammate of mine, Teddy Paris, and his brother Malcolm. They owned a small rap label called Ninth Ward Records and were a hell of a nice couple of guys. But lately they’d been making quite a chunk of change. So much that I overheard 300-pound Teddy telling JoJo he’d pop a cap in the bastard who torched JoJo’s bar and shot Loretta. “Just a word,” Teddy said. “And it gets done.”
Teddy was no gangster. But it was that kind of night.
Abby and I joined JoJo.
The Paris brothers politely left, swearing their return.
“Teddy shoot himself if he tried to use a gun,” JoJo said, lazy and unfocused to no one in particular.
“I don’t know who called him.”
JoJo nodded.
I felt raw and beaten. I’d had to wake up Abby from the couch where she’d fallen asleep. Her eyes were dazed and unfocused. But she seemed determined to go with me the same way victims of crimes want to help others to ease their own pain.
I got a cup of coffee. Abby just sat there and tried to smile at JoJo.
JoJo watched the wall.
“Heard the surgery went fine,” I said.
He nodded.
JoJo had on a gray cardigan over a black golf shirt. As I reached for his shoulder, I noticed he was still wearing bedroom slippers.