Wicked City (30 page)

I knocked again, harder.

“If you don’t stop that, I’m going to blow a hole through that goddamn door.”

“This is Sheriff Murphy,” I said. “Just checking up to make sure y’all are all right.”

“Mr. Murphy?” There was the sound of a heavy fist against a wall, and I heard the man begin to cry, not a sniffling kind of cry but a deep broken wail that almost rattled the house. “It’s me, Phil.”

“May I come in?”

The wail only grew louder, and I tried the doorknob.

A mammoth blast blew out two front windows by the door, and I dropped to the beaten porch, covering my head with my hands. Two more deputy cars arrived and shone their lights up onto the shotgun house while I crawled back behind the safety of the patrol cars. I stood and ran my hands over my filthy suit.

“Doesn’t want to talk?” Jack Black asked.

“How’d you get that idea?”

Black nodded. “Want to flush him out?”

“Guess we have to.”

Two other deputies I’d taken on rolled behind the house with scoped hunting rifles, and Black and Quinnie stayed behind the doors of the car. I took out a 16-gauge Browning, a Sweet Sixteen, from the trunk of the Chevy and closed the trunk with a hard clack.

An hour later, the man yelled for one of you sonsabitches to come on in and work out his terms of freedom.

“Terms of freedom?” Black asked.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, hell,” I said, handing the shotgun to Jack.

I walked up the broken steps again to the porch, unarmed and with my hands in the air. I stepped to the open door that let out a hot, filthy smell like a mouth of a human and called out the man.

I moved inside, where the air seemed superheated and dimly lit with a kerosene lantern. Something moved to my left, in the corner of my eye, and I turned and saw a big man with no shirt and dirty brown trousers holding another lantern to his face. A large red welt covered half of his face, dropping it into red shadow, a partial mask.

“She threw hot mush on me.”

I nodded.

“I beat her for it. I cain’t let something like that go.”

“Where’s she?”

“She in with the kids, got a butcher knife in her hands as long as my arm.”

“You shoot her?”

“I tried, but the dang bitch moves too fast.”

“She stab you?”

He shined the light onto his side, showing a bloodied shirt. “Sort of,” he said. “Mr. Murphy, you don’t remember me, do you?”

I looked at him.

“I used to come in the filling station all the time. Had that ’49 Hudson with all them brake problems. You set me up that time when I couldn’t pay for gas. I brung it back to you.”

“Sure, partner,” I said.

The man smiled and nodded.

And I began to walk through the hall of the shotgun, noting holes in the wall and blood smears. I pulled a flashlight from my pocket.

“Mr. Murphy?” I turned back, facing the front door. “Cain’t let her go. You understand. She said she’s going back to Atlanta to be with her folks and I cain’t understand that. You know what I mean. A woman cain’t just decide something like that.”

I kept walking. I heard a cylinder click into a gun.

I turned back to look at the man and the man saw something in my eyes that made him lower the hammer.

I flashed the light into a small room with wooden walls and floor. Three small iron beds running side to side. Against the wall, and in the narrow scope of light, I twisted my head to see a small woman with a bloodied face, nose broken and bent, crying into the shoulder of a child not even two years old.

She had welt marks on her neck and cigarette burns across her forearms. Her face looked like a piece of rotten fruit.

“Come on, ma’am.”

“Where?” She snuffled and coughed.

“Out of here.”

I turned to the hall, and the man stood with the kerosene lantern in his left hand and the .38 to his head.

“They cut the power Tuesday before last. I ain’t had work since all you shut down the town.”

“Where’d you work?”

“Atomic Bomb Café, for Mr. Yarborough,” he said. “Worked for Mr. Yarborough for fifteen years.”

I kept the flashlight low, and across a table I saw a milk bottle half empty and an open bag of white bread. Three bowls sat on the table with a mush that looked like gray paste.

“You try the mills?”

He nodded. “They ain’t ate in three days. I brung all this and all that woman did was cuss me out.”

He screwed the gun into his ear, ramrod straight, and shut his eyes.

“Phil.”

Jack Black moved through the open front door, a hulking, silent shadow, a shotgun perched in his shoulder, the barrel stretched out before him. A floorboard creaked, and the man closed his eyes.

The man took a breath, not making a sound, tears running down his scalded face. He opened his eyes, as if coming wide awake, and dropped the gun, it falling with a clack to the floor.

“This town is a goddamn mess,” he said. “Why’d you do that, Mr. Murphy? Why’d y’all go and do that?”

JOHNNIE AND MOON SLIPPED BACK OVER THE COUNTY LINE
sometime that night. Johnnie had stolen one of those new Dodges, a Custom Royal Lancer convertible with a big ole V-8. He’d seen it on the commercial where they called it having “Flair Fashion,” and with a personality as new as tomorrow’s headlines. The damn dashboard looked like something in an airplane, quick and round, right there before him. Nice two-tone paint job in pink and black, with fat whitewalls, and tight-nubbed fins in back. He popped on the lighter in the dash and told Moon to get his fat fucking feet off the dash ’cause he was acting just like a durn nigger.

Moon grunted and shifted, a shotgun between his legs. Johnnie didn’t think he’d ever seen Moon without the shotgun, almost an extension of his hand as he walked around his still, checking the corn liquor coming out and stoking that fire. That fat sonofabitch was stupid as hell but kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t too sure about Reuben these days. On account of the way he acted when he’d offered up robbing Hoyt Shepherd. He didn’t figure Reuben had gone straight, but maybe he’d gone soft, like he was thinking of getting a job for a living.

That man had been crooked since before the war. Johnnie remembered seeing him take a five-hundred-dollar payday, right there in the back of Hoyt’s Southern Manor, to take a dive on some no-talent wop from Philadelphia who he could’ve pounded into the canvas with one hand.

“You with me?”

Moon grunted.

“If they stop us,” he said, “we just huntin’.”

Moon nodded.

“Listen, you know Veto’s Trailer Park? Right down the road from the Skyline Club and the El Dorado Motel?”

Moon nodded.

“We get in there, get the work done, and we’ll be on our way. We can get rid of the mess somewhere downriver.”

Johnnie’s eyes caught the intermittent flash of streetlights up on telephone poles as he turned down Crawford Road. He looked at a group of soldiers standing and talking in the parking lot of Sam’s Motel and shook his head.

“They make me sick,” he said. “They act like they own the goddamn town. If they didn’t have all those tanks and guns, I’d personally ace them off the goddamn planet.”

The fall air felt good from the open top of the convertible and he took a hit from the pint between his legs. He rolled slow and easy, not caring if they spotted the car because they’d ditch the car sometime later tonight and steal another.

He listened to the radio and turned down the road to Opelika and passed by Kemp’s Drive-In and the Hillbilly Club and turned in to Veto’s Trailer Park, the white lights in the crooked arrow calling them on in.

Moon spit out of the window and broke apart the shotgun, thumbing in a couple shells from the bib of his overalls. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and hoisted his fat ass up out of the Dodge. The whole car flattened down for a moment as he balanced on the door, and then he waddled toward the Airstream, a perfect little stainless steel egg of a trailer, walking with no gun, only a good ten feet of rope in his hand.

“YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAD?”

“No,” Billy said. “I came to see you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not with them,” he said. “Can we go to the office?”

We’d just come back from King’s Row, Billy coming up from the back door to the sheriff’s office and meeting us inside the chain-link parking lot. He was cold and his teeth chattered, standing in a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

He seemed glad we went back to my office, and I closed the door behind us.

“Can I have a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, and I got him one from a pot Jack had made that morning, smelling bitter and burnt.

The kid didn’t seem to notice and drank it down anyway.

“Your dad is getting out tomorrow.”

“You think he killed Mr. Patterson?”

I looked to him, the question coming out of nowhere.

I shook my head. “Why do you say that?”

“I just figured that’s why you brought him in.”

“We brought him in on two counts of running a gambling establishment and a bunch of other charges on violating the liquor laws and having slots.”

“Is he going to jail?”

I shrugged. “He may. How bad is that coffee?”

“Tastes fine to me.”

I sat on the edge of my desk. Billy’s right leg jumped up and down with nerves, reminding me of the way I felt before a fight, wanting to go ahead and get to it.

“What’d you come to see me about?”

He looked out the open window, where you could see down the hill and just make out the lights over the river to Georgia. The night air smelled of rain.

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sure, bud.”

“You remember that girl I was with back in the summer? The one that Fuller tried to beat on.”

“Lorelei?”

“Yes, sir.”

I waited.

“She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere and I’ve been looking everywhere. I think somethin’ bad’s happenin’. I don’t know what. But I think they got her.”

“Who?”

“The people she told you about. She was real scared after what happened at the Rabbit Farm.”

“Who else knows she talked to me?”

He shrugged.

18

ARCH FOUND HIMSELF AWAKE
at three a.m., walking the woods near his house with a whiskey bottle, wandering around the endless acres of pine trees with deep thoughts of Bastogne and those holes that would explode and swell like an open wound and bullets that would whiz by your ear but miss you, as if you were protected by the hand of God. His men buried deep in foxholes, their feet frozen black and purple, the snow mixed with the ash from the broken forest. As Arch weaved in and out of the maze, the fall moon hanging low, full and bright, he lost himself for a moment, half expecting to see his breath crystallize before him. Instead, he stopped, his heart jackhammering in his chest, and took another drink. He decided to walk back to his house for his keys and shaving kit. He stopped for only a moment, Madeline awake now, and kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d be right back.

“Arch?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

But he had already started his car, a new-model Pontiac, and he turned quickly from the gravel and the new boxed ranch with big modern glass windows that let in plenty of light and out onto the open road, the moon a traveling friend as he headed back to the soft glow of Phenix, soon finding the turn to Highway 80 and Montgomery. He lit endless cigarettes and finished the last of the Jack Daniel’s, both hands on the wheel and sweating, hearing only the purr of the big motor and the warm morning air coming in through the windows as he got to Montgomery, quickly cutting south and soon finding daybreak just around Fort Deposit. But it was a false dawn, just purple and black, and in the darkness he watched the Alabama city signs flash by, in minutes and hours or seconds, coming right after one another.
GREENVILLE, CHAPMAN, EVERGREEN, CASTLEBERRY, POLLARD, FLOMATON, ATMORE
. And soon it was midmorning, and he looked at the scruffy, unshaven face in the rearview mirror before crossing the bridge over Mobile Bay and through the little town of Grand Bay — where he stopped for two cups of coffee, gas, and to use the bathroom — and then over the Mississippi line, hugging the green shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the little beach towns mixed with the big ones, taking him to places he hadn’t been in years, not since becoming county solicitor in ’47, and he crossed through Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and over the St. Louis Bay. It was late summer, and children played on wide green lawns and people sat on wide stately porches built sometime around the Civil War, living in their own world covered in a canopy of ancient oaks disguised in those sloppy beards of moss.

Before he knew it, he was in Louisiana, with New Orleans seeming like a dream. In the roughneck town of Morgan City, he stopped for a piss again and found himself in a vile, filthy bathroom puking in a dirty toilet, and when he washed his face in the lavatory he had no idea why his nerves had acted up.

He bought a Coca-Cola and a piece of fried chicken to settle himself, pumping gas, and moving on over the bayou in New Iberia and Lafayette. It all was a storybook down there, with the wildness of it all and all the little waterways and clapboard shacks and sunburned people with sharp eyes who seemed to see something in the man with the Alabama plates that made them stare. Hell, he wasn’t even tired by the time he hit the Texas line and Port Arthur by Sabine Lake and hugged the lapping green waves of the Gulf, feeling stifled and hot and sweaty even though the windows were down, the Gulf and Texas bringing him nothing but humidity and hellfire gospels and twangy country music on the radio.

He knew that if he was caught, they’d revoke his bond, but he was sick of just sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes and drinking Jim Beam and watching
The Lone Ranger
and the
Adventures of Superman
on television with his daughter. And Madeline not talking to him, lying next to him at night, wide awake with worry because she just knew he’d killed Mr. Patterson even though he’d sworn he had nothing to do with it.