“I got to get Bert.”
“He’s not going with you.”
“The hell you say.”
“He’s got a platoon of soldiers up and around his house. They believe he’s getting ready to split town, and they don’t buy his religious act.”
“Do you?”
Fannie just looked at him, cocking her head slightly to the side, and lit another long cigarette. She leaned her head back, pulling in the smoke, and drew a sweep of her red hair to one side.
“I want something from you before you leave,” she said.
He turned at the front door, suitcase in hand. She whispered into his ear, and her breath was warm and sweet.
“You got to be kidding,” Johnnie said. “You mention me and the Hoyt Shepherd job again and you gonna get me killed. Hoyt Shepherd will drop me in that ole river loaded down with logging chains just as easy as takin’ a mornin’ piss.”
And, with that, he opened the front door and walked out on the old rotted porch and out to the Hornet hid back by some privet bush. He tucked the suitcase into the trunk and turned to the bush, where he started to take a leak.
He heard her walking behind him and he started to whistle.
“Listen, they may not even find you, Fannie,” Johnnie said. “Hell, the Hill Top is two miles from the highway. You’re the only goddang thing out here.”
“Not far enough.”
He zipped up and turned to her, jingling the keys in his hand. The old, rotten Victorian behind Fannie looking to him like a haunted house from a picture show.
“Why do you say that?”
She didn’t say anything, only turned to the north and pointed to the dust buckling and rising from the dirt road. From the looks of things, a mess of cars was headed that way.
“Who else is in the house?”
“Few girls. Them twins. Some more from town that got scared.”
“Get back inside.”
“Why?”
“I said get the fuck back inside,” he said, popping his trunk again and pulling out a Winchester Model 12. “Get your clothes off and put on a robe. Something sexy. Tell the girls to stay in their rooms. I said now.”
Johnnie clenched his jaw, stocking extra shells in his pant pocket and down into the shaft of his pointed boots. He eyed a place up in the turret on the second floor, and looked to see the first flashes of the windshields of the approaching cars.
EVERY CLERK, PROSECUTOR, DEPUTY, AND JUDGE HAD BEEN cleared from the Russell County Courthouse. Only the Guard remained, with Bernard Sykes setting up command in Arch Ferrell’s old office and Sykes’s team from the state attorney’s office already tearing through Ferrell’s personal files and papers. General Hanna’s stepson, Pete – an eighteen-year-old kid working as the general’s personal driver – had taken us through the courthouse and out back to the brick sheriff’s office, where Hanna ushered me down into a basement storage room filled with dozens of cardboard boxes. “These look familiar?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Why don’t you call your buddy Britton and John Patterson down here? It looks like a mess of uncounted votes going back to 1945.”
“They kept them?” I asked.
“Sheriff Matthews may be everything else, but he’ll never be accused of being a genius.”
Thirty minutes later, we found more. In jail cells, we found car batteries hooked to head braces, horse whips, logging chains, and several fat leather belts fitted with silver dollars. Along the worn leather were traces of blood. Some of the cells had been fitted with iron shackles in the concrete, like something out of a medieval museum.
In another cell was a crude little motor that plugged into a wall with a needle and vial at the end. I thought it must be something for junkies and hopheads, but one of the Guard boys who’d been in the Navy said it was for giving tattoos. We wouldn’t know for a while exactly why they’d be giving out tattoos in a jailhouse.
We’d been up all night, and everything seemed foggy and light. Jack Black set a coffeepot on a hot plate. General Hanna had upended Sheriff Matthews’s desk onto the floor, where all his junk was being hustled into cardboard boxes and tagged.
He offered me a cigar like the ones he smoked with Jack Black. I thanked him and pulled out a Kool instead that I smoked with the first cup of coffee. I kneaded my temples with my thumb and forefinger and sat on top of Matthews’s desk, something I’d still think of as Matthews’s desk until weeks later when I had it taken out into the county landfill and burned.
A few minutes later, little Quinnie Kelley was hustled into the sheriff’s office, and I stopped talking with Hanna and Black and introduced Kelley. He still wore his courthouse coveralls and clutched a thick, clothbound book in his arms.
He didn’t shake hands with the men, only laid down the book on the table and said he’d taken it from Bert Fuller’s office shortly after he’d been hurt. He kind of smiled and cut his eyes over to me when he said it.
“I didn’t trust nobody, and I figured that someone might try to burn it up. But people should see it. See the shame of it.”
I opened the book, and it revealed a pasted photo album, the kind you kept for the family, only these were black-and-white pictures of girls. Some of them nude, some clothed. Mostly just of their heads with a little pasted rundown on their measurements, color of eyes and hair, weight, height, any scars or deformities, quality of teeth, and special sexual skills. All of the women had been given numbers.
I looked up at him. “These were girls Fuller arrested.”
Quinnie shook his head. “Y’all are slow. That’s the registry, the goddang book, Lamar. That’s Fuller’s handwriting plain as day right there.”
The familiarity of using my first name made me blush a bit, and I turned back to the book and studied the pages and noted the details about where they worked and what they did and various sexual perversions the women were willing to do. In the back pages was a ledger showing amounts owed and earned.
“He got twenty-five percent off every girl.”
I nodded and set down the book.
“Thanks, Quinnie,” I said, shaking his hand.
He reaffixed his Coke-bottle glasses and nodded, and then turned to Hanna and saluted him. Hanna just looked at the odd little man as he passed, and pulled the book over to him and flipped through the pages.
“Urination?” he said. “What in the hell? This is the filthiest, most vile town I’ve ever known. We should just burn it to the ground and let y’all start over.”
“Make sure you skip over my house when you do,” I said.
“How could you stand it?”
“You can’t see what’s hidden under the rocks.”
Jack Black returned to the room and reached for his shotgun he’d left on the desk. “There is some kind of trouble in the county. You ever hear of a whorehouse called the Hill Top?”
I hadn’t.
“There’s been some shooting out there.”
I looked to General Hanna. And he looked over to me and smiled. “You tell us, Sheriff.”
13
WE PARKED DOWN the road from the old Victorian, the windshield wipers keeping our view clear, and watched the two lights from the upstairs windows. A dark figure appeared up in the turret and then was gone. The old house was unpainted, with a sagging porch and crooked columns; a red bulb light rocked in the light wind. A couple cars were parked down the road, but it was growing late and raining, and I could barely make them out where we’d parked. Major Black sat at the wheel, with me in the passenger’s seat and Quinnie Kelley behind us. Since we’d left the sheriff’s office, Kelley had talked nonstop, in between the occasional directions out to the Hill Top. His big bug glasses were fogged, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
“Now, don’t be thinking that I know this place ’cause I’m a customer. I’m a married man.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Quinnie,” I said.