I walked back to Quinnie and Quinnie stood like a gunfighter, hand on the butt of his.38, his jaw clamped.
“Call Jack and have him send a couple more deputies this way,” I said. “I’m gonna try and talk to this fella.”
“You want to wait for Jack?”
I shook my head and walked through a narrow walkway piled high with broken toys, produce boxes, and rusted car parts. An engine block rested on bricks on the front porch.
No light shone from the house.
I knocked on the screen door. And heard nothing.
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.