Authors: Ace Atkins
“Me and him know each other. He offered me money to get on his label.”
“You gonna leave Teddy?”
“Don’t know.”
“What do you want to be when you’re grown up?” I asked.
“I am grown up.”
“You’re fifteen.”
“I’m a man,” he said.
“You like women?”
“They a’ight.”
“Just all right.”
“Yeah, I like them.”
He looked away from me and dabbled a fry into the ketchup.
“I have a woman in Mississippi that’s pretty pissed at me.”
“You fuck someone else?”
“No.”
“Get drunk?”
“No.”
“Then what she bitchin’ ’bout?”
“It’s my birthday tomorrow and she had something planned.”
He finished off the burger and carefully poured more ketchup in a neat little pile. He liked to keep everything separate. There was no mixing of ketchup and fries till he was ready.
“Who was that girl at the club?”
“Tamika.”
“Who is she?”
“A friend.”
“She’s a kid.”
“Maybe,” he said. “She use her sister’s driver’s license so she can dance. She ain’t bad. She can shake her ass and shit.”
The streetcar passed underneath the oaks outside. A priest and a woman with a bruise under her eye walked in and found a seat by the bathroom. I finished the omelette and drank some more coffee.
“Where we gonna head next?”
“I don’t know.”
I excused myself and walked outside, trying Curtis again. The phone rang about six times before he answered. He sounded out of breath.
“Stella got me doin’ this exercise tape, got that black dude that’s some kind of big star in Hong Kong. You know he got that funny head that look like a turtle? Man, that shit kickin’ my ass.”
“What you got?” I watched my truck across the street and a couple of kids skateboarding around it. Crime lights scattered on my hood and I heard some bottleneck guitar playing at a biker bar in the crook of St. Charles.
“Pinky’s Bar.”
“Where?”
“It’s in the Marigny but ain’t no fag place or anything,” Curtis said. I heard Stella yelling at him. “Ask for Fred. You’ll get what you need.”
PINKY’S SPECIALIZED in kick-ass punk music, explosive drinks, and a Tuesday-night bondage show, or so I heard from Curtis. I’d left my leather mask back home and I never owned a whip in my life but decided I’d be safe. I told ALIAS he could wait in the truck, but he said he wanted to see this place. He said freaks were interesting and wanted to know if it was like that shit in
Pulp Fiction
. I’d parked off Elysian Fields and Chartres by a methadone clinic and a vegetarian restaurant that offered discounts to same-sex couples. A few years back, I wouldn’t have even driven through this neighborhood; the gunshots and violence were constant. But a few years ago, the homosexual community had taken over the Marigny, cleaning it up and making it their own. But now the historic district right by the Quarter was going through another change. Gentrification. Now it was hipper than Uptown and way too cool for the Quarter.
And Pinky’s, I think, was supposed to be too cool for anyone.
A nice neon sign of a forties pinup in a pink nightgown hung over the vinyl padded door with a diamond glass for a window. Nice curvy butt and shoulders and blond hair on top of her head in ribbons. She winked at you, holding a hand of cards. Pink neon surrounding her body. From inside, Johnny Cash was singing “That Lucky Old Sun,” the Ray Charles number.
A grizzled white dude with multiple piercings and a shaved head smoked a clove cigarette behind the bar and flipped through a copy of
Newsweek
. A photo of George W. Bush on the cover looking intense. He nodded along with the article as I waited for a little service.
“What’ll it be?” he asked. He was British.
“Two Cokes.”
“I want a beer,” ALIAS said.
“One Coke and a Barq’s.”
“Man, that’s root beer.”
“No shit.”
ALIAS walked off to the jukebox.
“I’m also looking for a guy named Fred Moore,” I said.
“She’s not in.”
“She?”
“She’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “She had to pick up the band.”
We waited as the bar really opened up. The lights dimmed. More pink neon. Black-and-white photos of forties B actors and movie posters for these noir films that I didn’t even know lined the walls. A few Bettie Page flicks. Some sixties Roger Corman stuff. ALIAS loaded up the jukebox with some rap music I’d never heard.
The waitresses walked in and started getting ready for the night. Brunette and blond. They were all beautiful and young and hard as hell. Their pasty white faces never saw the sun. Deep red lips outlined in black and hair up in Andrews Sisters configurations. Tight black Ts with glitter sayings:
BITCH
and
HOT STUFF
and double dice on snake eyes. They all wore combat boots and black socks.
ALIAS gave me a wild stare over the back of one of the girls and mouthed the word “Freak.”
A few minutes later, an older woman with hair so blond I wasn’t too sure it wasn’t white walked in the door with a group of tired kids hauling guitars and pieces of a drum kit. She pointed out the stage cast in a red light, walked over to the bar, and asked the pierced Brit for the mail.
He handed some stuff to her but didn’t mention me. She had on large black sunglasses in the darkened bar. Long black shirt, tight black pants.
I introduced myself and said I’d like to talk to her about some business in private. Johnny Cash came back on in the shuffle and sang about God havin’ a heaven for country trash.
“I do my business here. You don’t like, then fuck off. This is my place.”
She sat at the bar stool next to me. She was in her late forties or early fifties. She reminded me of Deborah Harry if Deborah Harry lived an even tougher life. She lit a long cigarette.
“Who was Pinky?”
“My mother.”
“No shit.”
“No shit,” she said. “I’ve heard that more GIs jacked off to her than Betty Grable.”
“You must be proud.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
“I had one of those posters of Farrah Fawcett. Got me through puberty.”
“You must be proud too.”
“I have guilt.”
She took a long draw of cigarette and nodded about ten times, letting the smoke just float out of the corner of her mouth. Her mouth looked like a shrunken, dead rose. She kept looking over my shoulder at ALIAS. She watched him as she played with her cigarette.
Fred motioned for the bartender. “Watch that kid.”
The bartender nodded.
“The kid’s with me.”
“What are you, into some kind of Big Brother program?” she said. “Get rid of that guilt you got.”
“I heard you could lead me to someone who conned a friend of mine.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Great question,” I said. “I can arrange money.”
“Who sent you?”
“Curtis Lee.”
“Thought he was on the Farm.”
“Got out.”
“I would’ve stayed if I was married to that wretched woman.”
“He loves her.”
“Curtis has problems.”
“Maybe.”
She walked off, spoke to the band for a few minutes, and then returned to the bar. Punks began to fill up the place, all black-T-shirted and pierced, tattoos muraling their arms. Heads shaved. Hair moussed up in impossible directions.
“What do you want to know?”
I repeated the story about Teddy, the kid, and the con. The man with cauliflower ears. She listened.
“How much money did he lose?”
“That’s for you to find out and then tell me who I need to find.”
She shrugged. “How much?”
“Has to come through first.”
“I haven’t run a game in five years.”
I ordered another Coke. She paid for it and I appreciated that.
“Anyone run the big games around here?”
“Used to be this cocksucker named Fourtnot but he died in the eighties. I don’t know. Mostly freelance. Lots of Lotto games. Big cons on old women down at the lake-front. But what you’re talking about is impressive. Good imagination.”
“Not bad.”
She reached out with her long fingers and slowly raked her red nails across my arm.
“Tell your boy to get lost and come with me,” she said.
“Where would you start?”
She flipped her hair back and lit another cigarette. She looked at herself in the mirror, not finding what she was looking for, and mussed her hair with her fingers. “I will. You won’t.”
Her fingers were stained with nicotine and her breath smelled of garlic and mint. She looked at me and sighed. “I want five thousand.”
“Has to come through tonight,” I said.
“I’ll work on it.”
“I need it within a couple of hours.”
She nodded.
“What happened to Pinky?”
“She jumped off the balcony of the Fountainebleau in Miami.”
She stubbed her cigarette into an ashtray filled with peanut shells and walked away.
I DROPPED ALIAS at his mansion a little past midnight. He told me that the place — a Mediterranean Revival number on Pontchartrain with bonsai-looking trees — was going to be plowed under someday and updated with something he’d seen on
Deep Space 9
. We walked inside an empty house and I noticed a little spot for him in the living room with a GI Joe sleeping bag and a small CD player. Dozens of rap CDs lay on the floor by his pillow and a couple of discount packs of chips and warm liters of Pepsi. Little indentations from missing furniture spotted the white carpet. Moonlight crept into his paneled French doors from the pool.
“You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
I gave him the number to the cell and watched him as he tucked himself into the blanket and turned his back to me.
I drove back home, hoping that thing from Fred would shake out. Without that, I didn’t have much. Teddy wouldn’t respond to my messages about that dick Trey Brill. I was beginning to lose patience and I was tired as hell.
But as soon as I got close to my warehouse on Julia, I felt something was out of place.
Four cars were parked in broken patterns in front of businesses that had closed up for the night. A black Cadillac Escalade, two red Ferraris, and a green Rolls, all their bright silver rims shining down the stretch of asphalt.
I didn’t turn into the warehouse. I parked down the street and walked.
The convertible top was down on the Rolls. A box of .38 slugs sat empty in the passenger seat. The light to my warehouse burned bright through a huge bank of industrial windows. The small blue door that leads to the second floor was closed.
I slipped a key into the lock and slowly pushed it open with both hands. I reached for the Glock in my jacket. The seventeen rounds waited jacked inside.
Upstairs, I heard Annie’s high-pitched barking. She yelped in an urgent rhythm.
I crept up the stairs and heard a crash in my loft and a couple of men laughing.
I moved forward, my heart skipping pretty damned quickly in my chest. I tried to control my breathing and slip silently to the landing. Annie kept barking, her yips working into a howl.
The huge sliding door had been pushed open and inside about a half-dozen men rifled through my shit. A man with a puckered burn mark across his cheek drank my Jack Daniel’s from the bottle and then spit a mouthful onto the floor. Two of the men were shirtless and muscular, wearing stiff, wide-legged jeans and clean work boots. Gold and platinum in chains hung around their necks and molded into their teeth.
I couldn’t spot Annie.
I slipped my finger tighter on the trigger and backed down the stairs to call the police. My heart began to palpitate, my breathing quick. The man with the burn mark asked for a lighter.
I took another step backward.
I felt the sharp prick of a flat, wide blade in my side.
The knife moved up to my neck.
“Slow down, motherfucker. We waitin’ on you.”
He pushed me forward on the landing while I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket. In the darkness, he hadn’t seen it.
As we entered the large open space of the warehouse, a couple of tool shelves by the window where I kept my field interviews had been toppled. Several VHS tapes — loaded with interviews of people who’d died years ago — lay in piles on the floor.
A short, muscular man in a net shirt walked toward me, his palms open on each side as if waiting to begin prayer. His teeth were platinum and jeweled and he had a red tattoo of a heart that seemed to be live and beating on his muscled chest.
His right hand darted to the small of his back and he came up with a snub-nosed .38 that he jammed and twisted in my ear. I was so intent on not moving, I didn’t even notice his feet kicking out my legs.
I fell to the floor. He inched closer with the gun to the bridge of my nose.
“You like scrambled eggs?”
He called ’em “aigs.”
His group ringed me. Their eyes were red and squinted tight and they gritted their teeth while I squirmed.
“What you doin’ with them Paris brothers?” the man asked.
The man with the scar pulled out a book,
Catcher in the Rye,
from my kitchen table and held a Zippo against its pages. He dropped my book next to the pool of whiskey and I watched its pages curl with smoke.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Annie’s yelps came from inside my bathroom.
The leader knocked me across the face, holding the gun in my ear.
“Teddy’s my friend,” I said.
He laughed at that, his platinum teeth feral and wild. He yanked me halfway off the floor with one hand and an arm the size of my leg. His arm didn’t even tremble as he held me there.
I smelled the fire burning into the book’s musty pages.
“I take it you’re Cash?”
“How you know my name?”
“Luck.”
He let me go. As I got to my knees, I heard the clicking of guns around me. He kicked me hard in the ribs. I tried to breathe but couldn’t. My bones felt like they were made of splintered wood. He thumped my head with the back of his hand. “Who got that money?”