Dark End of the Street

The beefy man benching re-racked the weight with a clanging thud and grunted as if someone had just stepped on his crotch. I wanted to tell him that 315 pounds didn’t really call for a show. But I stayed with U’s plan, holding more comments inside.

Then I decided to get right to it. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were working with Levi Ransom?”

Cook kept nodding yes, until he gave a big grunt, and cranked out a last rep on the machine.

He wiped off his face with a towel and took a sip from a bottle of Evian.

“We’ve been through this. Door is back the way you came.”

“I saw the police report on Mary James and Eddie Porter. Levi Ransom killed them. You were washing money for the Dixie Mafia. What happened, Cook, needed a favor? You needed to flex a little and prove you were a badass?”

“Fuck you,” he said, moving on to a bicep machine for preacher curls. He bent over the bench, almost in a prayerlike pose, and muscled up a bar attached to a pulley system.

“What did Eddie Porter do? Find out about your deal with Ransom?”

He ignored me. I looked around the mirrored room.

U had wandered off. He was talking to the two meatheads. I thought I overheard him giving tips on how to bench more. One of the boys was smiling.

Cook took another sip of water.

“If you’d been straight with me, Loretta wouldn’t have been shot.”

The intensity in his face broke away. His jaw fell slack.

“No one told you?” I asked. “Didn’t figure you to be a true friend of hers anyway.”

Then the son of a bitch really snapped.

I could tell he’d been trying to keep it in. Red-faced and breathing deep lungfuls of air. But after I said “true friend,” his arms darted out and yanked me into a headlock and began pounding me in the face. He only got off two quick jabs to my cheek and forehead before I pulled my head out and twisted his arm behind his back.

He fell to his knees with a high-pitched scream.

The meatheads ran to him.

But U had drawn a gun and yelled for them to stay. It was the type of command you’d give a dog.

They stayed. Cook buckled with intense pain. I wanted to hold him there forever.

Chapter 56

“COOL IT,” I said. I spoke as pleasantly as I could to a man I’d brought to his knees with pain. I twisted his arm an inch higher behind his back.

“You motherfucker,” Cook screamed. “Don’t you ever say that, you goddamned cocksucker. Come into my house? I’ll kill your ass.”

I pulled his arm even higher, heard a slight crack, and then let his arm relax about two inches. He grunted; I let him go. He almost fell on his face, but caught himself with the other arm and used the preacher machine to stand.

“They shot her in the chest and left her bleeding on the floor of JoJo’s bar. Nice people. Even set fire to the business that JoJo had run for thirty-five years, man. You know what that means? You know what kind of sweat and patience and hard work that takes? She had to lie on the ground of the bar and watch their whole life burn around her while she waited to either bleed to death or catch on fire. Yeah, Cook, you’re a great friend to her.”

He closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, catching his breath and rotating his arm in its socket.

U walked over and turned off the boombox. He told the men to sit down but one still tried to get to Cook.

“Sit down!” Cook yelled.

We were all quiet for several moments. I think Cook wanted to cry, if he’d had any soul or conscience left. But the only emotion he seemed to possess in grief was shutting his damned mouth.

The wind battered the wall of glass and the sky became dark for a few moments. Then the room became light again, bright yellow beams streaking across the tops of trees lining the Bluffs.

“You come with me,” Cook said, pointing outside. “They stay.”

I followed him to the deck, hanging stilt-legged off the side of the house. The view made my stomach jump a little as the wind loosely blew the tops of the trees and my hair. I put my hands in my pockets and stayed silent. Most of the time when you wanted information, it was best to shut up.

Out in the natural light, Cook looked much older than I thought. Small lines had formed above his upper lip and loose folds of skin fell over his eyelids.

“Eddie Porter was a great friend,” he said, his hands on the railing as he looked down at the river passing in muddy, swirling circles. “I tried to help him even after I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Eddie Porter stole two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from Bluff City.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, his voice more twangy than usual. Less controlled. “It wasn’t my money, it was Ransom’s. He floated me for the studio and for an Ampex recorder when I got started. He sometimes used us to run through some cash. He never took anything we made, only got back what he’d given… Porter took it all.”

“So why did he kill Clyde’s wife?”

“Eddie was in love with Mary. Ransom knew it.” Cook wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Killing him would be too easy. He wanted Eddie to watch Mary hurt for a while.”