Dark End of the Street

Perfect grabbed Jon by the edge of his collar and yanked him away, “This is mine. Go outside!”

She pushed the gasping woman onto her back and began knocking beer bottles and half-filled glasses to the floor. Perfect kicked the jukebox, stopping some sad blues song cold, and walked over to a row of black-and-white photos of people Jon guessed were famous singers. She started cracking the glass frames with the butt of her gun. A bunch of ’em came crashing down and Perfect kicked and skidded them in jagged pieces across the floor.

She yelled again, “Where is he?”

The old woman got to her feet and smoothed her dress over her hips. Jon wandered over to the two, big ole roughshod doors and looked out the window. No one. Dead street. He crossed his arms across his chest and looked at the floor.

“We know he’s in Memphis!” Perfect said, walking real quick like across the wooden floor and aimed the gun straight at the woman’s forehead. “You have two seconds.”

“Sister, you trip on power. Don’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“Think it brings you out of that backward upbringin’?”

“Shut up!”

“Look at you, gun in hand. Greasy-ass boyfriend. No five-hundred-dollar shoes can change what you are. You left the country but that pig shit sure stuck to you.”

Miss Perfect looked down for a moment at some fancy shoes she’d been wearin’ since Memphis, her mouth forming a big O.

She jumped a step back in surprise before she shot that big ole nigra woman right in the chest.

The woman reeled backward, knockin’ down and crackin’ chairs as she fell. Her scream deep and throaty and seemed to shake the whole dang bar. Everything vibratin’ around Jon’s head.

His head jammin’ and heart jackknifin’ in his chest.

Perfect looked down and admired the gun in her hand. She watched the fallen woman, loose and bleedin’ on the floor, and started to grin. She didn’t know she had it in her.

“Miss Perfect,” Jon yelled. “We didn’t come for that. Dang, you screwed us all now. We ain’t got squat.”

He ran to the window and looked outside. All right. They hadn’t worn gloves and he didn’t know what kind of gun she’d used or who owned it. This wasn’t a hit. You set a dang hit up real different. If he’d killed Travers tonight, his gun would come back to a crack dealer in south Memphis.

“Miss Perfect. Miss Perfect.”

“Let’s go.”

“We can’t. That your gun?”

She nodded.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I bought it.”

Jon’s leg started aheavin’ and jumpin’ right where he stood until he ran over to the long wood, Mardis Gras beads drippin’ down from glass rack like a fancy curtain. He plucked a couple bottles of gin and whiskey from a row of booze and started pourin’ all over the place. Over the scarred ole bar and the floor and the jukebox and even the old nigra woman who lay still on the floor.

“Goddamn,” Perfect screamed. “What the hell are you doin’?”

“Savin’ your skin, woman.”

He kicked the backdoor with the heel of his boots. His mind racin’ back in time to a day locked away in his soul. Mamma wasn’t breathin’ either. Mamma wasn’t breathin’ either.

“It’s all clean,” he said, tossing the cheroot onto the bar and watching a bluish-yellow blaze kick up and begin to smolder and burn in the wood. A poof of air sucking from the room.

A couple of them old, dusty-as-hell photos began to crack and fall as if the old woman’s scream had awoken them dead singers one last time.

Jon yelled to Perfect to follow: “Last train to Memphis, sister.”

As the smoke gathered and flames grew, the jukebox sputtered and crackled to life one last time. Its weak lights pumped and dimmed with a scratchy, slow-moving 45 record that seemed to mirror that of a weak woman’s heart.

Chapter 44

I HEARD THE SIRENS about halfway across Canal Street while I walked toward Royal and back into the Quarter. I’d left Abby at my warehouse, locked up tight and watching reruns of Josie and the Pussycats, after I got the call from Loretta that she was closing up. I’d hopped a streetcar and was even planning on seeing if Loretta wanted to get a cup of café au lait down at DuMonde – it was that kind of cool night – and talk about the things that we couldn’t discuss around JoJo. But as soon as I rounded the turn in a swift jog down Conti and saw the smoke surging above the high rooftops, I felt my stomach drop from me and my throat clench. I broke into a full run down the crooked sidewalk and past the all-night bars and executive strip clubs.

Outside, there were two fire trucks and an ambulance. Two hulking firemen were lashing their hoses to a hydrant when I yelled that there was someone inside. I didn’t even see their reaction as I kicked in the two big Creole doors, the battered wood breaking away as if paper, and running inside. The smoke was so thick and bulging, blackened and coiled, that I dropped to my knees and squinted into the room lit by the orange flames eating away the walls and crawling live and blue on the brick in a crisscrossed scrawl.

I saw a hand.