The girl nodded.
And then he heard the shot downstairs.
The boots ran back down the landing and then hit the staircase.
“Goddamn,” Johnnie said to the young whore. “That bitch is crazy.”
The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She was doughy fat and white, with brown eyes the size of saucers. “Y’all got a back door here?”
The girl didn’t speak.
Johnnie pointed the gun at her.
“I said, y’all got a back door?”
THE SALON LOOKED TO BE SOMETHING OUT OF THE OLD West. Red velvet couches and heavy oak furniture. Cut-glass whiskey decanters and boxes of cigarettes and cigars. Old-time paintings of fat naked women with red hair and red lips. I passed through the room and followed the long hallway, trying to keep quiet on the wood floors. The hallway seemed to elongate as I walked, hearing Black’s boots overhead and then opening the swinging back door and hearing the crack of a shot.
I dropped to the floor and saw a woman pointing a pistol back down at my head. Before she could take aim, I tackled her to the ground and wrestled the gun free. Someone else in the room screamed, and I pointed the gun to her and she held her hands over her mouth and screamed and screamed, although she tried to stop.
She fell to her knees, and I pulled the woman to her feet and pushed her against the kitchen table.
“What are you doing here? This is my house.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Miss Fannie Belle, and if you don’t leave my home immediately I will have you arrested.”
Black ran into the room, his shotgun tucked into his shoulder, and pointed from corner to corner in the room. He held the gun on the redheaded woman.
“Ma’am, just whose Hudson is that parked outside?” I asked.
“It’s not mine.”
Just then, a car horn started honking and an engine started. I ran for the front door and out onto the porch, as the Hudson fishtailed and twisted in the mud and then broke free and shot right for the main highway.
Quinnie ran after the car for a long time, yelling for it to stop, until I lost sight of him.
I walked back into the house and held the women, while Black made a call on the radio for some help. Three girls he found upstairs waited in the hallway, toward the door.
“You want to tell me what you do, Miss Belle?” I asked.
I sat down across from her at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette while she and another girl, too old for the pigtails she wore, stared at the floor.
“I don’t work.”
“Then what do you do here?”
“Nothing.”
“Who are these girls?”
“They are my nieces.”
“Even the black one?”
Fannie turned her head and coughed, as if my cigarette smoke had invaded her space. I smoked it down a little more and squinted at her through the haze, reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out the folded piece of paper Jack Black had given me.
I smiled, the cigarette clamped in my teeth. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m kind of new at this.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Reading you your rights.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“You did try to kill me, Miss Belle.”
“You broke into my home.”
“Sorry, I thought this was a cathouse.”
She looked at me and snorted a bit, then reached down and squeezed my knee. I looked up at her and she smiled. “We can work something out, baby.”
I didn’t move, just started to read the paper in my hand.
“You goddamn sonofabitch,” she said, as Black pushed the three girls into the kitchen. I started to finish reading but glanced up again, noticing something familiar about one of the girls.
She looked away as I stared. Black hair and blue eyes, china-white skin. I watched her cross her skinny white arms over a low-cut red velvet dress. She wore a lot of red lipstick, rouge, and she’d taken a heavy black pencil to her eyebrows like a Hollywood actress.
“Didn’t I meet you on the Fourth of July?”
She didn’t answer.
“You were with Billy Stokes,” I said.
TWO HOURS LATER, I SAT WITH THE GIRL IN A BACK BOOTH of Choppy’s Diner. The young girl looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days, the way she scraped the eggs off her plate and cleaned the last bit of it with a piece of toast. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and asked her if she wanted another plate, and she looked up at me from where she’d leaned into the table and shook her head, her mouth full of food.
My arm rested on the back of the booth, a cigarette between my fingers. Jack Black had taken the others to the jail. This one, too scared to talk, didn’t say a word to me, as I drove past the courthouse and took the upper bridge over into Columbus. I had to ask her three times to get out of the car.
“You work for Fannie Belle?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her hair hung down over a face that was so white it looked like it belonged on a porcelain doll.
“How old are you?”
She shrugged.
“You sure you don’t want more to eat?”
She shook her head, her eyes still tilted toward the table but not chewing anymore.
I waited and didn’t speak. The waitress came over and placed the bill on the table, and I put down a dollar and a fifty-cent piece.
“You the new sheriff?”
“That’s what they’re telling me.”
Her hands shook so hard on top of the table that the salt shaker began to bounce and move. She started to cry but didn’t move, even as I put my hand over hers. I gave her fingers a squeeze to reassure her.
She looked up at me and nodded and nodded. “I’m ready. I can do it. Let’s go.”
“Do what?”
Her chin tilted up and she looked at me, confused at what she saw, or didn’t see, in my face. She shook her head and just watched me. The waitress came by once more and refilled my cup of coffee, and I lit another cigarette.
“Coffee and cigarettes are a fine thing,” I said.
“That’s all you want?”
“She speaks.”
“Where’s Bert Fuller?” she asked.
“Still lying in bed.”
“He doesn’t work for you?”
“You were there,” I said. “We’re not exactly good friends.”
“So who’s in charge?”
“The Guard. Town is under martial rule.”
“What’s that?”
“That means the town was so rotten that the governor replaced everybody. I’m the temporary sheriff till they can find someone better.”
