“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 cafe 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.
I crawled for her, almost touching her fingers, when three men pulled me away. I saw two others picking up Loretta and dragging her from the building. She wasn’t moving.
In the clearing of tearing eyes, ragged and stinging, I saw the blood across her dress.
I crawled away from the men trying to give me oxygen and ran to her as they loaded her into the ambulance and sped away. I ran after the ambulance for a few blocks, coughing in spasms, until I bent over and tried to steady my breathing with my hands on my knees.
The ambulance screamed, lights twirling and scattering on the old buildings, all the way to Decatur and heading to Charity.
I ran back to JoJo’s and a fireman confirmed that’s where they’d taken her.
I stood at the bar for a moment watching the smoke pouring from the broken plate glass window and snaking from the broken twin doors. Dozens of firefighters held firm, washing the fire down as it continued to eat away the chairs, tables, jukebox, bar, and vintage photographs and posters. All that heat. The heat felt like a sunburn across my face where I held myself. Paralyzed.
The sound of cracking. Brick buckling.
I turned to find a phone.
But he was already there.
JoJo watched his business of thirty-five years curl and bend with that pressure and heat. His expression dropped and froze as I watched someone that he didn’t know tell him about Loretta. As I walked to him, he saw me.
JoJo turned his back and got into his Cadillac, speeding away.
A bby and I found JoJo a little after 3:00 A.M.. at Charity Hospital. I’d picked her up, worried they’d head over to the warehouse next. He sat in an anonymous room full of dozens of vending machines and scattered tables and chairs sipping coffee from a paper cup with an old teammate of mine, Teddy Paris, and his brother Malcolm. They owned a small rap label called Ninth Ward Records and were a hell of a nice couple of guys. But lately they’d been making quite a chunk of change. So much that I overheard 300-pound Teddy telling JoJo he’d pop a cap in the bastard who torched JoJo’s bar and shot Loretta. “Just a word,” Teddy said. “And it gets done.”
Teddy was no gangster. But it was that kind of night.
Abby and I joined JoJo.
The Paris brothers politely left, swearing their return.
“Teddy shoot himself if he tried to use a gun,” JoJo said, lazy and unfocused to no one in particular.
“I don’t know who called him.”
JoJo nodded.
I felt raw and beaten. I’d had to wake up Abby from the couch where she’d fallen asleep. Her eyes were dazed and unfocused. But she seemed determined to go with me the same way victims of crimes want to help others to ease their own pain.
I got a cup of coffee. Abby just sat there and tried to smile at JoJo.
JoJo watched the wall.
“Heard the surgery went fine,” I said.
He nodded.
JoJo had on a gray cardigan over a black golf shirt. As I reached for his shoulder, I noticed he was still wearing bedroom slippers.
My hand weight felt dead and useless. He wouldn’t look at me. Hadn’t looked at me since I’d walked in.
