by Tim Willocks
“Have you got Charlie’s letter with you?” she said.
George Grimes had to think too long. By the time he nodded she knew he had it anyway.
“This is what we’re going to do,” she said. “There’s a café across the street. We’re going to go over there and have an espresso and I’m going to smoke another cigarette while I read the letter. Otherwise I’ll have some of the guys come in here right now and take it off you.”
The old guy looked at her and decided that she meant it, which was good because she did. Ella picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. She felt better. Once you decide to do something, even something hard, you always feel better. That was Charlie again. Or Jefferson. She didn’t like it that she hadn’t known his real name. It wasn’t really like he’d lied to her, it was just, she didn’t know what it was, she felt stranded. Or something. She looked at George Grimes again. Maybe that wasn’t his real name either. Somehow she knew he was okay—crazy for sure, but she couldn’t sense any malice in him. She stepped over to the door and he opened it for her.
“We’ll take the back door,” she said.
“Suits me, Miss,” said George Grimes. “I had to go across that dance floor again I don’t think I’d come out alive.”
The back door was kept closed by a fire bar. Ella shoved it and the door swung open on a flight of wrought-iron steps running up from the basement to ground level. George followed her up the steps to a narrow garbage-strewn lot sandwiched between the backs of two old seven-story commercial properties. There wasn’t much light, but thirty yards to their left the black slit of an even narrower alley could be seen, running at a right angle back toward the street out front. George looked up and down.
“This way,” said Ella.
She led the way toward the alleyway. Maybe it was the walking and the sense of open sky above her but she felt clearer-headed. Half of what had happened in the dressing room was a blur in her head, mixed in with the stage lights and the pounding music and the crowd’s applause. A double espresso at Carlo’s, nice and quiet, and maybe she could work all this out.
They were twenty feet from the alleyway when a man emerged and looked at them and smiled.
Ella felt George’s hand on her left arm, stopping her dead. The hand was firm and dry and reassuring. She could feel him standing close up, direcdy behind her. The guy up ahead was white and arrogant-looking. It was the smile, like he was Mr. Maximum Joe Cool, when in fact he was just a slob in a sweatshirt. He had the worst kind of damply curly beard that made him look even fatter than he was. Joe Cool lifted a hand-held radio to his mouth and said something.
She wasn’t sure because of the traffic noise bouncing down the alley behind him, but she thought he said, “Chicken’s in the pot.”
Behind her she heard the old guy’s breathing get faster. Suddenly she couldn’t even remember his name.
In her ear she heard him say, “Don’t turn around, Miss, if you can.”
She almost turned there and then, but didn’t. The hand disappeared from her arm. She missed it.
Joe Cool, still smiling, ambled toward them, shoving the radio into the pocket of his baggy off-white pants.
“Evenin‘, lovebirds,” he said. “Where y’at?”
Ella’s arms rippled with gooseflesh and she shivered. She didn’t turn. She wanted to. She wanted to see the steady gray eyes and the heavy brows. George, she remembered now. George’s eyes, the ones without malice. Joe Cool had rat eyes, bright and empty. They kept flicking between her crotch and her tits.
“Oh, Mama, do I like that dinky belly ring,” he said.
“Whadda you want?” snapped George.
Ella almost jumped. The voice was steel-hard with don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. She wondered if George had vanished and the voice belonged to someone else. She couldn’t sense his presence anymore, but she didn’t turn. Joe Cool stopped and put his hands on his hips and pushed his potbelly at them, all aren’t-I-just-the-man-and-funny-to-boot.
“Oooh,” he said. “Why, I wanna talk to you and your little lady, old-timer. No fuss, no mess, you just come along with me for a—”
“Let me see a badge,” said George.
“A badge?” Joe Cool snorted in a short, ugly laugh. “Well, let me see what-all I got back here.”
Joe Cool casually reached back under his sweatshirt, his eyes drawn back to the ring through her navel. As he started to pull his arm back out, Ella felt herself hurtle sideways across the alleyway. By the time her shoulder hit the dirty red-brick wall, Joe Cool was pirouetting into the garbage with blood-sprays coming out of him, back and front, and her ears finally registered the aftershock of two deafening cracks as they echoed and died between the buildings. There was a clatter as a silver revolver dropped from Joe Cool’s hand. The back of his skull hit the pavement with a sound she’d rather not have heard. Ella turned her head.
The old man stood in a pale cloud of smoke aiming a funny, pointy-barreled gun at the body. He looked at her and raised his free index finger to his lips. Ella nodded. She didn’t scream. She didn’t feel like screaming, though she knew she was supposed to. The old man—George, George—flashed a glance back at the lumpen heap. Joe Cool wasn’t moving. George turned back at her and made another gesture. He seemed to want her to get down. She nodded and went into a crouch against the wall. The bricks were clammy against the outside of her bare arm. George strode forward, his pistol never wavering from its target, and picked up Joe’s revolver by the trigger guard. Next to the body was a plastic trash bag that Joe had burst open when he fell. George slipped the revolver inside the bag. Still ready to fire on the instant, he bent down, grabbed one of Joe’s wrists and, with a strength that surprised her, hauled him across to lie by the same wall as Ella, ten feet closer to the black slit of the alley. Joe’s belly wobbled, obscenely pale and bloody, from under his crumpled sweatshirt, but he made no sound. Ella discovered she felt nothing for him at all. You^re in shock. All she could think of, with relief, was that at least the old man was on her side.
She watched George slide along the wall toward the alley. She awoke to the fact that Joe Cool must have spoken to someone else on that radio. She felt a flood of concern for George. He was near the alley mouth now, moving like an old cat. Just this side of the blackness he stopped and waited. Listening. Her ears had recovered after the shots. She tuned in. All she heard was the traffic noise, and some rhythmic thumping from inside the club. George suddenly turned to face her but didn’t look at her. He crouched stiffly, then using one hand on the ground to steady himself he sat down, his legs pointing her way, and shuffled up close to what he thought was the right distance from the dark gap in the alley walls. What the fuck was he doing? George raised his right arm, the one nearest the wall, to full stretch and pointed his gun at the sky. Then again he waited, like that, for the longest seconds she’d ever counted. She wanted him to look at her but his eyes were resolutely fixed on some distant point far above and behind her head.
In a blink, George flopped backward from the waist. As his gun arm cleared the wall it snapped down into the gap, his face turning with it, and she heard three brief cracks, this time not so loud. On their heels came a muffled moan and clatter. George lay motionless, staring intently along his arm. Then slowly, the gun and his hand still invisible to her, he shuffled up onto his ass and clambered stiffly to his feet. Without a glance in her direction he disappeared into the gap. Ella crouched there alone for what was the longest wait so far. Another gunshot: Ella jumped and almost lost her balance. She stood up and looked back at the stairs to the club. Sammy. A telephone. Big guys who knew and liked her. Go for it.
“Miss MacDaniels, I’m coming out!” shouted George.
She almost ran anyway, but didn’t. George reappeared with a second revolver dangling from his finger. He dropped it in the bag with the first and walked over to her, slipping his own gun into the rear waistband of his pants. He was just the way she needed him to be: cool as one of Sammy’s bass
runs and just as clear.
George said, “Go back to the club, right now, and forget any of this happened.”
“What?”
“They must’ve followed me. I didn’t mean to endanger you this way, I apologize for that, but if you go back now and say nothing to the cops, no one will be the wiser.”
Ella found herself saying, “You can’t do this.”
“Yes I can. Just tell me where the Old Place is.”
“I don’t know the address. I just know the road there from Macon. It’s near a town called Jordan’s Crossroads.”
George frowned. “I guess Jordan’s Crossroads’ll have to do. Please, Miss, go now. The shots may have been heard. No one will know you left your dressing room.”
Ella, irrationally, was enraged.
“You just put me through the worst five minutes of my life, you old asshole. I’m coming with you.”
And that was that and she saw that George Grimes, looking at her eyes, knew it.
“Miss,” he said, “if we’d had more like you on Tarawa we’d have cleared the atoll in two days instead of three.”
Ella had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded like a compliment. George took her arm.
“Let’s go.”
Ella followed him into the alley. Twelve feet inside, a man in a sport coat lay huddled facedown in a gleaming black puddle. George nodded downward as he strode over him.
“This one kind of knew what he was doing. He just didn’t expect I would too.”
Ella’s foot brushed the dead man’s arms as she stepped over him. Again she felt nothing.
“Were they cops?” she said, hurrying to keep up with him.
“No. Cops would’ve shown a badge,” said George over his shoulder. “I don’t know who they are or who sent them.”
They approached the end of the alley. Cars passed through her line of vision.
“We get out, we’re turning right,” said George. “My car’s fifty yards down. Keep a coupla steps behind me.”
And in a flash she was out on the street and blinking in a glare of lights and noise that seemed more dazzling than those in the club. After a few steps she realized that it was dazzlingly normal. The street was exacdy as she would have expected it to be if nothing had happened. Her feet skimmed the sidewalk as if her boots had wings. She slowed, kept George a little ahead like he’d said. There weren’t many people walking. The drivers that passed by didn’t stare at anything except her ass, which was also dazzlingly normal. George stepped over to a battered sedan and opened the passenger door. As he walked around the hood she climbed in with her bag and slammed the door. It was all dreamlike and floaty, as if everything happened without her having to think about it. George got in behind the wheel and started the engine.
“You okay?” he said.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They pulled smoothly into the traffic.
“When we’ve made a few blocks, pull over at a phone booth,” she said.
“What the hell for?” said George.
“I want to call Sammy at the club, to tell him I’m fine and that he’s not to say anything about you or me to the cops when they show up.”
George stared at her.
“We don’t want Sammy thinking you’ve kidnapped me, do we? They’d have our descriptions then and we’re kind of easy to spot, don’t you think?”
“Jesus Christ,” said George. He seemed impressed.
“Plus, Sammy’s carrying a gram and he might want to get rid of it.”
Suddenly, from nowhere, she started shaking from head to foot. A wave of nausea rolled up from her pelvis.
“Stop the car,” she blurted, and grabbed the door handle.
George swung up to the curb, no dramatics, and stopped gently. Ella threw up into the gutter. She had nothing in her stomach, just a thin fluid. She felt George’s hand on her back. She retched dryly once more and felt okay again. She pulled her head back in and slammed the door and as she settled back they were moving again.
“Nerves,” said George. “Delayed reaction. Happened to me a whole bunch of times.”
Ella looked in her bag for a cigarette. She wished she’d brought the water with them.
“You know,” said George, “I didn’t expect to enjoy dueling with you, Miss MacDaniels.”
Ella lit the cigarette. It was good.
“If I’d had a chance to think about it, neither would I. I’d like you to call me Ella.”
“Ella.”
“Have I earned the right to read Charlie’s letter yet?”
George grinned and shook his head. He reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, in what sounded like wry admiration. “Jesus Christ.”
Then he handed her the letter and she took it and held it in her lap. And before she opened it she wondered, to herself, how long it would take them to get to Georgia and if she’d ever again hear the crowd whooping it up at the Factory.
SEVEN
CICERO GRIMES made it back to the City without killing himself or anyone else and without getting arrested for pan-homicidal driving. He also managed to remember Ella MacDaniels’s name and address. Fortified by these omens, he dared to hope that things might be looking up. On the edge of town he stopped at a gas station and called his father. As expected there was no reply. He drove on through light traffic. All he had to do was get his father under control. And the girl. He had time, he was sure: it seemed unlikely that Ella MacDaniels would go waltzing off with a stranger like George in the middle of the night. Maybe all three of them should go back to Arcadia and swap notes with Lenna Parillaud. Grimes had to admit he would feel safer with Bobby Frechette pitching for their team. Maybe Jefferson had made some deal with Lenna for her to look after his daughter. Why hadn’t he told Grimes? There was no reading the Captain’s mind. He was a riddler. As Grimes turned onto Willow he saw by a clock that it was getting on midnight.
He peered through the window to try to catch the street numbers as he passed. Up ahead his eye caught a ripple of winking lights, red and blue. A police patrol car was pulled up to the curb beside a milling group of spectators. The seven-story building rising behind the crowd looked to be industrial, not residential, and Grimes relaxed. It wasn’t Ella MacDaniels’s apartment then. As he drew closer he made out between the spectators a pair of legs splayed limply on the sidewalk and he cursed. It was probably a drunk passed out, or an epileptic, but it might be a cardiac arrest or a stabbing or something else he might be able to do something about. Grimes couldn’t drive by a casualty without checking it out. He pulled over behind the patrol car and got out. He peered over a shoulder and his heart sank: the guy had been shot. Grimes would lose valuable time.
“Please, folks! Give the guy some room!”
One of the cops was trying to keep the curious at bay. The other knelt beside the wounded man with a small white plastic case decorated with a red cross. The lid of the case was open and the second cop was sifting through it in an aimless panic. He looked as if he were searching for a cold beer. Grimes put his reluctance aside and shouldered his way forward. The first cop pointed at him with his nightstick.
“I’m not asking you to stand back, sir, I’m telling you”
Grimes looked at him and said, “I’m a doctor, Officer. Maybe I can help.”
The second cop looked up at him from the sidewalk, almost grinning with relief as the responsibility for something he knew little about slipped from his shoulders. He was young and nervous.
“God bless you, Doc. Paramedics are on their way.”
“What’s your name, Officer?” asked Grimes.
Names relaxed people, made them more efficient. As the cop spoke Grimes got to work.
“Felton, Rod Felton,” said the officer.
Grimes crouched by the wounded man and pressed his fingers into his groin. The femoral pulse was rapid and thready. The guy’s blood-soaked shirt had been pulled up under his ar
mpits to reveal two small puckered holes in his torso an inch above and below the right costal margin in the midclavicular line. Gut and liver. Bad news, the liver. Heavy internal bleeding, difficult to control. The man’s chest heaved in fast, shallow pants. Plasma volume was the priority. As Grimes pulled the first-aid chest over he glanced at the guy’s face. His head rolled from side to side, pillowed on a rolled-up jacket. Beneath a clammy lemon-gray sheen his bearded features were contorted and he murmured with pain. In the first-aid case Grimes found a bag of saline and a 16-gauge IV cannula needle. Gauge 18 would have been better. He handed a pair of scissors to Officer Felton.
“Rod, cut that shirt off for me, would you?” instructed Grimes. “I need to get to his neck.”
“Sure thing, Doc.”
While Felton hacked through the shirt, Grimes tore open the bag and inserted one end of a short tube, squeezed the saline through. The guy’s veins were collapsed and he was in cardiovascular shock; Grimes didn’t see a cut-down pack in the case. He would go for the subclavian. Felton pulled the bloody cloth clear of the guy’s throat and shoulders.
“Good man,” said Grimes. “Hand me this tube when I ask for it.”
Grimes handed the drip bag and connecting tube to Felton, put the needle on the guy’s chest and moved to position himself behind the guy’s shoulder. As he did so he glimpsed a poster in a glass case on the wall nearby:
THE RHYTHM FACTORY
tonite:
from Miami!
ERNESTO RUIZ
and
THE NIGHTHAWKS
As Grimes’s eyes swept by they were drawn back again by some subliminal recognition toward a second poster:
Every Friday:
ELLA MacOANIELS
and
CATDADDT
Beneath the tide was a grainy reproduction of the head and shoulders of a young, unsmiling black woman with striking features. Grimes bit the inside of his lip.
