Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

  DOC VOODOO: Aces & Eights

  By Dale Lucas

  Published 2011 by Beating Windward Press LLC

  First Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © Dale Lucas, 2011

  All Rights Reserved

  Book & Cover Design: Copyright KP Creative, 2011

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Mom and Dad. Finally.

  Haitian vodou, like organized crime, is a hierarchy: a complex system of patrons and clients; bosses, captains, and soldiers. Everything works on a basic quid pro quo principle as old as time: this for that; a favor for a favor; you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Collectively, the gods of vodou are known as the lwa.

  At the top of the lwa pyramid are the Orishas: the movers and shakers; the matriarchs and patriarchs of a number of elemental clans whose powers bind all those beneath them: the cool, fluid Rada; the fierce and fiery Petro; and the Ghede, the house made up of the ancestors, the dead, and their chthonic keepers.

  Doing the work of the Orishas and running their own stables of servants and soldiers are the caporegime of the vodou realms: the Barons.

  And at the bottom of the heap—the minor spirits, dead souls, and lingering ancestors who do the grunt work of the Orishas and the Barons, along with everyday Joes like you and me: people of flesh and blood who give the Barons and Orishas offerings in exchange for blessings and curses; and who sometimes give their bodies over to possession as shuttles and mouthpieces for the lwa.

  Small wonder that when we’re saddled by the lwa, doing their dirty work, they call us horses...

  The question inevitably arises: Will the Negroes of Harlem be able to hold it?

  —James Weldon Johnson, 1930

  Chapter 1

  Wooley’s hands shook, so Johnson offered him a tug on the reefer and Wooley took it. The sweet-grass filled his throat and nostrils, then his lungs, and he held it. Moments later, his brain felt like a wad of soggy cotton and every moment seemed to live in a perfect little bubble, separate from the last, like pearls on a string. His hands didn’t shake anymore, and Johnson grinned beside him in the dark, teeth bright white in his mahogany face.

  “Dig this! Wooley’s grinnin’ ear to ear!”

  Tibbs rode shotgun. He huffed and jacked the breech on his pump twelve to make sure a shell was ready and waiting. “That mean you niggers are ready to roll?”

  Johnson’s reply, “Who you callin’ nigger, nigger?” came with a smile, but there was venom in it. Wooley took another tug on the reefer and handed it back to Johnson. He blew on it, and the cherry glowed in the darkness of their idling Model T.

  “Cocked and locked?” Bedoux asked from behind the wheel. Wooley answered with a snort, as did the others, and Bedoux eased the accelerator. The car crawled up the street toward their targets.

  Wooley saw them up ahead through the windscreen: Lester Bernice, with the little tin lunch pail he used to shuttle the bolito slips from his route; his policy-boss, Chester, next to another one of the Harlem Knight block-bosses, Frupp; and a kid that Wooley didn’t know, probably not even seventeen yet.

  Not much younger than Wooley himself.

  XX

  “So pay attention,” Lester said, and Beau did his best to listen, though it was getting late and he knew Fralene would want him home soon. If he wasn’t careful, he’d have to explain to Lester, Chester, and Frupp why his sister was out wandering up and down Lenox Avenue after midnight, calling Beau by his unwieldy Christian name, Buchanan.

  Lester plunged into his umpteenth explanation. “The pail’s full of dough and slips. You bring it back to your block-boss, and they collect and give you blank slips for the following day. Never hand over the slips or the dough unless there’s at least one witness, if not more. You don’t want to do it out in front of God and everybody, but for fuck sakes, don’t be dumb enough to hand over a pail fulla cash to anybody—anybody!—when there ain’t somebody else there to vouch for you makin’ your drop.”

  “Sound advice,” Chester said, eyes still on the checkerboard before him. He and Frupp were melted into their chairs in front of Frupp’s Barbershop, which had been closed for hours, but which Frupp never seemed to leave. The old barber and the bolito boss sat smoking thin little Mexican cigars, munching boiled peanuts, mulling over whether to jump or crown next.

  “You gonna move?” Frupp asked. “Slow as molasses in goddamn January...” Frupp was boss for this block, but Beau was apprenticed with Lester, who made his slip and dough deliveries to Chester. Chester had promised that the game would soon be over and they’d all cross 128th and 129th Streets back to his block to see the slips and dough safely deposited at the night bank. But presently, the game didn’t seem close to ending, and Beau was more than a little nervous, standing out on the street in the middle of the night next to a middle-aged Negro numbers runner carrying a tin lunch-pail filled with hundreds of dollars in coin and small bills, not to mention the receipts for the first flush of the following day’s policy slips. Still, best to keep his mouth shut and go with it. They were the experts, he the newbie.

  Chester made a double jump. Frupp countered with a triple, leading to a king. “Son of a bitch!” Chester huffed. Frupp burst out with a round of wizened laughter that sounded like a dull handsaw on a termite-ridden log.

  “Shit on a stick, Ches,” Lester moaned. “I saw that comin’. You didn’t see that comin’? You blind, old man?”

  Beau heard a click behind them and turned in time to see a heavy woman in a loose housedress come stomping out of the brownstone next to Frupp’s Barbershop. She looked pissed, and something about the flip-flop of her slippers on the stoop stones and the sway of her ample bosom under the housedress filled Beau with maternal terror.

  “Y’all wanna shut your filthy old mouths?” the woman hissed. “I got my little ones sleeping right inside—” she indicated the ground-floor window just a coin-flip from where Beau stood, “and I don’t need you wakin’ ‘em up with all your carryin’ on. Ain’t you got gin joints to patronize?”

  “Well, ma’am,” Chester began, with a mock courtesy that Beau had seen him employ a hundred times in the name of good-natured sarcasm, “first and foremost, I’m insulted that you’d even suggest gentlemen such as we would patronize any establishment that’d serve liquor. This is a dry nation, after all.”

  “Here here,” Frupp chimed in. “Goin’ on five—naw—six years dry! That’s Prohibition, miss! The law of the land, case you didn’t know!”

  Chester waggled a finger at her. “You’d do well to keep your own sorry after-dark activities to yourself, miss!”

  Beau laughed in spite of himself and the fat woman in the housedress came pounding down the stoop steps toward them, thick lips pursed, eyes bulging angrily.

  That’s when the black Model T rolled into view and the gun chatter started.

  XX

  This was Wooley’s first spitfire for the West I
ndies, but he hoped it wouldn’t be his last. Running numbers was fine and good; likewise dealing at Papa House’s card tables or crouping at the dice games; but real money and respect came by the gun. Kings didn’t trust wetworks to just any flunky, and if your king offered you the opportunity—as Papa House had offered Wooley—then you took it and you made damn sure you didn’t screw the pooch and spank her.

  Part of Wooley felt bad when he saw the fat lady in the house dress appear on the stoop and knew she’d be walking right into the line of fire. But that small, remorseful bit of him was forgotten when his weed-addled brain moved on to its next bubble-moment and he was back on Papa House’s dime: a lean, mean killin’ machine.

  So Wooley did just what Johnson told him, leaning right out the side window of the Sedan and squeezing the trigger of the Tommy gun with the muzzle low. It kicked and the gunfire made his ears ring and his teeth chattered and flossy tongues of flame spat from the muzzle in strobe-quick bursts. Above and behind him, he heard Johnson doing his part with a pair of Smith & Wesson six shooters, while next to Wooley, Tibbs made boom-chakka-boom music with his pump shotgun.

  He sprayed the stoop and the brownstone and the barbershop with his Tommy; and Johnson took pot-shots at the numbers-runners, ventilating each in turn; and Tibbs provided the insurance, following Wooley’s lead spray and Johnson’s target practice with a carpet of buckshot.

  The funny thing was that once he opened up, Wooley had no clue what was happening. The noise from the guns blew his hearing and the world was all bells; the muzzle flashes and gun smoke dropped an iridescent haze in front of him that he could barely see through; and the dust, mortar, and shattering glass from the brownstone and the barbershop clouded their targets. The only thing he saw clearly was a lunch pail that went flying upward, splaying its coins, bills, and numbers slips into the cold night air, so much expensive confetti.

  Then the car lurched under him, their targets shrank behind, the cold wind kissed his face, and Wooley knew that Bedoux had his foot on the accelerator and their work was done. Away they went. Faintly, behind the alarm-clock ring in his ears, Wooley heard the fat lady screaming, voice echoing up and down the block.

  So that was that. Wooley ducked back into the car.

  XX

  Beau thought he might be bleeding, but he’d just pissed himself. Strangely, he wasn’t embarrassed, just glad to be alive. He even welcomed the fat lady’s screams in his ringing ears—further proof that he was still breathing; still in the game.

  Frupp lay folded backward through his shattered barbershop window, stitched up and down with the raspberry-jam pockmarks of bullet wounds. Chester had taken a belly-full of the Tommy slugs and a face-full of buckshot. A piece of his brain and skull stuck to the brick lintel above the barbershop door. Lester lay in a heap of coins, small bills, and pink bolito slips. He had a small pistol in his hand—a little .32 that Beau knew he always carried at the small of his back. The little revolver gleamed in the gun-smoked, lamp-lit haze.

  When Beau saw the Model T speeding away down the block, heard its brakes squealing as it rounded the nearest corner and cut due south, he knew what he had to do. Those sons-of-bitches in that car made him piss himself! They weren’t gonna roll off without a little bit of lead lip from Beau Farnes!

  So he snatched up Lester’s gun and took off running, cutting south through the nearest alleyway, hoping that he might get to 127th Street in time to catch them on their double-back. As he pounded down the dark alley, he heard the fat lady screaming, louder now, surprise and shock giving way to stark horror.

  “My baby! My baby boy! Those bastards shot my baby boy!”

  XX

  They cut from 128th down to 127th and turned hard right again, Wooley sliding over against the rear door, thinking he might go spilling out into the night.

  “Shoulda cut down farther,” Tibbs growled.

  “I’m drivin’,” Bedoux snapped. “You shut your trap and—what the fuck?”

  Wooley leaned forward, peering over Bedoux’s and Tibbs’s shoulders through the windscreen. It was the kid. He broke out of an alley, ran right into the street, raised a little .32 popgun and started squeezing off rounds. The first went wild. The second put a hole in the windscreen and Wooley heard it buzz by his left ear before punching out the back.

  The kid didn’t have a mark on him. Impossible! He was standing right there with the others, and Wooley knew they’d all taken heat!

  Bedoux hit the gas and the car lurched forward. Tibbs shoved three more rounds into his shotgun and jacked the first into the chamber.

  Another round from the kid’s .32 punched through the windscreen, veering too close for comfort to Bedoux in the driver’s seat. Bedoux bent, and the car swerved.

  Then something big and heavy bounced off the roof. The windshield shattered with the impact. With the wind in their faces, they were flying blind.

  “Did you hit him?” Johnson brayed. “You hit that little bastard?”

  Bedoux hit the brakes, the car careened sideways, and the whole rumbling mess screeched to a halt broadside in the middle of 127th Street. Wooley wondered what the hell Bedoux was doing, but before he could ask, Tibbs was out the passenger door, shotgun in hand, rounding the car.

  “Wooley,” the elder gun barked, “get your skinny little ass out here and—Jesus Christ!”

  Wooley did as he was told. He threw open the back door and leapt out with his Tommy gun, ready to follow Tibbs and finish the kid.

  Wooley saw the kid. He was still alive, tumbled over in the gutter, neither broken nor bleeding.

  They hadn’t hit him.

  Tibbs wasn’t looking at the kid, though. He was looking at something standing right out in the middle of the street, and there was fear in his eyes.

  Tibbs is afraid, Wooley thought. Tibbs ain’t afraid of no man.

  So he followed Tibbs’s gaze and saw what had him so spooked.

  Death stood in the middle of 127th Street. He had a gun in each hand.

  The apparition conjured a whole slew of bedtime stories from the dusty bins of Wooley’s weed-addled brain. He was draped in a long overcoat and a coiled, serpentine scarf, both undulating and billowing in the night on a wind that wasn’t there. The coat was coal black and the scarf was the angry red of hot iron or an open wound.

  Buried amid the coils of the scarf and the upturned collar of the coat was a broad face painted white in the semblance of a skull, framed by hoary, ropy dreadlocks and crowned with a black top hat. From the shadows under the hat brim, black eyes burned out at them, smoldering like banked coals.

  Fuck me! Wooley thought. That’s Baron Samedi! The gravelord! The Cemetery Man!

  Who called the Baron?

  And who’s he come to collect?

  Tibbs, who was born in Jamaica and should have known the Baron on sight and been terrified of him, didn’t seem fazed. He just hipped his scattergun and barked at the nasty apparition.

  “You best be skinnin’ out, mister! Three seconds, and you’re goat meat!”

  The Baron heard—Wooley saw the glint in his eyes that seemed to welcome the challenge, and the way his black-and-white painted lips seemed to sneer.

  Tibbs opened fire.

  The shotgun roared, ka-chacked, roared again. On Wooley’s right, Johnson popped off round after round from his six shooters, laughing as he did so. Wooley raised his Tommy to throw a burst, but in the breath it took to do so, he saw the Baron’s coat and scarf fan up before him. The slugs didn’t draw blood. It was like the coat and scarf threw up a screen of black-hot heat before him, and all the lead that came barreling his way hit that screen and veered aside and left him untouched. Wooley even saw the shots going wild, kicking up scraps of cement, sparking off lamp-posts, shattering windows and popping the tires of parked cars.

  But not a single shot touched the Baron.

  Wooley’s Tommy gun was heavy in his hands.

  Tibbs kept firing, pumping, firing. When the scattergun was dry, he threw it
down and went for the Webley he kept stashed in the shoulder holster under his coat.

  That’s when the Baron raised his .45’s and opened up on them.

  Wooley dove. The twin autos sounded like cannons and he heard the bullets whiz by above him; heard their hot lead punching ragged, wet holes through Johnson and Tibbs; felt their blood on his bent back and shoulders; smelled gun smoke and gore as the two of them hit the pavement on either side of him. Wooley raised his head. The Baron stalked nearer, smoking guns still high.

  Before Wooley could cry surrender, he heard the driver’s door open and knew Bedoux was stepping out. The driver’s own .45 coughed, throwing round after round at the Baron in the center of the street.

  But the Baron marched on, putting two slugs in Bedoux without breaking stride. Then he was looming over Wooley, holstering one pistol beneath his living coat, reaching down with his black-gloved hand to take Wooley by the collar and haul him up onto his feet. Wooley heard his own voice, high and reedy, pleading with the lord of all the dead and the keeper of their houses; felt the sting of tears in his eyes, and the ring of ruined hearing in his ears from all the gunfire, and smelled the blood of his companions and the smoky cigar stink that wafted off the Baron, and looked into his black, smoldering eyes and knew that if he stared into those eyes too long or too hard, they’d swallow his soul and make mince of it.

  He realized his feet were off the ground. The Baron held him aloft with one fist, sneering behind his painted skull-face, and spoke with a voice that sounded like a wind moaning through a cane break.