Quarry's Choice (10 page)

At the far left I went through a push door into the bar, which was like entering into a different world. Country western from a jukebox, barely audible out in the dining room, blasted in here—Charley Pride singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.” Charley was the only black person in here. The patrons appeared to be locals ranging from retail workers to lawyers to farmers to loggers to college kids. Beer neons glowed behind a long, well-stocked teakwood bar with ten stools and two bartenders, one of them female. The tables were rough varnished wood and so were the booths.

Here the hookers were hard at work, segregated from the respectable folk partaking of the dining room’s countrified fare. This was a world of single men (well, men who’d come alone anyway) and decent-looking hookers no older than early thirties in bare-midriff blouses and minis or hot pants, doing the time-honored B-girl routine of getting watered-down drinks bought for them, with that motel next door just waiting to take it to the next rung of paradise.

On the far side of the room was a double-size doorway with a red drape hung from a curtain rod. Nobody stopped me when I pushed through into a casino that made Mr. Woody’s look like Caesar’s Palace. The walls were covered in cheap rec-room paneling, the floor cement again. More lighted beer signs rode the walls, many plastic, a few neon.

A roulette wheel, a craps table and two blackjack tables were well-attended by a mix of men similar to the bar’s, which it was slightly bigger than. One side had four sectioned-off areas for poker, two tables in play. A couple of bouncers in black t-shirts and black slacks were walking the room—they looked like country boys, thick-armed, thick-thighed, and thick-browed, ex-farmhands who got fired for diddling the livestock.

Again, the hookers were working the room, bringing luck (of a sort) to various men, some of whom spurned them but many did not. The odd thing was the variant nature of the men—a frat boy in colored t-shirt and bellbottoms rated the same kind of twenty-something babe as the country-club type with a white vinyl belt in his plaid pants. A few waitresses in black hot pants and white halter tops were threading through, handing out complimentary drinks. When a hand landed on a shapely waitress behind, it just got lifted gently off, like a piece of lint.

I was heading through the bar to rejoin Luann when I heard somebody call to me. The voice was female, mid-range and as smoky as the room itself.

“Hey, honeymooner! Bring your cute buns over here.”

The female behind the bar was in her mid-forties with a red beehive that had been in style when she dropped out of high school. Her features were formerly attractive, meaning booze and hard living had exploded them into caricature, with heavy make-up adding further cartoon touches—painted-on thick black eyebrows, big green bloodshot orbs under green eye shadow, pug nose with too-large nostrils, thin-lipped wide mouth with yellow teeth and vertical smoker’s wrinkles.

She wore a waitress’s uniform, black, cut low enough to expose as much of a shelf of bosom as possible without entering aureole territory. She also had on a white apron.

Her name tag said
DIXIE
.

I went over to her, leaning in between vacant bar stools. Down two from us, at the end of the counter, a deathly pale dark-haired sunken-cheeked guy—who had been handsome once in the way Dixie had been pretty once—was reading the sports section of a newspaper, smoking a cigarette, with a can of Miller’s and a glass ashtray in front of him. This was Dixie’s better half—Randolph “Dix” Dixon. Killian showed me pictures.

She said, “Fanny Rae snitched on you.”

“She did?” Who the hell was Fanny Rae?

Reading my mind, she answered, “Your waitress, you silly goofus! She says you and the pretty little lady in there are on your honeymoon.”

“Yeah, we are.” I jerked a thumb in the general direction of the Dixie Court. “This’ll make our seventh motel in as many nights.”

Dixie chortled and all of that red hair moved as one, like Mickey Mouse’s head at Disneyland. “Lucky seven!”

“Lucky seven,” I said, grinning back at her.

She leaned in and rested her boobs on the bar. She smelled like face powder and too much perfume. Probably not cheap perfume, but too much. “Listen, handsome, I got a soft spot for kids just starting out. Can I buy you two a drink?”

“Sure. Just a Shirley Temple for Holly. She doesn’t imbibe.”

“Well, ain’t that cute. How about you, good-lookin’? Do
you
‘imbibe’?”

“I wouldn’t say no to a beer. Anything you have on tap is fine.”

“We got Bud and Coors.”

“Coors.”

“You sure, kid? Drinkin’ Coors is like makin’ love in a boat, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah—it’s fuckin’ close to water!”

I laughed, like I hadn’t heard that a decade ago, and then pretended to read the name tag just under the exposed flesh of one vast breast. “ ‘Dixie’. . .are you
the
Dixie?”

“One and only. That’s the hubby—Dix. Dix! Meet the honeymoon kid here.. . .What’s your name, good-lookin’?”

“Bob.”

Dix managed a smile that was like a wrinkle in a hound dog’s neck. He gave me a lazy glance from dark rheumy wide-set eyes, then stuck out a clammy hand that I shook, and he returned to his paper.

“You go in,” Dixie said warmly, “and enjoy your dinner. That’s the best chicken in either McNairy or Alcorn Counties. Shoo! I’ll bring them drinks in myself.”

I thanked her and returned to the table, wondering if Dixie’s kindness was Act One of a melodrama that was destined to end with a good-lookin’ honeymoon kid getting looted and beat to shit in the parking lot.

Back in the dining room, the chicken arrived about the same time Dixie did with the Shirley Temple and the pilsner of Coors. She was all smiles and shook Luann’s hand, saying, “You done right good, honey. Your man’s got some nice buns on him!”

Luann whipped up a smile that seemed to satisfy Dixie, who took her leave. In her business, Luann often had to whip up such smiles.

She was looking past me as Dixie hauled herself, big boobs and all, back into the bar. “Did you see that lump?” she asked.

“You mean in her throat, when she talked about us being honeymooners?”

“No. In her apron.” ’

“Yeah. Must be a tumor.”

“What?”

“A tumor shaped remarkably like a ball-peen hammer.”

The chicken was good enough that I understood how respectable people from nearby little towns might drive out here for it, even with prostitution and gambling running wide-open next door. Luann liked the well-battered stuff, too. She seemed at her happiest eating something that wasn’t salad or some guy’s johnson.

Using both hands to hold up a chicken breast, Luann said, “Don’t let her fool you.”

“She doesn’t.”

“She isn’t nice.”

I gestured with a chicken leg. “Well, she might be nice about some things, and not nice about others. People aren’t just one thing, you know.”

“They are mostly one thing.”

“You mean nice or not nice.”

She nodded and her tiny teeth tore off a bite of breast.

I ordered Luann a dish of ice cream with chocolate sauce and left her at the table again, so I could go back in the bar and thank Dixie for her generosity.

When I got there, she was dealing with an aggrieved customer. He was a small bald man about thirty-five in a brown off-the-rack suit and he was crying.

“My wife will kill me,” he said. “My boss will
fire
me.”

“You’re a growed man, sir,” Dixie said coldly. “You shouldn’t ought to gamble more than you can afford.”

He lowered his voice, and I had to edge up just a little closer to hear. “There’s something you need to know. If I tell you, will you help me? I think it will help
you
.”

Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. “Tell me and we’ll see.”

He swallowed. Pointing toward the red curtain onto the gambling hall, he said, “That man with the mustache and the glasses who deals poker for you? He’s cheating both of us! I lost five hundred dollars to him.
All
my traveling money.”

“Damn shame. I can stake you a twenty if that will help.”

“I’m only halfway through my route! I sell watches.
Good
ones. Hundred up. My sample case is in my trunk.” A thought jumped into his mind and his eyes. “I could give you a really fine watch, if you help me out!”

“That’s right generous.”

He was keeping his voice low. “I don’t want to embarrass you. I know you and your husband run this place.”

“We do,” she said.

Dix, reading the funnies now, was glancing the salesman’s way. He had the expression of somebody tasting an oyster for the first time.

Very quietly, the little guy said, “That mustached dealer of yours is cheating. Dealing off the bottom. I thought I saw him do it more than once. Then I saw him
for sure
. That’s how I lost the big hand, and it’s not right. He must be cheating
you
, too.”

Her hand dropped to her apron’s pouch, fingers slipping in there.

Maxwell’s silver hammer?

But instead she brought out a fat wad of cash. She peeled off twenties to the tune of what must have been five hundred and said, “We’ll just take care of this, sir. Thank you for callin’ it to our ’tention, in such a gentlemanly fashion.”

She handed him the cash.

He wasn’t crying now. He was beaming. “Thank you! Oh, Dixie. . .may I call you Dixie?”

“Please do. And what’s your name, hon?”

“Harold. Harold Reed.”

“Mr. Reed, Harold,” she said with a wide yellow smile, extending a hand and her big bosom over the bar, “don’t you be a stranger now. Never let it be said the Dixie Club can’t take a little ’structive criticism.”

Grinning, Harold Reed was counting his money as he went out the bar exit.

I said, “That’s damn decent of you, Dixie.”

She looked distracted. “Uh, yeah. Price of doin’ business.”

“I just wanted to thank you for the free drinks for my wife and me.”

She realized who I was suddenly (or anyway, thought she did). “Well, it’s my favorite honeymooner. You bet—my pleasure. You all come back.”

“Oh we will.”

I went quickly into the restaurant where Luann had just finished her ice cream. Without sitting, I took a look at the bill, which was under ten bucks, and left fifteen. Took my bride by the hand and went out.

They were fast. Dixie and her husband were already in motion, trailing the bouncer who was dragging the salesman from the parking lot to between the main building and the motel. A big air conditioner was making a lot of noise nearby.

I told Luann: “Get our bag out of the room and put it in the car. Here are the keys.”

I handed them to her.

She nodded.

“You get in the car and wait for me. Keep your head down.”

She nodded, and scurried off.

The slice of moon was painting the overgrown area behind the buildings a deceptively peaceful ivory. Forming a semicircle, they were in the ankle-high grass, but a thicket of weeds and kudzu and God knew what else was waiting like an all too penetrable wall just a few yards away.

So pale he almost glowed, Dix was smoking, grinning, his mustache riding his sneer like a surfboard does a wave. He had a gun in one hand, a snubby .38. He stood near Dixie, who faced the bouncer and his prisoner. The captor had a roundish head, a stupid face, long brown stringy hair with sideburns, and was beefy verging on fat. His chin sat on another one and his little eyes peeked out from piggy pouches. For a big guy, he didn’t look like much trouble to me.

But he was plenty of trouble for the salesman, whose arms he held pinned back. . .

. . .if not as much trouble as the big-boobed beehive redhead in the black waitress uniform and the white apron, which was already splashed with blood.

The three places where she had hit him in his bald skull with the hammer were easily visible, ribbons of red trailing from each. The little guy was woozy from pain but the mercy of unconsciousness hadn’t come his way yet.

Chicken wasn’t the only thing that got well-battered at the Dixie Club.

She snarled, “What do you think, Dix? Has our guest learned his lesson? Or does he go for a swim in the swamp?”

Dix had a laugh that was mostly cigarette cough, a harsh, terrible disruption in a night where insects and birds sang. “Put him out of his fuckin’ misery. That sample case may not be no small change, ya know.”

The little salesman said, “You can
have
the watches! Take them! Let me
go
!”

She raised the hammer and I said, “That’s enough.”

I stepped into view with the nine millimeter raised their way. No silencer, but that chugging air conditioner should do the trick.

Dix’s gun was at his side, as limp as that jaw of his, which had just trapdoored open. The bosomy broad whirled toward me and blood flew off the hammer’s head like scarlet spittle. Her lip was peeled back and her teeth looked feral and her big green bloodshot eyes looked fucking nuts.

“
You!
” she said.

“Drop the hammer,” I said.

“Fuck you!”

I shot her husband.

She dropped the hammer.

And the bouncer dropped the little guy, and took off running, toward that wall of bushes. The nine millimeter slug entered his head in back and a clumpy stream of things that had been inside it projectile-vomited out his forehead.

Dix was slumped in the grass, awkwardly on his side, an uncomfortable position had he been alive; he was staring at us with a ragged hole just above one expressionless eye. Several yards away, the bouncer lay face down, dead as the Confederacy. Dixie just stood there with clawed hands trembling at her side, staring at me with hot hatred that might have got to me if I didn’t have the gun.

The salesman was on his knees in the grass. He looked up at me, wondering if he had just been saved or was in the middle of something very bad about to get him killed.

“Have you ever seen me before?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Could you recognize me again?”

“No!”

“Good. Why don’t you take your five hundred dollars and go?
Go.
Don’t look back.”