There was a blizzard, or what looked like one, up in New York City. In the TV news footage the snow drifts looked about hip high. And there was a sleet storm over Maryland and Virginia. But here in Atlanta the sun was out all day and the temperature was in the low 60’s. It began to drop around dusk, and the wind was up. Now it was in the upper 40’s and holding, and that was fine for me. I didn’t want it any lower. I’d had enough of sitting around in parked cars in freezing weather, waiting for my feet to turn into ice cubes. I guess that’s a sign I’m getting old, but I don’t like to think so.
It was a simple tail, a follow-around for the evening and report-back in the morning—that kind of thing. Like most of that kind of work, it was a goddamn bore. Most of the evening I was in my ’65 Ford, parked at a slight angle across the street from the Dew Drop In Cafe. Every half-hour or so, I’d leave the car and cross the street. I’d pass the cafe and look in. Each time, so far, she’d been there. Emily Campbell, 19, blonde and pretty, hunched over the bar sipping a glass of beer. There were eight or ten other drinkers in the place and they were all black. What interested me was that there were exactly two empty bar stools on each side of her. None of the studs seemed to be trying to make time.
The last pass by the cafe, a big stud with an Afro turned slowly on his stool and stared at me past the neon sputter of the cafe sign. That stare curdled my blood a bit, and I thought about calling Hump and having him drop into the cafe and see what he could find out from the inside. Hump’s black, and that’s a great disguise in the part of town I was operating in this Friday night, the 10th of December.
I decided against calling Hump. The fee for the tail was too low, and it wouldn’t do to split two ways. On the way back to the car my blood started flowing again and the hard ridge of muscle high in my back relaxed. It was just routine. Nothing to worry about.
The phone call earlier in the day shouldn’t have surprised me. The state legislature was in special session, and I usually got some work out of the members’ back-alley merry-making. Mainly nasty little jobs. Things I’d straighten out, so the folks back home wouldn’t hear about them. The first favor I’d done was for old Hugh Muffin, a long-time state senator from the southeastern part of the state. It involved some pictures of Hugh being blown by a 16-year-old hippie chick. The pictures, according to the chick and her boyfriend, were worth ten thousand dollars. Hump had talked to the boyfriend in the bathroom of the little apartment in the 10th Street area, and I’d reasoned with the girl in the bedroom. In the end, we had the prints and the negatives and they had a few new bruises.
After that, there were other jobs. A few bucks here and a few bucks there. Some of them came through Hugh and others by way of the legislative grapevine. In this new job there’d been no mention of Hugh, though I knew that he and my new client, Arch Campbell, were drinking friends. Maybe Hugh had suggested me. Maybe not. Anyway, the job seemed simple enough. Arch Campbell had a daughter at Tech. Apple of his eye and only child and all that. Now, according to him, it looked like she was headed for hell in a handbasket. After a fine freshman year, dean’s list, her grades were down, and she’d decided against going into her mother’s sorority. She wouldn’t return her mother’s calls. Twice her mother had driven out to Tech to see her, and both times she’d been out. My job was to tail her around for a day or two and find out what was distracting her. That was fifty dollars a day, flat fee.
I started the job in the late afternoon. I drove out to Tech and found her dormitory without any trouble. Then I cruised around the parking lot until I spotted her green Toyota with the tag numbers the old man had given me. I parked in a space two rows behind her, and walked around until I found a pay phone. From the noise in Arch Campbell’s room at the Regency, it sounded like they were having a hell of a party. He had to shush them down before we could talk.
“Call your daughter,” I told him, “and say you’re coming right over to see her.”
“I don’t understand . . . ”
“Say you’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“If you say so, I will, but . . . ”
I said, “Do it right now,” and hung up.
I got back to my car and waited. Sure enough, about six or seven minutes later, a girl came running out the side entrance of the dorm. She was fumbling her arms into a sweater and looking around as if she expected the devil himself to appear. She got into the green Toyota and burned rubber leaving the parking lot. A block or so later, the panic seemed to drain out of her and she eased down to fit into the traffic. I fell into place two cars back and relaxed. She was a driving-manual driver, and it wasn’t hard to keep her in sight.
When she reached West Peachtree and North, she turned and headed downtown. She went through the main part of Peachtree and reached Whitehall. I was right behind her then. When she took an abrupt right into a service station, got out, and went to a phone booth. From where I was, she seemed upset. She had slammed the receiver down hard on the final call. Right after that, she’d driven to the Dew Drop In Cafe. That was almost four hours ago, and she was still there. If she was waiting for someone, as I guessed, then that someone was a few hours late.
It was time to check on her again. I didn’t relish that much, not after the big black with the Afro had taken that hard look at me. But if she took a quick run out the back door, I’d have to start over again the next day, and I didn’t want that, either. I was sitting there, debating with myself, when a set of headlights struck the back window and lit me up. A car eased to the curb behind me. I leaned down and got the slapjack from under the seat. I placed it on the seat beside me and, as the headlights went out, I turned and saw two blacks get out of the car. One was on the walk side and the other on the street side. They were arguing and raising a lot of good-natured hell, like they’d already had a few to drink. The one on the walk said he had to get home before Annie did, or there’d be shit in the soup the next day. The other one was kidding him about Annie and trying to talk him into some pig feet and another beer at the cafe. It sounded so real that I believed it, but I kept my eye on the one in the street. He was edging toward my car, but that seemed normal enough because he was waiting for a spurt of traffic to go by. Watching that one was my mistake. The other one, the one who was insisting that he had to get home before Annie, whipped open the door next to the sidewalk and eased into the seat beside me. He was carrying one of those nickel-plated .32’s, the ones we called Saturday Night Specials. They weren’t much good, but they’d kill you from a couple of feet away.
“Sit still, white ass,” he said.
I sat still.
The one still outside stopped pretending he was trying to cross to the cafe and circled the car. He moved into the back seat, directly behind me. He leaned forward and hooked an arm around my neck. The hard hump of muscle in his forearm almost choked me. “See what he’s carrying.”
The black with the .32 found the slapjack on the seat and passed it back. “This on the seat.” He patted me down and handed my wallet over the seat back.
As soon as the black with the .32 moved away from me and was ready, the arm slipped away from my throat. In the back seat he used a pencil flashlight to go through my wallet.
“Hardman,” he said behind me, “I’ve heard of you. What’s a cop doing in this part of town?”
I was going to let the mistake ride, but the black on the seat beside me knew better. “He ain’t a cop any more. Got throwed off the force over a year ago.”
“That so, Hardman?”
“Yes.”
There went that small chance of immunity. If they thought I was a cop it might not get too rough. But now they knew better. If I’d been thrown off the force, it wouldn’t bring much heat when something happened to me. The way I’d left, if anything happened to me they might even declare a paid holiday.
“Hardman, what you doing down here?”
“Working up nerve enough to go over and order some pig knuckles to go.”
“That ain’t the answer.” The arm hooked around my throat again. “Ferd!”
Ferd, the one with the .32, shifted the gun to his left hand and drove his right into my kidney. I wanted to scream, but the hump of muscle choked it off. There was nothing else to do, so I farted.
“Jesus,” Ferd said, “I think he shit his pants.”
The arm slacked so I could breathe.
“Not yet,” I said, “but you keep that up, and . . . ”
“I’ll make it easy for you,” the one in the back seat said, “You watching the white chick, huh?”
It was time to make my mind up. I’d probably piss blood in the morning, anyway. A few more blows in the kidney, and I’d end up pissing blood and tissue. It wasn’t worth it.
“For yourself?”
“No, her daddy. He’s worried about her.”
“That cunt can take care of herself,” Ferd said, laughing.
“Watch your mouth,” the other black said.
Ferd clamped his mouth shut.
“Maybe you ought to back off from the job.”
“I think I ought to,” I said.
“We see you following the girl around again, it won’t be just a talk.”
“I’m off the job, as of now.”
“That’s a smart white ass.” The arm tightened around my neck and I was pulled back and up, until I was out of my seat. Ferd worked me over, belly and kidneys and groin. I wanted to vomit, but it was backed up and choked off by the arm at my throat. It wasn’t until they were through and I was slammed forward against the steering wheel that it came gushing out. It splattered all over my pants and shoes and the floorboards.
“Remember, Hardman.”
From the headlights and the engine noises, I knew they’d left. It was half an hour before I could sit up. It was another ten or fifteen minutes before I felt strong enough to drive. I didn’t think I could make it to my house, so I drove over to Hump’s apartment. I leaned against the wall in the entrance hall and pressed the buzzer until Hump came down the stairs and got me.
I think I slept for a time in the tub. Then it was a struggle to straighten myself out, and a harder one to step from the tub onto the bath mat. I was shaking all over when I dried off, and got into one of Hump’s oversized terry cloth robes. Before I left the bathroom, I tried to pull the plug and let the bath water out, but I found I couldn’t lean over that far and had to leave it.
Hump was in the kitchen with a bottle of J&B. He got a glass for me, and I eased into a chair across from him. Hump’s coal-black and six-six, and weighs on the order of two hundred and seventy. He was a defensive end at Michigan State and later with Cleveland. In his fourth year of pro ball he tore up a knee and the operation didn’t restore it all the way. He’d lost a lot of his speed and quickness, and pro ball was out. He drifted down to Atlanta and did some coaching at one of the small black colleges in town. He gave that up after a couple of years because the pay wasn’t much. Now he did whatever came along. Dirty or clean, it didn’t matter to him. Since I felt the same way the last year or so, it was a common bond of sorts.
I met Hump two years ago, while I was still on the force, working nights. I’d gone to check into a brawl that had been reported at the Blue Light. The fight was over when I got there. Three black studs were spread all over the floor and Hump, barely sweating, was seated at the bar drinking draft beer.
“Those boys tried to have some fun on me,” Hump said.
It seemed that the shortest of the three had started it by looking up at Hump and asking how the weather was up there. Hump had spit in his eye and said that it was raining. That was when the fight broke out. From the way Hump looked, it hadn’t been a long fight. I remembered Hump from a game I’d seen him play against the Falcons, and I had a beer with him while we waited for the paddy wagon. The nervous owner told the story the same way Hump did, and when the wagon came I sent the three busted-up studs off to jail. They didn’t argue at all. Jail was better than staying in the bar where Hump was.
In the year since I’d been thrown off the force, Hump and I had worked a few deals together. When he needed money and I needed a back-up man, I’d call him. If I had a friend left in Atlanta, it was probably Hump. But I’d never said anything like that to him. There was always the chance that he didn’t feel that way about me at all.
Hump poured me a shot of the J&B. “I looked in your car. The slapjack’s gone. The wallet’s there, but there’s no money in it.”
“There wasn’t much to start with,” I said. “Fifteen bucks maybe.”
“I left the windows open to air it out,” he said.
I sipped at the J&B.
“You want to look around for these boys?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Maybe not ever.”
He nodded, like that made sense to him. “You owe me one bit of trim for the one you chased away.”
My memory was a bit blurred. Then, with the time screwed up, like it had happened a week ago, I remembered the girl with frizzy blonde hair who’d peeped out of the bedroom when Hump carried me into the bathroom. She looked like a hippie chick from around the tight-squeeze area.
“I owe you one, then.”
“One whiff of you,” Hump said, “and she remembered she had to be home.”
On my third drink, I felt good enough to stagger over to the phone and make two calls. The first one was to Arch Campbell. I told him I’d been called out of town suddenly and I wouldn’t be able to follow up on the job. I let him know that all I’d found out was that she was hanging out in some pretty rough bars. He said he’d send me a check for the one day’s work.
My second call was to Raymond Hutto at the Schooner Topless Bar. When Hump heard me ask for Raymond, he came over and stood just past my shoulder, listening.
All I said to Raymond was that I was available. He said for me to drop by the Schooner at three the next afternoon. He might have something for me by then.
Hump was waiting when I hung up.
“You doing anything the next day or so?” I asked.
“No.”
“I thought we might make a run to New York.”
“Hardman,” he said, smiling, “that’s as good as trim, any day.”