Free Wicked City by Ace Atkins

called.”
    “Now, that’s class.”
    “He wants to see me.”
    “When?”
    “Now.”
    “Tonight? You got to be pulling my leg.”
    “Would you ride with me?”
    “Sure. You want me to get Hugh?”
    “Maybe you can get him to take your wife and kids home,” John said. “You mind driving? Not really feeling up to it.”
    I nodded and then watched as he opened the top drawer of his father’s bureau and pulled out an Army-issue .45 he’d probably carried in North Africa and Sicily. He checked the magazine. “Let’s go.”
     
     
    HOYT SHEPHERD CAME TO PHENIX CITY DURING THE DEPRESSION to make it in the mills built alongside the Chattahoochee. But instead he found out his talent lay elsewhere and joined up with a British-born hustler and cardsharp named Jimmie Matthews. Soon, the two learned they could make more money playing poker with soldiers at Fort Benning than they ever could working looms or in the hellfire heat of the foundries or delivering laundry, like Matthews had done. Hoyt Shepherd never even graduated high school, but he’d always had a peculiar — some said genius — way with numbers and figures and was the man to ask when playing the odds. He and Jimmie soon took over the Bug racket — the town’s numbers game — and by the time the big war was in full swing, they were knee-deep in whores and cash and hoped to hell the good times would never end.
    But it had been a decade since D-day, and the rackets game couldn’t be played as wide open as the old days. Once again playing out the odds, he and Jimmie had sold off their interests on Fourteenth and Dillingham a few years back and parlayed their twenty-year hustle into some good real estate and a factory that made marked cards and loaded dice for saloons and casinos from Atlantic City to Havana.
    John and I drove out on Opelika Highway, heading toward the Lee County line, where I turned onto a backcountry road that dipped up over a hill and followed a loose downward curve into a little private valley. The narrow road softly turned again, causing the car to glide and flow on its own, and we could see the massive brick ranch house set among long, wide wooden fences corralling Black Angus and a few quarter horses that pricked their ears as the car neared.
    At the iron gate, I slowed, and a man carrying a hunting rifle tapped on the driver’s-side glass. I rolled down the window and told him who we were, and the man looked into the front seat and checked the back. He asked us to step out of the car and we did.
    He patted both of us down, taking the .45 off John and checking the trunk.
    Finally, he unlatched the gates and swung them wide to a long gravel road.
    The house glowed bright, as perfect as a doll’s house, and we weren’t halfway up the concrete walk, landscaped neatly with a row of crepe myrtles and sweet-smelling gardenias, when Hoyt Shepherd shuffled outside.
    He was shoeless in black trousers and a big Cuban-style shirt and he smiled and waved and walked toward John, offering him a big, meaty hand, a soft smile on his lips.
    John looked to me and then back to Hoyt. Not knowing what else to do, he just shook his hand. But I could see it pained him, and he tore away as soon as making contact and Hoyt invited us inside.
    Hoyt didn’t shake my hand. Only looked to me and grunted.
    He asked us if we wanted a cocktail and we both declined, and he walked us through the house, past a big old stone fireplace with a big deer head over it holding an antique rifle and through all the modern, boxy furniture and out back to a kidney-shaped pool. A little record player on a drink cart played a rhumba.
    Jimmie Matthews sat at a table under an umbrella, only a soft blue glow coming from the pool, and the light made Matthews’s face look strange and pale as he nodded to us and also offered his hand to both of us.
    We sat in a loose grouping of lounge chairs, and Hoyt relit a dying cigar while I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket.