Free White Shadow by Ace Atkins Page B

her small breast from the dress—that dress her father had saved for—and sucked on her and moaned and smelled of rum and cigarettes.
    And soon his man, the driver, helped him into that big broad lobby of the Nacional, where the floors were made of tile and looked like a chessboard not unlike the one old men played on in the center of the Placetas square on Sundays, and she watched as the men and women in their stiff clothes drinking mojitos stared at her and the drunk general before they moved onto an elevator—the first one she’d ever ridden—and they took it to the top and to a large suite with everything yellow and gold with fringe on the drapes and champagne in buckets and the general stumbled in the bathroom to get onto his knees to vomit in the bathtub, and she stood there with that vomiting sounding like something breaking wide open and ripping apart and she pulled the kitchen knife from under her skirt and she waited until he stumbled out and dropped his army green pants to his knees and showed his weak erection and scarred hairy knees and she walked to him with that practiced smile and she curtsied like on her confirmation day in that same dress, and she said her father’s name over and over and over as she let that blade fly into the man’s stomach and his neck, washing her white lace with blood that scattered across her cheeks and eyes, with thoughts of only that gentle old man who had raised her and what this man, this weak pathetic-smelling man, had done to him.
    Moncada, she told the general before he died. The 26th of July.

    IT WAS nine p.m. before Ed Dodge got home to Alaska Street in Seminole Heights, an old neighborhood built along the Hillsborough River with little pockets of houses and bungalows built back in the twenties and stretching up and over Nebraska and Florida Avenues. Grocery stores, motor courts, and car dealerships that hustled people in with colored flags and promises of winning a TV or a washer and dryer. All he could think about was bloody bats and bloody carpet and half footprints that went nowhere and detectives and captains that didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. No one had been arrested. Just a bunch of people questioned. Just thanking God he wasn’t out there still canvassing Ybor City, or still at Tampa General in the cold meat locker where Charlie waited for a morning autopsy.
    Franks and Inspector Beynon wanted the whole squad back at six a.m.
    He noticed the flicker of the television in the family room as he pulled into his driveway and cut the lights. When he walked inside, he saw Steve Allen’s Tonight Show . Gene Rayburn was doing the news.
    The television lit the family room paneled in knotty pine, and he called out to his wife. She didn’t answer.
    He called out to her again and cut on the lights.
    The record player was on the kitchen table and twirled and skipped around the inner groove. Perry Como.
    Dodge turned off the player and the wooshing sound stopped. The room was quiet.
    As he turned the corner, coming back out of the kitchen, there was a flash of movement, and he saw a small figure holding a rifle.
    “Hands up!”
    Dodge put his hands up.
    “Git on out of thar.”
    Dodge smiled and stepped forward.
    His son squinted at him, looking down the barrel of a play rifle, a Davy Crockett cap down hard on his head.
    “What’s the haps, Davy?”
    “I said keep them hands where I can see ’em.”
    Dodge did but at the same time, his eyes wandered down to an ashtray filled with dozens of butts. Some had red lipstick and others, Marlboros, did not. He thought about Perry Como and cigarettes and the empty bottle of gin he saw on the counter.
    “Your mother have company tonight?”
    The boy shrugged. He let down his rifle.
    “Who was it?”
    “Some man,” he said. “We went to Mrs. Green’s house. She let us watch television all night.”
    “Didn’t your mother put you to bed?”
    He shrugged again and placed the rifle on the table.
    “Can