Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (30 page)

The hairs on the nape of my neck prickled with unease. I remembered sitting in that very chair; the way the floorboards had creaked and sagged beneath my weight, Croker’s ghoulish grin as Big George thrashed in the pool below me.

“There was nowhere else for me to sit,” Grace said, “so I just parked my fanny on the edge of Croker’s desk, flashing some leg, which Croker seemed to like. He was petting my thigh like a housecat. Telling me what a ‘firecracker’ I was.

“Chauncey tipped me the wink to keep Croker busy while he finished baiting the hook. He was about to seal the deal with a contract worth about as much as toilet paper. That’s when Croker lit his cigar and reached down behind the desk. Just as casual as you like. I thought he was looking for an ashtray. Before I even knew what had happened, Croker pulled some kind of hidden lever and Chauncey dropped through a trapdoor and landed in the pond below.

“Quicker than it took Chauncey to fall through the floor, Croker sprang from his chair and grabbed me by the hair so hard I thought he’d scalp me. He dragged me over to the trapdoor. At first I thought he meant to throw me down there with Chauncey. But no, he just wanted me to watch what happened next …

“That was the first time I saw Big George,” Grace said, “and the last time I saw Chauncey Clyde. The first bite cut him off clean at the hips. Chauncey, he—he didn’t die right away. Better that he had …” She shuddered at the memory.

Took a deep breath and continued.

“When the screaming finally stopped,” she said, “Croker gave me a choice.

“I could go the same way as Chauncey Clyde—or …”

She stared at her wedding ring, bitter tears welling in her eyes.

“Some choice,” I said.

“I didn’t have to think too long.”

She took another drag from my cigarette, blew smoke, and then looked up at me.

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

I didn’t know what to make of her story. Grifters getting dropped through trapdoors and fed to giant gators … It all sounded like something from a bad pulp book.

She didn’t seem surprised, just nodded to herself.

“You will,” she said. “Stay here long enough, you’ll see.”

And she was right.

What happened to Johnson was all the convincing I needed.

Leaving Croker and his cronies to drunkenly eulogize Johnson, I made my excuses and hurried upstairs to pack a scram bag. I could still hear them downstairs, cackling and chinking glasses.

I didn’t hear the door open behind me.

When Grace said, “You’re leaving,” I just about jumped out of my skin.

“He’s crazy!” I said, like it was a secret she’d been keeping from me.

“I tried to tell you.”

“You might’ve tried harder.”

She watched as I continued packing my bag. “Where will you go?”

“Anywhere but here,” I said over my shoulder.

“What about me?” she said, in a tiny cracked voice.

I paused. Turning towards her, I said, “Come with me, Grace. We’ll leave tonight. As soon as he passes out. I’ve got enough scratch to give us a start somewhere. I’ll find another place to play. The big time’s out,” I said, with a rueful glance at my deformed hand, “but there’s always other places to play.”

She was shaking her head before I even finished talking.

“He’d find me,” she said. “Find
us
. He’s got friends everywhere.”

“Just how far is his reach?”

“Far enough.”

It wasn’t just the local law Croker had in his pocket, she told me; as long as he kept the liquor flowing, his gangster pals in the city would do anything to keep him happy.

“Then … then I don’t know what else to say, Grace.” I forced my eyes away from hers. “I’m sorry.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t go.”

She put a hand on my crotch.

I inhaled a sharp breath. “Grace—”

Her hand caressed me through my pants.

“Don’t …” I said.

Half-heartedly, I’ll admit.

And the other guy—he put up no fight at all, he was putty in her hands.

“There’s money,” Grace said, as she slid down my zipper and took me in hand. I stifled a moan as she pressed her breasts firmly against me. Her breath was hot and heavy in my ear. “He keeps it locked in the safe behind that horrible painting on his office wall.” She told me she knew the combination to the safe—the date Croker had caught Big George—she’d just never dared to do anything with what she knew. “I never had good enough reason to—until I met you,” she breathed in my ear. “Darling, why run away with nothing when we could be rich?” I struggled to focus on what she was saying but it was hard for me to think about anything else apart from how much I liked her hand being where it was and what she was doing. “How rich?” I said, in a hoarse rasping voice. And then she whispered in my ear what Croker’s life was worth. I didn’t need telling what we’d have to do to earn it. But as her hand brought me to release, I bit her shoulder and heard myself saying
yes-yes-yes
.

* * *

In the weeks that followed, and while Johnson’s carcass was picked clean by Big George, our pillow talk turned to murder. The stakes were high. It had to be perfect. If we could make it look like an accident, we’d get away clean. The seed had been planted, and from that seed grew a tree from which I saw two nooses swinging in the wind if Grace and me got it wrong; hell, considering what happened to Johnson, if we got it wrong, being hanged would be a blessing.

I started to lose my nerve, kept putting it off.

The strain began to tell on Grace; she grew sick with worry. “What are we waiting for?” she pleaded with me one night. She was sporting another fresh black eye, Croker’s going-away gift before he left on another rum-run. “You let him keep beating me like this,” she sobbed, “he’ll kill me!”

“I’ll kill him first,” I said.

“When?”

“Soon, baby.”

“How?”

The way she kept badgering me, I felt like blacking her other eye.

“I’m working on it, damn it!”

And then I finally figured it out.

It was Big George’s feeding time, usual crowd, just a regular weekend night.

I was providing accompaniment on the piano while Croker stood out on the deck, leaning with his back against that rickety wooden rail, clutching a whimpering collie pup by the scruff of the neck as he gave the crowd his standard spiel. “I was just a young’un, fishing for channel cat with my Pap when this big bastard broadsided us, flipped our boat, flung us both in the swamp …”

As he leaned against the deck rail, I prayed those wooden boards would collapse against his weight, plunging him down into the pond—

That’s when it hit me.

The deck rail …

I must’ve played a bum note. Croker looked at me sharply above the heads of the crowd. I grimaced an apology but it was too late, I’d ruined his act.

Without further ceremony, he tossed the pup over his shoulder.

Big George snatched it from the air with a snap of his jaws.

Even the dog-lovers gasped in awe.

Croker hauled himself away from the deck rail and started leading the crowd back inside. “Sharpen up,” he warned me as he limped past the piano.

I glanced back at the deck rail, at the rickety wooden boards Croker leaned against during every show. How easy it would be to remove a screw here, a nail there … With a crowd of witnesses to see Croker fall to his death, Grace and me would be beyond all suspicion. The perfect murder. Forget about the money in the safe—that was pocket change—we’d be looking at a juicy fat insurance payout, even the deed to the bar. ‘Course, we’d want to get rid of Big George and rename the place. ‘Smitty’s’ had a nice ring to it. But we could have it all, live like royalty.

It would work, I told myself.

“It’ll work,” I told Grace, the next time we were alone.

And it would have, I’m sure of it.

We just never got the chance to put it to the test.

This time, there was no calm before the storm, just another storm that knocked out the power, even the red neon gator looming over the front lot. The regular crowd stayed home to wait it out. The coochie gals got a rare night off. Candles lined the bar slab, and flickered from tables around the room. The guttering flames reflected eerily off the glass eyes of the stuffed gators on the walls. The rain belted down in a white noise roar; flashes of lightning lit up the bar like a welder’s torch; thunder crashed and boomed like God was on a drunken rip-and-tear through heaven. The bar was leaking like a sieve, the floor strewn with pots and pans and spittoons to catch the rain as it bucketed down through the cracks in the ceiling. I was slouched at the piano, smoking and drinking and playing a sloppy duet with the rain as it pitter-pattered the high notes.

Since I’d figured out how to fix Croker’s wagon—or rather, his deck rail—it felt like a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Come the weekend, Croker was due for a big surprise when he fed Big George; when
he
fed Big George.

I smiled to myself, picturing making love to Grace on a big pile of money.

Then a voice behind me said, “Give your stumps a rest, Smitty.” I startled at the voice. Hadn’t heard Croker emerge from his office. He’d spent most the night back there. I turned around on my stool and found him looming in front of me.

“Come n’ drink with me,” Croker said, gesturing to a nearby table. He was clutching a jar of hooch and two glasses and looked like he’d started without me.

I joined him at the table. A candle flickered between us, suggesting a séance.

“How’s Mrs. Croker feeling?” I asked him, just as cool as you like.

Grace’s nerves were still playing on her. This morning, Croker had insisted Doc Culpepper examine her. She hadn’t worked the bar that night and I assumed the old quack had confined her to bed. That was fine by me. The squirrely way Grace had been acting lately, I was afraid she’d tip our mitts to Croker.

Croker seemed touched by my concern.

“Nothin’ a good long rest won’t fix,” he said.

He filled our glasses from the mason jar. His hands were shaking. I noticed his knuckles were skinned, but thought little of it. As he poured the hooch, liquor sloshed across the table and splashed dangerously close to the candle flame.

I said, “You want I should pour?”

He wasn’t careful, that damn firewater would ignite like gasoline.

But he just waved me off and raised his glass in a toast.

“Here’s to you, Smitty.”

He chinked my glass like a butting stag.

I knocked back my hooch in a gulp. It really was good stuff. I told him so.

He nodded and refilled our glasses. “Almost a shame, idn’t?”

“What’s that?”

“The recipe,” he said, “that it dies with me.”

I had to stifle a smile; the dumb bastard had no idea how right he was.

“I guess it doesn’t have to,” I said.

“It’s a family recipe, Smitty. Passed down from father to son. I’m the end of my line.”

“Never thought about having kids?”

“‘Course I thought about it.” He winked at me. “And it ain’t for want of trying.”

No kidding, I thought; I’d had the sleepless nights to prove it.

“Nope,” he said, “I just can’t have ‘em. Took me four wives before I realized the problem was with my own plumbing. Looking back on it now, I almost feel a little bad for them three other wives.” He raised his glass and drank to absent wives. Then he teetered to his feet, leaned unsteadily across the table to light his cigar from the candle, before collapsing back into his chair.

I suddenly realized just how drunk he was. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen him actually smoke one of his stogies. Must’ve been … the night Johnson came to The Double G.

A flash of lightning flared through the room, followed by what I thought was a rumble of thunder that shook the bar to its foundations; then the
real
thunder rumbled, sounding tiny compared to the sound the gator had made below us.

I nipped from my drink, willing my hands not to shake, telling myself to stay calm, even as my heart started tripping and I broke into an icy sweat.

Smoke wreathed Croker’s head as he puffed his cigar and stared at the flickering candle. The flame glinted in his eyes like hellfire. “Not bein’ able

to sire me a son,” he said, “that’s God’s punishment what I done …” Glancing up from the flame, he smiled at me sadly. Then, as if embarrassed by his sentiment, he hawked a great glob of phlegm into the nearest spittoon. Clearing his throat, he said, “I ever tell you how I caught Big George?”

“Once or twice,” I said, not forgetting the other hundred times.

Croker shook his head.

“Not how he took my leg,” he said. “How I
caught
him.”

Now that I thought about it, I didn’t believe he had; nor was I sure I wanted to know.

“Gator bait,” he said.

I chuckled uneasily. “Well, I kinda figured that much—”

“That’s what the slavers used to call ‘em.”

“Called who?”

“The nigger chil’ren,” he said. “Gator bait.”

I pictured the painting on the wall of his office.

The money in the safe was suddenly far from my mind.

“You gotta understand how bad I wanted that gator, Smitty. I’d never wanted nothin’ so bad in my life. Leastways, not until I met Grace. It was like Big George had took something from me—not just my leg, nor my daddy—something I could hardly describe, something I feared I might never get back ‘less I caught him. I tried every hunting trick my daddy ever taught me, used every kinda bait I could think to use. But it was no damn good. That bastard gator confounded me at every turn. I was gettin’ desperate …

“She was ten-years old. Kinda cute, I guess. Name of Abby Collins. ‘Course I didn’t know nunna that then. The fisherman don’t care about the worm when he baits his hook. She was fetching home a block of ice from the store in town. That’s all the searchers found of her. A length of twine in a puddle of melted block ice on the road between here and dark town where I snatched her.

“I brought her out to a nice quiet spot on the swamp I’d already staked out. No one around to hear her screams. And she was screaming plenty. Begging for her momma. I tied a rope around her waist, attached to a tire-float so she wouldn’t sink; carved up her back with a razor and then tossed her on in.