The Dying Crapshooter's Blues Read Online Free

until he saw a familiar face and gave a short wave.
    Grayton Jackson spied him and broke away from his pretty, plump, and chattering wife to make his way down the marble steps and through the morning drizzle, looking odd and uncomfortable out of uniform as he ducked under the umbrella.
    The younger man whispered in his ear. Jackson, known simply as “the Captain,” kept his blank stare riveted on the wet sidewalk. When Collins finished, he responded with a blunt nod, dismissing him, and then moved to the bottom of the stone steps to wait in a brooding silence for his wife to stop talking and get moving.
    Â 
    Joe opened his eyes to the lonesome bleat of a truck horn on Houston Street and looked up at the familiar delta of cracks on the water-stained ceiling. Before he could come fully awake, he

sensed the heat of a body next to him and turned his head slowly, in case there was a shock waiting. He had woken up to some fiercely ugly women in his day. Not that he cared that much; homely faces sometimes came with bodies that were completely lovely, full-muscled hourglasses built for a good time. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was some matinee idol. He just needed to prepare himself when it was time to greet his guests in the morning light.
    Though not this morning. The woman next to him—
Adeline,
that was her name—was pretty, pale, raven-haired, with long lashes, a delicate painted mouth, and a body as slender as a flower.
    Joe knew her type. Though she came from a decent family and had enjoyed a proper upbringing, she smoked and caroused and found shady characters like him to take her to back-alley speakeasies to drink and dance. She had approached Joe boldly the last time he was in town, casting her eye upon him at a speak and then walking directly away from the fellow who had brought her there and right up to him. He dropped a hint that he stayed at the Hampton when he visited Atlanta, and there had been a note from her waiting at the desk when he checked in.
    He had taken her to a little club on Lime Row where they offered a trio of a piano, trumpet, and guitar, along with bottles of half-decent gin. Adeline drank like a sailor, danced up a frenzy to the gurgling jazz, and didn’t sober up until they came upon Little Jesse Williams lying on the cold sidewalk with a hole in his stomach.
    Joe had walked the six blocks back from Schoen Alley in the drizzly half dawn to find her fast asleep in the bed. Normally, that wouldn’t stop him from diving between her legs, but he was tired, and the scene on the street, and then in Jesse’s rooms, had darkened his mood, so he let her be.
    Turning his head to look out the window, he saw that the sky held a deep gray dinge as the rain kept falling. He slipped from under the sheets and moved through the dim light to the sink to
splash some water on his face and gaze at the reflection in the mirror.
    People meeting Joe assumed right away that he was at least half Indian, which was likely true. After his copper skin, which went from light bronze in winter to the color of an old penny in summer, they noted his glittering black eyes, then his nose, which had curved like a bow until being broken in his first and only prizefight; and finally his smile, which was wide, white, and devilish, as if he was tending to a private joke. The way he got along so well with colored folks was more proof that he was something other than an American white man. Some people, not unkindly, called him “Indian Joe.” On the other hand, he’d gotten into bloody fights with drunks who took one look and decided that “Geronimo” or “Chief” was a more amusing moniker. The truth was no one could say for sure what blood ran in his veins, certainly not him.
    When he was a kid, he made a game of imagining that his eyes and hair, as black as anthracite, had come from his father, an Italian, or from his mother, an Iroquois. Or that his compact frame was a gift from