Wicked City Read Online Free Page A

right into the thickest, tangled bunch of the crowd, elbowing their way through as only kids can do; the headlights and red lamps on the squad cars making old Fifth Avenue seem like Hollywood Boulevard.
    A mess of Boy Scouts in their dress green outfits stood on the corner pointing at the motions of Chief Deputy Bert Fuller of the Russell County Sheriff’s Office.
    Fuller squatted onto his fat haunches, his eyes following a thick mess of dried blood on the warm concrete by the windows of Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, rubbed his face, and motioned to a couple deputies.
    Fuller wasn’t a tall man, but what he lacked in height he made up with girth. He walked through the town slow and deliberate in those tailored western clothes with snap buttons that some said he’d bought while stationed in Texas. Billy had never seen him without a hand-tooled gun rig — holding gold-plated pistols — and a Stetson hat.
    He watched Fuller follow smaller drops that led back toward the Elite.
    Fuller slipped his Stetson back on the back of his head and called out: “Would someone get me some cardboard to cover this fucking thing up?”
    Many times Billy had seen Fuller at the Palace or the Strand or the Victory Drive-In, settled into his seat watching the cowboys on the big screen. He’d prop up his boots and munch on a sack of popcorn with that small, cruel mouth and peer at the screen with his beady brown eyes.
    He looked straight at Billy, as if he’d been caught peeping into someone’s window. “Where’s your daddy at? Go on and pull at his pant leg about what you seen.”
    Then Fuller’s gaze fell upon the girl with her pegged jeans and boy’s shirt and hair twisted into a ponytail and tied with a red bandanna. Fuller wet his lips and smiled, as if he was about to speak, his eyes wandering over her body and face as he stood there with all that activity around him, just breathing her in.
    When Billy turned back, the girl — Lorelei — had disappeared.
     
    2
     
    BEFORE I MARRIED JOYCE and settled down in Phenix, I’d come to Columbus, Georgia, at the end of the Depression to make my way as a prizefighter. I was only a teenager, just old enough to leave the corn and cotton farm I’d grown up on outside Troy, Alabama, where I’d heard about Kid Weisz from boxing magazines. I knew he’d trained some of the top fellas like Corn Griffin, who was supposed to be heavyweight champ before getting upset by Jim Braddock in ’34. And I’d showed up at his sweaty hothouse brick gym with little more than a duffel bag, an old jump rope, and some dog-eared paperbacks with titles like Scientific Boxing by a Fistic Expert and The Sweet Science.
    I was skinny and rangy, and my feet got tangled up about every time I sparred. But I lived in that gym every day and listened to old Weisz and his strange, loopy philosophies I still hear in my head about every morning in the shaving mirror: The world is largely made up of gropers, kid, little people who are always being pushed around by the natural bullies of society. But you got to remember that the gropers of this world are the real people. And that the bullies of the world are only the elements that make up the froth of society. They foam so freely that they necessarily come to the top more easily. But it’s the solid, substantial members of human society who remain below and grope to the top only on real, basic ability.
    And he’d stop and look at me with that one clear eye, that cloudy one staring off dead in the distance, his ears jugged and cauliflowered, and pull me from what I was doing, on the speed bag or the heavy, and grab me by the thick of the forearm, so I could smell his coffee-tinged breath: Murphy, the gropers are those who want to learn. They are always grasping the means to find out ways of improving their lot.
    When I came to the gym, I didn’t even own my own pair of gloves. I worked in the off-hours for my gear and training at the candy factory on the river and would