Yardbird by Mark Slade

Yardbird by Mark Slade

Author:Mark Slade [Slade, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gumshoe - A Next Chapter Imprint
Published: 2020-04-29T22:00:00+00:00


14

Nothing happened the rest of the night. Scratch sat in his Dodge, watching the house Felix lived in. At around six am, a light in the living room came on. A yellow hue glowed behind a thin white curtain. A short skinny shadow appeared. The curtain moved and an enlarged eyeball briefly appeared.

Way out in the distance, Marty Robbins's Singin' the Blues echoed. A few seconds, the music grew louder as a red Plymouth Fury roared down the cul-de-sac and came to a screeching halt at Felix's house. The same red Fury that had been driving around when the Klan was chasing Felix. The curtain moved again. Thirty seconds later, the front door to the shack opened up and Felix ran out, slamming the door behind him. He jumped in the car and it sped away.

Scratch started the Dodge and sped off behind the Fury. Two Cadillacs, one brown, one white, came out of nowhere and blocked the Dodge. Scratch hit the brakes, the car and he jerked forward, stopped just a hair from colliding with the brown Cadillac. Scratch smacked the steering wheel, watched the Fury drive off into the rising sun, Marty Robbins's voice echoing.

Two lean black men in zoot suits got out of the brown Cadillac and a six-foot-eight, 300-pound white man with a jigsaw scar that ran from the left side of his face to the right side, stepped out of the white Cadillac. The three of them hurried to the Dodge, opened the door and dragged Scratch out. Scratch belted the lighter-skinned black man, the darker-skinned one drove a punch hard into Scratch's midsection. Scratch fell to his knees, wheezing.

Pita-Paul was the big white guy's name. The underlings didn't have names. They were replaced almost weekly, either by haphazard deaths or jail. Pita-Paul had been Uncle Homer's bodyguard since World War II ended. A refugee along with his mother and a very beautiful red-haired sister called Heilke, they came to Darktown by accident, thinking they were in California. They ran out of money and the bus dropped them off thinking it was a funny joke to put Germans in the black part of Odarko, Oklahoma. The joke was on the bus driver. Uncle Homer offered the man a job right away. In spite of his lack of English, Pita-Paul and Uncle Homer understood each other from the jump. Mama and Heilke also lived in Homer's house, the only mansion in Darktown and almost as big besides Oliver Spiff's. As anyone could guess, Heilke was Homer's third wife, and his prized possession. The main wife, Delilah, lived in the big black house on Hubbard with the two boys, just before the line into Odarko, while the second wife, Alma, lived alone in a yellow shack not 100 yards from the chicken factory.

It was Dozen Grant who stepped out of the white Cadillac, not Uncle Homer. Dozen was called that for two reasons. 1: He was the 12th and last child of Mimi and Garret Morris. 2: He was just an inch from being considered a dwarf.



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