Memphis Ribs - Softcover

Duff, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941298672 ISBN 13: 9781941298671

Verlag: Brash Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

It’s May in Memphis, and four bloody murders occur on the eve of the International BBQ Contest and the Cotton Carnival: a conventioneer is stabbed at an ATM machine, a gang leader and his girlfriend are executed, and a wealthy local businessman is killed in his own home while his bodyguard is napping outside the door. It’s up to homicide detective J.W. Ragsdale to solve these seemingly unconnected crimes without scaring away the tourists who are arriving in droves. That’s not going to be easy. Ragsdale’s investigation pits him against a crack-dealing gang in the midst of a bloody drug war, a Memphis BBQ king struggling to hold on to his crumbling empire, a shotgun-wielding assassin, an East Coast mobster with a taste for BBQ and the blues, and the newly crowned Maid of Cotton, who will do anything to keep her tiara.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gerald Duff is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and has published 19 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction, all of which have brought him well-deserved comparison to Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Calvin Trillin, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner. Memphis Ribs is his unforgettable tale of deception, crime, and barbecue. His stories have been cited in the Best American Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prizes, and the Editors' Choice: The Best American Fiction. Duff grew up in two parts of Texas: the petro-chemical area of the Gulf Coast, and the pine barrens of Deep East Texas, which made for two-mindedness and a bifurcated view of the world, as he demonstrates in his fiction. His characters are deeply rooted both in the past and in the present, and they struggle fiercely and comically in a quest to achieve escape velocity from places which are not their homes. He has has worked as a hand in the oil fields and the cotton fields, as a janitor, a TV camera man, a professor of English, a college dean, and as a bit actor in television drama. He has made up stories all his life and written wherever he's been. He's still doing that.

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Memphis Ribs

By Gerald Duff

Brash Books, LLC

Copyright © 2015 Gerald Duff
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-941298-67-1

CHAPTER 1

Midnight on Front Street in Memphis, and Franklin Saxon was leaning up against the grill of his father's Lincoln Continental, watching five members of the Bones Family attack a Union Planter's Bank ATM with two sledgehammers. The stand-alone machine was newly installed and located in a part of the Bluff City away from the center of downtown. Franklin wondered if the executive in charge of that division of Union Planter's had guessed right about its profitability. It would probably do well in the daylight hours, nothing after nine p.m., of course, and pick-up again each morning when the sun rose to shine on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge over the Mississippi. It was worth a try, probably, and Franklin wished the bank well in the venture.

Franklin Saxon did hope the Bones Family would get the ATM cracked open, though, soon, so he could finish his business with them and leave that deserted part of the city and get back to Midtown. The drinks he had had in the Peabody Hotel before, during and after his keynote speech to the medical equipment convention were dying on him, and with each bang of a sledgehammer against the face of the ATM, he was realizing how careless he had been to agree to meet with the Bones Family here.

It had seemed droll at the time when their spokesman, one T-Bird, had said they needed to make a withdrawal, but now all Franklin Saxon felt was not amusement but rising impatience and a hint of growing anxiety. This first deal with the Bones Family was off to a twisted start, and Franklin felt a twinge begin just at the top of his nose between his eyes. It started to move up and into his forehead, and he stepped away from the front of the Lincoln and looked up and down Front Street, beginning to scratch at his temples with both hands. Not a headlight was in sight in either direction, but a deep need to move was rising up from Franklin's viscera with each clang of the sledgehammers.

"Gentlemen," he called from the shadows where he had parked, "that hammering's not going to do it. I'll give you two more minutes, and then I will consider our deal to be off."

"That's all we be needing," the one called T-Bird said. "We just prizing up the bottom now. Hash, he getting the forklift to tear it loose. See yonder?"

"Tear it loose?" Franklin Saxon said, hearing an engine crank as he spoke and then, turning to look, seeing a forklift approaching from a construction site just behind the ATM, an area he had not noticed previously.

"Look, this is not the way I want to do business."

"We be putting the machine in the pickup bed," T-Bird said, pointing toward a Toyota truck parked on the sidewalk. "Then we give you the cash over yonder on Jackson behind the Piggly Wiggly store."

"Oh," Franklin Saxon said. "I see. It's got to be quick, though. I'm leaving, and I'll drive by there in thirty minutes. One-half hour from now on the dot. Understand?"

By the time he had said that, he had taken a couple of steps toward T-Bird and when he turned to get into the Lincoln, he saw a man staggering toward him on the sidewalk in the shadows of the building beyond the car. He was white and balding, carrying a sportcoat over his shoulder. He was obviously drunk and holding out one hand in front of him as though to tell Franklin to wait, don't tell me your name, I almost got it, it's right on the tip of my tongue.

"Saxon," the man announced in a tone of triumph. "I know you. You're Mister Saxon."

"No," Franklin said. "You're mistaken, I'm afraid."

"Oh, yeah, sure," the man said, stopping and beginning to look toward the swarm of Bones Family members around the ATM, two with their backs turned to the machine, pushing hard against it, one directing the fork lift driver, and another preparing to slam a sledgehammer one more time against the lawful property of Union Planter's Bank.

"You talked to us tonight at the convention, remember?" the man said. "About business conditions in the Delta. There in the Peabody." The man gave Franklin Saxon a big sales grin and paused as though waiting to be recognized. At the sound of a particularly well-placed sledgehammer blow from across the street, he turned to look at the ATM. "What're they doing over there, Mister Saxon?" he said. "That bunch of boys?"

"Conditions in the Delta and here in Memphis are a lot worse than I led you to believe, I'm sorry to say, my friend," Franklin Saxon said, opening the door of the Lincoln. "Tell you what. Why don't you discuss them with my colleagues?"

"T-Bird," Franklin went on, calling toward the Bones Family at work, "this gentleman wants to discuss economic trends with you and your group. See he learns what he needs to know, all right?" As Saxon pulled away in the Lincoln up Front Street, he could see through the rearview mirror the conventioneer beginning to run toward the buildings across the street with two Bones Family members following at a trot.

He headed the car toward the next intersection, telling himself to be careful and to watch for drunk drivers on the way to Overton Park with its winding roads and dark stands of trees. Hardly the time for a fender-bender now.

"Cool and calm," he said aloud, hearing the phrases his father had repeated to him each day of his life, "slow and steady does the trick. One step, then another." After this part of it tonight, he thought, Mister Barry Speed of points east will fly into the Delta, and that will be the next bit of new business I'll have to tend to. Right now, though, I'll get to Overton Park, he promised himself, park by the twelfth hole under those big red oaks, and give myself a little boost before I have to meet that bunch again.

The old man was right about one thing, Franklin reflected as he drove up Madison, the speedometer steady on forty-five through the deserted streets of downtown Memphis, every new thing's a learning experience.

CHAPTER 2

The heat and humidity of May in Memphis had put a tight seal between the door and the frame again, so J. W. Ragsdale had to try twice before he could break loose from his house into the morning light. The weather started doing that sometime in the spring every year, and every time J.W. noticed the trouble he had getting outside the house on Tutwiler, he promised himself he'd borrow a chisel from somebody at the station and take care of it.

But by the time he got back home each night, he'd forgotten the fact that water and sun were trying to entomb him in a rent house in Midtown and he just got a drink and went on to bed.

I'll ask Delbert today, he told himself, and stepped out onto the porch to pick up the Commercial Appeal. Delbert Jackson liked to build birdhouses and whatever else homeowners in White Haven did on the weekends, so he was bound to have a spare chisel to bring into the division station in the big brown briefcase he always carried.

The news girl had thrown the paper where she always did, just at the point when the sidewalk joined the porch, but this time it had landed up against a cardboard box positioned right in front of J.W. Ragsdale's front step.

When J.W. leaned over, he saw that the box was filled to its top edges with dead magnolia leaves and buds that had blown from the big tree in his front yard over into the one next door.

Mrs. Stoker had also left him a note fixed to one flap of the box with a clothes pin. J.W. dropped the wooden pin into his shirt pocket while he read the neighborly message. "Here's some of your trash, Sergeant Ragsdale," Mrs. Stoker said in a small even hand, "for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Brash Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1941298672
• ISBN 13: 9781941298671
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar