The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by David Fulmer Read Free Book Online Page A

flaking smoke from the Georgia Railroad Yards; the scrabble and squeak of rats running through the gutters; and the grunts of drunks who had spent the night in doorways. Had he been sighted, he would have seen the terrain rise sharply on the other side of the tracks to a ridge upon which resided the state capitol, its gold dome a heavenly umbrella now half obscured in the gray morning mist.
    Willie knew the avenue as well as any other, and his ears guided him to the corner of Hilliard Street and then into Schoen Alley. He counted off the steps to the bottom of the wooden stairs and climbed up, careful to keep his guitar from banging the banister. When he knocked on the door, a woman he didn’t know let him in, and he passed through the tiny kitchen, where two or three people were loitering. From the smell of their cheap
colognes, he figured them for local rounders, either standing guard or with nowhere else to go.
    He felt his way to the bedroom doorway and stopped. Right away, he heard Little Jesse’s labored breathing and smelled the dried blood and sour odor seeping from his ravaged innards. The other rounders in attendance spoke up, greeting him, all except for the one sitting in the corner.
    Before he could figure out if it was death himself who had taken a seat in the room, he heard Joe Rose’s voice.
    â€œCome on in, Willie,” Joe said. “We’re just waiting on the doctor.”
    Â 
    Over the morning hours, the word about Little Jesse had gone around, and as the afternoon began, more people showed up at his rooms. Not a few of the whores arrived still in their Sunday church dresses and hats. Everyone had advice, and not a word of it was worth anything. All stripes of small-time crooks, sports, and rounders came and then went as soon as a bottle was empty. The women, most of whom Jesse had worked at one time or another, came and stayed. One, a thin and homely whore named Martha McCadden, took over tending to the victim. Joe had left word that he wanted at least two men around at all times.
    Jesse lay on the bed, gray and sick, drifting slowly through a morphine fog. Among the visitors, he recognized a couple shady characters, though he couldn’t quite make out their faces. Then he realized who they were and knew that they would be staying close by so they could escort him home.
    A few minutes before one o’clock, a ruckus started outside and someone called in to announce that Dr. Nash was there at last.
    There had been some discussion about carrying Little Jesse to a real doctor or to the emergency room at Grady Hospital, a few short blocks from where he had fallen. He refused, rasping

out a curse at the suggestion. A bullet wound would instigate a police report, and that could bring all kinds of trouble, not the least of which might be Officer J. R. Logue or one of his cronies coming back to finish the job. Jesse muttered darkly that he’d take his chances.
    Weston Nash was a familiar character in the rougher parts of town. Well educated and from a good family, he had fallen under the sway of the powders he prescribed to his patients, then lost his medical license after a botched surgery resulted in a death. When he wasn’t answering a call to stitch a razor cut, take care of a hussy’s trick baby, or tend to a crapshooter with a police bullet in his gut, he spent most of his time holed up in quarter-a-night rooms around downtown with his solutions and syringes.
    On this Sunday, it had taken the better part of the morning for a couple of the rounders to locate him in a George Street flophouse and drag him out.
    He now came stumping up the back stairs and into the bedroom, muttering foul curses. Though he was a tallish man, he appeared bent and deflated by his addiction, like a furtive buzzard lurking near something foul. He wore an old suit that was rumpled and dusty and splotched with stains, a shirt that was yellowing at the collar, and a loud tie that hung askew. His