Title: Casey’s Last Chance
Genre: Mystery
Author: Joseph B. Atkins
Publisher: Sartoris Literary Group
Purchase on Amazon
About the Book: Tough, gritty, and
atmospheric, Casey’s Last Chance unfolds
against the backdrop of a treacherous,
race-torn 1960s South that’s ready to explode with
civil rights workers challenging an organized resistance itching for combat.
The central character, Casey Eubanks, is a small-time North Carolina hustler on
the run after an argument with his girlfriend Orella leaves his cousin dead. A
crony steers him to a big operator in Memphis, Max Duren, a shadowy former Nazi
with a wide financial network. Duren hires Casey to do a hit on labor organizer
Ala Gadomska, who is stirring up trouble at one of Duren’s mills. Things go
wrong, and Casey’s on the run again, this time from Duren’s goons as well as
the cops. Enter Martin Wolfe, a freelance reporter investigating Duren’s
operation. He tries to solicit Casey to help him and FBI agent Hardy Beecher
bring Duren down. Casey dumps Wolfe, steals his car, and returns home to
Orella. A bloody shootout with a Duren goon, however, convinces Casey to join
Wolfe and Beecher. It’s Casey’s last chance. The three take off back across the
South to execute a plan to destroy Duren. Everything works until the explosive
end…but will anyone emerge unscathed?
CHAPTER
1
July 1960 …
The night sky broke just as the Greyhound crossed the
Tennessee line. Down came a blinding deluge that forced cars and trucks off to
the sides of Highway 72 and under the shelter of the overpasses, but not the
Memphis-bound bus that carried Casey Eubanks. He stirred through the troubled
sleep that overtook him after the stop in Decatur, and stretched his arm across
the newspaper in the seat next to him. He heard none of the rain that beat
against the windowpane, only Clyde Point’s voice in his dream.
This is your last chance, Casey Eubanks.
The bus braked to make the left onto Union near
downtown. It was a half-hour early.
I’m already way out on a limb talking you up to my
boss like I did. He’s telling the Big Guy, the Big Mahah, you’re the right man
for the job, but are you man enough to take the job?
Casey woke to the lights leading up to the crest of
the hill where Union crosses Front and then descends toward the Mississippi
River. People huddled in doorways and under awnings. As the bus pushed through
the sheets of rain, he spotted two platinum blondes at the entrance of an open
garage. Their lips worked feverishly as they stabbed the air between each
desperate drag of their cigarettes.
He could still hear Clyde’s voice.
You get a new life, a new identity, the cops off your
back, plenty of cash in your pocket, and maybe, someday, that pool hall you
used to tell me was your big dream. And you get to forget the woman who put you
in this mess.
Casey had been to Memphis before—when the sidewalks
swelled with uniforms, drunk, swaggering GIs forcing the black zoot-suiters
spilling off Beale Street to move to the side. He’d come with an AWOL high
roller from Fort Bragg who promised to back him in a nightlong set of
three-cushion, one-pocket, and straight pool at $200 a match. The high roller
disappeared after he lost the second round of one-pocket, and the last thing
Casey remembered was getting his head split open with a blackjack. He woke the
next morning at the bottom of the levee, the Mississippi River to one side and
Cotton Row to the other.
He climbed off the bus, groggy and in a bad mood.
Do it right, and both you and me reap the rewards.
He wanted his hotel room and his bed. Other than a few
travelers and a Commercial Appeal hawker, the station was dead. He
stopped to buy a paper. CUBAN
STREET FIGHTING read one
headline. His eyes moved across the page. KENNEDY
OUTLINES PHILOSOPHY ON LABOR. He turned to the pages inside—EXOTIC DANCER OPENS AT THE SULTAN CLUB—then flipped from front to back, and back
to front again. No news about the killing of Bux Baggett in Jonesboro, North
Carolina, the woman who caused it, and the curly-headed fool who did it and
who’s on the lam, a hustler and pool shark with a tattoo of Rita Hayworth on
each arm.
Your last chance, Casey Eubanks.
Casey stood at the station entrance and checked out
the street. The rain had subsided. Streams of neon red and yellow reflected off
the pavement. The blondes were walking eastward, their heads side-by-side under
a parasol, still gesturing with their cigarettes.
In the glass window to his right, just
close enough to catch the corner of his eye, he saw another fake blond,
himself, an alien named James Thompson, the burial insurance salesman who’d
snatched his body back in Phenix City. He studied his new self, the dyed hair,
the oversized gray suit Clyde Point had given him. For a moment he felt as if
he were high. High on reefer. Like the time he dropped his favorite cue stick
and watched it slither across the pool table. He knew it was no snake, but he
never touched that stick again. Never even looked at it.
He thought of the woman who put in the dye, the scowl
in the bathroom mirror, the stubby fingers that dug through his hair like grub
worms.
“Curly, you gonna look weird as hell as a blond,”
she’d told him. “You too dark to be a blond.”
He stepped out into the steam and made his way up
Union, past the golden glow of the Peabody Hotel, through the airless night,
when it’s a struggle even to breathe, toward what Clyde called a “little,
easy-to-miss street named November 6,” where he’d find his hotel.
What he found was an alley lined with trashcans and
fire escapes. At the far end of it was a neon sign: Hotel Paris. The
alley served the side door exits for every building on it except the hotel
itself, four stories of stacked brick, a lean-to with nothing to lean to. It
was just wide enough for three windows on each of the three floors above the
lobby. As he walked toward the hotel on the oily strip of tar and asphalt, he
heard the scramble of claws against the pavement.
Casey jumped the puddle in front of the entrance and
opened the door. Inside was a stretch of darkness broken by a lone bulb hanging
over the counter at the other end of the lobby. A clerk in a navy blue shirt
and dark pinstriped vest scribbled on a notepad. A young guy, early twenties. A
cigarette dangled from his lips as he stopped to hum a few notes before jotting
something down. Nearby was a black vinyl couch. On the wall behind it hung a
photograph of a city boulevard on an overcast day—no people, no cars, only
deserted sidewalks and empty cafés. A Swastika hung from the roof of a
building. Beneath the photograph, in gold letters, was Champs Elysées,
Paris, 1941.
An overhead fan buzzed. By the couch was an unlit
stairway. You been a small-timer all your life. Now you get to play in the
big leagues. The big leagues. A bus ticket to a cheap flophouse in a back
alley.
He approached the counter.
“Name?” the clerk asked, ashes dropping from his
cigarette onto his notepad. He blew them off to the side.
“James Thompson.”
The clerk checked his ledger and reached below to grab
a chain with a single key. He dangled it in the air. “Welcome to the Hotel
Paris,” he said, dropping the key into Casey’s open palm. “Suite 13. Your lucky
number. Bathroom’s at your end of the hall.”
He flipped the
light and climbed the stairway to the third floor. The kid was right. His suite
was next to the bathroom.
