The Ranger

by Ace Atkins

  “You boys lost?”

  The skinny man—Quinn seeing the jacket patches included both the American and Confederate flags—smiled a row of very uneven yellowed teeth. A tattoo crept around the side of his neck. He looked to be jail-hard, moving slow in speech and eyes. A gun at his waist. That fat man with the wispy red beard carried a 12-gauge.

  “Let ’em out,” Quinn said.

  The skinny man kept grinning.

  Quinn walked right through the center of the group, elbowing one boy out of the way, and to the cattle trailer. He opened the gate, whistling and calling out the cows. Hondo hopped inside and nipped them along.

  A half ring of men moved toward Quinn as he stepped back and let the flow of cattle pass him. He saw two more guns, the boss yet to pull his pistol, and Quinn kept his rifle by his side, finger on the trigger.

  The men shuffled and stared, a couple of them looking to the boss and toeing the ground.

  “You need me to call the sheriff’s office?” Quinn asked. “This place isn’t abandoned.”

  The skinny man nodded to a couple of the boys and they made a run at Quinn, Quinn stepping right for them, busting one in the skull with the rifle’s butt and punching the other in the throat, not even breaking stride until he got within maybe a foot of the boss man’s face and smiled at him. The man smelled of sharp body odor and old cigarettes.

  The man pulled his pistol, and Quinn reached for his wrist, twisting it back until there was a sharp snap and the man fell to his knees. Quinn kicked him in the body twice as he fell and the gun dropped. Quinn picked it up, emptied the cylinder of the cheap .38, and slid it into his pocket.

  “Gather your shit and get gone,” Quinn said. “I’m in my legal right to shoot every one of you shitbags.”

  Hondo barked and nipped at the fat man’s heels. He kicked at the dog.

  Quinn said: “Do that again.”

  He walked straight away, not looking back, not hearing that telltale click of weapons until he reached the gate. There were two clicks, but Quinn didn’t really give a damn, as if he’d heard the buzz of a mosquito.

  Quinn called Wesley Ruth, but five minutes later the rusted trailer drawn by a King Cab truck ran down the road, bumping over potholes and ravines, Quinn standing on the porch, watching the face of the skinny man behind the wheel but not getting a look in return. With the trailer in the way, Quinn couldn’t get a read on the tag.

  The fat man remained in the empty cattle hold like a fattened hog, pointing a pistol up at Quinn and smiling, wild-eyed and happy, giving a jailhouse wink before they turned onto the main road.

  Quinn made coffee in an old speckled pot on the propane stove, and he and Wesley sat on the porch rocking chairs—just as cold inside the house as outside—drinking and talking. Quinn had a couple cigars in his truck, and they fired them up, Hondo now at his feet.

  “So you found the dog,” Wesley said, studying the tip of the cigar like he was surprised by the glow. He wore a flannel shirt under his old Tibbehah High letter jacket, occasionally taking off his ball cap and rubbing his head.

  “He found me.”

  “You say there were five of them.”

  Quinn described all the men.

  “You think your uncle may have sold the cattle?”

  “You know a lot of folks who work cows in the middle of the night?”

  “I put out word to look for that King Cab and the trailer.”

  “I guess I need to do something with those damn cows,” Quinn said. “Anyone caring for them?”

  “I heard Varner was tending to your uncle’s business.”

  Quinn nodded, and the men sat in silence for a while. “I saw Anna Lee tonight.”

  Wesley cracked a grin, the cigar clamped in his teeth. “That didn’t take too long.”

  “She was babysitting Caddy’s boy, and I stopped by.”

  “Your momma is a saint for helping out Caddy.”

  “I don’t think she had much choice.”

  “Caddy was a wreck when she finally left Jericho,” Wesley said. “I picked her up twice for driving drunk and high. Took her straight home.”

  “Can we discuss the matter at hand?” Quinn asked.

  “Does Anna Lee still make it hurt?”

  “How old are you?”

  “You know, every time I see Meg I still want to take her to bed.”

  “We weren’t married.”

  “But it still hurts,” Wesley said as he walked to the porch edge and tapped the ash. “Even when she’s chewing my ass out. I’d even say especially when she’s chewing my ass out.”

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s not share a special moment. Okay, Quinn?”

  “Just asking,” Quinn said.

  “I think she got something different than what she signed up for,” Wesley said, a hard flash in his eyes. “She was counting that NFL money before my junior year.”

  “She wasn’t like that, man. Not that I recall.”

  Wesley just looked at Quinn, smoking down the cigar, dropping it to the front steps, not even half spent, and crushing it out. “Shit.”

  “Can I show you something?” Quinn asked.

  Quinn found a kerosene lantern in the shed and set it on top of the kitchen table, which was covered in checked oilcloth. He pointed out the patterns of blood that he’d seen on the wallpaper, careful not to touch any of it. The spatter—which someone had tried to blot away—looked like an enormous halo, flecks of dried blood across the flowered print.

  “What’s this tell you?”

  “That Leonard didn’t clean up what I asked him to clean up.”

  “But all this was examined with whatever you people do?”

  Wesley nodded. “We do have a little sense around here.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “Could take several weeks. Maybe a month. State lab is backed up.”

  “You know what happened to the gun?”

  “You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Wesley said, holding on to the edge of the table.

  “Johnny Stagg says he owns all this land,” Quinn said. “He’s putting a lien on the property.”

  “I know you don’t like the idea of Stagg finding the body, but they’d been friends for the last few years. Stagg would come over just to check on his equipment.”

  “And make loans.”

  “I wouldn’t be telling folks about your uncle’s gambling problem,” Wesley said. “What good would it do?”

  “Since I’ve been back, everyone seems to want to tell me my uncle was a great man before they whisper secrets in my ear.”

  Wesley shrugged, every movement in the old house magnified in the emptiness. The men turned down the hallway back to the front door, moving back outside, the screen door slamming behind them.

  “No ideas on those shitbags tonight?”

  “The cattle rustlers? I’ll think on it.”

  “No offense,” Quinn said. “But you don’t seem to know a hell of a lot.”

  Wesley leaned on the door of his patrol car and nodded. “Oh, I know who they are. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to tell you. We got it, Ranger.”

  “Nice jacket.”

  Wesley looked down at the old letterman’s jacket and all the gold pins that covered the big T and smiled. “I earned this son of a bitch. And hell, it was the first thing I could find when you woke me up. You mind if we both get some sleep?”

  Quinn got to sleep for ten minutes before he heard a car roll into the drive. He checked the window, seeing a sheriff ’s cruiser, thinking that Wesley had changed his mind.

  But when Quinn went to the door, he found Lillie Virgil, dressed in uniform and holding a flashlight up into his face.

  “I thought you were Wesley.”

  “Do I look like Wesley?”

  “Nope.”

  “I got a lead on the lot lizard. We gotta head up to Bruce. Are you sober?”

  “I’ve been drinking coffee for two hours.”
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br />   “Good,” she said. “If we leave now, we can make it to church.”

  9

  Bruce was about thirty minutes out of Jericho in the northern part of Calhoun County. A lumber mill dwarfed the small downtown—a road sign reading WELCOME TO BRUCE WHERE MONEY GROWS IN TREES—and even at dawn the metal buildings were lit up, with mountains of logs waiting in piles to be cut down into planks, plumes of steam rising up into the cold air. Lillie pulled into a service station and grabbed a couple more coffees; they’d arrived in town thirty minutes early and were supposed to see the minister at his church at seven. Quinn and Lillie sat in her Cherokee for several minutes, watching the logging trucks bumping their way down a gravel road and leaving the mill’s chain-link gates. The light turned from slate gray to a brilliant purple while Lillie, making a face at the weak coffee, confessed to not stepping foot in a church for ten years.

  “The only people who are brave enough to pay me a visit are the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said.

  Quinn blotted a napkin at the busted skin on his knuckles.

  “You should wrap that up,” she said.

  “I will when we get back,” he said. “Do those men sound familiar?”

  “We’ll look at some photo packs back in Jericho,” Lillie said.

  “Wesley said he knew ’em but won’t tell me.”

  “Wesley is often full of shit.”

  “You think Stagg sent ’em?”

  “What do you think?” Lillie started the cruiser, and they made their way through the old downtown, not all that different from Jericho, and along a small street to a Baptist church with a parking lot that was empty except for a Buick parked in a space reserved for the minister. After Lillie had left Quinn at his mother’s last night, she’d made some calls to people on the Calhoun County school board, finding two girls named Beccalynn younger than ten. She’d spoken to the first girl’s mother, finding the woman at home with three other children. The second call yielded the Bullard family, and a long pause when Lillie asked questions about young Beccalynn’s mother, whose real name, it turned out, was Jill. The man, a pastor, asked if they could meet in person.

  “How long has it been since her family saw her?” Quinn asked.

  “Three months,” Lillie said.

  “How long has their granddaughter been living with them?” Quinn asked.

  “More than a year.”

  They found Reverend Bullard in his office with an open door, the church offices smelling of musty old Bibles and cleaning supplies, that familiar church scent. He had them sit in a little grouping of four chairs, where Quinn assumed he did counseling. Lots of brochures on alcoholism and domestic violence on a table between them. He offered them coffee and they took it, pretty weak, but they couldn’t complain, waiting for him to come to the point as he made polite conversation, talking about losing his sermon and having to retype the whole piece last night.

  He was in his early forties, slight and graying. He had a soft, gentle voice and wore a basic blue suit and red tie. A piece of toilet paper had been stuck on a cut on his chin. “Did you find her?” he asked.

  Lillie shook her head. “Your daughter, Jill, was in Tibbehah County last month. We want to talk to her in regards to an ongoing investigation.”

  Quinn could tell Bullard assumed he was a deputy, too, and Lillie did nothing to try to set him straight.

  “What’s she done now?”

  Lillie shook her head. “Nothing. But a man she was seen with was killed. We just want to know more about him.”

  “I figured she was dead,” the pastor said. “We’ve been expecting that call for four years. I pray for her every day, but she has to make decisions on her own.”

  Lillie nodded. Quinn felt himself start to sweat.

  “Beccalynn was Jill’s second child,” he said. “She aborted the first. We didn’t know until later. There has been nothing but drugs and men ever since. We only have one child now and that’s Beccalynn, and we pray that her mother never again enters her life.”

  “Do you have any idea where she could have gone?” Lillie asked, her hands held tight in her lap. Quinn shuffled in his seat and put down the coffee, feeling hot in the small room with all its plaques and religious posters, a purple robe hanging on a hook by the door with two umbrellas and a baseball cap.

  Bullard shook his head and looked at his hands.

  There’d been a time when Caddy had gone down to Panama City with some friends and had disappeared for about eight days. Quinn’s mother about lost her mind, and Quinn had to get a special pass to leave Fort Benning. He and another Ranger who wanted to come along had searched in and out of every shithole along the Miracle Mile until they found her passed out in a daiquiri bar, two boys from the Navy base trying to ease her back to their car.

  He and his buddy nearly ended up in jail for whipping the shit out of those sailors. Four months later, Caddy disappeared again.

  “She used to call and ask for money,” the preacher said. “I didn’t even know that she’d been in Tibbehah County. I figured she was still in New Orleans.”

  “Does your wife know we called?” Lillie asked.

  “No.”

  “You think she might know something?” Quinn asked.

  “She knows less than me,” he said. “The last time I saw her was in New Orleans. I had wired Jill money at a grocery store on Royal Street. I waited till she came and picked it up, and followed her out. She looked just wild, with her clothes and hair. She didn’t seem to know me at first. When she did, she made wild accusations and said very hurtful things. She’s not my daughter. I don’t know who she’s become and would never want my wife to feel what I had felt.”

  Quinn stood, feeling like he could not breathe.

  “Now we have a name,” Lillie said, still sitting looking up at him. “We’ll try and run her through the system.”

  “You understand if I don’t want to be notified,” the preacher said.

  Lillie laid down her card and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “If you hear from her, please let us know.”

  Quinn shook his hand with speed and left the building, finding some comfort out in the chilled early morning air. He wanted to punch the shit out of something but tried to calm his thoughts with breathing.

  They always said that shit worked, and sometimes it did.

  Lena had spent the last three days at a women’s shelter in Jericho, where they fed her three meals a day and gave her a bunk in the basement of the Baptist church among rows of folding chairs, golden choir robes, and two Ping-Pong tables. The fat wife of the preacher had taken particular interest in her, coming down the steps late at night with cake or pudding, high on the glory of the Christmas season, reading tracts of Bible stories from old Guidepost magazines and comparing Lena’s plight to that of the Virgin Mother. She told the fat lady she hadn’t been a virgin since she was thirteen, thank you very much, but she did appreciate the pudding. The woman would smile at her and pat her on the head, and for most of the day Lena was free to help out with dishes in the kitchen after prayer breakfasts and fold laundry of the other gals who were there, including a woman in her forties with a busted lip and a black girl about her age who was just about as knocked up and said she wasn’t no virgin, either. On that Sunday afternoon, after a supper of baked chicken and peas and sweet tea, Lena took a walk, promising the local counselor that she only needed some air and would not smoke, drink, or do intentional harm to herself or the baby.

  She found herself in downtown Jericho, the sun headed down not long past four. The bare trees and old rusted tower looming over the squat buildings were dark and shadowed, as if they’d been sketched in pencil. With the four dollars left in the quilted coat she’d been given, sewn by the good sisters of the church, she ordered a hamburger and small milk shake at the Sonic Drive-In, sitting at a table up by the kitchen window, while the slots were filled with white boys’ muddy trucks and black boys’ sporty sedans jacked up on high silver rims.

 
The milk shake was what she needed, and, with less than a dollar left, she asked the waitress for an order of fried pickles. The woman set them down and didn’t even ask to be paid, Lena left somehow thinking that she’d been in a similar spot at one time or another.

  Visiting hour was tomorrow, and if Jody, or Charley Booth or whoever he really was, didn’t want to see her again, she guessed she’d hand-crawl her way back to Alabama and ask for some forgiveness from her father, although her daddy had made it pretty damn clear she was not much use to their family as a common whore. She figured maybe she could stay at the church and work, but the ladies had already tried to place her with a program in Jackson that sounded like a place that a girl left without her child.

  If she could just have the kid and get back on her feet, she could take care of it. She had a sister in Birmingham who could watch the baby if she could find work. Her momma could help if she could find where she was living, the last place being Tampa, where she’d been working as a dancer. She figured she just needed to settle this thing with the boy since it was him who’d told her that he’d loved her and that she sure made him whole, and all of that had sounded pretty solid over some cold beer and weed, but sober, rattling around her head at the Sonic, it sounded pretty much like horseshit off a greeting card.

  She tried to keep the last few pickles, them cooling off fast in the wind, when she saw the black Camaro, the one from the jail the other day, whip into the parking lot and slide right into a slot by an old Ford.

  That muscled guy with the shaved head and the stubble mustache and goatee leaned out the window and pressed the red button, calling out what he wanted just as if they didn’t have an intercom and kind of laughing about it to some girl that sat next to him, shadowed in the front seat. The man said he wanted a country-fried steak sandwich, some tater tots, and a large cherry limeade.

  “Oh, and a sundae with that cherry toppin’,” he said.