The Ranger

by Ace Atkins

  “You take the east side of the street and I’ll take the west.”

  “For what?” Quinn asked.

  “Ask them if they’ve seen Shackelford or his girlfriend.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “And Quinn?”

  He turned.

  “Don’t act like a sergeant.”

  “Roger that.”

  Quinn found people at only two of the six houses where he knocked. One of them remembered the girl—named Latecia—but couldn’t recall ever seeing a white man in the neighborhood. Lillie pretty much found the same thing, only learning that Latecia left more than a year ago to move up to Chicago. One woman, she’d said, recalled a white man but never spoke to him.

  They made their way back to the Jeep and climbed inside, Lillie calling back to night dispatch—dispatch being Mae, a portly country woman who’d worked for the county as long as Quinn could remember—to get her to run both names through the state system.

  Lillie wheeled the truck around and saw a short black man carrying two armfuls of groceries under the streetlamps. She slowed to a stop but kept the engine running while she got out. Quinn stayed put, seeing her talking to the man but not hearing what she said. Lillie was smiling, and the man laughed, and then he said something to her and pointed back down the road and then again to the south.

  Lillie climbed back behind the wheel.

  Quinn waited.

  “He said he’d seen Latecia last month at the Fast Stop.”

  Quinn nodded.

  Lillie turned north again, picking up the county road and heading through the slum district of burned-out trailers and houses rotting along the dry gulley that gave the neighborhood its name. During the summer after the rains, the smell of the sewage and garbage became so foul that it gave the air a kind of rotting sweetness.

  Lillie punched the cigarette lighter and let down the window an inch.

  “You mind if I ask you something?”

  “You’re going to ask anyway.”

  “Why’d you and Anna Lee break up?”

  “We never really did.”

  “Come back?”

  “When I joined the Army, we made a promise we’d stick together,” he said. “But about six months in, the letters stopped coming, and she wouldn’t return my calls.”

  “You didn’t want to know?”

  “You can’t make someone love you,” Quinn said, watching the old houses and trailers converge at a corner grocery, with barred windows decorated with beer advertisements. They sold fried chicken and pizza, barbecue on Saturdays.

  “I would’ve wanted an answer.”

  “Never got one.”

  “You want one now?”

  “Not really.”

  Lillie killed the engine.

  “What if I said you were lying?”

  “I’d say that’d be your right.”

  He got out of the Jeep, Lillie trailing him as he opened the door to the old grocery store and held it for her. Lillie waved and addressed the cashier as Miss Williams, and Miss Williams told Lillie she was real sad to read about her momma in the newspaper.

  “You know a woman around here named Latecia?”

  “I know four.”

  “Last name is Young.”

  Miss Williams shook her head and took a seat on a metal stool behind a glass case filled with overcooked chicken and pizza drying out under the heat lamps.

  “She’s got a tattoo of a rose on her arm.”

  The old woman nodded. “Seen her last week.”

  “You know where she stays?”

  “I cashed a check for her.”

  “Got an address?”

  “Sent that check to the bank.”

  “You mind calling me if she comes back in?” Lillie asked.

  “What’d she do?”

  “Nothing. Trying to find her boyfriend, but I’d appreciate you not telling her that.”

  Lillie handed her a business card, Miss Williams nodding and placing it on the lip of the cash register. She turned and looked up at Quinn for the first time and smiled, her right front tooth made of gold. “You Jason Colson’s boy.”

  He looked at her.

  “Your daddy was just plain crazy.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You look just like him.”

  “And how’d you know him?”

  Miss Williams laughed. “Boy, I used to change your diapers.”

  Just as they made it back to the Jericho city limits, Lillie had a call: a horse had escaped its fence and was running down the middle of Highway 9. She dropped Quinn off at the farm and sped off, lights flashing, toward the town Square and away. And Quinn was left there, shaking his head and smiling, deciding to drive back into town to see his mother, maybe stay the night.

  Ten minutes later he walked up the driveway on Ithaca Road and spotted two shapes moving by the windows of the little ranch, his mother and some man he’d never met. The thought never occurring to him that she may have been dating, that there could be someone else she’d spent her time with in between taking care of Jason and going to church.

  Quinn checked the time. Twenty-one hundred hours.

  The man was tall, with a wide, full stomach, and wearing a baseball cap. His mother brought him a plate of pie and he smiled up at her. She took her place across from him, and they sat and ate, not seeming to say a word to each other.

  Twenty-one hundred.

  Quinn wondered if the action had started to heat up at the Rebel Truck Stop.

  Quinn grabbed a cup of coffee at the diner and sat behind the wheel of his truck for a while. The coffee was terrible and weak, and reminded him of the chow hall at Benning. He’d learned to appreciate strong coffee out on maneuvers, grounds and all, and wished he had some now. But sometimes coffee is just warm company, especially when it’s cold with the heater off in your truck, and he sat there in a dark corner out by the gas tanks, watching the rows and rows of trucks, parking lights on, but otherwise pretty still.

  His cell rang.

  “Where are you?” Lillie asked.

  He told her.

  “Your mother’s worried.”

  “Didn’t know I had a curfew.”

  “You want me to join you?”

  “Nah,” Quinn said. “I don’t think this is worth your time.”

  “You looking for Kayla?”

  “Yep.”

  “Think she knows some more?”

  “I do.”

  “You want to call me if you get something?”

  “You miss me?” Quinn asked.

  Lillie hung up.

  He spotted Kayla nearly an hour later, making her way between trucks, hopping up into cabs or craning her head up to windows, smiling and talking, and moving down the line with a few rejections. She had on tight white jeans and that same puffy pink coat and carried a child’s backpack over her shoulder. Quinn followed her, turning down a row of trucks and then losing her, crossing behind an eighteen-wheeler, chugging exhaust in the dark, and then coming up on her.

  She was talking to a skinny man in a flannel shirt and ski hat. She handed him some cash and then turned and noticed Quinn. Quinn stood maybe ten yards from her and nodded back. The man looked back to Kayla and then to him.

  She started to walk, and the man held her arm, pulling her back, and came toward Quinn.

  “Who are you?”

  “I want to see Kayla.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s between me and Kayla.”

  “You know this fucker?” he yelled over his shoulder.

  Kayla walked up, head down, hands in the pockets of the big pink coat, and said he was okay, that she knew him. The man didn’t stop staring at Quinn, Quinn noting the man was just plain ugly, with a misshapen face and weak chin, acne across his forehead and on his neck.

  “You got a problem?” he asked Quinn.

  “Ugly doesn’t make tough.”

  The man made a move for Quinn, and Quinn punched him in the stomach, knock
ing him flat on his ass, leaving him gasping for air. Quinn stood over the man, just observing, until he got to his feet and walked away.

  “Who’s he?” Quinn asked.

  “My boyfriend.”

  Quinn didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” she said. “I haven’t even started to work.”

  “The girl is dead.”

  Kayla shrugged. Her face was white and chapped, dark hair catching a long streak dyed red. The diesel smell was strong, pumping and fuming around them.

  “Thought you’d want to know.”

  “I didn’t know her.”

  “Her real name was Jill Bullard.”

  Kayla shrugged again. “Nobody has real names out here. We’re all just kind of passing through until we can get to Memphis or Jackson.”

  “Can I buy you something to eat?”

  “I got to work.”

  “Sure like to know anything about her.”

  “I told you. What the fuck.”

  “You know where she lived?”

  “The point is to be working all night,” she said. “Then you go home. You see?”

  “You just carry everything in that backpack?”

  “Your girl Jill kept a locker,” she said.

  “You know where?”

  “What, are you gonna break into it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “I’m not the police.”

  “Then what the fuck do you care?”

  “Can you show me the locker?”

  “You really buy me something to eat?”

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “He’s a pussy.”

  Quinn grabbed a tire iron from the Ford and tucked it inside his coat, following Kayla inside the Rebel Truck Stop. The restaurant and shopping mart was still, late on a Sunday night. The cashier, watching a small television, peered up for a moment with his old hooded eyes and then went back to his show as Kayla took Quinn back to the bathrooms and showers, a long row of telephones and video games, pinging away, in the hall. She nodded him over to a bank of lockers and showed him one in the right corner, saying she remembered the locker because it was the same as her lucky number.

  “Thirteen?”

  “Been lucky for me.”

  Quinn listened for a moment and waited a beat as a fat trucker came out of the toilet, smelling like five-cent aftershave, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

  When he was gone, Quinn slipped the edge of the tire iron near the lock and gave it a sharp tug. The lock busted right apart, denting the frame, but the locker opened.

  He reached inside and found some folded clothes and a pack of condoms. She’d squirreled away some beef jerky and a bottle of Aristocrat vodka, a carton of cigarettes, and three pairs of panties.

  “You ever heard of a man named Keith Shackelford?”

  “No.”

  “You ever see Jill with a man?”

  “I always saw her with a man.”

  “This guy may have burn marks on him.”

  She shook her head.

  Quinn squatted down and reached deep in the locker, finding a thick leather-bound book, or what could pass for leather. It was a case for photographs, branded with Native American symbols and designs. He unbuttoned the cover and flipped through twenty or so pictures.

  He closed the locker door and stood up, flipping through more, reaching a side pocket and finding a thick pack of more photographs bound with a rubber band. In the weak fluorescent light he sorted through pictures of Jill Bullard. Jill playing with Beccalynn at some park. Jill and her parents. Jill with some man he did not recognize but would check against Shackelford’s mug shot. Jill partying out on Beale Street. And then a shot that just kind of left him cold, paralyzed, before he flipped the image, front to back.

  “You know this girl?”

  “I got to pee,” she said.

  “Do you know her?”

  Kayla looked at Quinn, her mouth open, backing away, looking as if she might cry.

  Quinn turned back to the photo. Jill Bullard and another girl, clicking glasses at some club, both in short skirts and tight tops. Good times.

  He didn’t bother to go after Kayla.

  He knew the girl.

  Caddy.

  15

  Sometime in the early morning on Monday, just as light was coming on, something woke Lena in that old trailer. She turned and saw the door was open, nothing in the frame, the girls gone now. She rolled back over, eyes closed, and then opened them to find the old man—Daddy Gowrie—standing over her, his pants unhitched to his bony knees, and saying, “Shh. Shhh.” Over and over.

  Lena wanted to scream, but the sound caught down deep in her throat. She pressed herself against the mattress and dug her heels into the coils, trying to get free of the blankets. As she scooted back, she felt hard steel and reached down and found a pistol—guns seeming to grow like mushrooms around the trailer—and she pointed it right between the man’s legs, down to his flaccid place, and told him, without any kind of thought, that she’d be happy to remove what was troubling him.

  He kept saying, “Shh. Shhh,” until another man rushed the door, and the old man nearly tripped over himself while he hitched up his pants and turned to run. Gowrie yelled, “Pa!,” and then, seeing him fiddling with his pants, Gowrie coldcocked the old man across the jaw, sending him down to his knees. Gowrie kicked his ribs twice so hard that Lena screamed, getting her breath back, as she steadied the gun in her hand.

  Gowrie turned to her and held out his hand, his head wrapped in a red bandanna, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans, no shoes, making her know that he’d run from somewhere to find the situation.

  “He’s a sick man,” Gowrie said. “Git.”

  He kicked his father again, and the old man scrambled to his hands and feet and skittered out of the room and down through the open front door. Gowrie reached for a lighter on the kitchen counter, clicking flame to cigarette, and then looked back to Lena, studying her with more appreciation. The wind seemed to enter the room and pull out every breath, the whole space feeling more empty than anything she’d ever imagined.

  “Next time, pull that trigger. That old man has had so many weapons aimed at him, I think he’s gotten used to it.”

  The front door battered against the trailer wall in the cold morning wind. Gowrie stood there, smoking, as she lowered the gun. And in walked Ditto, out of breath and red-faced, his eyes flitting from Lena back to Gowrie, standing there with some measure of toughness but still too damn afraid to ask questions.

  Quinn and Lillie were back down in Sugar Ditch searching for Keith Shackelford’s girlfriend, finding nothing new from Miss Williams but meeting a teenage boy in the Fast Stop who knew her. He said he’d seen her down at a yard sale a couple days back, and after getting a decent idea of where he was talking about, they piled back into the Jeep and headed deeper into the Ditch, finding an empty lot where a fat man was sitting in an easy chair. The fat man wore sunglasses in the weak winter sunshine, holding court by a camper behind an old pickup and two long tables filled with about anything you could imagine: old clothes, dishes, hats, CDs, microwave ovens, and a couple television sets. Lillie let Quinn do the talking this time, Quinn getting a feeling that Lillie was testing him to see if he could handle not being a hard-ass. He greeted the fat man and introduced himself, asking about Latecia.

  “She bought two pairs of shoes for her kids.”

  “You know where she lives or works?”

  “Where she gonna work ’round here?”

  “Who was she with?”

  “Boy named Peanut.”

  “You know where I can find Peanut?”

  “What you want with Peanut?”

  “We just want to talk to Latecia. She’s not in any trouble.”

  “I heard that shit before.”

  But the fat man told Quinn, with a grunt, not ever leaving the fol
ding chair, and pointed them back the way they’d come, a block over from the Fast Stop, where they could find Peanut playing spades under an old pecan tree.

  “Thanks,” Quinn said, offering his hand.

  The man looked at his hand and then up at Quinn. “I ain’t seen a sheriff’s car down here in two years.”

  The pecan tree looked like it had been sculpted, not grown, sitting there in the side lot of the liquor store, rooted in the air with most of the dirt eroded away, leaving only a tangled mass in the hard-packed ground. Quinn and Lillie parked on the street and approached the game, the five players not glancing over once as they got close. Quinn watched their hands and movements more out of instinct than any real worry. He could only imagine these guys thought they were going to get tossed from their daily game. Lillie greeted them like old friends, and apparently knew a couple of them from some minor arrests. They lifted their eyes from their cards and said hello, none of them moving or asking what they were doing wrong. The men were all in their twenties and wore heavy coats and scarves, and crisp and bright new baseball caps.

  “Which one of y’all is Peanut?” Lillie asked.

  No one looked up.

  “I’m not here to hassle any of you,” she said. “I’m looking for Latecia Young. And Latecia isn’t in trouble, either. We’re trying to find a fella named Shackelford.”

  One of the men lifted his eyes from his cards, front chair legs settling down to the dirt. He was skinny and wore a St. Louis Cardinals cap. He had green eyes and an earring in each ear. He looked to Quinn and then Lillie, and nodded. “That guy is a piece of shit.”