by Ace Atkins
“Anna Lee’s worried.”
“You think maybe she just wanted a reason to call?” Wesley said. “I’d really prefer not getting in the dead center of this shit.”
“You mind riding out there and checking up on him?”
“Say, where’d you get that ole junker?” Wesley asked. “Where’s your truck?”
“I borrowed it.”
“We got an old car just like that in impound last week.”
“No kidding.”
Wesley eyed him for a long moment and spit some snuff out in the coffee cup. He nodded and said, “Fine, I’ll ride out there. But I think Anna Lee is twisting your pecker.”
“You talk to Lillie tonight about the fire?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a hell of a revelation.”
Wesley nodded at him and played with the bill of his baseball cap, spitting again. “Quinn, you know anything about Keith Shackelford?”
“I know he was Fourth Infantry.”
“You know he’s a meth head and a professional fuckup?”
“Said he was clean.”
“He’s a freak show,” Wesley said. “His life has been spiraling down the shitter since he got out of the Army. I thought he was dead, and I really don’t appreciate you all dumping his ass back on my doorstep.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that the arson investigation of that fire was fixed?”
“Keith Shackelford makes his living as a federal snitch,” Wesley said. “He works both sides. He got in with some blacks up in Memphis and sold them out to the DEA, and then he come down here and tried to do the same thing to Gowrie’s bunch.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“You pay him?”
Quinn didn’t say anything.
“He’ll tell you what you want to hear, conspiracies and lies about your uncle,” Wesley said, rubbing his temples from fatigue. “But sometimes people are such fuckups they leave grease on the cookstove, and sometimes old men get so damn depressed they stick a gun in their mouth.”
“Keith Shackelford was cooking meth for Gowrie.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Wesley said. “But I wouldn’t believe any stories that turd tells me without checking them out.”
“Will you check it out?”
“Goddamn, Colson. I said I would.”
“You mind if I ride with you to check on Luke?”
“Let me stick my boot in that anthill, partner.”
“I can play nice.”
“I love you, brother. But don’t treat me like a moron.”
Anna Lee drove over to the farm at four a.m.
Quinn hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking about Caddy, standing there pissed off in a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s outfit and a fake-fur coat, bragging about her new convertible and what a good mother she’d been. He sat outside on a rocking chair in the cold silence, covered in horse blankets and smoking a cigar. Hondo had wandered on in from the back field and now stood barking at Anna Lee’s car, hair raised, the night brisk and clear, with a moon so huge that it lit up the pasture and glowed off the tin roof of the barn.
Quinn’s aunt’s old laundry line stood bent and crooked on the hill like some kind of crazy Calvary.
Anna Lee stepped out in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knit hat and gloves, and made her way up to the screen door, spotting him sitting there in the dark, giving her a little start, before she stepped inside and sat down in a chair opposite him.
“You hear from Luke?”
She let out a breath and shook her head. Quinn could tell she’d been crying. Hondo sniffed her and sat back down.
“I called Wesley.”
“Wesley said he drove over to that compound, or whatever in the hell it is, and he wasn’t there. Said the girl wasn’t there, either.”
“You ask folks at the hospital?”
She used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. “No, Quinn. I didn’t think of that. Hell, I’ve been calling every thirty minutes.”
“Sorry,” Quinn said. “The girl needed to see a doctor. I didn’t see any harm in that.”
“I didn’t mean to jump your ass.”
“Old habits.” Quinn smiled at her.
She took off her hat and leaned forward in her chair. “If she’d gone into labor, Luke would’ve called an ambulance.”
“Maybe there wasn’t time.”
“If the delivery was rough, he’d need help.”
“You know, I got holed up in this Afghan village one time with two pregnant women, both going into labor from stress, thinking soldiers were there to kill everyone. I’ve never heard more screaming and pain in my life. We were blowing up a mess of ammo the Taliban had stashed and we could still hear those women.”
“Luke would’ve called.”
Quinn nodded. “Shit. Okay.”
She wiped her face and nose with the hat and blurted out a nervous laugh, nodding. Pulling her hair away from those wide brown eyes, she said, “You will?”
Quinn put his hand on her knee and smiled at her. “I’ll find him.”
Quinn found the back door to his mother’s house unlocked and slipped in again, just like he had as a teenager. She was asleep on the couch, same as she’d always been back then, an empty wineglass by the remote, the television showing the menu from a DVD of Hooper. His dad had worked on that film, jumping the car over that gorge, playing stunt driver for Burt Reynolds, several years before Quinn was even born. He remembered watching that movie and Billy Jack and a mess of Southern-chase drive-in movies, where his dad had stunted as moonshiners and hell-raisers, maybe the best time in Jason Colson’s whole sordid history.
Quinn left the television on and slipped back into his old bedroom, finding the old footlocker he’d kept as a boy, his grandfather’s old WWII issue, the key hidden behind an old photo of Anna Lee.
He turned the key and found everything as he’d left it six years ago: washed and dried hunting camos, so worn they felt soft to the touch, and an old pair of Merrell boots. He pulled out the gear, along with two double-edged knives, and then felt the sides for the loose board he’d fitted as a false bottom. Underneath, he found his dad’s Browning .308 hunting rifle, with a sling and four packs of a dozen bullets. He slipped all of them from the Styrofoam cases and into the pockets of his hunting jacket after he’d dressed.
He moved back out the way he’d come in and walked down Ithaca Road to his F-150 and cranked the ignition. It was nearly five a.m.
He called Anna Lee again.
She hadn’t heard from Luke.
Boom lived in an old shotgun shack at the edge of hundreds of acres of cotton farmed by his family for the last two generations. He didn’t come out for several minutes after Quinn began to bang on the sagging screen door, finally emerging in old-fashioned long underwear and scratching his ass.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“I said come on.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“You can sleep on the way.”
Quinn was already halfway back to his truck. That big moon hung way out there over the fields, the dead cotton plants brushing against one another in the wind. Boom’s New Holland tractor sat parked under a crooked barn roof.
“Where we headed?” Boom called out from his doorway.
“Hunting,” Quinn said.
“Bullshit.”
“I need some help.”
“You mind me putting on my pants first?”
“I’d prefer it.”
They drove north through the heart of Carthage, nothing more than a defunct general store, a rotting building that had been a post office, and a corrugated-tin building that housed a volunteer fire department. Boom fed bullets into Quinn’s big-ass Colt Anaconda with incredible dexterity in that one hand and then loaded another deer rifle Quinn had brought from his uncle’s stash.
“How many guns?”
“I got my old .308. And my .45. Can you balance your rifle on a l
imb?”
“Yeah. But you got a plan?”
“Just want to look around is all,” Quinn said. “I promised.”
“Why’d Anna Lee come to you?”
“She blames me.”
“This would work better at night,” Boom said. “Sun will be rising soon.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Then how come you need me?”
“I need you to watch my six.”
“Sure,” Boom said, reaching into a red-and-black-checked coat with his hand for a cigarette, popping it in his mouth and then going for the lighter. “I can watch your ass. This big .44 is pretty sweet. I think I can handle that kick.”
“These folks are living on Mr. Daniels’s land,” Quinn said, hanging a left on County Road 29.
“Mr. Daniels’s been dead a long time,” Boom said, face lighting up in the glow of the cigarette. “His kids divided the land, logged it out.”
“Gowrie bought it?”
“I don’t know who owns what. Down that fire road, his people brought in a mess of trailers. They got signs up and all kind of shit. You got to walk to get down there.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Figure a mile. I don’t make a regular visit.”
“How come?”
“They got a sign that says they don’t appreciate people of color. You see?”
“Yeah, I saw the sign.” Quinn had half a cigar down in the tray. He reached for it, punching the lighter. “Nice.”
“How you know Luke’s down there?”
“I saw the girl with Gowrie at the truck stop. She’s broke, and I think she took up with his people.”
“Maybe you lookin’ for an excuse?”
“Maybe.”
“Good excuse.”
Quinn, having hung a left onto County Road 29, killed his lights, shut off his engine about two miles down and coasted to the bottom of the hill. He found a little patch of cleared land, where he parked behind a thick mess of privet bush and tangles of dead kudzu.
“Luke could still be deliverin’ that baby.”
“Sure.”
“But you want to call on ’em anyway.”
“I just want to look around,” Quinn said. “You don’t have to go.”
“You callin’ me a pussy?”
“I just said you didn’t have to go.”
“Goddamn. Are we friends or what?”
21
Rangers have always prided themselves on their skills in the woods. Although Quinn had never been on a single mission that wasn’t in the desert or up a mountain, he’d been trained for years at Fort Benning to move through the deep woods at night, up, down, and around those red clay hills of the Cole Range, being smoked to shit by his instructors until they damn near killed him. He’d marched the range so many times by himself or with his platoon that he could move blindfolded, feeling each twig and branch, moving from tree to tree, always forward, always toward the objective, the SLLS still resonating in his brain. STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. SMELL. You do this a thousand times, a million times, as a Ranger, it becomes so commonplace that you stalk men and encampments as well as you breathe.
Behind him, Boom sounded like an elephant, hitting branches and tangles, but Quinn never thought for a moment they’d be heard. When they got close, he’d search for a decent vantage point, never asking Boom once if his shooting had suffered without the arm.
If there were trouble, Quinn knew Boom—one-armed or not—could drop half those bastards with that big .44.
They followed the fire road, walking a good hundred meters along a deer trail through brush and thickets. Most of the trees were newly planted pines, the blanket of rusted needles as soft and quiet under their feet as carpet. Quinn slowed as they spotted the beaten trailers and motioned Boom forward, Quinn pointing over to a low-hanging branch where Boom would balance his rifle and pick off any targets he saw fit.
Quinn, the .308 slung on his back, .45 in his belt, would make his way down the eroded slope and into the ravine running into old Hell Creek.
Boom winked at him and took position.
He was having a ball.
It was coming up on 0530.
“Just a look?” Boom said, whispering.
“Trust me,” Quinn said with a grin.
A soft dawn shone from the east across the still trailers, no lights or activity. He could hear the gentle hum of generators in a sorry old barn, leaning hard to the hills, the tin roof crudely painted with a Rebel flag. Quinn edged through the woods the way a deer would, keeping just out of reach of the clearing, watching everything.
A trailer door opened, and an old man stumbled out, took a leak, and then moved down toward another trailer, slamming the door. A girl, maybe fourteen, in a yellow oversized sweatshirt and panties, emerged from the crooked barn holding a laptop computer under her arm.
She smoked a cigarette in the cold and finished it off before heading up a long trail to another trailer and a crude parking lot filled with an old black Camaro, a blue GTO, and Daddy Gowrie’s cherry red El Camino. Assorted busted-up trucks and sleek muscle cars.
Quinn checked the time again, not needing it but reacting as he’d been trained.
Size, Activity, Location, Uniforms, Terrain, Equipment.
Four men headed out from another trailer. All of them had shaved heads. Two wore camo jackets, one wore a woolly pully, and the last was in a sleeveless T-shirt. The same boys who’d tried to steal his uncle’s cattle for Johnny Stagg. They weren’t armed, but Quinn knew there would be guns in the trailers or down in the barn.
The men headed down to a smoking trash barrel and added in some stray branches and scrap wood. One of the boys, the skinny shitbag who’d confronted Quinn at the farm, held a joint in his hand, smoking it down before passing it along. His eyes looked black and cheeks hollow.
Quinn stayed there a good hour until the sun came up, turning everything a slate gray and then a bright purple, more men and women coming out of trailers, most headed down to the barn to fetch food on paper plates and then returning to their heated shitholes.
He figured on about eighteen folks. Eleven men. Seven women. Quinn sighted the men down the rifle’s scope, a clear, clean shot of each of their heads, big as dinner plates. He missed his M4 carbine, maybe some flash bangs and grenades, but the hunting rifle would do just fine. The problem was on the reload, but if things got tight, he had four clips for the .45.
He shifted the scope from man to man, watching as Gowrie walked out from the trailer farthest up the hill and joined the men, Quinn taking aim like he’d just found the big prize buck.
Gowrie snatched the joint out of one boy’s fingers and headed off to a drainage ditch, where he unhitched his pants and started to piss, standing ankle-deep in rubber muck boots. He had thick black hair on his shoulders and a map of jailhouse tattoos on his bare back.
Gowrie was a massive target in Quinn’s scope. His shaved head, balding at the crown, was dead center for the .308, which could blow a hole the size of a baseball through his skull. Quinn could drop him before his boys even knew what happened, pick up the girl and Luke, and boogie on down the road, no one the wiser.
How many people would even miss the son of a bitch?
Quinn listened, looking for any sign of the girl or Luke, noting all the action and folks in the camp, the comings and goings, who carried a weapon, what kind. He kept the sight in on the same place, Gowrie moving back and forth in the crosshairs, the bridge of his nose dead center.
Quinn took a deep breath, feeling the trigger under his finger, thinking about Uncle Hamp cutting down bamboo to make cane poles, teaching him how to drive a truck when he was twelve. He saw his uncle walking down a fire road at sunset into the heart of that never-ending forest after ten-year-old Quinn had started to believe he was the only man left on the planet. Uncle Hamp welcomed him with a smile and took him down to the Fillin’ Station for four cheeseburgers and a scoop of ice cream.
He’d never stoppe
d looking for Quinn.
Gowrie looked feral, with those broad tattoos across his back and shoulders, lording over these shitbags. He was animated and wild, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, not feeling the cold on his bare chest.
Quinn felt that trigger so perfect on his fingertip. He breathed soft and easy.
Quinn lowered the gun. And waited. The only guilt Quinn felt was for the damn ease of the shot.
About that time, Quinn heard a girl scream.
Pain was a son of a bitch, and every time Lena wanted to get up the doctor kept on pushing her down and telling her it was better for the baby, and she couldn’t get up and move on out of this filthy room in this damn dim light and walk out into the cold darkness. The pain kept on coming along and then it would stop, and then start again, Lena wishing it would just hit her hard and constant and not make her feel like things were going to get any better. One of Gowrie’s women, a girl not much older than her with big tits and streaked hair, held one of her arms, and the doctor motioned for another young girl to hold the other, both of them loopy and giggling but strong, when she’d buck up and tell ’em, baby or no, she was getting the hell out of there.
“Come on,” the girl with big tits and silly hair said. “Just take it easy.”
“You done this before?” she asked.
“Hell no.”
“Then why don’t you shut the hell up,” Lena said.
She wanted to be cold. Lie on a cold stone somewhere.
The doctor had her legs spread open, her underwear cut off and tossed away, a big tent of sheet over her legs. She couldn’t see what was going on there and didn’t really care, just fought with those girls and gave one big huge massive push that felt like she was trying to take the biggest damn dump ever. She forced herself to her elbows, legs spread apart, vision dimming, the words and sounds and screams going dull in her ears, as she yelled and pushed and felt her whole body just arch and ache with pain, the pain no longer coming in waves but just a steady kind of hurt, a tensing of everything in her, as she pushed and pushed, the doctor telling her that she wasn’t pushing and her calling him a goddamn dirty liar and him saying if she didn’t start pushing the baby wasn’t coming out. And Lena said, “I don’t care if it ever comes out.”