The Ranger

by Ace Atkins

  “He didn’t give a shit as long as the money come in regular,” Stagg said, shaking his head. “These people invited him down to Biloxi, gave him the VIP till they won their money back. They’s the ones who broke him. They broke his mind, Judge.”

  “You tell this to anyone?”

  “Hell no,” Stagg said. “But he left a note.”

  Blanton shook his head, eyes bloodshot and dark-rimmed. Johnny Stagg felt his face glow red-hot, like he’d just taken a dump on the man’s high-dollar Oriental rugs.

  Quinn met Wesley in the front drive, nodding over to Gowrie’s 1969 black Camaro. “How do you like my wheels?”

  “When are you headed back?”

  “Today.”

  “You plan on driving that machine back to Columbus?”

  “Is that a problem?” Quinn asked.

  “Probably,” he said. “It’s a piece of evidence. We thought it had been stolen from the gas station, but Lillie said you took it.”

  “I guess we’d better drive it back to the sheriff’s office, then.”

  “Things might happen to a vehicle in transit.”

  “Sure could.”

  Wesley grinned a little.

  “Hell yeah,” Quinn said, jumping into the front seat, cranking that big engine and knocking it into reverse, Dynaflow pipes puttering like a speedboat as they pulled alongside Deputy Leonard McMinn and waved.

  McMinn tilted his head like a dog hearing a high-pitched sound and raised his hand to wave back.

  Wesley dug some dip from the front of his uniform pocket and thumped it with his thumb. “Hit it,” he said.

  Quinn redlined the motor, taking it on up before knocking it into first gear, the Camaro beautifully hanging there in space, burning the shit out of Gowrie’s back tires and sending up black smoke into Leonard’s face.

  They laughed all the way out to Main Street and then hit the long, long road out of town, taking the Camaro on up to way past a hundred, knowing that no one could touch them, Quinn feeling like he had in high school, only this time with the law riding shotgun.

  “This is more fun than that fire truck.”

  “Bet your ass,” Quinn said.

  He found a country music station, and they blared some good outlaw stuff from back in the day, zipping down all those hidden country roads, passing forgotten cemeteries and crumbling gas stations, nothing but gravel and dirt. Quinn switched with Wesley, and Wesley took the car bumping up and over the road into an overgrown field, crashing through a rotting fence and spinning out in the mud and dust, nearly getting stuck in a ravine, but then redlining her again and mashing that pedal till they were back onto the country road leading to the farm.

  Both of them laughed so hard they almost lost their breath.

  The radio played Haggard, “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” and Quinn couldn’t help but laugh at the future sheriff of the county tearing up the back roads. They hit a turn, and Wesley shifted up, taking on the grade of the hills ringing the valley of the farm, the Camaro spinning gravel and dust along the narrow road.

  “Who in the hell left us in charge?” Wesley said.

  “Some unfortunate folks,” Quinn said.

  “God help us all,” Wesley said, rolling down the window and spitting, running fast along the line of barbed wire, the fence line nothing but a blur. The road would crest the hill, and they’d hit another road that would lead back to his uncle’s place, maybe a mile or so way. The land out here was rented by a hunt club and owned by a logging company, as was much of the big stretches of old timber. Quinn recalled all that old-growth timber on the old McKibben place being logged out, as Wesley turned north and downshifted, running along the ridge of the hill. He wondered if a guy like Johnny Stagg possessed a soul.

  “You look out for my momma,” Quinn said.

  “You bet.”

  “And do better than Leonard.”

  “I promise.”

  “Gowrie will be back,” Quinn said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He won’t let this rest.”

  “You worry too much, Quinn.”

  Wesley slowed at the next curve, that final bend up in the hills that would head east and back down into the valley to the farm. He downshifted and braked to where a couple trucks pinched the road.

  Quinn couldn’t see anyone standing close and figured the trucks belonged to a couple of hunters who’d been too lazy to find a place to park. Wesley stopped hard, those back pipes chugging away in idle. “What the hell,” Quinn said, opening the passenger door.

  Quinn noticed Wesley had his hand on his service revolver.

  “Hold up,” Wesley said, slipping on his sheriff’s office cap.

  Quinn didn’t listen, coming from around the back of the Camaro and finding Gowrie and the skinny boy with the broken wrist threading through the two trucks. A third fella, fat and slow, with a bloodied hand and dead eyes, wearing a rotten smile, held a 12-gauge.

  Quinn was unarmed, feeling like his pants were down.

  He looked to Wesley. Wesley eyed him for a moment.

  “Sorry, Quinn,” he said, spitting on the ground and giving Quinn his back. “I promised to keep the peace.”

  “You son of a bitch” was all Quinn got out before Wesley joined the men, and Gowrie and the boys started shooting.

  The fat boy unloaded with the 12-gauge, hitting Quinn hard with buckshot in the leg and ass, and Gowrie fired off a pistol, a bullet grazing his side. He fell ragged and hard on the gravel.

  “Mornin’, soldier,” Gowrie said and laughed.

  Quinn crawled behind the Camaro, the engine still running. He heard the men talking, Wesley saying something about keeping the deal, and Gowrie said, “You bet.”

  “Go ahead and make it look real,” Wesley said. “Shoot for the calf or my ass. I brought this little .22.”

  Quinn sat on his butt, leaning against the Camaro.

  He looked around the edge of the muscle car and saw Wesley’s back, hand reaching out with a small .22 pistol to hand to the fat man.

  Gowrie stood there with his jeans tucked into his boots, loosely holding a .45 auto and smiling. “You bet, boss.”

  Gowrie lifted the gun and shot Wesley Ruth right in the head and heart with the .45, dropping the big ex–football player to the road.

  “Where you at, soldier?” Gowrie said.

  Quinn heard the men’s feet walking across the gravel, coming around the Camaro, Quinn wondering where Wesley had dropped his gun. He thought about approaching from the other side of the car, thinking maybe he could lift a gun from Wesley’s belt and sneak up on the men from behind. But even if he made it, all of them were armed, and he wouldn’t have time.

  He searched out a tree line, maybe ten meters away, where all kinds of junk had been dropped off by lazy country folks. Old refrigerators and stoves, cans and bottles and toys, and deer skeletons left to rot, meat smelling sickly sweet.

  They would hit him, but he could make it to some concealment, maybe lose them back in the woods.

  Quinn ran for the forest and the dumping ground, feeling bullets pass his ear as shots zipped around him.

  He kept moving. You always kept moving.

  Another shot ripped through his back, his shoulder feeling as if it had cracked clean, and he fell down hard on his face, dragging himself through the heaped piles of rotten newspapers and deer guts, beer bottles and car parts. He backed himself behind an old stove, looking down the ridge through a head-high growth of newly planted pines.

  He could maybe crawl his way through, make it back down to the county road by his uncle’s house and wait them out until he could find some help.

  Gowrie whistled, and told his boys he’d seen Quinn run into all that shit yonder.

  Quinn felt light-headed as he moved away from the stove, his leg covered in blood, thinking a femoral artery could have been hit, and in that case he was fucked. He ripped the arm off his shirt and twisted it tight around his thigh. His back w
as covered in blood, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about that. He couldn’t raise his left arm, but he could use his fingers.

  In the field, they’d cut loose his uniform and get some QuikClot into that son of a bitch, that powdery shit saving his life at the Haditha Dam and again along a rocky ridge in the Arma Mountains.

  This time, he didn’t have body armor or a weapon. You didn’t get a Purple Heart for dying in a junkyard.

  He heard the fat man breathing before he heard his heavy walk. The skinny fella with the black eyes, still wearing a makeshift cast on his arm, walked in front of Quinn first, kicking at his bloody leg. The fat man followed, out of breath and sweating, mopping his face with his shirttail, showing his blubbery white belly.

  “How’s it feel?” the fat man asked, unwrapping a stump that had been a thumb.

  The fat man kicked at him. Both boys raised their guns and smiled.

  33

  The fat man’s head exploded into a fine mist, and he fell on top of Quinn, the cracking explosion of a big revolver sounding only after. The other man raised his weapon, his shirtfront opening up with a huge hole, blood spreading across his chest as he fell dead, another crack before he hit the ground. Quinn kicked and pushed, and the pain and effort of getting that fat son of a bitch off him was something else, but he gritted his teeth and crawled, his damn right leg not working worth shit, the tourniquet coming loose. He retied it as he heard the gunning motor of the Camaro and saw the spray of gravel, the muscle car bounding southward on the hill, nearly losing traction in that curve but righting itself and disappearing.

  Quinn tried to stand but couldn’t.

  He finally got to one knee, looked up the rutted path from the county junkyard, and waited to see who’d saved his ass. At first he heard padding feet, the sun looking high and pale over the ridge and path. He thought he saw a man in a worn rancher’s coat, a cigarette hanging loose from his weathered face, the hill tunneled with bright green leaves with the smell of tobacco in the wind. Sheriff Beckett motioned for Quinn to get a move on, follow him on out.

  Quinn’s vision kind of kicked in and out, but it was clear as hell when he saw that cattle dog with a gray-and-black quilt coat trotting the path for him, smelling his blood and then barking.

  He heard a big baritone voice coming from somewhere up the hill. A large shadow holding a silver Colt .44 in his left hand.

  “Hey, Quinn,” Boom said. “I been waiting for you. Found Hondo.”

  “You stay here,” Ditto said, behind the wheel of a red GMC Jimmy he’d stolen from a motel in Yalobusha County that morning. Lena nodded while cradling her baby in one arm. Her other hand held that little .22 peashooter she’d brought from Alabama, her saying she should have used it on Charley Booth when she’d had the chance.

  Ditto walked to a side door of the movie-house church, recalling a similar place in his hometown of Calhoun City where a crazy preacher thought he possessed a true healing gift. A rich man with the cancer had joined up with them, and for weeks the preacher had laid on hands, asking them all to join in the touch to drive the devils from his soul to cleanse him. Even when the man died, the preacher didn’t give up, refusing to let folks take the body from the church, letting the man lay there for nearly a week, telling everyone that he could raise that son of a bitch from the dead.

  The preacher finally let them plant the man, still saying he could have done it if the body hadn’t been embalmed.

  Brother Davis was of the same mold but had always been good to Ditto. Davis knew that Gowrie was crazy as a shithouse rat and would take some pity on their situation.

  All he wanted was five hundred dollars, only half of what was come due to him.

  Ditto’s damn heart jackhammered in his chest as he walked down the vacant aisle, his heart way up in his throat. If one of Gowrie’s boys spotted him here, they’d hang his ass high.

  He found Brother Davis asleep in the first row, feet kicked up on the stage, snoring. A book by Pat Robertson about saving your family during the End Times was splayed across his lap.

  He awoke with his eyes wide, probably expecting the Beast.

  “Brother,” Ditto said, whispering. “I’m in a mess and need some money. Gowrie wants me dead, and I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s me,” Ditto said. “You know me.”

  Brother Davis nodded, screwing up his face and studying Ditto’s profile. “Gowrie’s gone.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Don’t belong to him,” the old man said. “People from Memphis comin’ for it.”

  “I just need five hundred.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “Them boys in Memphis gonna take what’s theirs and shut us down.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Continue with my ministry.”

  “You really a minister?”

  “Yes, sir. Hell yes, I am.”

  Ditto shook his head. “I got eight dollars left and a girlfriend with a baby.”

  Brother Davis: “That feisty girl? I sure like a girl with spirit.”

  Ditto nodded. Brother Davis licked his cracked lips.

  “Y’all intimate? Did she get nekkid yet?”

  “Can I just borrow a little?” Ditto said.

  Brother Davis stood and closed his book, finding the stairs to his pulpit and leaning into the podium. A big cross fashioned from stripped and shellacked cedar beams hung from chains. “Let me see the girl.”

  “Why?”

  “She needs to be taught a lesson.”

  “Good-bye, Brother,” Ditto said. “Good luck.”

  “Just give me five minutes,” Brother Davis said, his dirty eyeglasses and golden smile catching in the weak movie-house light. Ditto thought how strange it was that the cross above him had been fashioned from fallen logs and chains from a hardware store. Didn’t look too fitting.

  “Oh, shit,” the preacher said.

  Ditto turned.

  Up the aisle, a door with a diamond window was kicked open, and walking down the aisle was Gowrie himself, Ditto nearly shitting his drawers, but Gowrie walked right past him and approached the preacher standing in the pulpit. He raised a gun before the homemade cross.

  Gowrie wore a ski hat, his eyes wide and electric on that ole meth.

  “They got state people down here,” Brother Davis said. “They was like fire ants all over your place last night.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “It ain’t ours.”

  “You give it to Stagg?”

  Brother Davis shook his head sadly. “Belongs to them boys in Memphis.”

  “And you’re gonna let ’em have it?”

  “Don’t have no choice.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Gowrie shot him in the shoulder and leg, the old man falling to the ground. Gowrie hopped up on the stage like a damn cat and started to kick the old man, asking him again where he’d put the goddamn money. He walked to the edge of the stage and unhitched the cross from the chains, it falling down near the preacher’s head.

  “Them folks will kill me.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “It’s done.”

  “You lyin’ shithole preacher, where’d you put the money? You lyin’ shithole preacher.”

  The old man pointed with a bloody hand behind the curtain and said something about the cash being in a box of hymnals by the door. Gowrie squatted down and checked the box, counting handfuls of cash in his thick little hands.

  “This all you got?”

  “We never had no more.”

  “You damn liar.”

  Gowrie stood over the old man, kicking him in the head again and dragging his bloody ass to the cross.

  Gowrie wrapped the old man in the chains and hoisted him into the rafters of the old movie house. Ditto breathed his first breath, thinking maybe the son of a bitch had forgotten about his presence.

  “Come on, you little fat shit, and help me get what’s mine,”
Gowrie said, tying the chain to the wall, leaving the gold-toothed preacher hanging and dropping blood to the wood stage and searching for just the right prayer to set himself loose.

  Ditto scrambled to his feet and ran to follow, wiping his sweating hands on his pant leg, mouth trembling, and pissing a bit on himself.

  “Where we headed?”

  “Where Johnny Stagg got my goddamn money.”

  Lena saw Gowrie park behind the movie house and come right through the front door. She slid down in the seat of the car, closing her eyes and shushing her baby, who’d taken that very moment to start wailing, now calling the baby Joy, something that Ditto had come up with, maybe the first sensible name she’d come across in some time.

  Ditto inside with the preacher, Gowrie coming in the rear.

  Not an ideal situation.

  But the boy had left the motor running, and she could just slide on over and get as far gone from Jericho as a half tank could get her. Instead, she just waited there, closing her eyes and praying a bit, hoping the Lord would find her thoughts a lot stronger than Brother Davis’s. She waited to hear gunshots and prayed that Ditto would make it through. That little fat boy had more guts than any man she’d met in her life.

  A good ten minutes passed. She heard gunshots.

  She crawled behind the wheel, holding the baby in the passenger seat with her right hand, using a pillow from the motel to corral her on the seat. She knocked the car into gear and moved up in front of the movie house, seeing the door was wide open.

  Her hands shook. Even Gowrie wouldn’t shoot a girl with a baby.

  She’d point that ole peashooter at him and give him a talkin’-to. She would leave with her little fat boy, money or not.

  She didn’t want their goddamn money and would tell him so.

  She reached for the crying baby and got out of the car, holding Joy and that .22 so tight. She felt like she was walking all sluggish in water, her blood running so fast, her mind a hot tangle of thoughts. She heard a man crying but saw no one until she looked up from the pulpit.

  There she saw golden-mouthed Brother Davis hanging from the cross, the cross swinging like a pendulum from a mess of chains.