The Redeemers

by Ace Atkins

  “Don’t you mean ‘serve’?” Chase said. “I never read nothing about a man getting serviced in the Bible.”

  “Same damn thing,” Peewee said. “When the pastor got to that part, all of us sitting in a big wide circle, her eyes met mine and we were on, brother. I knew right then and there it was a damn done deal. Hard part was waiting through all that talking and praying, drinking coffee and eating cookies, until I could walk her out to the parking lot.”

  “And she just jumped into the van?”

  “You better believe it.”

  Chase slurped some more of the shake, watching all the cars and big trucks go past on the boulevard, snaking out toward the interstate to Birmingham, down to Montgomery, and on to Mobile Bay. “Uncle Peewee?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What the hell are we gonna do?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “We got blood on our hands.”

  “Hush up.”

  “What we did with that fella’s body,” Chase said. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “I said hush your mouth.”

  “We ain’t going back to Gordo,” Chase said. “Are we?”

  His Uncle Peewee just shook his head, not saying nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything in particular. He raised his hand and asked his waitress if he could get a refill of his Pepsi.

  • • •

  Stagg found Ringold out back of the Rebel, loading hickory wood into the barbecue pit with big black Midnight Man. Both men were sweating, as they’d chopped and stacked a cord of wood, keeping the fire going good and stoked orange-hot. Stagg never trusted a barbecue joint that didn’t smoke their meat each and every day, the smell of the pit the best advertising a place can have. “How you doin’, boys?”

  “Smokin’ turkey legs,” Midnight Man said in that gruff, deep way of speaking. “Ribs. Cracklins. You want me to save you some?”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir,” Stagg said, patting Midnight Man on the back of his sweaty white undershirt. The man wandering on into the kitchen, knowing Stagg didn’t come to Ringold to talk about pork plates.

  Ringold slid his tattooed arms back into a green canvas jacket. He wore a ball cap that day, WINCHESTER ARMS. “Yes, sir?”

  “Police issued four warrants,” Stagg said. “Couple turds over in Alabama. And Kyle Hazlewood and our buddy Mickey Walls. Heard anything from Walls?”

  “We didn’t leave our last meet on good terms.”

  “You hurt him bad?”

  “Didn’t leave any marks.”

  “But you got his attention?”

  “I did,” Ringold said. “Although he kept on denying any part in it.”

  “Sheriff’s office got hold of some cell phone records that show all four of those turds were working together,” Stagg said. “They believe Mickey Walls orchestrated the whole thing while screwing Cobb’s daughter down in Gulf Shores. How’s that for getting back at her daddy?”

  Ringold just nodded. Most of the time, Stagg could get a good read on a person, but with Ringold it was damn-near impossible. His eyes were a cold and clear blue, almost washed of all color at all. He never knew the man to laugh or be pissed-off, living in a state without any emotion at all.

  “I talked to Walls twice,” Ringold said. “Next time, he’ll have to bleed a little more.”

  The iron door to the barbecue pit was open and Stagg watched the new pieces of hickory catch fire and burn down to embers. Stagg walked over to the fire, squatted down, and rubbed his hands into its warmth. The chimney above the truck stop pumped out hickory smoke just in time for the lunch rush. “Leave him be,” Stagg said. “Now that the law is involved, I don’t want us nowhere near him. I’ve done business with Walls. He ain’t that smart, but he’s no moron, either.”

  “He won’t admit to a thing.”

  “Just how did you try and get his attention?” Stagg asked, grinning a little.

  “Laid his hand on a tile saw and threatened to slice off a few fingers.”

  “How’d he like that?”

  “He screamed a little,” Ringold said, reaching into his pocket for a cigar and burning the tip with a big stainless steel lighter. There was something in the gesture of the lighting, the tobacco smoke trailing from his mouth, that reminded Stagg a great deal of Quinn Colson. He got up off his haunches and placed his warm hands into his khaki pockets, rocking back on his heels.

  “All you Army boys smoke or dip?”

  “Keeps your mind sharp,” Ringold said.

  “In some ways, you and Colson are cut from the same cloth,” Stagg said. “The attitude. The training. Y’all have similar characteristics.”

  “Maybe,” Ringold said. “But we think a lot different.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m a realist, Mr. Stagg,” Ringold said, grinning. “Colson just could never wrap his head around what a good deal he could’ve had.”

  • • •

  How can anyone live like this?” Lillie said. “This place is a complete shithole.”

  “Certainly misses a woman’s touch,” Rusty Wise said, standing next to Mickey Walls’s eighty-inch television and surveying the mess of beer cans, pizza boxes, and empty bottles of Jack. Lillie acted as if she hadn’t heard him, just trying to take in the kitchen, the living room, the two bedrooms piled high with more shit they’d have to search.

  “It misses a human’s touch,” Lillie said. “Pass me that bottle next to your toe. If he and those boys were knocking a few back, maybe we can get some prints.”

  They’d been there nearly an hour with Ike McCaslin and two men from the MBI in Batesville. They were walking Walls’s backyard with some kind of electronic tools to spot if anything might have been buried. “What the hell is this?” Rusty said, reaching for a DVD on the coffee table. “Lesbian Cheerleaders 4? I don’t know Mickey real well but never figured him for a pervert.”

  “Maybe it’s an art movie.”

  “Not from the looks of the pictures on the back,” Rusty said. “Lord Almighty. Looks like she’s getting a pelvic exam.”

  “I get the idea, Rusty.”

  “Reminds me of a gosh-dang frat house,” Rusty said. “No rules. No one giving a damn about picking up their clothes or food. No Momma telling them what to do. You see the mess of bills by the telephone? Looks like some creditors onto him real hard.”

  “He was about to lose the flooring business,” Lillie said. “At least that’s what Larry Cobb says. Cobb says he was about to cut off his supply. If you were him, where would you hide that money?”

  “Well, we’ll know more when we get his bank statements,” Rusty said.

  “You think he rolled on up to the teller and unloaded a few hundred grand?” Lillie said. “If he did, I hope to hell he got a free toaster. Or at least a sucker.”

  “What would you do with that much money?”

  “I’d get the hell out of Jericho,” Lillie said. “I’d change my hair and my name and leave the damn county. I’d go and raise my daughter in a better place.”

  “Shoot,” Rusty said. “You know that’s not true. You know you love Jericho and Tibbehah County more than anyone. You wouldn’t do all this hard work for nothing. This is your home. You want to see that folks follow the law.”

  “That’s me, Lillie Virgil, goddamn civic leader,” Lillie said. “Remember that shit at the next pancake breakfast.”

  Rusty laughed and shook his head, looking a bit lost in Mickey Walls’s swirling chaos. In a back room, Ike McCaslin was searching in closets and under the beds. Lillie knew one of them, probably not Rusty, was going to have to crawl under the house next. In her mind, she could see Rusty getting stuck under the crossbeams and her having to hook his boots to her Jeep and pull him out.

  Lillie had started to unzip couch cushions, knowing she wouldn’t find anything but some bottle caps a
nd old pretzels, but wanting to go through the process. Room by room. Inch by inch. She wanted everything done right before they allowed Mickey to come back. Rusty had moved on back to the kitchen and took a handful of bills and loaded them into a cardboard box. “Lillie?”

  She looked up.

  “I wanted to apologize for my behavior the other day,” Rusty said. “What I said wasn’t any of my business, one way or another. I was trying to make a point, but sometimes my words get jumbled up in my mouth.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I meant what I said about you loving Jericho,” he said. “It might be as corny as all get-out, but I love it, too. When I moved down to Columbus, it wasn’t home. I liked being a lawman and not having to sell dang insurance and all. But coming back here, raising my family where I was raised, really means something. Y’all are my people.”

  “Was it the new Walmart that sold you?”

  “Shoot,” Rusty said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” Lillie said. “This place definitely has a peculiar kind of charm. Where else could you meet creeps like these?”

  “You think Mickey’ll talk?”

  “Let’s give him some time to think on things,” Lillie said. “We both know it’s going to take a good long while to find that money. But he doesn’t know about those cell towers placing his three boys near the Cobb place.”

  “Calls back and forth to Hazlewood ain’t enough.”

  “Nope,” Lillie said. “But that dumb son of a bitch doesn’t know it. God damn it. If we could just find Kyle, I’d play those bastards off on one another. It could be beautiful.”

  “What’s your best guess?”

  “For Kyle?”

  Rusty nodded. He lifted the box up in his chubby little arms to take it back out to the sheriff’s truck.

  “Do you really want me to say it?”

  29.

  That afternoon, the horses arrived.

  Jason had unloaded them from the trailer and turned them loose into the open field behind the farmhouse. For the last two weeks, he’d mended fences, tested the gates, and finished the roof on the barn. The outside needed painting but would do fine until spring. Once where there’d been only cattle, now the farm had a couple Appaloosas and an American paint horse named Bandit in honor of Burt Reynolds.

  Quinn’s father was out back with them now, along with little Jason and Anna Lee’s daughter. The kids climbed the slat-rail fence and rubbed their hands between the giant animal’s eyes. Jason had shown the children the proper way to feed a horse, flat of hand, so they didn’t get bit.

  “Nice,” Anna Lee said. “Isn’t it?”

  They were seated in Quinn’s living room, which at one time had probably been called a parlor. Over the years, the room had seen family members laid out on cooling boards, the arrival of a gramophone, and now a flat-screen television hung on the old beaded board. Above the fireplace was a dual gun rack filled with a vintage Winchester and an old Enfield rifle Quinn had bartered for in Afghanistan. The Enfield had been taken from the British more than a century ago and inlaid with mother-of-pearl by the Afghanis, or, as the chieftain who sold it said, “Made it our own.” There were a lot of black-and-white photos of the Beckett family and a few of Quinn’s time in the service. Caddy. Jason. Jean. Dead Hamp Beckett.

  “You think y’all can stay for supper?” Quinn asked.

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “I told him no horses.”

  “But he brought them over anyway?” Anna Lee said.

  “He didn’t have anywhere else to put them,” Quinn said. “I have the land. But you just wait, I’ll be taking care of them full-time.”

  “You think he’s going somewhere?”

  “You never know with Jason Colson.”

  “He seems to be doing fine,” Anna Lee said. “He’s good with kids.”

  “He’s always been good with kids. And animals,” Quinn said. “And jumping over shit.”

  “Y’all look just alike,” Anna Lee said. “And even little Jason. You can tell it’s his granddaddy. That all y’all are related.”

  “You know, he asked me this morning about Caddy,” Quinn said. “He wanted to know when his momma was going to get well. And quit poisoning herself. I never told him anything. Momma wouldn’t say anything more than Caddy was down with the flu.”

  “Kids know things.”

  “Caddy’s worried the state will try and take him away.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “She could lose her rights,” Quinn said. “If Jean wanted to push things, she could get a lawyer and become Jason’s legal parent.”

  “But she won’t.”

  “She couldn’t do it to Caddy,” Quinn said. “No matter how many times she falls, Jean believes it’s only temporary.”

  “I know y’all love her,” Anna Lee said. “But as Jason grows up, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions. She falls again and it’s going to mess him up bad.”

  Quinn walked over to the window and looked through the old leaded glass, making the image of the kids on the fence seem wavy and unreal. Old Jason was on Bandit now, riding bareback, galloping around the mud and cow dung, cowboy hat raised high like Buffalo Bill Cody. The kids clapped. Quinn didn’t speak.

  “Maybe I’m not one to talk,” Anna Lee said.

  “If it comes to it, I’ll take Jason,” Quinn said. “Caddy and I have always had that understanding. Ever since she came back from Memphis, I promised her I’d always look out for him.”

  “What did she say this morning?”

  “We just talked,” Quinn said. “She complained about some alcoholic guitar player who did nothing but pluck away at ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I brought her coffee and a carton of cigarettes.”

  “That’s all y’all talked about?”

  “That and all that happened when we were kids.”

  “‘All that happened’ covers a lot of ground,” Anna Lee said. “I know something bad happened to Caddy. You’ve told me that much. But in all the years we’ve been together, you never really said what. You one time told me she had problems with boys because she’d been molested as a child. But you never said when or who did it.”

  “It’s not something I like to talk about,” Quinn said. “Besides, it’s her story to tell.”

  “Whoever did it must be dead,” Anna Lee said, giving a nervous laugh. “Because, knowing you, you’d hunt him up and kill him yourself.”

  Quinn didn’t speak. He watched his father step Bandit forwards and then walk him backwards. He patted the animal’s neck and led him back over to the fence and little Jason and Shelby. Both of the kids had on jeans and boots, heavy wool coats and hats. Quinn let the lace curtains fall away in his hands and turned back to Anna Lee on the couch.

  “That’s it,” Anna Lee said.

  “What?”

  “You killed the son of a bitch.”

  Quinn sat down in an old leather chair by the fire. The chair had come from Judge Blanton’s estate sale, as well as a couple tall barrister bookshelves on the far wall filled with books Quinn loved and books he planned to read. There was Hemingway, a lot of Russians, sport and hunting books, and the good old stuff from the Greeks. A big red kilim rug lay spread out under the furniture, where Hondo had found a place to sleep. Quinn reached down and patted the dog’s head.

  “I like being here with you,” Quinn said.

  “How old were you?”

  “How about we talk about supper. Or horses.”

  “How old were you?”

  Quinn met her eyes. They were dark brown and sleepy and knew him better than anyone. She had her fingers to her mouth, waiting for him to answer her.

  “I was ten,” he said. “I had shot deer out of season and a game warden had come for me. Caddy followed me into the Nati
onal Forest and we thought we could run away.”

  “But he came for you?”

  “It was raining and there was this barn,” Quinn said. “He’d tied me up but left his shotgun. He left it in a corncrib so he could get to Caddy.”

  • • •

  Johnny Stagg was just about to take off for the evening when Mickey Walls walked into his office and stood in the doorway, not sure if he had the right to enter. Stagg pointed to a chair in front of his desk and Walls sat down. The boy looked wrung-out and nervous as hell. Man didn’t even seem to take notice of all those framed photographs of famous Mississippians on his wall. Just the other day he’d added LeAnn Rimes to the wall after one of his dancers told Stagg she was born in Jackson.

  “That linoleum you laid is holding up fine, sir,” Stagg said.

  “Glad you like it,” Walls said, face sweaty, eyes bloodshot. “Armstrong Commercial. Tough as it gets. But I need your help with something, Mr. Stagg. I didn’t want to call, have this conversation to be heard by anyone. To be honest, I don’t know if the police got some wiretaps on me.”

  “On account of that Cobb business.”

  “I didn’t rob Larry Cobb,” Walls said. “Hell, I wasn’t even in the state.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The cops don’t believe me,” Walls said. “That big woman Lillie Virgil and that fat little turd Rusty Wise are over at my property right now, going through my personal things.”

  “They got a warrant?”

  “Of course they got a warrant,” Walls said. “I’m not going to let the law root through my underwear unless they got some paper.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I’m good.”

  “I said sit down, Mickey,” Stagg said. “You want a Coca-Cola or some barbecue? Midnight Man has been barbecuing all damn day. I think he made too many ribs. We never get a rush on ribs midweek. But, good God, how that meat falls off the bone. Melts in your mouth.”