The Redeemers

by Ace Atkins

  “And what happened?”

  “He tossed away Quinn’s gun, smacked him around, tied us both up and made us walk,” she said. “He told us he was taking us out and that Quinn would have to go to jail for killing those deer, running from the law. The whole time, I felt his eyes on me. Do you understand what I mean? I was only eight, but I knew what he was thinking.”

  Lillie didn’t say anything, the hill getting a little more steep, seeing her breath come out frosty and quick, listening, watching the trees and the growth around them. She would turn and look back every so often, expecting to see one of those shitbags from the road following them. Maybe even kind of hoping that they were.

  “It started to rain and that’s when we found shelter in that old barn,” Caddy said. “I guess the National Forest used to be part of some old farms. I didn’t see a house, only the barn.”

  “And that’s where you think Quinn will head?”

  “I think if he’s hurt, like you say, and cold, that’s where he’d go to hide out.”

  “Or maybe he’s leading some folks that way,” Lillie said. “Quinn has taught me that it’s always best if you can control a situation. A barn would be a solid enclosure for him to wrangle the bad guys into a tight space.”

  “It’s almost pretty out here,” Caddy said. “Everything seems so clean. I can breathe.”

  “How was rehab?”

  “That’s the path,” Caddy said, ignoring her and pointing. “I know it. The trail we followed. Jesus Christ, that seems like yesterday. How can something be so far back but so close in your mind?”

  “Bad stuff is like tar,” Lillie said. “It’s hard to wash off.”

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Caddy said, walking faster, hands in her pockets. “It was as bad as it gets.”

  The light seemed brighter across the ridge. Morning light shining through the ice in the trees, nearly blinding, as she crested the hill and stood at the rim of the old pond. Only it wasn’t a pond. It was just a big ugly mud hole with pockets of ice spread across.

  “This is it?” Lillie said.

  Caddy nodded.

  “You sure?”

  Caddy walked to the edge of the mud and ice. She stood there and looked all around her, her face frozen in cold or maybe the memory of that time. “That motherfucker raped me,” she said. “I was eight years old. He’s dead and gone, but I can still smell his breath every morning I wake up.”

  “But Quinn took care of it.”

  “Why should a ten-year-old need to make things right?”

  “And Hamp?” Lillie said. “How’d he play in this?”

  “He found us,” Caddy said. “He buried the son of a bitch, took me home and got me cleaned up. Quinn got to hike out on his own. That’s what happened. How he became the little lost boy who was a hero. It changed him.”

  “Changed you, too,” Lillie said. But she wasn’t sure Caddy heard her. A sharp wind cut across the top of the hills just as Caddy exclaimed a giddy shriek. She smiled big and pointed into the nothingness of the pond.

  “He’s alive,” Caddy said. “I told you. He is here.”

  Lillie walked up to Caddy’s shoulder and stared down into the pond, seeing an ugly man staring, flat-faced, against a thin sheet of ice. He looked bluish, taking on a quality like he’d been cured and pickled.

  “Yeah, that looks like Quinn’s work.”

  “Come on,” Caddy said, walking around the pond, heading west. “Come on.”

  • • •

  Hypothermia or some other bad shit overtook Quinn about midday. He started to shiver and his breathing came too fast, him straying off course after sighting a tree a hundred meters away. His teeth chattered, and his mind would wander, thinking back on times he’d tracked rabbit and deer in these woods with Boom. He would recognize a little creek, an oak now doubled in size, some moss on the side of a rock. Sometimes there was the smell of the rabbit over a fire, the warmth of the stones. Other times he’d be back on some rocky ledge in Kandahar Province that looked like a vista from a John Ford film, bullets ricocheting off rocks, earth shaking from air strikes. He would jolt to attention as if touched by a live wire, snapping his head to the far reaches of the Big Woods. One step at a time. Move, move, move. Come on, Ranger, get your ass up. Seventeen miles. Seventeen miles was a brisk jog before breakfast. Nobody cared if you were hungry or thirsty. Cold or busted-up. Come on, Ranger. Keep moving. Don’t you slow up. Don’t quit. Don’t you fucking quit. This is a paradise. Do you know how goddamn lucky you are?

  He was back on the Darby Queen obstacle course at Benning, on top of the Haditha Dam on night patrol with his platoon, watching a bright red setting sun as mongrel dogs ate dead Iraqi soldiers, heart sinking as Anna Lee gave him a secret smile and turned her back, driving his old ’89 Ford full tilt and spewing mud, with Boom laughing at his side, and then that endless twenty-one-gun salute to old Hamp Beckett as they lowered his broken self into the ground. Quinn heard the shots and stumbled into a ravine, falling, but catching himself with one hand. The water ran under a thin sheet of ice, reddish mud covering the front of his jacket, his boots slipping, not finding purchase. Come on, Ranger. Fucking move. Get up. Go. Go. Go. Jason Colson gave a thumbs-up, put the pedal to the metal, and jumped that cherry-red Firebird over a broken bridge and a crooked Alabama river. Yee-haw.

  Quinn felt like he was about to throw up. He dry-heaved and wavered on his boots, trying again to get the hell out of the crevice. He found a foothold in the ravine and was crawling up with one hand until he sighted another hand with dirty fingernails reaching for him, grabbing him by the barn coat and tugging him up onto the hard frozen ground.

  “Stay down, motherfucker.”

  Quinn got to his knees and looked up at two men. They didn’t look friendly. Both held hunting rifles and wore green puffy coats similar to the man who’d tried to kill him back at the pond. They were both white, smallish, and stubby, with red-chapped, unshaven faces. They smelled like body odor and stale cigarettes. Quinn couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t smelled them a mile away. They had the look of men who lived in the woods and lived to hunt. One of them carried a GPS, his jaw fat with tobacco.

  Quinn gave them a hard look, about to reach for the gun at his hip. One held a rifle on him while the other pulled the Beretta and snatched the .308 off his back, slamming the ever-living shit out of his broken arm, bringing tears to Quinn’s eyes and his mind back to full focus and sharpness. One of the men, just as short and ugly as the other, pulled a radio from his pocket and announced that they’d gotten the son of a bitch. “About half-dead.”

  The one in front of him had pocketed Quinn’s Beretta. The other man had slung both rifles over his shoulder so he could work the handheld radio, cocky and sure his buddy could control the ragged-looking man in front of him. Dead-eyed and one-armed. Quinn knew he was covered in dried mud and Rusty’s blood.

  Quinn kept staring at the man with the gun. He listened to the other. The pain in his busted arm was sharp and raw and felt as if the bones had ripped through the skin. His bad hand hung in a twisted and bizarre way, fingers turning black and purple.

  Maybe three feet away, the man pointed his rifle at Quinn’s chest. Quinn bent at the waist and started to puke, dry-heaving up a little water, retching until hollowed-out. Coughing and gagging as he looked at his boots and then at the other man’s boots moving in closer. That was close enough. The men were hunters, men who lived in the woods and could follow a trail and stalk their prey. They were patient men who could walk quietly and live off the land.

  But they weren’t soldiers. They were sloppy and nervous, shifting from foot to foot.

  Quinn came up with the bowie knife and stabbed the gunman up under his jaw and well into his head. The knife stuck hard and Quinn let go of the bone handle as the man fell, reaching into his pocket, the man going slack as Quinn snatched back his Ber
etta. He squeezed off four rounds into the man with the radio and another two into the man he held, before dropping him to the frozen ground.

  Blood poured from the man’s mouth as he flailed, rolling back and making a deep internal scream. Soon all his motion and rage stopped.

  Wind came fast and hard off the western side of the rolling hills and down into the wide expanse of the forest. The trees were much older here, untouched by loggers for decades, the land growing up tall and strong and healing over the scars men had made. Everything was still and peaceful as Quinn tried to just breathe, slow himself, come back down from wherever the hell he’d been. He had blood all over his right hand and across his jacket.

  “Where are you?” the radio on the ground asked. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck’s going on out there?”

  35.

  Lillie found the dead men first, holding up her hand to Caddy on the path, telling her to stay back. “More of your brother’s handiwork,” Lillie said. “God, it’s a mess. I’d rather you not see this shit. Try not to look down.”

  But Caddy didn’t listen. Caddy Colson never listened to anyone, walking up to where Lillie stood and seeing the weird diorama set in dirt and ice. One man lay facedown in moldy leaves and another was flat on his back, with big wide eyes and a bowie knife stuck up under his chin and impaling his tongue. There’d been a big scuffle, lots of footprints, and more blood. It looked like a butcher’s floor that needed a good mopping.

  “That’s Quinn’s knife,” Caddy said.

  “So it is,” Lillie said. “He can come back and get it himself. Let’s just keep moving.”

  “What about that pack?” Caddy said, getting down on all fours and starting to rifle through a camo backpack, finding big brass bullets, a half-used roll of gauze, torn strips from a flannel shirt, and an empty bottle of water. She held up a roll of fishing line and some hooks, a book of matches. “He must’ve gotten this from Rusty. Why’d he leave it?”

  “He took their guns,” Lillie said. “A man can only carry so much.”

  Caddy shook her head, got to her feet, and began to follow Lillie again, Lillie glancing down every few minutes to study her GPS. She took off her hat, tightened her ponytail with a rubber band, and tugged the hat back on before heading off. The woods soon opened up into a sprawling meadow dotted with small trees. The brown grass was hip-high and brittle with ice, as they waded through. The sky was big and wide, gray and lifeless.

  “It’s straight ahead,” Caddy said. “I remember it. Just keep walking. I know where I am. I know it.”

  “We’re taking the long way around,” Lillie said.

  “Why?”

  “In case someone’s watching, I’d rather not have my ass hanging out,” Lillie said. “Here, we can duck back into the woods.”

  “But I can see it,” Caddy said. “I see the glimmer off the tin roof.”

  “And folks can see you, too,” Lillie said. “Keep walking. You hear shots, run into the woods. You hear me?”

  “Who are these guys?”

  “In my humble opinion, I’d say professional shitbirds,” Lillie said. “They’re not law enforcement and don’t have any authority at all out here. I see someone I don’t know and I’ll shoot first. I’m not asking for badges. You know, like that movie?”

  “What movie?”

  “Ask Quinn when we see him,” Lillie said. “He’ll know. He knows those Westerns.”

  She looked at Caddy, who’d grown very pale and silent. Her eyes, unblinking and silent, wouldn’t leave that barn. Her jaw set, muscles clenching in her face.

  “You OK?”

  “I didn’t want to come back here.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Never,” she said. “I only wanted to burn it down. I burned it down a thousand times in my mind.”

  They moved in a big sloppy circle, following the tree line and coming closer to the big old barn, washed and beaten of paint, leaning hard against the wind. Lillie held her Winchester as she walked, her trigger finger just outside the guard.

  Up ahead, the figure of a man walked out from the shadows waving his arms over his head. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Deputy Virgil?”

  • • •

  I don’t feel comfortable doing this in the daylight,” Mickey Walls said. “And truth be known, I don’t feel comfortable doing this at all. Can’t we get right another way? After all this shit’s over and the dust has settled?”

  “Dust ain’t gonna settle,” Chase said. “Now get out of the fucking Hummer and show me where Kyle hid my stash.”

  They’d come this far, might as well see this through, get this kid gone. Mickey knew any moment he’d see a Tibbehah County patrol car roll on up behind them, lights flashing. How they’d love to put him with one of those Alabama boys, try to pin Kyle on him. If they ever did find Kyle.

  “So that’s it?” Mickey said. “You just up and decide to take the rest of it? ’Cause you earned it.”

  “I’m making it right,” Chase said. “I done told you, I want half. This is just between me and you now. What’s right is right.”

  “Can I ask you something first?”

  “Sure,” Chase said. “I ain’t got no truck with it.”

  “How do I know you ain’t gonna use me and then shoot me right in the head like your Uncle Peewee?” Mickey said.

  “’Cause you don’t,” Chase said. “You’re thinking like the defense in the LSU game. After Saban took that time-out, they were waiting on that trick play. They changed up their defense, watching ole Landon Collins run back on the field, clock ticking down.”

  “I didn’t see the game,” Mickey said. “I don’t give a damn for LSU or ’Bama.”

  “The ball is snapped to Mosley instead and he hands the son of a bitch off to Jarrick Williams,” Chase said. “LSU knew it was coming but could never imagine it coming like this.”

  “So you’re not going to shoot me?” Mickey said. “You’re going to take your money and leave Jericho? Right?”

  “Right as rain.”

  “Come on,” Mickey said, opening the door to his Hummer, windshield wipers frozen in place. “Kyle kept it in the septic tank. Hope you don’t mind the smell of shit.”

  • • •

  Sometime on the walk out of the woods, Quinn started talking to his dead uncle.

  Uncle Hamp looked to be in fine form, not even any scarring from where he’d shot himself in the head, and seemed to have lost a good bit of weight. He looked almost like the Hamp Beckett who’d come home from Korea and the U.S. Army to take over as lawman of Tibbehah County, running the back roads and trying to shut down the Colson family stills. His eyes and buzz cut were the same shade of black. His hair looked to have been varnished at some point, maybe after death.

  “How’d you find me?” Quinn said.

  “You used your radio,” Hamp said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Damn, it’s cold,” Quinn said. “I can’t feel nothing.”

  “Move closer to the fire,” Hamp said. “Help’s on the way.”

  “I got rid of the guns,” Quinn said. “I hid them in the creek. I couldn’t carry them anymore.”

  “You did fine.”

  “I saw the barn,” Quinn said. “I nearly made it. Didn’t I?”

  “You just needed some help.”

  “Won’t they see us?” Quinn said. “That’s a lot of smoke.”

  Uncle Hamp tossed on some more old twigs and the fire kicked up good and hot, crackling under that tin roof. His face was obscured with all the heat and fire, smoke twirling around him. Nothing looked the same in the barn, not as he remembered. It looked like a fun house, the whole shelter tilted and warped, walls that curved and tin that sagged. Quinn recalled a rat. There had been a rat up in the corncrib. He recalled it looked at him with those red eyes, guarding all the old corn, while the fat ma
n crawled on top of Caddy, making those noises.

  “Can I look at your arm?”

  “Don’t you touch it.”

  “Looks broke?”

  “Don’t touch me,” Quinn said. “I swear, I’ll shoot you, Uncle Hamp. I already killed plenty of men. It hurts bad. God damn, it hurts.”

  “I’m not your damn uncle,” someone said. “Jesus Christ. Quinn? Can you even fucking see me?”

  “God, there were rats up there,” Quinn said. “Nasty as hell. They had red eyes.”

  “Just stay warm,” someone said, Quinn feeling two cold fingers on his neck. “Your lips have turned blue. You can barely talk, Ranger.”

  • • •

  Glad I found you,” the man said, grinning little yellow nubs for teeth. “Help’ll be here soon. We’re going to try and land a chopper right over there in that field and get you two out. That’s a big wide space out there in them weeds.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Lillie asked.

  The man wore a blue jacket with an insignia for the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He took off his hat, showing his short gray crew cut, and introduced himself, giving himself the rank of captain. Lillie felt like her stomach had dropped out of her. The man Ringold had mentioned. God damn it. Caddy eyed him with some suspicion, crossing her arms over her body, and raised her eyebrows at Lillie. Her pink wool hat was far down on her head, her shoulders slumped and hands in her pockets.

  “I don’t want to be evacuated,” Lillie said. “We just walked over twelve miles, up through those hills, to get to the middle of nowhere. I think we’ll stay until we get business finished.”

  “Ma’am,” the Trooper said. “It’s nearly night. We got some good folks out here. The best. We’ll find Mr. Colson and get him to answer for what he did to Rusty Wise. I guess this isn’t his first go-around with a matter like this.”

  “I don’t know you,” Lillie said. “I never even heard your name. So why don’t you get the fuck out of the way.”

  “I can’t do that, ma’am,” the Trooper said. “Too much blood been spilt.”