The Broken Places

by Ace Atkins

  “Mister, you’ve just gone and kidnapped the chief of police of Jericho, Mississippi,” said Leonard the cop.

  “Damn shame,” Bones said. “Now open the fucking door, Chief. You going out first. And watch out for their shotguns, cut through a man real quick. Don’t go fast, and don’t try to be a dumbass hero.”

  The fat man was sweating as he pulled the door inward, Bones and Esau standing back of the three men. The house lights had gone up in the club, and girls were sitting buck-ass nekkid on the edge of the stage. The colored lights still twirled, and the disco ball scattered light on the ceiling. The two U.S. Marshals were waiting on them, standing between them and the door, both of them brandishing pump shotguns. One of them old and white-haired, the other a little quicker, with a drooping mustache and hard eyes. Esau and the law just never could get along. He’d never met a cop that was worth two shits, all of them nothing but grown-up titty babies.

  Up above the stage, a teenage white boy with tattoos down his arms raised his hands up, scared shitless.

  “How about some music?” Bones said. Esau prodded Johnny Stagg. Bones kicked Jamey Dixon square in the ass to keep him going. The fat cop had his hands up, wandering forward, not needing anyone to tell him how to dance. “I said play some fucking music,” Bones said.

  Esau aimed his .357 up at the DJ and nodded.

  The boy wore a sleeveless black T-shirt showing thin and bony arms. Esau wanted to just shoot him where he stood, but that would bring on those pumps and it would be a hell of a mess. They used the three men as cover and they’d walk from the Booby Trap just as pretty as you please.

  “What do you want?” The white DJ’s voice sounded high like a woman’s. He was nervous as hell. The girls, black and white and Mexican, had started to huddle together and were slipping back into their bras and nighties. The air still smelling of stale smoke and cherries and cheap-ass perfume.

  “Play ‘All I Have to Offer You Is Me,’” Bones said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Charley Pride, you dumb motherfucker,” Bones said.

  “Who’s Charley Pride?” said the DJ.

  “Jesus H.,” said Bones.

  The Marshals had not moved an inch. Shit, Esau wasn’t sure they had even blinked. They just stood there, immobile, breathing, keeping their eyes on Esau and Bones, 12-gauges keeping them from the front door, the cool air outside, and heading on down the road with Mr. Johnny Stagg.

  “I should shoot you right now,” Bones said. “‘Who is Charley Pride?’”

  “You got it, Brian,” Stagg said, grinning like he was still the host of some fish fry. “Look under the country music. We play it up for the Ruritans.”

  Brian. Fucking Brian went to looking and came up with the CD, smiling like he’d really accomplished something for old Johnny Stagg. “Got it,” he said. “Got it. What’s that song again?”

  The short Marshal with the mustache and Wyatt Earp complex dropped the muzzle a half-inch and raised it up real quick. One of the dumb girls, a black girl with a wide ass, held on to the gold pole as she zipped up a pair of knee-high go-go boots.

  “‘All I Have to Offer You Is Me,’” Bones said. “Shit fire.”

  And then there was lap steel and sad guitar and that steady drumbeat and Charley Pride asking some woman to marry him even though he didn’t have a pot to piss in. No crystal chandeliers. No mansion on the hill. No fancy clothes for her to wear. Basically, the woman was fucked. Esau had promised Becky a lot better a long time back.

  “Move,” Esau said, pushing Stagg forward. The lights danced over them, the strippers huddled together, watching the show. A couple dumb-eyed truckers sat in their easy chairs with shaking hands still raised. Stagg followed Chief Leonard, and Dixon followed Stagg. The shotgun barrels of the Marshals moved with them all slow and easy, almost in time with Charley Pride, as if they were all at a country dance. The girls’ mouths open, the Marshals made of wax. Ain’t nobody wanted to shoot. That was the shit of the whole situation. Someone was gonna have to fire first, because this thing wasn’t gonna end pretty for none of them.

  Chief opened up the door to the smell of rain and spring outside, and a sky that was dull and dark. The Marshals pivoting, and then following, .357 screwed down into Stagg’s head, Esau ready to pull that trigger any second and send them all on a one-way trip to hell. They backed up, music growing fainter, door slamming behind them, and all coming into the wide truck stop parking lot. Bones tossed a set of keys to Dixon and told him to start up his old GMC. Dixon walked around the battered front grille and got his hand on the handle before getting really stupid and making a run for it.

  He got ten feet before Bones shot Dixon in the leg.

  Stagg fell flat to the ground and covered his head. His dumbass buddy got down a little slower. And then those Marshals fired off two, three, four rounds of buckshot right to where he and Bones stood, breaking out Dixon’s truck windshield and scattering glass across their faces and onto the wet asphalt. Esau wasn’t seeing so good with something very unpleasant in his eye, but he got a good enough view to cut down the short Marshal in the chest. Bones squeezed off that 12-gauge and knocked that old Marshal off his feet and flat on his back. Esau reached for Johnny Stagg, pulling him along with them.

  Even with the shot leg, Jamey Dixon had jackrabbited far and away.

  “Come on,” Esau said, yelling. “Come on. We’re taking this son of a bitch with us.”

  Stagg’s easygoing confidence was gone. He looked as if he’d shit his pants.

  “I said come on,” Esau said. “You ole devil.”

  “You want to take a look?” Ophelia asked.

  She and Quinn were again standing in the foyer of the Bundren Funeral Home. A service was going on in the chapel; Tom Cat McCain’s wife had finally died after a long and brave fight with something or other. Ophelia had been prepping her when they brought in the dead from the Hardin place. Quinn felt sorry for Ophelia. Even his stomach turned at seeing what was left of the two guards.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” she said when Quinn had asked. “They were kind of half rotten and half pickled. Always interesting to see what happens to a body after time. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone had been down there that long. Not much left. I took some photos, looked for anything obvious. But not much to really see. I think I know which is which from measuring them. But they’ll have to set the families straight with dental records. Can you believe their uniforms were still intact? That’s some fine Chinese craftsmanship. One hundred percent polyester. Shoes, guns, and gunbelt made out fine.”

  “Anything to note?”

  Inside the chapel, a PA system was playing Sandi Patty singing “In Heaven’s Eyes.” Quinn had never been a real fan of Sandi Patty’s. Jean downright hated anything contemporary, citing Elvis’s love of old-time hymns as testament.

  “One of the men had a bashed-in skull and a broken shoulder,” Ophelia said. She was dressed for the job today, not for greeting the bereaved. She wore an old pair of jeans and black T-shirt with sneakers. She had a surgeon’s mask hanging from her neck. “Sure you don’t want to take a peek?”

  “What about the other man?” Quinn said. “The fresh one? Richard Green?”

  “I don’t like to judge,” Ophelia said. “We’re all the same in His eyes. But he was one weird-looking human. I’ve never seen anyone with teeth in such decay. And I’ve never worked on a body with a tattoo on their penis. Why would someone do that?”

  “I guess it can get boring in prison,” Quinn said.

  The Sandi Patty stopped. Thank God. And some prerecorded organ began. Or at least Quinn thought it was prerecorded. As many times as he’d been in the Bundren’s wood-paneled little chapel, he’d never seen an organ.

  “Did I wake you?” Ophelia asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You just sounded tired when I called,” she said. “Like you’d been asleep.”

  “Always call for something like this,” Quinn said. “I’d l
ike to get these reports written and moving down the line. The bank is notifying the families of the guards, but I’m sure the Feds will be down here sooner than later.”

  The chapel doors opened, and people in uncomfortable suits and dresses came filtering out. Ophelia motioned for Quinn to follow her back into her father’s office and turned on a light on his desk. The room looked as if it had been unchanged since 1976. More wood paneling and one of those glass cubes for family photos. The cube and several photos on the wall were of the twins, Ophelia and Adelaide.

  “I’m sorry about cornering you,” Ophelia said, noticing Quinn staring at the family photos. “I guess you know it all now. And it’s up to you to talk to Caddy.”

  Quinn had yet to take a seat and looked Ophelia right in the eye. “Caddy says Dixon has asked her to marry him.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yep.”

  “What did she say?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yep.”

  “I know a half-dozen girls in Jericho who went out with that piece of shit, before Adelaide and during. You know Connie Fisher? The one who owns the tanning parlor? She says Dixon knocked her unconscious one night. He’d been drinking Jäger and taking pills, and said he didn’t like the way she was looking at some boys at a field party.”

  “Can you get me those results tonight?”

  “How about the morning?” Ophelia said.

  Quinn nodded. Ophelia sat down on the edge of her father’s desk and pulled the mask off her neck and tossed it in the trashcan. “I got to get those bodies tagged and bagged and then I’m locking up. You want to head down to Pap’s for some catfish? My treat.”

  “I’d love it, but I’m just coming on.”

  “I thought you were just headed off?”

  “Nights,” Quinn said. “I’m on nights for the time being.”

  “That hadn’t stopped you from getting called during the day.”

  “Perks of the job.”

  The only light in the room came from the green-shaded banker lamp, sounds from the murmurs of well-wishers talking out in the hall. You could hear most of what they were saying very clearly. Most of them wondering if they’d get Miss McCain in the ground tomorrow with the weather being so bad and all. Quinn and Ophelia sat in the half-dark, listening for a while. She looked down at her slim hands, red mouth in a knot, having something to say but holding it back a bit.

  “My mom and I appreciate the warning,” Quinn said.

  Ophelia nodded. “Some other time for dinner?”

  “You bet,” Quinn said.

  “There aren’t many people in this town that I like, Quinn,” she said. “Anyone our age that isn’t stupid, crazy, or flat-ass broke has left Jericho. I don’t think they are ever coming back.”

  “Never thought I would.”

  “Family,” she said, large brown eyes lifting on Quinn. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

  • • •

  “Do you boys have a fucking clue as to what you’re doing?” Johnny Stagg said. “I don’t have your money. And if I did, I don’t go around and carry a million dollars in my wallet.”

  “You get shot?” Esau said. Bones was driving, heading far out in the county, back to the hunt club. Beyond getting up with Becky, he wasn’t too sure about what came next.

  “Nah,” Stagg said, sitting in the jump seat between them. “I wasn’t shot.”

  “Then how come you’re bleeding?” Esau said. “You got blood all over your face.”

  “Got some buckshot or glass in me,” Stagg said. “I don’t even know how you can see me with that eye.”

  “Lookin’ rough, Esau,” Bones said, turning off Highway 9, driving toward the National Forest, the piney hills rising up out of the misty farmland. “Better get that checked out.”

  Esau flipped down the visor mirror and studied his eye. His whole right eye was clouded with blood, no white of it left. Down in the deep corner he spotted a gouge where the glass had chipped in. Son of a bitch, live to walk away from two U.S. Marshals only to get a drop of glass in your eye. It hurt like a son of a bitch, and he couldn’t see for shit.

  “Mr. Stagg,” Esau said. “Me and Mr. Magee don’t have much time to waste. And we do appreciate you taking a nice little Sunday ride with us. But we’re getting the hell out of this county before midnight and we want to be compensated for what you and Jamey Dixon took from us. So you best quit worrying about my personal health and start studying up on your own dilemma.”

  Stagg sucked on his tooth and looked at the back of his hand that he’d wrapped with his red sweater. There was some nastiness to the wound but nothing that would kill him anytime soon. Bones was whistling along to that Charley Pride song as they rounded a corner by a grouping of three silos and an old barn, another road twisting and snaking up on into the forest and the hunt club. Esau called Becky, and when she answered, talked fast. He said he just wanted to make sure everything was fine. “And I’m bringing a guest. Who? Just wait, doll. He’s a respected member of the community.”

  The dirt road up to the club was rutted and worn, swinging Johnny Stagg this way and that from Esau and Bones, jerking him up and down till the hunt lodge appeared on the horizon. “Y’all know that there house belongs to a former U.S. senator?” Stagg said. “He’s a fine man and won’t like it at all if y’all try and get inside.”

  “No shit?” Bones said. “Guess I shouldn’t been wipin’ my ass with his silk bedsheets.”

  “I need all the cash you got on hand,” Esau said. “I figure you got it all in a safe at that truck stop whorehouse. What you’re gonna do is reach out to your pal the chief and have him wrangle what you can. I don’t think I need to explain the situation to you. I think it’s pretty clear what we’ll do if you don’t want to comply and we’re not happy with what we get. We’ve already killed plenty of men, and your sad, old bony ass won’t make a difference to us one fucking bit.”

  “How long you boys been inside?” Stagg said, still bold enough to pretend this was a conversation.

  “Ten years,” Bones said, as he hit the gravel road up to the final leg of the lodge. “Ten long years.”

  “Y’all do some business in Memphis?” Stagg asked.

  “Plenty,” Esau said.

  “Ever hear the name Bobby Campo?” Stagg said.

  “Sure, we know Bobby Campo,” Bones said. “Motherfucker has that town wired.”

  “He did,” Stagg said. “He’s serving some time just right now. But you know people who still run some business up there?”

  “Yeah,” Bones said. “Sure.”

  “I’d recommend you call those boys and see what kind of anthill you just kicked over here in Tibbehah.”

  “Why?” Esau said, studying his bad eye in the visor. “Are you somebody?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” Stagg said. “I think you need to make some calls and figure out exactly what y’all have done.”

  Bones drove up beside the wood lodge and killed the engine. Rain continued to pelt the windshield and drain down off the high-pitched tin roof. “I don’t think it matters a monkey’s ass or not, Mr. Stagg. A dead man’s still a dead man. I’d say you need to get on the fucking phone and call that fat-ass chief and get us our fucking money before we blow your goddamn head off. That about the size of it, Esau?”

  Esau flipped the visor back up. He turned to Stagg’s weathered country ass and took in a deep, long breath. “That’s about the size of it.”

  His eye had started to swell all the way shut. He knew if he didn’t find a doctor soon, he’d probably lose it. Right now Esau just wanted to throw back some whiskey, have a smoke, and figure out where and when they were gonna be leaving town. He breathed deep and hard again, balled up his fist, and knocked that silly old son of a bitch hard in his throat.

  The man gasped and coughed and sputtered.

  Bones got out of the truck but leaned back into the cab for a moment. “What’d you go and do that fo
r?”

  “Punctuate the fucking thought,” Esau said. “His time is ticking.”

  “I know how it looks,” Jamey said. “But I swear to you, I’m fine.”

  “Jesus, God,” Caddy said. “Jesus.”

  “Just a few bruises and cuts,” Jamey said. “I guess they didn’t hear the sermon.”

  She’d found him back at The River, lying down on a hay bale and sucking in some ragged breath. He had blood all over his Sunday shirt; one of his eyes had swollen shut. Somewhere along the way he’d lost a boot, and his sock was thick with mud. His jeans were fresh with blood, and a Western belt cinched his thigh.

  “Have you been shot?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Jamey said. “Maybe. It’s not so bad.”

  “We got to get you to the hospital,” Caddy said.

  Jamey shook his head. He pushed himself off the hay, sitting upright. Caddy was down on one knee, touching his face, tracing over the cuts and bruises. “Are they done with you?”

  Jamey shook his head, taking off the other boot.

  “Did you give them what they wanted?”

  “They forced me to go see Stagg with them,” he said. “I got away, but they took Mr. Stagg. A couple lawmen were killed.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Not Quinn,” Jamey said, spitting some blood onto the ground. “No one from around here. These were some U.S. Marshals.”

  “They killed them?”

  “Yep,” Jamey said. “Esau Davis and Bones Magee. They said they’re not leaving Tibbehah County till they get what they came for.”

  There was much rain on the barn’s tin roof, and the church bulletins fluttered in the wind from the big, open doors. Water dripped from above the rough-hewn rafters. “Will they kill Stagg?” Caddy said.

  “Probably,” Jamey said, trying to stretch the hurt leg. “He can’t have that kind of money lying around. Can he?”

  “I hope they do.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Caddy,” he said. He coughed up some more blood and spit it onto the dirt floor. “Don’t you let them infect you. These are some wicked men, and me and you got to stay strong. Think on this. We can figure it all out. Those boys can’t run around forever. Every cop in north Mississippi will be heading this way now.”