by Ace Atkins
Quinn shrugged.
“Army made an honest man outta him,” Donnie said. “Wish I could say the same.”
“Good to see you, Donnie.”
Donnie nodded and shook his hand. Quinn smiled at the woman. She looked away and covered her left cheek with her hand.
“How’s your momma?” Donnie asked.
“Loving Elvis.”
“Caddy?”
“Don’t know.”
“Your dad?”
“Still gone.”
“He was my hero,” Donnie said, big Edelbrocks growling behind him. He smiled. “I had all them movies he was in on VHS and used to study the shit out of his stunts. If you paused the frame just right, you could see it wasn’t Burt Reynolds at all. Shit, it was Jason Colson.”
Quinn nodded.
“I wanted to be a stuntman more than anything,” Donnie grinned and gave a two-finger wave and backed out slowly.
Quinn followed Boom back to the truck. They sat there and finished their coffees until the kids all drove away and bit by bit all the neon and light was gone. Jericho was getting ready for Sunday morning. You could hear the wind and the fall blowing into town.
“Donnie’s into some shit,” Boom said.
“Yep,” Quinn said, and cranked the truck.
“What you gonna do?”
“I got bigger shit to deal with,” Quinn said. “Did you read about the fucking mess Janet Torres left at her house?”
“I heard.”
“Know anything about it?”
“Nope.”
“Nobody else seems to, either.”
7
THEY CAME FOR THE TORRES’S DOGS AT DAYBREAK MONDAY, FIVE DIFFERENT humane societies from around state, packing the matted, flea-infested animals in crates and into vans, chugging exhaust into the cold air. Some of the dogs held their ground and had to be snared with long poles and wire loops. They’d starved and shit and pissed on themselves so long that human contact seemed strange. Kenny and Quinn had been looking after them since the first of it, making sure they had food and water. Kenny wandered over to one cage and looked in on an old, tired black Lab and asked if it would be trouble if he put her in his truck.
“Don’t see why not,” Quinn said.
Kenny waddled into the cage and scooped the filthy animal up into his arms, talking to her, the dog licking his fat chin and goatee. The animal moved weak and slow.
“These are some class folks, Sheriff,” said a woman who’d come up from Jackson.
“You ever seen anything like this?” Quinn asked.
“Only every week or so,” the woman said. “Mississippi isn’t too big on animal welfare. Most we can cite them with is neglect. Legislators can’t tell the difference between family pets and animals to hunt. They think we’re all nuts with PETA, trying to tell people what they can do with their property.”
“What’s this amount to?”
“Hundred-dollar fine.”
Quinn stayed until all the dogs had been taken, the smell of them still lingering. He lit up a cigar just to clear his head out, knowing most of the dogs would have to be put down for their own good. Many would have severe heartworms, congenital problems from the inbreeding, and other behavior problems like nipping the hands trying to save them. Lillie told him yesterday that Janet Torres had made a bundle by selling Chihuahuas crossbred with miniature poodles on the Internet, some at five hundred dollars a piece. She called them Chi-doodles and had bragged she’d coined the name.
Lillie walked around the mud in tall rubber boots, taking pictures of the empty cages, horrible conditions, for when they’d go to trial.
“You want to kick around the house some more?” she asked.
“Can’t hurt.”
Quinn followed her up into the Torres place, unlocking the padlock on the front door and heading through the little kitchen. He and Kenny had left the windows open, and that had helped with the putrid smell a bit. But not much. The trash, rotten food, and busted toys remained. Children and Families had taken pictures, but Lillie shot off a few more digital images, twisting open the blinds, letting a little light inside the property.
“I called every single number off three months of her cell phone bill,” she said. “Called a lot in Mexico, and had Javier from the El Dorado stop by and help.”
“That’s pretty stand-up.”
“He called Torres an embarrassment to the Mexican people,” Lillie said. “He and some other Mexican business folks have offered a reward for them.”
“On my tenth birthday, I ate so many tacos I puked in one of his sombreros.”
“He get mad?”
“Thought it was funny,” Quinn said. “My dad threw the party, and slipped out the back door after charging up a dozen margaritas for him and his girlfriend.”
“The movie star?”
“The other one,” Quinn said. “The cocktail waitress from Tampa.”
“He really double for Burt Reynolds?”
“Six movies,” Quinn said, opening up cabinets and shining his Maglite inside. “Got fired for showing up drunk on the set of Stroker Ace. That’s when my folks were still together.”
“You check the Torres bedroom?”
“They kept separate bedrooms,” Quinn said. “You got to walk knee-deep through garbage to get to her poor bed. Torres had a small bed in a guest room. Kept a lot of pornography, stuff it looked like he was selling. Multiple Mex bootlegs.”
“Anything good?” Lillie asked.
“It’s all there,” Quinn said. “Check it out for yourself. I think Kenny took a couple home.”
“Dog and pony stuff?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Quinn said.
“Bullshit.”
“You check out her bedroom again, and I’ll check around the room with the cribs,” Quinn said. “You get far with those bills?”
“She’d run up fifteen credit cards to the max, eight of them more than ten thousand dollars.”
“What’d she buy?”
“She collected shit off QVC,” Lillie said. “Crazy shit that she stored in that shed out back. Collector dolls signed by Marie Osmond. You walk into that shed, and they are all arranged in rows staring out at you. It creeped my shit out.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Do I lie?”
Quinn worked through the kitchen and the children’s room, feeling his stomach kick up a little, a stark emptiness in his gut, as he shined the light under the thirteen empty cribs and through the long wall closet littered with busted toys, sun-faded and cracked. Two cases of expired milk formula, diapers from Walmart, and quart jars of Vaseline.
He found a small taser gun in with the stuffed animals, electric tape wrapped tight for a better grip.
Quinn smoked the cigar down to a nub, crushing it out on the front steps, looking down the hill at all those empty cages and rivers of shit and piss heading down into a gulley. He hoped he could convince the county to take the property and burn it all. He’d go back to the office, take a hot shower, and change into some fresh clothes, use some saddle soap on his boots. You got warned about catching all kinds of diseases before heading into missions, but no one thought about this kind of shit in America.
Lillie joined him on the old crooked porch. “Ever know a woman who could wear a size twelve double E?”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “But she had a hell of a personality.”
“Janet liked shoes, mostly house slippers. Sexy shit, with feathers that matched her negligee.”
“You want me to get sick?”
“Think she’ll come back for these?”
Lillie cracked open a shoe box, showing off thick rolls of cash bound with rubber bands.
“How much?”
“First few rolls are hundreds,” Lillie said. “If they’re all the same, I’d say about twenty grand.”
“Seems like the first thing she would’ve grabbed.”
“I don’t think they ever came home after taking that baby to see Luk
e,” Lillie said. She fanned away the cigar smoke as if it was worse than her cigarettes. “The Torres family hauled ass the moment they knew he wasn’t buying that horseshit story.”
“Be an incentive to come back.”
“Especially if the place was locked up tight, everyone gone,” Lillie said. “How do you want to rotate?”
“We can work in four-hour shifts,” Quinn said. “I’ll take one just like everyone else. I wouldn’t want anyone out here for longer. This smell, it gets into your clothes and in your skin.”
AT TWILIGHT, the sky lit up orange, pink, and black over the shape of the Rebel Truck Stop and the red neon sign of the sexy mud-flap girl kicking her legs back and forth along Highway 45. Donnie Varner drove around the complex with its twenty pumps, mostly diesel, and a big diner that served the best chicken-fried steak in north Mississippi. Around back was a big metal barn called The Booby Trap, where truckers would work out a little loneliness over cold cans of Coors or Bud. Women worked the poles and a back room filled with ragged vinyl chairs facing mirrored walls. Before he shipped off to the Sandbox the first time, Donnie got eight lap dances from a pregnant girl from Eupora named Britney who promised she’d be using his money to fund her college education. She said she wanted to study dolphins. She also said for two hundred bucks, she could go and make Donnie’s willie sneeze, Donnie saying, “For two hundred bucks, I can make my own willie sneeze, darlin’.”
Now, after doing business in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and OK City, this place seemed kind of quaint and homey to him, not that den of iniquity like his preacher had called it. This place was pretty minor league talent; any girl with a decent ass and boobs could find work in Memphis or New Orleans, maybe Sammy’s Go-Go in Birmingham.
“Mr. Stagg in?” Donnie asked a fat guy named Leonard who’d been a deputy sheriff for fifteen years before Quinn Colson had run him off. Leonard looked up from the sports page of the Daily Journal and nodded, leaning forward and stubbing out the cigarette between his fingers.
“He call you?”
“He knows I’m here,” Donnie said.
“I’ll ask.”
“Just open the fucking door, Leonard,” Donnie said. “Shit. Don’t be such a goddamn hard-on.”
Stagg had two offices, one in downtown Jericho, for meetings on his development company and county business, and the real office behind the pole dancers, right next to the back room where high-stakes poker was played. Stagg was even so goddamn ole-time corny that he ran a Faro game on Sunday nights. The only person Donnie’d ever heard of who played Faro was Wyatt Earp.
Leonard opened the door and waved him inside.
Stagg was on a phone call, giving him that Johnny Stagg wink and pointing out an open chair. Donnie took in the office with heads of dead animals and mounted fish, framed pictures of folks who’d sent glamour shots to him; people who were only famous in northeast Mississippi but somehow meant shit to Johnny Stagg. Maybe Stagg thought if he collected enough of them he wouldn’t be the son of some dirt farmer out by Carthage who had to peddle his soul and rape thousands of acres of land to make that first million.
“Donnie,” Stagg said. “You got something to discuss?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Johnny. Maybe I just came on out for a beer and a pecker tug. Did I walk in the right room?”
Stagg grinned.
“Yeah, I got business.”
Stagg propped up a pair of oxblood loafers on his desk. Stagg dressing like an old frat boy, with his button-down shirt, red sweater-vest, and Ole Miss team belt, wanting so damn much to be accepted by the folks in Oxford that he gave a decent amount of income to the athletic program there, Donnie hearing he was about to get a full seat on the board despite having barely graduated high school in Tibbehah County. He’d come a long way from cleaning out bedpans for the old people he conned out of land for nearly a decade.
“Guns.”
“What you got?” Stagg said, his weathered face a road map to hell. “I could use a good deer rifle.”
“Not to sell,” Donnie said. “I’m buying.”
“I don’t sell guns, Donnie.”
“Johnny, you’d sell your own mother if there was money in it.”
“I don’t appreciate that kind of talk,” Stagg said, scratching his cheek. “My momma’s been dead for twenty years.”
“Would that make a difference?”
“Your daddy is a fine man,” Stagg said. “War hero, at that. He know you’re out here?”
“My daddy hadn’t wiped my ass for some time.”
“And the proposition?”
Donnie reached into his blue jeans jacket for a torn piece of notebook paper, reading it off like a grocery list: “Eighty Mossberg shotguns, fifty AKs, seventy-two Glock 19s, and fifty or so M4s. Oh, and a couple grenade launchers. I wasn’t so sure about those last two.”
Stagg just smiled, showing off his tombstone teeth, and laughed like Donnie had said something funny. Donnie just waited, deadpan.
“Took all I could from a shitty situation in the Guard, Mr. Stagg,” Donnie said. “Got out with a few toys. I got forty-six M4s left, but they’re wanting a hundred. I can get most of what they want. M4s, being military grade and all, are a little trickier.”
“Can’t help you, son.”
“Is that really a picture of you and Tim McGraw or one of those phonies you get made up at Six Flags?”
“Tim came to one of my parties at Ole Miss last year,” Stagg said. “His wife sang me ‘Happy Birthday.’”
“Is she just as pretty in person?”
Stagg smiled and walked past Donnie, Donnie thinking the son of a bitch was throwing him out, but instead he called in Leonard. Leonard stood, splayfooted and nearly cross-eyed, the long-running joke being that he’d been the only deputy who could keep his eyes on two suspects at once. “You get Dara for me?” Stagg asked.
“I don’t need to pay for no girl,” Donnie said.
“Call it a welcome-home gift,” Stagg said. “Thanks for all you done for America.”
“Hell,” Donnie said. “If you put it like that.”
The girl was too good for The Booby Trap, Donnie halfway impressed Johnny could recognize the talent or maybe had at least gotten lucky. She was not hard-looking or wrinkled or drugged-out. She seemed almost shy at first, with a thick head of curly blond hair and wide-set brown eyes. She smelled like cherry perfume, a nineteen-year-old, barely legal wet dream who sat him down in a ragged chair in that empty mirrored room—a goddamn thousand Donnie Varners—shitty dance music playing so loud he couldn’t hear himself think as she straddled his waist and pulled her tank top over her head. The girl kept on a pair of cotton panties, and Donnie got a good bit of ass in his hands.
She pulled down her bra strap by strap, showing off a natural pair, soft and drooping, not like those rock-hard things girls got in Playboy. She leaned into him with hot cinnamon breath, letting him smell the cherries in her hair and neck, and then pulled back, helping him out of his jacket, rubbing his chest, pulling off his boots.
“What the hell?”
But then she rubbed his feet and ran her hands up each of his legs, spreading his knees wide apart and then moving the flat of her hand around the old bulldog. Donnie closed his eyes, wishing he had a cold Coors in one hand and a smoke in the other. And, damn, if she didn’t pull up his shirt, kissing his stomach and then peeling down her panties, bending over to give him the whole show.
Johnny Stagg was a good man, Donnie thought, as she fell back into him and twisted up his shirt and ran her hands over her chest before she stopped cold as the houselights flicked on and the music stopped, Leonard’s ugly face looking down on him.
He was sucking his teeth.
“God damn, Leonard,” Donnie said. “You sure made it shrink up.”
“He’s clean,” Dara said, reaching for her little panties and thin tank top, fanning out a match after she lit a smoke and disappearing behind the bar to pour herself a Jack on ice.
“
And I thought you loved me,” Donnie said, heaving himself into his Levi’s jacket, walking to her, and stealing the smoke from her mouth. “I am truly hurt.”
The girl toasted him from behind the bar.
Leonard opened up the back door, motioning Donnie with two fingers. The red light from the neon mud-flap girl, kicking high and low, high and low, outside.
“Mr. Stagg will be in touch,” Leonard said.
“You ever get deputy of the month?” Donnie asked.
Leonard scowled at him.
“Guess not.”
8
QUINN RELIEVED KENNY AT TWO A. M. A COUPLE DAYS LATER, BRINGING IN a thermos of black coffee and a cold sausage biscuit, a Maglite, and a ragged Louis L’Amour paperback he’d found at the farmhouse. Kenny had been standing in the kitchen when he opened the back door, chain-smoking cigarettes and staring into the darkness, dog tired and deep in thought. Quinn moved past him, patting him on the shoulder, but Kenny didn’t move, a big fat shadow with the glowing red tip of his cigarette in his mouth.
“I had to shower three times to get this smell out,” Kenny said. “Washed my hair with lemon juice.”
Quinn sat down on the Torres’s old sofa and screwed off the cap from the end of his thermos and poured a cup. “You hear anything?”
“Walked in from the north end of the property, just like you said. Been quiet.”
“I brought a book.”
“What is it?”
“Quick and the Dead,” Quinn said.
“Didn’t they make a movie out of that?” Kenny said.
“Yep. Sam Elliott.”
“He was real good in that Lebowski picture,” Kenny said in the darkness. “Funny as hell.”
“You don’t have to stay, Kenny.”
“I’m good,” he said. “Drank a couple Red Bulls. Been just kind of thinking a lot. Took that Lab to see Jess Colley. Jess says she’s got mange and heartworms. Gonna cost five hundred dollars to get her healthy.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” Kenny said. “Get her fixed up, I guess.”
Quinn drank some more hot coffee and felt for the flashlight and paperback at his side. He leaned back into the sofa, knowing that four hours wasn’t a damn thing. On training and in missions, waiting could be days or weeks, sometimes while wearing face paint and blanketed in a ghillie suit. Being a Ranger was full-tilt shitstorm or nothing. When you weren’t shooting, you were running, and when you weren’t running, you were jumping out of airplanes. He knew keeping still was an art.