The Lost Ones

by Ace Atkins

  “Where the fuck is that?” one of the cops asked.

  “South of Tupelo, north of Starkville,” Lillie said.

  “Never heard of it,” the cop said.

  “Neither have most people.”

  “Y’all in the hill country,” the other cop said. “My people from Marshall County.”

  The night manager was a dark-skinned doughy man with badly thinning hair and the bulging eyes of a bulldog. He didn’t bother to speak to any of the cops, only reached into an old pair of black dress pants and pulled out a passkey, muttering to himself about the couple being the only guests who’d paid for the week. Lillie showed him the warrant, but it didn’t seem to make a difference, he didn’t question anything they asked. He looked to be Pakistani, and Quinn asked him something in Pashto.

  The man just stared at him with a blank look and walked to the door. He knocked a couple times. The man had sweated a great deal through a very threadbare Grizzlies T-shirt, the perspiration forming a V at the nape of his neck. He knocked some more, and Quinn exchanged looks with the cops. The man turned and shrugged, crossing his arms over a fat little potbelly.

  “You hear something?” Lillie asked.

  “I think I hear a kid crying,” one of the men said. He gave Lillie a wry smile.

  “Open it up,” Lillie said.

  The manager turned the key and walked back, the two Memphis patrol cops stepping up and pushing on inside with guns at the ready but below their waists. Quinn and Lillie followed, the lights cutting on, showing two unmade beds and piles of fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, dirty linen and used diapers. The manager started into a roll of a language that Quinn didn’t know as he threw open the old curtains and tried to raise a window that looked as if it had been painted shut years ago.

  Lillie walked into the bathroom and quickly came out, holding her breath. “Toilet’s backed up.”

  The manager had kept the door open, and the sound of passing cars filled the little room. He was already on his cell phone, dog-cussing somebody about the shithole he’d found.

  “How’d they pay?” Lillie asked the man. The manager looked annoyed that she’d spoken to him and kept on muttering into his cell phone. Lillie took the phone from the much shorter man and repeated, “How did they pay?”

  “Credit card,” he said.

  “Probably one of these,” Quinn said, walking to a small writing desk that faced the window. A neat arrangement had been made of three credit cards and driver’s licenses for both Ramón and Janet Torres. Besides the garbage, that’s all they had left in the room. No luggage or clothes or even a toothbrush.

  “They coming back?” one of the cops asked.

  “Nope,” Lillie said. “They wanted to offer a little F.U. to us. I guess they knew their daughter had given them up.”

  Quinn nodded to her, already walking to the door. She joined him outside on a weedy hill filled with busted bottles and candy wrappers and rusted hubcaps and shit off the streets. “They got some friends,” Quinn said. “Got them some new IDs. New cards. They could be anywhere.”

  “Yep,” Lillie said. They watched the cars circle Memphis on I-240, spoking out to Nashville to the east, Little Rock to the west, or New Orleans south. Lillie smoked another cigarette as they stood there, kicked at a stray bottle, and walked back to the Jeep.

  JOHNNY STAGG FOUND DONNIE working the register that morning at Varner’s Quick Mart. Even though it was Friday, Stagg was dressed for Sunday with his shiny pin-striped suit, shined alligator boots, and a tie painted up with the head of a big buck. Donnie nodded to him as soon as he walked in the door and asked his cook, an old black woman named Peaches, to take the register for a few minutes. Donnie got his half-finished Mountain Dew and sat down at a back table, where old men were known to linger in the morning instead of tilling or feeding or whatever old country men do. He fired up a smoke and leaned back in a folding chair.

  “You want some coffee?” Donnie asked.

  Stagg shook his head. He’d just shaved, and there were nicks on his thin, papery skin. He grinned a big tombstone smile and leaned forward across from him. “Need to know more about your people.”

  “They ain’t my people.”

  “I need to know who we’re dealing with here,” Stagg said. “You ain’t exactly ordering up a load of discount Sheetrock.”

  “I don’t think they want to be known, Mr. Stagg. If my money ain’t good, I’ll try somewhere else.”

  “You’re making folks a little nervous,” Stagg said. “They said Memphis has been crawling with federal folks in the last few months.”

  Donnie blew some smoke out of his nose. One thing he hated so much about his daddy’s store was the smell of old grease and dead crickets he sold for bait. The smoke at least helped some with that, and to pass the time. Running a place like this, smoking’s about all there was besides playing with his pecker. And you couldn’t really do that in public.

  “Your buddy from Memphis?” Donnie asked.

  “One of ’em.”

  “Well, I ain’t no FBI.”

  “We’re talking smart business folks. They don’t want to see these guns end up in some kind of Waco situation. You know what I mean? We got them crazy Nazi folks arrested or killed and finally out of Tibbehah County. But people read about it all over and it still makes ’em nervous.”

  “I know how much you hated to see Gowrie and his people go,” Donnie said.

  Stagg grinned. He leaned back and smoothed down his big buck tie. He nodded. Donnie squashed out the cigarette in the silver ashtray, noticing they’d run out of cracklins on the sale rack and he hadn’t even called the goddamn Golden Flake rep to stock.

  “Don’t believe the bullshit,” Stagg said, still grinning, still preaching. “Your buddy Quinn Colson spread around a lot of lies in that election. He hates that I’m trying to take this county out of the eighteen hundreds.”

  Donnie drank a little of the Mountain Dew and shrugged. He leaned back in the chair and looked over his shoulder at Peaches ringing up a couple teenage boys. Maybe she could order up the cracklins all his customers wanted to buy for lunch. A sack of cracklins and hot sauce was a cheaper meal than buying a burger or a chicken on a stick. These days, you spent most of your goddamn wage on the gas to drive to the work site.

  “Believe it,” Stagg said after a few seconds.

  “These people ain’t even American, Mr. Stagg,” Donnie said. “Just some Mexicans who want some military-grade hardware. Don’t know why and didn’t ask, but I think they’re part of some of them cartel folks who settled in after Katrina. I don’t give a shit about what goes down in Ole Mexico. How ’bout you?”

  “My people want to meet ’em.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, that kind of cornholes me, Mr. Stagg. I bet you’re familiar with the phrase ‘cut out the middleman.’”

  Stagg grinned. He slowly nodded. He scratched the inside of his ear with his pinkie like he was trying to clear out the wax to hear Donnie a bit better. Like Donnie could surely not be questioning a great mind like Johnny T. Stagg. But hell, Donnie knew more about Stagg than Stagg knew himself. He knew the T in his name didn’t stand for shit. He was born just Johnny Stagg. Not John. Not Jonathan. Johnny Stagg, the son of a manure salesman from Carthage, who took on a middle initial because he thought it made him seem respectable.

  “They’ll need reassurance,” Stagg said.

  “You want Dara to pat down my bulldog again?”

  “I think that girl’s taken a shine to you.”

  “Only thing your girls take a shine to is cash.”

  Stagg shrugged. That goddamn toothy smile on his face wouldn’t leave, like he was a television preacher who’d been infected by the spirit of God and that happiness coursed through his veins like a drug. Donnie wondered if he should offer up a few amens for Brother Stagg’s gospel of tits, grits, and cash.

  Donnie just nodded.

  “OK, I’ll meet ’em
,” Donnie said. “But it don’t matter two shits who I sell ’em to. All they got to figure is if the money is good. Money’s good, and that should put their mind at rest.”

  Stagg stood up. He buttoned his shiny suit jacket and offered his long, skinny hand. His grin sliced even wider, his breath smelling like Listerine. “All I can ask.”

  “When?”

  “You busy tomorrow night?”

  “We got church the next morning.”

  “I know.” Stagg’s eyes wandered over him. “Who the hell you think is teaching Sunday school?”

  11

  QUINN HAD GOTTEN HIS OFFICE IN SOME KIND OF ORDER. THE RECKLESSNESS of his uncle’s paperwork, unfiled reports, and dirty guns sickened him. He never saw that side of him growing up and wondered if the sloppiness had spread in him like a cancer. Or maybe he’d never noticed it. Hamp had been the lead Quinn had followed when his father left town. A big, lumbering man who wore a tobacco brown ranch coat and beaten Stetson, Hamp got him out of trouble more than once and pushed him toward the Army. He took Quinn hunting from the time he could hold a gun and taught him how to track animals and to fish. He’d walk him around the muddy edges of the old pond and point out the prints of raccoon and deer and bellies of cottonmouths. He’d given him guns, taught him to shoot. He’d introduced him to the joys of a good cigar on his thirteenth birthday. His funeral had brought Quinn back again to a town that Hamp had always told him to escape.

  When Quinn took the job, Hamp’s longtime secretary, Mary Alice, asked if she could burn all the files. Instead, Quinn had them sorted and placed in a row of a half-dozen locking cabinets. He kept them all in his office against a far wall as a visible legacy he’d inherited. A weak light shone in from the east window across his desk.

  The old rancher coat hung on a hook by the office door, the leather worn smooth and soft by the elbows. Quinn’s new ball cap hung next to it.

  After he and Lillie got back from Memphis, Quinn sat at his desk, drinking coffee and going through the night’s reports filed by Kenny and his six other deputies. A total of nine for the entire county. He learned Kenny couldn’t spell worth a crap.

  Someone knocked on the door, Quinn looking up to see Mary Alice peering inside. Mary Alice, who was gray-headed and plump, said a woman was out front who wanted to see him.

  “She say the trouble?”

  “She showed me a badge,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with ATF over in Oxford. She ain’t that nice. Talks like a Yankee.”

  Quinn widened his eyes and nodded.

  He stood when the woman entered. He would have stood even if she hadn’t been a federal agent or had been coming to see him. She was average height, but lean and hard, with red hair and light gray eyes. Her skin was the color of milk, with light freckles across her nose and cheeks. She was carefully made up with lined eyes and a deep red mouth. Without makeup, she might’ve looked washed-out and pale.

  She wore a crisp, fitted blue suit and two strands of pearls on her neck. She took his hand and held his smile with the intense, serious look of a woman who was used to men grinning at her and didn’t have time for their shit. This woman was all business, reports and record keeping and making sure that her scores at the shooting range didn’t just match the boys but embarrassed them. Quinn had known a lot of women just like her in the service. He admired them.

  Quinn dropped the smile and offered her coffee.

  “No thanks,” she said. “You know, I expected someone a lot older.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  She looked to be about his age, maybe a little older. She smiled, slightly. It was a professional smile but one that held little interest.

  “Dinah Brand.”

  Quinn let go of her hand. She sat down.

  “Don’t be afraid of the coffee,” Quinn said. “An Army buddy at Fort Lewis gets it in Seattle.”

  She cocked her head. “Hard to find good coffee in Mississippi,” she said.

  Quinn called out to Mary Alice. She placed a mug in front of Agent Brand and closed the door behind her. She took a sip and then set the mug at the edge of his desk.

  “Not bad.”

  “I’m guessin’ you didn’t drive over from Oxford for a cup of coffee.”

  “I’d like to talk to Mara Black.”

  “Thought Mary Alice said you were ATF?”

  Brand nodded, opened her purse, and placed on his desk a card with her name and Special Agent embossed in neat type. “We’re interested in her stepfather.”

  “Ramón?”

  “You know him?”

  “To be honest, never met either him or Janet,” Quinn said. “Thought we had them in Memphis this morning, but something spooked them. Most people recall Janet ’cause of her size. No one seems to recall the husband or daughter.”

  “Didn’t her daughter go to school?”

  “Dropped out two years ago to help with all those kids.”

  “I read there are thirteen children missing?”

  “Eleven that we know about,” Quinn said. “What’s that have to do with ATF? The Torreses doing some moonshining, too?”

  Brand took a cautious breath, one that let her think for a moment, decide what to say. She wasn’t really sure about Quinn, not too sure if some hick sheriff could keep up with someone who trained in Washington. Always an enlisted man.

  “Mr. Torres has some friends we’re investigating,” she said. “He may know where we can find them. We’ve been looking at Mr. Torres for a while now.”

  “What kind of friends?”

  Brand’s gray eyes roamed over Quinn’s face, and she nodded after a few moments as if she’d just decided to take him into her confidence. She crossed her legs, and Quinn tried his best not to stare. It had been a long while between women. A sweet-hearted hairdresser in Columbus, Georgia, who needed someone to raise her two kids. And then a real estate agent in Phenix City who was twenty-four but acted like she was eighteen. And then there was the brief thought of Anna Lee when he’d come home, although she’d married Luke. But that whole idea seemed to make much less sense now that she was pregnant.

  “We have a paid informant who thinks Mr. Torres works with the Los Zetas.”

  Quinn looked away from her legs. He smiled.

  “Miss Brand, I’ve been away for about ten years,” Quinn said. “You’re going to have to get me up to speed. The only Mexican folks I know in this area are some people in the restaurant and construction business. A couple of them I played high school football with.”

  “There’ve been some changes in law regarding buying weapons,” Brand said. “States that border Mexico have to report anyone who purchases a large amount of weapons.”

  “You’re talking straw buys?”

  “Yep,” Brand said. “Cartels will pay a lot for good weapons. They used to back their trucks up to gun dealers on the border and get forklift loads of 39-millimeter cartridges. Nobody said anything to them. As long as they presented a clean driver’s license, no questions asked.”

  “And now these cartel folks are sending people into the Deep South?”

  “Mississippi doesn’t have much bite in its gun laws.”

  “But we are last in education and health,” Quinn said. “Where are you from?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “How long have you been working with the Feds?”

  “Since college.”

  “You married?”

  Her face colored. Her eyes roamed over Quinn’s smiling face. She looked up at the brick wall of a framed photo of his squad at the Haditha Dam. A photo of him and Uncle Hamp with a prize buck. A small school picture of Jason on his desk. There was always that beat of surprise when people saw Jason, because they saw the resemblance but also noted his color. Sometimes it was racism, often just surprise, not sure of how to ask if they were kin.

  “Are you?” she asked, widening her eyes.

  “Nope.”

  “Ever?”

  “Never.”

  “Who’s the c
hild, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “My nephew.”

  She tilted her head to the side and nodded.

  “I came to see Mara Black,” Brand said. “Can you set that up?”

  “I can.”

  “Will you.”

  Quinn nodded and stood.

  Brand stood and smoothed down her skirt. She reached for her purse as Quinn walked to the door and opened it wide. They shook hands. She smelled very nice close up, just a little perfume to draw you in and then cut your ass to pieces.

  “You think you might stick around Jericho after you’re done?” he said.

  “I suppose you’ll have questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said. “Lots. Maybe I could buy you lunch.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “SO YOU BUY HER LUNCH?” Boom asked.

  “Bought her a hot dog at the Sonic.”

  “Bullshit,” Boom said. “You took her to the Sonic?”

  “Fillin’ Station.”

  “That place just as bad.”

  “They do a mean blue plate,” Quinn said. “Special was meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans for five bucks. Sweet tea and corn bread.”

  “You been in the Army too long,” Boom said. “Eatin’ MREs and shit on a shingle. Anything tastes good to you. She say she like it, she just bein’ nice.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “She really look that good?”

  “She did.”

  “Red hair and freckles. Nice body?”

  “Yep.”

  “You think she really a redhead?” Boom said, grinning a little.

  “Didn’t get that far,” Quinn said. “We were talking about Mexican drug gangs.”

  “You gonna try?”

  “Kept her card.”

  Quinn had picked up Boom at his shotgun shack out toward Drivers Flat. The house wasn’t much, just a ramshackle tin-roofed job built by his great-grandfather, one of the original black landowners in the county, but it was surrounded by five hundred acres of cotton. The cotton would be ready for the gin in a few weeks, and Boom would work the tractor till every plant was harvested, splitting his cut with his father and eight brothers and sisters. By the time it was all divided, he barely had enough to live.