The Lost Ones

by Ace Atkins

  He opened up at nine, unlocking the cattle gate at the end of his road. Tiny’s fat ass wasn’t even up yet as Donnie bounded up the wooden steps to the shop and turned on the lights and turned off the alarm. A lot of what he did at the shop was answering phone calls and taking orders off the Internet. He’d get maybe two people stop by on weekdays. Saturdays were his busiest time when it wasn’t hunting season or football season.

  He ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes as he checked his e-mail and leaned back into his seat to fire up his first cigarette of the day. Someone was looking for a Smith & Wesson .38 with a six-inch barrel. Another fella wanted to know if he could get him a good deal on a Henry rifle. There was the daily devotional his aunt had forwarded, and a couple messages from a girl he used to date in Eupora. She wanted him to know she was getting married in the spring, saying it in kind of an ugly way. Tiny had sent him a pornographic picture of a woman having sex with a pickle.

  Donnie shook his head and shut down the computer. He had a week to come up with another order of guns for Luz and her banditos. She said this would be their final order for a while, maybe their final order ever, because they all had to boogie on down the road to Louisiana and then back south of the border.

  He’d asked her how they got the guns back in.

  She just smiled at him.

  He figured they did it with those carnival trucks. You could hide a mess of guns in those contraptions. And he imagined it wasn’t too hard to grease the wheels of the Mexican border folks. They weren’t looking for drugs coming into Mexico.

  Donnie hadn’t asked her about Janet Torres and those kids.

  He didn’t even mention them to Shane and Tiny. That wasn’t his concern or his business. He didn’t even think Luz knew about them. And if she did, that was something she’d have to make right with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the confessional. Donnie ran guns. Luz had ordered them. If he started trying to make judgments and getting involved in things that didn’t involve him, everything he’d worked hard for in Trashcanistan would come tumbling down. Shit, it took a five-grand investment to grease those wheels in the AFG.

  Donnie didn’t have shit to come home to, and bringing them M4s with him was about the smartest thing he ever did. All those guns were supposed to be given to the goddamn local police. And what would happen to those guns? As soon as Uncle Sam’s ass pulled out of the armpit of this earth, those guns would wind up with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or some other assholes with barrels aimed back at Americans. If he wanted to sell them to a bunch of Mexicans so they could kill one another, he figured he was doing this country a goddamn service.

  Donnie walked outside, flicked his cigarette into the kudzu, and heard a truck approach from down the road. He thought it was probably Shane, wanting his cut from the truck run up to New Albany. He knew it wasn’t Luz, the girl just shining him on till she got what she wanted and could hit up the next dumbass with a nice arsenal for sale. He’d called her ten times since yesterday, not getting a voice mail or nothing.

  Quinn Colson drove up and stopped not two feet from him. He waved and smiled at Donnie.

  “You want to do some shooting?” Quinn asked.

  Donnie smiled. “Shit, why not?”

  Donnie rounded up a couple targets, basic bull’s-eye patterns he set out at fifty yards. Both he and Quinn were wearing guns. Quinn had a 9mm Beretta and Donnie had a Glock he’d brought down from the shop. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it was there and handy and loaded.

  “I just nearly had to arrest my sister.”

  “What did Caddy do now?” Donnie asked before squeezing off all seventeen rounds into a tight center pattern.

  “She stopped traffic at her boy’s daycare,” Quinn said. “She wouldn’t move her car till she got an apology from Mrs. Shelton. Can you believe that shit?”

  “What’d Mrs. Shelton do?”

  “Nothing,” Quinn said. He stretched out his arm and unloaded his Beretta. “She was scared.”

  Donnie watched Quinn unholster his gun. “You like that Beretta?”

  Quinn nodded and squeezed off those rounds. The shots cracked through the wilderness. He was good. Better than anyone Donnie had ever seen. Quinn could always shoot like that, like he’d been born to it.

  “It’s served me well,” Quinn said. “I guess I got used to it.”

  “You might think about getting some new guns for the department,” Donnie said. “Your uncle used to carry that lever-action Winchester with him like it was the damn eighteen hundreds. I don’t think he ever updated even a pistol.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “I can get y’all a good deal,” Donnie said. “You can bid it out, but I’ll make it worth your time.”

  “Might be a while before the county supervisors give me another nickel,” Quinn said. “I just got Boom hired to run a maintenance shed, and they acted like I was trying to rob them. You know we’re pretty much the only county in the state that doesn’t service our own vehicles?”

  “Yeah, I heard you and Stagg got into it.”

  “I made it known Stagg didn’t want a shed so he could keep selling fuel out of the truck stop. At a nice profit, of course.”

  “Stagg never heard of a conflict of interest,” Donnie said. “Don’t come natural to him.”

  Quinn reloaded his Beretta from a box of bullets Donnie had brought from the shop. Donnie dropped out his magazine and did the same. A soft gold light fell across the rolling acres of kudzu and skinny pine trees and shone hard off the top of his silver Airstream. Up the hill, he saw Tiny walking out to his front stoop to take a leak. He waved with his free hand.

  “Reason I came by is I wanted to talk to you more about your friend, the Mexican girl.”

  Donnie nodded.

  “We need to talk to her, bud.”

  Donnie shook his head and snicked the clip back into the Glock. “I don’t know what to tell you. I met the girl, took her to the Sonic, and tried too soon for the sugar patch. I hadn’t seen her since. You know, this morning I got a goddamn e-mail from a woman I seen maybe three times. She lives over in Eupora and wrote me some crazy-ass letter about her getting married. Saying it real ugly, telling me that her fiancé had a good job at the Kroger meat department. What does that mean to me? Discount T-bones?”

  “Lillie went looking for your girl at the beauty shop,” Quinn said. “The women there didn’t know anything about her.”

  Donnie shrugged.

  Quinn fingered in more bullets, doing it quick and easy, not even paying attention to the loading, as natural as a man could breathe. “You said that’s how you met her. You’d think a looker like that would be pretty known in Jericho.”

  “I said I thought she was friends with those women. Hell, I don’t know. You come over here just to bust my nuts?”

  “I came down to shoot,” Quinn said. “If I don’t shoot a target, I may just have to shoot my sister.”

  “You hadn’t gotten used to Caddy yet?”

  “She’s come home to make trouble,” Quinn said. “And she’ll leave like she always does.”

  Donnie walked out to the targets and replaced them with new ones, tacking them up with long pins into Styrofoam. He handed Quinn the one he’d shot up. The pattern was as neat as if he’d sketched it with a paintbrush. Donnie was just as accurate, killing the target just the same, but it was loose and wild-looking up close.

  “You know me and Caddy got together while you wasn’t here,” Donnie said. “I couldn’t handle her, either.”

  “She doesn’t want to be handled,” Quinn said. “I think that’s most of her trouble. She doesn’t know what the hell she wants.”

  “She’s just wild,” Donnie said. “That may piss you off, saying that, man. I’m sorry. But you know you can do nothing about a person when they gone wild.”

  “You forget how I used to be?”

  “Army straightened your ass out.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “Didn’t do that for me,” Donnie said. “I hate pe
ople telling me what to do. When to eat, when to sleep, when to shit. You know, I had to study a diagram on how to properly put in a latrine? A fucking ditch where we would piss and shit. We had this lieutenant right out of West Point who handed a blueprint to me as if it had come down from Mount Sinai. We lit us a little fire under there while he was on the commode.”

  Quinn smiled.

  “I need you to find that girl,” Quinn said. “I don’t care what you’re into with her. Doesn’t matter to me. But I got to find those kids.”

  “You ever figure out how that woman ever got all those children?”

  “Bought ’em,” Quinn said. “Her daughter said some of the older girls were sold on the Internet, taken to Atlanta, and pimped out. They were what? Twelve? Thirteen?”

  Donnie felt his face color, a nauseous feeling down deep. He turned and spit. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started to thump them, shaking his head to let Quinn know the whole thing made him sick.

  “What she’s got now is six little girls and five little boys,” Quinn said. “They’re all under five years old. Two of them have special needs. Her daughter Mara told us they came cheaper that way. Like dented-up goods at a grocery.”

  “Bad stuff.”

  “I can’t imagine a person who’d beat a child like that. She poured hot sauce into their mouths if they cried. If that didn’t work, she’d dunk them in water till they passed out. She’d fly into rages, and ole Ramón and Mara had to restrain her.”

  Donnie nodded, the smoke clouding Quinn’s face as he spoke. “Bad stuff.”

  “You help us out?” Quinn asked.

  “What do you think she’ll do with the kids?”

  “We’re not talking about stable people here,” Quinn said. “We think she may already be in Mexico. But if not, she’ll probably try to get rid of the kids before she travels.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I don’t think she wants to leave any evidence,” Quinn said. “Understand?”

  Donnie started a new cigarette before the other one had even gone out. His hands shook as he lit up, and Quinn noticed the shaking.

  Quinn holstered the Beretta and tipped the brim of his baseball hat.

  “You know where to find me,” he said.

  27

  “WELL, YOU AIN’T GONNA GET JACK SHIT FROM DONNIE VARNER,” BOOM said. “You know you can’t trust his ass. Remember that time we did all that work planting those trees, and Donnie took a cut of what we made? What did he say when we confronted him?”

  “He said he deserved it,” Quinn said, “because he was the one who got us the job. He called it a finder’s fee.”

  “It’s always been chickenshit like that. He’d sell you out for a Coca-Cola, man. You know that’s the truth.”

  “You think he’s the one who gave us up when we borrowed that fire truck?” Quinn asked.

  “I know it was him,” Boom said. “He got caught, and your uncle leaned on him. He figured he’d get it easier if the sheriff’s nephew was in on it.”

  “I never found out.”

  “Who else knew we took that thing?”

  “Wesley Ruth. Your girlfriend.”

  Boom looked up from under the hood of a Ford truck up on blocks. He grinned and turned back to his work. “You had Anna Lee on your lap the whole time. You think ole Luke Stevens know that?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Why we do that crazy shit back then?” Boom said.

  “’Cause there wasn’t much else to do around here.”

  “What will you do if you catch some kid doing the same?”

  “Put him in jail.”

  “Ain’t that hypocritical?”

  “I guess,” Quinn said. “How’s that truck coming along?”

  “Be better if I had more help,” Boom said. “I got a fella comes and helps in the morning. But all the supervisors did was OK me for the job and the delivery of two hundred gallons of fuel out here. You know how much they payin’ me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither,” Boom said, standing up, reaching for a grease rag and rubbing his fingers along it. “Guess it don’t matter. I appreciate the job. We’ll see about all that crazy bionic shit at the VA. I hear it’s a crapshoot and a lot of paperwork to get that kind of device. Right now I can do it, but I drop a lot of shit.”

  Boom had brought in his own set of tools on a big rolling chest. In the week since the meeting, without an official vote, the county had kicked on the electricity, and small lamps shined down the length of the barn on piles of junk and ragged scrap metal. Quinn made a mental note to bring out a work detail of prisoners to dig into the mess.

  “What do you think?” Boom asked.

  The big Ford F-250 was up on blocks and stripped of its tires, the windows covered in brown paper, but large and bold in the center of the barn. Boom stood back from the engine and admired the truck. Quinn couldn’t see what he was admiring but trusted him.

  “You think you’ll get her running by Christmas?” Quinn said. “I don’t know if the one I have now will make it through the week. Engine sounds like it’s about to throw a rod.”

  “Damn, I just started to work two days ago,” Boom said. “First week on the job, and you already giving me shit.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Quinn said. “Did you know Donnie Varner had been seeing Caddy?”

  “Man, everybody knew about that,” Boom said. “They weren’t too private about it.”

  “She’s been giving me a lot of shit since she’s been back,” Quinn said. “I’m waiting for her to make her dramatic exit and let us all get on with our lives.”

  “What’s Jason think?”

  “I think it’s confused him.”

  “But does he like her being around?”

  “I don’t think the up and down is good for anybody,” Quinn said. “This latest act won’t last, and then what?”

  “Why don’t you just try for custody, then?” Boom asked. “You got a history of her ditching town, and with all the drugs and mess.”

  Quinn shrugged. The wind was bright and cold coming from the mouth of the shed, and the room smelled of gasoline and fresh grease. Boom had swept the dirty concrete to a polished shine. Quinn looked back to Boom and shook his head.

  “Caddy had it rough growing up.”

  “’Cause your daddy?”

  “Some,” Quinn said. “But other fathers have left. When we were kids, some bad stuff happened to her. Sometimes I forget what that must have been like.”

  Boom nodded. The right arm of his flannel shirt was neatly pinned at the elbow. His only arm was as thick and hard as the branch of an old oak.

  “What happened?” Boom asked.

  “You remember when we were kids and I got lost?”

  “Yeah, man,” Boom said. “Everybody remember that. I thought you was dead. Whole town looking for your ass. It made the papers in Jackson and Memphis. What did the headline read?”

  “country boy can survive.”

  “If it’d been me been lost, wouldn’t been no headline. Maybe a little story about a dumb black kid can’t find his way home.”

  “Caddy was with me.”

  “That’s not right,” he said. “You were alone.”

  “She was part of the time,” Quinn said. “I got caught poaching some deer, and we ran away. Caddy wouldn’t leave and tagged along. We camped out in the National Forest, trying to make our way to New Orleans.”

  Boom placed a cigarette in his mouth and then reached down on the edge of the truck for his lighter. “What happened to y’all out there?”

  “You drinking these days?” Quinn asked.

  “I hadn’t stopped.”

  “This is a drinking conversation,” Quinn said. “Between us. I don’t want you telling Lillie about it. Only man who knew about it is dead.”

  “Your uncle.”

  Quinn nodded.

  Boom walked over to the wall where he’d hung his coat. Quinn made his way out to his
old truck and opened the door, the radio squawking inside. He picked it up, cigar smoldering in the ashtray.

  “Where are you?” Lillie asked.

  “County Barn.”

  “You need to make it out to the Traveler’s Rest Motel,” Lillie said.

  “Someone not pay their bill?”

  “I don’t think this son of a bitch is ever gonna pay his bill.”

  “Bad?”

  “I’m guessing this fella looked better before he got shot in the head,” Lillie said.

  QUINN WASN’T A STRANGER to seeing dead bodies. In fact, every time he’d get back stateside, he’d think it was strange to go a day without seeing bodies lying in the street. But this was the first time as sheriff he’d been called to a scene of a killing. There had been some near killings, most domestics, a woman trying to cut off a man’s pecker, and there had been many natural deaths and two suicides. But there wasn’t any mistaking what had happened inside the room of the Traveler’s Rest sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Whoever killed the man had stuffed his body up under the bed. The maid had seen the blood spilling out on the carpet.

  The body was still there, but the bed had been moved slightly so the body could be photographed. Lillie did the photographing with a digital camera. She wouldn’t let anyone else inside the room, making Quinn put on some plastic hospital booties and gloves she kept in the back of her Jeep.

  Kenny stood guard outside, waiting for Luke Stevens to arrive.

  “Can we move the body?” Quinn asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “This a quiz?”

  “You’re in charge,” Lillie said. “You tell me.”

  “And I rely on you to tell me the proper thing to do,” Quinn said, catching just the shoulder and stray leg of the dead man. He wore dark jeans and boots. “Don’t we have to dust for prints and collect DNA and all?”