by Ace Atkins
“I figured,” he said. “I knew him at Fort Bragg.”
Quinn nodded. Ringold waited a beat, like he wanted Quinn to ask him about Bragg and the Special Forces, but Quinn stayed silent, staring at him. Quinn had heard Ringold had been 82nd Airborne and then Special Forces, but him knowing Ricardo was the first proof of it. Ringold brought it up because he wanted Quinn to know who he was dealing with.
“Can I ask you something, Sheriff Colson?”
Quinn nodded.
“Ain’t it hard to slow down?” Ringold said. “Some days, I feel like I’m just itching out of my skin for a little action.”
“What you do now is your call.”
“And what is it that I do?” Ringold said, a streetlight shining off his bald head. He rubbed the stubble on his beard and grinned.
“You walk behind Stagg,” Quinn said.
“Sure,” Ringold said. “But not too far, Sergeant.”
Quinn shrugged. The man was compact and hard, short and muscled, still dressing as if he were on patrol in Kandahar. His eyes were very light, with a strange intensity that was either high intelligence or batshit crazy.
“So you’re saying no to a meet?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Mr. Stagg is a man of compromise.”
“We could sit here for the rest of the night and debate what Mr. Stagg is a man of,” Quinn said. “But I’ve got better plans.”
From the reflection in his truck’s side mirror, Quinn saw Ophelia Bundren wandering out of the county building, speaking with Sam Bishop, Jr., and Betty Jo Mize of the Tibbehah Monitor. The old woman leaned into Ophelia, whispered in her ear, and Ophelia walked away with a smile. She joined Quinn at his truck and he opened the passenger door, helping her up into the seat of the tall truck.
Ringold nodded to Quinn as Quinn passed him at the front bumper, neither man moving out of the way, Ringold closing in on Quinn’s personal space. Ringold just stood in Quinn’s headlights, flat-footed and immobile, as he backed out and turned out of the lot and onto the road.
“Just what was that all about?” Ophelia said, staring.
“He wanted to give himself a proper introduction,” Quinn said.
Do you think we might have a normal night, Quinn?” Ophelia asked. “We both turn off our cell phones. I’ll make us some supper and we can sit on the couch and watch some television. No interruptions. No professional talk. We just act like regular folks.”
“I’ll turn off the scanner,” Quinn said. “But I better keep my cell on.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Son of a bitch. I better, too. I just figured I’d try.”
Ophelia had on a pair of faded Levi’s and a tight black shirt. She’d twisted her brown hair up into a bun at the top of her head and had kicked off her shoes. Her toenails a bubble gum pink.
“What’s for supper?” Quinn said.
“Well,” Ophelia said, “I’m not cooking that greasy old Southern food like your momma. How about some pasta and a healthy salad? I have a bottle of red wine somewhere around here. We can sit on the couch and watch The Bachelor, forget all about those shitbag supervisors, Johnny Stagg, and murders from long past.”
“What the hell’s The Bachelor?”
“It’s a show where one guy gets to date twenty-five women over a few weeks,” she said. “At the end of the show, the bachelor gets to decide which one he’s going to marry.”
“In a few weeks?”
“Yeah, but they go on a bunch of dates at beaches, travel to exotic countries, and listen to a lot of crappy bands the producers are trying to promote. If you get picked each week, he gives you a dethorned rose. The only trouble comes when the bachelor, or sometimes it’s a bachelorette, starts to make out and grub with multiple folks. You’ll see drunk crying, catfights, people screaming at each other and throwing shit.”
“I want to see that, I’ll just go back on patrol.”
“What’d you rather see?”
“I heard 3:10 to Yuma is on tonight,” Quinn said. “The real one, with Glenn Ford, not that god-awful remake.”
“Don’t you watch anything else besides westerns?”
“When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of action movies from the seventies,” Quinn said. “But then Caddy pointed out that all I was doing was looking for my dad, running all the stunt sequences in slow motion, trying to get a glimpse of my father. After Caddy brought it to my attention, I just stopped.”
“What about war movies?”
Quinn shook his head. “Hell no.”
“Suit yourself,” Ophelia said. “But you’d really like The Bachelor. Half the time the women are wearing flimsy little clothes or bikinis. They had one girl a few weeks ago that walked around the house without a stitch of clothes on. Of course they had her privates all blacked out. But, can you imagine doing that on national TV?”
“Pasta?”
“And salad,” Ophelia said. “And red wine.”
“Just me and you?” Quinn said. “On the couch, pretending to be normal people with normal jobs?”
“And Hondo, too.”
Hondo was already on the couch, making himself at home, resting after a long day of roaming the farm and chasing deer, cattle, and rabbits. Ophelia uncorked a bottle, Quinn not being one to drink much wine but not wanting to make a thing of it. She poured each of them a glass and then started to cut up the vegetables for the salad. Ophelia, as she should, showed excellent precision with the paring knife.
“I don’t want to complicate plans,” Quinn said, “but you did leave me a message about something you’d found?”
“I found something in that file you gave me,” Ophelia said, chopping and slicing carrots with a lot of dexterity and speed. “May not mean anything given the time frame. We can talk about it later, if you like.”
Quinn drank some wine. Wasn’t bad. But he would’ve rather had a cold Bud or Coors anytime. “I’d like to know.”
“There was some correspondence between your uncle and the FBI office in Jackson,” she said. “In the letters, it appeared that he’d sent them the remains of the dead man’s burned clothes and a pair of boots that were pretty much intact. It seems like old Dr. Stevens did take a dental record or at least tried to. The body was a mess and back then there wasn’t any DNA testing or reason to take tissue samples.”
“What happened to the body?”
“Potter’s field,” Ophelia said.
Quinn drank some wine and his face must’ve shown something, because she reached into the refrigerator and popped the top of a can of Coors.
“Gracias.”
She poured the rest of his wine in her glass and then got out a pot to boil some water. Quinn stood there with her, all of it feeling nice and normal. Ophelia could fill out a T-shirt, and her bare feet were cute as hell. Something really comfortable about her little place, all the low light and the sparseness of the rooms, with paintings of old barns and pastures and wildlife. Quinn just hoped the damn cell wouldn’t ring in the next few hours, which would be a minor miracle.
“I’ll call the Feds tomorrow,” Quinn said. “We didn’t have a lot of luck with the DA.”
“I wonder why?”
“No kidding.”
“You look a million miles away,” she said. “You doing OK? I’m worried about you.”
“Right here,” Quinn said, reaching for Ophelia’s hand and pulling her back into him close. He wrapped his arm around her stomach and started to kiss the back of her neck, feeling her shudder a bit as he placed a hand up under her T-shirt. Her stomach was flat and hard, Ophelia inhaling a deep breath, closing her eyes, tilting her head back into Quinn. Quinn could taste her skin on his lips and moved his hand over the first button of her Levi’s, and then the second, and then he slid his hand between her legs. Ophelia became a bit unstable on her feet
, reaching back with both hands, arching her back, and feeling for Quinn’s hair and face and then turning to him, Quinn kissing her harder now and finding her in his fingertips, the water audibly boiling on the stove, Quinn hoping like hell she didn’t hear it. But a buzzer sounded and she pushed him away, catching her breath, buttoning her jeans with one hand and smoothing down her T-shirt with the other. She picked up the paring knife and pointed it straight at Quinn’s heart.
“Sit,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stay.”
Hondo peered up from the couch, his rabies tags jingling on his collar. Quinn smiled.
“Drink your beer,” she said. “I’ll let you know when supper is ready.”
Quinn took his beer and found a spot on the couch next to Hondo. He picked up the remote and found 3:10 to Yuma just at the scene when Van Heflin agrees to take Glenn Ford back to prison. Seemed like as good a place as any to begin.
I appreciated you helping,” Caddy said early the next morning. “I could’ve gotten Boom when he gets off at the County Barn, but it’ll be nice to get this all distributed before then. It’s supposed to get down to five degrees tonight.”
“Remind me why we live here again?” Diane Tull said, driving her old Ford, loaded down with boxes of warm clothes from The River and twelve radiators the Jericho General Store had donated. “I could sell seed and feed down in Florida.”
“There are times when I think this county is a paradise,” Caddy said, leaning against the passenger-door window, farmland and long stretches of pine zipping by. “But then you see the ugliness of what we’ve done to this place, all the logging, busted-up trailers, and stripping of anything that can make a buck. We didn’t need a tornado to rip this town apart. We just needed a few more good years.”
“God gives us spring to make amends for it,” Diane said. “The wisteria and the daffodils and the trees coming alive again. It makes you remember this is a fertile place. That’s the reason our crazy ancestors staked out this land, thinking their families could thrive here. They could grow their own food, hunt what meat they needed.”
“Our people came here from North Carolina in 1846,” Caddy said. “Before that, they were kicked out of Scotland and Ireland. My momma’s family got some Indian in her, too. Choctaw.”
“I got some Cherokee,” Diane said. “Maybe the reason only this one strand of my hair is white. You think I should dye it?”
“No way,” Caddy said. “That’s your signature. I think it makes you look hot.”
“A hot momma at fifty?” Diane said, driving with two fingers on the wheel, looking for the turnoff on past the Richards place. “Hmm.”
“I don’t mean to get personal,” Caddy said. “But you been dating any?”
“I was seeing this fella from Tupelo last year, nice hair and good teeth, but I found out he was married and had two kids,” she said. “I met him online and he said he was divorced. But things started happening that didn’t add up. He’d take phone calls outside, come over at weird times, and never stay the night. I finally saw on his cell phone where he’d been texting his wife that he was at a tool convention in Atlanta. When he came back and started to love on me, I told him the convention was closed and he needed to hit the road. And take his goddamn tool with him. He started crying like a little boy, saying he’d been having personal issues, his wife was cold and all that. But, Caddy, I just don’t have time for that shit.”
Caddy was silent. She stared out the window, passing more clear-cut acres and ugly logging roads twisting into the hills. Seemed like everything of worth in Tibbehah was cut down, loaded on a truck, and taken out of the state. This place must’ve been a garden back during the Choctaws’ time, before a backhoe and bulldozer could rip the guts out of a place.
“I’m through with dating and men and all that mess,” Caddy said. “I miss Jamey Dixon every waking second. But to think about ever being with anyone else makes me want to just throw up.”
“Hadn’t been long, Caddy,” Diane said, slowing, taking a left turn down the county road to Fate. They would drop off the heaters at the Primitive Baptist Church and stop off at ten houses who’d requested cold-weather clothes. Caddy had the names of the families listed in a spiral notebook in her hand.
“Men are good for two things and two things only,” Caddy said. “Both starting with the letter F. Since I got myself clean, I’ve learned to fix plenty on my own.”
Diane pulled into the dirt lot in front of the little Primitive Baptist Church, a white clapboard building with a small hand-painted sign at the roadside. There were already twenty people outside, waiting in the cold, for them to arrive with the heaters. The preacher, a wiry old man named Shelton Graves, met Caddy and they went through the list together about which families were in luck, which ones would need more sweaters and blankets for the next few days. Mississippi wasn’t a place that prepped much for cold weather—the bad nights, the freezing nights, people treated like some kind of strange, cruel event. Back during the ice storm of ’94, the worst winter weather most people in the state had ever seen, some houses way out in the county didn’t have power for nearly two months.
Pastor Graves and Diane Tull pulled the radiator boxes off the truck and passed them into the hands of a thick-bodied bald man in a flannel shirt and Dale Jr. cap who stacked them neatly. Caddy had jumped up into the back of the truck, sorting through the boxes, looking for the baby clothes to hand over to one of the women who was waiting. Two more boxes, clearly marked in Magic Marker, were dropped off, and then Diane and Caddy were circling out of the lot, with a wave to the pastor and his people.
“What would people do around here without churches?” Caddy said.
“Starve,” Diane said.
“I don’t know if the South is as religious as it is practical.”
“Southerners have never been good at practical,” Diane said. “We’re stubborn, clannish people who don’t like being told what to do. And that makes us easy targets for the greedy.”
“I still believe there’s a lot of good,” Caddy said, smiling. “That took me some while to find out. But if you look for it, believe in it, you’ll find it. You look for the darkness and that shit will swallow you whole.”
Diane put both hands on the wheel, making a tricky sharp turn, the truck a little hard to handle, as it never had power steering, rolling like a leaden tank down the busted dirt road. “I just like to keep an eye out,” she said. “Surprises have never been much fun.”
• • •
“There’s been no official deal offered,” Sonny Stevens said. “But that conversation over in Oxford was pure, unadulterated bullshit. I don’t care if they got a hundred different rifles of yours, Lillie. You were there to protect Sheriff Colson and you performed your duty.”
“Except it wasn’t my rifle.”
“I know it wasn’t,” Stevens said. “Y’all have gotten in with some folks who play dirty for a living. I don’t care for it, but it’s the way they do business.”
“They seemed real proud of the timing,” Quinn said. “They indict this month, they can take us to trial just weeks before the election.”
“They’ll lose,” Stevens said. “But we can’t stop an indictment. Everyone knows you can indict a goddamn ham sandwich.”
“So what would a deal mean?” Lillie said.
“Please excuse my legalese here,” Stevens said, “but they’re just trying to fuck with you. That bullshit they floated past us about that cold case? You think they were just shooting the breeze? You make an arrest and they drop everything. Even if you just work with them, they may back off some.”
“Maybe I’ll have time to print up some new election banners?” Quinn said. “‘Vote for Colson. Indicted on Lesser Charges.’”
“You sure are taking this well,” Stevens said.
The law office was hot as hell that afternoo
n, the old man liking to crank up the heat to nearly ninety degrees, Quinn rolling up his sleeves as they spoke. Lillie fanned her face with a printout of confiscated items from her house. Outside, a brittle wind rattled the windows, rain from earlier freezing along the porch bannister and freezing the drops in the bare trees along the Square.
“I did do a bit of asking around about that case,” Stevens said. “Lots of folks remember. But no one—and I mean no one—wants to talk about it.”
Quinn nodded.
“I don’t see how you can ever make a case on something so damn old,” Stevens said. “The DA isn’t even offering a realistic time line to make something work. Putting a case together could take y’all years. This rush doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Funny thing is,” Quinn said, “we were on this already. We didn’t need someone trying to bribe us or hold our ass to the fire.”
“Welcome to a political shitstorm,” Stevens said. “What happened back then was barbaric. There hadn’t been a lynching in this town for thirty years before that. People got sick over what happened to those two little girls and didn’t want to wait for the process of law. It’s an affront to everything I believe in.”
“Can you at least give us some names?” Lillie asked. “They don’t have to give statements, maybe just lead us in the right direction.”
“This happened thirty-seven years ago. It’s a history lesson. You’re not going to find anyone who wants to discuss it.”
“It’s not history to Diane Tull,” Quinn said.
“Not many folks are going to rally around this fella who got killed,” Stevens said.
“Because he was black?” Quinn said.
“Because he killed a young woman and raped another,” Stevens said. “There were town people, not county people, who knew what was going to happen to this fella and turned their backs. The man I spoke with was part of a group of men who gave the go-ahead to make this happen.”
“Who?” Quinn said.
“I can’t say,” Stevens said, leaning back into his chair, the day darkening in the windows behind him. “I’m sorry. He’s a client. This was said in confidence. He believes his hands are clean.”