by Ace Atkins
All of the Tibbehah County Sheriff’s Department came out to see the homicide. All seven of them.
Lillie borrowed a stepladder from the Rebel Truck Stop to shoot photos of Stillwell’s body, not that she had a hard time getting near the corpse. She and Kenny planned to spend the rest of the morning sifting through the garbage for any evidence. She brought a box of trash bags to take anything that wasn’t bagged up already back to the county barn. No telling, Lillie said, how long it would take to look through all this crap.
Quinn asked Johnny Stagg for the surveillance tapes.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Stagg said. “Only one issue with that.”
Quinn waited.
“That’s one place we don’t keep a camera,” Stagg said. “Don’t have a lot of folks stealing garbage. Mainly, people just tossing their shit in there without permission. Hardly worth the cost.”
Quinn shook his head, asked for everything he had anyway, telling Stagg that a car would’ve had to pull in view of one of his cameras at some point. Stagg didn’t say anything for a long while, hands in his khaki pants pockets, wind fluttering a few hairs of his greased pompadour.
“Or a motorcycle,” Stagg said.
“Even if it’s who you think it is,” Quinn said, “they’d take a truck. Kind of hard to ride around with a body perched in plain sight on the back of your Harley.”
“You’d be amazed at the brazenness of some folks,” Stagg said, both men standing next to Quinn’s truck, watching Lillie take a few more photos. Kenny had backed up his truck to start piling the garbage in. It was cool, but Stagg’s face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat. “But you ain’t gonna find nothing in that stuff besides steak bones and last week’s leftovers. Lord willing, I hope Deputy Virgil has a strong nose and stomach.”
“She does.”
“You sure admire that woman,” Stagg said, wiping his brow with a paper napkin, “don’t you? Shame she don’t go for your type.”
“We been over this ground before,” Quinn said, crime scene tape fluttering around the four dumpsters situated at the back of the Rebel. The hiss and pull of 18-wheelers coming from all around them. “Why Stillwell?”
“You don’t know?” Stagg said. “Thought y’all had been real chatty.”
“That the reason LeDoux would have him killed?”
Stagg opened his mouth, then shut it in a false, toothy grin and didn’t say a word.
Quinn shook his head, not wanting Stagg to know about any private conversations he’d had with the man. He never doubted Stagg might’ve killed the son of a bitch himself and dumped him out back not just to throw folks off but because he was that goddamn arrogant. Stagg’s face turned to feign a little sadness as he watched Lillie crawl down the ladder and Ophelia and two men from the funeral home, one being her uncle, lift Stillwell out of the trash and put him in a body bag and on a gurney.
“Two tough gals,” Stagg said.
“Pretty clear what killed him.”
“Two in the head,” Stagg said. “I seen it. LeDoux making a goddamn statement.”
“Since you seem to know,” Quinn said, “go ahead and tell me.”
“On why LeDoux killed him and deposited his dead ass on my property?”
“That’d be the question.”
“Shit,” Stagg said. “Stillwell told me himself that he was the boy who put LeDoux in prison. He was the goddamn informant for the Feds and somehow LeDoux knew about it.”
Quinn nodded.
“He’s got a list and he’s crossing off names.”
“Who else is on that list?” Quinn asked.
Stagg was quiet. His face was as flat as he’d ever seen Johnny Stagg’s be. He was the kind of man who’d shake your hand and look you in the eye while selling your ass out far and wide. He reached into a vest pocket and pulled out a rubber comb, running it through the pompadour and ducktail. Before speaking, he popped a mint into his mouth and offered one to Quinn.
Ophelia looked over to Quinn after she shut the doors to the Bundren Funeral Home van. He nodded at her and they drove off.
“Me,” Stagg said. “He got no reason to come back to Tibbehah and make trouble unless he thought I was part of the reason he got sent to Brushy Mountain.”
“Were you?” Quinn said.
“You see me working with the goddamn government?”
“I think Bobby Campo might disagree with you,” Quinn said, “if he wasn’t in prison right now.”
Stagg sucked on the peppermint and then began to crush it up between his back teeth. Lillie was knee-deep in the dumpster now, passing bags of trash to Kenny and Deputy Dave Cullison. It would be a long night, as Lillie had specific and methodical ways to handle the crime scene.
“I need to help.”
“Quinn?” Stagg said.
“I want you to nail that son of a bitch to a tree,” Stagg said. “I know’d what you think of me, but he’s Satan’s pecker personified. You understand? You think them boys at Hell’s Creek brought trouble to this county, you wait and see when the clock turns back twenty years.”
“It can’t.”
Stagg snorted and shook his head, Quinn being a young man who didn’t know things back then or even now.
“I didn’t want to say this, but you need to know something,” Stagg said. “You and Lillie had a first-class ticket up Shit Creek. I made some calls, pulled in some favors, maybe knew a few things about that DA in Oxford and his liking of girls who hadn’t seen their eighteenth birthday yet. You understand?”
“God bless you, Johnny.”
“Grand jury come and gone,” Stagg said, “y’all been bothered?”
“They had manufactured evidence and then stepped away.”
“Since when have you ever known for people like that to have some kind of conscience?” Stagg said. “I ain’t got no political aspirations beyond the borders of this here county.”
Quinn nodded, Stagg offered his hand.
Quinn just walked away, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and got in line with the deputies to start sorting through the piles of shit.
• • •
“I guess you heard?” E. J. Royce said, just as Diane Tull was about to hang the closed sign in the window of the Farm & Ranch.
“Heard what?”
“Surely you know’d about the commotion out at the Rebel?” Royce said, hands in his back pockets and raising up on his toes. “They just found Hank Stillwell’s body in a trash can.”
“Oh, God.”
“It’s true,” Royce said. “I heard about it at the Fillin’ Station about thirty minutes ago. Figured I needed to let you know.”
Tull had the cash drawer out and was counting money out into a zippered bag for the bank. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Royce said. “Someone shot him right in the head and tossed him like some garbage.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Diane said, counting out the dollar bills and collecting them in bundles. She could count and talk at the same time, finishing the task and starting to gather the checks into a neat pile. She figured at least a couple them would bounce, and she was pretty sure which ones, but she took them anyway. People had to start prepping now for planting season. She placed them in the bag, thinking about that last time she’d seen Hank Stillwell, never thinking of him getting hurt, only hurting himself.
“Damn shame,” Royce said.
“Did you intend on buying something or did you just come in to scare me some more?”
“Lady, I ain’t trying to scare you,” Royce said, running a dirty finger up under his nose. “I intend to protect you. I don’t want something to happen to you when you ain’t looking. I know’d your, you know, passion for trying to help folks out. But to an old lawman, this ain’t looking good.”
“Who sent you?”
&nbs
p; “Ain’t nobody sent me,” Royce said. “Are you implying I know the folks who killed Hank Stillwell?”
“Do you want to buy something? I’m closing in . . .” Diane said, looking at her watch, “in thirty seconds.”
Royce shook his head, took off his trucker’s cap, and left it hanging by his side. On his right hip, he wore a gun as if the twenty-first century was just some kind of practical joke on the world. He looked shabby and filthy in the same old Liberty overalls and beaten shoes. Diane had on pressed Levi’s and a tight-fitting white button-down shirt, the handmade pair of leather boots shined and gleaming for another show tonight at the Southern Star. She’d changed at the Farm & Ranch, as there wasn’t much time between closing and happy hour. She was going to do her makeup in the mirror of her truck. But now this. Goddamn Hank Stillwell was dead.
“Shot twice in the back of the head,” Royce said, putting on his trucker hat again. “Lord, I miss them days when we kept the doors unlocked and all know’d each other at church time.”
“Good night, Mr. Royce,” Diane said, reaching to the table for her set of keys.
Royce didn’t move. He walked up close to the counter, placed a liver-spotted hand on Diane’s fingers and the keys. “You ain’t fucking listening,” Royce said. “I don’t want you talking to Quinn Colson or his dyke deputy. This ain’t a request. It’s protection for you. I know’d your daddy. He was a fine, fine man.”
Diane snatched her hand away. “I told you to leave.”
“I need your word,” Royce said. “That’s how things used to be done.”
“Get out.”
“Come on, sugar,” Royce said, stepping back from the counter and then walking around it. “You look like you’re all dressed up for a long riding tonight. Hard being left by a man late in life. I hate to see it.”
The dumb bastard kept walking, a man too sure of himself for too long.
Diane put her hand to the phone but then snatched it away, reaching under the counter for a 12-gauge kept there if they’d ever had a robbery—which they’d never had in the history of the Farm & Ranch. She grabbed the gun, tucked the stock up under her arm, and walked forward quick and hard, pressing the double barrels up under the old man’s chin.
Retired sheriff’s deputy E. J. Royce stopped cold in his tracks.
“I got a singing gig in twenty minutes,” she said, “and I’m tired of you and your shitheel buddies looking in my window. Now, kindly step back, get in your truck or else my delicate finger might slip and I’ll blow your goddamn head off.”
“Holy shit . . .” Royce said, kind of muttering it as his jaw was closed tight.
“Why are you a part of this?”
Royce clenched his jaw tighter.
“Get the hell out of here,” Diane said. “Now.”
Royce turned, slowly at first, and then with some old-man speed, gimpy leg and all, looking to anyone outside like a dissatisfied customer, bell ringing upon exit. Diane watched his truck spin out in the gravel and head for the highway. She put down the gun, grabbed her money, and went to turn out the lights and lock the door.
She thought about opening up that first set with Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City,” feeling about like that.
They rode in one big mechanical, growling mass away from the clubhouse and down south, through the bottomland to Sugar Ditch. It was late, but there were still black men out drinking by the old grocery and kids running wild and holding sparklers by the tight-clustered shacks. Chains got off his bike at the store, the rest of the club behind him, but not dismounting, waiting for what was to come. Jason saw him walk up on the porch and grab the first black man he saw, a young guy in shorts and a blue tank top, and slap him hard on the mouth. An old man who was sitting with him raised up from his chair and Chains pointed a .38 at his head. Jason wished like hell he’d stayed with Jean.
There were words exchanged. Chains pistol-whipped the old man. Finally the young guy pointed down the road, the long, unpaved roads of shacks clustered on that nasty creek, where folks still washed their clothes, bathed, and dumped their sewage.
Chains got onto his bike and just zipped on forward, the kids holding burned-out sparklers standing, openmouthed, as the bikers roared past them in the night, down and around a curve and an old church that sat up on the only high land in the Ditch.
Beyond the shacks, nearly to Highway 45 and the county line, Chains pulled in front of a one-level house, neatly painted white but with a rusted roof. There was a wide-open porch where six or so men sat around two tables drinking and smoking, playing cards. A tall, upright man, young, stood from the group and walked away and into the yard. He wore a white tank top, black dress pants, and no shoes, a cigarette hung loose from his mouth. The other men followed him, standing behind him, backing him.
Some of the bikers did the same with Chains. Not that he needed or wanted the support. Jason followed Stillwell up the crowd facing each other.
“You Dupuy?” Chains said.
“Yeah. What the fuck you want?”
Chains stepped up and pointed to Hank Stillwell and said one of his people had killed his daughter.
“One of my people?” Dupuy said, cigarette bobbing his lips. “Slow down there, Fonzie.”
Chains slapped the cigarette right out his mouth. Dupuy didn’t move. Chains turned to his boys, who Jason saw now had some pistols out. The Born Losers carried chains, knives, and guns. This whole Fourth of July was turning to shit. Back at the clubhouse, he could have just ridden away, taken off. This wasn’t about being tough, brave, a man. This was about being crazy and mean. These people didn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to Lori and her friend.
“You tell us where to find this man or we start burning,” Chains said. “Shack by shack.”
“Go ahead,” Dupuy said, thumbing blood off his lip. “Law be all over your ass in ten seconds.”
“We are the law tonight.”
Big Doug had wrapped some rags around a fattened branch and started to pour a small can of gasoline over it. He flicked open a lighter and got the torch going. He ceremoniously handed it over to Stillwell.
“How about we start with your place?” Chains said.
The black men were outnumbered. The man called Dupuy just shook his head and spit onto the dirt, knowing he was beat. The two small tables on the porch of the old house were cluttered with playing cards and poker chips. And piles of money.
“I heard what happened,” Dupuy said. “Them girls yours?”
LeDoux pointed to Stillwell, slick-faced and wide-eyed, holding the torch.
“You ain’t got no truck with the Ditch,” Dupuy said. “Y’all just got it in for that one.”
“You ain’t stupid,” LeDoux said.
“Appreciate that, Fonz,” Dupuy said. “Y’all put out that fire, let me pour some drinks, and y’all cool out. I got some moonshine taste like birthday cake.”
“We want that man.”
“I’ll find him,” Dupuy said. “Right now, y’all white men my guests. You dig?”
LeDoux looked to Hank Stillwell and thought on it, slowly nodding. “Don’t you fuck me, nigger,” LeDoux said, “or we will turn your world to ashes.”
Dupuy kept hard eye contact but didn’t say a word, just turned to some of his people and then put on a pair of boots. They scattered into the slums as the Born Losers sat on their bikes or sat on the man’s porch drinking his moonshine, playing a few hands of cards with the older black men. Someone had some weed. They smoked.
Within thirty minutes, Dupuy was back. He was grinning.
Jason walked up to where LeDoux, Big Doug, Gangrene, and Stillwell spoke to the man. Everyone was smoking, pistol shots and fireworks cracking overhead. A group of ragged kids had come out to look at the motorcycles. One of the Losers let the kids take turns sitting on his Harley, letting them touch the dials and hold t
he handlebars.
In the small semicircle in the weak light by the porch, Dupuy held up a simple gold cross on a chain. “This look like hers?”
Stillwell snatched it out of Dupuy’s hands. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “We’re gonna murder your ass.”
Dupuy didn’t react. He popped a cigarette in his mouth and pointed north.
“Boy don’t live here,” he said, “ain’t from here. Came to see a local girl and then she told him to get gone. You see, he ain’t right in the head.”
Dupuy touched his temple as if it needed more explanation.
“Understand he got a tent up in the National Forest,” Dupuy said. “He sold that cross to a man I know for five dollars. Y’all need some directions to get the hell out of my world?”
A half dozen of those shitbirds walked into the Rebel at suppertime, taking a seat in the back booth Reserved for Johnny Stagg, Family, and Friends. Stagg didn’t need anyone to call attention to it, he saw them on his TV monitor, tasseled loafers up on the desk, and motioned over to Mr. Ringold. They couldn’t hear what was being said but watched as a waitress came over with a big smile and advised the bikers that they may want to find another place to sit. Whatever they said, it must’ve been unpleasant and crude, as the woman skittered away right quick, not handing out menus and ice water. A good five seconds later, Stagg’s phone rang and he didn’t even bother to listen. “Yeah, I seen them.”
“Mr. Ringold?” Stagg asked, hanging up the phone
“You could call the police.”
“Sure.”
“And have Colson take out this garbage, too.”
Stagg nodded. “I’d kind of like a little heart-to-heart with Mr. LeDoux,” Stagg said. “I don’t care to speak to his people. He got something to say about plans, then me and him need to get to talking.”
“I’ll stand with you.”
“Yes, sir,” Stagg said. “But I don’t care to have another shoot-out at the Rebel, that wouldn’t look too good on them AAA maps. This is a goddamn family restaurant.”