by Ace Atkins
• • •
Quinn was driving west to Choctaw Lake in the Big Green Machine, Lillie Virgil riding shotgun with a Remington pump, telling him how much it pained her to be inadvertently helping Johnny Stagg.
“We’re doing our job,” Quinn said. “What these folks did—”
“They’re not people.”
“When the law breaks down, you see civilization is a pretty thin veneer,” Quinn said. “Law is theoretical, an illusion. Or at least it was to the Afghanis.”
“But we’re a civilized nation, Quinn,” Lillie said. “Don’t you know it?”
“Roger that,” Quinn said, rubbing his head where Mr. Jim had clipped him close. “We don’t knock and hit the door hard.”
“I say we wait for the fuck nuts to come out and take a leak,” Lillie said. “You know that turd doesn’t have a tank set up.”
“Snatch him out of bed, cinch his wrists behind his back, and toss him in Art’s vehicle,” Quinn said. “I want this quick and mean and his ass in the jail quick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can I ask you something, Lil?”
“You bet.”
“I want to finish this thing and resign,” Quinn said. “Bring in LeDoux and then leave this all for Johnny Stagg to worry about.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Lillie said. “You want to pull a Gary Cooper?”
“Both of us can find work elsewhere.”
“But this is home.”
“That was Jean’s trouble,” Quinn said. “I think she was scared to leave, not knowing what was out there. There’s no electrified fence around Tibbehah County. We are free to go as we please.”
“I left for a lot of years,” Lillie said. “You, too. Don’t let the bastards raise their fucking flag.”
Quinn was silent, heading down off Jericho Road and on toward Choctaw Lake, the land growing flat, the hills behind them. They soon saw the open expanse of water, a thick mist rising in the false dawn. There were a few ducks, a lot of geese.
“Did he stink?”
“Who?” Quinn said.
“LeDoux,” Lillie said. “Who else?”
“I’ll let you cuff him and you can decide for yourself.”
“You’re a true gentleman, Quinn Colson,” Lillie said. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
She cut her eyes over at him and they shared a smile, rolling straight ahead, two vehicles following, Quinn turning off his lights and rolling forward slow and easy to the tin-roof clubhouse, leaning hard to the left. Within a hundred feet, a rusted single-wide had been dumped onto some cinder blocks, no lights, but smoke coming from an outdoor furnace feeding heat in through a rigged metal pipe.
Since they’d checked out the clubhouse, two trucks had parked nearby and a couple bikes.
“Fuck,” Lillie said.
“Come on,” Quinn said. “Grab your weapon.”
Quinn reached for his cell and hit the trooper captain’s cell number on speed dial. The phone rang and rang. He’d just spoken to the man.
Two men stepped from the clubhouse. Quinn lay down the phone, hit the lights and siren, and the two patrol cars followed suit, the blue-and-whites flashing, slamming on brakes, out in seconds.
Quinn was out with his shotgun, taking aim on the men. Lillie, by his side, doing the same with her gun. His four other deputies backed them up, Quinn not taking an eye off the two bikers as they stood, lit up in his headlights. He yelled for Dave, Art, and Ike to take the trailer.
“Kenny, stay with the vehicles and call dispatch,” Quinn said. “Tell those troopers to get their asses down here.”
“God damn, they’re ugly,” Lillie said, shotgun up in her arms as natural as can be.
“Is LeDoux in that trailer?” Quinn said.
The bikers had their hands up but didn’t say a word. They were young and scruffy. And silent. They were also drunk and wobbled on their feet.
Quinn heard the door to the trailer bust open and Art and Dave yelling as they entered. More yelling. No shots.
Quinn looked to Lillie, Lillie taking control of the two bikers as he walked toward the trailer with the pump. He had gotten about twenty meters when he saw Art come to the door and say they got him, Quinn running up into the trailer to find Dave Cullison cuffing LeDoux.
LeDoux had his face to the floor of the trailer, the room lit only by the deputies’ flashlights. He was laughing like a crazy man. “I wondered when you were coming.”
“How the hell would you know?” Quinn said.
LeDoux couldn’t stop laughing.
There was a rumbling outside, the sound of guttural engines gunning in unison coming down Jericho Road and straight for the clubhouse. Quinn looked to his deputies as they yanked LeDoux from the floor and pushed him forward out of the trailer and onto the dark gravel lot.
From a quarter mile away he could see the lights of the bikers shining bright.
The nurse brought Johnny Stagg a cup of water with a straw and held it up to his mouth. An early gray light filled the hospital windows as she checked the monitors and took his temperature, plumping up his pillows and asking if he needed to take a pee-pee. He said he did but could use some help. The woman, who was black and stout, helped him throw his legs to the side of the bed and held him up while he walked. She was trying to be gentle, but the feeling of those busted ribs and that fractured leg bone brought tears to his eyes. He leaned on her to keep pressure off the left leg.
“You need to sit on the commode and make a deposit?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. She held him up as he did his business, the woman saying not to be shy, she’d seen it all. She walked back with him, supporting his weight, as he moved slow, with her helping him settle into the bed.
“You need something, Mr. Stagg, just press that red button,” she said. “You see it on the side? Yes, sir. Just press that button you need to go again. They’ll be around in a little while with breakfast.”
Stagg figured he could send Ringold to the Rebel for some good food, hopefully not having to stay here for long. He’d hire some help at the house. And he’d hire more help for himself. If he could get a man like Ringold, he could get a dozen just like him.
He’d be rid of LeDoux and rid of Colson. He wished things could’ve been simpler, easier. But with the Mexes coming in, cutting off a man’s head and such, he needed violent men to do violent chores.
An orderly lay down a tray on the rolling table. She opened the cover as if revealing the finest meal ever made—some runny eggs and watery grits. The coffee was the color of river water. The orderly began to spoon up some egg and lift it to his mouth.
“Ma’am,” Stagg said. “I’m not hungry just now. Do you mind?”
The woman left and Stagg lay there, watching the morning news from Memphis, waiting to hear maybe some news about Craig Houston or the burning of those biker clubhouses. Surely Houston’s people were ready for more. But there was nothing, only talk about the rain coming in later that day and Grizzlies returning to top form.
Stagg thought of the humiliation of being beaten down by that biker and those Mexican boys. He recalled his daddy taking him behind the woodshed and taking a fat branch to his exposed backside, whipping him good until the welts began to bleed.
Stagg reached for the fork, hands shaking, having to bend his mouth down to the food because his shoulder and elbow weren’t working so good. He scooped up a little bit more the next time, some grits with eggs, and lifted it slightly higher. He chewed and swallowed, a little bit more light shining from outside that hospital window.
He’d just as soon burn down all of Jericho than surrender to them bikers and bean eaters.
• • •
Quinn, Lillie, and the deputies tried to make it to their vehicles but had to turn and run into the Born Losers clubhouse, toting the two bikers and
Chains LeDoux, when the bullets started to fly. The bikers—Quinn counting fifteen—had rode into that gravel space off Jericho Road and opened fire on the Big Green Machine and the two county patrol cars, automatic rifles busting up glass and sending rearview mirrors flying, tires flattening real quick.
Lillie was talking with dispatch, telling Mary Alice to get those troopers down here fast or she’d be cracking some fucking heads in Jackson when this thing was over.
LeDoux was laughing, where they’d tossed his ass by a ratty old pool table.
This wasn’t the scenario Quinn had planned. He’d readied for a tactical operation, quick and clean, getting LeDoux and getting back to Jericho. They were armed with handguns and shotguns, only Lillie bringing a rifle with her. She’d busted out a window facing the road, checking the situation through the scope. “I can get six of them easy,” Lillie said. “You think the DA in Oxford would say we were being impulsive?”
“I’ve gone past giving a shit about that,” Quinn said.
“Y’all are on our property,” LeDoux said. “Our land. Y’all are the invaders.”
His two boys had been hog-tied and left in the middle of the clubhouse. They hadn’t said a word or moved from where the deputies had left them.
Lillie steadied the weapon inside the clubhouse, the space smelling of stale cigarette smoke, urine, and vomit. The walls were adorned with pictures of girls in bikinis straddling Harleys and posters advertising beer. Above a makeshift bar was an old velvet painting of a black woman with enormous breasts lying sideways and smiling. It was a well-worn space that smelled and felt abandoned.
Lillie took the shot. And then three more.
“Ha!” she said, reloading.
“Hell is coming,” LeDoux said. “Hell is coming.”
Quinn twisted his shotgun to full choke. He had his Beretta 9 out on a beaten pool table, away from the windows, laying down an extra magazine from his pant pocket. Dave and Art had set themselves up by the other window, just two industrial-glass panes facing the front. Kenny was now on the cell with Mary Alice while Ike McCaslin checked a back door and barricaded it by pushing over an old cigarette machine on its side. Dawn had come on and hard yellow light filled the road, the bikers finding cover out in the trees, parking their Harleys in the middle of the road to discourage anyone coming in or out.
Lillie took another shot.
Quinn saddled up next to her. From the window, he could see two bodies in the road.
She reloaded the rifle with bullets from her pocket. She handed her weapon to Quinn and he used the scope to see a bald-headed man with tattoos crawling near the cruisers, carrying an AR-15 and aiming it toward the clubhouse.
“They’re coming up through the tree line,” Lillie said. “I’ve got six of them behind your truck.”
“How bad’s my truck?”
“Boom is an artist,” Lillie said, “but he’s no magician.”
Quinn yelled for Art and Dave to get down just as glass shattered and Dave was thrown back, writhing on the floor, smearing the concrete with blood. Quinn ran for the deputy, ripping off his jacket and pressing it to the shoulder wound, as Lillie lifted up her weapon and fired six times.
The automatic weapon was silenced.
Kenny crawled to where Quinn lay with Dave flat on his back, white-faced. Quinn pressed hard on the wound, Kenny now telling Mary Alice they had an officer down and they needed medical help to roll with the cops coming over from Pontotoc and Lee County.
“How many shots you got left?” Quinn asked.
“Don’t ask,” Lillie said, “unless you want to walk out to the truck for my tac bag.”
“They get an inch closer and shoot them,” Quinn said. “Art?”
Art had his Glock leveled out the broken window, the cold air battering the ragged blinds against the wall. Nearby, Confederate and Nazi flags fluttered from the ceiling. Dave was clenching his jaw, body convulsing, breathing slowed.
“They’re inching around,” Art said. “Lillie?”
Lillie fired just once.
“Nope,” Art said. “That shit’s stopped.”
Dave was conscious but in shock, Quinn’s jacket was a bright red and he wished like hell he’d brought some QuikClot. The pressure, depending on the wound, would only help for so long.
Someone was pushing against the back door and hitting the cigarette machine. Ike McCaslin fired into the open space. The pushing stopped.
“How’d they know?” Lillie said. “How’d they fucking know?”
LeDoux was still laughing where they’d left him. Lillie told him to shut the fuck up or she’d kick him right in the throat. The other two boys were silent, tossed together in a trash pile by the bar. “Y’all are dead,” he said. “Don’t you see it?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lillie said, “or I’ll shoot your ass right now. You hear me?”
She turned the rifle on LeDoux to make her point. Quinn had made his way to the window, checking out the bikers hiding behind the county vehicles at the tree line. Dave was bleeding out on the floor while help from the other counties was a long time coming.
Quinn peered out again as four more shots cracked off, breaking out more glass.
He walked back to where Dave lay. Lillie exchanging more shots. Even if they could get most of them, it was a long walk back to Jericho. More wind whistled through the busted windows. The old clubhouse felt hollow.
“Sheriff!” a man yelled from out by his truck. “You hear me?”
Quinn looked back over to Lillie.
“They got you,” LeDoux said. “They fucking got you.”
Lillie walked up to LeDoux and kicked him hard in the side. He yelped but laughed at the same time.
Outside, beyond the vehicles, stood a muscular bald man with a tattooed face. He held an AR-15 aimed at the clubhouse. “Send out Chains,” he said, “and we won’t finish y’all off. Y’all got about sixty seconds.”
Quinn turned to Lillie and handed her the weapon. The pushing was starting again on the back door, the cigarette machine skidding on the dirty floor. The AR-15 scattered bullets across the front of the clubhouse. From the edge of the window, he could see four, five, eight men, at different vantage points.
God damn, everything was so quiet.
So quiet until they heard the revving of a big car engine rolling straight down dirt road. Quinn could just make out the early-morning light glimmering off the windshield as it barreled straight for the gauntlet of Harleys and the clubhouse. The engine gunned harder as it approached the bikes and ran right through them, scattering some and rolling over others. It was a big car, a black SUV. It skidded to a stop sideways and a figure in a black ski mask holding an automatic weapon similar to the bald man’s opened fire.
He shot several bikers, taking out the big man with the bald head first, the bald man firing off a couple shots before the bullets hit him in the center mass and left him sprawling. The other bikers behind the cruisers started to run instead of staying with their cover. More shots from the man in the mask and they were down, too.
Quinn ran to the back door to help Ike and Art move the cigarette machine. Lillie was now providing cover for the man in the ski mask, whoever he was, while Kenny kept the compress on Dave’s shoulder.
Art shot a skinny bearded man who raised a shotgun to them. As they rounded the corner of the clubhouse, there was a stillness on the lake. The shooter ran back toward the black Suburban and drove off just as fast he’d ridden in. The ducks and geese that had scattered at the gunshots landed back on Choctaw Lake. The birds started chirping again.
The bikers who were left walked from the woods with hands raised. Quinn could hear an ambulance siren.
I believe about everyone I know is pissed at me,” Quinn said five weeks later, sitting on the farmhouse porch with Ophelia Bundren. It was a warm morning, grass was turning green
again, trees beginning to leaf, and out in the pasture three new calves had been born. They nudged up under their mothers, nursing, knee-deep in mud.
“I’m not pissed at you.”
“My momma won’t speak to me on account of me talking to my dad,” Quinn said. “Caddy and I have a strong difference of opinion on a great many things, most of all our dad. You know that’s why she moved out?”
“She moved out because she found a house to rent near The River,” Ophelia said, sitting on an old metal chair beside Quinn. “Y’all need your own lives. And privacy.”
They’d finished an early breakfast, blue and green Fiesta plates, cleaned of biscuits and country ham, sitting on top of an old whiskey barrel.
“I miss Jason.”
“I know you do,” Ophelia said, reaching out touching Quinn’s hand. “But he didn’t move to China. Y’all went fishing yesterday.”
“I still can’t believe Jean won’t talk to me,” Quinn said. “She knows how important it is to do this the right way.”
“It’s the honorable thing to do,” Ophelia said, “she understands that. She just doesn’t know why you’re taking your father.”
“But you do,” Quinn said, reaching for an Arturo Fuente and getting it going with the stainless Zippo, clicking it closed. It would be his last smoke for a bit, a long time on the road ahead, eleven hours’ straight drive to the long-dead soldier’s hometown in Statesville, North Carolina. There would be a proper burial there. He’d been Army, 196th Infantry, a sergeant like Quinn. Quinn and Ophelia had talked a while about the man, what they knew, and some about how he’d died.
“Why’d he come to Jericho?”
“He’d met a woman,” Quinn said. “He’d been part of the last combat brigade to leave Vietnam and came home not the way he left. I’m not really clear on all he did, but I know from his family he saw a lot of action.”
“They seem like nice people,” Ophelia said. “When we got the dental records match, I was on the phone with his sister for nearly an hour. His parents are dead. The siblings lost touch with him for nearly two years before he wound up here. He just kind of roamed the country, I guess.”