by Ace Atkins
“They invited us to the funeral.”
“Do they know about your father, his connection to all this?”
Quinn shook his head, ashed his cigar, looked out in the greening pasture, listening to the birds and the cow gently moaning out toward the creek. “But he wants to tell them,” Quinn said. “It’s important to him. He needs it.”
“Your momma said he’ll take off before the trial,” Ophelia said, squeezing Quinn’s hand again. She was wearing one of his old gray Army T-shirts, her bare legs pushed up under the shirt and against her chest.
“Jean and I have some strong opinions on that,” Quinn said. “She always gave me the simple explanation of why he left. Turns out that wasn’t true. It was a hell of a lot more complicated.”
“But he could have come back,” Ophelia said. “LeDoux’s been in jail for twenty years.”
“It’s a long way to North Carolina and back. Plenty of time to hear his side.”
“So you’ll give him a chance?” Ophelia asked. She smiled at him, looking hopeful and young with no makeup, hair in a ponytail. She looked all of eighteen, not a woman who exhumed bodies and X-rayed skulls and dealt with the dead on a daily basis and really enjoyed her work.
“I appreciate you,” Quinn said. “You did good.”
“You, too.”
“Does that mean I have your vote?” Quinn said. “Might be my only one.”
“How about we go back into the house and I’ll let you know.”
Quinn smiled, put down the smoldering cigar, and they walked back inside, leaving the front door wide open.
• • •
“I have to admit I’m getting a little tired of looking at pictures of killers and rapists every other day,” Diane Tull said, driving her old truck, windows down, engine knocking a little. Caddy Colson sat beside her, after making a run down to The River with five sacks of 13-13-13 fertilizer to jump-start their spring garden.
“Lillie said it might take a while,” Caddy said. “She said you’ve already looked at nearly a thousand.”
“Or more,” Diane said. “You know what it’s like to clutter up your mind with those folks?”
Caddy didn’t say anything. And just as soon as it was out of her mouth, Diane wished she hadn’t said it.
Caddy’s car had broken down, again, and she needed some help running a few errands, now wanting to go with Diane to the sheriff’s office. She said she’d like to offer some support, but Diane knew she just wanted to see Quinn, let him know all was well with Jason, their new home, and improvements out at the church.
“What if you never find out?”
“I’ve lived my life never letting that man take a day from me,” Diane said. “That won’t change. I think about Lori Stillwell every day. I don’t think about that man.”
Caddy pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office, Lillie waiting inside the conference room. She had several thick books out on the table. They looked old and well-worn. “I have some more photos on my laptop,” she said. “But these weren’t in the database. I got these from Alabama Department of Corrections.”
Diane took a deep breath, removed her purse from her shoulder, and sat at the table. Caddy asked Lillie if Quinn had been in yet.
“Haven’t seen him,” Lillie said. “We’re both working days, but he said he had some business needing tending to.”
Diane flipped through the book, page by page, looking at each photo, studying and dismissing them, one by one. She tried not to look at the list of convictions below each picture, as Lillie had sorted them by the most likely possibilites from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Similar crimes, similar assaults on young girls. My Lord, there were a lot.
“Have we exhausted Mississippi?” Diane said, brushing back that gray streak from her eyes.
“Yep,” Lillie said. “I think we flushed that toilet. And Louisiana, too. I would have thought for sure that this piece of shit would have floated upriver.”
Diane got through a dozen, two dozen, photos of many men, most of whom had been housed at Kilby Prison. Lillie brought her some coffee, Caddy sticking around, waiting for Quinn, talking in whispers about raising children, the new Walmart being built, and some kind of reality show they’d been watching. Diane drank the coffee and checked the time. Carl was running things at the Farm & Ranch, but she needed to get on soon. He wasn’t the best on the cash register.
She was halfway through the book, about to quit for the day, jumping two pages ahead, but then something made her flip back. She looked at the mug shot of a man convicted and sentenced in 1980. There was something in the eyes and the self-satisfied grin. And he had those scarred marks on his face. She kept the page open, thinking back to Jericho Road and that slow-moving black Monte Carlo. The way he had snatched her hair, Lori’s weeping, being pushed to the ground. Humiliated. “Run,” the man had said. “Run.”
Lillie was standing over her shoulder. Caddy had walked off to talk to Mary Alice at the front desk.
“Look at that ugly son of a bitch,” Lillie said. “Jesus, I hate to put you through all this. That may be the ugliest one I’ve seen.”
She reached over Diane’s shoulder, Diane unable to take her eyes away from the photo, Lillie’s finger finding details of the man printed out on old-time typewriter. “Got burned up in a prison fire in ’83,” she said. “I bet it was another prisoner tossing gas on him in the cage. Damn, what a way to go.”
• • •
Quinn drove north on the Natchez Trace and stopped off at the green rolling mounds built by the Natives about a thousand years after Christ. He parked his truck, a loaner, as the Big Green Machine was still with Boom. It required a lot of body work, repainting, and a brand-new door on the passenger side. He got out and stretched, walking to the sheltered picnic tables looking out on the three mounds. The cigar he’d started that morning with Ophelia was in his pocket and he lit up, sitting there on top of the picnic table, staring out at the biggest of the mounds, knowing it had been some kind of ceremonial center or residence of someone of high rank in the tribe. He’d seen some artists’ renderings, way back when he was in school, of some kind of wooden hut perched up high, a holy man speaking to the masses.
Quinn blew out a long stream of smoke, thinking of the warriors back then, all that was left of them buried in those mounds. Long, pointed arrowheads and rocks used for killing. The leader had lived on the bodies of those men and their weapons, standing tall, offering up plans, ideas that would turn to shit in about five hundred years with the white man.
Quinn had smoked down to the cigar band when the big black Suburban drove up and parked beside his truck. The man who walked behind Stagg, Ringold, hopped out from behind the wheel and approached the picnic table. It was a soft, gray day. A light rain had fallen earlier and looked as if it would fall again. Everything was so bright and green, the air charged with gentle warmness that would last a couple months and then turn to an unbearable heat that would bake the streets of Jericho.
“There must’ve been some incredible battles,” Ringold said.
“You know it.”
“Never written,” he said, “never known. Just those old bones and bits of sharpened rock.”
Quinn nodded, tearing the band from the cigar, smoking it down to the nub. Ringold had on a black T-shirt, jeans, and desert boots. The completeness and color of his sleeve tattoos coming right to his wrists, hands clear as per Army regulation.
“You know what I have a hard time with?” Ringold said.
“Being around Stagg?”
“After the service,” he said, “I had a hell of a hard time slowing down.”
“You call what you do slowing down?” Quinn said. “Being a Fed isn’t exactly selling women’s shoes.”
“It ain’t jumping into Kandahar,” Ringold said.
“Nope.”
“You fucking Rangers,” Ringold said, “y’all would rather blow shit up and leave it all in pieces on the ground than try a little finesse.”
Quinn tossed down the cigar, stood, and ground it out with the toe of his cowboy boot. “That what you were doing with those bikers out at Choctaw?”
“You complaining?”
“No, sir.”
Ringold smiled. “I wanted to let you know, all that shit with the local DA has gone away,” he said. “All charges have been dropped. AG has been informed of what you got facing you and some real problems within the highway patrol.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Stagg called it,” Ringold said. “I heard it straight from the hospital bed.”
Quinn nodded. “Appreciate you letting me know,” he said. “Can’t force this election, but we’ll see if I’m still around to do anything about it.”
“You’ll be around,” Ringold said, nodding. “Stagg thinks you’re in his pocket. He’s adding five grand to your reelection campaign.”
“Which I’ll send back,” Quinn said.
“Keep it,” Ringold said, his jaws clenched. Medium height, compact, and muscled. His bald head and black beard made him look like some kind of wild priest. “You want him to think he’s protected.”
Quinn nodded. They both turned and walked back to their vehicles. A light mist had started to fall. A thin white sun burned hot through some ragged clouds.
“We got a lot of work ahead,” Ringold said. “Stagg’s got some big plans for this county.”
Quinn nodded. He shook Ringold’s hand and the men drove off in opposite directions on the Trace.
• • •
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