by Ace Atkins
“You said you saw bloody clothes in a burn pile out back?”
“I don’t really know what I saw,” Pratt said. “Sorry to trouble you.”
“I was over in Parsham County this morning,” Quinn said. “The sheriff over there found Miss Byrd’s Nissan left abandoned on a back road. You know anything about that?”
“No, sir,” Pratt said. “But it sure as hell sounds like Gina is drinking again. Lord. She promised me a thousand times she was through with all that mess. I’m sure you know how low things got for Gina at one point in her life. Said if wasn’t for Jesus Christ Himself on the mainline, she wouldn’t be here today.”
“You told Deputy Caruthers that you thought she might be hurt,” Quinn said. “And you believed she’d been in some kind of fight with her daughter?”
“I don’t know about all that,” Pratt said. “Sorry to have worried y’all, but I need to get back to work. We’re two days late taking inventory on the merlots. Damn Christmastime about cleaned me out. Wonder how y’all did without a decent liquor store here in Tibbehah County all these years.”
Quinn studied Chester Pratt’s face. The man had been sweating, eyes bloodshot. His breath smelled like bourbon and breath mints. Pratt kept his hands on his waist and continued to nod, buzzing with the high energy of someone who wanted to break free of a situation or was in a bad way to get to a bathroom. Quinn scratched at his cheek and smiled. “Just a few more questions, Mr. Pratt.”
“Okay, then,” he said, rubbing his unshaven jaw. “Yes, sir. Whatever y’all need. However I can help.”
“When’s the last time you saw Gina?” Quinn asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe four, five days ago.”
“And where was that, sir?”
“She came over to my house for supper,” Pratt said. “I cooked two T-bones and made some twice-baked potatoes. We sat around and watched one of those movies she liked. Something about these two old geezers holed up in a nursing home telling stories to each other. You had to go through a bunch of shit and flashbacks just to learn that those two very people were husband and wife but were too far gone to know they were talking about themselves. It sure made Gina cry. But I didn’t care for it at all. I prefer a little more action and adventure in my stories.”
“Have y’all been having any trouble?”
“You mean fighting?” Pratt said. “No, sir. That’s not my style. My ex-wives may not like me anymore but they can never say I wasn’t any fun. Kind of hard to yell at each other during one of those weepy-ass movies. Just so you know and not for public consumption, but Miss Byrd stayed the night and we did have intimate relations.”
“Good for you,” Quinn said. “And did you speak to her after that?”
“Once or twice,” Pratt said. “Didn’t think too much of it. She’d gone over to some craft store in Tupelo. You know she’s been working over at that flower shop in town? DG’s Creations. She’s been making these fancy painted door hangings for Miss Donna Grace. I got one right there on my front door. See that wood and glitter thing that says Hotty Toddy? That woman sure had more than one talent.”
Pratt patted a little rhythm on his thighs, jangling at the keys in his pocket, and rocking up and down on his front toes. “I hope I’m not in any trouble,” he said. “When I called, I may have been drinking just a little. Sampling my own product. Maybe I was a little hurt she might’ve run off with a new man after we shared that romantic dinner at my house.”
“Watching sad movies and eating those T-bones?”
“Yes, sir,” Pratt said, grinning. “Sure was a special date. Set out candles by the hot tub and everything. I guess I’m just a romantic old fool.”
“Any idea who this mysterious other man might be?”
“You’re gonna have to ask Gina Byrd that question,” Pratt said. “Or maybe one of her girlfriends.”
“You have some names to check with?”
“Oh, hell,” Pratt said. “I don’t know. Miss Donna Grace. Diane Tull at the feed and seed. I think she kept in touch with Lillie Virgil. Did you know she’s now a damn U.S. Marshal?”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “Might’ve heard something about that.”
“Now that’s a nasty woman right there,” Pratt said. “She once pulled me over for speeding and gave me a talking-to with words I never heard coming out of a white woman’s mouth. She actually called me a rich, spoiled son of a bitch and to slow down or she’d put me in hot pants and send me along Highway 49 to pick up trash. I figure she was trying to tell me that truckers might get a real kick out of it.”
Quinn stood there and waited, not saying another word, letting Pratt fill in the silences and maybe offer a better explanation of why he had been so worried about Gina Byrd. Quinn didn’t know much, but he was pretty sure there wasn’t any mysterious boyfriend who took her away from the fast-paced life in Tibbehah County to race tricked-out Mules down in Louisiana.
“Don’t know what to tell you, Sheriff,” Pratt said. “I guess I’d figured Gina had gotten herself straight. That she’d gotten too old to put on a bikini and race around the mud. Damn if I don’t feel stupid as hell. I’ve been married three times and had more women than I can count to cheat on me. I’ve always been the trusting type. I figure when relations happen between a man and a woman that they got some kind of special bond. You know what I’m saying, Sheriff?”
“Have you tried calling her?” Quinn said.
“So many times my fingers’re nearly worn out,” he said. “Want to see my cell phone?”
Pratt reached into his pocket without being asked, thumbed through the Samsung and showed a screen with forty-nine calls to the same number and name. gina. Quinn looked at it and nodded, his own phone buzzing on his hip and showing a familiar number. He held up a hand to Pratt, stepped back toward his truck, and took the call.
“Some bad shit’s going down in Parsham County,” Boom Kimbrough said. “I came down to get Gina Byrd’s Nissan and had to help that sheriff out of some booger woods junkyard after he fired a shot at me. I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody will tell me nothing. But the county coroner showed up, along with three more deputies and a news van out of Tupelo.”
“Roger that,” Quinn said. “Headed your way.”
Quinn turned to Chester Pratt and said they’d have to continue the conversation later.
“Everything okay out there, Sheriff?” Pratt asked.
Quinn nodded and climbed into the Big Green Machine, heading back to Parsham County.
* * *
* * *
“Something’s a-matter,” Holly Harkins said.
“Nope,” TJ said. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.”
“Bull W. Shit,” Holly said. “Friends don’t lie to friends. If something’s bothering you, you better damn well spill it.”
TJ drove Holly’s mom’s beat-up Dodge minivan along Jericho Road headed toward Choctaw Lake, where Holly worked two nights a week at the Captain’s Table fish camp. She’d serve up fried catfish and hush puppies until ten o’clock when she’d come out of that cinder-block restaurant smelling like grease and nicotine. The poor girl had to wash her hair twice with Suave rosemary and mint shampoo to remove the stink.
“Why do you think something’s a-matter?” TJ asked.
“Hell,” Holly said, popping her bubble gum and watching the winter landscape roll by. Nothing but bare branches, dead weeds, and gray skies. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve been your best friend since third grade.”
“I thought you’d been my best friend since kindergarten.”
“We met in kindergarten,” Holly said. “But I didn’t really trust you until third grade. That’s when you stuck up for me with that Harris boy that kept on looking under my skirt on the monkey bars. I still can’t believe you put a dog turd in his lunch box.”
“Power Rangers,” TJ said, grinning.
“The look on his damn face. It was worth it. Wasn’t it?”
“You are a damn trip, TJ Byrd,” Holly said.
TJ took the old minivan up to seventy, after passing a sheriff’s deputy headed back the opposite way into town. TJ popped an AC/DC CD into the stereo, blasting “Highway to Hell” through the one speaker working up front. She planned to kick around the lake a little after she dropped off Holly, Ladarius saying he might join her to smoke a joint, maybe shoot some rats that gathered behind the dumpsters. She was down for whatever he wanted after he’d come up with the two hundred dollars she needed bad. That would be enough to keep the lights on at their trailer and pick up some groceries at the Dollar General for her and John Wesley.
“You’re quiet,” Holly said, brown hair scattering across her chubby, freckled face. She had on her sky blue Captain’s Table tee with Matthew 4:18 printed on it. “When you’re quiet, it means you’re thinking hard about something.”
“I’m just zoning out,” TJ said. “I ain’t thinking about nothing.”
“If you can’t talk about it with me, who can you talk with?” Holly said. “Ladarius? You really think you can trust that boy? Because I’m not so sure, TJ. I’ve been hearing some stories about him and that Rhonda Price. Something about those Sonic waitresses on roller skates just makes boys crazy.”
“Ladarius doesn’t give a damn about Rhonda Price or her fuckin’ roller skates.”
“Well, I’d watch my back if I were you,” Holly said. “You know that character Hot Stuff? That cute little devil that wears a diaper and carries a pitchfork? I heard that Rhonda Price got a tattoo of Hot Stuff right inside her left leg. I’ll let you study on the meaning of that.”
“I said I don’t give a damn about Rhonda Price,” TJ said. “Or if Ladarius hooked up with her. Or about some trashy devil tattoo near her cooter. I got lots bigger problems. Sheriff’s giving me hell. Momma’s gone missing. And I got to get to the Dollar General to get John Wesley’s fucking Cap’n Crunch.”
“You shouldn’t feed John Wesley that shit.”
“Holly.”
“Yeah?”
“You asked me what’s the matter,” TJ said. “And now I’m damn well trying to tell you.”
“Why’s the sheriff giving you trouble?”
“Why do you think?” TJ said. “Fucking Chester Pratt thinks I know where Momma has gone. But I know he’s just trying to make trouble for me because he doesn’t want to pay what I’m owed.”
“Where is your momma?” Holly said. “She’s not really down in Louisiana mud riding with some new man.”
“Do you really want to know?” TJ said. “ ’Cause if I tell you, that means you’re in it. You are damn well involved.”
“What happened, TJ?”
“You promise not to tell?” TJ said, slowing down in the final stretch of Jericho Road, the hills softening and the flat shimmer of Choctaw Lake coming up into view. It was late afternoon but had already grown dark this far out in the country, shadowed by tall pines and leafless trees, little cypress stumps poking up from around the shore. TJ drove to the crushed gravel lot around the Captain’s Table and parked far off from the other cars. She let down a side window, cold air rushing in, and fished out the pack of Kools. Say what you will about Ladarius McCade, but that boy comes in like a Marvel superhero in a pinch. What he did the other night, helping her clean up that mess and make things right. Damn. That’s a man in TJ Byrd’s book.
“Something bad happened, Holly,” TJ said.
“How bad?”
“Real bad,” TJ said. “So much blood that it took me almost an hour to clean up the mess.”
* * *
* * *
Quinn rolled up on the scene in Parsham County at 1700 hours. It was getting darker and colder fast, a light rain hitting the windshield as he reached for his shiny green sheriff’s office jacket with the Sherpa collar. Boom was hanging by his tow truck, the flashing lights of six cruisers and two ambulances flickering across the narrow dirt road. Quinn plugged a cigar into his mouth and surveyed the scene, glad whatever was happening wasn’t in Tibbehah County.
“Weren’t we supposed to have dinner with your momma?” Boom asked.
“We were.”
“Did Miss Jean tell you what she was making?”
“Salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes, and English peas.”
“Gravy?”
“You know it.”
“Damn,” Boom said. “Now we’re freezing our nuts off over in Parsham County. How you like that?”
“I got some coffee,” Quinn said.
“And I see you brought Hondo.”
Quinn looked back to his truck, Hondo sitting up tall in the passenger seat, tongue hanging loose, calm and cool with all the activity going on around him. Quinn walked back to the truck, patted the dog’s head, grabbed his thermos, and poured coffee into the silver cup.
“What are you hearing?”
“Dead body down in that ditch,” Boom said. “That fat sheriff nearly shit his pants after seeing whatever he seen. Fired a shot when I first drove up. I think my prosthetic must’ve scared him.”
“Lovemaiden has had murders before,” Quinn said. “Need I remind you we are in Parsham County?”
“Yeah,” Boom said. “I got the feeling that Sheriff Lovemaiden doesn’t have many people of color working for him.”
“Maybe they’re on a different shift.”
“Yeah, right,” Boom said. “That must be it.”
Boom stood tall in gray coveralls and work boots with an old blue Carhartt hoodie up over a CAT trucker’s cap. He was a big man, six-foot-five and more than two-fifty. The right side of his face still showed the scars, across his cheek and down into his brushy black beard, from when his Hummer had hit an IED outside Fallujah, sending him and two other Guardsmen flying into the air. Boom lost his right arm while his buddies lost their lives. He seldom talked about it, making his way with a shiny silver hook and sometimes with a modern prosthetic that could be outfitted with a variety of screwdrivers and ratchets for his work as a mechanic.
Since they both returned from the service, Quinn and Boom had faced white supremacists, the Dixie Mafia, and even a damn tornado as they tried to clean up their own backyard in Tibbehah. They shared the same sense of justice to help make their home a better place. Not a vision of what had been but what could be. Quinn only wished Boom could be working as one of his deputies instead of fixing engines at the County Barn. It was more about his police record than his disability. Boom had more than a few run-ins with the law after his discharge. Assault. Drunk and disorderly. Vandalism of public property. Boom went through what he called a “period of readjustment.”
“They won’t let me take the car,” Boom said. “Not now.”
“I figured,” Quinn said. “Where’s Lovemaiden?”
Boom lifted his chin down the road where several deputies had gathered in a semicircle. Quinn couldn’t quite make out Lovemaiden but started walking up the gravel road in that direction. A few of the deputies looked his way and sussed him out. Quinn knew a hundred white men just like them, lean-faced and dark-eyed, slow with a greeting, only a flicker of acknowledgment as he got closer. Too tough or too stupid to acknowledge him. Soon the circle broke up and Lovemaiden was there, hands on his hips, stomach hanging loose, and looking straight down at Quinn. The man didn’t look good, his face drained of color and eyes bloodshot.
“What did you hear?” Lovemaiden said.
“Heard you might’ve found something.”
“Goddamn right,” Lovemaiden said. “I ain’t never in my life seen something like it. What’s down in that ditch wasn’t never meant to be found. Doesn’t even look human.”
“Gina Byrd?”
“If you say so,” Lovemaiden said. “Not a lot left of whatever it was. You’re welcome to take a look.”
> “Want to come with me?” Quinn said.
Lovemaiden just stared at Quinn, lifting the Styrofoam cup to his lips and spitting. He didn’t nod or answer in any way but followed Quinn toward the hillside. Crime scene tape had been strung up on the ridge overlooking a narrow ditch filled with garbage and rusting metal. Quinn lifted the tape and walked down into the gully lit by bright work lamps like you’d find around a construction site, powered by a generator that hummed down in the ditch. Two deputies waited in the crevice, sitting on top of a junked pickup truck. One of them got up when he saw Lovemaiden and helped lift up another stretch of tape, Lovemaiden making great effort to bend under it and walk toward a group of blue plastic barrels.
“If it hadn’t been for the buzzards, I wouldn’t have seen it.”
A silver tarp had been spread over whatever it was that Lovemaiden wanted him to see.
“Sure you ready for this?” Lovemaiden said. “This shit’s on me now. Ain’t no medals for keeping this in your head, Ranger.”
Quinn nodded. He knew he’d seen lots worse, having once used a trowel and his hands to rescue the bodies of American soldiers hastily buried behind a hospital in Nasiriya. That had been almost twenty years ago, but the smell of it and the way those bodies had come apart in his hands was something that would never leave him.
Lovemaiden just stared at him, a most unpleasant look on his face. He spit into the cup again and grunted as he reached down and pulled up the tarp. Quinn turned on his Maglite and shined it onto the trash and weeds, seeing something that he couldn’t quite describe spilled out of a blue plastic barrel. The smell of it was almost as bad as those bodies he’d helped uncover years ago, only mixed in with the very strong odor of bleach.
“Whoever done this didn’t want it found,” Lovemaiden said. “Figured that bleach would eat everything down to the damn bone.”
“How long has it been down here?”
“You know the damn deal, Quinn,” Lovemaiden said and let go of the tarp. “Ain’t no such thing as no goddamn CSI North Mississippi. I got state folks rolling over from Batesville to see if they can put this jigsaw puzzle back together. But sure. I hear you. Don’t take much to note the proximity of that blue Nissan of your missing woman and this goddamn mess. How long has your woman been gone?”