The Shameless

by Ace Atkins

  The sun was white hot when they hit the blacktop. Across the lot, the driver’s side of the little red truck jacked open and the sawed-off little creep walked toward them. He wore a sleeveless work shirt over a white undershirt. Quinn spotted the butt of a handgun.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”

  “Get in my truck,” Quinn said, reaching for his .45. “This won’t take long.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Bradley Wayne said.

  “Damn, Bradley Wayne,” Quinn said. “Sorry about your lack of schooling. This silver star on my chest give you any indication?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Skinner stared down into the sanctuary as E. J. Royce ambled up the skinny staircase behind the choir loft to the baptism room of Jericho First Baptist. Royce didn’t say a word as he walked over to the big porcelain tub to fire up a cigarette. The man having no class, no sense of propriety, acting the way he did, thumbing his nose at convention and at Christ Almighty Himself. “Hell of a place for a meeting,” E. J. Royce said. “Smells like an old woman’s coot.”

  “You shouldn’t smoke in here.”

  “Why?” Royce said, grinning. “You gonna tell the pastor?”

  “Put it out.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Skinner,” Royce said. “I aims to please.”

  “Let’s get this done and over with.”

  “Didn’t figure you brought me here to save my soul,” Royce said, spewing smoke from his nostrils and then tossing the cigarette into the empty baptism bathtub. “I figured you had me come here because the good Reverend Traylor lets you do as you please. You really have your own key?”

  “I’m a church deacon.”

  “Goddamn,” Royce said. “Ain’t that something? So this is where a man gets born again.”

  Skinner gripped his Stetson tighter in his hands, nearly crushing the crown. His eyes began to water from the cloud of smoke, mixing with all those good church smells of old hymnals and burnt candles and such. During the Christmas season, they’d fill the tank with a tower of poinsettias, the prettiest dang thing he’d seen in his life.

  “Maybe you should try it, Royce.”

  “Oh, hell,” Royce said. “I been saved so many fucking times, I can’t even recall. This tank’s a mite better than Sarter Creek, where they damn near drowned me when I was a kid. All that ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ bullshit. The last time I got saved was by my whore wife who done run off with the mailman.”

  “Don’t know about all that,” Skinner said. “Where I come from, a man’s only saved once.”

  Skinner heard a creak out in the sanctuary, stopped for a moment, and lifted his finger to his lips. He walked from shadow into the light, over where the choir usually stood and the pulpit. He didn’t see anything and turned back to Royce, as much as it pained him to be in the profane man’s presence. But every man had a place in God’s toolkit. God love him, Royce had his place just as much as Skinner.

  “What’d those New York women say?”

  “What’d you mean what’d they say?” Royce said. “I was the one doing the talking.”

  “And you told them?”

  “Damn, Skinner,” Royce said. “We done worked all this shit already. They run out on me the first time. But I said my piece the second go-round. And they sure as shit listened. You trying to screw me over what I’m owed?”

  “No, sir,” Skinner said, swallowing, stepping back from the sunlight filling the sanctuary from the skylights and filtering through the stained-glass windows. “I don’t doubt you do as you’re told. You’ve always been a faithful servant to this county.”

  “Servant?” Royce said. “Christ Almighty. Where’s the fucking money?”

  Skinner reached into the square pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He counted out the cash, lifting his eyes to Royce halfway through, the rangy old man licking his lips. “Wait until five minutes after I leave,” Skinner said. “And then you can go, too.”

  “Wouldn’t want no one to see us together,” Royce said. “It’d really make those other Baptists shit their drawers.”

  Skinner took a long breath and turned toward the skinny little staircase, his tall frame having to bend down to get through the low opening. As he left, he heard the pop of a match and looked back to see the bright flame against Royce’s whiskered old face.

  Royce winked at him and began to laugh.

  * * *

  * * *

  “How dumb would you have to be not to know you’re the sheriff?” Maggie asked. “It says it right there on your sleeve.”

  “I ran Bradley Wayne Guthrie’s record after I arrested him,” Quinn said. “Not too bright. The .44 he carried in his saggy-ass pants was stolen from a chicken hauler over in Yalobusha County. He had warrants on him in Lafayette and Union counties for check fraud and stealing propane. Looks like his only means of income was what Dana Ray brought home in her panties every night from Vienna’s.”

  “I hate that place,” Maggie said. “I wish y’all would just tear it down.”

  They sat across from each other in a booth at the El Dorado Mexican restaurant, Brandon beside Maggie still dressed in his football pants and cleats. Under his pads, he’d worn a T-shirt adorned with a T. rex trying to pick up a hamburger with its short arms. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

  “That place, in some form or another, has been around for more than twenty years,” Quinn said. “I don’t think they’ll ever get rid of it. No matter what the supervisors say, it just brings in too much money to the county.”

  “Can’t you shut it down?” Maggie asked.

  “All I can do is enforce the laws,” Quinn said. “Dancers have to answer to a certain dress code or else Fannie loses her liquor license. Sometimes we check to make sure the dancers have on their G-strings.”

  “What’s a G-string?” Brandon asked, his blond hair wild and his face flushed from being outside in the sun all morning.

  “It’s underwear about as wide as dental floss,” Maggie said.

  “Ouch,” Brandon said.

  “You got that right,” Maggie said.

  Brandon made a face and dug into the chips, Quinn thinking back on the lie E. J. Royce had repeated about the standards at the El Dorado, a rat jumping out and scurrying back to the kitchen. Had to have been some bad blood between him and Javier, Royce claiming Javier had brought the Cartel to Tibbehah County some years ago. There had been some activity, but it didn’t have a damn thing to do with Javier, a hardworking good man who kept his restaurant running on the town square back when everything else left. The Cartel had come to town at the invitation of Quinn’s childhood buddy Donnie Varner. Donnie, now in prison, wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  Javier brought them big plates of food, carne asada for Quinn, a veggie burrito for Maggie, and a plate of beef tacos for Brandon. Just as Quinn began to eat, he watched Tashi Coleman walk in the restaurant and head toward their table. He had a stack of notes from Cleotha to call Tashi back, but it had been a busy morning. Steam floated up off the tortillas, a roasted jalapeño at the edge of his refried beans.

  “Shit,” Quinn said.

  Brandon looked up with a grin. He loved to hear Quinn cuss because he so seldom did. Quinn left that to the bad guys and Lillie Virgil, Lillie being a master at the art of cussing.

  “I left you five messages at the sheriff’s office,” Tashi Coleman said. “When I drove by, I saw your truck and decided to take a chance.”

  “Maggie,” Quinn said. “You know Tashi Coleman?”

  Maggie nodded. She’d done two interviews with Coleman since the crew had come down from New York. Maggie said she actually kind of liked the women and greatly admired what they were trying to do. Quinn didn’t ask her much more about it, letting it be Maggie’s personal deal, doing what she could about Brandon Taylo
r’s death.

  “I wouldn’t bother you if this wasn’t important.”

  “We still don’t have an ID on the body,” Quinn said. “State sometimes takes months. I’ll call you when I hear something.”

  “Finding that body at the Pennington property brings up a lot of questions.”

  “And I’ll answer them when or if I know more.”

  “How in the world did you even know it was there?”

  Quinn looked over at Maggie and then pointed to the empty spot beside him. “Have you eaten?” Quinn said. “Javier has carnitas with chile verde today. It’s hard to beat.”

  “Can we speak in private?” Tashi said. “Just for a moment?”

  “Will you be recording it?”

  “We always record what we do,” she said. “But not here. With your family. I’m not here to make trouble, Sheriff Colson.”

  Quinn turned to Maggie and she shrugged. Quinn knew she wanted him to help these women. This whole Brandon Taylor thing was causing some friction in the Colson household. Tashi Coleman had asked Maggie about him and Brandon having a falling-out in high school, which surprised him. The truth was Quinn barely knew the kid.

  Quinn slid out of the booth. “Ask Javier for some tinfoil and some hot sauce.”

  “Sorry about your lunch,” Tashi said. “This won’t take long.”

  Quinn followed her out of the El Dorado to where she’d parked a little Toyota. Her friend Jessica sat on the hood and handed Tashi the big microphone they carried around everywhere they went in Jericho.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you guys win?” Tashi asked, smiling. She sat down beside Jessica on the hood of the car. Everyone was all smiles and friendly.

  “Brandon’s team got beat forty-three to thirteen,” Quinn said.

  “How old is Brandon?” Jessica said.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Quinn said, “but my carne asada’s getting cold.”

  Tashi crossed her arms over her chest, looking a little nervous behind the thick black glasses, biting her upper lip. “OK,” she said. “How did you know where to dig?”

  “It’s an open investigation.”

  “Could the body be from the time Brandon went missing?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “How old’s the body?” Tashi said. “And when was the victim killed?”

  “Body was of a young woman,” Quinn said. “We can’t be sure yet how long it was down there.”

  “Are we talking the Civil War or modern times?”

  “I can’t talk about all that now,” he said. “You need to understand why we keep an open investigation closed to the public. It’s not on account of being secretive.”

  Tashi held the mic in her hand. It was an odd-looking thing, about as big as a softball and covered with fuzz. Jessica stood up by the curb, arms wrapped around her waist, her blue hair looking washed out and dark at the roots. Quinn smiled at them, waiting for them to get what they needed so he could finish his damn lunch.

  “Is that it?” Quinn asked.

  “You’re a big hunter. Right?”

  “Easier to tell you who doesn’t hunt around here than who does.”

  “And you’ve been hunting since you were Brandon’s age?”

  “Younger,” Quinn said. Jessica pulled the blue hair from her eyes and stared at Quinn as he stood close to their car. She wasn’t worried. She looked hungry and eager. Quinn tried to count all the piercings in her left ear but quit at eight.

  “Did you ever hunt on the land where you found the body?” Tashi asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Never?” Jessica asked. “You got in trouble for hunting on private land before. Right? Even back when you were a little kid.”

  Quinn nodded, believing he knew where they were headed with this. The time back in the Big Woods when he was lost, at only ten years old. Something he never liked to discuss except with Caddy, because she was the only other person alive who knew the truth. “I didn’t pay much attention to boundaries as a kid,” Quinn said. “And, yes. Sometimes it got me in trouble. Everything about that time was in the papers. I don’t really have too much to add.”

  “This isn’t about you,” Jessica said, speaking up quick. “This is about Brandon.”

  “We heard you’d been run off that land a week before Brandon went missing,” Tashi said.

  Quinn shrugged. “I don’t recall that.”

  “And it was Brandon Taylor who had turned you in.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “We have a source who said you and Brandon got into a nasty fight over a deer stand,” Tashi said. “Or maybe your relationship with Maggie?”

  Quinn shook his head. “I barely knew Brandon, let alone Maggie, back then. I only had one girlfriend in high school.”

  “Maggie told us you’d met when she’d come down for the summers.”

  “We met,” Quinn said. “But she was a lot younger. Just what are y’all trying to say?”

  “Our source says there had been reports of some wild shooting out on the Hawkins property,” Tashi said. “And after Brandon Taylor was found dead, your uncle made sure the state investigators never heard about it.”

  Quinn just stood there and shook his head, aware of the microphone and knowing how more denials might sound on tape.

  “Our source is pretty solid,” Jessica said. “They put you there on the land. And they were present during a cover-up.”

  Quinn was glad they didn’t know more about when he’d been lost years before. Some things were truly best left buried. “Miss Coleman,” Quinn said. “I’m going to bet your source is a man named E. J. Royce. And if I’m correct, I’d hope you put your investigative skills to work and look at that man’s record. He should’ve never served in law enforcement in this county. He’s an embarrassment to the profession.”

  “He showed us his accommodations,” Jessica said. “He said he was your uncle’s best friend and was your uncle’s very first hire at the department.”

  “My uncle had a big heart,” Quinn said. “He often looked after people who took advantage of him. He took in stray dogs and took care of folks in the county who didn’t have enough to eat. Sometimes he bought coats for poor kids . . . I better get going.”

  “Did you ever shoot at Brandon?” Jessica asked. “Even if it was just to scare him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were you jealous of his relationship with Maggie Powers?” Tashi asked.

  Quinn placed his hands on his hips and shook his head. He turned to look inside the plate-glass window of the El Dorado and saw the back of Brandon’s head and Maggie laughing at something the boy had said. He hadn’t eaten since five that morning and that was just a tall cup of hot coffee and a cold biscuit.

  “I appreciate what y’all are trying to do,” Quinn said. “Come back to see me when you have better sources.”

  “So you deny it all?” Tashi said. “We need to be clear on this. It’s why we’re here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Every damn word. My family appreciates what y’all are doing. I know the Taylor family does, too. But some bad folks are playing with your good intentions. This county has a way of messing with your head. Stick around a while longer and you’ll see exactly what I mean.”

  “We plan on it, Sheriff.” Jessica nodded at Quinn. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  FOURTEEN

  It was mid-September when Quinn and Lillie arrived at the annual Good Ole Boy, a big gathering of every swindler, huckster, and elected official in north Mississippi. Quinn parked his big green truck on a far hill under a pecan tree, both of them walking down a winding gravel road to Old Man Skinner’s work barn. Skinner had been hosting the big event, which kicked off the fall elections, ever since Johnny Stagg went to jail. It was early night and the air smelled of barbecue c
hicken and woodsmoke, summer edging toward fall. A large bonfire blazed in an open field. Gray-headed men in plaid shirts and jeans with fancy-ass pockets warmed their hands by the flames. There was a lot of laughter and backslapping, everyone wanting to be seen and heard.

  “I can’t believe you talked me into coming with you to Bullshit City,” Lillie said. “I hated this thing when I worked for the sheriff’s office and hate it even more now.”

  “Don’t you want to hear how Mississippi is about to become the next Utopia of the South?”

  “Sure,” Lillie said. “But after you make the rounds and we get to eat some of that good chicken, let’s get the fuck out of here. Only reason I come here is for the goddamn chicken.”

  “Sheriff has to be looking ahead,” Quinn said. “Election next year. My uncle always said it never hurt to shake a few hands.”

  “Just disinfect when you get home,” Lillie said. “I should’ve worn a hazmat suit instead of my good jeans. Goddamn. Would you look at Ole Man Skinner over by the fire, grinning like a fucking idiot, eating up this shit like it was vanilla ice cream. Does he really think he looks good in that old Stetson? He reminds me of the goddamn Crypt-Keeper.”

  “After these rumors have been swirling around Jericho about me,” Quinn said, “I figured it’s best for me to show my face. Confront anyone who wants to whisper behind my back.”

  “Those girls from New York still convinced you’re the spawn of Satan?”

  “They believe I have something to hide.”

  “Lord help us,” Lillie said. “If they’re letting it all ride on the word of E. J. Royce, then what the fuck has the world come to? If those women stick around long enough, they’ll figure it all out. Right now, everything must seem like a conspiracy. You hunting on private property—you and Hamp. You marrying Maggie. That damn, poor Taylor kid found with a fucking hole in his head. Now those old bones buried by the creek. Sometimes bad shit happens. You can’t force a fucking answer to every goddamn thing.”