The Broken Places Read online

  ALSO BY ACE ATKINS

  Crossroad Blues

  Leavin’ Trunk Blues

  Dark End of the Street

  Dirty South

  White Shadow

  Wicked City

  Devil’s Garden

  Infamous

  The Ranger

  Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby

  The Lost Ones

  Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  Copyright © 2013 by Ace Atkins

  Endpaper map © 2013 by Joe Worthem

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atkins, Ace.

  The broken places / Ace Atkins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59270-0

  1. United States. Army—Commando troops—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Mississippi—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.T49B76 2013 2013009334

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  In memory of David Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Also by Ace Atkins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgments

  The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

  But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

  Don’t ever take a chance you don’t have to.

  —ROGERS’ RANGERS STANDING ORDER NO. 5

  “This ain’t no joke,” Esau Davis said. “We go home, you go home. But a few more years on our sentence don’t mean jack shit to us. We’ll kill you if we need to.”

  The prison guard, face flat to the concrete of the ag shed, made a short grunt in agreement as Esau removed a knee from the man’s spine and a good two inches of baling wire from his ear. Just to make sure the guard was listening, Esau slammed the man’s forehead into a trailer hitch before looking to a skinny black man with a misshapen head and crooked teeth. The black man, Bones Magee, set about binding the guard’s hands and feet. This was the third guard he and Esau had snatched up in the last ten minutes. Bones wore black-and-white pants, while Esau wore green-and-white stripes, Esau being the one who’d earned minimal confinement on Parchman Farm.

  “What do you think?” Bones asked.

  “We got twelve minutes till second watch,” Esau said. “We better get gone or we gonna be tasting buckshot.”

  Esau gripped the bound guard by the collar of his jacket, which read MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, and dragged his ass into a storage room where they kept the seed, fertilizer, and sprays. The large bay doors on the equipment barn were open, a big sprawling picture of the Mississippi Delta stretching out table-flat over the Mississippi River and a thousand miles beyond. The sun burned up half gone and diminished, hazed and fuzzy with the storm clouds blowing in from Texas. Another convict—officially, “offenders” these days—ambled up and watched the black clouds smudging up the last of the sun, thunder signaling a shitstorm on the way. The convict, short, white, and bald, with a homemade swastika scrawled on his naked chest, scratched his belly and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Not yet,” Esau said.

  “You want me to set us out a picnic with Vienna sausages and Little Debbie cakes to watch the storm?” Dickie Green said. “We could sing some songs.”

  “I just got your stupid ass out a lifetime of shoveling shit and dead birds from the chicken house,” Esau said. “Only reason you’re part of this is ’cause of me.”

  “I’m here ’cause you need me,” Dickie said. “I’m a part of this thing. I am the driver of the rig. I don’t drive the rig and you don’t get to the stables. You don’t get to the stables and you ain’t got the horses. You don’t get the horses and you’re floating down Shit Creek.”

  Dickie counted each of his efforts on his stubby, dirty fingers.

  “I’m pretty sure of the progression of our situation,” Esau said. “Since it’s my fucking plan.”

  Esau stood a little over six feet, broad and muscular, with copper-colored hair and a brushy, copper-colored beard. The same wiry orange hair sprouted across his thick arms and along the nape of his neck and down his back. He had a pale white complexion burnt up red and pink from working a tractor for the last eight years. He didn’t care for Dickie Green one goddamn bit, but the son of a bitch was right. Dickie had to be the one to return the horses to the stables. They’d done it and done it well a thousand times before. All they needed was a good storm to make the tracking all the more difficult in the night and they were good to go. Out of the stables. Out of Unit 29. Out of Parchman Farm.

  “And the sheet shows we’re checked out?” Esau said.

  “I tole you my woman took care of us,” Bones said. “We got some extra duty tonight on account of the storm. More tractors and shit to bring in from outside. All set up. You know, I do believe that woman loves me.”

  “Is she blind or just stupid?”

  “I tell her I’m running off to Mexico and send her some money to meet me,” Bones said. “Just like in that movie with Morgan Freeman. She think we gonna get married and that all her five fucking kids comin’ down, too, and we gonna drink margaritas and eat fish tacos on the beach.”

  “I don’t want to kill no one,” Esau said.
“But I don’t promise nothing. Once we leave this shed, ain’t no turning back. We do what needs to be done.”

  “I just helped you gag and tie up four guards,” Bones said. “Right about now, I’m stripping the motherfucker and about to put on his clothes. I would say I’m already in this, white man.”

  Esau rubbed his coppery beard and nodded. Dickie Green checked the false bottom of the horse trailer, the two horses nickering and lightly kicking up their feet as the lightning snapped out across the mud and flat-ass land. Esau knew it was a plan but not much of one, twenty-six miles to freedom, with not a tree or any cover between. The plan had been in place for six years now, Esau working his way through every smiling detail, from landscaping the superintendent’s house to welding Dumpsters and barbecue pits to finally getting to drive that big Steiger 9170, planting cotton, beans, and corn.

  Esau pulled himself out of the striped convict pants and white convict shirt that no matter the washing still smelled like dead fish and ammonia. He kicked off his work boots and got down to his skivvies before zipping himself into a blue coverall. Bones fitted himself nicely into a guard’s uniform, with the ID still clinging to the official jacket. Dickie waited by the trailer, opening up the gate, pulling away the false bottom and having them lie down flat. Esau thought they were taking a hell of a risk with Dickie Green’s dumb ass at the wheel, but he also knew everyone wanted this to work. Bones lay next to him, as snug and tight as cheap corpses buried two for one, as Dickie slid a thick metal sheet over them and left them in darkness. There was the sound of hay spread on top of the sheet and then the affixture of a ramp. Two of the guards’ quarter horses hefted up and heavily clop-clopped on into the trailer, standing with all their weight on the thick sheet and over Bones and Esau. “Damn, damn, damn,” Bones said. “Just don’t let one fall through onto my balls.”

  Esau laughed a little as the big diesel started and pulled on out of the equipment shed and into the wind and the coming rain, rambling and breaking and bumping up over the long road back from the ag buildings and far away from the housing units. Dickie stopped the truck twice, Esau and Bones listening to muffled talk with the guards, and then Dickie moved on. He was taking them east toward the stables and the dog kennels, where Dickie would snatch the woman guard and get the horses out. Dickie wouldn’t ride with them on account of him having a bad case of hemorrhoids and not caring all that much for horses. He told Esau he wanted to drive the trailer out of the front gates bigger than shit, because he said he’d set things in motion with another female guard who must be so fat and ugly and generally stupid that she would fall for a guy like Dickie Green. Fine by Bones and Esau, because the guards would be on Dickie in two seconds and not watching them hauling ass across open land.

  “You good?” Esau asked.

  “Don’t care for tight places.”

  “Just breathe, man,” he said. “Don’t think of it.”

  “Can’t see, can’t move,” Bones said. “Don’t like this. Shit, get me out. I can’t breathe.”

  “Close your eyes,” Esau said. “Dark is dark. You want to spend the rest of your life in Unit 29, jacking off to General Hospital and Victoria’s Secret?”

  “Just paid thirty dollars for a Playboy.”

  “Ain’t no way to live.”

  “No way.”

  “With another man spending our money.”

  “How do you know he hadn’t already?”

  “We don’t,” Esau said. “But if he has, be nice to confront him on it.”

  “Our money,” Bones said. “Our money. Our job.”

  “Breathe, brother, breathe,” Esau said.

  “Don’t trust that motherfucker,” Bones said.

  “Says he found God.”

  “Found him a way out, leaving us behind.”

  The diesel slowed and rambled to a stop. There was the chugging motor and the rancid, uneasy breath of Bones Magee. Some talk and then a long, long wait before the gate creaked open and those big-ass animals got helped out as the metal buckled and popped overhead. Esau heard the nearby wild, wailing cry of the bloodhounds that had been raised at Parchman for the last hundred years.

  Dickie Green pulled the metal sheet back and grinned with his grimy brown teeth and shithole breath. “Hello, gentlemen.”

  “What’d you do with her?” Esau said.

  “Hit her in the head with an ax handle,” Dickie said. “Ain’t no nice way to do it.”

  Esau pushed his way from the hole and helped Bones out. They walked into the stables built of thick slats of wood and corrugated tin. The tack room smelled of rich leather and tannins and big open buckets of molasses. He handed Bones a blanket, saddle, and bridle. “Yippee-ki-yay,” Bones said. “Never rode no horse before. Black people don’t care to play cowboy.”

  Esau reached for the tack he needed and hustled back to the center of the stables, where Dickie held both horses. He slipped the bridle over one’s head but had to coax and cool the second one, the horse smelling and sensing the convict hands on him. The one with the more gentle nature, a painted gelding, was given over to Bones. Esau took the reins of the nervous horse, canting back one to three steps, and lifted his big frame onto his back. Dickie tilted his head and looked up at them in the soft-bulbed light. “You boys are on your own.”

  He offered his stubby hand out to Esau. But Esau just kept his hands on the leather reins, making for the mouth of the barn, rain pinging the tin roof real good, hoping the second horse would just follow on along and not dump Bones Magee into a ditch. They weren’t even out of the barn when Dickie started the truck and pulled out and away from the stables and onto Guard Road, toward the main gate of Parchman. Esau kicked the horse’s ribs to head north, away from the howling hounds that’d be on them soon, and keeping close to the edge of the cemetery, where they buried men whose families had written them off long ago, their flat headstones just slick places in the dirt. Ain’t no way Esau would be buried there. Ain’t no way he’d let another man take his rightful reward away from him. He’d written nearly five dozen letters and tried calling every chance he got. No response. And his lawyer, that rotten piece of shit, hadn’t gotten a dime of all that money been promised to work some kind of miracle on Esau’s release. Escape was the only way.

  Lightning flashed, spiderwebbing and cracking out far and wide across Parchman. Twenty-six miles of road and sixty miles of ditches. The hounds howled and yipped, sensing what was going on before the guards even leashed them up. Esau turned back to Bones, who was dog-cussing his horse, his ass riding everywhere but the saddle. But hell if he weren’t staying on. The wind, the rain beat down hard on their faces; hard-packed dirt became mud and mud became a river. There wasn’t much light, only the twinkling jeweled lights of Rome, Mississippi, and Tutwiler miles and miles beyond. But a few miles into the ride, the storm and darkness became all, and all Esau could do was try his best to find due north. North was gone and away. Away from Parchman and onto Jericho, where they’d left the loot at the bottom of a bass pond with those two dead men. The lightning struck once so close he could feel the strike pitch from the ground and into the horse’s back. You could smell that coppery-coffee topsoil like the earth was just created new.

  Esau whipped the flank of his horse now, blinded by the wind and the rain but tasting his freedom all the same.

  Ophelia Bundren slid into the booth across from Sheriff Quinn Colson and passed along another file thick with reports on her sister’s killing from a decade ago. “This town might believe Jamey Dixon’s bullshit, but I know who he is and what he’s capable of. Did you know he was on the Square yesterday, passing out flyers about some revival at a barn?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “He wouldn’t even look at me as I passed. He knew I was there but kept on smiling and shaking hands. Dixon has no shame or sense of honor. A revival in a barn? I guess that sounds about right for him.”

  “So what’s in the file?” Quinn said. It was early, daylight just coming on in Jericho,
Mississippi. He’d been on patrol from 1800 to 0600 and was looking forward to a hot bath, a shot of whiskey, and some sleep. Out the plate-glass window of the diner, he spotted his cattle dog Hondo sniffing the air from the tailgate of his truck. Hondo looked beat, too.

  “A psychological profile of his time in prison,” Ophelia said. “He’s a sociopath.”

  “Is that what the report says?” Quinn drank some coffee from a heavy mug that read FILLIN’ STATION.

  “He convinced his shrink he’s a new man,” Ophelia said. “He said he doesn’t recall two years of his life before he killed my sister. You believe that?”

  “No, ma’am,” Quinn said. “Not at all.”

  “How do you think he got on the pardon list?”

  “Ophelia,” Quinn said. “We’ve been through this maybe a hundred times. And I agree with you that Dixon hasn’t changed. But it doesn’t sound like what’s in that file is going to move things along.”

  Ophelia looked down at her hands, nails cut boy-short but still painted a bright red. She was dark-complected, with high cheekbones, Indian doll eyes, and a tight red mouth. Quinn had known her his whole life, and even before her sister’s murder had never known her to smile. Still, she was pretty and looked good that morning in a short navy dress with cowboy boots and a gray cardigan. Unless you were from Jericho, she’d be the last one you’d figure for a funeral home director. And now that Luke Stevens had taken a job in Memphis, she was also the coroner of Tibbehah County.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “He was on the governor’s pardon list.”

  “But who put him there?”