The Forsaken Read online

  Lillie walked back to her truck and pulled out a little point-and-shoot Nikon that she said belonged to the sheriff’s office. She took eight or nine pictures from different perspectives and then slipped the camera in her side pocket. She hadn’t worn a hat that day, her brown hair tied up and pinned in a bun. Lillie Virgil was tall and competent, intimidating to some people. People around town whispered that Lillie didn’t care much for boys, but Diane didn’t believe it. She thought people in Jericho couldn’t handle seeing a woman so tough, she could outshoot, outcuss, and outfight most of the men.

  “You got a few minutes?” Lillie said. “Got a few questions.”

  “Not much to say,” Diane said. “Didn’t see much and shot at just a blur of him.”

  Lillie closed one eye in the harsh light and smiled at Diane. Diane had the bucket in one hand and walked over to the spigot to turn off the hose. The flowing water was ice-cold that morning.

  “Not about this.”

  “Oh,” Diane said, standing there, last bits of water draining from the uncoiled hose. “I guess I expected Sheriff Colson.”

  “You rather talk to him?”

  “No,” Diane said. “Guess it doesn’t matter. Just didn’t feel like discussing it last night. I don’t know how much to add, either. I guess it’s no secret what happened. That old story has gotten to be pretty famous.”

  “Seems like it was a secret for a lot of folks.”

  Diane nodded, turned, and dumped out the dirty water from the bucket. She’d gotten some paint off the side of the truck, now the message reading YORE GD. Lillie said she was pretty sure that nail polish remover trick would work, but it would be a hell of shame to mess up that red-and-white paint job. The old truck being a real work of art. Diane stepped back, looked at her dead stepdaddy’s truck, and agreed. Those rotten bastards for doing this.

  “We’ve reopened the case,” Lillie said. “Both of them.”

  Diane hung next to her truck, leaning against the tailgate, and nodded. She asked if Lillie wouldn’t mind going inside, “My hands feel like they’ve frozen solid.”

  Lillie followed her up the ramp and into the big storage area where they kept the feed and fertilizer and overflow from inside the farm supply. Diane sat on a big stack of dog food and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the wind.

  “You want one?”

  “Trying like hell to quit,” Lillie said.

  A flyer for an upcoming rodeo at the Tibbehah Ag Center fluttered in the cold wind. The event promised the grand spectacles of monkeys riding dogs, and that proceeds would go to disaster relief. Lillie turned her head to read the flyer. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen a monkey riding a dog,” Lillie said. “Must be something.”

  “They don’t really ride ’em,” Diane said, “they’re more tied to cattle dogs. The cattle dogs work the sheep and it looks like the goddamn monkeys are cowboys.”

  “They dress the monkeys as cowboys?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am,” Diane said, blowing out another stream of smoke. “Hats, chaps, six-shooters. The works.”

  “Signs and wonders.”

  Lillie just stood silent and watched Diane smoke the cigarette, no other vehicles in the gravel parking lot that morning. It was still early and the Farm & Ranch wasn’t even officially open yet. She’d left the front cattle gate unlocked and slightly open for a feed delivery, now sort of wishing she’d locked up behind her as she most often did. She wasn’t ready to get into all this again and wished liked hell she hadn’t let Hank Stillwell stir up the muck from the bottom.

  “So everyone pretty much knew this man was killed because of what happened to y’all?” Lillie said.

  Diane nodded.

  “I wasn’t even eighteen.”

  “But you do know who did it?”

  Diane shook her head. She tossed the cigarette and started a new one. Lillie brought out her notebook and left it hanging by her right leg, not even opening her pen.

  “But you knew,” she said. “Everyone knew?”

  “I knew right away that a black man had been taken out and hung and then burned,” Diane said. “I’ll be real honest with you, Miss Virgil. You know how I felt?”

  “Relieved.”

  “Yep.”

  “And now?”

  Diane Tull’s face twitched a bit, sitting there on those sacks, mind back into the summer of 1977. She gave a nervous laugh, hands shaking a bit, holding the cigarette, as she blew out some smoke and wiped her eyes. “What I feel about it now?” Diane said. “How about shame? Embarrassment? Guilt? You want me to keep going, keep coming up with words on the horror of what they did?”

  “You’re a hell of a person,” Lillie said. “If a man did that to me and to my friend, I don’t know if I’d care where he ended up.”

  Diane’s face shifted into a bitter and knowing smile. “Shit,” she said. “Y’all don’t know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wasn’t him,” Diane said, shaking her head, looking away, crying again, feeling embarrassed for it. “I saw the man who did this to us not six weeks later. I told Sheriff Beckett and he told me to keep quiet. I told my daddy and he told me the same thing. No one would listen. I guess this story seemed a lot neater if they’d hung the right man.”

  Lillie swallowed and took a deep breath, at first not seeming to know what to say or ask. “Then who’d they get?”

  “First black man they could find,” Diane said. “Looking for the first tree they could find. I never knew the man’s name or his people. And I don’t think anyone else did, either. Can you imagine the horror of those bastards coming for you?”

  “Who?” Lillie said. “Who were they?”

  You know there’s an easier solution to this, Mr. Stagg,” Ringold said. “We need to consider some creative options on this issue.”

  Stagg grinned, liking the official manners and formal way Ringold spoke. But the man was off base about his plans, not understanding the way this county worked. “You mean just kill the bastard?”

  “Pretty much what I had in mind,” Ringold said.

  Stagg glanced over at the black-and-white surveillance TVs stacked on the wall: restaurant register, truck stop register, wide shot of the Booby Trap stage, wide shot of the diesel pumps, and long shot of the parking lot behind the Rebel. They hadn’t had an armed robbery in seven years, not since that teenager from Pontotoc had come over and held up a couple working girls with a hunting knife. Stagg hadn’t had to do a damn thing other than disarm the boy, call the sheriff, the boy busted and bleeding and crying by the time he got there. The girls, all six of them, deciding to take matters into their own hands, inflicting a world of pain with their long nails and tiny fists.

  “If you got a fucking copperhead in a jar, I wouldn’t advise you let it loose,” Stagg said. “You might have a plan for that son of a bitch, but them sidewinders are unpredictable, finding nooks and crannies and laying low till you don’t see them. That’s what this man is like, who he is. You think I hadn’t thought about just shooting the son of a bitch dead? How ’bout every day for the last twenty years.”

  “He’s a threat,” Ringold said, arms crossed over his chest. “To your business and to all you’ve done around here.”

  “OK,” Stagg said, picking up a toothpick, working a little meat from a back molar. “Let’s say we blast this bastard’s grits all over north Mississippi. Right? He’s gone, but our troubles are still with us. No, sir. You being an Army man, top shelf, with all that Secret Squirrel ninja training and all, should know not to prepare for what you think might happen but what could happen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ringold said. “I follow.”

  “This man has a lot of friends,” Stagg said. “He’s the goddamn Will Rogers of shitbirds. They love him. Follow him to hell and back and beyond. They been waiting and planning for his release since his ass pranced i
nto the doors of Brushy Mountain. If we take him out, they’re still coming. That’s what he’d want and what they’ll do. We ain’t dealing with rational people here. They don’t have any belief system other than to fuck up the order of the world.”

  Ringold stood cocksure, with erect military posture that always reminded Johnny Stagg of that goddamn Quinn Colson. Ringold was the flip side of the coin: tough, good with a gun, but knew on which side his bread was buttered. He didn’t think Colson had all of Ringold’s tattoos, skulls and daggers and spears for the number of men he’d killed overseas. Colson was a Boy Scout, a non-realist, someone who needed to be taught the lessons of the world.

  “But, tactically speaking . . .”

  “Sure,” Stagg said, “he gets out. Yes, sir, he’s coming this way.”

  “And what happens next?”

  “That’s why I plan to keep that fucking snake in the jar,” Stagg said. “We do that and all the plans and bullshit and threats are gone. He wants to lead a revolt, a movement. He wants to come back to Jericho not ’cause it’s the best thing for his people. He wants to come back to Jericho to cornhole the shit out of me, the way I cornholed his ass more than twenty years back.”

  Ringold nodded. His bald head catching in the light, the stubbled beard on his face more than the fella had on his head. Stagg was pretty sure he’d never seen the man as much as crack a grin, which suited him just fine. Ringold was the pure and unfiltered killing machine he wanted, and if Chains LeDoux wanted to ride his Harley and nasty ass on into the Rebel like a fucking parade, that Ringold would be there to greet him at the door.

  “So how’s it work?” Ringold asked. “To keep him incarcerated?”

  “I got things in motion,” Stagg said. “This man has secrets. Fucked up a lot along the way. And I got a long memory of this town. Even if some of our citizens think their asses are lily-white.”

  Stagg swiveled a bit in his leather chair, the executive model in the catalog, pushing forward with the tips of his oxblood loafers. He nodded, again glancing over the surveillance screens, seeing a fat woman buying three Moon Pies and a Coke inside the Rebel, and one of the working girls not giving but a half-assed effort on the pole, looking dog tired or drunk. She’d need a talking-to. You work the pole, you work the pole. You didn’t know how to sell it, go back to your momma and tin can trailer.

  “This sack of shit ran drugs and guns out of Tibbehah since he got out of the service,” Stagg said. “Talking back in the Vietnam days.”

  Ringold nodded. He was chewing gum, watching Johnny Stagg as he stood by the doorframe, listening, waiting for what needed to be done. He wondered if Ringold had a problem with killing another military man, some kind of ethical conflict, since the guy was a vet. Or maybe he’d just been mixing up Ringold and Colson in his head.

  “I don’t know what he did over in Southeast Asia,” Stagg said. “Don’t care. He ain’t from here. He came down here sometime around ’seventy-four to raise hell down at Choctaw Lake. I think this was a stopover for them, heading down to the Coast, and they built some kind of fucking clubhouse out there. One of those shitbirds owned the land. He did it fair and legal. They shot guns and drank whiskey, smoked dope. That was what it was all about back then. People smoking dope, dropping acid, doing pills. Those fellas, the Born-Fucking-Losers, would mule all this shit from New Orleans and bring it up into north Mississippi and Memphis. Ain’t nobody fucked with them. Ain’t nobody around here seemed to care much. They were bad for business. I was an honest family man, trying to run a friendly little ole gas station here, and them scroungy fuckers would shoot up on their bikes, riding like they’d just come out of hell itself. People didn’t like it. Didn’t want to be around it.”

  “What about the law?”

  “You know the law back then was Colson’s uncle, a good ole boy but a weak man named Hamp Beckett. Hamp Beckett was lazy, greedy as hell. He wouldn’t go looking for trouble unless the county was up in flames. These boys tended to keep to themselves down at Choctaw Lake and what they did in Memphis or Birmingham wasn’t the concern of Sheriff Beckett. At least the way he told it.”

  “So how’d you go about it?” Ringold said, the boy rushing his story, Stagg preferring to illustrate the story, the situation, the setup, the players, before dropping the punch line.

  Stagg leaned back in the executive-model chair and crossed his nice shoes at the corner of his desk. A big old Kenworth had just rolled on under Rebel’s tin roof and was sucking down some diesel. It sure was something just to be able to sit back and watch people spend cash on gas, groceries, and pussy.

  “Why you think it was me?” Stagg said, grinning. “Who did something?”

  “’Cause I know you, Mr. Stagg.”

  “Hmm,” Stagg said. “Well, I guess you can say I got frustrated being cut out of the action here in Tibbehah. As a young man, I done got myself involved in timber, land deals, and such. And when I opened up the Rebel, I got money not only for what was headed out of Jericho but what was headed through. To see all that money, all that opportunity, going to a bunch of nasty folks who didn’t shave or shower just didn’t sit well with me. And I tried to work with them. God knows, I tried to turn it into a good situation.”

  “Threats?”

  “Let’s just say I made some arrangements with some folks in Memphis,” Stagg said, inhaling, sweetly recalling that time when he sprayed a can of Raid on that nest. “And they made sure their little clubhouse got shaken to pieces and them boys got scattered to the wind. It wasn’t no easy thing and ended up with me being beholden to some folks in Memphis for nearly twenty fucking years. But that’s done. LeDoux went to jail and now I get to rule the roost.”

  “I still say kill the bastard,” Ringold said. “One shot. No trouble.”

  “I never figured the son of a bitch would be cut loose,” Stagg said. “But we’re gonna stop that cold. Nothing to worry about.”

  Ringold stood silent. Man was a goddamn rock.

  “I understand what you have in mind, sir,” Ringold said. “But you’re also about to flush the sheriff down the toilet. You do that and his investigation stops. All this is shot to hell. I just don’t understand how one benefits the other.”

  “Shit,” Stagg said, laughing to himself. “You think I’m flushing Colson down the toilet? I’m about to get that cocky son of a bitch right where I want him. And where I need him.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “In the palm of my fucking hand,” Stagg said. “Just like his ole dead uncle.”

  • • •

  “Some boys at school were calling Jason a little creamy,” Quinn said. “Where do kids hear crap like that?”

  “You know as well as I do,” Lillie said, “their shitty parents.”

  “Caddy’s going to be pissed at my advice.”

  “Let me guess,” Lillie said, both of them sitting in Quinn’s office, running through last night’s reports and her talk with Diane Tull. “You told Jason to whip their asses, right?”

  “You want some more coffee?” Quinn said.

  “Am I right?”

  Quinn poured some more coffee from his Thermos into Lillie’s cup, no good way of telling Mary Alice that her stuff was god-awful. “And Lillie Virgil would’ve said different?”

  “I may be lots of things, Sheriff,” Lillie said, “but I’m no hypocrite. Some kids start calling Rose a beaner or a wetback or that crap and I’ll tell her to punch them right in the throat.”

  “Little girl’s going to be a tough one.”

  “Smart, too,” Lillie said. “Those big brown eyes see everything.”

  Quinn got up and propped open a window, taking a seat on top of his desk, and firing up a half-finished cigar. Lillie didn’t seem to mind or notice, only occasionally noting her uniform had started to smell like a Havana whorehouse. Quinn had started the cigar after dropping off Jason an
d put it out when walking in past Mary Alice.

  “And that’s all you got out of Diane Tull?” Quinn said.

  “All I got?” Lillie said. “I think that’s a gracious plenty.”

  “She knows who lynched that man,” Quinn said. “If she’s got that kind of guilt and remorse, she’s heard things. People can’t keep a secret like that this long.”

  “She said a couple days after, her lying up in a hospital bed, some man came to her parents and told them it was all done,” Lillie said. “That some men from town had taken care of the man who’d done it.”

  “Who came to her parents?”

  “She didn’t know,” she said. “She said this was at the hospital and happened out in the hall, her only getting pieces of loose talk. First feeling good about it and happy the man was dead.”

  “And the men who did the lynching?”

  “Diane said she didn’t want to know,” Lillie said. “Too much shame in it. That’s some heavy burden on a teenage girl. Not only was she raped, shot, and had to witness the murder of her friend, she then believes she caused the death of an innocent man.”

  “You really believe she doesn’t know more?” Quinn said.

  “Nope,” Lillie said. “She realized we knew about the lynching and it didn’t take too much to connect what happened. She’s got a lot of remorse and guilt about what happened. She said when she saw the shitbird who really raped and shot her a few weeks later and tried to tell her parents, no one would listen. She said all of Jericho was pleased and happy that justice was done.”

  “Seems like my uncle was, too.”

  “Surprise you?” Lillie said.

  Quinn shook his head. Mary Alice knocked on the office door and peered in, waving her hand in front of her face and telling him to at least cut on the ceiling fan. “Y’all want some coffee?”

  Quinn told her they were good. Mary Alice, all made-up, hair tall and coiffed, and wearing a friendly snowman sweater, shut the door.

  “Where would you start?” Quinn said. “With both of them? The killer and the victim?”