The Ranger Read online

  “You act like we’ve been buds for a while,” Gowrie said, staring straight ahead, watching the colored cars and roads and checkered flag come to life. There was a city way off in the distance, and he watched it as if the whole window was real. He thumped the steering wheel some more, shifted up and down, and mashed the accelerator. “Let’s go. Hell. Shit, you started this mess, wanting my boys to steal that man’s cattle.”

  “Boy, you’re flying a million miles an hour on those eleven herbs and spices.”

  “That son of a bitch shot me in the back with an arrow,” Gowrie said. “Missed my heart by an inch. So why don’t you get Campo’s dick out of your mouth before blaming me?”

  “That don’t sound Christian,” Stagg said, smiling. “I don’t care for that kind of talk.”

  Gowrie grinned back. “Only religion I found gets counted at the church.”

  “I’m headed to see Brother Davis right now,” Stagg said. “I wanted to tell you face-to-face.”

  “You touch that money stash and I’ll kill your ass.”

  “If that money don’t get to where it’s owed, they’re comin’ for me.”

  “I’m sick and tired of people using me up,” Gowrie said. “You keep clean, don’t you, Brother Stagg? You don’t have to keep your money in some movie-house church.”

  Stagg didn’t say anything.

  “Hell no. You got clean money in a regular bank. Ain’t no filth on those pressed good-ole-boy slacks.”

  The checkered flag flew, and Gowrie was off, shifting up and down, wrecking the car twice, spinning and getting the hang of it, in and out of all those race cars, moving on fast to that electric city on the horizon. After the third wreck he plugged a cigarette in his cracked lips and popped open a Zippo etched with a skull over a Rebel flag. There was more dried blood on the back of his neck, a dark stain spreading across his shoulder.

  “Don’t go near that church,” Stagg said, resting his hand on top of the video booth. “You get gone.”

  “Just how you gonna make me do that, Johnny Stagg?”

  “You figure that out.”

  Gowrie nodded. “What happens to my boys when we break camp? How we supposed to train? How are we supposed to live?”

  “I’ll get you some money.”

  “How much? You gonna compensate me for all I’ve lost?”

  Stagg told him, and Gowrie crashed the car, rear-ending a tractor trailer and sending them both up into a big plume of smoke and fire. He crawled out of the booth, smoked down the cigarette, and tossed it to the concrete. “Like I said, none of this shit would’ve happened if you hadn’t sent my boys to steal them cows.”

  “They were mine.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn,” Gowrie said, yelling and then smiling, breaking into a little laugh. “You kicked up a shit storm, and if you think I’m shagging ass without breaking it all apart, you are crazy as hell. What do you think we all stand for? You were to give us a base camp where we could run maneuvers and train. Now you treatin’ me like I’m some kind of criminal. I’m the only thing you got between you and that crazy soldier.”

  “Acting sheriff called the state troopers two hours ago. They’re coming for you.”

  Stagg stared at the dried blood across Gowrie’s T-shirt. The blood had hair in it and torn bits of flesh, some of the blood had dried on his hands and up under his fingernails. Gowrie noticed him staring and smirked, and licked his cracked ole lips.

  “You mind me asking you a question?” Stagg said.

  “Shoot,” Gowrie said.

  “Just what do y’all train for?”

  Gowrie popped a fresh cigarette in his mouth and reached on top of the video game for his leather jacket. He fired up the Vantage and blew smoke as he spoke. “I don’t mind you asking at all, Mr. Stagg.”

  The smoke drifted up into the ceiling, and Gowrie slipped back into the jacket as Stagg took a step back and looked up at the two surveillance cameras over Gowrie’s shoulder. He pulled any shit and he had four boys with guns ready to kick in doors and drop this piece of shit where he stood.

  Gowrie watched his eyes and craned his head and looked to each corner, the cameras, and then back at Stagg.

  He grinned.

  “When you and your family are having bacon and eggs and sitting pretty as you please in that great big old house you got,” Gowrie said, “you might start noticing things on the television. The battle for the Holy Land has begun, and the Beast walks among us. When airplanes begin to disappear and people you known your whole life start to vanish as they stand before you, don’t come down to Hell Creek and be asking me for any help. No, sir.”

  “We have a deal?” Stagg asked.

  “We’re in a war. Don’t you see it?”

  Gowrie grinned a rotten smile and walked away, popping his middle finger over his shoulder as he slammed open the exit door and moved back into the purple night.

  Not much past four in the morning, Quinn and Lillie headed south on Highway 45 about twenty miles into Lowndes County. Some kid had called Quinn’s cell phone, telling him that Keith Shackelford was in trouble, and Quinn was pretty sure it was a trap till Lena came on the line. And even now as they drove into the BP filling station, lit up like a beacon in the middle of acres and acres of dead cotton fields, he chambered a round in his .45, and Lillie stepped out with a shotgun, hanging down cool and loose by her leg. He scanned the parking lot, seeing a clerk counting out cigarettes by the register and a trucker taking in some diesel. Down by the air and water pumps, out back by the Dumpsters, he saw a pudgy kid with freckles and Lena sitting on a curb.

  The kid got to his feet, giving Lillie cause to hold the weapon in both hands and turn in a full circle. Quinn walked easy and slow, gun in hand, till he reached the boy and asked him just what in the hell he wanted this early.

  “Keith Shackelford called for you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead.”

  “What happened?”

  The kid told him. Quinn looked to Lena, seeing she’d been crying. She just sat on her ass in the cold, keeping the baby tight to her chest and inside her coat, her breath fogging up around her.

  “You need to get that baby somewhere,” Lillie said. “It’s thirty degrees.”

  “We ran out of gas,” the kid said.

  “Where were you headed?” Quinn asked.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Where’s his body?”

  “In the shitter.”

  “Excuse me?” Quinn asked.

  “I tried to get him cleaned up and he died on me in there,” the kid said. “I just propped him up on the commode, didn’t figure on staying till the car died on us. I kept it running so the baby would get some heat.”

  “You get that baby inside.”

  “That man in there told us we couldn’t hang about. He thought we might steal something while he was watching television. He figured right ’cause we needed some cheese crackers and milk.”

  “Get that baby inside,” Quinn said, some force in it. “We’ll get the police down here.”

  “Oh, hell no,” the kid said. “Those police in Tibbehah are crooked as hell.”

  “Who are you anyway?” Lillie asked.

  “People call me Ditto.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  The boy told her, and Lillie grabbed his arm and pulled him aside, telling him his short list of options. He nodded along with her till she let his arm go and he wandered back to Quinn. “You want to see him?”

  “You see all this or he tell you?”

  “I seen it.”

  “You beat on him, too?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Ditto said. “No, sir. I tried and get him out. He wouldn’t go to a hospital, said he was fine.”

  Quinn followed the boy back around the gas station, beyond the stacks of plastic crates and piles of bagged garbage waiting for pickup. The boy toed open the door and flicked on the lights, and they found Keith Shackelford seated on the toilet, shirt a
nd pants bloody. His mouth was open and his eyes had been swollen shut. In a gesture of respect, the boy had placed that Dale Earnhardt cap atop Shackelford’s head.

  “He don’t even look human.”

  Quinn regarded the dead man in the filthy stall, floor coated in grime and piss, and lightly shut the stall door. “You don’t let anyone in here till I come back. You hear me?”

  “You want me to stay here in the shitter with a dead man?”

  “You stay here till I come back.”

  Quinn ran outside, Lillie walked back out from inside the station, shaking her head, calling the attendant a certified moron. “She’s holding a child, for God’s sake.”

  “You call Wesley?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry, Quinn. Jesus.”

  “If Gowrie had been in jail, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “You thought Shackelford had left the state.”

  “That kid said he’d gone to visit an ex-girlfriend who was a pump for Gowrie. What a dumb shit.”

  “Thirty degrees, and outside with a baby,” Lillie said. “Kids this dumb shouldn’t procreate.”

  Quinn nodded. “I brought him back into this.”

  “We both did.”

  “They worked the shit out of him,” Quinn said. “Kid said Shackelford was beaten on until Gowrie got tired and winded. His face looks like hamburger. Man makes it through hell and back and gets into this.”

  “You think they’ll testify?”

  “Both of ’em are scared shitless.”

  About that time, Quinn’s beaten truck cranked and worked into a wide U—turn, heading past the pumps and hitting Highway 45 south, driving hell-bound for nowhere. Lillie was already on the phone to the local sheriff as Quinn jogged to the road’s edge, seeing the silhouettes of Ditto and Lena, watching the red taillights of his truck disappear into the early morning.

  30

  Quinn had a hell of a breakfast a few hours later at the Fillin’ Station with his mother, country ham with eggs and grits, black coffee and orange juice on the side, although Jean Colson didn’t touch her plate. She drank coffee and picked at her eggs, passing a biscuit to Jason and leaning in every once in a while and asking, “How can you eat right now? After finding a dead man on a commode?”

  “You eat when you can.”

  “I’d be sick to my stomach,” she said, whispering.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Quinn said. “You done with that?”

  Quinn sliced the biscuits, adding his ham, and drank some coffee, signaling to the waitress for a fill-up. He hadn’t slept in a while, but the lack of sleep really didn’t bother him. He went nearly a week without regular sleep when they took Haditha Dam back in ’03. Those mortars kept pounding for nearly four days, driving his whole company nuts, while they called in air strikes and waited for reinforcements.

  “How ’bout y’all get out of town for a little bit,” Quinn said. “Just a couple days.”

  “You better worry about yourself,” his mom said.

  “Those deputies still watching the house?”

  “It’s just George and Leonard,” she said. “Last night Leonard came in and watched the television with us. He’s a nice fella. He’s getting married next year. Really nice girl from Columbus, owns her own hair salon.”

  “So he watched television with you?”

  “They show General Hospital repeats late at night.”

  The bell above the diner door jingled, and Wesley Ruth walked in, looking about ten years older, unshaved, but dressed in his official sheriff’s uniform and an official ball cap reading TCSO. He sat his big frame down at the table without being asked and before Mary even got close said, “Coffee.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Hell of a thing when a crime scene is moved about forty miles.”

  “But he died at the gas station.”

  “I think I’ll take Jason outside,” Jean said, lifting Jason from the high chair and putting him over her shoulder, looking away from the men, strolling around and showing him all those great photos of Quinn as a boy and his grandfather as a semifamous stuntman.

  “Did your dad really work on Billy Jack?” Wesley asked.

  “He was one of the bad guys.”

  “I love that movie,” Wesley Ruth said. “You know, ole Tom Laughlin learned hapkido from Han Bong-Soo himself. You know, the Father of Hapkido?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “Don’t act like you don’t know these folks,” Wesley said. “Y’all train in that stuff, don’t you?”

  “Mainly jujitsu.”

  “That’s all a lot of joint locks and throws and all that. You mind showing me sometime?”

  “Wesley, I need some more folks at my mother’s house.”

  “George was there this morning.”

  “And Leonard sat his fat ass on the couch watching soap operas with them last night. That doesn’t give me much comfort.”

  Wesley nodded. “We’re a little shorthanded.”

  “Heard you got people coming in.”

  “MBI is sendin’ down half a dozen men today,” Wesley said, craning his neck, searching for Mary and his damn coffee. “We’re gonna arrest Gowrie this afternoon.”

  “Even without Lena and that boy as witnesses?”

  “Lillie heard enough to pull him in.”

  “I want to go.”

  “No way.” Wesley shook his head. “These are state men, and it’s all got to go by the rules or some liberal lawyer will tear us a new asshole. That boy Gowrie has lost his damn shit, and if he’s not careful, I’m gonna punch his ticket.”

  “How many men?” Quinn asked.

  “Six,” Wesley said. “Plus George and Leonard. Maybe I can get Lillie to watch your mother and that boy.”

  “My nephew,” Quinn said. “And I got it.”

  Mary brought Wesley’s coffee, and he blew across the lip of the cup and took a sip, wiping his mouth. “That girl and the kid won’t get far. No offense, but I don’t think that ole truck of yours will make it. His name is Peter Francis, by the way. What’d you call him? Ditto?”

  “Gowrie won’t go easy.”

  “They never do.”

  “How many gun battles you been in, Wesley?”

  “Law enforcement isn’t like being in the Army, Quinn,” Wesley said. “Y’all get to mow down towelheads with M4s. We got to have probable cause. You gonna eat that ham biscuit?”

  “You eat it.”

  Quinn got up and peeled off the money for the ticket. Wesley stuffed some biscuit in his mouth and took a sip of coffee before he spoke. “Where you going?”

  “I’m sitting with my family till you bring him in.”

  “How hard can it be? You and Boom could’ve taken them all out yesterday.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Thing about Jericho is everyone knows what’s goin’ on. The tough part is provin’ it.”

  “Call me if you find that girl,” Quinn said. “And my truck.”

  “What are you driving now?”

  “A pretty sweet black Camaro.”

  Wesley nodded, eating more. His mouth too full to speak.

  Ditto came back to the motel, counting out the sixty dollars he had left from selling Quinn’s hunting rifles to those blacks at the feed store. He’d thought about ditching the truck in a creek or river but didn’t have the heart and instead found an old barn, nearly toppling over from rot, where he slid her inside and left the keys in the ignition. It was nearly a three-mile walk back to the motel, them heading north instead of south like they had planned. They were holed up in a little town up in Yalobusha County called Water Valley.

  Lena had drawn the curtains and passed out in bed with the baby. The baby still not having a name days after birth couldn’t be a good thing, but Ditto didn’t study on it too long. He was too busy thinking about how to make those sixty dollars last beyond sunset tomorrow.

  He could sell the truck, but it would have to be to someone who didn’t care too much
about registration and all that mess. He needed someone he could trust who wouldn’t be a good citizen and alert the law.

  Ditto sat down at a little table in the dark, the heater blowing out air that smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke, and ate the last bit of the banana pudding and chicken they’d bought at the town’s Piggly Wiggly.

  As long as he could get free from Gowrie, it was a good day for him.

  He could find a job, didn’t matter what it was. Only reason he got mixed up with Gowrie’s boys was on account of that stretch at Parchman for burglary of a Goodyear store outside Tupelo. He’d been worried about finding a new set of mud tires for his truck and come out two months later with the Lee County judge sending him down to worry about getting cornholed by all them blacks. Not that he had a real hard time with niggers, he’d been around them his whole life. But a man who hadn’t spent time in a state facility had no way of knowing how you had to make your decision on where you stood, and if you just waited there in the middle of the road, you’d find yourself bleeding out your backside or dead. The Brotherhood was a family. You come in with them and you were inside an electrified fence of protection. Any man who judged him for that was an ignorant man at that.

  He never wanted to be back there. But when you’re headed to the state line with your vehicle running on fumes, sometimes a little prayer wasn’t a bad thing.

  He slid into bed, counting out the sixty dollars one more time for good measure and then turning to Lena and that sleeping baby, thinking her name was Joy because that was the word that had popped into his mind.

  His kissed the girl on the forehead, and then the sleeping child with the sweetest breath he’d ever smelled, and wondered if this wasn’t the cleaning of things in his whole life.

  You couldn’t be Ditto on everything.

  Maybe now he’d come back with his own goddamn answer.

  The men from Jackson arrived at the Tibbehah Sheriff’s Office at four p.m. in their brand-new state cars with handguns and rifles that shone fresh with oil and seemed to be lifted straight from the box. They dressed in civilian clothes, suits for investigators and jeans for those in narcotics, all of them wearing heavy hunting jackets bulging from their Kevlar vests. Wesley Ruth brought them all inside, where they talked in the interrogation room, a spot usually reserved for the coffeepot and open boxes of doughnuts, old file cabinets lining a wall, a stack of unsold calendars to raise money for the volunteer fire department.