The Ranger Page 5

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “Just go.”

  “You don’t believe it’s yours?” she said. “You should know I come for you with a gun. Guess I don’t need it now you’re locked up.”

  “You need to shut up.”

  “Listen,” she said, reaching through the fence with her skinny fingers and grabbing his orange coveralls and pulling him close. “I don’t care what they say you done.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’.”

  “We’ll get through this. All of us.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  And she believed for a moment he was still speaking to her but then saw the glint in his eyes as he followed some movement behind her, back along the parking lot by the long, winding railroad tracks. She turned to see two men crawling out of an old black Camaro, both of them lighting up cigarettes, one of ’em as skinny as Jody and the other thick and muscular. They were dead-eyed, wearing T-shirts cut off at the shoulders and jeans so tight it was obscene.

  “Who are those men?”

  “Alpha dogs,” he said, moving away. “Go. Get lost. I don’t want you or that damn baby.”

  “I thought you’d quit messing with all that shit? Jody? Listen to me.”

  But he’d turned and walked up to the guard, who nodded him back inside out of the cold, where she was left shivering in a glittering shirt and ruffled dress that hugged her expanding butt. As she backed up, the sadness feeling like an animal clawing her chest, she passed by the two men. Her eyes met with the thicker of the two, black-eyed and scruffy-faced, with hollow cheeks and corded animal muscle on his skinny frame. His hair was buzzed down to the scalp, and the T-shirt he wore had the U.S. Capitol on it topped with a Rebel flag and read I HAVE A DREAM, TOO. The man eyed her and tugged at himself between his legs, smiling at the other, leaving her with his sharp odor lingering long after he’d moved away. On the back of his neck was a tattoo similar to Jody’s, a crude—almost childlike—image.

  He flicked his cigarette into the weeds and called out to the guard to get Charley Booth’s ass out there.

  She froze, and he turned back to stare, licking his cracked lips.

  Lena ran for the tracks and followed them till she was back in town, broke, busted, and nowhere to go.

  “Honey?” Jean Colson said. “I said cream of mushroom. Not chicken noodle.”

  Quinn’s mind had drifted as he followed that shopping cart up and down the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly, nodding to what his mother was saying but not hearing half of it.

  “Quinn?”

  Jean Colson looked at Quinn as if he were still a twelve-year-old boy who’d get a quarter for the bubble-gum machine if he didn’t act up. Caddy’s baby sat up high and attentive in the cart, trying to reach for everything they passed.

  “Wasn’t there,” he said.

  “Look again.”

  “Didn’t you go to the store last night?”

  “This for Sunday,” she said. “We got some folks comin’ over after church. People want to see you, honey. There’s going to be a ceremony. You got to feed those people who are coming.”

  “I’d rather have catfish.”

  “We’ll go to Pap’s before you leave.”

  “Who are all these people anyway?”

  “Friends.”

  “You look. It’s not there.”

  She handed over the grocery cart with a huff. Jason held on to a box of animal crackers as Quinn headed down aisle 8, cake mixes and spices and syrups and things. He stopped to pick up some Aunt Jemima pancake mix, his momma never having breakfast food, and was thinking that a pound of good coffee would be nice when he spotted Lillie Virgil striding down the aisle, one hand on her gun, lithe and hard in a tan uniform, until she reached the cart and grabbed hold of it in midroll. She smiled at Jason and called to him, tickling his chin with fingers and talking baby talk, telling him he sure was a handsome boy, before lifting her eyes at Quinn and asking, “You think your momma will let you out tonight?”

  “Come again?”

  “There’s someone you need to talk to. Says he’ll only talk to you.”

  “I can’t right now. Can’t you see I’m grocery shopping? We have people coming over after church and you need some cream of shit to make the casserole.”

  “He sure is cute.” She leaned in again, face softening, and said, “I’ll pick you up.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not hearing a lot of what you’re telling me.”

  “Good soldier, believing what you’re told.”

  “What time?”

  “Give me thirty minutes,” she said. “I got to change out of this uniform.”

  Quinn smiled at her. “Don’t get yourself in deep on my account.”

  “Who said I’m doing this for you?”

  Quinn kept pushing the cart, running his hand over his clipped hair, Jason growing upset because the last animal cracker was gone. He searched down the aisle of flour and spices, the kid now crying like crazy, till he was able to make it three rows over to the cereal aisle.

  He found the first box he saw, some kind of sugary -O’s, and opened the box. His nephew was pacified and smiled up at Quinn, a big old thank-you smile, and Quinn leaned into him and grabbed his ear, noticing his father’s eyes for the first time, and the thought startled him.

  6

  There were three trailers at the bottom of a dead-end road that didn’t even have a number, just another knot in this little enclave called Chance’s Bend, which was mainly white and broke-ass, on the outskirts of a hamlet called Fate. Quinn got out of his truck followed by Lillie, Lillie looking better than he could recall, in a black V—necked sweater with dark jeans and boots, smelling and looking very nice. Quinn had joked with her about her dressing up for him, and the comment didn’t sit too well with her, Lillie trying out the silent treatment, almost embarrassed, for the last ten miles.

  She followed behind Quinn as he knocked on the door, seeing a large couch laden with a pillow and sleeping bag through the glass. A toilet flushed, and a fat man with a ponytail walked back into the room wearing an open bathrobe and boxer shorts, scratching himself.

  Quinn knocked again, and the man made his way to the door and cracked it, trying to keep some privacy, although the door was glass and there wasn’t much to hide.

  “Heard you were lookin’ for me?” Quinn asked.

  The man was slack-jawed, with a pitiful goatee on his weak chin, more salt than pepper, and he had smallish eyes that looked like pinholes. “Get in here, boy. Damn, someone’s gonna see you.”

  “What’s up, Uncle Van?” Quinn asked.

  “Don’t you know I got shit to do?”

  “You could’ve stopped by my mother’s house.”

  “Shit.”

  “Or called.”

  “Lillie stopped by and was asking me questions, and I told her some of what I know’d and left out a few things I didn’t. I told her I had some things to share but would rather share them with my own people. You understand?”

  Uncle Van was the youngest of the Colson brothers; Quinn’s dad, Jason, was the oldest, and the middle brother was Jerry, a good man who made a decent living working as a long-haul truck driver. But it was Jason Colson that everyone knew. He’d made a name for himself in Hollywood as a stuntman and drank all his money away back in Jericho. He’d been gone since Quinn turned twelve, no one hearing where he’d disappeared to or what he was doing. Not so much as a birthday card.

  Van was the last one left in Tibbehah County, wandering his way through professions as diverse as coyote trapper to tree surgeon to housepainter. He kept scratching and readjusting himself on the couch, reaching for the remote and killing the television, the channel tuned to an infomercial about a religious enema called the Almighty Cleanse.

  “That man on TV says everyone has backed-up shit,” Van said. “That’s the trouble. He says everything from headaches to cancer to personal relationships can be f
ixed. You believe that?”

  Quinn shook his head.

  Uncle Van shrugged and massaged his chest, reaching for his pack of Vantage cigarettes and some matches. “If I had the eighty dollars, I’d at least try it. Wouldn’t that be something if you could just shit out your problems? Damn, I’d be on the toilet for a week.”

  “Van,” Lillie said, not sitting or taking off her leather jacket. She just stood there with her arms across her chest, looking down at his uncle. “Tell Quinn what you were telling me, about seeing Hamp last week.”

  “I saw him Friday.”

  “Day before he died,” Quinn said.

  “I’d seen him a few times before that.”

  “You said Quinn might want to know,” Lillie said.

  “I don’t want to be involved with this shit.”

  “You’re already involved with this shit,” Lillie said, moving in a bit, blocking the television as Van was trying to turn it back on to learn more about the Almighty Cleanse system. “Tell Quinn.”

  “I seen your other uncle a couple times out at the Rebel Truck Stop,” Van said, putting down the remote, leaning into the thick cushions of the beaten couch. “Okay?”

  “So what?” Quinn asked.

  “Do you mind?” Van said, turning to Lillie, who still stood over him. Lillie looked to Quinn and shrugged and made her way out of the trailer, the door slamming shut behind her.

  “I’m not pleased to admit this, but I do on occasion like to head down there for some companionship. When I have the money.”

  Quinn waited.

  “I talk to the girls, watch ’em dance a little. There was one I used to bring flowers from the Piggly Wiggly. But she wasn’t worth it. When the money ran out, so did the companionship. You can get the full treatment out with one of them lot lizards. You know what I mean?”

  Quinn kept waiting, not saying a word, seated across from Van in a rickety metal chair, the room smelling of stale cigarettes and Lysol. An open Styrofoam box sat on a barstool, a half-eaten portion of barbecue and baked beans.

  “Both times I seen him, he was with the same girl,” Van said, finishing the cigarette and burning into a new one, perched there like a redneck Buddha. “She and Hamp were doing some serious talking in his personal vehicle. Just made me think of all the times he looked at me like I was the shit off his shoe. Here I am, getting worked on, and across from me is the damn sheriff of the county with a woman in his car. That’s what I would call a complex sitiation.”

  “But they were talking,” Quinn said.

  “Ain’t but one reason to talk to a woman like that and that’s to haggle over the price.”

  “Maybe he was going to arrest her?” Quinn asked.

  Van shook his head.

  “You’ve seen the girl? You know her?”

  “They call her Jasmine. Like the plant. I know’d ’cause I kidded her about it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Just leave me out of this. Okay? I’m trying to get a job with a road crew.”

  Quinn stood up and checked his watch, noting it was coming up on five. He saw Lillie on the other side of the glass door, leaning against the handmade railing and smoking a cigarette, checking her watch, too. Quinn offered his hand to his uncle and thanked him for getting in touch.

  “Hey, Quinn. Listen, since the plant closed, things been a little rough. Wonder if you might give your old uncle a loan till I get straight?”

  Quinn reached into his pocket and pulled out forty dollars, mashing it into Uncle Van’s hand. “Will that hold you?”

  “You were always my favorite,” Van said.

  The Rebel Truck Stop had occupied the same piece of property since the late fifties, not a half mile off 45, the old highway that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up to Lake Superior, cutting through the eastern edge of the state of Mississippi and along the eastern border of Tibbehah County. The station used to be known for the billboards advertising a pair of Bengal tigers caged by the pumps, a sign above them reading DO NOT TAUNT OR FLICK CIGARETTES ON THE ANIMALS. But by the time Quinn was a child, only one of the tigers was still alive, slow and toothless, rottenly depressed and living in filth, dying a little while later.

  That was about the time Johnny Stagg got the idea to open a truck stop strip club, a little shack called the Booby Trap. The county tried to shut him down dozens of times and failed, with Stagg lining the pockets of the supervisors, thriving for years until someone set fire to it, most believing it was Stagg himself. Stagg rebuilt bigger and bolder, with a place for truckers to get showered and fed, buy spare parts for their eighteen-wheelers, or rest for a while in a big-rig parking lot that stayed full most nights. Maybe a hand job before they got back on the road.

  Quinn parked up toward the restaurant. The strip club was housed in a separate building visible from the highway, a big neon sign plastered on the broad side with a Confederate flag and the outline of a curvy woman, the kind you see on mud flaps.

  He waited with Lillie in the truck about twenty minutes until they saw what they were looking for, a girl in a short plaid skirt, cowboy boots, and a pink ski jacket jumping down from the cab of a big rig and counting the cash in hand.

  Quinn nodded to Lillie and followed the girl into the truck stop, bustling with tired folks cutting into leathery steaks and wilted salads. The girl asked a cashier to break a twenty and found a spot at the diner’s counter, ordering a slice of pecan pie and a chocolate shake.

  The girl was black-headed and very pale, with pockmarked skin and skinny legs. She ate the food fast and went back out into the cold, strolling through the long rows of parked big rigs, sometimes craning her neck up to an open window to talk, then moving on to the next row. Quinn caught up with her as she turned a corner, smiling and waving her down, dozens and dozens of trucks chugging around him in the cold, the air smelling of diesel. Parking lights almost looking like holiday decorations.

  “Hey, I’m not hustling anyone. I’m looking for my boyfriend.”

  Her eyes were brown and strangely narrow, her nose stubby. Quinn offered her a twenty-dollar bill. She shook her head.

  “I just want to talk.”

  “I don’t go nowhere for less than fifty.”

  He paid her, tapping out his wallet for cash.

  “Where’s your rig?”

  He led her back to the F-150, Lillie in the passenger seat. The girl not seeming to mind there was someone else in the cab, just hopping right between them while Quinn cranked the engine. “You can pull round back of the club,” she said. “They don’t open up for a few hours. And only one of you can touch me. Okay? Goddamn, it’s cold.”

  “You know a girl named Jasmine?” Lillie asked, her face coloring.

  The girl shook her head as Quinn drove to the back side of the strip club, parked by two overflowing Dumpsters, and killed the engine. The daylight was fading into a horizon of black, the pine trees inked cutouts, pools of stagnant water on a parcel of cleared land turning to ice.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  The girl shook her head. She looked scared.

  “I think you’re full of shit,” Lillie said, letting down a side window and lighting a cigarette.

  “You the law?”

  “Yeah, I’m the law,” Lillie said, turning to face her, reaching into her purse and showing her badge. “How about you tell us where to find Jasmine, and we’ll set you right back where we left you? If not, we’ll get you for solicitation.”

  “I don’t give two shits.”

  “Don’t act like you haven’t got any sense,” Lillie said. “We just want to ask her a couple questions.”

  “I’ve only been here a week.”

  “That’s a lie,” Lillie said. “You got busted for trying to peddle pussy on the town Square this summer.”

  The girl didn’t say anything.

  “You’re from Florida,” Lillie said, blowing smoke through the cracked window. “You got priors. Your name is Kayla.”

  “She hasn’t be
en around in a while. Okay? Y’all leave me alone.”

  “Are y’all friends?” Quinn asked.

  Kayla studied her hard-bitten nails, her knee jumping up and down like a piston. “Can I have a cigarette?”

  Lillie handed her one with her lighter.

  “You know where she lives?” Quinn asked.

  “She got real fucked up. She ain’t coming back. What’d she do anyway?”

  “She knew a man who got killed,” Quinn said. “We think she may have seen something or known something about it.”

  Kayla looked out at the blackened horizon over an endless row of pines bordering the highway, looking like a high wall to Quinn. Lillie let out a long breath, patience waning, reaching for the girl’s arm and pulling her attention toward her. “You know her real name?”

  Kayla shook her head.

  “You know where she’s from?” Lillie asked.

  “Said she was from Bruce.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s white?” Quinn asked.

  “Sure she’s white.”

  “What color’s her hair?” he asked.

  “Brown. Hell, you could look right at her and then forget her face. She looks like half the people I ever met.”

  Lillie let go of her arm. “What else do you know about her?”

  “I know she’s got a kid. Showed me pictures on her phone.”

  Quinn looked to Lillie and Lillie asked, “She say the kid’s name?”

  Kayla didn’t say anything, just looked down at the cigarette in her hand. Quinn repeated the question.

  “Said her daughter’s name was Beccalynn. She said it like that, all one word, because I asked her if she’d call her Becky, you know, just to talk. But she said no because it was one name.”

  “That’s a start,” Lillie said. “If she’s in school. How old do you think her daughter would be?”

  “I don’t know,” Kayla said. “Six? She didn’t say.”

  “Can you ask some of the other girls for us?” Quinn said. “I pay cash.”

  Kayla shrugged. “I think that girl is long gone. Y’all ain’t gonna find her.”