The Heathens Read online

  Varner took a seat on a barstool, gesturing to Miss Vicki for two cups of coffee. Quinn figured he was drinking the dollar coffee on Varner’s tab this morning.

  Mr. Varner was a tall, lumbering Marine who’d served long and hard in Vietnam. He’d been a sniper, and despite his age, had come out to assist Quinn on more than one occasion. Like Quinn, he kept his hair buzzed high and tight and dressed in crisp, ironed clothes each morning. His boots were spit polished and shined, as were his new black-framed glasses. His face leathery and weathered under the blocky silver crew cut.

  Miss Vicki set down two steaming mugs. The men thanked her. Varner’s hand shook slightly as he took a sip. His fingers long and yellowed with nicotine.

  “What’s your momma say about Caddy connecting with your daddy out there in Texas?”

  “You know, she hasn’t even mentioned it.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “No, sir,” Quinn said.

  “Bet she’s got more to say about that new baby of y’all’s?”

  “She’s gonna help watch Halley when it’s time for Maggie to get back to the hospital,” Quinn said. “I’m glad. Hasn’t been easy on her, little Jason being gone.”

  Varner didn’t answer. He looked out the window, the backward script of Lipscomb’s hand-painted on the plate glass. open since 1911. The Square was already filling up fast that morning. Nearly every storefront was occupied now, including a new coffee shop, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a mixed martial arts studio. The town looked better than Quinn could ever remember. Trees and bushes were trimmed, sidewalks fixed, and store canopies new and mended.

  “Ever miss the way it was?” Varner asked.

  “Nope,” Quinn said.

  “Me, either. All y’all can do now is fuck it all up.”

  “Appreciate the confidence in the younger generation, Luther.”

  “Heard someone is gonna open up a gourmet grocery over where that old candle shop used to be.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Might cut into the bottom line at the Quick Mart,” Varner said. “We don’t exactly deal in nothing gourmet. You think folks will ever tire of Vienna sausages and saltines? Or a bag of cracklins with hot sauce for their lunch?”

  “Around here?” Quinn said.

  Varner nodded.

  “Not a damn chance.”

  Varner smiled a little as he lifted the coffee and took a sip.

  * * *

  * * *

  Chester Pratt lived out on County Road 357 in a prefab log cabin with a green tin roof and wraparound porch. He didn’t have much property to speak of, just three acres, but what he did have was wooded and lush, with wandering turkeys and deer that would come straight up and nearly eat out of your hands. That morning he’d been so damn tired, he’d turned on the outdoor mushroom heaters and wrapped himself with a Mexican blanket, sitting there in a wicker chair and looking out in the deep woods. He sipped Pappy from a broken bottle he’d salvaged last night and drained into a Yeti cup. He nursed the bourbon, thinking on whether to stay and work out a deal with Stagg, or perhaps head down to Central America for a year or two. He’d heard that Costa Rica was a hell of a place for an American on a fixed income.

  Chester had grown giddy with the idea when he’d fallen fast asleep, headlong into a wild dream about endless sugar beaches and clear blue waterfalls and brown Mexican women with nipples as big as silver dollars. He dreamed he was king of some kind of tribe, sitting high on a throne, wearing nothing but a sarong and getting attended to until something went crazy and those beautiful brown women smiled to show pointed teeth. Their eyes glowed red and they attacked, chasing him into the palm trees and some kind of rain forest, making crazy-ass sounds, clicking their tongues and scattering up trees as a squirrel or monkey might do. He found himself alone and screaming on a flat boulder in a fast-moving river, those brown women jumping in after him, gathering around the rocks and beginning to feast on his flesh as if he was a turkey supper. Chester Pratt awoke kicking and screaming, breath caught deep down in his chest and choking for air.

  He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of TJ Byrd.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Hellfire,” he said. “Shit. Shit. I’m not scared one damn bit.”

  “Why’d you scream like a woman?”

  “Scream?” Pratt said. “Men don’t scream. I didn’t scream.”

  “You sure as hell just screamed,” TJ said, kicking his feet off a glass coffee table. His legs knocked over the Yeti of whiskey and he goddamned her as he reached down and uprighted the mess, a good cup of bourbon seeping down through his deck. This just wasn’t Chester Pratt’s day at all.

  “I asked you before and I’ll ask you again,” TJ said. “Where’s my damn money?”

  “Where’s your momma?”

  “Somewhere where you ain’t never gonna find her,” she said. “Her welfare ain’t none of your concern.”

  “The hell it ain’t,” he said. “I’m worried sick about that woman. Did y’all get into it again? ’Cause if she’s hurt or you hurt her, I need to know. Right here. Right now.”

  “This is between you and me,” TJ said. “You better get me what I’m owed. Or I’ll make your life a hell on this earth. I promise you that.”

  Chester was more than sixty years old and wasn’t used to being lectured by some teenybopper. TJ Byrd was ninety-nine pounds of pure redneck muscle and attitude. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall, standing there with her hands on her hips, wearing a heavy camo coat up over her jeans and T-shirt cut up above her bare belly. Her skin as pale and smooth as alabaster.

  “That wasn’t your money,” Pratt said. “That’s your momma’s money. And any type of financial or business arrangement is between consenting adults. Sorry, little girl. Take a seat at the kids’ table. This ain’t none of your damn business.”

  “That money was my money,” she said. “Left for me by my daddy’s momma. My momma didn’t have any more right to that insurance check than a man on the moon. And you come by, a goddamn vulture, picking across the bones of a poor sick woman that you didn’t even know. Do you even know her name? Or how she died?”

  “I don’t know about any of that mess, kid,” Pratt said, reclining in the rattan chair, his head still fuzzy and thick from that nightmare and those cannibal women. “Your momma and I talked this over. Contracts were signed. Deals were made. Sorry, but that’s the way of the world. You got issue with what she done, talk to your momma.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “She’s gone.”

  “Whatever y’all cooked up between you two ain’t funny no more,” he said. “Where’s she at, TJ? Is she okay?”

  “I’m not my momma’s keeper,” she said. “Don’t you ever go and send Johnny Law on my ass ever again.”

  “I didn’t send no one on your ass, TJ Byrd,” Chester Pratt said, wiping the lid of the Yeti cup with his finger. He took a long pull.

  “You’re not going to find her,” TJ said. “She met up with a new man and gone down to Louisiana for a little R&R. Mud riding. Drinking and partying. She’s sick and done with your sorry, wrinkled old ass.”

  “That’s bullshit, little girl,” he said. “You know what I think?”

  “I don’t really give a damn, old man.”

  “I think you’re just upset about me and your momma being in love,” he said. “I don’t think you can handle that your momma found a little bit of happiness in this world. You don’t want that. I know all about you and your worship of your dead daddy. Jerry Jeff Fucking Valentine. Shit. I hate to break it to you, kid, but he wasn’t no Billy the Kid. He was nothing but a fuckup and loser. And I swear to hell you’re just like him.”

  That’s when that little girl reached into her coat and pulled out a pistol.

  “He left me his gun,” she said. “And if you and m
e don’t get square, I’m gonna shoot those low-hanging nuts right off you.”

  “Come on now, girly.”

  “You had a chance, Chester,” TJ said. “You stole my momma’s money. Money she only had ’cause she’d stolen it off me. You tried to threaten me, sending the police out knocking on my door like I did something wrong.”

  “Get out of here,” he said. “I’ll call the sheriff.”

  “Do it,” TJ said. She reached down on the glass table littered with an empty bag of chips, an overflowing ashtray, and the silver insulated cup of booze. She snatched up his cell phone and tossed it right in his lap. “Call 911. I damn well dare you. Call Sheriff Colson and let him know some seventeen-year-old girl is gonna shoot you. Because you’d be right. But then at least we might can get straight on all the trouble you caused me and my family. You’re sitting here drinking whiskey and eating Golden Flake chips while my little brother can’t even get breakfast.”

  “I can help y’all out,” Pratt said, reaching back for his wallet. “How much you need?”

  “All of it,” TJ said. “Eighteen thousand, nine hundred and eighty dollars,” she said. “Plus interest.”

  “What’s the interest?”

  “Still working on that,” TJ said, still holding that gun on him. That little girl thumbed back the hammer and placed her finger on the trigger. “What’s it gonna be, Chester?”

  “I’m not trying to make trouble,” he said. “I just want to find your momma and make everything right. I just need some time. Why won’t anyone in this world give me some goddamn time?”

  “Two days,” TJ said. “You better get me my money, Chester, or I’m headed straight to the sheriff. You can lie to yourself all you want, but you’re nothing but a con man and a goddamn thief.”

  “What did you and Ladarius do with her?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she said. “You’re goddamn crazy, old man. She’s safe. And she’s away from you.”

  “She was scared of you,” he said. “Scared of her own child and just what you might do to her. I know y’all are hiding something, and I won’t quit till I find her.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Sheriff Bruce Lovemaiden helped himself to an extra plate of chicken and dumplings, greens, and cornbread for lunch at Momma Jo’s Country Cookin’ before swinging right back around to get that Nissan Sentra hooked up for transport to Tibbehah County. He figured he could’ve easily sent one of his three deputies on duty to get the job done, but Lovemaiden was in the mood to take a little ride in the country and finish his fourth cup of sweet tea. Momma Jo had refilled his cup before he left and he liked to sip on it while he tuned into a talk radio station out of Jackson that gave the news straight and uncut to the working man. As he drove on the snaking gravel road, a little rain tapping at his windshield, the boys discussed all these crazy folks wanting to take down monuments to the Confederate dead all across the South.

  Hell, they’d already gotten rid of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest up in Memphis, leaving the bones of him and his wife in a concrete box, not a hundred feet from a community basketball court. It was a damn disgrace and a laugh riot that these people wanted to erase the history of his ancestors and folks who’d given their lives for what they believed was right. If Lovemaiden had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. If some of these damn antifa millennials holding signs and singing rap songs wanted to head on into Parsham County and take down the soldier by the old railroad station, they’d have a real fight on their hands.

  He shook his head with the thought of it as the radio headed on into a commercial about a big gun and knife show at the Jackson convention center. Two days of family fun with all kinds of guns, knives, and antique weapons. “Win a survival backpack valued at five hundred dollars, a brand-new Ranger ATV, or a Vietnam commemorative M16. Special appearance by YouTube sensation and catfish noodler Mary Beth Brown. And boys, don’t forget, women are always welcome.”

  Lovemaiden wouldn’t mind riding down to the capital to see that Mary Beth Brown. One of his deputies had passed around pictures from the internet of her catching the big boys in nothing but a pink string bikini. Lord. The thought of them puppies swinging around in that little top nearly made him drive off the dang road. Instead, he belched into his hand while he turned onto the dirt road and parked, checking his watch for the time and phone for a message from Quinn Colson. He figured that tow truck would be here any minute.

  The rain fell soft as he got out and stretched, turning his bad back this way and that, and stepped over a narrow drainage ditch to take a leak into a kudzu-filled ravine. He looked down to where folks had come to toss out old TVs, refrigerators, car engines, and buckets of motor oil. This was one of the main unofficial county dumps in Parsham and illegal as hell. Lovemaiden wasn’t into hugging damn trees, but he sure as hell didn’t like his county to look like a postcard from Tijuana.

  As he zipped up his fly, he noticed the buzzards circling the ravine high above him, those big-winged, floating creatures zeroing in on something down in that old gully. Lovemaiden sniffed at the air but didn’t catch a whiff of nothin’. Although this was the kind of place where folks gutted a deer shot off-season and tossed the head, legs, and the guts. Or maybe some dog got hit on the road and made it down that hill to die. That ravine sure seemed like a good place to die, as nasty and godforsaken as any in his county.

  The buzzards, six, seven of them, continued to circle. Lovemaiden reached into his patrol car for his slicker and slid into it before he carefully walked onto the worn path down into the mess. There were whole rusted-out cars and trucks, even a bass boat and a pile of steel barrels. As he high-stepped through the dead kudzu, the wilted brown leaves crunched underfoot. He walked careful, trying not to get any mud or deer entrails on his new boots.

  From up the ravine and on the road, he heard the sound of a rambling truck engine and then the crunching of tires on gravel slowing to a stop. Lovemaiden looked up and squinted at all those circling buzzards. Just what the hell were they all excited about? He got close to a rusted deep freezer, and with a little hesitation, opened up the lid, looking inside. Nothing but some stagnant water. But as he closed the top and turned, he lost his footing and tumbled downhill, sliding deeper into the ass crack of this shithole and rolling into the far side of the hill, where he came face-to-face with the side of an overturned blue oil barrel. Son of a damn bitch.

  Lovemaiden used the side of the plastic drum to stand, knowing he’d twisted the holy shit out of his ankle. The contents of the barrel had spilled loose down into the weedy patch of ground, and at first Lovemaiden didn’t make sense of exactly what he was seeing. Something in his mind seemed to have been jimmied loose. What he saw looked for all the dang world like a human jigsaw puzzle, parts of a storefront mannequin spread out to be snapped back together again. The first thing that hit his brain was that he was looking at one of those Japanese sex dolls perverts buy on the internet for hundreds of dollars.

  He hobbled closer, knocking the dirt and leaves off his uniform, unable to take his eyes off a clump of flesh set down near a upside-down vinyl recliner. Lovemaiden toed at it with the pointy tip of his Tony Lamas until he flipped the damn thing and saw he was looking at the severed leg of a human being, as clean and white as a slab of marble.

  Lovemaiden felt his lunch rise up in his throat while he hopped on one foot away from the body parts, not being able to make it five feet before he fell onto his ass, crawled, and started to vomit. The vomiting wouldn’t stop until he’d purged himself of every damn morsel Momma Jo had fed him. All the greens and cornbread and chicken dumplins he could stand. Damn that woman to hell.

  He hobbled and ran until he got to the hill, making his way up the way he came, dragging his hurt foot behind him. He heard a man above calling down to him, but didn’t stop, hell, he couldn’t stop. He clawed at the kudzu, reaching for loose roots to
hold him up as he got back to the road. He’d nearly made it when he saw some huge black fella looking down at him.

  “You all right?” the man said in a deep voice.

  The man looked like a damn giant, wearing gray coveralls and a baseball cap. He reached down a big hand to Lovemaiden, only it weren’t no hand, it was a silver hook.

  Lovemaiden screamed, a sound he’d never heard in his life, let go of the roots, and slid back down the hill. The black man, still lording over him, called out something that the sheriff couldn’t quite understand. Lovemaiden reached for his gun and fired a single shot into the sky.

  “Git!” he said. “Get the hell out of here. Leave me the hell alone.”

  There was a long silence. Lovemaiden looked up into the dark sky, the falling rain, and the crazy carousel of black birds. His mouth felt dry as a damn bone. The pistol shot rang in his ears.

  “Sheriff Lovemaiden?” the black man said. “My name’s Boom Kimbrough. Came over to take that Nissan back to Tibbehah County. You sure you’re okay down there?”

  FIVE

  Quinn waited outside Bluebird Liquors for a half hour before Chester Pratt wheeled into the parking lot in his shiny black Mercedes. Pratt crawled out, looking bedraggled and disheveled, and headed straight for the front door as if he hadn’t seen the Ford F-250 painted Army green with a silver Tibbehah County Sheriff star. Quinn pressed off the tailgate where he’d been texting with dispatch and called out to the man’s back, “Hold up there, Chester.”

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” Pratt said. “Was just about to get up with you. Been a whale of a day.”

  “Getting a little concerned about Gina Byrd,” Quinn said. “Hope you might throw a little light on the situation.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Pratt said. “Her daughter says she took off with some new fella. That’s starting to sound about right. You know Gina. She’s a hot-blooded woman who sure likes to party.”