The Fallen Read online

  He knocked on the door and waited.

  A young woman, maybe his age, maybe a little younger, opened the door. She had long reddish brown hair, pale green eyes, and pale skin peppered with a lot of freckles. The woman came up to Quinn’s chin, standing there in blue jeans and an oversized gray sweatshirt cut wide at the neck. The shirt fell from her shoulder, an image on the front of Johnny Cash giving Nashville the finger. Standing there, looking pretty, while she held a twelve-gauge, broken open and loose, in her hands.

  She had silver rings on her fingers, several rope bracelets on her right wrist, nails painted black on one hand and a bright blue on the other. The woman looked at Quinn from under the tangle of all that hair. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I took out the shells when I saw you drive up. Whoever did this is long gone. The dumb son of a bitch. Do you see the mess all over my house? My front door was wide open.”

  “Someone here with you?”

  “Just me and my son,” she said. “He’s in his room. I’m trying to get him to sleep.”

  “And you’re Miss Powers?”

  “Maggie,” she said, not smiling, eyeing Quinn as she turned sideways and let him walk inside the little house. “And you’re the sheriff now.”

  “That’s right.”

  Quinn introduced himself and Maggie smiled a little bit, setting the shotgun on the kitchen table and reaching for a bottle of beer. “Nice you answered the call,” she said. “Didn’t expect to see the county sheriff show up to a little break-in like this.”

  “Small department. We all put in time,” Quinn said, looking around. “What’d they take?”

  “Nothing,” Maggie said.

  “Nothing?”

  She nodded, pulling the sweatshirt up over her bare shoulder, standing there in the middle of the room, which was a wreck of spilled books, DVDs, an overturned flat-screen TV, and cushions from the sofa tossed into the middle of the room. It was a pleasant room, with framed photographs and a half-dozen funky-looking paintings on the walls. The door to a greenish vintage refrigerator was open, a mess of food littering a black-and-white checkerboard floor.

  “You sure nothing’s gone?” Quinn said.

  “No,” she said. “But my gun was right where I’d hidden it. And my jewelry. I’m sure the TV is busted. Someone just ripped the whole thing off the wall. Why would someone go to all this trouble?”

  “Got any enemies?” Quinn said.

  Maggie Powers laughed and shook her head, staring at Quinn with those light green eyes. Quinn felt his mouth go a little dry, watching her, something so damn familiar about those eyes and those freckles, the way she stood there, with bare feet and face partially hidden by that long hair. He cocked his head and was about to say something when his radio squawked at his hip. He reached for it and turned down the volume.

  “Does my ex count?” Maggie asked.

  “You bet,” Quinn said. “Divorced?”

  “Almost,” she said. “Thank God. All over but a few dashes of the pen.”

  “Y’all been getting into it?”

  “We always get into it.”

  “Is this his style?”

  “He doesn’t have a style,” Maggie said. “But he’s not usually violent or abusive, if that’s what you’re asking. Mainly, he’s just a self-absorbed asshole.”

  “Oh,” Quinn said. “One of those.”

  “You got kids?”

  Quinn shook his head. “I have a nephew.”

  “Married?” Maggie said.

  “Nope.”

  Quinn had his hands on his hips, staring at Maggie Powers, trying to locate just where he knew the woman from. A long silence hung right there between them. She had really nice green eyes, so light they were nearly translucent, sharp and smart, looking straight through him.

  “Goddamn you, Quinn Colson,” she said. “Are you going to remember me or not? Don’t hurt a girl’s feelings.”

  “Maggie,” he said. “Maggie Powers. Your grandmother lived here. You stayed with her during the summers. You came up from Biloxi?”

  “Mobile,” she said, running a hand through the long, draping hair like a comb, sweeping it from her face.

  “Your daddy was a truck driver,” Quinn said. “He used to let us come out and take a look at his rig when he dropped you off. He had a big Kenworth that had a funny name.”

  “The Blue Mule.”

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “Had a big kicking mule on the mud flaps. He was a good guy.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Maggie said. “He’s been gone a long time. I remember trailing you and your friends around at the baseball park and the town square. Your pretty little sister?”

  “Caddy.”

  “And this real funny black kid,” she said. “Y’all had dirt bikes. You’d jump them into the Black River.”

  “Boom.”

  “And that little blonde who wore dresses but loved to climb trees and follow y’all around,” she said. “I remember how’d you sometimes hold hands down to the woods and talk to each other in little whispers. It was pretty cute.”

  Quinn nodded but didn’t say Anna Lee’s name, his mind coming back to the summers back in the eighties and early nineties, before high school, and before things got real and serious. Back when he’d been a local hell-raiser, and not a town hero or a military man, with plenty of rough edges and fear of absolutely nothing. Maggie Powers. Those freckles and that nice red mouth. He’d kissed her once but could not for the life of him remember when or under what circumstances. There had been a lot going on back then, slipping out, running wild, and a boy they’d all befriended who’d gone missing. A long time ago.

  “Grannie left me the house,” Maggie said. “We rented it for a while. But now, with the divorce, seemed like a good time. We’d been living in Nashville. Figured it was a good a time as any to see about the easy and slow-paced life in Tibbehah.”

  Quinn smiled. “Not as slow as you might hope.”

  “Crime?”

  “Not much in town,” Quinn said. “People on your street don’t often lock their doors. But we have a little out in the county. I can search for prints on that front door handle, if you like, but most of the time we don’t get a match.”

  “It could be my ex.”

  “You want me to talk to him?” Quinn said. “If he admits to being here, you could press charges.”

  Maggie shook her head. “The less I have to do with him, the better.”

  “Is he violent?”

  “My ex-husband?” she said. “Yes. And no. Mainly, he’s an asshole. And, boy, does that man like to drink. He might have stumbled through this house and not even remember it.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Quinn said, reaching into his pocket for his card, writing his personal cell phone number on the back. “I’m on duty all night. Call if you need anything.”

  “Maggie,” she said. “Maggie Powers. You won’t forget me again?”

  “No, ma’am,” Quinn said. “I don’t see that ever being a problem.”

  Maggie smiled at him, those pale eyes wandering over his face, and pulled the wide neck of the sweatshirt up off her freckled shoulder. “Damn. Doesn’t it seem like we were just kids ourselves?”

  8

  “Damn,” Opie said. “I like this car. Where’d you get it?”

  “Borrowed it from the pre-owned lot at Big T’s,” Wilcox said, gunning the Challenger’s Hemi motor. “Some douchebag just traded it in for a minivan.”

  “Hot damn,” Opie said. “We could go from the bank to the highway in less than a minute.”

  “I’ll steal something bigger,” Wilcox said. “Some kind of SUV. Or another van. For the money and the guns.”

  Wilcox slowed down on Church Street and headed toward a big white bank
set off from Flick’s Amoco in the heart of Potts Camp, Mississippi. There wasn’t a hell of a lot in Potts Camp. A truck stop, a barbecue joint, a mess of churches, a tanning salon, and two banks. The only bank Wilcox cared to see was the big bank, Potts Camp Federal. The men didn’t speak as they passed the front doors and toured around the side by the window teller.

  Wilcox nodded, tinted windows up, cab filled with cigarette smoke, and turned off from the bank and headed back toward the truck stop. It was past four o’clock and the day workers—the suckers—were cashing their Friday checks.

  “Don’t you want to see the inside?” Opie said.

  “Don’t ever show yourself on tape, that’s goddamn amateur hour,” Wilcox said. “Besides, you ever walked into a shithole bank that didn’t look like every other one? Only a moron would overthink these things. We are trained, equipped, and ready to deal with hostiles within small spaces. These folks aren’t hostile. Most of them are fat old ladies who piss their pants when you tell them to get down on their knees. Only thing you got to watch out for is the wild card. You know what I mean?”

  “Like that crazy-ass coot down in Jericho?”

  “Exactly,” Wilcox said. “Every other motherfucker down here is carrying. And every motherfucker wants to be a stone-cold hero. We need to shut down that hero mode fast and hard. All the rest is easy. Anyone who takes more than ninety seconds in and out to rob a small target like this is a fucking disgrace.”

  “You think they really have good fried chicken at that truck stop?”

  “Probably,” Wilcox said. “But we’re not stopping. Every other asshole in this town knows each other. Just as soon as we’d sit down and wait for that chicken—and it may be the most delicious damn chicken you’ve ever tasted—someone is going to start asking questions. Where you from? What are you doing down here in Potts Camp? Are you all in the service? Because my idiot son jacked off on two tours in Afghanistan and came home to a parade.”

  “No fried chicken.”

  “No fried chicken, Ope,” Wilcox said. “Soon as we get back to Memphis, let’s go to Gibson’s and get some donuts. We can study some maps, see the best way to hit that bank, and run for deep green cover.”

  “Nice to have a safe house.”

  “That was Cord’s call,” Wilcox said. “Only reason I agreed was because Tibbehah County was so damn landlocked. Only real way out of town was Highway 45. And I sure as hell didn’t want to be Dukes of Hazzarding the back roads with those hick cops. Here, we got lots of options. Did you know Potts Camp backs straight up to the Holly Springs National Forest?”

  Opie shook his head. Wilcox turned down onto Highway 78, gunning that big Hemi engine and taking that vehicle up to a hundred. Opie grinned like a damn kid in the passenger seat, the engine purring as he tapped the dash, wanting Wilcox to redline that motherfucker. But Wilcox took a breath, adrenaline flowing a bit, maybe a bit too much, and took his boot off the accelerator.

  “What the hell, man?” Opie asked.

  “Don’t want to get busted by the nice guys.”

  “You mean the cops?”

  “All cops think they’re heroes,” Wilcox said. “But, in reality, they freakin’ suck. The nice guys of this world are really assholes. And the assholes, like us, are the ones doing the most good.”

  “And what are we doing that’s good?”

  Wilcox checked his profile in the rearview mirror, liking the close-cropped beard he’d been rocking lately, the square, lean jaw, the small, hard eyes.

  “Making everyone feel alive.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Tell me something, Opie,” Wilcox said. “Do you or do you not feel like your boots are back on this planet now? Not like when you were picking up beer bottles down on Treasure Island and playing Jimmy Buffett songs for fat tourists from Cincinnati.”

  “I don’t know,” Ope said. “It was pretty relaxing.”

  “Relaxation only leads to death,” Wilcox said. “That’s what happens to people when they retire. They sit around and do nothing and pretty soon they stop giving a shit about everything. It’s not getting old that leads men to getting limp dicks. It’s when they stop giving a shit about life. This is life. This is purpose. The mission. The training. Keep that adrenaline flowing in your blood and that ding-dong will stay hard as a rock star.”

  Wilcox turned to Opie and, straight-faced, blew the smoke out of his nose.

  “You’re crazy,” Opie said. “You do know that, Sarge?”

  “That’s what makes me an authentic genius,” he said. “I’m just colorful as hell.”

  • • •

  “Mom,” Jason Colson said. “I need you to be really honest with me about something.”

  “Of course,” Caddy said. “Anything.”

  It was after supper, and Jason sat on the floor near the television while Caddy lay on the couch, both watching the Avengers kill aliens while taking out most of downtown Manhattan. There was a lot of noise and violence, aliens on space bikes trying to take over the earth from a porthole from another dimension. Caddy was exhausted. She’d spent most of her day sorting and boxing donations of food and clothing, picking up Jason thirty minutes late from school. Caddy felt like hell about it.

  “This is embarrassing,” Jason said. “But I really need to know.”

  Caddy felt her heart flip a little, pushing herself up, planting her feet on the floor. “Is this about your granddad?” she said. “Because your granddad loves you very much. He just has some real problems with saying good-bye. He fell on his head about a thousand times doing stunt work. You know, he didn’t say a word to me or Uncle Quinn. He just packed up that cherry-red Firebird and said adios to this town. In his way, I think, he believed he was doing the right thing.”

  Jason just stared at her as Iron Man fell from the space portal, free-falling to earth without his jet propulsion. And then it was the damn Hulk—the brainless, muscular Hulk—who had the good goddamn sense to launch himself from a skyscraper and snatch Iron Man from the air and certain death.

  “Is there really a Santa Claus?” Jason asked.

  Caddy swallowed, flummoxed. “What’s that, baby?”

  “Kids in school were making fun of me,” he said. “They said Santa was just your parents. But you and Grandma told me he comes to her house every year just like he did when you and Uncle Quinn were little. And Uncle Quinn always makes a big deal on how he has to work late on Christmas to help light the way for the reindeer. Is that just a bunch of bullshit, Momma?”

  “Jason.”

  “Well, is it?”

  “No,” Caddy said, swallowing again. Taking a breath, thinking on it. “Well, I mean. Yes. You asked. You wanted me to be honest? Yes. It’s not true. But it’s not, altogether, bullshit.”

  “Isn’t a lie bullshit?”

  “Where do you learn to talk like that?”

  “Uncle Quinn said it ain’t cussing if Grandma and my teachers don’t hear it,” he said. “And Miss Lillie said the only folks offended by cussing are fat ladies in big hats who can’t do their business on the toilet.”

  Caddy didn’t speak, only nodded and blew out her breath. She looked at the television. All was right in the Avengers’ universe. Iron Man was alive. Flat on his back, he opened his eyes and said he was hungry and wanted to go out for a shwarma. Whatever the hell a “shwarma” was, they wouldn’t be getting them in north Mississippi for a long while.

  “There is no Santa Claus,” Caddy said. “It’s for fun, to make children feel good and safe.”

  “Kind of like Jesus.”

  “Wait,” Caddy said, now up on her bare feet. All the air washed from her lungs. “Wait. Wait. No. That’s not the same. That’s not the same at all, Jason Colson. One is a funny old man in a red hat who magically flies around and the other is a historical figure. Did you know there’s more evidence that Jesus
existed than there is for Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar?”

  “Who’s Caesar?”

  “The man on the salad dressing,” she said. “No, he’s from a long time ago. Who’s putting all these questions into your head? Is it Uncle Quinn? If Uncle Quinn’s bad-mouthing what I do again, I’m going to go over to the sheriff’s office right now and tell him the way the world works.”

  “No,” Jason said. “It’s not Uncle Quinn. I’ve just been thinking on things. When it’s quiet and I’m in the woods. Sometimes Uncle Quinn and I are hunting, but we don’t talk for a long time. I just thought about what those kids were saying about Santa and it made sense. And I started thinking about all the stuff you and Jamey told me about Jesus. It kind of seemed like the same thing. Walking on water. Turning water into wine. Raising up a dead man. You know? It’s all magic. And what I know now that I’m not a kid is that magic ain’t real.”

  “It’s not magic,” she said. “It’s divine. Jesus was the Son of God.”

  “But how did He know it?”

  “He knew it.”

  “But He thought He had one father, Joseph,” Jason said. “But turns out that God got His mother knocked up by herself.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Joseph must’ve been mighty pissed.”

  “Jason,” Caddy said. “It’s called Immaculate Conception. She was filled with the Holy Spirit and made a baby.”

  “Like me?” Jason said, looking at her dead in the eye, really believing it. Not smarting off a bit. He seemed confused and curious at the same time. “The same way I was made?”

  Caddy opened her mouth but closed it again fast. She reached for the remote control and turned off the television. For a moment, she could hear the wind outside, a thunderstorm expected overnight. The wind chimes on the back porch tinkled. She damn sure better be able to relay the concept of Jesus Christ to a nine-year-old boy. Although what had happened to her was far from immaculate.

  “It’s in the Bible,” she said. “And if you have faith, you have to believe it’s God’s Word.”