The Broken Places (6 page)

•   •   •

Bones parked the sweet Chevelle
out back of some mom-and-pop restaurant in Eupora and killed the engine. It was past ten o’clock now, and Esau figured the place must be closed. The lights were off in the windows facing the two-lane blacktop, and this was as good a place as any to ditch the ride and look for another. Next door was a roadside motel with plenty of pickings.

“What color do you want?” Esau said.

“Don’t matter a shit now.”

“You really pissed about the car?”

“I love this car.”

“We ain’t got time to hide it,” Esau said. “We get what we need and you buy ten of ’em just like this one.”

“Yeah,” Bones said, taking the keys from the ignition. “But I like this one. I swear this car loves me, way it reacts to my touch. Reminds me of this girl I used to do up in Corinth.”

“Her panties like Armor All?”

“No,” Bone said. “But I get my hands on her parts and she purr just like this Big-Block 632.”

“Just don’t stick your dick in the tailpipe.”

They were out of the car now, standing over its warm hood, smoking cigarettes and drinking some Wild Turkey straight from the bottle. Esau hadn’t had a drop of liquor since he got to jail, never tasting that crap convicts make in their toilets out of fermented peaches and apple parts. The cigarette tasted new and exotic, too, although he did get a pack from time to time at the Farm, smuggled in for fifty bucks.

“When we get to Jericho,” Bones said, “where we gonna stay? I don’t think Jamey gonna let us sleep on his couch.”

“Preacher Man do what we tell ’im.”

“So we just go up to where he live,” Bones said, “knock on the door and say, ‘Hello, motherfucker, how you been?’”

“Yeah,” Esau said, cigarette burning down in his fingers. “Something like that.”

“Hello, motherfucker,”
Bones said, laughing. “He gonna shit his drawers.”

“He’ll know,” Esau said. “He’ll be waiting.”

“But it won’t make no difference.”

“Nope,” Esau said. “No, it won’t.”

Without warning, the back door to the little clapboard restaurant opened and a white man in a greasy white T-shirt walked out carrying a fat trash bag in each hand. He looked at Esau and Bones by the car. His face was lean and weaselly, with a thick black mustache and black hair pulled into a net. He tried to seem unaware of the two men as he moved past and swung the trash bags up over his shoulder and into a Dumpster. He wiped his hands against each other, passing the car, and then rubbed his hands on his filthy T-shirt, suddenly seeming pissed off.

“Help you fellas?” he said.

Esau shook his head. Esau gave him a look like helping was none of his damn business.

“Restaurant is closed.”

Bones smoked down the cigarette and tossed it on the asphalt. He ground it out with his new pair of truck stop boots. “Don’t say.”

“Move on, then,” the man said. “This is private property, and y’all trespassing.”

Esau glanced up behind the man and to each corner of the restaurant. He didn’t see a surveillance camera. Hell, they couldn’t even afford to fix the roof.

“You boys speak fucking English?” the man said. “We keep this clear so we ain’t robbed every fucking night.”

Bones stood up straighter and tucked in his stiff, cheap T-shirt. He lit another cigarette and passed the pack to Esau. He drew on the cigarette in contemplation, the ash glowing red-hot and lighting up his face. He looked up, cigarette clamped in his teeth, still wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses. “You know, we wasn’t plannin’ on it,” Bones said. “But shit, now you mention it.”

The cook reached up under his T-shirt for a little gun, maybe a junk .32, and made it almost level when Esau shot him once, just once, in the center of his forehead. The jolt of the man, jerking back and then shaking and crumpling like a tumbling leaf, made Bones laugh like hell. There was something so comical about people dying to Bones’s crazy ass. Esau remembered the way Bones laughed and laughed the time that white-boy credit card thief from Pascagoula got shanked on the basketball court. The thought of the boy’s jerking spasms and crazy redneck cussing and prayers always brought a smile to Bones’s face. And this man, the mustached man in the white shirt, was just perfectly dead. Bones got down on one knee and reached for the gun the man had dropped.

“What a piece of shit,” Bones said. “Ain’t worth five bucks.”

“But what’s in the till?”

“Hell,” Bones said. “Let’s find out.”

They pulled the dead man by his belt into a hollow space behind the Dumpster and then moved into the part darkness of the catfish and steak joint, finding the man had just cooked himself a T-bone and a baked potato. The steak was still warm and bloody, his cigarette smoldering next to it. Esau grabbed the knife and fork and cut off a thick piece of the steak.

“You want some?”

“Ain’t gonna eat no dead man’s steak.”

“Why?”

“Bad luck is why.”

“Says who?”

“Common fucking sense,” Bones said, finding the little key already turned in the cash drawer. “Three hunnard and twenty.”

“Add to what we got.”

“You gonna finish that whole steak?”

“Yep.”

Bones turned off the kitchen light and walked to the front door to look out the glass, at 18-wheelers, pickups, and sedans blowing by. “I think the man here owns that Caprice Classic,” he said. “Seems like a real shame to leave my baby for that piece of shit. But hell. I’ll drive it for a few miles down the road and we can ditch it.”

“Highway Patrol will know it’s us.”

“Not if they can’t find his car,” Bones said. “Or his body.”

“You want to toss him in the Dumpster?” Esau said. “They still gonna find him.”

“Go get the keys out his pocket,” Bones said. “I pull around his ride and we stick him in the trunk of my sweet Chevelle. We drive east from here, like we headed to Alabama, and leave the Chevelle and his ass in the trunk. By the time they find it, they think we outta Mississippi.”

“Bones,” Esau said, shaking his head and chewing on some gristle. “Don’t ever let me say you stupid as shit.”

“And don’t ever let me say you look like your momma was raped by an orangutan.”

“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t say that,” Esau said, finishing off the steak. He picked up the T-bone to get off every bit of gristle and meat. His hands and orange beard felt shiny and slick. “Or I might have to kill you, too.”

“Cool,” Bones said. “Now we know where we stand; go grab that dead motherfucker and pack him up to go.”

Caddy could hear the tapping rain on the tin roof of the home she shared with Jamey Dixon. Dixon didn’t officially live there, he had a little trailer he kept out back of the church, but most nights he would knock on her side door about eleven after Jason had gone to bed. He’d help her clean up, finish putting up the dishes, maybe bring some of his own laundry. Mostly they would sit on her old back porch and talk, sometimes having a little red wine while he would discuss what excited him most about being a Christian. The excitement is what got her, talk of country music and ministry and ways of doing things different from before. Jamey never preached to her, never really preached to anyone. He just believed in everything he read from the Bible or learned from Johnny Cash. He believed in redemption and forgiveness and helping the poor and sick. He believed that worldly possessions were junk that weighed you down. He knew that love was beyond all other things, the most important thing in this world, and the most powerful. Everything was simple, with no judgment or hang-ups.

When they were together, naked and kissing and feeling hands and mouths and bodies hot across each other, she never once believed he was thinking about where she had been, the men she’d been with, or whether she would fuck it all up again. Jamey believed in who Caddy had become.

She nuzzled into him, his strong arm around her. Both of them stared up at the ceiling, hearing the wind and storm outside, rain on the roof. She knew Jason was safe asleep in his bedroom, although she always locked the door to make sure he didn’t surprise them, and the lights were off and the dishes done. Part of her felt domestic, and the scariest part was that it didn’t scare her at all. She wanted Jamey here all the time, a husband to her, a father to Jason.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make dinner,” Jamey said.

“Were you really working?”

Jamey was quiet. His arms held her close and she could smell the nicotine and Lava soap on his fingertips. “No.”

“My family will come around.”

“At least your mother now says two words to me.”

“She likes you.”

“But Jason still doesn’t feel comfortable unless you’re there.”

“Not true.”

“He sees how Quinn reacts to me, and he follows his lead.”

“Quinn has been lied to,” Caddy said. “There is still a part of him that can’t accept that our uncle was corrupt as hell, no matter that he found the proof. And if Uncle Hamp helped out some drug dealers, he sure would set up a man like you.”

“He’d been wanting to for a long while.”

The rain on the roof was so comforting. The gentle shift of oak leaves, winds through the blood-red azaleas by her bedroom window. “I’m so sorry,” Caddy said. “Did I ever tell you that? You don’t ever seem to take notice of the way people act around you, good or bad. You just remain yourself. How in the world do you do that?”

“I may have talked a few times about this guy Jesus.”

“I’m so sorry,” Caddy said. “I’m so very sorry that happened to you.”

Jamey maneuvered off his back, propped himself on his elbow, and ran his middle finger between her breasts and down along her ribs. Her skin contracted with goose bumps. “I don’t care what people say,” he said. “I’m where I want to be. This is the place.”

The wind rattled the tin roof and the rain fell harder against the glass. Caddy pulled him in closer. “Where do we go from here?” Caddy said. The words fell from her mouth, escaping thoughts she had held close.

“We start over.”

“For how long?” she asked.

Jamey sang a few lines from “When My Last Song Is Sung.” His voice was deep and weathered and earnest. Caddy laughed. “Just like Haggard.”

•   •   •

Quinn got the call
from dispatch to meet Kenny out on County Road 381. He’d barely climbed from his truck when Mrs. King came out into the dark, garden hoe in hand, held like a royal staff. Kenny nodded in agreement as she explained she’d heard one of her dogs barking and came out to find a fella tossing turnips into the bed of his pickup truck. When she yelled for him to stop, he jumped in the truck and nearly took out one of her pecan trees.

“How many you think he stole, ma’am?” Quinn asked.

“You the sheriff?” asked the old woman. She was still in her nightgown, hair in a pink shower cap.

“I am.”

“I knew your uncle real well,” she said. “Me and him went to school together before they built the new high school. We just had one big school for everyone in Jericho. That would’ve been back in 1953. Everybody loved Hamp. Respected him. Went off to Korea.”

“Yep.”

“And now you’ve taken over?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How is Hamp doing?”

“Not good.”

The old woman studied Quinn’s face.

“He died.” Quinn decided not to explain that his uncle had shot himself with a .44 out of self-pity and shame and for throwing in with the worst man in the state of Mississippi. If the woman didn’t know that already, or had forgotten, then what was the use explaining?

“Sorry for your loss.”

“And yours,” Quinn said.

“Nobody died.”

“You lost your turnips.”

“Yes, sir,” the old woman said. “That son of a bitch.”

Kenny shook his head, sure-footed and Barney Fife–serious about the whole thing. If he asked Quinn to dust for prints, Quinn decided right then and there to go straight home and pour himself a double Jack Daniel’s.

“You recognize the vehicle, ma’am?” Kenny asked. He was a portly guy with a thick stomach and a mustache and goatee to hide a weak chin.

“I didn’t. It was a white truck,” she said. To Quinn, “You know, you sure favor your uncle.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

“You used to hunt out here,” she said. “With that black boy.”

“Boom Kimbrough,” Quinn said. “Yes, ma’am.”

She nodded and chopped the ground with her hoe.

“Well, that fella took the whole patch,” she said. “We were gonna pick them on Saturday. I had a whole lot of people who asked for greens at church. Now I’m going to have to tell them that they’re gone. I’ve been living here for fifty years and never had any trouble. We don’t even lock our doors.”

“Probably should.”

“You know what your uncle used to say?”

Quinn smiled. “I recall a lot that he used to say.”

“He used to tip his hat at me on the Square and say if folks started locking their doors, then he wasn’t doing his job.”

“My uncle and I have a different viewpoint on that.” Quinn nodded. “I prefer to plan for the worst.”

“If a man plans for the worst, then won’t he get the worst?” Mrs. King said.

Kenny turned to Quinn and waited for his answer, hands folded over his large stomach.