The Lost Ones (24 page)

Luz’s face turned sad. She shook her head as if she didn’t know.

“That fat woman, the American? What in the hell is she doing with y’all?”

“I saw her and I saw the children,” Luz said. “The man, her husband, has friends in Mexico. He is trying to leave the country.”

“And y’all going to give him a ride?”

“I don’t know,” Luz said. “Who is she?”

“She killed a child. She’s beaten and tortured the others,” Donnie said. “Y’all need to let those kids go.”

Luz shook her head. “I’m sorry. This is why you’re angry?”

“I don’t know what y’all do, and I really don’t give a shit. But when you start hurting kids, that makes my stomach turn.”

“I can find out,” Luz said. “There is so much you don’t know.”

“I know enough.”

“Vincente was my friend.”

“I’m sorry.”

She pulled the Jack Daniel’s from his hand and drank down a generous portion. She sat at the edge of the pullout bed and held her head in her hands, black hair spilled over her face.

She began to cry a bit.

“Just what the hell is going on?” Donnie asked. “I feel like I walked into this picture show kind of late.”

31

QUINN HAD FALLEN ASLEEP AT THE FIRE, BUT THE HARD KICK OF A BOOT
knocked him awake and down on his side. He turned and looked up into the double barrel of Warden Porter’s shotgun, the flat of his boot across Quinn’s chest. The man was red-eyed and unshaven and breathing hard. “Get up,” Porter said.

He stepped off Quinn’s chest and let the boy get to his elbows and then knees.

Porter knocked him across the mouth with the butt of the shotgun, sending him sprawling down by the edge of the pond. Quinn’s mouth began to bleed.

Caddy screamed and ran to him, trying to block the way between the old man and her brother. Quinn regained his vision and wiped the blood from his lip, feeling like his jaw might be broken. He pulled Caddy back as Porter approached, the old warden wearing a dark rain slicker and slouch hat.

“You kids give me trouble and I’ll sink y’all both in that there pond,” Porter said. “Don’t matter to me.”

“My uncle said you were a cocksucker,” Quinn said.

Porter moved on him, Caddy trying to push him away and getting the back hand from the older man, sending her onto her butt in the mud. Quinn rushed the man, a flurry of little fists and elbows, not really knowing how to fight yet, and the man gripped his small fist and pulled it hard behind his back, hard enough that Quinn heard the pop in his shoulder. Porter held him facedown in the mud before he jerked him up and bound his wrists with thin rope, telling his sister to quit her bawling.

“We got a good eight miles to go through this forest,” Porter said, picking up his hat from the ground. “I’ll pull the boy, but don’t make me rope you, too. You hear me?”

Caddy didn’t say anything.

Porter screamed it again, veins bursting in his neck.

Quinn spit blood at the man.

“You ’bout broke my neck when you set that trap for me over that ravine, you little shit,” Porter said. “Don’t try and be a man.”

Quinn spit out some more blood and watched as Porter kicked dirt over the fire, sending smoldering smoke up into the gray sky. He pulled some Red Man from a pouch in his coat and set a fat chaw in his cheek. He looked to Quinn and his crying sister and shook his head with disgust. Porter yanked at the rope tying his hands.

“Don’t worry, Caddy,” Quinn said. “Don’t you worry about nothing.”

Porter lumbered over at the lean-to and kicked over the carefully placed pine and oak limbs. He studied the way Caddy had arranged all the food she’d taken from the house on a rock shelf and laughed as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He marched back to the smoking fire ring and reached down for the .22 Browning that had once belonged to Quinn’s grandfather. He roughly pulled out the loading pin and shook loose the long bullets inside. He threw the gun over his shoulder, spitting in the dirt fire, and grinned at Quinn. The man had dared him to say a word.

He’d left about four feet of rope hanging from Quinn’s wrists and used the loose end to yank him to his feet. Porter kicked him hard in the backside, setting him forward and stumbling and right to his knees. Quinn called him a fat old bastard. The old man kicked him again.

“You can be as tough as you want, boy,” Porter said. “But the next kick is for your sister. You want that?”

Quinn shook his head, and the man marched them forward up the fire trail and over the first great hill and the next, taking them out the opposite way from the way they’d entered the woods, the long way.

“Why are you headed west?” Quinn asked. “It’s shorter back toward Tibbehah County.”

“Sometimes I figure out things on a walk,” Porter said, taking a moment to study the darkening sky. “Hadn’t figured out what to do with you all yet.”

Caddy’s face was a mess, but she had quit crying. She walked alongside Quinn, step for step, until Porter reached for her shirt and yanked her back with him. When Quinn turned back and stopped walking, Porter slapped him against the back of the head.

“You lay a hand on her, you bastard, and I’ll kill you.”

“Sure like to see you pull that off, kid.”

It started to rain a few miles in, the trail wandering and wild, overgrown with thorny brush and blocked with fallen, rotting trees. But Porter knew the way, as Quinn did, and they pushed ahead. The rain coming down hard in Quinn’s eyes as he felt his jaw swell to the size of a baseball. Caddy was quiet, and every so often, Quinn would look over his shoulder to make sure she was OK. She walked right in front of Porter, and Porter lowered his eyes on the wetness of her shirt and small figure, spitting now and then into the brush.

He called her “girlie” and tried to make small talk. He said he was sorry for the rain. He said he was sorry her no-account brother caused all this trouble. Caddy didn’t answer him. The trail spread out into four or five fingers, dipping up and down the rolling hills of north Mississippi, until they connected with a well-traveled path through a patch of new-growth trees that thinned down and long into an open clearing of cotton land. An old rusted barn stood alone in the new growth of the forest, the farmland being reclaimed by nature.

Porter moved fast ahead and yanked rough on Quinn’s wrist, pulling him forward like he was a dog, taking him under the sloping roof, rain pinging hard above them. Quinn and Caddy were soaked to the bone, both shivering. Porter shook the rain off his slicker and hat. He put his hat back on and looked around the barn, finding an old metal bucket to sit on and stare outside.

There was thunder and stillness.

“No, sir,” Porter said. “I hadn’t quite figured out what to do.”

Quinn gave him a hard glance. Porter kept staring at his sister. Quinn readjusted himself between his legs.

“You need to peepee, little boy?” he asked. “Come on. I ain’t holding it for you.”

He loosened the ropes with one hand, Quinn’s wrists red and chafed. His fingers had turned a purplish blue. Porter pointed the end of the shotgun all loose and wild at Quinn, waiting for him to take a leak in the rain, water coming down cold off the cedar and down his neck and back.

When he finished, Porter spit again and bound a single wrist and yanked him toward the cedar, tossing the end of the rope around the trunk and binding Quinn there in the rain. Quinn muttered to himself, calling Porter a fat piece of shit.

Porter didn’t even smack him. He sauntered on up the hill and back into the ramshackle, forgotten barn. The rain tap-tap-tapped on the metal roof and stopped for a long, slow moment, thunder growling far out to the west. A deep electric silence far up into the waiting barn.

Caddy screamed.

Porter yelled. “Just lay down. Lay down, damn you.”

Quinn had lost feeling in his wrists and fingers and tugged hard as he tried to loosen himself. The minutes stretched out. He dropped to the ground and placed his feet against the trunk and pushed and wriggled and felt the rope burning and tearing into his skin until he bled. The rope was wet and slick, and with a final kick and tug, one hand broke free, and the other, both dead and asleep and clumsy as he made his way to the yawning mouth of the barn and stepped into the darkness. There was more thunder out in the gentle gray light, and the metal humming with it all.

Porter had hung his rain slicker all neat and civilized on a nail by the door. His hat and 12-gauge rested on a ledge with an old Coleman lantern.

“Lay down, damn you,” Porter said from high up in the loft. A homemade ladder built of two-by-fours lifted on up into the crooked ceiling. Quinn rubbed the blood back into his clumsy hands as he reached for the shotgun. Caddy screamed at a higher pitch like bubbles popping at the surface of a pond.

“YOU AWAKE?”
Dinah Brand asked from beside Quinn in the old iron bed. It was late night, a soft storm passing outside, only an old quilt his Aunt Halley had made across their naked bodies. As Dinah turned in shadow, hand propping her head, the curve of her hips and smallish breasts were clear in a sliver of light from the hall.

“It’s raining,” he said, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

“You need to let your dog in?” she asked, whispering.

“He’s got a door in the back.”

“Were you dreaming?”

“I haven’t slept.”

“Sounded like you were dreaming.”

“No,” Quinn said. “I’m fine.”

“You worried about what we’re doing?” Dinah asked, staring down at him. Her voice had a husky edge to it. “Because I’m not. This is my personal business on my personal time.”

“I’m not worried. Couldn’t sleep is all.”

Dinah backed in closer to Quinn’s body. Quinn’s arm wrapped around her. The rain and storm pinged off the edge of the roof as it had in his memory. Her skin was warm to the touch, and her hair smelled of sweet shampoo. His feet stuck out the bottom of the quilt. “You want some water?”

“Please.”

Quinn scooted out as Dinah righted herself, reaching for one of Quinn’s old flannel work shirts, slipping inside and buttoning. In bare feet, she followed him to the kitchen, a single light on over the stove as he filled a canning jar from the tap.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Quinn handed her some water. Lightning flashed from far off, the thunder low and grumbling out across the pastures. He shook his head.

“Just some family drama,” Quinn said. “You really want to meet my family?”

“I really do.”

“You might think less of me.”

“I doubt that.”

“My mother is a good woman,” Quinn said. “And my sister. Well, she walks a pretty rough road. It’s not her fault.”

Dinah Brand looked natural in Quinn’s old shirt, red hair loose and a bit wild, bare feet twitching on the floor by the kitchen table. Her eyes almost translucent in the light, long white shapely legs with really nice knees.

“You got great legs,” Quinn said.

Dinah stretched on her right leg and turned it this way and that. She smiled. “I do. Don’t I?”

Quinn nodded. Hondo padded on in from outside and shook his wet coat. He’d been asleep in the mudroom, and he stretched out long and yawned. Quinn tossed him a biscuit from a tin on the counter.

“Hungry?”

Dinah shook her head.

“Thirsty?”

She shook her head.

“Want to go back to bed?”

Dinah nodded.

She clutched the edge of his shirt in her hands and tiptoed across the room to him, hands across his neck and a warm, welcoming slow kiss. He reached around her waist and pulled her up into him, letting his hand drop down below her narrow waist.

He had begun to back her down the hall, working on the old shirt’s buttons, when the phone rang.

Quinn said, “Son of a bitch.”

It had to be way past midnight. But late-night calls were common. Lillie and the other deputies checked in at all hours. Quinn told them he’d be mad if they didn’t let him know about something important.

“Sheriff?”

Quinn did not recognize the man’s voice.

“Who’s this?”

Dinah tucked her head on Quinn’s shoulder. He felt the soft curve of her back under the flannel shirt with his free hand. She stared up at him.

“I know where those kids are at,” the man said.

Quinn waited. His hand stopped.

“Don’t worry about tracing this call,” the man said. “I’m at a pay phone, and don’t have nothing to do with this mess. But that fat woman and the Mex are about to boogie on down the road. If you’re quick, you can still catch them up in New Albany.”

“Where?” Quinn asked.

“You need a pen or can you listen to me straight?”

32

“I AM IMPRESSED, AGENT BRAND,” LILLIE SAID, WINDOW CRACKED, CIGARETTE
in hand, as the night highway flew past. “You sure made good time from Oxford. I mean, it was what? Maybe thirty minutes from the time the sheriff got the call? Damn, you federal people are sharp. The best. I’m telling you what.”

Dinah didn’t answer, only glanced back at Quinn as they headed up 45 North in Lillie’s Jeep and then cut west on 78 into Union County. Lillie drove with Dinah in the passenger seat; Quinn sat in back, exchanging phone calls with the sheriff in Union County, making plans to get on the farm where he’d been told the children were stashed. He said he’d meet Quinn with a couple deputies but couldn’t guarantee a warrant. They could try for a welfare check only and then see how to proceed. By the time they hit the county road where they were supposed to find Janet and Ramón, it was 0500 and dark as hell.