The Ranger (16 page)

He was in the lot and opening the door to the old Ford when Blanton walked up on him and said: “It’s a fair deal.”

“Not even half the land value?”

“Quinn, why do you want that burden?” Blanton said. “I’m working for you and I’ll do what you say. A little personal advice? Walk away with some money in your pocket.”

“That land’s been in my family since 1895.”

“The offer may not be generous, but it’s fair. If that fella Lamar in there pushes it, you won’t have nothing. He’s the kind that makes five hundred an hour. You might even owe some.”

“I’d rather burn it down.”

Blanton looked out on the downtown Square and reached into his coat pocket for an old gold timepiece. He fiddled with it in his left hand, winding it up, before turning back to Quinn and giving a generous smile. “Okay. I’ll fight them.”

“Good.”

“But you need to understand the odds.”

“I do.”

“You could lose everything.”

“At least make that son of a bitch work for it.”

“Hamp dumped this on you.”

“I’ll finish it.”

“Damn, you are Hamp Beckett’s nephew to a T.”

“I appreciate you saying that, Judge.”

Quinn smiled. The old man smiled back and patted Quinn’s shoulder, before walking back inside the El Dorado.

Quinn took
a hot shower and shaved and dressed in an old flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, his mother warming up a plate lunch for him. She’d gathered leftovers from his homecoming party, ham and potato salad, some sweet-potato pie from Thanksgiving. He thanked her and sat at the kitchen table, Jason in a high chair across from him, working on small bits of ham and green beans, chugging down some apple juice, and then staring at Quinn until something about Quinn’s face tickled him a great deal. Quinn winked at him. And that made the situation somehow even better.

His mother finished cleaning up a bit around the sink, a local radio station playing some old-time gospel, and she sat down by Jason, wiping his face with a damp rag. She smiled at Quinn. Quinn had seen that look before, the sadness before he’d leave.

“Do people say things about me? About how I’ve been gone so long?”

“People in Jericho have little to do but gossip.”

“But they say things about me, about the way I feel about my family.”

“I don’t pay it a bit of mind.”

“They’re wrong, you know.”

“Believe me, they know about every trip I’ve made over to Columbus, Georgia, to see you. They know everything you’ve been doing.”

Not everything.

“I don’t like it.”

“Shush,” Jean Colson said, leaning back in her chair, looking much older than the mother he’d seen in his mind for so long. Lines on her face, creases around her eyes. “Just wind.”

“It’s not because I don’t care about you or Caddy.”

Jean looked across at her son and reached for his hand. He met her halfway.

“A man does what you do and you got to put up some barriers, some walls. Your grandfather had to do the same thing. I know who you were protecting.”

Quinn smiled at her. Jason tossed the plate of food down to the floor with a clatter, laughing.

“Guess he doesn’t care for my cooking,” she said.

“I’ll be back,” Quinn said. “Sooner this time.”

“You take care of you. I got things here.”

16

Latecia Young wasn’t happy to see Quinn, and was
even less excited when he mentioned Keith Shackelford’s name. She just kind of hung there in the doorway of her project apartment, arm propped on the frame, looking Quinn up and down, and then walking back to her kitchen, not saying come in but not telling him to get lost, either. Quinn entered, removing his baseball cap as he did, and followed her, where she was heating up a cold plate of mac and cheese. She ate the mac and cheese standing up, twisting open a half-drunk bottle of Diet Coke while they talked, nodding and agreeing with what he said, like she really didn’t have any choice in the matter. Quinn was pretty sure she thought he was with the sheriff’s office, but he never said that, only said that his uncle had been the sheriff.

“And you haven’t seen Keith all year?”

“Nope.”

“You know where he’s living?”

“Las’ time we talked, he’d been staying with Jett. I don’t know where he went after the fire.”

“You seen him since?”

“Don’t want to, neither,” she said, shaking her head. “Heard it fucked him up real bad.”

Latecia was muscular and thin, light-skinned, wearing a threadbare T-shirt and faded jeans without shoes. A light blue maid’s uniform hung on the back of a bathroom door.

“He call you?”

“Sometimes.”

“But you don’t answer?”

She shook her head.

“Can you call him back now?”

“You want me to lie?” she asked, resting her arm on a refrigerator. She’d been inked with a blue tattoo on her bicep of praying hands. “Play games? Hadn’t been for that fire, I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten away from him. You ever had someone grabbing you so tight while you know they the one drownin’?”

“Why was he drowning?”

She shrugged.

“Just call and say you have something he may want. Tell him you’re gonna drop it off.”

“Shit, no.”

“Will you give me the number?”

She looked Quinn up and down again and then stared at him for a beat, thinking and trying to decide how this whole thing would shake out. “I got myself clean. I haven’t had a drink in six months. I don’t even smoke.”

Quinn nodded.

“I keep my job for another three months and I get my kids back.”

“How many kids?”

“I got a boy and a girl. The boy is six and the girl is eight.”

“Who’s got them now?”

“They with a foster family,” she said. “They father was worse than Keith. Used to beat me if I even thought about leaving. How you get into these things? I can’t think right for myself.”

“Did you know Jill Bullard?”

She shook her head, looking down at her untouched dinner.

“What about Keith and Jett Price? They spend a lot of time together?”

“Sure.”

“What’d they do?”

“Drank, smoked weed. Talked war and drank. Jett sold guns, I think. They used to sit around all day in their underwear and play video games till they’d get a call and git gone.”

“Where?”

She walked over to a chair where she’d hung her purse, reaching inside for a cell phone and scrolling through the numbers. She repeated the number to Quinn.

He memorized it.

“Don’t you tell him where you got this.”

“No, ma’am.”

“What’d he do now?”

“I don’t think that fire was an accident.”

“Lots of folks wouldn’t mind seein’ Keith dead.”

“Like who?”

“Are we finished? This may be shit, but it’s my goddamn dinner.”

Quinn called the number,
and Keith Shackelford picked up on the first ring.

“Jett Price’s family wanted to check on you,” Quinn said. “Make sure you didn’t need any money.”

There was a long pause.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“I’m a friend of the family,” Quinn said. “The church took up a collection. But, sorry to bother you.”

“Hold up. Hold up. How much we talkin’, preacher man?”

Quinn picked up Lillie,
and they drove northwest about thirty minutes into Webster County and the town of Eupora. There wasn’t much to Eupora besides a big gas station coupled with a McDonald’s, a run-down motel, a family fish buffet, and a pizza joint by the railroad tracks. The address Shackelford gave had them turning off Highway 9 onto a side street behind a state mental hospital.

Shackelford lived on one side of a tired old duplex, the other apartment looking abandoned, with a plywood-covered window and a screen door hanging loose from the frame. They passed the house once and then parked down the road, walking back, Lillie saying she wasn’t happy with how Quinn had set this up.

From across the street they could see in the apartment’s long shot of hallway, running from front door to back, a shadowed figure looking out from the frame.

“You see that?” Quinn asked.

“He see us?”

“I think he sees that uniform.”

“Son of a bitch.”

The shadow turned and darted full speed down the hallway, hitting that back door at a rush, and ran into a wide, open field chest-high with dead grass and junked cars. Quinn took off at a sprint, running around the house, spotting the figure, swallowed up by the field, moving in slow motion, feet weighed down.

Quinn caught him by the collar of his T-shirt and wrestled him down into the winter mud.

Keith Shackelford wasn’t
much to look at, but most people in the gas-station restaurant couldn’t keep their eyes off him. Half his face had been ruined in the fire, with bright red skin and deep rubbery scars across his throat. Both his ears had burned to nubs, and he had no eyelashes or eyebrows to speak of. His hair had been burned away, although he kept a ball cap down over his eyes, black and red in honor of Dale Earnhardt. Quinn couldn’t figure out for the life of him how Keith Shackelford could then pop a cigarette in his mouth and click open the lighter.

“I appreciate you coming with us,” Lillie said.

“Didn’t know not coming was an option,” he said, turning his eyes toward Quinn.

“You had a choice,” Quinn said.

“So I guess there ain’t no donation plate.”

“Sorry about that,” Quinn said.

“And you ain’t no preacher.”

“Nope.”

They drank coffee in the rear corner of the little McDonald’s connected to the gas-station convenience store. Keith took a seat in the very back, eyes down, trying not to lift them off a paper cup that he didn’t touch.

“How well did you know Jill?” Quinn asked.

“How’d you find me?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged. “She was around. With Jett a lot. I think he liked her a hell of a lot more ’an she liked him. She was only around when he had money. You could always count on Jill to be around then.”

“You didn’t care for her?”

“Did I say that? I’m sorry she’s dead. You could tell she’d been a good-lookin’ girl before she got all messed up. Had Daddy issues. I guess you know her daddy was a preacher. Those kids never turn out right.”

“What were y’all into?” Lillie asked, Quinn noticing how relaxed she asked it, slipping back in her seat, reaching for a cigarette herself, making the whole thing nice and easy, conversational.

“You name it,” Keith said, placing his hands on the table, wearing thin gloves, a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrist and the throat. “I tried every drug known to man, and I’m still sitting here with y’all and drinkin’ coffee.”

“And you served with Jett?” Quinn asked.

“No,” he said. “We was both in the Army but not together. He’d been out for a few years when I come back from my last tour. You military? ’Cause if you ain’t, you need to get a refund on that haircut.”

“I am.”

“Still?”

“Yep.”

“Reserves?”

“No,” Quinn said, reaching for his coffee. “I’m in Third Batt of the Seventy-fifth.”

“You a Ranger?” Keith asked. His thick scarred eyelids opened, making him look confused, his face naked and seeming like that of a man much older than twenty-five.

Quinn nodded.

“Goddamn,” Keith said. “I saw two Rangers get in a bar fight one time in Memphis, and they done beat up the bouncer and two cops. Took about a dozen men to control them, and they was still fighting. Y’all are crazy as shit.”

Quinn shrugged.

Lillie said, “We’re thinking that Jett may have owed some folks some money when he got killed.”

“Sure. He owed me some goddamn money.”

“Some people may have wanted to scare him a bit?” she asked.

Keith looked down at his coffee. He looked around the restaurant and caught the eye of a teenage boy eating a cheeseburger and staring at Keith’s face. Keith looked at him and flipped him the bird. He shook his head. “What are y’all driving at?”

Quinn looked at him.

“I done my time,” he said. “Okay. I got the hell out of Dodge and got free of that kind of life. When a man gets turned upon the spit, he starts to contemplate his soul. I can imagine hell feels a lot like waking up in the middle of the night with your clothes on fire and children screaming. I tried to find those kids. I tried. I see ’em every night. That little girl comes to me sometimes. Jett’s daughter told me it was okay. I tried, man. But half that damn trailer was up and burning after the explosion.”

Lillie exchanged looks with Quinn.

“What exploded?”

“Half that trailer.”

Keith put a hand to his destroyed face, his fingers moving up to his temples and lost eyebrows. He shook his head. “You ever get to that point that you just don’t give a goddamn?”

“What explosion?” Lillie asked.

She knew. Just like Quinn knew.

“They said they’d pour gasoline on me and finish the job if I said a word,” he said, starting to laugh. “I guess that’s what happened to Jill. You know what? She was never too smart.”