The Ranger (19 page)

Quinnʹs cell rang
about halfway back to Jericho. It was Anna Lee.

“You asleep?”

“I’m headed back from Memphis.”

“Quinn, did you give some girl Luke’s number?”

“She was pregnant and needed a doctor.”

“That girl called us at supper, and Luke drove off to find her. He hasn’t answered his phone in nine hours.”

“Sounds like the girl’s in labor.”

“He’s not at the hospital.”

“Call Wesley.”

“I called him,” she said. “He wasn’t worried.”

“I’m sure Luke’s fine.”

“He went out to that compound up in the hills.”

“You want me to call Wesley for you?”

“Why in the hell would you put Luke in with those people?”

“I’m sorry, I thought Luke was a doctor.”

“Those people out there. Holy Christ. Why’d you set him up like that?”

Gowrie left after
the screaming got too bad, after her water broke on the steps with Ditto and ran through her panties and down her legs and she was left in that dirty little room with four women stoned out of their minds. Not a one of them had five years on Lena, and they kept on telling her everything was going to be all right. The hell it was. She kept on punching that number on the cell phone, the one she’d been given at the truck stop, feeling like this was the only way the goddamn pain would stop. But the girls tried to soothe her, bringing her some pills, which she spit on the floor, and a hit of whiskey, which she did drink. Just about twilight is when time kind of stopped, and she threw that phone to the floor and began to walk the creaky floor of that trailer, women on each side of her, telling her to be cool. Be cool? She walked and couldn’t breathe, those damn girls not giving her the space. She held on to her big belly and thought of Jody. Jody Charley Booth, and what he’d done by planting his seed in her, after lying on his back and looking up at the stars and telling her how good it felt when he didn’t have to wear one of them things. And she’d asked if he’d finished within her, and he swore on his momma’s life that he hadn’t. And she believed him.

Not ’cause she trusted him, but ’cause it was what she wanted to believe, and if Charley Booth was going to be beholden to her and they’d live together, and he’d go out and make sure they was taken care of, she’d never, ever, have to step foot in Alabama again.

“You want some more whiskey?”

“Hell no, I don’t want no whiskey.”

She doubled over, the pain something fierce, her busting apart at the seams, muscles and organs coming undone, that baby on the move and wantin’ out of there. And as she got on all fours on the bed, a woman bringing a cool cloth for her neck, she had the scariest thought of all. What if she was too small? What if the baby couldn’t get out? She’d hide it. She’d hide it. ’Cause she saw, in her mind, Gowrie walkin’ in and splitting her in two with a hunting knife and having no more worries about it than gutting a fish. She’d be a fish to Gowrie. And that’s all she’d be.

Men were in the room now. She could smell them. She could smell and feel better than she ever had before, and she wished at this moment that she wasn’t feeling a goddamn thing. They craned their necks and looked at her bare legs, the women trying to push those grinning bastards out.

“She don’t look right,” Gowrie said.

A hand reached for her, and she turned and grabbed it and bit down with all she had, tasting fur and blood and bone. The man yelled and backed away. And she rolled over to her back, scooting far against the wall, feeling the cold tin against her back and telling the man to get the hell away from her. “Don’t you cut me. I ain’t no fish. Goddamn you, don’t you.”

He held his arm where she’d bit him and dropped to a knee by her bed, reaching for the hair that had gone wild over her eyes. His glasses caught light all funny in the weak glow of the lamp. He held his hand over her forehead and told her to just hold on, the pain letting go, like the busting wasn’t gonna happen at all. Everything gone still as a lump in her.

I can’t feel nothing. I can’t feel nothing.

His hand held hers. He was nice-looking, with green eyes and brown hair, reminding her of that fine doctor on
Days of Our Lives
.

“Call 911.”

“Shit, no,” Gowrie said. “Brought you here, didn’t we?”

“She can’t have this baby here in this filthy room.”

“She called a doctor. I don’t need the law.”

That’s when the pain came on so strong that her spine bucked from the bed, and she dug her nails into his arms and said, “Goddamn you, Jody. Goddamn. You killed me.”

The doctor just said, “Hold on.”

20

Wesley Ruth met Quinn at the Tibbehah County line,
his sheriff’s truck pointing north on a muddy shoulder and chugging exhaust in the cold night. Quinn pulled opposite him, headed toward Jericho, and Wesley let down his window, Styrofoam spit cup in hand, and said, “You sure like waking me up at night. Is this going to become something regular?”

“Anna Lee’s worried.”

“You think maybe she just wanted a reason to call?” Wesley said. “I’d really prefer not getting in the dead center of this shit.”

“You mind riding out there and checking up on him?”

“Say, where’d you get that ole junker?” Wesley asked. “Where’s your truck?”

“I borrowed it.”

“We got an old car just like that in impound last week.”

“No kidding.”

Wesley eyed him for a long moment and spit some snuff out in the coffee cup. He nodded and said, “Fine, I’ll ride out there. But I think Anna Lee is twisting your pecker.”

“You talk to Lillie tonight about the fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a hell of a revelation.”

Wesley nodded at him and played with the bill of his baseball cap, spitting again. “Quinn, you know anything about Keith Shackelford?”

“I know he was Fourth Infantry.”

“You know he’s a meth head and a professional fuckup?”

“Said he was clean.”

“He’s a freak show,” Wesley said. “His life has been spiraling down the shitter since he got out of the Army. I thought he was dead, and I really don’t appreciate you all dumping his ass back on my doorstep.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that the arson investigation of that fire was fixed?”

“Keith Shackelford makes his living as a federal snitch,” Wesley said. “He works both sides. He got in with some blacks up in Memphis and sold them out to the DEA, and then he come down here and tried to do the same thing to Gowrie’s bunch.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“You pay him?”

Quinn didn’t say anything.

“He’ll tell you what you want to hear, conspiracies and lies about your uncle,” Wesley said, rubbing his temples from fatigue. “But sometimes people are such fuckups they leave grease on the cookstove, and sometimes old men get so damn depressed they stick a gun in their mouth.”

“Keith Shackelford was cooking meth for Gowrie.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Wesley said. “But I wouldn’t believe any stories that turd tells me without checking them out.”

“Will you check it out?”

“Goddamn, Colson. I said I would.”

“You mind if I ride with you to check on Luke?”

“Let me stick my boot in that anthill, partner.”

“I can play nice.”

“I love you, brother. But don’t treat me like a moron.”

Anna Lee drove
over to the farm at four a.m.

Quinn hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking about Caddy, standing there pissed off in a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s outfit and a fake-fur coat, bragging about her new convertible and what a good mother she’d been. He sat outside on a rocking chair in the cold silence, covered in horse blankets and smoking a cigar. Hondo had wandered on in from the back field and now stood barking at Anna Lee’s car, hair raised, the night brisk and clear, with a moon so huge that it lit up the pasture and glowed off the tin roof of the barn.

Quinn’s aunt’s old laundry line stood bent and crooked on the hill like some kind of crazy Calvary.

Anna Lee stepped out in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knit hat and gloves, and made her way up to the screen door, spotting him sitting there in the dark, giving her a little start, before she stepped inside and sat down in a chair opposite him.

“You hear from Luke?”

She let out a breath and shook her head. Quinn could tell she’d been crying. Hondo sniffed her and sat back down.

“I called Wesley.”

“Wesley said he drove over to that compound, or whatever in the hell it is, and he wasn’t there. Said the girl wasn’t there, either.”

“You ask folks at the hospital?”

She used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. “No, Quinn. I didn’t think of that. Hell, I’ve been calling every thirty minutes.”

“Sorry,” Quinn said. “The girl needed to see a doctor. I didn’t see any harm in that.”

“I didn’t mean to jump your ass.”

“Old habits.” Quinn smiled at her.

She took off her hat and leaned forward in her chair. “If she’d gone into labor, Luke would’ve called an ambulance.”

“Maybe there wasn’t time.”

“If the delivery was rough, he’d need help.”

“You know, I got holed up in this Afghan village one time with two pregnant women, both going into labor from stress, thinking soldiers were there to kill everyone. I’ve never heard more screaming and pain in my life. We were blowing up a mess of ammo the Taliban had stashed and we could still hear those women.”

“Luke would’ve called.”

Quinn nodded. “Shit. Okay.”

She wiped her face and nose with the hat and blurted out a nervous laugh, nodding. Pulling her hair away from those wide brown eyes, she said, “You will?”

Quinn put his hand on her knee and smiled at her. “I’ll find him.”

Quinn found
the back door to his mother’s house unlocked and slipped in again, just like he had as a teenager. She was asleep on the couch, same as she’d always been back then, an empty wineglass by the remote, the television showing the menu from a DVD of
Hooper
. His dad had worked on that film, jumping the car over that gorge, playing stunt driver for Burt Reynolds, several years before Quinn was even born. He remembered watching that movie and
Billy Jack
and a mess of Southern-chase drive-in movies, where his dad had stunted as moonshiners and hell-raisers, maybe the best time in Jason Colson’s whole sordid history.

Quinn left the television on and slipped back into his old bedroom, finding the old footlocker he’d kept as a boy, his grandfather’s old WWII issue, the key hidden behind an old photo of Anna Lee.

He turned the key and found everything as he’d left it six years ago: washed and dried hunting camos, so worn they felt soft to the touch, and an old pair of Merrell boots. He pulled out the gear, along with two double-edged knives, and then felt the sides for the loose board he’d fitted as a false bottom. Underneath, he found his dad’s Browning .308 hunting rifle, with a sling and four packs of a dozen bullets. He slipped all of them from the Styrofoam cases and into the pockets of his hunting jacket after he’d dressed.

He moved back out the way he’d come in and walked down Ithaca Road to his F-150 and cranked the ignition. It was nearly five a.m.

He called Anna Lee again.

She hadn’t heard from Luke.

Boom lived
in an old shotgun shack at the edge of hundreds of acres of cotton farmed by his family for the last two generations. He didn’t come out for several minutes after Quinn began to bang on the sagging screen door, finally emerging in old-fashioned long underwear and scratching his ass.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“I said come on.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“You can sleep on the way.”

Quinn was already halfway back to his truck. That big moon hung way out there over the fields, the dead cotton plants brushing against one another in the wind. Boom’s New Holland tractor sat parked under a crooked barn roof.

“Where we headed?” Boom called out from his doorway.