The Ranger (9 page)

As Quinn finished up, he saluted the moon, and reached into the truck for the last two beers, popping one, saving the other for a nightcap. About halfway to the dark house he heard a dog barking, his first thought being that Hondo had treed something, and the last thing he wanted to do was walk half a mile to save a scared raccoon.

The bark was quick and popping. And then he noticed the sounds of the cows.

And the voices of men in his uncle’s pasture.

Quinn moved into the house and retrieved an old Winchester .45 lever-action, then followed the road, a long dark tunnel with nimble, wiry branches overhead. The cows’ crying growing closer, Hondo’s barking. Men yelling, and then the dog’s yelp.

He levered the gun, put a .45 in the chamber, and continued to walk. Hondo zipped under the barbed wire and walked at his side under the moon. A cold wind shot down from the foothills.

At the fence, he could make out three men, and then five, kicking and swatting at the cows and loading them onto a long rusted trailer. Quinn moved along a ditch, then steadied his hand on a cedar post, staying there for maybe a good five minutes, rubbing Hondo’s ears, before one of the miscreants spotted him and nudged another in the ribs.

They weren’t ranchers. Three of them were nothing more than kids with shaved heads and wearing ragged jackets, another was a fat man with a shaved head, wispy red beard, and a scrawled tattoo on his neck. Quinn took the last fella to be running the show, from the way he was bossing everybody around. He was older, tall and skinny, with hollow dark eyes, and was shirtless under a camouflage jacket with all matter of patches and symbols.

Quinn’s hand left Hondo’s head and waved to them. “Hello.”

The skeletal man broke away from his group and walked to a midpoint between them and Quinn.

Quinn walked toward him, seeing himself and the dog as moon shadow. He held the rifle loose and easy in his left hand.

“Evening” was all that came to Quinn’s mind.

8

The skinny guy didn’t say a word, just kind of stood
there. He was a little shorter than Quinn, sporting a shaved head with short black mustache and goatee. He had vacant black eyes and a bulging lower lip packed with snuff, spitting every few seconds. Quinn guessed the guy was trying to stand tough, but he looked more confused than anything, other men now surrounding him in the moonlight like trained dogs. He didn’t break his stance as Quinn walked around to the open cattle gate, some of the cows scattering from the herd and heading back to pasture.

“You boys lost?”

The skinny man—Quinn seeing the jacket patches included both the American and Confederate flags—smiled a row of very uneven yellowed teeth. A tattoo crept around the side of his neck. He looked to be jail-hard, moving slow in speech and eyes. A gun at his waist. That fat man with the wispy red beard carried a 12-gauge.

“Let ’em out,” Quinn said.

The skinny man kept grinning.

Quinn walked right through the center of the group, elbowing one boy out of the way, and to the cattle trailer. He opened the gate, whistling and calling out the cows. Hondo hopped inside and nipped them along.

A half ring of men moved toward Quinn as he stepped back and let the flow of cattle pass him. He saw two more guns, the boss yet to pull his pistol, and Quinn kept his rifle by his side, finger on the trigger.

The men shuffled and stared, a couple of them looking to the boss and toeing the ground.

“You need me to call the sheriff’s office?” Quinn asked. “This place isn’t abandoned.”

The skinny man nodded to a couple of the boys and they made a run at Quinn, Quinn stepping right for them, busting one in the skull with the rifle’s butt and punching the other in the throat, not even breaking stride until he got within maybe a foot of the boss man’s face and smiled at him. The man smelled of sharp body odor and old cigarettes.

The man pulled his pistol, and Quinn reached for his wrist, twisting it back until there was a sharp snap and the man fell to his knees. Quinn kicked him in the body twice as he fell and the gun dropped. Quinn picked it up, emptied the cylinder of the cheap .38, and slid it into his pocket.

“Gather your shit and get gone,” Quinn said. “I’m in my legal right to shoot every one of you shitbags.”

Hondo barked and nipped at the fat man’s heels. He kicked at the dog.

Quinn said: “Do that again.”

He walked straight away, not looking back, not hearing that telltale click of weapons until he reached the gate. There were two clicks, but Quinn didn’t really give a damn, as if he’d heard the buzz of a mosquito.

Quinn called Wesley Ruth, but five minutes later the rusted trailer drawn by a King Cab truck ran down the road, bumping over potholes and ravines, Quinn standing on the porch, watching the face of the skinny man behind the wheel but not getting a look in return. With the trailer in the way, Quinn couldn’t get a read on the tag.

The fat man remained in the empty cattle hold like a fattened hog, pointing a pistol up at Quinn and smiling, wild-eyed and happy, giving a jailhouse wink before they turned onto the main road.

Quinn made coffee
in an old speckled pot on the propane stove, and he and Wesley sat on the porch rocking chairs—just as cold inside the house as outside—drinking and talking. Quinn had a couple cigars in his truck, and they fired them up, Hondo now at his feet.

“So you found the dog,” Wesley said, studying the tip of the cigar like he was surprised by the glow. He wore a flannel shirt under his old Tibbehah High letter jacket, occasionally taking off his ball cap and rubbing his head.

“He found me.”

“You say there were five of them.”

Quinn described all the men.

“You think your uncle may have sold the cattle?”

“You know a lot of folks who work cows in the middle of the night?”

“I put out word to look for that King Cab and the trailer.”

“I guess I need to do something with those damn cows,” Quinn said. “Anyone caring for them?”

“I heard Varner was tending to your uncle’s business.”

Quinn nodded, and the men sat in silence for a while. “I saw Anna Lee tonight.”

Wesley cracked a grin, the cigar clamped in his teeth. “That didn’t take too long.”

“She was babysitting Caddy’s boy, and I stopped by.”

“Your momma is a saint for helping out Caddy.”

“I don’t think she had much choice.”

“Caddy was a wreck when she finally left Jericho,” Wesley said. “I picked her up twice for driving drunk and high. Took her straight home.”

“Can we discuss the matter at hand?” Quinn asked.

“Does Anna Lee still make it hurt?”

“How old are you?”

“You know, every time I see Meg I still want to take her to bed.”

“We weren’t married.”

“But it still hurts,” Wesley said as he walked to the porch edge and tapped the ash. “Even when she’s chewing my ass out. I’d even say especially when she’s chewing my ass out.”

“What happened?”

“Let’s not share a special moment. Okay, Quinn?”

“Just asking,” Quinn said.

“I think she got something different than what she signed up for,” Wesley said, a hard flash in his eyes. “She was counting that NFL money before my junior year.”

“She wasn’t like that, man. Not that I recall.”

Wesley just looked at Quinn, smoking down the cigar, dropping it to the front steps, not even half spent, and crushing it out. “Shit.”

“Can I show you something?” Quinn asked.

Quinn found a kerosene lantern in the shed and set it on top of the kitchen table, which was covered in checked oilcloth. He pointed out the patterns of blood that he’d seen on the wallpaper, careful not to touch any of it. The spatter—which someone had tried to blot away—looked like an enormous halo, flecks of dried blood across the flowered print.

“What’s this tell you?”

“That Leonard didn’t clean up what I asked him to clean up.”

“But all this was examined with whatever you people do?”

Wesley nodded. “We do have a little sense around here.”

“How long does that take?”

“Could take several weeks. Maybe a month. State lab is backed up.”

“You know what happened to the gun?”

“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Wesley said, holding on to the edge of the table.

“Johnny Stagg says he owns all this land,” Quinn said. “He’s putting a lien on the property.”

“I know you don’t like the idea of Stagg finding the body, but they’d been friends for the last few years. Stagg would come over just to check on his equipment.”

“And make loans.”

“I wouldn’t be telling folks about your uncle’s gambling problem,” Wesley said. “What good would it do?”

“Since I’ve been back, everyone seems to want to tell me my uncle was a great man before they whisper secrets in my ear.”

Wesley shrugged, every movement in the old house magnified in the emptiness. The men turned down the hallway back to the front door, moving back outside, the screen door slamming behind them.

“No ideas on those shitbags tonight?”

“The cattle rustlers? I’ll think on it.”

“No offense,” Quinn said. “But you don’t seem to know a hell of a lot.”

Wesley leaned on the door of his patrol car and nodded. “Oh, I know who they are. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to tell you. We got it, Ranger.”

“Nice jacket.”

Wesley looked down at the old letterman’s jacket and all the gold pins that covered the big
T
and smiled. “I earned this son of a bitch. And hell, it was the first thing I could find when you woke me up. You mind if we both get some sleep?”

Quinn got to sleep
for ten minutes before he heard a car roll into the drive. He checked the window, seeing a sheriff ’s cruiser, thinking that Wesley had changed his mind.

But when Quinn went to the door, he found Lillie Virgil, dressed in uniform and holding a flashlight up into his face.

“I thought you were Wesley.”

“Do I look like Wesley?”

“Nope.”

“I got a lead on the lot lizard. We gotta head up to Bruce. Are you sober?”

“I’ve been drinking coffee for two hours.”

“Good,” she said. “If we leave now, we can make it to church.”

9

Bruce was about thirty minutes out of Jericho in
the northern part of Calhoun County. A lumber mill dwarfed the small downtown—a road sign reading WELCOME TO BRUCE WHERE MONEY GROWS IN TREES—and even at dawn the metal buildings were lit up, with mountains of logs waiting in piles to be cut down into planks, plumes of steam rising up into the cold air. Lillie pulled into a service station and grabbed a couple more coffees; they’d arrived in town thirty minutes early and were supposed to see the minister at his church at seven. Quinn and Lillie sat in her Cherokee for several minutes, watching the logging trucks bumping their way down a gravel road and leaving the mill’s chain-link gates. The light turned from slate gray to a brilliant purple while Lillie, making a face at the weak coffee, confessed to not stepping foot in a church for ten years.

“The only people who are brave enough to pay me a visit are the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said.

Quinn blotted a napkin at the busted skin on his knuckles.

“You should wrap that up,” she said.

“I will when we get back,” he said. “Do those men sound familiar?”

“We’ll look at some photo packs back in Jericho,” Lillie said.

“Wesley said he knew ’em but won’t tell me.”

“Wesley is often full of shit.”

“You think Stagg sent ’em?”

“What do you think?” Lillie started the cruiser, and they made their way through the old downtown, not all that different from Jericho, and along a small street to a Baptist church with a parking lot that was empty except for a Buick parked in a space reserved for the minister. After Lillie had left Quinn at his mother’s last night, she’d made some calls to people on the Calhoun County school board, finding two girls named Beccalynn younger than ten. She’d spoken to the first girl’s mother, finding the woman at home with three other children. The second call yielded the Bullard family, and a long pause when Lillie asked questions about young Beccalynn’s mother, whose real name, it turned out, was Jill. The man, a pastor, asked if they could meet in person.

“How long has it been since her family saw her?” Quinn asked.

“Three months,” Lillie said.

“How long has their granddaughter been living with them?” Quinn asked.

“More than a year.”

They found Reverend Bullard in his office with an open door, the church offices smelling of musty old Bibles and cleaning supplies, that familiar church scent. He had them sit in a little grouping of four chairs, where Quinn assumed he did counseling. Lots of brochures on alcoholism and domestic violence on a table between them. He offered them coffee and they took it, pretty weak, but they couldn’t complain, waiting for him to come to the point as he made polite conversation, talking about losing his sermon and having to retype the whole piece last night.

He was in his early forties, slight and graying. He had a soft, gentle voice and wore a basic blue suit and red tie. A piece of toilet paper had been stuck on a cut on his chin. “Did you find her?” he asked.

Lillie shook her head. “Your daughter, Jill, was in Tibbehah County last month. We want to talk to her in regards to an ongoing investigation.”

Quinn could tell Bullard assumed he was a deputy, too, and Lillie did nothing to try to set him straight.

“What’s she done now?”

Lillie shook her head. “Nothing. But a man she was seen with was killed. We just want to know more about him.”

“I figured she was dead,” the pastor said. “We’ve been expecting that call for four years. I pray for her every day, but she has to make decisions on her own.”

Lillie nodded. Quinn felt himself start to sweat.

“Beccalynn was Jill’s second child,” he said. “She aborted the first. We didn’t know until later. There has been nothing but drugs and men ever since. We only have one child now and that’s Beccalynn, and we pray that her mother never again enters her life.”