Текст книги "The Forsaken"
Автор книги: Ace Atkins
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
Do you think we might have a normal night, Quinn?” Ophelia asked. “We both turn off our cell phones. I’ll make us some supper and we can sit on the couch and watch some television. No interruptions. No professional talk. We just act like regular folks.”
“I’ll turn off the scanner,” Quinn said. “But I better keep my cell on.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Son of a bitch. I better, too. I just figured I’d try.”
Ophelia had on a pair of faded Levi’s and a tight black shirt. She’d twisted her brown hair up into a bun at the top of her head and had kicked off her shoes. Her toenails a bubble gum pink.
“What’s for supper?” Quinn said.
“Well,” Ophelia said, “I’m not cooking that greasy old Southern food like your momma. How about some pasta and a healthy salad? I have a bottle of red wine somewhere around here. We can sit on the couch and watch The Bachelor, forget all about those shitbag supervisors, Johnny Stagg, and murders from long past.”
“What the hell’s The Bachelor?”
“It’s a show where one guy gets to date twenty-five women over a few weeks,” she said. “At the end of the show, the bachelor gets to decide which one he’s going to marry.”
“In a few weeks?”
“Yeah, but they go on a bunch of dates at beaches, travel to exotic countries, and listen to a lot of crappy bands the producers are trying to promote. If you get picked each week, he gives you a dethorned rose. The only trouble comes when the bachelor, or sometimes it’s a bachelorette, starts to make out and grub with multiple folks. You’ll see drunk crying, catfights, people screaming at each other and throwing shit.”
“I want to see that, I’ll just go back on patrol.”
“What’d you rather see?”
“I heard 3:10 to Yuma is on tonight,” Quinn said. “The real one, with Glenn Ford, not that god-awful remake.”
“Don’t you watch anything else besides westerns?”
“When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of action movies from the seventies,” Quinn said. “But then Caddy pointed out that all I was doing was looking for my dad, running all the stunt sequences in slow motion, trying to get a glimpse of my father. After Caddy brought it to my attention, I just stopped.”
“What about war movies?”
Quinn shook his head. “Hell no.”
“Suit yourself,” Ophelia said. “But you’d really like The Bachelor. Half the time the women are wearing flimsy little clothes or bikinis. They had one girl a few weeks ago that walked around the house without a stitch of clothes on. Of course they had her privates all blacked out. But, can you imagine doing that on national TV?”
“Pasta?”
“And salad,” Ophelia said. “And red wine.”
“Just me and you?” Quinn said. “On the couch, pretending to be normal people with normal jobs?”
“And Hondo, too.”
Hondo was already on the couch, making himself at home, resting after a long day of roaming the farm and chasing deer, cattle, and rabbits. Ophelia uncorked a bottle, Quinn not being one to drink much wine but not wanting to make a thing of it. She poured each of them a glass and then started to cut up the vegetables for the salad. Ophelia, as she should, showed excellent precision with the paring knife.
“I don’t want to complicate plans,” Quinn said, “but you did leave me a message about something you’d found?”
“I found something in that file you gave me,” Ophelia said, chopping and slicing carrots with a lot of dexterity and speed. “May not mean anything given the time frame. We can talk about it later, if you like.”
Quinn drank some wine. Wasn’t bad. But he would’ve rather had a cold Bud or Coors anytime. “I’d like to know.”
“There was some correspondence between your uncle and the FBI office in Jackson,” she said. “In the letters, it appeared that he’d sent them the remains of the dead man’s burned clothes and a pair of boots that were pretty much intact. It seems like old Dr. Stevens did take a dental record or at least tried to. The body was a mess and back then there wasn’t any DNA testing or reason to take tissue samples.”
“What happened to the body?”
“Potter’s field,” Ophelia said.
Quinn drank some wine and his face must’ve shown something, because she reached into the refrigerator and popped the top of a can of Coors.
“Gracias.”
She poured the rest of his wine in her glass and then got out a pot to boil some water. Quinn stood there with her, all of it feeling nice and normal. Ophelia could fill out a T-shirt, and her bare feet were cute as hell. Something really comfortable about her little place, all the low light and the sparseness of the rooms, with paintings of old barns and pastures and wildlife. Quinn just hoped the damn cell wouldn’t ring in the next few hours, which would be a minor miracle.
“I’ll call the Feds tomorrow,” Quinn said. “We didn’t have a lot of luck with the DA.”
“I wonder why?”
“No kidding.”
“You look a million miles away,” she said. “You doing OK? I’m worried about you.”
“Right here,” Quinn said, reaching for Ophelia’s hand and pulling her back into him close. He wrapped his arm around her stomach and started to kiss the back of her neck, feeling her shudder a bit as he placed a hand up under her T-shirt. Her stomach was flat and hard, Ophelia inhaling a deep breath, closing her eyes, tilting her head back into Quinn. Quinn could taste her skin on his lips and moved his hand over the first button of her Levi’s, and then the second, and then he slid his hand between her legs. Ophelia became a bit unstable on her feet, reaching back with both hands, arching her back, and feeling for Quinn’s hair and face and then turning to him, Quinn kissing her harder now and finding her in his fingertips, the water audibly boiling on the stove, Quinn hoping like hell she didn’t hear it. But a buzzer sounded and she pushed him away, catching her breath, buttoning her jeans with one hand and smoothing down her T-shirt with the other. She picked up the paring knife and pointed it straight at Quinn’s heart.
“Sit,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stay.”
Hondo peered up from the couch, his rabies tags jingling on his collar. Quinn smiled.
“Drink your beer,” she said. “I’ll let you know when supper is ready.”
Quinn took his beer and found a spot on the couch next to Hondo. He picked up the remote and found 3:10 to Yuma just at the scene when Van Heflin agrees to take Glenn Ford back to prison. Seemed like as good a place as any to begin.
I appreciated you helping,” Caddy said early the next morning. “I could’ve gotten Boom when he gets off at the County Barn, but it’ll be nice to get this all distributed before then. It’s supposed to get down to five degrees tonight.”
“Remind me why we live here again?” Diane Tull said, driving her old Ford, loaded down with boxes of warm clothes from The River and twelve radiators the Jericho General Store had donated. “I could sell seed and feed down in Florida.”
“There are times when I think this county is a paradise,” Caddy said, leaning against the passenger-door window, farmland and long stretches of pine zipping by. “But then you see the ugliness of what we’ve done to this place, all the logging, busted-up trailers, and stripping of anything that can make a buck. We didn’t need a tornado to rip this town apart. We just needed a few more good years.”
“God gives us spring to make amends for it,” Diane said. “The wisteria and the daffodils and the trees coming alive again. It makes you remember this is a fertile place. That’s the reason our crazy ancestors staked out this land, thinking their families could thrive here. They could grow their own food, hunt what meat they needed.”
“Our people came here from North Carolina in 1846,” Caddy said. “Before that, they were kicked out of Scotland and Ireland. My momma’s family got some Indian in her, too. Choctaw.”
“I got some Cherokee,” Diane said. “Maybe the reason only this one strand of my hair is white. You think I should dye it?”
“No way,” Caddy said. “That’s your signature. I think it makes you look hot.”
“A hot momma at fifty?” Diane said, driving with two fingers on the wheel, looking for the turnoff on past the Richards place. “Hmm.”
“I don’t mean to get personal,” Caddy said. “But you been dating any?”
“I was seeing this fella from Tupelo last year, nice hair and good teeth, but I found out he was married and had two kids,” she said. “I met him online and he said he was divorced. But things started happening that didn’t add up. He’d take phone calls outside, come over at weird times, and never stay the night. I finally saw on his cell phone where he’d been texting his wife that he was at a tool convention in Atlanta. When he came back and started to love on me, I told him the convention was closed and he needed to hit the road. And take his goddamn tool with him. He started crying like a little boy, saying he’d been having personal issues, his wife was cold and all that. But, Caddy, I just don’t have time for that shit.”
Caddy was silent. She stared out the window, passing more clear-cut acres and ugly logging roads twisting into the hills. Seemed like everything of worth in Tibbehah was cut down, loaded on a truck, and taken out of the state. This place must’ve been a garden back during the Choctaws’ time, before a backhoe and bulldozer could rip the guts out of a place.
“I’m through with dating and men and all that mess,” Caddy said. “I miss Jamey Dixon every waking second. But to think about ever being with anyone else makes me want to just throw up.”
“Hadn’t been long, Caddy,” Diane said, slowing, taking a left turn down the county road to Fate. They would drop off the heaters at the Primitive Baptist Church and stop off at ten houses who’d requested cold-weather clothes. Caddy had the names of the families listed in a spiral notebook in her hand.
“Men are good for two things and two things only,” Caddy said. “Both starting with the letter F. Since I got myself clean, I’ve learned to fix plenty on my own.”
Diane pulled into the dirt lot in front of the little Primitive Baptist Church, a white clapboard building with a small hand-painted sign at the roadside. There were already twenty people outside, waiting in the cold, for them to arrive with the heaters. The preacher, a wiry old man named Shelton Graves, met Caddy and they went through the list together about which families were in luck, which ones would need more sweaters and blankets for the next few days. Mississippi wasn’t a place that prepped much for cold weather—the bad nights, the freezing nights, people treated like some kind of strange, cruel event. Back during the ice storm of ’94, the worst winter weather most people in the state had ever seen, some houses way out in the county didn’t have power for nearly two months.
Pastor Graves and Diane Tull pulled the radiator boxes off the truck and passed them into the hands of a thick-bodied bald man in a flannel shirt and Dale Jr. cap who stacked them neatly. Caddy had jumped up into the back of the truck, sorting through the boxes, looking for the baby clothes to hand over to one of the women who was waiting. Two more boxes, clearly marked in Magic Marker, were dropped off, and then Diane and Caddy were circling out of the lot, with a wave to the pastor and his people.
“What would people do around here without churches?” Caddy said.
“Starve,” Diane said.
“I don’t know if the South is as religious as it is practical.”
“Southerners have never been good at practical,” Diane said. “We’re stubborn, clannish people who don’t like being told what to do. And that makes us easy targets for the greedy.”
“I still believe there’s a lot of good,” Caddy said, smiling. “That took me some while to find out. But if you look for it, believe in it, you’ll find it. You look for the darkness and that shit will swallow you whole.”
Diane put both hands on the wheel, making a tricky sharp turn, the truck a little hard to handle, as it never had power steering, rolling like a leaden tank down the busted dirt road. “I just like to keep an eye out,” she said. “Surprises have never been much fun.”
• • •
“There’s been no official deal offered,” Sonny Stevens said. “But that conversation over in Oxford was pure, unadulterated bullshit. I don’t care if they got a hundred different rifles of yours, Lillie. You were there to protect Sheriff Colson and you performed your duty.”
“Except it wasn’t my rifle.”
“I know it wasn’t,” Stevens said. “Y’all have gotten in with some folks who play dirty for a living. I don’t care for it, but it’s the way they do business.”
“They seemed real proud of the timing,” Quinn said. “They indict this month, they can take us to trial just weeks before the election.”
“They’ll lose,” Stevens said. “But we can’t stop an indictment. Everyone knows you can indict a goddamn ham sandwich.”
“So what would a deal mean?” Lillie said.
“Please excuse my legalese here,” Stevens said, “but they’re just trying to fuck with you. That bullshit they floated past us about that cold case? You think they were just shooting the breeze? You make an arrest and they drop everything. Even if you just work with them, they may back off some.”
“Maybe I’ll have time to print up some new election banners?” Quinn said. “‘Vote for Colson. Indicted on Lesser Charges.’”
“You sure are taking this well,” Stevens said.
The law office was hot as hell that afternoon, the old man liking to crank up the heat to nearly ninety degrees, Quinn rolling up his sleeves as they spoke. Lillie fanned her face with a printout of confiscated items from her house. Outside, a brittle wind rattled the windows, rain from earlier freezing along the porch bannister and freezing the drops in the bare trees along the Square.
“I did do a bit of asking around about that case,” Stevens said. “Lots of folks remember. But no one—and I mean no one—wants to talk about it.”
Quinn nodded.
“I don’t see how you can ever make a case on something so damn old,” Stevens said. “The DA isn’t even offering a realistic time line to make something work. Putting a case together could take y’all years. This rush doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Funny thing is,” Quinn said, “we were on this already. We didn’t need someone trying to bribe us or hold our ass to the fire.”
“Welcome to a political shitstorm,” Stevens said. “What happened back then was barbaric. There hadn’t been a lynching in this town for thirty years before that. People got sick over what happened to those two little girls and didn’t want to wait for the process of law. It’s an affront to everything I believe in.”
“Can you at least give us some names?” Lillie asked. “They don’t have to give statements, maybe just lead us in the right direction.”
“This happened thirty-seven years ago. It’s a history lesson. You’re not going to find anyone who wants to discuss it.”
“It’s not history to Diane Tull,” Quinn said.
“Not many folks are going to rally around this fella who got killed,” Stevens said.
“Because he was black?” Quinn said.
“Because he killed a young woman and raped another,” Stevens said. “There were town people, not county people, who knew what was going to happen to this fella and turned their backs. The man I spoke with was part of a group of men who gave the go-ahead to make this happen.”
“Who?” Quinn said.
“I can’t say,” Stevens said, leaning back into his chair, the day darkening in the windows behind him. “I’m sorry. He’s a client. This was said in confidence. He believes his hands are clean.”
“You always keep it so goddamn hot in here, Mr. Stevens?” Lillie said.
“It’s twenty degrees outside,” Stevens said. “We might get an ice storm tonight.”
Lillie looked to Quinn. She shook her head. “You want to tell him or should I?”
“Go ahead, Lil,” Quinn said.
“That man who was found burned up on Jericho Road never touched those girls.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Stevens said.
“Diane Tull saw the man who raped her a few weeks after they killed this man,” Lillie said. “It’s torn the shit out of her every day with everyone telling her to keep her mouth shut. She blames herself. These good people in town should be ashamed.”
Stevens swallowed. He nodded and rubbed his freshly shaved jawline. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “I never heard they got the wrong man. Is she sure on this? Hell, she was just a little girl.”
Quinn nodded.
“Jesus.”
“But given our personal shitstorm,” Lillie said. “We won’t be following up on anything but looking for new employment.”
“Y’all lose this election and God knows what kind of people will be running things,” Stevens said. “When you came back, Quinn, I had some hope for this place, that Johnny Stagg wouldn’t piss his mark on every inch of this county.”
“Seems like the new Johnny Stagg has more to lose than ever,” Quinn said.
“He’s a changed man, Quinn,” Stevens said, shaking his head. “Haven’t you heard? Everything straight and legal and for the good of this county.”
“Might not be out in the open,” Quinn said, “but Stagg’s got a pretty sweet deal going on the side.”
“Beyond the Rebel?” Stevens said.
“Yes, sir,” Quinn said. “Nobody can ever say the man suffers for ambition.”
The first real thing Chains LeDoux ever said to Jason Colson was outside a Tupelo beer joint, both men pissing against a brick wall. Chains was so drunk that he needed one hand to brace himself as he turned to Jason and said, “Who the fuck are you, man?”
Jason finished up, zipped up his fly, and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
LeDoux was a mean drunk, always looking to fight after a few shots of Jack, and tonight he’d had a whole bottle. He stumbled over to Jason, jabbing him with a dirty finger and saying, “Snitches are a dying breed.”
“I’m not a snitch.”
“You expect me to believe all your bullshit?” Chains said. “You just show up in Jericho and get in with Big Doug, talking about how you make movies out in Hollywood? Bullshit, man. I bet you ain’t even been to Hollywood. You’re a damn humper for J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Hoover’s been dead since ’72.”
“Well,” LeDoux said, “whatever Fed got you wanting to break us. That’s what all you want, right? You hate us? Hate our kind because we don’t work for the man. We don’t stand in lines and punch the clock and dance like puppets. We ride, we screw our old ladies, we get high and loaded. Why you want to shut that down?”
“I’m not trying to shut anybody down,” Jason said. Feeling a little uneasy, as Chains had that .38 tucked in his belt, leather vest wide open, eyes burning hot with Jack and little red pills. “I’m just passing through, visiting some family. Come on, let’s drink.”
“You’re a fucking snitch, Colson,” LeDoux said. “Right?”
“Just a stuntman.”
“What movies have you done?”
“I’ve done a lot,” Jason said. “I work for an outfit called Stuntmen Unlimited. You don’t want me to ride with y’all and that’s your thing, man. Either we drink and hang out or I’m gone.”
“You’re gone when I say, motherfucker,” Chains said, “or I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”
A few of the boys had wandered outside the beer joint, shouldering past one another, trying to get a good view of what was about to happen, lots of shit-eating grins on their faces. Big Doug wasn’t among them. Big Doug was inside chatting up a big-titted cocktail waitress named Connie who told him he reminded her of Grizzly Adams.
“I worked on The Longest Yard, a TV show called Kodiak.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s about an Alaska state patrolman.”
“I knew you were a fucking pig.”
“It’s a TV show,” Jason said. “I did the stunts.”
Chains wavered on his feet, a few of the boys rallied around him, standing behind and around him. Stillwell high as a goddamn kite, wearing big yellow circular glasses and giggling like an idiot, a can of Coors in one hand and cigarette in the other.
“Come on,” Stillwell said. “Give him a break, Chains. He don’t mean nothing.”
“What fucking shows?” Chains said. “I want to know.”
“W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, a western called Take a Hard Ride with Jim Brown.”
“That sounds like bullshit,” Chains said, scratching his dirty beard. “How you gonna be a stunt double for some big-ass nigger?”
“You know what? I don’t have to tell you who I am. Either you believe me or you don’t. I don’t give a god damn.”
Chains snickered. The door kept on opening and closing to the little beer joint. A couple lazy-eyed women came out and sat on the bikes, passing a joint to each other. His enforcer Gangrene shifting his weight. A lot of smoke. It was July, Mississippi heat coming up through the dirt and gravel.
“If you’re as tough as you say, how about I see you take a punch?”
Jason kept that eye contact with Chains. Here we go. Here we fucking go.
“You want to hit me?” Jason said. “OK. Maybe it will make you shut your mouth.”
Chains laughed, scratched his bare belly, and spit on the gravel. Music came from inside the joint. Led Zeppelin. “Candy Store Rock.” He stepped up two paces, Jason seeing it from five miles away, a big unwieldy roundhouse punch right for his head. Jason did not move, did not duck, did not flinch, took the blow to the jaw and staggered back a bit, rubbing his jaw, feeling the lights go off and on and his teeth rattling a bit. He spit out a little blood and nodded to Chains.
“Now you,” Chains said. “See what you got, man. Let’s see what you got, fucking stuntman.”
“I’m good.”
“I said fucking do it.”
“I’m good, man,” Jason said. “You wanted to take a shot. I let you take a shot. It’s what I do. I don’t feel things like regular folks.”
“I say a Fed would never mix it up with folks like us,” Chains said. “Might look bad in court.”
Jason felt his jaw swelling and shook his head. He spit some more blood.
“Unless you’re scared?” Chains said. “Scared it might hurt feelings and I might shoot your ass.”
Jason felt that familiar tension in his neck and shoulders. He nodded and took in a breath, catching the eyes of about everybody in the whole Born Losers standing out in the parking lot, an arrow on a cheap mobile sign offering 2 for 1 tonight. Zeppelin kept on jamming inside the Tupelo beer hall. Jason put his hands on his waist and looked direct to Chains, behind him all those gleaming Harleys, chrome and leather, lined up in just a perfect way.
“Boy is scared?”
Blood rushed into Jason’s face, heart pumping like a piston, and he walked up to that nasty, stinky, bearded son of a bitch with wolf eyes and threw a hard right into his soft, sweaty belly and then followed with a left hook that toppled Chains LeDoux over like an lumbering old sack. He was flat to the gravel, eyes closed, sucking in air, as his woman came over and started to comfort him. Big Doug walked up to Chains and spilled some Coors down on his face. Hank Stillwell kicked at him with his toe. And another rider they called Slow Joe helped Chains to his feet, still half conscious, as Big Doug tossed some more Coors in his face, a beer joint baptism.
Chains lolled his head to the side, his whole weight being supported by Big Doug, head and open gray eyes coming around to Jason. He was missing a couple teeth.
He elbowed himself away from Big Doug and staggered toward Jason, pulling out that .38, Zeppelin playing “Tea for One.” Jason knew all the songs, as he had the album back at his apartment in Venice that he’d probably never see again. Chains aimed the .38 right between Jason Colson’s eyes and said, “Scared now?”
Jason didn’t answer.
“God forgives,” he said. “Born Losers never fucking forget.”
Chains turned his head and spit out a mess of blood, “You know what I do when people look at me like I’m some kind of animal?”
Jason again didn’t answer.
“I fucking feed on it, man,” LeDoux said. “I love it.”
He stretched the gun out farther in his hand, thumbed back the hammer, and squeezed the trigger. Click. He squeezed it again. Click. And four more times, the hammer falling on an empty chamber.
“Fuck,” he said. “I guess I forgot to load the motherfucker.”
The Born Losers all started laughing, a big fat woman who rode with one of the boys with the shrillest of giggles. Even Gangrene smiled a row of rotten teeth. Chains tossed the pistol over his shoulder and embraced Jason in a big bear hug. “Welcome, brother.”
Over his shoulder, Big Doug held up a shiny new leather vest with a back patch reading BORN LOSERS and a front patch reading 1 PERCENTER .
“No need for probation for a crazy son of a bitch like you,” Chains said. “Put on your colors and let’s ride till dawn.”
There were hoots and rebel yells, and the boys showered him with Coors and Budweiser while the vest was slid on him by Chains LeDoux himself, the man’s mouth a ragged, bloody mess. Despite every lick of sense he had, Jason smiled.
The engines to the Harleys cranked and gunned louder than ever, Jason feeling the laughter and the brotherhood and thinking to himself, This may be the dumbest goddamn stunt I’ve ever pulled.
The boys pulled out on the long ribbon of blacktop.
And Jason followed.
