The Sinners
Page 33
“She looks beautiful.”
“Sometimes I forget the world of shit and pain she came into,” Lillie said, looking at her reflection in the window. “You ever think about that? Where we found her? The filth of that place? Sometimes I can still smell it. You and me chasing all those shitbirds out of Tibbehah County.”
“We had us a time.”
“It’s not over, Ranger,” Lillie said. “The Southern shitbird isn’t exactly an endangered species.”
“I want you to find Wes Taggart.”
“I will.”
“And Boom wants to testify against him.”
“Maybe he’ll get lost on the way to the courthouse,” Lillie said. “Mississippi roads have a lot of potholes, might shake his ass out of the van.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said. “That’s not our way. That’s too damn easy.”
Lillie shrugged. “So this is how it all goes?” she said. “You get married, you have a ready-made kid, and you settle into life on the farm. Just promise me that you won’t go all soft on me. I think that’s the one goddamn thing I couldn’t take. Taking in the chamber of commerce meetings, glad-handing the supervisors, eating up caramel cake with the Garden Club.”
“What the hell do you have against caramel cake?”
She held out a little box to him, tied with a blue silk ribbon. Quinn took it, holding it, and Lillie told him to go ahead and open the fucking thing. He pulled at the ribbon and opened the top, finding a tarnished silver star inside. TIBBEHAH COUNTY SHERIFF. ’74.
“It was your Uncle Hamp’s,” she said. “I found it in his desk after he died. It’s the same one he wore when he first became sheriff. I think it’s high time you have it.”
“Jesus, Lil.”
“I couldn’t admit for a long time what he’d done to this place and himself,” she said. “Don’t let the shitbirds tarnish what you got. You keep on doing your damn job.”
The music started up inside the church, the first strains of “You Are My Sunshine,” a personal favorite of Quinn’s mom and Caddy and the signal to come up to the altar.
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said, slipping the old star into his suit pocket.
“You fucking better,” Lillie said, whispering, pushing open the door, all heads turning to the side of the pews toward Quinn and Lillie. “Memphis ain’t but ninety-nine miles away, Ranger. And if you fuck up on your job, on Maggie, or any of it, I’ll be all over your ass. Now, get in there and marry that girl.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ace Atkins is the author of twenty-three books, including eight Quinn Colson novels, the first two of which, The Ranger and The Lost Ones, were nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel (he also has a third Edgar nomination for his short story "Last Fair Deal Gone Down."). In addition, he is the author of seven New York Times-bestselling novels in the continuation of Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. Before turning to fiction, he was a correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times, a crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune, and, in college, played defensive end for the undefeated Auburn University football team (for which he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated). He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
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