by Ace Atkins
Rerun smiled up at him from where he stood, real proud he’d shot both those fellas, a pistol hanging loose in his chubby little hand. Donnie’s ears rang with the sound of the gunshots as he smiled back, not sure what the hell was going on.
Rerun wavered on his feet and then fell to his damn knees, clutching at his stomach.
Donnie hadn’t even had time to reach for the .38 at the small of his back. Now he was standing in a heavily guarded facility with a truckload of weapons, a dead kid, a dead Memphis cop, and a big fella bleeding out on the dock.
“What the hell, man?” Donnie said. “What was that?”
“Wasn’t Akeem,” Rerun said. “Tyrell threw in with Deshaun and fucked us. Wanted it all to himself. Goddamn. Son of a bitch, man. I’m shot right in the fucking gut.”
Donnie didn’t know what time it was. But he sure knew it was time to bust out that gate and head on back to Tibbehah County.
“Can you walk?” Donnie said.
Rerun nodded, but it sure was a chore getting that big ole boy to his feet.
“C’mon.”
* * *
• • •
“Did you want an apology?” Fannie asked. “Do you want me to get down on my hands and knees and grovel for my life?”
Sam Frye didn’t answer. Little beads of water dropped off his black slicker and onto the hardwood floor. He fingered at the old .45 with the long suppressor in his hand.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not going to do any of that shit. I’m going to sit here in my comfortable silk robe, have a smoke and a drink to unwind from a hell of a goddamn day, and tell you what happened to your son. I do believe when it’s all over, you’ll understand just what I did and why I did it. You’re a professional, Sam. You know the ways of the fucking world.”
“Tell me,” Sam said. His mouth felt dry. It had been a long time, many years, since he’d felt so nervous. His hand shaking around that cheap pistol.
“Mingo was my friend,” Fannie said, clicking on her golden lighter and firing up that tiny cigarillo. “You know he worked for me down on the Rez with the big chief. And then came up here for a few years. Best damn employee I ever had. I swear to that. I loved that boy as if he was my own.”
“You’ve said that,” Sam said. “Only he wasn’t your own. And you had him killed. Or did it yourself.”
“Just wait, Sam,” she said. “Please. I’m getting to all that. Let me just say, that boy really opened up to me. Told me all kinds of things about you and your ex-wife. What was her name? Norma. Yes, Norma. Y’all sure did love to party. Wow. Sounds like that bitch put your lovesick ass through the wringer. All those goddamn men. The shame. The drugs. What a fucking mess in high heels.”
Sam steadied his hand. He raised the weapon. It would be so easy. Just a flick of his index finger and Fannie Hathcock would quit talking and cease to be.
But he couldn’t. Not now.
He just had to know about his beautiful little boy.
* * *
• • •
Donnie didn’t slow down as he hit the security gate, inches from the bumper of another semi he followed out onto Winchester, the road to the airport empty and lonely at one-thirty a.m. Donnie drove easy and cool, passing by the apartment buildings and strip malls, going right by the Take Off Grill, where he’d first met Akeem and Rerun and took first damn place in the Hot Wing Challenge. They were slow rolling solid and easy past Dixie Belles strip club, all lit up in pink neon, with a sign outside reading: GIRLS WITHOUT UNDERWEAR DON’T GET THEIR PANTIES IN A BUNCH.
“How you doing there, partner?” Donnie asked.
Rerun grunted something, leaned against the passenger door and window looking pale and bled out, eyes glassy enough they refracted the neon of the strip club.
“Think you can hold on till Tibbehah?”
Rerun didn’t answer.
In truth, they didn’t have a damn choice. He couldn’t exactly roll up to Baptist Memorial in that big rig and drop off a gunshot victim without drawing a little attention to himself. No, ole Rerun would just have to hold on until they crossed the state line and he could dogleg it somewhere around Red Banks. Maybe then he might be able to stop off and check out what exactly Rerun was dealing with. But right fucking now, the best he could offer was the jacket from the UPS uniform pressed against his big belly, praying like hell that his guts didn’t come tumbling out.
“How about some music?” Donnie said. “You like some music, big man?”
Rerun grunted. Donnie reached up to the stereo above the windshield and flitted about the channels, searching for some decent music as they headed south along Highway 78 and down toward the state line. This was a solid area to pass through, hundreds of eighteen-wheelers coming and going out the intermodal facility and the Love’s truck stop. He finally found a classic rock station, 98.1, playing ole Joe Walsh. “Life’s Been Good.” Hell yeah. That would get ’em through the night.
Donnie thumped at the big wheel, downshifting as they hit the line, rolling into Mississippi. A shit ton of guns in his trailer and a nearly dead fat man riding shotgun.
“Don’t know why people always shit on the Eagles,” Donnie said. “It always impressed the hell out of me how Don Henley could play the fucking drums while singing. I love ‘The Long Run’ so damn much. I don’t give two shits what anyone else said. I’d fight any bastard who says that’s not a fine song. What do you think, Rerun? You old enough to listen to the damn Eagles?”
Rerun didn’t answer. His head lolling on his shoulder, tongue hanging loose.
“Almost there, buddy,” Donnie said, shifting down, looking to the next exit. “Don’t let your big ass be dying on me.”
* * *
• • •
“Now do you understand?”
Sam didn’t answer, seated across from Fannie Hathcock in the cavernous room, dead animals everywhere, watching them with glass eyes. The chilled air in the room smelled of cigar smoke and women’s perfume. Not of the expensive stuff Fannie wore, but cheap body lotion, cherry and strawberry stuff sold by the gallon. There were tiny bits of glitter all over the leather couch where she sat from strippers wriggling in the seats. Looking closer, pinpricks of cigarette burns in the full-grain leather.
“I don’t want trouble,” Fannie said. “I can help you bring Mingo home.”
“How?”
“I can take you to where he was buried.”
“You know?”
“I was there, Sam,” Fannie said, leaning forward and touching his knee. “I cried like a baby for days. Buster White killed him. Why won’t you listen to me? Why would you take the word of some country trash off the street? She blames me for everything. Anything bad goes on in Tibbehah County it’s Miss Fannie’s fault. But you? You are in the goddamn life. You know when you are outmaneuvered and outgunned. There was nothing I could do but watch. God. Just to think about it. Why do you think killing Buster White gave me so much goddamn pleasure? Every whack of the hammer brought tears to my eyes thinking about that boy. He was so good, Sam. He was a good man. A loyal, hard worker and a friend to me.”
Sam didn’t speak. His heart raced and mouth felt dry as he watched the woman take a swig of some gin. Her voice had a slight tremor, hands shaking on the glass.
“Search me,” she said. “I don’t have a gun. I don’t even have my hammer, baby. I just wanted it to be you and me. I wanted you to sit down, take a load off, and listen to why I couldn’t tell you. I just couldn’t tell you, Sam. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Sam wasn’t sure what to say. Mingo and his daughter had been his biggest embarrassment. He was a failure. A missing father. A loser who never offered guidance or love. He only saw the boy maybe four or five times after Norma died. He let others care for him, left him to be raised on the Rez by aunts, uncles, useless cousins while Sam was out doing for Sam
Frye. He let out a long breath and stood, gun loose in his hand.
He had failed his son completely. The woman leaned back, cigarillo pointed upward in her mouth, opening her knees as she reclined.
“He had your eyes,” Fannie said, speaking to the ceiling. “You know that. So kind and dark. Handsome. So very handsome.”
The woman started to cry and Sam walked away from her as she leaned up and took another drink from the crystal glass. The ice clinking loud behind him as he headed out the big twin doors of the porch, propped open and letting in the hot, humid air off the dark and endless lake. Choctaw Lake, named for his people but built long after they’d been run from Mississippi or had to hide out like animals in the wilds of the hills. Choctaw Lake. Sam stepped outside to have a cigarette, listening to the sounds of the woods, the crickets and frogs deep-throated and loud, the ticking of water off the leaves.
The lake seemed to go forever, a fog lifting off the surface and twisting into the mist.
He slipped the gun back into his pocket, unsure what he needed to do. Was the woman now offering herself to him? She knew he’d been watching. She had wanted him to come to her.
Sam Frye knew as soon as he heard them. The security lights of the grand house on the lake clicked on and flooded out onto the rich green lawn. Four men with rifles stepped out toward the porch, all of them wearing sheriff’s office uniforms and pointing guns straight at him.
Sam Frye didn’t speak. What can a man say in his last moments? He flicked the half-spent cigarette out into the wetness, looking the jug-eared man with the tin star on his chest straight in the eye.
The rain tilted sideways across the green lawn and lake as they started to fire.
22
Quinn found Bentley Vandeven at his family spread, a sprawling three-thousand-acre compound called Cedar Grove down in Pocahontas, Mississippi. He hadn’t been there in years, not since tracking down his father there years ago, living in a rusted-out trailer and tending to the horses and stables for the Vandeven family. Jason Colson was supposed to be elsewhere, Los Angeles, Austin, maybe even up in Wyoming. Some rumors even had him playing a stunt double in a new Indiana Jones movie. But nope, Quinn’s father had been hiding out not more than two hours from Tibbehah County, teaching Bentley to ride and shoot skeet and, if the rumors were true, spending even more time with Bentley’s mother, a well-known socialite named Mary-Margaret who’d been Miss Ole Miss in the eighties and later a runner-up Miss USA.
Bentley rode up to the stables in a golf cart, dressed for the hunt in khaki pants, a pressed blue shirt with a shooter patch on his right shoulder, and rose-tinted sunglasses. “Damn good to see you, Quinn,” he said, stepping out of the cart. “Wish you’d called first. Been out with a few guests hunting quail.”
“Y’all stocking or transplanting?”
“Stocking,” Bentley said. “Too many coyotes around here to transplant.”
“Most folks think the bush hog killed the quail in the South,” Quinn said. “Destroyed their habitat.”
“Or armadillos eating their eggs or pesticides,” Bentley said. “We stock pheasants, too. You should come down sometime. It’s a hell of a good time. Love for you to be my guest.”
“I don’t hunt for sport,” Quinn said.
“Those birds get a fair shake,” Bentley said, standing next to a tall fence painted black and a small corral where Quinn’s dad used to train Tennessee Walkers. His face appeared thinner than Quinn recalled, almost sallow, and he looked as if he’d lost twenty or thirty pounds. “We let ’em out that morning and they get plenty of time to scatter. It’s mainly about watching those bird dogs work. They just love it. Have you seen our English setters? They come from a line in Oxford that goes back sixty years.”
Quinn shook his head, watching a blue roan stallion and a coal black mare galloping around the paddock. The riders were young women, looked to be about college age, dressed in tank tops and short shorts with tall riding boots. Both of them waved to Bentley as they practiced with the horses.
“Friends of my sisters,” Bentley said. “Silly girls. They’re just visiting.”
“Y’all do have plenty of space.”
The stable had dozens of private rooms on the second floor, the entire structure built of river stone, cypress beams, and copper fixtures. Jason Colson had given him a tour when Quinn had come to confront him. His father seemed proud of the work he was doing for the Vandevens, not ashamed in the least of hiding out from his own family.
“Something on your mind?” Bentley asked.
Quinn leaned his elbows on the black rail fence, watching the women sit high in the saddle, the Walkers cantering in a fine, smooth gait around the paddock. He recalled his dad saying something about Tennessee Walkers riding so smooth, you could hold a cup of tea in your hand without spilling a drop.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” Quinn said.
“Things with Caddy didn’t really work out,” he said. “I think everyone saw that crashing and burning from the start.”
“Because you were using her to keep tabs on me.”
“I think it was more about the age difference,” Bentley said. “Your sister is six years older. If Caddy was a man and I was a woman, nobody would say a thing. My mother is twenty years younger than my dad.”
“Yep,” Quinn said. “That must be it.”
Caddy had once told Quinn that Mary-Margaret Vandeven had moved on from the aging stuntman to the owner of a BMW dealership and now an Argentinian horse trainer half her age.
“The only reason I’m back here now is because Daddy decided to open up Cedar Grove,” Bentley said. “I run the hunts and my sister Anna runs the wedding parties. We built a beautiful little chapel by the lake. You can stay out here with your whole family, have the entire grounds to yourself for a weekend. It’s not what I want, but it allowed us to keep the land. It’s not all roses and sunshine down here, Quinn. We have troubles, too.”
Quinn looked at Bentley, not really being able to see his eyes behind the rose-tinted glasses. For a young man in his early thirties, he was looking haggard. He needed a haircut and a shave pretty badly. The shirt was tailored and probably expensive but hung off his skinny frame like it was on a scarecrow.
“Caddy said you were leaving Jackson.”
“I hate my daddy about as much as you hate yours,” he said. “I guess I’m just biding my damn time before he keels over.”
“Hard to hate someone that you barely know and seldom see.”
“Haven’t heard from Jason lately?” Bentley asked, taking off the sunglasses and placing them in the pocket of the hunting shirt with the shooter patch, two pockets, and all types of bells and whistles.
“Haven’t heard from him for three years,” Quinn said.
“Me, either,” Bentley said. “I think your daddy is ashamed of what happened with that big land deal in Jericho. Maybe blames some of that on me, since it was my father who was supposed to back him. I’m real sorry about how that worked out.”
“My father has a hard time seeing things through,” Quinn said. “His most death-defying stunt has always been confrontation.”
“Most folks think my father is one hard-nosed, tough-as-nails businessman,” Bentley said. “But he inherited most of what he’s got and my mother runs this family and all of Cedar Grove. That man is only held together by Glenfiddich and duct tape.”
Bentley let out a long breath and joined Quinn, leaning against the top rail. Quinn faced the corral while Bentley leaned his back against the fence. The sun was high and very hot, the pasture and paddock still moist and muddy from the rains.
“Don’t suppose you drove all this way for us to talk about daddy issues?” he said.
“Nope.”
“You know we own a piece of those chicken plants,” he said. “And you came to find out what I know about that man who got shot, the one
who was suing us for workplace conditions.”
“Hector Herrera,” Quinn said. “But you knew his name. You warned Caddy not to get too close to him. That it wasn’t safe.”
“With these people?” Bentley said. “I’d call that an educated goddamn guess.”
“You’ve heard something.”
“My father and his people didn’t care for Herrera,” Bentley said. “He was suing them for ten million dollars. What the hell do you think?”
“I think you know more than how to open the cages of a bunch of birds and teach some rich folks where to aim,” Quinn said. “A lot more, I’d say. Who’s trucking in those prisoners from those private jails?”
“Shit, Quinn,” Bentley said. “Why do you think I’m here driving folks from New York around in golf carts? Once my father got involved with the Watchmen, I was out. I wanted nothing to do with him or any of these people. All of this has gone too damn far. Vardaman. He lives off the hate he knew was festering under the surface with those people. He did his dead-level best to cultivate and grow them to make him stronger. Make them feel better about their own pathetic lives. That’s not the Mississippi I know.”
“Your daddy didn’t get rich by playing by the rules,” Quinn said. “And y’all didn’t earn this big stable and all these grounds by the sweat of your brow.”
As the women circled back by the fence, Bentley turned to the paddock and forced a smile and waved. He spoke between clenched teeth. “I know what I am,” he said. “And who we are. Sometimes I wish I could scrub all the bullshit right off me.”
“Always time to stand up.”
“For what?”
“Help me find out what the hell’s going on in my county.”
Bentley started to laugh, cackling so much it sounded like he might choke. Bentley turned from the fence and spit, eyeing Quinn with a reddened face.
