by Ace Atkins
He filled up the coffeemaker, taking care to restock the creamer and sugar in the dispensers and finding a seat before Donnie by the plate-glass window, pumps still off, big sign outside saying gas was going to take half your paycheck. Donnie slumped in his seat, the dripping sound of the coffee echoing through the mart.
“I’m gonna be gone for a while,” Donnie said. “Just wanted you to know.”
Luther raised his gray eyebrows, stubbed out his cigarette, and reached into his mackinaw coat pocket for his pack, shaking one loose. “You get a new job?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s the vocation?”
“Truck driver.”
“Same outfit out of Tupelo?”
“International corporation,” Donnie said, amusing himself. “Got offices in Texas.”
“When do you leave?”
“This morning.”
Luther nodded, cigarette burning down low and slow in his bony fingers. He wiped a speck of tobacco off his lip and leaned into the booth. His arm rested on the edge of the seat as he motioned lightly with the cigarette butt. “I guess I can get someone to fill in for you. Don’t worry about that.”
“Appreciate that, Daddy.”
“When will you be back?” Luther asked.
“That’s the hell of it,” Donnie said. “I don’t know. It might be real long. I don’t know.”
Luther nodded. He got up and stretched his long legs, tucked in crisp Wranglers, and wandered back to the coffeepot on arthritic knees, filling two large Styrofoam cups to the rim, stirring in the sugar and creamer he knew his son liked.
“What you gonna haul?” Luther asked, sliding the coffee before him.
“I don’t know,” Donnie said. “Different stuff.”
“This have something to do with that Mex gal I keep hearing about?”
“You can’t fart in this town without someone hearin’ it,” Donnie said. “But, yeah. It’s something like that.”
“You thinkin’ of marryin’ her?” Luther said, taking a sip of hot coffee. “Call me if you do. I’d like to see that.”
“You’re gettin’ a little ahead of yourself,” Donnie said.
“Figured.”
“People will talk, Daddy,” Donnie said. “But don’t listen to them. You need to trust me that for the first time in a while, I got things figured out.”
Luther opened his mouth and then closed it. He smoked a bit more of the Marlboro red and took a long sip of coffee. He looked at Donnie from those old hooded eyes that had seen a mess of Vietcong drop in rice paddies, and he smiled. He nodded with acceptance.
“You be careful,” Luther said. “I don’t like men knocking on my door in the middle of the night. Sheriff Beckett was the one who come out and told me that you’d been wounded. He was straight up about it, said he didn’t know if you were dead or not. I walked around for five miles when I heard, thinking back on when we’d lost your mother. Man, I felt like a real failure all over again.”
“I’m just driving a truck.”
Luther nodded.
The smell of baking biscuits and frying bacon and sausage came from the open door of the kitchen. Peaches hobbled out into the room, peering over at Luther and Donnie sitting in the corner. “Y’all want something to eat ’fore we open up?”
“You set me up a dozen sausage biscuits?” Donnie said. “I’ll take ’em to go.”
“Mr. Luther?” Peaches asked.
He shook his head. Donnie stood up across the table.
“The woman’s worth it?” Luther said.
Donnie nodded.
“OK, then.” Luther stretched out his long fingers, offering his hand to his son.
“I TOLD YOU that she couldn’t be trusted,” Lillie said, not two minutes after meeting Quinn back at the sheriff’s office.
“Don’t you recall how I started this conversation?”
“Well, it was stupid,” Lillie said. “I think that should be said. But I guess I won’t say anything about what part was doing the thinking for you.”
“That had nothing to do with it.”
“Well,” Lillie said, sliding out of her coat. Her hair was looped through the back of a ball cap. “Did you at least get laid out of the deal? I mean, if you’re gonna be fucked one way, might as well be fucked in the other.”
“You do realize I pay your salary?”
“Nope,” Lillie said. “This county pays my salary, and Mary Alice writes the checks. You rather have someone sugarcoat the way the world works?”
“Have I ever?” Quinn asked.
“What do we do now?”
Quinn shook his head. He walked over to his office window, looking out on the jail, seeing the moon shining across the width of the Big Black River and a portion of the old metal bridge that spanned it. He heard the flick of a lighter and smelled smoke coming from Lillie’s way. When she spoke, she had that tight-mouthed way of speaking that people get with a cigarette between their teeth. “You want to get Donnie Varner a going-away present? I’ll chip in.”
“Nope.”
“Maybe a bottle of Jack,” Lillie said as Quinn turned. “Isn’t that what he always drank when smoking dope? I swear, it impaired that boy’s brain. Do you remember when he painted that piece-of-shit Cutlass camouflage?”
“We could arrest him.”
“What would the Feds say about that?”
“I’m trying to protect him.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Lillie said, taking off her ball cap, working the brim into a tight circle, and then slipping it back on her head. “But the dumb bastard made his play. This is his own private shithole.”
“And Ramón and Janet?”
“Yeah,” Lillie said, smoking a bit. “I guess they kind of get lost in the shuffle. I didn’t figure the ATF was that big on finding out what happened here. They only wanted Ramón’s narrow little ass. Nobody gives a shit about what those kids went through.”
“What do you think?”
“Do the Feds want our help?”
“Nope.”
“Have you always liked redheads? I told you they were crazy as hell.”
“Get Kenny up on the radio and have him watch the road out by the Varner land,” Quinn said. “I want to know when that truck heads back out on the road and out of the county.”
“You think she might’ve warned you about Stagg.”
“I kept some things from her, too,” Quinn said. “I didn’t tell her that I’d seen Donnie with Luz. I’d like to say I was protecting Donnie, but that wasn’t it.”
“You wanted to handle this without the Feds holding your peter?”
“Lillie, you sure got a way with words.”
“I’ll call Kenny.”
Quinn settled into his office chair, tired but not feeling like he needed sleep. He was used to spending days on end without rack time. Always the hardest thing about a mission was the damn waiting. You’d make camp, prep your gear, and wait for the word. He never dreaded it, more just wanted it to happen, capturing airfields, offering support for a rescue, or clearing houses. One of the most popular T-shirts you could buy at Fort Benning read Jump out of airplanes and kill people. What do you do?
Pretty much how Quinn’s life worked for nearly a decade.
He cracked his window, feeling the first bit of winter blow into his office. He had half a La Gloria Cubana waiting cold on his desk. He fired it up with a Zippo and leaned back, thinking about trying to get to Donnie through his daddy before he made a play that would land him in federal prison for the rest of his life or get his name in the paper with the headline town mourns dead son.
Quinn could do without another soldier headline. He picked up the phone to call the Quick Mart when Lillie walked back into his office.
“You think Donnie might be throwing a keg party without inviting us?”
“How’s that?”
“Kenny just saw four dually pickups with Louisiana and Texas plates turn down the road to
Donnie’s gun range,” Lillie said.
Quinn reached for his ball cap, rancher coat, and gun.
“Put that out,” Lillie said. “Don’t even think of smoking in my vehicle.”
“It’s OK,” Quinn said. “We’re taking mine.”
45
“THIS PICTURE JUST GETS PRETTIER AND PRETTIER,” DONNIE SAID, STARING out the window of his Airstream and rubbing a fist in his eye. “Holy Christ. It’s four in the morning.”
“How many?” Luz asked, getting up from the couch and coming up by Donnie’s side. They’d just walked up the hill to grab a few things and go ahead and hit the road.
“Four trucks, I think,” Donnie said. “Ain’t nobody’s gotten out yet. Engines still running. I can see the exhaust. You guess this your boyfriend come up a little early?”
“Can they see where you parked the truck?”
“Nope.”
Luz punched up some numbers on her cell and talked in fast Spanish to Javier, Luis, and the boy, Donnie not needing a translation. Luz probably saying something like “Move that shit right now, here comes Tony the Tiger and a few of his asshole buddies.”
“You think he got the Lucky Charms fella with him, too?” Donnie asked. “Or ole Count Chocula? These cartel folks love those crazy-ass names.”
Luz reached for a Glock she’d left on the table by Donnie’s smokes and Wild Turkey and said, “The truck is ready. Is there a way around them? In the woods?”
Donnie poured a handful of bullets from a Dixie cup into his palm and filled his pockets. He reached for the .38 and also grabbed a Browning 9 and a couple spare clips and walked to the back door, opening up and motioning for Luz, turning to look right into the pockmarked face of a Mex with a busted nose and bristled mustache under a flat-crowned cowboy hat. The man had three of his buddies with him, pointing some AKs at him, taking the damn weapons from his hand and kicking his ass to the ground. The main dude in the cowboy hat reached for Luz’s waist and pulled her back into the trailer.
She got off one clean shot, before they grabbed her, and one of the boys fell, and, damn, if it wasn’t Ramón Torres, holding his leg and cussing up a storm of hellfire and shit from where he was bleeding in Donnie’s kitchen. The big man knocked Luz across the face with the back of his hand. Ramón screamed some more, and yelled at Donnie as if he’d been the one who’d pulled the trigger.
What a mess.
“YOU GONNA CALL DINAH BRAND?” Lillie asked.
“Would you?”
“Hell no,” Lillie said. “She’d probably just set up a conference call after the shooting was done.”
“She said to ignore it,” Quinn said. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“May put the damper on that romance.”
“I think that’s already in the shitter.”
“If it’s any consolation, I bet she had a good time doing it with you,” Lillie said. “Probably wasn’t all about her business with the cartel.”
“Sure appreciate that, Lillie.”
Quinn slowed the F-250 onto the shoulder of the county road, turned off his KC lights, and met up with every available deputy in Tibbehah County. Boom stood with Kenny by a loose group of patrol cars and pickup trucks. The ATVs Quinn had called for had been unloaded, time coming up on past 0400, headlights off on the vehicles, everyone grouped and waiting for Quinn’s word. Besides Boom and Kenny, he found Dave Cullison, Chris Smith (who was Dave’s stepson and had served with Donnie in the Guard), Art Watts, and Ike McCaslin. Quinn was pretty sure Art was a second cousin of Donnie’s but wasn’t exactly sure how that tree all worked out. McCaslin was Quinn’s only black deputy, tall and bony, with the thickest redneck accent he’d ever heard.
Quinn laid out a legal pad on top of the nearest patrol car, probably Cullison’s, and sketched out the loose topography of the Varner land, the gun range, and to the south, the Byrd property, where they’d meet up at a rally point halfway down the fire trail. The trail ran about a mile before they got to what was the Byrd house decades ago, now falling in on itself and rotting, the family cemetery all overgrown with weeds and kudzu, thick sweetgum trees breaking through the graves. Most of the men, and Lillie, had hunted the land and knew it well.
Quinn drew a sweeping arrow from the rally point to where he’d take Boom, Kenny, and Ike with him. He told Lillie to post the rest of the deputies and set them two to four yards apart on the ridge overlooking the gun range since they were all the best with rifles. They’d work off signals from their radio, cell phones not worth a shit this far out. Quinn got his cigar going again with his lighter and stood back as the deputies studied the points.
“I know y’all got hunting rifles in your county vehicles, right?”
Everyone went to their cars to grab their .308s, .30-06s, and .30-30s. None of them looked like they were hurting for ammunition. Quinn nodded at Boom, knowing Boom didn’t have to be here. Boom smiled back, his .44 Anaconda tucked into his thick western belt.
“Once we get to the rally point, we go dead silent,” Quinn said. “They won’t hear the motors from the fire road, but once we move, night sounds will get you killed.”
“And a full moon,” Kenny said, shaking his head.
“Full moon is good,” Quinn said. “We walk the woods and stay in the dark. The land is wide open down at Donnie’s place. The moon will light ’em up.”
They unloaded the ATVs, riding out onto the rough trail, what had been a cleared road now thick with young saplings and clogged with vines and broken branches. They rode single file, bouncing up and over the ruts and around the logs, limbs and loose branches clawing at the Carhartt coat Quinn had grabbed from his trunk along with his Remington pump, loaded with twelve rounds, and a pair of field glasses. He had his Beretta 9 and six spare magazines with fifteen rounds each. He led the way, lights turned off on the moonlit path, scattered and wild, up and around the old shack where the last Byrd had lived up into the 1970s, his body undisturbed for nearly two months before a relative came looking. There was still an old outhouse standing upright and a barn that had settled at an awkward angle.
Quinn stopped short of the family cemetery and a small clearing where a deer stand stood tall in a waist-high field of yellowed grass. The moon above was big and round, glowing blood red on the blowing grass. The ATVs fell silent behind him as everyone stopped and waited.
Quinn ground his cigar underfoot and made his way down the ridge to a decent vantage point and focused his field glasses on the trucks. He saw the four jacked-up pickups Kenny had described. One had Texas plates, another Louisiana. Four, five men stood by the trucks.
Lillie walked up to his side, and he passed her the glasses.
“That all of ’em?” Lillie asked.
“I hope.”
And then they both heard the shot.
THE ONE THEY CALLED TONY tied Donnie to his own kitchen chair and started beating the ever-living shit out of him. It wasn’t fair to say it was all Tony, some of his boys joined in, including Ramón Torres with his injured leg. He was hobbling on that damn thing, strips of bloody bedsheets working as some kind of cheap-ass tourniquet. Guess the bullet had gone straight through. There were a lot of fists and pointed boots coming at Donnie, fast Spanish with a lot of threats that didn’t make a lick of sense. He just tried to take it, laughing at them dumb shits, because he sure as hell wasn’t gonna give them the satisfaction of seeing fear in him before they put a bullet between his eyes. Luz was holding on to his arm, screaming at the men as they worked out their social problems, screaming and crying. Donnie’s eyes about swelling shut as he cracked out a whispered “What did you ever see in this guy? The damn cowboy hat?”
A couple fists knocked his lights out twice. He didn’t mind the pain as much as the coming to with more fists flying. Luz screamed more, running for the door. Donnie wondered what had happened to Javier and Luis, thinking those boys weren’t as stand-up as they promised. He’d even take that kid shooter right about now. Donnie’s head lulled to his che
st, looking at the world crazy and cocked and bloody as hell, his trailer more fucked up than he’d ever seen it. Four of them huddling around one another, talking, smoking, worn out from giving the goddamn beating, bless their hearts.
“They want to know where you’ve put the guns,” Luz said, whispering, crying in his ear.
“Don’t you tell ’em.”
“They’ll find them anyway.”
“Give your boys a chance,” Donnie said. “They can get out.”
“Didn’t you hear what they said?” Luz asked. “They want to cut off your head. Leave a message.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Donnie said, spitting blood across his shoulder. “I bet that’s gonna hurt like a bitch.”
LILLIE LED THE THREE DEPUTIES down on the ridge, all spacing themselves among the trees, looking down into the little gulley, watching the men below walking around with AK-47s, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and laughing. Faraway music from a car stereo lilted through the air. Quinn walked ahead of Boom, Kenny, and Ike McCaslin, telling them to leave their ball caps with the ATVs and unzip the front of their jackets, leaving space for their undershirts to show a bit.
“Why?” Ike asked, not butting up against Quinn but more making talk as they wound through the headstones.
Quinn turned to him, crooking his head to the side, showing what the bill would look like in silhouette. “An open shirt gives another vertical line. From far off, you’ll look like another tree.”
“Kenny’s been thinking like a tree for years,” Ike said.
From back behind him, Quinn heard Kenny give a quiet “Fuck you.”
The headstones lay crooked and lichen-coated, sculptures of wood stumps for loggers and small lambs for children. Lots of names Quinn knew from growing up in the county, the dead, long-gone relatives. He found the footing along the hill to his liking; all the recent rain had made the October leaves as soft and silent as wet cotton. Soon they were headed down the slope to the objective rally point where he’d give Lillie the order to start shooting at the men by the trucks, maybe flush out whoever had fired that pistol. Quinn didn’t like the sound of that single shot and silence.
