The Shameless

by Ace Atkins

  It wasn’t noon yet but damn-near one hundred. Quinn had promised to stop by a few cabins and shake a few hands. Not his favorite part of the job, but a necessary part of being sheriff.

  “What are you gonna name him?” Quinn said, nodding to the big dog as they walked back toward her family cabin.

  “Cujo,” Maggie said.

  “That movie always scared the hell out of me,” Quinn said. “I never looked at a Saint Bernard the same way again.”

  “My mother didn’t like me watching scary movies,” Maggie said. “Especially anything with the supernatural. I wasn’t even allowed to watch Gremlins until I was fifteen. I was told those little bastards were satanic.”

  “Only when they got wet.”

  “My daddy didn’t care so much,” Maggie said. “Especially when he was home from the road. We’d watch all kinds of movies late at night. He loved Smokey and the Bandit. Convoy. White Line Fever. Did I tell you he named his truck The Blue Mule? Just like in the movie.”

  “Many times,” Quinn said.

  “Well, if we stay married, we’re bound to hear the same stories,” Maggie said. “I’ve heard all about your dad and his time out in Los Angeles. About how he jumped those Pintos back before you were born and how he worked as a double for both Burt Reynolds and Lee Majors.”

  “Did a lot of work on The Fall Guy,” Quinn said. “He used to always tell me and Caddy the show was based on his life.”

  “Was it?”

  “Hell no,” Quinn said. “If you’re ever unlucky enough to meet him, you’ll understand why.”

  “I’m just proud we got through our wedding without any family drama,” Maggie said. “I won’t ever forget Lillie Virgil stepping up like she did, standing in for Boom as your best man. It was a hell of a thing.”

  “Best woman,” Quinn said, walking with her side by side down a dusty path, back toward the cabins. The food trucks already starting to grill sausage and peppers, chicken on a stick, and barbecue, the air thick with grease. “She still thinks she can find the son of a bitch who did that to Boom.”

  “Hope she does.”

  “Me, too,” Quinn said. “I have a few questions for him.”

  “I bet.”

  “More than just what he did to Boom,” Quinn said. “These people from the Coast have been wiping their feet in Tibbehah County for years. They’ve been running drugs, guns, and women through here for too damn long.”

  “You said it was worse under Johnny Stagg.”

  “Not much difference,” Quinn said. “Stagg was just better at keeping it secret. Tibbehah County has been wild and wide open since the white man swindled it from the Choctaw. Same shit, different crooks. If I can talk to Wes Taggart, I might get what I need to stop some of this.”

  “But can Lillie find him?”

  “Lillie Virgil can find anyone.”

  Quinn and Maggie found their way back to the Sunset Strip, a long, narrow shot of two-story cabins perched alongside a hill. All the little coves and streets had names like that. Happy Hollow. Groovy Gardens. Beverly Hills. At night, Christmas lights shone down on the dirt paths, families sitting on their mini porches with their feet on the railings, listening to music and drinking.

  Tonight was their last night. Maggie’s mother and sister and her sister’s kids had gone home. There was an Uncle Paul, who didn’t do much but sit on the porch and drink beer and wander down to the track when the horses ran, but he was gone, too. Now it was just Quinn and Maggie. Quinn’s soon-to-be-adopted son, Brandon, was back home with Jean, Quinn’s mom. He was looking forward to finally being alone with his new wife.

  “Oh, crap,” Maggie said.

  Quinn had seen the men before she had, not slowing a single stride as they walked up onto the Sunset Strip. Five men wearing Watchmen militia gear—black pants, black T-shirts with the rebel flag, and sunglasses—gathered at the mouth of the narrow street, blocking their way, waiting for Quinn. They had short hair and unshaven faces, two of them smoking cigarettes. Their dress and their attitudes tried to imply they were former military. But Quinn knew the difference.

  Quinn either had to stop walking or move right through them. If Maggie hadn’t been with him, he’d have head-butted the biggest guy and taken the next one out with a sharp elbow. Quinn had met a hundred guys like this, wannabe Special Forces operators who took online courses and drooled over gun magazines. Quinn appreciated a good gun, but it wasn’t any more than a tool for him.

  He reached down for Maggie’s hand and squeezed it. She breathed a little harder and her freckled face shone with sweat. Quinn pulled the Liga Privada from his lips and blew smoke in all their faces.

  The men stared at him. A short man, muscled and low to the ground, coughed and swallowed. “You know who we are?” he asked.

  Quinn didn’t answer. He just placed the cigar to his lips and drew in some more smoke.

  “You ain’t got no right coming to Founders Square,” he said. “You ain’t got no right trying to make Senator Vardaman uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable?” Quinn said, trying not to smile. “Now, that just breaks my heart.”

  Another man stepped up by the sawed-off little fellow. He was a little taller, with wraparound sunglasses and a GLOCK hat. All the men wore guns on their hips and all of them probably carried permits. If they made any more trouble, he’d make sure to run all their records.

  “Vardaman told you up in Tibbehah,” the man said. “You can’t stop what’s happenin’. You thought you were real clever shutting down his talk. Permits, you said. That was just a damn lie.”

  Every man wore a red bandanna around his neck. Most of them tattooed, kind of shorthand these days to show folks you’re tough. The tattoos were of shamrocks and Gaelic symbols. The Punisher logo from comic books.

  “Come on, Quinn.”

  “Nice place you got, ma’am,” the short man said. “A real pretty shade of blue.”

  Quinn slowly dropped his right hand to the butt of his Beretta 1911, slow and easy, nonthreatening. “If you speak,” Quinn said, “speak to me. And if you want to threaten a law enforcement officer, you’re gonna have to do a much better job.”

  “You don’t feel threatened?”

  “By you?” Quinn said. “Not at all. Only thing you boys threaten is my sense of smell.”

  “It’s coming,” another man said, piping up like he’d just thought of what to say. “Ain’t nobody gonna stop it. Especially you. You ain’t got the right to wear that flag on your sleeve.”

  Something broke in Quinn with them talking about his service. Pushing by Maggie, he walked up on the man, who was red-faced with spittle on his lip, and reached out and grabbed the loudmouth by his nose, twisting and pulling until the little fella dropped to his knees. The men yelling and threatening but not doing a damn thing.

  “You boys can spend the rest of the fair in jail,” Quinn said, twisting the man’s nose more for good measure. “Or you can walk away. It can be all corn dogs and cotton candy. Doesn’t matter a damn to me.”

  There’d been a time when Quinn would’ve taken them all on. He’d been in bar fights, hand to hand in combat, and even left in a pit to battle it out with other Rangers. But law enforcement wasn’t like being a Ranger. Assholes weren’t real threats.

  Quinn let go of the man’s nose and stepped back. He hadn’t let go of the cigar in his right hand. He put it back in his mouth and took a draw. The men turned and dispersed, the short man looking hard at Quinn and spitting in the dirt. They walked toward Founders Square and the pavilion, where you could still hear the stump speeches from the PA system.

  “Didn’t even drop your cigar.”

  “Hope that didn’t scare you,” Quinn said.

  “Would you think less of me if I said I liked it?”

  Quinn drew on the cigar and squinted one eye in the harsh morning ligh
t. “Not a damn bit, Maggie Colson.”

  THREE

  Don’t kid yourself, Ray, this place is fucking dying,” Buster White said, adding emphasis with the bloody steak on the end of his fork. “Enjoy it while you’re here. The last days of Rome. Everything is burning. Goddamn Nemo fiddling.”

  “You mean Nero,” Ray said, his petit filet in front of him untouched, a cigarette smoldering in a coffee saucer.

  “Then who the fuck is Nemo?” Buster White said, chewing, reaching for a big glass of cab, wine and blood dripping down his fat chin.

  “A fish,” Ray said, picking up the cigarette. “From a kids’ movie. My grandkids love all that crap. I’ve seen it a million times. Fish gets lost, gets caught, and then jumps into the toilet to save his life.”

  They sat in the back room of the Old Chicago Steakhouse in the far corner of Buster White’s casino in Tunica. Officially under the ownership of Dixie Amusements, a corporation with offices in Biloxi, New Orleans, and Memphis, a front for a Syndicate of good ole boy thieves who’d been running shell games in the Deep South since the mid-1950s. Buster was getting old. Ray could see it in his dark-rimmed eyes, bad, blotchy skin, fattened jowls, and continuous indigestion. He couldn’t get through three sentences before belching.

  “Are you closing us down?”

  “Maybe,” White said, sawing back into the T-bone and filling his mouth, not breaking stride in the conversation. “But that’s not why I wanted to see you. Whether this place goes tits up or not isn’t up to me. We’ve tried to move our casinos off the river and inland. But the religious nutsos think by taking gambling off the water, it’ll just spread all the fucking and dancing. So we got what? The Coast. And the fucking Indians. But something else gave me a goddamn heart attack this morning.”

  Ray nodded, brushing some ash off his seersucker suit, legs crossed, cordovan loafers buffed to a high shine for a meeting with the boss. “Wes Taggart.”

  “You’re damn fucking right,” Buster said, belching into his fist and then running his tongue over his back teeth for some loose meat. “The dumb shit hillbilly went and got himself caught, not two miles from my fucking castle. He’d reached out to me, trying to make some kind of amends for fucking me right in the ass. Claimed stealing the tractor trailer wasn’t his idea, he’d been set up. When he got busted, he had a cute little piece of tail with him from up in Jericho. What’s her name, Amber? Cherry?”

  “Twilight.”

  “Oh, Christ. Are you fucking kidding me? He should’ve known the puss would be his undoing. What do I always say, don’t shit where you eat and don’t fucking let the puss go to your brain. It makes you goddamn soft and fucking stupid. Hey? Aren’t you gonna eat? Don’t you like your steak? I hired this guy right from Pascal Manale’s, doubled his salary after he cooked for me and the missus one night. Sharp black guy. Talks just like a white man.”

  “Wes Taggart won’t talk.”

  “Glad you got the faith, Ray,” White said. “But these younger guys ain’t from the same mold as you and me. We were all raised different, from a different time, a different era. We knew all this shit would go around and come back around. You get caught, you shut your mouth, you do your time, and when you’re out you get your reward. But Taggart and that shit-for-brains J. B. Hood . . . Christ Almighty, why did we ever send those guys up to north Mississippi? All they did was rob me fucking blind.”

  Ray had to be careful of what he said. He never liked or trusted those guys or ever thought in a damn million years they could do a better job than Fannie Hathcock. But goddamn Buster was sure of it at the time, although he wouldn’t say shit now even if his mouth was crammed full of it. So Ray did what Ray had always done ever since he and Buster had been boosting cars from the airmen on the Coast and running shithole clip joints on Beach Boulevard. Back then they were full of piss and vinegar and wore crew cuts and worked out with weights and ate nothing but steak and pussy. But, goddamn, times had changed. Buster belched again and pointed to Ray again with the end of an empty fork.

  “I couldn’t have Fannie try and work with the Chief again,” Buster said. “That man would’ve scalped the red hair right off her head if we hadn’t made the damn peace after what she did. Christ. I’m going to send her back to work out the details of running our shit on the Rez now that Tunica is dying this slow and painful death. Did you see the outlet mall out there? I only saw two cars in the big parking lot. Two cars. Bally’s is gone. Harrah’s is gone. We need those red-skinned Choctaw bastards.”

  “Hood and Taggart couldn’t do it.”

  “Those boys would’ve fucked up their own funerals.”

  “Fannie’s doing a damn fine job,” Ray said. “We did good putting her in charge.”

  “What goddamn choice did I have?” Buster White said. “Those boys shit the bed. And Fannie had to clean it up. It’s fine. It’s fine. At least for now.”

  Ray lifted the cigarette to his lips and squinted in the smoke. It had to be damn-near sixty degrees in the back room of the Old Chicago Steakhouse, but Buster was sweating like a hog. Sure, Taggart was a liability. But how much damage could he really do unless he knew some real cruel and current shit about Buster and those Cartel folks in Houston? Something was making his old buddy shit his drawers. Something dirty and nasty.

  “Not much we can do now,” Ray said, blowing the smoke from the side of his mouth.

  “Would you fucking eat?” Buster said. “That’s a hell of a piece of meat. A nice char, good and bloody on the inside. Better than barely legal puss.”

  Ray shook his head. As he’d gotten older and grayer, he had less tolerance for Buster’s crude talk. He hadn’t changed a bit since they were teenagers in the way he thought of money and women. The more, the better—in everything. Food, booze, pills. And Ray seriously doubted he’d ever see the businesses in Tunica close up. All of it would far outlast him. Buster sat there, a gelatinous hump, wheezing, the meat along the edge of the T-bone sliced away.

  “How’s the cooze?”

  “Come again?”

  “Fannie,” Buster White said, giving a half laugh, a half burp. “Who the fuck’ve we been talking about?”

  “Good.”

  “She still mad at me?”

  “Fannie doesn’t get mad,” Ray said. “Fannie’s all business.”

  “Just like you taught her,” Buster said, grinning, putting down his knife and fork. “I’ll never forget when you brought that little piece of country trash into my bar in New Orleans. Real Coal Miner’s Daughter shit. I thought you’d lost your damn mind. She was nineteen? Eighteen?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three, with legs going on forever and long red hair. And those tits. Christ Almighty. The best tits I’ve ever seen. My mouth’s watering just thinking about them. I knew she was trouble then. And, goddamn, I know she’s trouble now.”

  “She cleaned up one hell of a mess,” Ray said. “Wes Taggart and J. B. Hood could’ve gotten us all sent to prison. North Mississippi was her reward. We’re not going back on that. Are we?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Buster said, picking up the T-bone with his hands and chewing off those last bits of gristle. “You’re pussy-blind, Ray. You’ve never seen what kind of creature you’re dealing with. I’d watch my back, if I were you. That woman will be the death of us both.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Damn, the kid was good. Caddy Colson knew all parents thought their kids had special talents, but she’d never seen an eleven-year-old throw and catch the football like her son Jason. He was nearly a head taller than most of the kids and could zip it downfield flat-footed without much effort. He was fast, too. During the start of summer drills that night, she watched Jason lead the pack, tossing a football back and forth to his new cousin, Brandon, making sure the younger boy was feeling comfortable at practice. This was only his second year playing Little League
ball, but Caddy Colson truly believed, the Good Lord willing, the boy was going to get a college scholarship. Ole Miss. Or if he got really good, Auburn.

  “Did you hear from your brother?” her mother, Jean Colson, asked. Both of them sitting high in the stands at Tibbehah High stadium. “He said they were coming back from the fair early.”

  “He called.”

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  “No, ma’am,” Caddy said, trying to watch practice. The fifty or so boys were lined up, in mismatched shorts and T-shirts, bear-crawling for ten yards. Jason again leading the pack, most of the boys a good five yards behind him.

  “I hope he and Maggie didn’t get in a fight.”

  “Why would you think that?” Caddy said, baseball cap down in her eyes, dressed for the hot practice in a white tank top and khaki shorts with pink flip-flops. She held her keys in her hands and they would rattle on her knee every time she got excited watching her son run.

  “Brandon’s daddy’s been making trouble,” her momma said. “He’s working with some lawyer in the Delta to make sure he can appear in court. I can’t imagine that sitting well with Quinn. A filthy, no-good killer and bank robber.”

  “Quinn knew what he was getting into when he married Maggie,” Caddy said. The boys ran backward in the ninety-five-degree heat, the sky turning a soft pink and blue over the metal visitors’ stands across the field. “That’s why I’m glad I never had to mess with an ex-husband or some dumb ass who wants to get to know his son years later. No, ma’am. Jason is all mine.”

  Caddy knew her mother wouldn’t follow up. As much as she adored her grandson, she’d only asked once who his father might be. The hard truth of it was even Caddy didn’t know, the boy born in a wild, spun-out fucking kaleidoscope time in Memphis filled with Jack Daniel’s, little white pills, and boys. House parties and lap dances and waking up in places she never knew she’d visited. There had been a garage rock drummer, a boxer, two pro wrestlers, but all those she’d ruled out on account of Jason being half black. Caddy Colson returned home damn-near ten years ago to Tibbehah County toting a black baby and everyone wanting to know her business. But she’d gotten clean and straight after a couple of tries and God could’ve never blessed her with a better son than Jason.