by Ace Atkins
Lillie turned to Reggie, whose mouth hung open, looking uncomfortable standing there, a few of the working girls peeking into the narrow office from the metal platform. “OK,” he said. “She’s got the paper. We’re done.”
“Can’t wait to see Skinner burn this place down,” Lillie said. “Not that it’ll matter much to you. It’ll just make it much easier to see what you’re really about. And when the Feds come knocking and you run, I’ll track your ass down wherever you go. I can smell that cheap-ass perfume from a thousand miles away.”
“You wouldn’t know Chanel from a bottle of Jean Naté cooter splash, Lillie Virgil,” Fannie said, blowing out smoke and pointing toward the door. “Y’all tell Skinner he’ll be hearing from my attorney. Nude dancing is a First Amendment issue and we got every right to do our thing twenty-four/seven, three hundred sixty-four days a year. Even a stripper needs a break on Christmas.”
“Like you cut Mingo a break?” Lillie asked. “Can’t let anyone get close to you. Can you? That boy treated you better than he treated his own momma. And then one day he just up and disappears. Fell off the face of God’s green earth. That’s on you, woman. Your hands are filthy with that boy’s blood.”
“People come and go,” Fannie said. “This is the service industry.”
Lillie nodded to Fannie Hathcock, watching the woman give her a hard stare from behind the glass desk, cigarillo trembling in her fingers. “Stick to that tall tale, Fannie,” Lillie said. “A simple businesswoman just trying to earn a dollar with jiggling boobies and watered-down cocktails. That’s some real sob sister shit right there. Just don’t forget a lot of folks know who you really are and that’s gonna be your undoing. See you on the run. It’s gonna be a hard-ass fall.”
* * *
* * *
Quinn Colson had insisted Tashi and Jessica move out of the Traveler’s Rest, knowing they didn’t feel safe, weren’t safe, and had few options in Tibbehah County. The only other motel was a place called the Golden Cherry across the street from the strip club, a flea trap renting rooms by the hour according to what people in Jericho had told her. The sheriff offered them a bed at his farm until they could get settled somewhere in town or else based out of Tupelo. Maggie Colson gave them her son’s room, Tashi already thinking of the possibilities of telling part of the story from Brandon Taylor’s namesake. The small room had a double bed, which Jessica and Tashi had shared for the last few nights, the walls decorated with pictures and posters of Westerns and Native American art. An old rifle that looked like a relic hung over the bed Maggie said had belonged to her great-grandparents. Old hardcover editions of Huck Finn, Treasure Island, White Fang, and Kim were stacked neatly on top of the headboard.
Tashi sat on the bed with her legs folded, MacBook in her lap, scrolling through scanned records of the Taylor file. Jessica was on the floor, headphones on, listening to the two-hour confidential interview they’d done with Ansley Cuthbert, speaking about her friendship with Brandon, taking money from Johnny Stagg for the “Daddy parties,” and how she and Brandon threw in with a girl named Skylar Cole to blackmail the guests. All of it culminating with Skylar beaten to death and buried deep, Brandon being forced to watch and then running for his life to where he and Ansley hid in an abandoned house in the Big Woods. Ansley did not want to be named on the podcast. She’d remain anonymous, a friend of Brandon’s only, someone the killers never knew existed.
Tashi closed the laptop and left Jessica listening to the interview, heading out into the first-floor hallway and through the screen door to the front porch. The door closed with a hard thwack, Maggie Colson looking up from where she sat in a metal glider with a huge black man who appeared to have a prosthetic arm.
Maggie introduced him as Boom Kimbrough, the sheriff’s best friend.
“Quinn had to head over to Alabama,” Maggie said. “He asked Boom to stick around while he’s gone.”
“Does he think those men will come back?”
Maggie shook her head and nodded toward Boom. “Boom was coming over to supper anyway,” she said. “Quinn just asked him to come on over a little early.”
Tashi couldn’t help but notice a very large handgun in Boom Kimbrough’s lap. It was big and silver and seemed as large as a cannon.
“Don’t you worry,” Boom said, smiling. “I’m a better shot now than when I had two arms. Ain’t nobody getting on this porch without permission.”
Tashi smiled but didn’t say a word. She didn’t like guns, never liked them, and hated the idea of being protected in such a way. She and Jessica shouldn’t have to hide out like criminals in an effort to tell their story. Ansley Cuthbert shouldn’t have to keep quiet and be afraid to speak out even twenty years after Brandon’s death.
“Did Quinn go to see Johnny Stagg?” Tashi asked.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said, but Tashi could tell she was lying. Quinn had mentioned last night he’d put in a request to meet with Stagg, Stagg being the man in charge of north Mississippi back then. “Y’all are welcome to stay as long as you like.”
“It shouldn’t be long,” Tashi said. “We’re getting close.”
“Is Ansley enough?”
“I wish she’d let us use her name,” Tashi said. “It would give us a lot more credibility. But for now, it’s all we have.”
Boom stood up, sticking the large gun into a holster on his belt along his left hip, looking like one of the gunfighters from the movie posters in Brandon’s room. The Man from Laramie. Code of the West. He walked to the edge of the porch, staring down the gravel road at the bridge spanning a meandering creek.
“Quinn said two of those boys followed you back from Tupelo.”
“That’s right,” Tashi said. “They’d been in our motel room, too. They trashed some of our notes and wrote some nasty things on the mirror over the sink.”
“What kind of things?” Boom said, looking to Maggie, moving back and forth on the glider. She was wearing jeans and a threadbare VOTE FOR COLSON T-shirt, no shoes.
“Mainly about us being outsiders,” Tashi said. “And about me being Jewish.”
“Wonder how they feel about a one-armed nigger carrying a big-ass gun?”
Tashi smiled, feeling an ease of the pressure she’d carried around for days. “Doubt they’d like it very much.”
Boom grinned back at her. “Quinn ever tell you about the time me and him took on some peckerwood racists out at Hell Creek?”
“I heard a little bit about it,” Tashi said.
“This was right when Quinn came home after his Uncle Hamp died,” he said. “Town had pretty much turned to shit.”
“Hold on,” Tashi said. “We just got some new recording gear shipped to us. Let me get it.”
Maggie stood up and said she’d put on some coffee. Boom kept still at the edge of the porch, nodding but continuing to watch the road. The man looked like a mountain, large and muscular, in ragged jeans and a faded flannel shirt, a CAT ball cap on his head. Back turned, he started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Good times,” Boom said.
“What?” Tashi said, opening the screen door.
“Putting those motherfuckers on the run,” he said. “You got to do that from time to time. Let them know where they all stand.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Quinn drove up through Birmingham and cut across the rest of Alabama and most of north Mississippi to talk to Vardaman. Vardaman wasn’t hard to find. He posted all his rallies and appearances on his Facebook page, a small picture of himself grinning in front of Mississippi and American flags, promising a RETURN TO VALUES, a larger picture for the banner showing him speaking before a huge crowd of his supporters, many in Watchmen caps and holding up signs. THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN. STOP REWARDING, START DEPORTING.
By the time Quinn arrived, the rally was over, but he spotted Vardaman’s ca
mpaign bus parked outside the Landers Center. The flashing sign facing Interstate 55 advertising that CURIOUS GEORGE LIVE would be coming soon, as well as MONSTER TRUCK JAM and REPTICON: MEMPHIS REPTILE & AMPHIBIAN SHOW. Quinn stopped his truck sideways in a long stretch of open slots, Vardaman’s bus being one of the last vehicles left, a few folks coming in and out of its door. Quinn let down his window, watching the bus, and finished the cigar he’d been smoking since Tupelo, his tumbler of truck stop coffee gone cold.
He didn’t have a warrant and hadn’t given advance notice he’d be coming. Quinn wanted to catch Vardaman off guard. Within a few minutes, he spoke with three different handlers until a pudgy young guy in a rumpled blue suit with thick brown hair and a goatee led him up onto the bus and back toward a little booth situated by the rear windows. The guy said his name was Tudhope and that he broadcasted an AM talk radio show in Meridian.
“Wrote my first book when I was fifteen,” Tudhope said, mopping the sweat off his brow with his tie. “It was called Take Back My America. Went to number eighteen on the USA Today bestsellers list. Maybe you remember it?”
Quinn didn’t answer, following Tudhope’s wide body between the seats to the back of the bus. Vardaman waved from the booth, dressed in a white dress shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A woman sat with him in the little cove, lots of blonde hair, big teeth, and large, almost bovine blue eyes. Tudhope introduced her as the senator’s press secretary. Quinn took off his ball cap, still standing, and nodded to them both.
“Little far from Tibbehah,” Vardaman said. “Glad you stopped by, Sheriff. We never got to finish our talk at the Good Ole Boy.”
“We finished it,” Quinn said.
“All you said was ‘Bullshit,’” Vardaman said. “Not exactly a productive conversation or spirited debate.”
“Nope.”
“Would y’all mind leaving me and Sheriff Colson alone for a few minutes?” Vardaman asked. “Looks like he’s got something personal on his mind.”
“Did you know a woman named Skylar Cole?” Quinn asked.
Vardaman gave an odd look, his face scrunched up, turning to each of his advisers. Tudhope nodded to the press secretary and squeezed his thick frame into the banquette behind the table. His pudgy face shone with sweat.
“We found her remains not far from your hunt lodge,” Quinn said. “Someone had busted her skull.”
“Sheriff,” Vardaman said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“She would’ve died in 1997,” Quinn said. He had no proof the body was Skylar Cole or even that it was from 1997. But he had enough to ask the question. “She was a regular at some of those house parties y’all liked to throw. Skeet shooting and whole hog barbecue. Whiskey and underage girls. Good ole times.”
Vardaman’s cocky smile dropped. He didn’t look to either his adviser or press secretary. He reached up and loosened his knotted tie and stared hard at Quinn. His nostrils flared as he nodded, understanding now exactly why Quinn was here and what he wanted.
“Skylar Cole brought the girls,” Quinn said. “They all came from Stagg’s place. You know the Booby Trap?”
The blonde woman started to laugh and shake her head. “I think this is all over,” she said. “Thank you for stopping by, Sheriff, but we have to be in Greenwood by tonight. He’s got a donor dinner at Lusco’s. They’re serving steak and pompano from the Gulf. I’ll walk you back to your truck.”
Quinn didn’t move, noting a nasty welt under Vardaman’s silver hairline.
“Looks like someone already tried to set you straight, Senator,” Quinn said. “Want to tell me where you got that bruise?”
Vardaman didn’t answer as Quinn kept on staring at him, his misshapen head and waxy-looking face folding into his true self, hard gaze and grinding jaw looking like he was chewing on something with his back teeth. He didn’t stop staring until Quinn said the name of the old state trooper that used to work for him and took care of their special business in Tibbehah County. The trooper had been famously shot out in the Big Woods, disgraced and exposed as being a longtime bad seed in the highway patrol. A notorious bagman who was finally found out.
“I don’t know that name,” Vardaman said.
“You should,” Quinn said. “He served as your bodyguard for years, as well as being the go-to guard for two Ole Miss football coaches. I’ve seen a lot of pictures of y’all together. Even a trip down to Louisiana to catch redfish.”
Tudhope gripped Vardaman’s arm and whispered into his ear. Quinn stood back, watching them and the blonde woman, who was playing with the tight pearl choker around her neck.
“I know Brandon Taylor blackmailed some of your guests,” Quinn said. “I know that Skylar Cole helped set them up. Both were killed. Y’all wanted it to seem like that Taylor kid killed himself. I know who was at those parties. All about the history of Stagg and the Booby Trap. And I know you were the one who ultimately made the call to kill those kids.”
“That’s the craziest horseshit I ever heard,” Vardaman said, still grinding his teeth, his face turning a deep purple. “I don’t know a damn thing about any of that. I’ve tried time after time to be cordial to you, son. At every damn turn, you’ve worked to embarrass me and harass my supporters. You arrested one of my people just two days ago, violating his fucking Second Amendment rights. I don’t know what kind of fantasy you’ve created in your mind about some cold case from twenty years back.”
“Might take a little time to put the pieces together,” Quinn said. “But it’s coming. Figured I’d just give you the option of dropping out of the race before you cause Mississippi further embarrassment.”
“You ain’t got shit, son,” Vardaman said. “Because all this is just a fucking lie. Nothing but an old-fashioned witch hunt. You ain’t got any facts. Just an outright fucking fabrication.”
“Might have a few keepsakes, too,” Quinn said. “Y’all sure none of those pictures are still around?”
Vardaman’s face blossomed with even more color, spit on his lips, as he breathed out his flared nostrils. “Lies,” he said. “Y’all just can’t stand that I’ve already won. You’ll do anything to slander my name.”
“You gonna double down on that, Senator?” Quinn asked. “When this all shakes out?”
Tudhope mopped his brow again with his tie, turning to the press secretary, the woman just shaking her head back and forth, pushing Tudhope out of the booth. The fat man, nearly tumbling to the floor, reached for the headrest of the banquette to gather his feet, and told them to clear the bus.
“It’s your call,” Quinn said, his eyes not leaving Vardaman’s. “But the election won’t stop a damn thing. I just hate having to drive all that way to Jackson to arrest you.”
“It’ll never happen,” Vardaman said.
Quinn nodded, picking up his cap from the table, little indentions in its flat top for poker chips and playing cards. A half-eaten bucket of KFC pushed toward the bus window.
“You’ll be long gone by then, son.”
“No, sir,” Quinn said. “My time rousting your crooked ass has just started.”
“That’s a threat,” Tudhope said, pointing, then reaching for his cell phone. “Y’all hear that? Say it again and you’ll be all over the news. We got every news organization in the state on speed dial.”
“Is that a fact?” Quinn nodded, turning. “So do I.”
* * *
* * *
Caddy liked to clean. She liked the order of it, not caring if it was inside the string of little shacks she offered to homeless families and battered women or the dusty old barn that had been the heart of her ministry. Caddy wanted to concentrate on the barn today, focus on its rugged simplicity as the genesis of everything she hoped to accomplish. She remembered Jamey Dixon first finding the place, sitting there crooked, alone, and abandoned on some logged-out
land along a dry creek bed. This was the place, he’d said. We’ll start it all here. The fallow land, the crooked barn, all of it his rock to build upon. And now she had to drive down the road and see the bones of the big new outreach building that probably would never be finished. She wished like hell she’d never even started it. Being incomplete and useless up on the hill was a slight to everything Jamey had wanted.
She’d heard the car pull up as she started sweeping the wooden floor, rugged one-by-sixes they’d laid down a few years before, stripped from an old house, secondhand and repurposed like everything else. Caddy had been thinking about Jamey most of the day, wearing one of his flannel shirts that morning, feeling safe and comfortable back in the barn and prepping for tomorrow’s Sunday service.
The big double doors of the barn were open, and she turned to see Bentley walk inside, hands in his pockets, hanging his head, not saying a word, just watching her work. She’d collected a pile of dirt in the center of the floor, the mismatched pews pushed off to either side while she swept.
“I tried to call.”
Caddy didn’t answer, only returned to her sweeping.
“I stopped by your mother’s house,” he said. “She told me you’d come out here. I know you’re upset. I can’t say I blame you.”
Caddy didn’t answer, sweeping, trying to forgive herself for being so almighty stupid as to trust someone like Bentley Vandeven. She’d let him into her private space out at The River, introduced him to her family, to her son, and brought him into her bed. So damn stupid. She wondered if anything he said had been true, running his hands over her body and telling her that her scars were so beautiful. Caddy came upon some broken glasses, pushing them into the pile of dirt, knowing the worst part of holding service in the barn was the cleanup. You never could quite clean up an old barn.
“I don’t like what’s happening,” he said. “I don’t like any of it. I’ve always done what my father has asked. I’ve always believed he had some kind of good business plan. He always dismissed Vardaman. He called him a joke, just some dumb hick with crazy ideas.”
