The Broken Places (29 page)

“You walked the whole way?” Quinn said.

“Most of it.”

“Thought you told Deputy Virgil you got picked up on Highway 45,” Quinn said. “That’s quite a walk from the Vardaman place.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“What time did you break loose, Johnny?”

Stagg scratched his cheek and smiled at Quinn. He smiled over at Ophelia, who pulled down the mask from her face but kept on the latex gloves. She nodded to Quinn. Quinn nodded back, and she wheeled away the body.

“Where’s the other one?” Johnny said, grinning like he was happy as hell, just ear-to-ear, wanting to hear the good news.

“Don’t have the other one,” Quinn said.

“That a fact,” Stagg said, nodding some more, being dumb enough to place a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “I am a little surprised at that, son. Weren’t you supposed to check in with them federal agents if you saw anything? I don’t think it was our county’s place to go in there and spook those ole boys.”

“We were checking on the lodge,” Quinn said. “Someone had broken in. We had taken precautions. Those men were already leaving the lodge, on the ATVs. With the time issues and the weather, we acted the best way we could.”

“Quinn, I know this is all new to you,” Stagg said, “but a country sheriff can’t make decisions like that ahead of some federal agents. Them men gunned down two Marshals in the parking lot of the Booby Trap. There’s jurisdictional things and laws you just ain’t thinking of. This ain’t the Ponderosa.”

“Like I said, Johnny,” Quinn said, “with the time and the weather and not knowing who was in that house, I made that call. That’s my job.”

Stagg shook his head sadly for the young man not quite tracking on his information. Ophelia walked back into the room in a sweatshirt and jeans and tennis shoes, hair pulled into a ponytail. Her big brown eyes switching from Quinn to Stagg, hands deep in the front pockets of her jeans.

“You mind removing your hand off my person, Johnny,” Quinn said. “With my training, I sometimes react involuntarily. You don’t want that.”

Stagg removed his skeletal hand, still preacher-smiling and happy with himself. He nodded, taking it all in, looking down, as if he were capable of philosophical thought, not just a gesture he saw in the movies. “Did I hear you had a chance to take that shot on that other boy?”

Quinn stayed silent.

“I don’t know your reason there,” Stagg said, sticking a peppermint candy in his mouth and crunching away. “I just hope nobody else gets hurt based on your assessing that situation. See y’all later.”

Stagg left the back room at the Bundren Funeral Home, door shutting hard and final behind him. Ophelia looked to Quinn, hands still in her pockets, and shrugged. “What was that all about?”

“He wanted both these jokers dead,” Quinn said.

“They did kidnap him.”

“He didn’t walk ten miles in a half hour,” Quinn said. “He’s trying to cut out the middle man. You know he’s connected with that armored car somehow.”

“So who’s he doing business with?” Ophelia said, walking back over to the worktable and putting away her tools.

“Jamey Dixon,” Quinn said. “Who else? Your family was right, Ophelia.”

•   •   •

Caddy walked outside
the Tibbehah Regional Hospital for a smoke break. Caddy had tried to quit smoking and had been successful
•   •   •

at it last year. But there were times when bad habits came back like old, familiar friends, and right now, she needed a pack of Marlboro Lights and some fresh air. Outside, there was a little worn area under a magnolia tree where visitors and mostly patients could smoke free and clear of the doctors. The soft ground was littered with cigarette butts, the sky above turning blacker than coal. An obese man in a hospital gown and in a wheelchair had taken to the edge of the little patch and smoked down a cigarette in ecstasy. He was missing a foot and a hand, unaware of Caddy, only watching the traffic on the slick, busted highway. Thunder threatened far off in the west. The clouds sped above like a deep black, churning river. Caddy wasn’t cold but held her arms against herself, some kind of thick charge in the air.

“You got an extra?” asked a busty woman in a short jean skirt and white tank top. She was probably not much older than Caddy but had the tired, worn look of someone who’d hit a few rough patches. Her makeup was thick, her nails long and red.

Caddy nodded, handing her the pack and letting her shake loose her own. Besides the fat man in the wheelchair, she was alone with the woman. The man in the chair checked out and loving on his cigarette, the passing traffic drowning out their words. More thunder broke, closer now.

“You’re Caddy Colson,” the woman said.

Caddy nodded.

“How’s Reverend Dixon?” the woman said then, taking a pull on that cigarette. “Everyone is real worried about him.”

“Do I know you?”

The woman smiled, makeup caked at the edges of her smile. “Yeah,” she said. “We do have some connections.”

“Do you go to The River?” Caddy said, smiling and feeling confused. The cigarette burned warm in her fingers.

“No, ma’am,” the woman said. “I hadn’t been back to church since a wild man running an Assembly of God out of Aberdeen tried to get me to handle the snake in his britches.”

Caddy tilted her head, finished the smoke, and ground it under her boot.

Those long, black clouds were moving even faster now, looking like ragged pieces of cloth, draped and flying past. The wind scattered Caddy’s short hair, a little rain but not significant enough for it to matter.

“I like your hair,” the woman said. “You sure can wear it.”

“Thank you,” Caddy said, studying the woman.

The fat man in the wheelchair turned back around, wheeling himself away from whatever he found fascinating on the roadside, and made his way back to the hospital. He nodded at the two women as he passed and said, “Damn, this don’t look too good.”

“I’m confused,” Caddy said to the woman.

“I’m friends with Reverend Dixon,” she said. “Of course, I just always called him Jamey. I used to meet with him over at Parchman, and I helped him get settled when he got out. I was the woman who picked him up at the processing center and took him to Walmart to get a fresh change of clothes. He went into jail with nothing but six dollars and some change. Did you know he had that girl’s blood on his jeans?”

“Funny,” Caddy said. “He never mentioned you. What’s your name?”

“Don’t really matter,” the woman said, slipping a neatly folded piece of paper into Caddy’s hand and pressing it closed in her fingers. “All you need to know is to pass this along to Jamey. I was supposed to come to you as a woman with similar problems. But you and I know we’re not gonna meet on any common ground. You got too much on your mind.”

Caddy opened the piece of paper and saw a phone number written on it. She looked up into the woman’s eyes.

“OK,” the woman said, taking another cigarette. She’d yet to hand back the pack, something that hadn’t been lost on Caddy. “Let’s go ahead and show our goodies. All right? Esau and his buddy are pissed off as hell at your boyfriend. Esau is my man. You understand? He and Jamey had an understanding. I helped the good reverend get settled. I made sure he was fine and took him to meet Mr. Stagg, just like it had all been arranged.”

“Why?”

“Hell,” the woman said. “You know why. What you don’t seem to know is that your man kept back a good portion of what he said he lost. That may not mean nothing to you, since you seem to really and truly found Jesus. But it means something to me and Esau and Mr. Bones, and if Jamey can walk upright and quit hiding behind the cross, then everything just gonna be fine.”

“He didn’t take any of that money,” Caddy said. “He gave it to Stagg for his freedom.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

The woman shook her head, the smell of cheap drugstore perfume all over her. Her bright red nails looked like something that should be hanging on to a branch. “He got to you? Didn’t he? That sandy hair and blue eyes and talk of this world and the next. Don’t be so fucking stupid. That ole song goes something like this. Jamey Dixon agrees to meet up with Esau in the next hour or else I’m gonna strut my ass into the sheriff’s office and lay down the whole story about making that deal with Johnny Stagg. All them walls will come down for Jamey, old man Stagg, and even that fat, pig-eyed piece of shit ex-governor and this whole hypocritical world. You’ll be the one left at home on a rainy night smelling him on your cold pillow.”

“Go away,” Caddy said.

“Fine by me,” the woman said, tossing the cigarettes back to Caddy and turning. Designs in silver thread had been sewn on her ass pockets.

“Tick fucking tock,” she said, and walked into the parking lot.

•   •   •

Up and over that ridge,
Esau walked till he couldn’t walk no more. He was bleeding bad out of his side and needed time to drink some whiskey and eat. Out of the mist high on the hills, he walked into a clearing and found a little deer stand not much bigger than a child’s play fort. There was a great deal of pain hauling his ass up a ladder into the structure and lying down on his side. He pulled the backpack away from him and searched for some of that Wild Turkey, drinking down a half-dozen good swallows.

He lay on his back, careful to get off his side, and stared up at the tin roof, rusty and torn. The rain dancing a good bit on it, the edges lifting up and back, up and back. He cocked his head forward a bit to drink down another quarter of the bottle. Amazing thing how whiskey could make the world seem like a better place even though it had turned to shit. He remembered hearing as a kid about those Confederate soldiers about to lose a limb and all they got was some whiskey and a prayer before that hacksaw moved in on them. He just hoped like hell he could boogie on down the road before the eye got to be even more of a mess. Becky had told him that morning that he looked real rough, but she’d love him one eye or not, kind of making a joke about him wearing an eye patch, just like a pirate, at whatever warm locale where they were headed.

Shit, right now it was like driving at night, when you can’t see a damn thing except for ten feet ahead in the headlights. He drank down the whiskey, just a little golden sliver of it left at the bottom. He knew he should eat, but he didn’t want to eat. The wind started kicking the hell out of the little house on stilts, Esau feeling like God himself had him in his hand. He leaned back and touched the side of flesh that had been shot into. He knew there had been muscles torn and lots of blood gone. He pulled back the cloth wrapped about his side, stained with the darkest shade of blood he’d ever seen.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The roof shook a good bit until a whole goddamn section lifted off and flew away. A damn shitstorm poured inside the structure, and Esau crawled into the corner of the little house, placing the backpack up under his head, and closed his eyes. The wind moved so fast all the wood was creaking and moaning and rocking the son of a bitch back and forth. But if he crawled back out into the wilderness, where the hell would he go? This little place had probably taken on worse.

He closed his eyes. He’d rest up. Wait to hear from Becky.

The roof had been torn in half, half rust and half black-ass sky. The structure wobbled some more on the pilings, like a drunk on unsafe legs. Rain, rain, rain.

Under his head in the backpack, he heard his cell phone. Becky. He knew she’d find him, wondering if she’d heard about poor ole Bones’s ass. He turned, cursing that damn wound, and opened the sack. He pulled out the phone and said, “OK, baby. It’s OK, baby.”

“Esau?”

“Who the hell’s this?”

“You came to me.”

“Dixon?”

“I’m sorry about Bones,” he said. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

Esau worked himself up to his knees and then used a two-by-four ledge to stand, wind and rain shooting on into the house. It was tough as a son of a bitch to hear what Dixon had to say, and he screwed his ear down into the phone.

“I ain’t got time to play,” Esau said.

“You’re the one who wants to meet,” Jamey said. “You tell me where to go.”

“I want what is fucking mine.”

“I understand what you want.”

“And you got it?” Esau said.

He didn’t say a word for a long while. “I got it.”

Esau nodded and reached for the last bit of whiskey. “All right, then. This how’s it gonna go.” But as he spoke and turned to look out of the open patch of roof, a border of blackness swept in from the west, reminding him of stories of frogs and locusts and creatures that would cover the sun and devour the earth. In his drunken mind, for that moment, Esau wondered if Dixon wasn’t conjuring the whole thing or if the Wild Turkey hadn’t just busted a blood vessel.

“Where?” the voice said on the phone. “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear nothing.”

“I’m here,” Esau said, yelling. “I’m here, goddamn you.”

Mr. Jim’s barbershop was just as Quinn had left it. Mr. Jim trimming some fella’s hair while Luther Varner sat on the waiting bench thumbing through
Field & Stream
. The television atop the Coke machine should have been playing
The Price Is Right
or
Days of Our Lives
,
the old men loving that stuff, but the local station had interrupted it all to run down the weather reports, bad night across Oklahoma and Arkansas, more bad weather for most of the mid-South. “They had two tornadoes touch down in Clarksdale, and I’m hearing about one over near Oxford,” Mr. Jim said, working the snippers to trim away a few stray hairs from a man’s bushy eyebrows. “What do you know, Sheriff?”