The Lost Ones (25 page)

Quinn liked it that way, always preferring night.

“What else did the man say?” Lillie asked.

“Told me about this property, said to hurry, and then hung up.”

“You recognize the voice?” she asked.

“If I did, wouldn’t I have told you?”

“A little testy this morning, Sheriff,” Lillie said. “You hit the wrong side of the bed?”

Lillie had been quiet most of the ride up, trying a few remarks out in the quiet car, knowing full well that Dinah had just rolled out of bed with Quinn. She hadn’t wiped the smirk off her face since they’d arrived at the sheriff’s office about three a.m., Lillie smiling at both of them, lighting up a smoke, taking them both in, studying them with much interest.

“What’s your move, Sheriff?” Dinah asked between making phone calls to Memphis and Oxford, touching base with the folks she worked with in the ATF.

“The way I’d plan this is different than the way we have to do it,” Quinn said.

“Quinn would like to call in an air strike,” Lillie said. “Flatten the shit out of everything and comb through the wreckage.”

“Nope,” Quinn said. “I found some high ground on the map I downloaded. I’d find a nice spot to set up my rifle and start picking off anyone over three feet tall.”

“See what I mean?” Lillie said.

“Didn’t say I would do it,” Quinn said. “I’m just saying that’s the most efficient. You pick off a couple, and more will come out to see what’s going on. That’s how you clear an area.”

Lillie turned off the exit. “I’ve been working on Quinn about certain laws we have in Mississippi. We’ve just gotten beyond shoot-to-kill being frowned upon.”

Quinn ignored her, getting better and better at that, and asked Dinah what she thought.

“If these are the folks I’m looking for, I wouldn’t knock on the door and say hello. Maybe get as close as we can and try and force a reaction. How far from the road are the barn and trailers?”

“About a mile,” Quinn said.

“Too far for an air strike?” Lillie asked.

“Hell, I wouldn’t call in an air strike,” Quinn said. “Those kids might be there.”

“What if you knew it was only Janet and Ramón and some of their compadres?”

Quinn was silent.

“See what I mean?” Lillie asked.

THEY GOT A HALF MILE
down the farm road before the first bullet spiderwebbed the passenger window, maybe three inches from Dinah Brand’s head. All three of them ducked, Quinn yelling for Lillie to cut off the lights. The Union County sheriff and deputy, braking behind them, did the same. Quinn was out of the Jeep and taking cover behind the vehicle almost at the same time. He fired five times with his Beretta auto and slipped the Remington pump over his shoulder with a homemade sling. There were no lights on the road, only the faintest of illumination well beyond a bend in the open, rolling field. A single white light shone near the mouth of a red barn.

Two more shots sounded, and Quinn spotted the quick flashes from a ravine at forty meters. He returned fire six times before he met Lillie and Dinah on the driver’s side of the Jeep. He kept a fresh magazine in his pocket and reloaded.

“Two guns,” Quinn said. “There’s a ditch to the north.”

He looked to the south of the road, gentle hills without trees, only cows, a bright white frost coating the brown grass, terrible cover for all. The Union County Sheriff’s car, a maroon Dodge Charger, pulled up within a couple meters of where they stood. The sheriff, a portly man in his seventies named Drake, and a young deputy, a muscle-bound black man in his thirties, joined them behind the cars. Drake removed his ball cap and looked to Quinn. “That warrant shit was a waste of time. Wadn’t it? Holy Christ. These crazy sonsabitches mean business. I got eight units headed this way.”

Four more shots came from the ravine, shattering glass in the Jeep and thudding against the doors of the Charger. “God damn,” Drake said. “Just had this car painted.”

All five of them squatted down behind the cars. Quinn introduced the sheriff to Dinah, the agent he’d told him about who was tracking guns out of Memphis. Dinah had her red hair tied up in a bun and wore a thick black ski coat.

“You really think they’d keep those kids in there?” Drake said. “I mean, shit. We gonna have to wait it out now.”

“I got tipped there are three trailers down that road,” Quinn said. “Up and over that hill.”

“That makes it a bitch to see,” Drake said. “We got shooters out on this road saying hello, and God knows what’s waiting for us.”

“All part of the fun,” Lillie said with a grin.

“Sheriff, this is my chief deputy, Lillie Virgil,” Quinn said.

Lillie nodded.

“I used to ride horses out here when I was a kid,” the sheriff said. “I don’t even know who owns it anymore. Tax record says it’s in bankruptcy. Don’t recall the trailers.”

“When we get some more folks out here,” Quinn said, “I’d like to head back to the main road and backtrack. I’d prefer to introduce myself from a different direction.”

“What do you think we got in there?” Drake asked Dinah.

“Maybe a shitload of automatic weapons headed back to Mexico,” she said. “They could be armed to the teeth with assault rifles. Grenade launchers.”

“Real cute,” Sheriff Drake said. “I was supposed to speak to the Ruritans this morning at eight. I was gonna give the opening prayer, and brag on our low crime rate.”

“You want us to pray now?” Lillie asked.

“Might help,” Drake said, turning to Quinn. “You really want to double back on them?”

Quinn nodded. Drake smiled at him as if recognizing an old pal.

“I knew your uncle real well,” Drake said. “Me and him had been sheriff about long as anyone in this state. He sure was a good ole fella. You favor him.”

Sirens sounded off down in the distance, and the flashers came up hard and fast from the main road, bounding over the gravel. The shooters were silent down in the ravine. Quinn watched for their shadows to return, heading back to the barn or out into the woods, where he planned to follow into the cleared land.

“Don’t matter to me if you go on,” Drake said. “You want a couple deputies go with you?”

Quinn nodded, Drake saying they’d meet him on the main road. Dinah and Lillie followed. Dinah carried a Sig Sauer P226 with a laser sight. A gun was usually the second thing he noticed about a woman. Lillie walked confident with a Mossberg pump and standard-issue Glock. Lillie was tall and lithe, good body, but with a tough walk. Dinah walked more girlish in her tall boots, and with more caution on the loose rocks and dirt.

Back at the county road, Quinn used his Leatherman tool to cut into the barbed wire and track alongside the ravine in some low-growing pines that had been planted in the last ten years or so. The pine needles were soft and quiet, muffling their steps as the group followed him. Quinn saw the sheriff’s cruisers and Lillie’s shot-up Jeep from the edge of the clearing. The ravine sat about twenty meters from the edge of the pine. Quinn spotted two shadows, holding hunting rifles at their sides. The men were speaking Spanish and watching as two more patrol cars joined the mess in the center of the dirt road.

Quinn could take both men out from where he stood and clear the path to the barn and the next objective.

“Don’t think about it,” Lillie said behind him.

“These boys are fucked and they know it,” Quinn said. “Folks are scariest when they got nothing to lose.”

Quinn quietly radioed to Sheriff Drake to spotlight the ravine. Two patrol cars hit the lights on the wide-open space, and the two men fired again at the deputies in the clearing. Quinn and Lillie fired at the same time into the ravine, dropping both men where they stood. A stillness fell over the early morning. Lillie let out a lot of air and dropped her weapon, refusing to look at Quinn. She walked across the open ground to the ravine, staring down at the dead men.

Quinn grabbed her arm and pulled her from the light, taking her back into the pines with him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“You know what else is up that road?” Lillie asked.

“Don’t ever walk out into the open like that,” Quinn said.

His voice had some edge about it, and although he knew Lillie didn’t like it, she said, “OK.” Dinah caught his eye, Sig Sauer loose in her hand, and followed Lillie without a word back toward the main road and the gathering of deputies. Union County had more than half of their department out on the farm road, spinning red-and-blue lights, radios squawking. The early morning had a bright chill to it, a frost spreading up on the rolling hills where the cows stood and made grumbling sounds.

Quinn didn’t ask but followed the path along the pines to the east and the lone barn, where he expected to find more trailers and more guns and maybe the kids. You always wanted to get a feel for the enemy before they saw you, know their size, their weaponry, their immediate location. You also never wanted to take a chance you didn’t have to. If the local sheriff agreed to march on in and start kicking in doors, fine by Quinn, but he wanted to know every damn detail.

Quinn was joking when he said it, but he wouldn’t mind having his old M24 sniper rifle in hand with a nice night vision scope. For most of his life, he worked on a simple premise: eradicate the enemy with as much speed as possible. He could pick off any opposition, man-for-man, within inches of those children, making sure no harm came to him or the kids. But there were laws and courts for even the most evil bastards in this nation, and he knew not to fire unless fired upon.

Those two men in the ditch back toward the road had made their choice. Quinn tried not to dwell on that stuff.

The thick pine plantings ended abruptly a half mile down, running next to the large barn. As promised by the tipster, three trailers sat up on blocks with four 4×4 trucks parked outside. A light shone down from a utility pole, and strobed light from a television flashed from inside the middle trailer. Two of the trucks were older-model Chevys with a lot of aftermarket supplies, KC lights, and glasspack mufflers. The third was a brown-and-tan GMC with a heavy chrome roll bar on top.

He called in his position to Lillie and the Union County folks.

The ground was beaten and uneven, with a thin layer of gravel spread out around the trailer encampment. The barn stood dark and quiet, only cows softly wailing by the feed troughs and buckets of molasses. Quinn kept watching the barn until a tall Hispanic man, maybe in his early twenties, wearing a black cowboy hat with a Concho band, walked out into the open holding an M4. Quinn was quite intimate with the model and made a call on his cell. Four more men joined him from the trailers, heading to the group of trucks, speaking Spanish, Quinn unable to hear what they were saying even if he had had great command of the language, which he didn’t.

The sun would be up soon, and the deputies would be bottlenecked on that road.

Quinn called into the sheriff to see if there was a back road or a fire trail the gunmen might use to try to escape arrest.

No one seemed to know.

All of the men carried assault rifles. The hills obscured the sheriff’s cars down the road. The men held the ground as Quinn watched the light of the television flashing inside one of the trailers, thinking back to another nameless village where his platoon dragged two American soldiers out from a Taliban safe house, the soldiers’ faces beaten to shit. The Rangers left no one standing within a hundred meters of the landing zone. Everything was done with quickness and speed, getting in and getting out, taking care of the enemy without discussion. Quinn tried to slow his breathing, clear his mind, not think so much.

If he moved a little bit out of the pine concealment, Quinn could take out all four men before they could squeeze off a round. He raised his Beretta 9 and aimed at a man in the black cowboy hat. The man wore a big denim coat with a Sherpa collar and continued to speak on a cell phone. A cigarette hung from his mouth.

Quinn took a breath.

He heard the cry of a baby from one of the trailers. The men turned, and a young Hispanic woman walked out, a baby against her shoulder, patting its back and yelling to the men. A toddler in pink pajamas waddled to the open door and looked out into the crisp night.

33

“I WENT AHEAD AND CUT THE POWER TO THE SONSABITCHES,” SHERIFF
Drake said. “I got six deputies in the woods surrounding the trailers, and the only road is blocked. If they try and shoot their way out, we’ll cut ’em down. I guess it’s their move now.”

The sheriff spread a large topographical map on the hood of a patrol car parked on the side of the county road, a few cars slowing to view the commotion. Quinn and Lillie stood on either side of him, Lillie smoking a Marlboro Light, and Quinn drinking coffee someone had brought in a Styrofoam cup. The sheriff tapped a pen to the location, circled it, and looked to both of them for a reply. The wind brought a razor chill to the back of Quinn’s neck, nearly taking his ball cap with it. Dead leaves tumbled out in the street and spun in a little vortex.

“If I wasn’t worried about those kids,” Quinn said, “I’d say let’s go ahead and hit them right now. But a five-mil round from one of those M4s will eat up those trailers. We don’t want to risk it.”

“You get an ID on the fellas in the ditch?” Lillie asked and blew out a long trail of smoke in the cold.

Drake shook his head. “Working on it,” he said. “But I’m betting they ain’t from Tishomingo.”

Lillie’s face had grown tight and stern. She was never pleased with herself when she fired her weapon. She’d want to know every detail of the dead men until she could set in her head that she’d done right. It didn’t matter to Quinn. He had learned long ago to leave the dead where they fall. Most of the men he’d killed were nameless and faceless, and he preferred to keep it that way. He did his job and moved on. Keeping score only weighted you down.

“Can I borrow one of your .308s?” Quinn asked. “And for Deputy Virgil, too. I’d like to scout those boys out one more time before sunrise.”