The Lost Ones (5 page)

“Naw, man,” Boom said. “I mean, stop the motherfucking truck.”

Quinn hit the brakes, and Boom had the passenger door open even before they stopped rolling. He vomited out most of the night’s beer and then hopped to the ground to relieve himself on an old oak tree.

After a bit, Boom hopped back in the truck. “I could eat.”

Quinn shook his head and popped the truck into gear.

THE SONIC LIT UP
the south end of Main Street, a couple blocks down from the Town Square, in red-and-yellow neon. Teenagers took nearly every parking slot around the drive-in, wandering from car to car as an old Tanya Tucker song played on the loudspeakers. Girls in tight jeans and cowboy boots mixed with the FFA boys in their camo ball caps and football players sporting their letterman jackets. Six girls sat together at a table in front of the kitchen, huddled against the wind and smoking cigarettes.

“Man, this shit takes me back,” Boom said.

Quinn ordered a couple hamburgers, fries, and black coffee.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Boom said.

“Maybe it’s time to start.”

Boom nodded. The waitress rolled by on skates and passed along their burgers and coffees. They sat there for a while, watching the high school kids and listening to the sheriff’s radio.

“What set it off?”

Boom drank some coffee and made a face. “I can’t drive.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“I tried to drive my daddy’s truck to the co-op for some feed and something happened.”

Quinn nodded. He unwrapped a cheeseburger and started to eat.

“Hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

“I seen something on the side of the road.”

“So you pulled off?”

Boom nodded. He hadn’t touched his food.

“What was it?”

“Goddamn trash bag.”

“But you thought it was an IED,” Quinn said.

Boom nodded again. He reached into the bag for the fries and burger. Quinn kept eating. One of the girls at the smoking table opened a small flask for whiskey from her purse and poured into a couple other girls’ cups. Quinn remembered being the one who’d go to Tupelo with his Uncle Van and buy quarts of Jack Daniel’s for field parties. He hardly seemed the right man to try and stop it now.

“You remember how my Uncle Van used to get us beer and whiskey?”

“Got me weed, too,” Boom said.

“You think that’s wrong?”

“He got paid.”

“You’re right,” Quinn said. “Had to give him twenty bucks a run.”

“Good to get the beer,” Boom said. “Makes this town more interesting.”

“Try not to make it too interesting,” Quinn said. “I can’t keep doin’ this shit. People will talk.”

“That’s all we got in Jericho, Miss-ippi.”

A silver Toyota Tundra with a roll bar and Edelbrock dual pipes circled into a slot across the way. The glare of the lights and the neon across the windshield made it tough to see. But Boom didn’t seem to have a problem, swallowing half the cheeseburger and pointing. “You know Donnie was back?”

“Heard something about it.”

“Last time I seen his country ass was at Camp Anaconda,” Boom said. “We played cards and drank some rotgut shit some of his Guard boys had made. Rough, rough shit.”

Boom was out of the truck first, with Quinn following. The teenage girls went quiet as Quinn passed, heads bowed, cups under table. Quinn hung back and watched Boom lean into the driver’s side of Donnie Varner’s Toyota and shake hands. There was a woman with him, and Boom nodded at the woman. They laughed.

Quinn walked over to the window.

“God damn, Sheriff Colson,” Donnie said. “The world’s been turned upside down.”

“What’s up, Donnie?”

“My daddy sent me newspaper clippings about what happened,” Donnie said. “Holy shit. Meth dealers, crooked-ass preachers, and here comes you, bigger ’an shit. Can’t say I was surprised about Wesley. But hey, man. Sorry to hear about your uncle. He was a good man.”

“If you say so.”

“Got to forgive, brother,” Donnie said, grinning wide. “That’s what the preacher man says.”

Quinn walked closer and noted the woman seated beside Donnie. She was very dark, eyes and hair both almost black. She had done little to acknowledge Donnie’s friends besides stealing a momentary glance. Her delicate bone structure and wide eyes reminded Quinn of something you’d see in a very old painting with women wearing black and lace and holding fans. Something almost regal about her.

“Who’s your friend?” Boom asked.

Donnie’s face colored a bit. He took a sip of his milk shake. “This is my friend, Luz. Luz, these are my boys Boom and Quinn. See that star? This son of a bitch is the goddamn sheriff. Used to be people in this town locked up their trucks and their daughters when he was around.”

Quinn shrugged.

“Army made an honest man outta him,” Donnie said. “Wish I could say the same.”

“Good to see you, Donnie.”

Donnie nodded and shook his hand. Quinn smiled at the woman. She looked away and covered her left cheek with her hand.

“How’s your momma?” Donnie asked.

“Loving Elvis.”

“Caddy?”

“Don’t know.”

“Your dad?”

“Still gone.”

“He was my hero,” Donnie said, big Edelbrocks growling behind him. He smiled. “I had all them movies he was in on VHS and used to study the shit out of his stunts. If you paused the frame just right, you could see it wasn’t Burt Reynolds at all. Shit, it was Jason Colson.”

Quinn nodded.

“I wanted to be a stuntman more than anything,” Donnie grinned and gave a two-finger wave and backed out slowly.

Quinn followed Boom back to the truck. They sat there and finished their coffees until the kids all drove away and bit by bit all the neon and light was gone. Jericho was getting ready for Sunday morning. You could hear the wind and the fall blowing into town.

“Donnie’s into some shit,” Boom said.

“Yep,” Quinn said, and cranked the truck.

“What you gonna do?”

“I got bigger shit to deal with,” Quinn said. “Did you read about the fucking mess Janet Torres left at her house?”

“I heard.”

“Know anything about it?”

“Nope.”

“Nobody else seems to, either.”

7

THEY CAME FOR THE TORRES’S DOGS AT DAYBREAK MONDAY, FIVE DIFFERENT
humane societies from around state, packing the matted, flea-infested animals in crates and into vans, chugging exhaust into the cold air. Some of the dogs held their ground and had to be snared with long poles and wire loops. They’d starved and shit and pissed on themselves so long that human contact seemed strange. Kenny and Quinn had been looking after them since the first of it, making sure they had food and water. Kenny wandered over to one cage and looked in on an old, tired black Lab and asked if it would be trouble if he put her in his truck.

“Don’t see why not,” Quinn said.

Kenny waddled into the cage and scooped the filthy animal up into his arms, talking to her, the dog licking his fat chin and goatee. The animal moved weak and slow.

“These are some class folks, Sheriff,” said a woman who’d come up from Jackson.

“You ever seen anything like this?” Quinn asked.

“Only every week or so,” the woman said. “Mississippi isn’t too big on animal welfare. Most we can cite them with is neglect. Legislators can’t tell the difference between family pets and animals to hunt. They think we’re all nuts with PETA, trying to tell people what they can do with their property.”

“What’s this amount to?”

“Hundred-dollar fine.”

Quinn stayed until all the dogs had been taken, the smell of them still lingering. He lit up a cigar just to clear his head out, knowing most of the dogs would have to be put down for their own good. Many would have severe heartworms, congenital problems from the inbreeding, and other behavior problems like nipping the hands trying to save them. Lillie told him yesterday that Janet Torres had made a bundle by selling Chihuahuas crossbred with miniature poodles on the Internet, some at five hundred dollars a piece. She called them Chi-doodles and had bragged she’d coined the name.

Lillie walked around the mud in tall rubber boots, taking pictures of the empty cages, horrible conditions, for when they’d go to trial.

“You want to kick around the house some more?” she asked.

“Can’t hurt.”

Quinn followed her up into the Torres place, unlocking the padlock on the front door and heading through the little kitchen. He and Kenny had left the windows open, and that had helped with the putrid smell a bit. But not much. The trash, rotten food, and busted toys remained. Children and Families had taken pictures, but Lillie shot off a few more digital images, twisting open the blinds, letting a little light inside the property.

“I called every single number off three months of her cell phone bill,” she said. “Called a lot in Mexico, and had Javier from the El Dorado stop by and help.”

“That’s pretty stand-up.”

“He called Torres an embarrassment to the Mexican people,” Lillie said. “He and some other Mexican business folks have offered a reward for them.”

“On my tenth birthday, I ate so many tacos I puked in one of his sombreros.”

“He get mad?”

“Thought it was funny,” Quinn said. “My dad threw the party, and slipped out the back door after charging up a dozen margaritas for him and his girlfriend.”

“The movie star?”

“The other one,” Quinn said. “The cocktail waitress from Tampa.”

“He really double for Burt Reynolds?”

“Six movies,” Quinn said, opening up cabinets and shining his Maglite inside. “Got fired for showing up drunk on the set of
Stroker Ace
. That’s when my folks were still together.”

“You check the Torres bedroom?”

“They kept separate bedrooms,” Quinn said. “You got to walk knee-deep through garbage to get to her poor bed. Torres had a small bed in a guest room. Kept a lot of pornography, stuff it looked like he was selling. Multiple Mex bootlegs.”

“Anything good?” Lillie asked.

“It’s all there,” Quinn said. “Check it out for yourself. I think Kenny took a couple home.”

“Dog and pony stuff?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Quinn said.

“Bullshit.”

“You check out her bedroom again, and I’ll check around the room with the cribs,” Quinn said. “You get far with those bills?”

“She’d run up fifteen credit cards to the max, eight of them more than ten thousand dollars.”

“What’d she buy?”

“She collected shit off QVC,” Lillie said. “Crazy shit that she stored in that shed out back. Collector dolls signed by Marie Osmond. You walk into that shed, and they are all arranged in rows staring out at you. It creeped my shit out.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Do I lie?”

Quinn worked through the kitchen and the children’s room, feeling his stomach kick up a little, a stark emptiness in his gut, as he shined the light under the thirteen empty cribs and through the long wall closet littered with busted toys, sun-faded and cracked. Two cases of expired milk formula, diapers from Walmart, and quart jars of Vaseline.

He found a small taser gun in with the stuffed animals, electric tape wrapped tight for a better grip.

Quinn smoked the cigar down to a nub, crushing it out on the front steps, looking down the hill at all those empty cages and rivers of shit and piss heading down into a gulley. He hoped he could convince the county to take the property and burn it all. He’d go back to the office, take a hot shower, and change into some fresh clothes, use some saddle soap on his boots. You got warned about catching all kinds of diseases before heading into missions, but no one thought about this kind of shit in America.

Lillie joined him on the old crooked porch. “Ever know a woman who could wear a size twelve double E?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “But she had a hell of a personality.”

“Janet liked shoes, mostly house slippers. Sexy shit, with feathers that matched her negligee.”

“You want me to get sick?”

“Think she’ll come back for these?”

Lillie cracked open a shoe box, showing off thick rolls of cash bound with rubber bands.

“How much?”

“First few rolls are hundreds,” Lillie said. “If they’re all the same, I’d say about twenty grand.”

“Seems like the first thing she would’ve grabbed.”

“I don’t think they ever came home after taking that baby to see Luke,” Lillie said. She fanned away the cigar smoke as if it was worse than her cigarettes. “The Torres family hauled ass the moment they knew he wasn’t buying that horseshit story.”

“Be an incentive to come back.”

“Especially if the place was locked up tight, everyone gone,” Lillie said. “How do you want to rotate?”

“We can work in four-hour shifts,” Quinn said. “I’ll take one just like everyone else. I wouldn’t want anyone out here for longer. This smell, it gets into your clothes and in your skin.”

AT TWILIGHT
, the sky lit up orange, pink, and black over the shape of the Rebel Truck Stop and the red neon sign of the sexy mud-flap girl kicking her legs back and forth along Highway 45. Donnie Varner drove around the complex with its twenty pumps, mostly diesel, and a big diner that served the best chicken-fried steak in north Mississippi. Around back was a big metal barn called The Booby Trap, where truckers would work out a little loneliness over cold cans of Coors or Bud. Women worked the poles and a back room filled with ragged vinyl chairs facing mirrored walls. Before he shipped off to the Sandbox the first time, Donnie got eight lap dances from a pregnant girl from Eupora named Britney who promised she’d be using his money to fund her college education. She said she wanted to study dolphins. She also said for two hundred bucks, she could go and make Donnie’s willie sneeze, Donnie saying, “For two hundred bucks, I can make my own willie sneeze, darlin’.”

Now, after doing business in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and OK City, this place seemed kind of quaint and homey to him, not that den of iniquity like his preacher had called it. This place was pretty minor league talent; any girl with a decent ass and boobs could find work in Memphis or New Orleans, maybe Sammy’s Go-Go in Birmingham.