The Ranger (14 page)

“They were supposed to be with me. Their mother, that’s the one who left ’em with Jett. Jett had no business taking on those children.”

Quinn didn’t know what to say, offering only another “Sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry,” Connie Price said. “I’d prefer not to discuss this, if it’s all the same. Why are y’all here anyway?”

Lillie said, “There’s some questions about the fire.”

“You mean about how my son could have been so damn almighty stupid to leave a skillet on his cookstove?”

“No, ma’am,” Lillie said. “We were wondering about the relationship your son had with Jill Bullard.”

“He was seeing her.”

“And Keith Shackelford?”

“He was from somewhere abouts in Memphis. They were in the Army together, drinkin’ buddies. My son killed his own children’cause he was drunk. That’s what you want to know?”

“My uncle was Sheriff Beckett,” Quinn said. “He’d taken a personal interest in what happened to your family.”

“How’s that?”

“Did you ever speak to my uncle?”

“He was at the service for the children,” she said, nodding. “He came by twice after that. He was a fine man. I was sorry to hear of his passing.”

“Did he ask you questions about the fire?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Connie Price said, stubbing out her cigarette and checking her watch. “Why would he?”

“I don’t think he was convinced it was an accident.”

“They did an investigation,” Connie Price said. “The fire marshal said things like this happen all the time and not to blame my son. But who else would you blame? He killed his own children.”

“Ma’am,” Lillie said. “Did you know anyone who’d want to do Jett harm?”

“Not like this. Who’d want to kill children?”

“Did my uncle ever give you reason to think he doubted what happened?”

She shook her head.

“Jill Bullard was found dead today,” Lillie said. “She’d been shot.”

Price put one hand to her mouth and placed the other on a chair to steady herself. She reached for the gold cross on her neck and kept her fingers there. She shook her head over and over.

“Could Jett have owed anyone money?” Quinn asked.

“Jett always owed people money. When you get yourself into drinking and drugs, that’s what happens.”

“You recall any names?”

“I really got to be going. I was supposed to be at church twenty minutes ago to help them set up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said.

“Do you know anyone we might speak to?” Lillie asked. “Folks who knew Jett or Keith Shackelford or Jill?”

“You can talk to Jett’s ex. She’d be glad to heap some blame on my son. Not that I disagree.”

Quinn helped carry the pies and cookies to Connie Price’s Chevrolet sedan in the drive. She closed them all up in her trunk, keys in hand.

“Where’d your son serve?” Quinn asked.

“He was in the invasion of Iraq,” she said. “He carried a Rebel flag on his tank when it rolled into Baghdad. I have pictures.”

“Was Shackelford part of his unit?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Connie Price said. “I don’t exactly know when they met in the service.”

“I’m afraid he’s dead, too,” Lillie said.

“When?”

“Right after the fire.”

“That’s a lie,” Connie Price said. “He may not be much to look at, with those burn marks across half his face. But I just saw him last week.”

14

Lillie got an address on Shackelford from a previous
arrest, and they found it strange that it was down in Sugar Ditch, the black district of the county. She called back to dispatch to verify, and apparently he’d been living with a black female who’d been arrested at the same time for possession of crack. The house wasn’t more than a shed painted a putrid green with a failing roof and asbestos siding. A few hard knocks on the door brought out a scared old black woman who found the law on her poorly screened-in porch. The house smelled of clean laundry, and the floorboards hummed with an unbalanced load. The old woman said she didn’t know the white man, had never met the white man, and didn’t want to meet him in the middle of the night. Lillie asked about his girlfriend, and she shook her head more, saying she’d only rented the house six months ago. The arrests had taken place two years ago.

“You take the east side of the street and I’ll take the west.”

“For what?” Quinn asked.

“Ask them if they’ve seen Shackelford or his girlfriend.”

Quinn nodded.

“And Quinn?”

He turned.

“Don’t act like a sergeant.”

“Roger that.”

Quinn found people at only two of the six houses where he knocked. One of them remembered the girl—named Latecia—but couldn’t recall ever seeing a white man in the neighborhood. Lillie pretty much found the same thing, only learning that Latecia left more than a year ago to move up to Chicago. One woman, she’d said, recalled a white man but never spoke to him.

They made their way back to the Jeep and climbed inside, Lillie calling back to night dispatch—dispatch being Mae, a portly country woman who’d worked for the county as long as Quinn could remember—to get her to run both names through the state system.

Lillie wheeled the truck around and saw a short black man carrying two armfuls of groceries under the streetlamps. She slowed to a stop but kept the engine running while she got out. Quinn stayed put, seeing her talking to the man but not hearing what she said. Lillie was smiling, and the man laughed, and then he said something to her and pointed back down the road and then again to the south.

Lillie climbed back behind the wheel.

Quinn waited.

“He said he’d seen Latecia last month at the Fast Stop.”

Quinn nodded.

Lillie turned north again, picking up the county road and heading through the slum district of burned-out trailers and houses rotting along the dry gulley that gave the neighborhood its name. During the summer after the rains, the smell of the sewage and garbage became so foul that it gave the air a kind of rotting sweetness.

Lillie punched the cigarette lighter and let down the window an inch.

“You mind if I ask you something?”

“You’re going to ask anyway.”

“Why’d you and Anna Lee break up?”

“We never really did.”

“Come back?”

“When I joined the Army, we made a promise we’d stick together,” he said. “But about six months in, the letters stopped coming, and she wouldn’t return my calls.”

“You didn’t want to know?”

“You can’t make someone love you,” Quinn said, watching the old houses and trailers converge at a corner grocery, with barred windows decorated with beer advertisements. They sold fried chicken and pizza, barbecue on Saturdays.

“I would’ve wanted an answer.”

“Never got one.”

“You want one now?”

“Not really.”

Lillie killed the engine.

“What if I said you were lying?”

“I’d say that’d be your right.”

He got out of the Jeep, Lillie trailing him as he opened the door to the old grocery store and held it for her. Lillie waved and addressed the cashier as Miss Williams, and Miss Williams told Lillie she was real sad to read about her momma in the newspaper.

“You know a woman around here named Latecia?”

“I know four.”

“Last name is Young.”

Miss Williams shook her head and took a seat on a metal stool behind a glass case filled with overcooked chicken and pizza drying out under the heat lamps.

“She’s got a tattoo of a rose on her arm.”

The old woman nodded. “Seen her last week.”

“You know where she stays?”

“I cashed a check for her.”

“Got an address?”

“Sent that check to the bank.”

“You mind calling me if she comes back in?” Lillie asked.

“What’d she do?”

“Nothing. Trying to find her boyfriend, but I’d appreciate you not telling her that.”

Lillie handed her a business card, Miss Williams nodding and placing it on the lip of the cash register. She turned and looked up at Quinn for the first time and smiled, her right front tooth made of gold. “You Jason Colson’s boy.”

He looked at her.

“Your daddy was just plain crazy.”

“How’d you know?”

“You look just like him.”

“And how’d you know him?”

Miss Williams laughed. “Boy, I used to change your diapers.”

Just as they
made it back to the Jericho city limits, Lillie had a call: a horse had escaped its fence and was running down the middle of Highway 9. She dropped Quinn off at the farm and sped off, lights flashing, toward the town Square and away. And Quinn was left there, shaking his head and smiling, deciding to drive back into town to see his mother, maybe stay the night.

Ten minutes later he walked up the driveway on Ithaca Road and spotted two shapes moving by the windows of the little ranch, his mother and some man he’d never met. The thought never occurring to him that she may have been dating, that there could be someone else she’d spent her time with in between taking care of Jason and going to church.

Quinn checked the time. Twenty-one hundred hours.

The man was tall, with a wide, full stomach, and wearing a baseball cap. His mother brought him a plate of pie and he smiled up at her. She took her place across from him, and they sat and ate, not seeming to say a word to each other.

Twenty-one hundred
.

Quinn wondered if the action had started to heat up at the Rebel Truck Stop.

Quinn grabbed
a cup of coffee at the diner and sat behind the wheel of his truck for a while. The coffee was terrible and weak, and reminded him of the chow hall at Benning. He’d learned to appreciate strong coffee out on maneuvers, grounds and all, and wished he had some now. But sometimes coffee is just warm company, especially when it’s cold with the heater off in your truck, and he sat there in a dark corner out by the gas tanks, watching the rows and rows of trucks, parking lights on, but otherwise pretty still.

His cell rang.

“Where are you?” Lillie asked.

He told her.

“Your mother’s worried.”

“Didn’t know I had a curfew.”

“You want me to join you?”

“Nah,” Quinn said. “I don’t think this is worth your time.”

“You looking for Kayla?”

“Yep.”

“Think she knows some more?”

“I do.”

“You want to call me if you get something?”

“You miss me?” Quinn asked.

Lillie hung up.

He spotted Kayla
nearly an hour later, making her way between trucks, hopping up into cabs or craning her head up to windows, smiling and talking, and moving down the line with a few rejections. She had on tight white jeans and that same puffy pink coat and carried a child’s backpack over her shoulder. Quinn followed her, turning down a row of trucks and then losing her, crossing behind an eighteen-wheeler, chugging exhaust in the dark, and then coming up on her.

She was talking to a skinny man in a flannel shirt and ski hat. She handed him some cash and then turned and noticed Quinn. Quinn stood maybe ten yards from her and nodded back. The man looked back to Kayla and then to him.

She started to walk, and the man held her arm, pulling her back, and came toward Quinn.

“Who are you?”

“I want to see Kayla.”

“Why?”

“That’s between me and Kayla.”

“You know this fucker?” he yelled over his shoulder.

Kayla walked up, head down, hands in the pockets of the big pink coat, and said he was okay, that she knew him. The man didn’t stop staring at Quinn, Quinn noting the man was just plain ugly, with a misshapen face and weak chin, acne across his forehead and on his neck.

“You got a problem?” he asked Quinn.

“Ugly doesn’t make tough.”

The man made a move for Quinn, and Quinn punched him in the stomach, knocking him flat on his ass, leaving him gasping for air. Quinn stood over the man, just observing, until he got to his feet and walked away.

“Who’s he?” Quinn asked.

“My boyfriend.”

Quinn didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want no trouble,” she said. “I haven’t even started to work.”

“The girl is dead.”

Kayla shrugged. Her face was white and chapped, dark hair catching a long streak dyed red. The diesel smell was strong, pumping and fuming around them.

“Thought you’d want to know.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“Her real name was Jill Bullard.”

Kayla shrugged again. “Nobody has real names out here. We’re all just kind of passing through until we can get to Memphis or Jackson.”

“Can I buy you something to eat?”

“I got to work.”

“Sure like to know anything about her.”

“I told you. What the fuck.”

“You know where she lived?”

“The point is to be working all night,” she said. “Then you go home. You see?”

“You just carry everything in that backpack?”

“Your girl Jill kept a locker,” she said.

“You know where?”

“What, are you gonna break into it?”

“Sure.”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“I’m not the police.”

“Then what the fuck do you care?”

“Can you show me the locker?”

“You really buy me something to eat?”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“He’s a pussy.”

Quinn grabbed
a tire iron from the Ford and tucked it inside his coat, following Kayla inside the Rebel Truck Stop. The restaurant and shopping mart was still, late on a Sunday night. The cashier, watching a small television, peered up for a moment with his old hooded eyes and then went back to his show as Kayla took Quinn back to the bathrooms and showers, a long row of telephones and video games, pinging away, in the hall. She nodded him over to a bank of lockers and showed him one in the right corner, saying she remembered the locker because it was the same as her lucky number.

“Thirteen?”

“Been lucky for me.”