The Ranger (34 page)

“Shit,” Lillie said. “Your friend?”

Quinn took the field glasses Lillie passed to him and watched the girl arguing with that boy Ditto and some skinny little white boy with jug ears.

“Yep.”

“Shit,” Lillie said.

“This complicates things,” Quinn said.

“I can take out Gowrie,” Boom said. “What do you say, Lillie? Shit.”

“What?” she asked.

“Son of a bitch moved.”

Quinn handed her the field glasses and nodded.

“What do you say, Ranger?”

“I can clear that room in under twenty seconds.”

“What about your girl and baby?”

“I can work around them unless they make a break.”

“Let’s go,”
Gowrie said.

He had his sweating forearm around her neck, Lena trying to breathe and hold Joy at the same time. The baby was screaming and Gowrie was yelling, making her move faster than her legs could work. She wanted him just to ease up a little, let her catch a breath before they broke out, because if she couldn’t breathe she’d drop the child.

He kicked open the gas-station door and walked her out onto the pavement, pointing the gun to her head and then back at the long row of policemen and cruisers. Lena had just a single moment of clarity then, looking at all those red and blue lights, all those guns aimed at Gowrie, and kind of took comfort that this wasn’t something being done at Hell Creek but in plain view of so many people.

If she or her baby died, someone would at least know about it.

He tightened the grip around her neck, his mouth hot and wet in her ear. “Get in the fucking car.”

He let off her neck and opened the passenger seat to the old muscle car. She tried to get inside, hold that baby close, but not fast enough for Gowrie, who kicked her in the ass and sent her toppling over, nearly crushing her child. She screamed at him and then just started screaming at all of it—at Charley for all he’d done and then Ditto for bringing them back here and then herself for the goddamn mess she’d caused. She’d thought she could grab Ditto, make Charley Booth see that some men were a hell of a lot smarter and stronger.

But Gowrie just ate her up.

She was in the car now, the .22 tucked into the blanket with Joy.

The keys were in the ignition as Gowrie tried to crawl over her.

She started the car with a free hand, baby in her right arm, and slipped her foot onto the pedal, knocking the car into first gear. The car lurched forward in a rush before she hit the brake, and Gowrie smacked his head against the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass, as Lena took a shaky aim at his chest with that ole peashooter and fired three times.

Her baby screamed. Gowrie fell out of the open door and rolled onto the grease-stained asphalt and ran for his boys.

She took her foot from the accelerator, slowing at a pile of creosote crossties, trying to stop that war-cry scream. Her baby screaming and crying.

Two cops looked into the window and tapped on the glass. The engine revved, but she wasn’t going nowhere. She tried to calm Joy, that .22 still frozen in her fingers.

She looked at herself in the rearview mirror, the red eyes, and tears causing some confusion. She climbed out, tossed the gun in the dirt, and saw Gowrie surrounded by his shitty daddy, Charley Booth, and two more boys.

Ditto wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Quinn Colson, two old men, and that big black man with one arm walked onto the grounds of the station. That woman deputy stood with them, aiming a rifle at Gowrie and his boys. Gowrie, bleeding in ragged spurts onto his T-shirt, seemed to think this whole mess was funny.

His gun was out.

All of ’em had guns out.

What followed
lasted only thirty seconds but would often take hours to debate.

No one ever said who fired first, but it was thought the first shot came from the town water tower, no one being able to say—officially—who was up that high.

Gowrie was knocked back, covered in so much blood it was hard to tell where he’d been hit, and his daddy whipped his pistol up before being shot twice through the throat. He fell to the ground, crawling for his El Camino and making it only to the door handle before he died.

Charley Booth made a run for it, turning once to fire his revolver at the cops and getting two rounds of 16-gauge shot through him, opening up his chest like two solid fists. He bled out within a minute.

The other two boys, names later released before they headed to Parchman, dropped their guns and put up their hands. A large black man with one arm knocked them to the ground, holding them underfoot.

Lillie Virgil was down, shot in the calf. Judge Blanton was flat on his back on the cracked asphalt, blood around his head like a halo.

Gowrie crawled back into the gas station and slammed the glass door shut behind him, breathing like a caught fish. The clerk had made a run for it, leaving the back door wide open, the wide expanse of a muddy field showing in a clear frame.

Gowrie saw the shadow of a man enter and then disappear like a wraith.

“Hey, soldier,”
Gowrie said, yelling, spitting blood. “Come on down and we can hammer this shit out. I didn’t kill your uncle. You hear me? I didn’t kill him.”

Quinn wanted to ask him about Wesley Ruth and Johnny Stagg and those men from Memphis but instead just hobbled around the aisles of the darkened convenience store, holding a fully loaded M1, hearing Gowrie breathing and cussing. His mouth giving him up as Quinn passed by a NASCAR display for Pepsi and bags of potato chips and pork rinds.

Quinn wanted to kill him.

He’d figured on killing him.

Quinn eyed Gowrie in the wide picture of the shoplifting mirror. Gowrie was on his ass with a pistol, holding his bloody stomach and spitting blood. The floor was slick with all that blood where he’d been crawling on his belly.

“How you doin’?” Quinn asked, limping slow.

“Peachy, soldier.”

“You know, you remind me of a fella I once met in the Kandahar Province,” Quinn said. “You ever hear of that place?”

“I ain’t stupid.”

“He ambushed me just as I was about to get on a helicopter,” Quinn said. “Tried to slit my throat.”

Gowrie didn’t say anything.

Quinn wavered from the pain and gritted his teeth as he crept down the aisle, realizing he was dragging his back leg. “Even after I shot him and cuffed his hands, he kept asking me to kill him. Why do you figure?”

Gowrie was silent, and then said: “You gonna shoot or teach me a goddamn parable?”

Quinn could turn on the next aisle and aim straight down the row with that old M1. Gowrie was already immobilized and sitting pretty. He could take the shot so damn easily.

Quinn stepped back, feeling as if a knife had sliced his hamstring and ass while he retraced his steps back down the aisle. The shot would’ve been so easy and quick.

“Do something,” Gowrie yelled.

Quinn looked up at the round mirror at Gowrie, eyes closing and opening, spitting blood, and trying to keep from passing out. Quinn shook his head and limped forward.

With his good arm, Quinn pushed over the candy-and-gum display, the old metal cage crashing on top of Gowrie. Gowrie kicked and flailed to get loose and rush Quinn.

Quinn staggered over to him, swinging the butt of that ancient rifle at Gowrie’s head, the shitbag’s pistol clattering to the floor. He punched Gowrie in his throat and bloodied chest. Quinn clenched his jaw in a mess of pain that almost brought him to his knees. He dropped on top of Gowrie, grinding his knee into the spot he’d stuck with an arrow not long ago. “You want it bad, don’t you?”

“What the fuck? Goddamn.”

“You want to be somebody.”

Gowrie’s mouth rushed with air, eyes watering. The smell of him was something tremendously sharp and rotting as Quinn held him down flat to the floor. Lawmen filled the room, Lillie limping behind them.

“You’ll be sorry you didn’t pull the trigger,” Gowrie said, whispering with a bloody smile. “You think those boys are the best I got? I’m coming back to kill you.”

“Counting on it.”

Lillie helped Quinn to his feet as two deputies wrestled Gowrie from the floor. When he was gone, only a slick trail of blood left, she turned to him. “The judge is dead.”

Quinn nodded. He picked up the old man’s gun and walked out into the daylight, the Dixie Gas sign reminding him of a flag.

36

Lena took a job at a barbecue house between
Tupelo and Birmingham, a little choke-and-puke perched on the side of a sloping green hill, everything coming on green in the early spring, where they paid her a decent wage and she could afford to keep a trailer, saving up for a little car, maybe heading on sometime. But the people who owned the restaurant were good people, let her cut out early to get Joy from the Little Angels day care. Lena spent most nights in front of a small television, where she’d rock and feed Joy, place her feet up on a busted coffee table and just rest. She hadn’t thought about Ditto for some time, it being nearly four months since Charley Booth had been killed in Jericho. But in the second week of March, a day when it was raining a shit storm outside, and truckers came in soaking wet and shaking like dogs, he touched the back of her sleeve and just smiled.

She’d missed that pig-faced boy.

She got a break thirty minutes later, her clothes smelling of hickory wood, and hands dry and cracked from washing dishes. The storm had moved on, and she found him sitting on the hood of a brand-new Dodge truck beaded with rain and wearing a pair of rattlesnake boots and holding a black cowboy hat in his hand. She’d never figured Ditto for the cowboy type, but it was an image. The pig-faced boy came to impress her, and he kissed her on the cheek, his own cheek flushing a bright red.

“I got money,” he said. “I took a job up in Memphis.”

She nodded.

“You weren’t easy to find.”

“I didn’t know you were looking.”

“I wasn’t sure who was looking for me.”

“You didn’t do nothin’.”

“I’m not innocent, neither,” Ditto said, fingering the brim of the cowboy hat in his hand. “How’s Joy?”

“Good,” she said, squinting into the sunlight behind his back. “Why’d you come here, Ditto?”

He slid off the hood of the truck and took her hand. “I’d like to look out for y’all. Come on with me?”

The air was choked with all that hickory smoke, burning off hazy and slow in the golden light. The green hills rose and broke with wet green trees and grasses growing knee-high. Eighteen-wheelers zoomed past them, scattering the smoke and peaceful views.

She smiled at the boy. “I appreciate what you did.”

He nodded. “But you won’t come?”

“How’d you get all that money?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he said. “But some ole buddies of mine sure have set me up.”

She touched his face and kissed his thin lips. The boy had poured nearly a quart of aftershave over himself. “What happened to Gowrie?”

“Parchman Farm.”

“He get the chair?”

“He killed a lawman,” Ditto said. “’Spec so.”

The boy looked sad and clumsy, fumbling in the pocket of a new snap-button shirt for some cigarettes and lighting them with shaking fingers. But he smiled anyway, trying to look loose and cool on the hood of that brand-new Dodge.

“You won’t come?” he asked.

Lena shook her head. She smiled at him.

“I was glad to know you.”

“You ever hear what happened to that soldier that got Gowrie?” Ditto asked. “I wanted to apologize for thieving his ole truck and stealing them guns.”

“He get ’em back?” she asked.

“Don’t know.”

“That old Ford wasn’t worth much.”

Ditto finished the cigarette and stomped it out in the gravel, walking around the side of the new Dodge and pulling out a big pink gorilla. The ape was so large it was bulky to carry, at nearly half the boy’s size. “You are still calling her Joy?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the sun coming out behind the clouds.

“I sure am,” Lena said, checking her watch, scooting off the truck. “I got to go. I’ll let her know you brung this.”

For all Quinn’s complaints
about becoming a Ranger instructor, riding the damn desk was a hundred times worse. As a platoon sergeant, there were always forms and paperwork and details to keep track of. But sitting in front of a computer all day, working on other folks’ shit, was a little slice of hell. He’d crack his office window at Benning with a brick and could smell the Chattahoochee River from where he sat, wanting so much to get on his boots and hike far into the Cole Range till he dropped from exhaustion. But he still walked with a limp, and the doctors there in Columbus said he might always keep it.

The sling was off, and he was able to head to the range and shoot. He taught weapons classes to the kids coming in, and they’d ask him about that limp, hearing that Quinn had been at Haditha and made several trips into Afghanistan.

He’d tell them he fell off a bicycle and leave it at that.

The only good thing about riding the desk was that most your weekends were free. And he’d found Columbus, Georgia, to be a pleasant old town. They had a big wide boulevard along the Chattahoochee, with brick storefronts that reminded him of movies from the thirties and forties.

He often met other older Rangers at bars there, leaving the topless joints and roughneck spots on Victory Drive for the younger men. They’d drink beer and raise a little hell.

Sometime in early March, Quinn got a phone call at his apartment on base, and he drove through the gates at Fort Benning into the downtown. He dressed in civilian clothes, starched khakis and a pressed blue button-down. His hair had been barbered the day before, and he had even pulled out a pair of brown cowboy boots his mother had sent him for Christmas, the card coming from her and Jason.

Jason back with her now.

Quinn walked into Ruth Ann’s, a favorite diner of the men at Benning. Ruth Ann’s had been there for decades on Veterans Parkway, about the only place in town that could serve a breakfast as good as Jean Colson’s.