The Redeemers (31 page)

“We’ve also been looking for a young man named Chase Clanton,” Rusty said. “Police here tell us he’s your nephew.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know why he and Mr. Hazlewood might’ve been talking?” Rusty said, rushing ahead a bit. He needed to let damn Sparks answer where he’d been the other night.

“Figure it must’ve been about the same job.”

“And where can we find your nephew?” Lillie said.

“Shit,” Sparks said. “I don’t know.”

“And do you know where you were on December thirty-first and the morning of January first?”

Sparks snickered, leaned back in the chair, and stretched, giving a big old fake yawn. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Y’all know I could get a lawyer. But I don’t have nothing to hide. I’ll tell you whatever it is you want to know.”

“OK,” Lillie said.

Lillie waited. Thank the Lord, Rusty Wise did not speak while they waited for the fat son of a bitch to fill the silence. Shitbirds couldn’t help but talk in a vacuum. Sparks licked the side of his mouth like he’d left some jelly there, shuffled in his seat, and looked straight at Lillie Virgil. “Darlin’, I was out hunting up some pussy.”

“Is that a fact?” Lillie said. “Where’d you go for that pussy, Mr. Sparks?”

“Down to the Waffle House,” he said. “Picked up a gal.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Sparks said.

“Women can’t resist you?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “We started a-talking and one thing just kind of led to another. One minute she’s pouring the syrup and the next she’s shaking my pecker.”

“And where’d you go for all this fun?”

“Shit, I got a party van,” he said. “We were fucking all night long. Woman couldn’t get enough of me. She tied me up and whipped my ass with a belt. Woman was wild.”

Lillie closed her eyes and dropped her head into her fingers, massaging her forehead. Another bad headache coming on strong. “And what was this lucky lady’s name?”

“Never got no name,” Sparks said. “But she was a rich woman from Birmingham. Drove a big old Cadillac. I knew from the way she putting that syrup on her pancakes that she was ready for some riding. I had some sex jelly in my van and a pair of handcuffs. Hot damn. We was on.”

Lillie just stared at the fat old man the same way you watch animals on a nature show. She wondered how the Good Lord could have fashioned such an all-purpose, nearly perfect human idiot. She waited a little more to hear about that rich woman from Birmingham, but Sparks didn’t finish the story. She just stared at him, knowing this was going absolutely nowhere.

“So y’all just knocked boots and went on your way.”

“Women want it same as men,” Peewee said. “It’s in the science.”

“Rusty, you think you’d be good enough to get me a fresh cup of coffee?” Lillie said. “I think we’re gonna be here for a little while.”

•   •   •

I
brought coffee and cigarettes,” Quinn said.

“What more does a girl need?” Caddy said.

“Y’all got a Starbucks just down the road. You think we’ll ever get a Starbucks in Jericho?”

“That might spoil the authentic atmosphere of the town,” Caddy said. “Next thing you know, we just might be civilized.”

“Two sugars and a lot of cream.”

“Marlboro Lights?”

“Hardpacks,” Quinn said, handing her a carton. “Better than flowers.”

“Momma would be mad,” Caddy said. “But after all the shit I’ve put in my body, that’s like a good helping of vitamins for my system.”

They walked into a courtyard together, today being the first day Quinn had visited the facility. It was a bright and cold morning with some sun and a lot of wind. The courtyard was vacant, with a couple picnic tables and a few tilled-up flower gardens spotted with concrete figurines of Saint Francis, Jesus, a baby deer, and two rabbits. The beds were littered with cigarette butts. There was a lot of trash in the dead grass, where people had been eating and pacing the ground.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m doing?”

“Nope.”

“How I’ve been? What do the doctors say? Have I kicked the shit and saved my soul?”

“How about we just sit down?” Quinn said, sitting at the picnic table and lifting the lid off his coffee. He smiled across the way at Caddy, his sister looking better but still very pale and washed-out, the color of her hair like dishwater, and some scabbed-over sores still spotting her neck and face. Didn’t take her two seconds to tear into the pack and light a cigarette.

“Momma and Jason came by yesterday,” she said. “First time I’ve seen my son in more than two months. How about you get one of those coffee mugs for me? ‘Mother of the Year.’”

“He was glad to see you,” Quinn said. “He loves you. He doesn’t care where you’ve been.”

“Maybe not now,” Caddy said. “But soon he’ll have thoughts about me. Hear things about how his mother is a fucking crack whore.”

Quinn reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing. The wind shot across the table and shook the bare trees and bushes, blowing some loose trash along the sidewalks. He drank some coffee and let Caddy smoke, as the first thing she’d said was to complain about having to bum cigarettes off a meth head who only cared for American Spirits.

“Daddy wanted to come with me today,” Quinn said. “But, shit. I don’t know.”

“You have more of a problem with him than I do.”

“He left us,” Quinn said. “And bad things happened. We spent a lot of time a couple years back pulling out that stuff and examining it with that doctor in Memphis. I figured that shit is still a part of what’s going on and, if we’re going to face it, it’s going to be me and you. No one else knows what happened.”

“Who’s alive.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” Quinn said.

“Can we not talk about it,” Caddy said. “My mind feels like a tangled web. I don’t want to walk that path into the Big Woods again. There’s so much I don’t really remember. You helped me remember and it helped facing it. But that door is closed again and I’d just as soon keep it closed until I can breathe a little. Is that all right?”

Quinn nodded, reaching across the table and squeezing her hand again. Caddy smiled at him, her mouth small and chapped. She let out a long breath and shook her head. “You’re wearing the same coat.”

Quinn watched her.

“I don’t recall much,” she said. “But I remember that coat. Uncle Hamp carried me out. I can still smell that ole tobacco suede. He was a big man, wasn’t he?”

“I know you don’t want to till it up,” Quinn said. “But I have a lot of friends who are like you. You realize you walked into a war zone when you were a kid. It eats at you and you’ll do anything to quiet your mind. I just don’t want you to think it makes you weak. God damn, Caddy, do you know how many friends I have from the Regiment who are sick right now? Sometimes you get out intact, but sometimes you bring back the disease with you. It takes a lot of time. And a lot of help.”

“I thought I was beyond it,” Caddy said. “But I lost something.”

“Dixon?”

Caddy looked him dead in the eye, blowing out smoke. “A fucking purpose.”

•   •   •

W
ell,” Rusty Wise said, sitting in the passenger seat of Lillie’s Jeep. “That was a gosh-dang waste of time.”

“Rusty?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You do realize it’s going to be tough as hell to be sheriff and remain such a nice, clean-mouth fella.”

“I do.”

“That the job might turn you, make you a little nastier, a little meaner, and that one morning you might just wake up yelling, ‘God damn, son of a bitch’? ”

“Could happen.”

“There is hope,” Lillie said, taking Highway 45 north, back up to the Jericho exit, passing Rebel Truck Stop billboards every half mile.
BEST CHICKEN-FRIED STEAK
IN MISSISSIPPI.
NATIVE
AMERICAN GIFTS. LINGERIE AND MORE.

“Did you get anything out of that?” Rusty said. “That man couldn’t stop lying. Every word that came out of his mouth.”

“Oh, you didn’t buy that he was a massive poon hound and that women just couldn’t wait to jump into his rolling party van?”

“Just like that,” Rusty said. “Man says he walked into a Waffle House and walks out with some rich gal who just want to get it on with him.”

“The man isn’t exactly George Clooney.”

“He’s not even George Gobel,” Rusty said, staring at the road ahead, fiddling with the zippers on his new jacket. “And, Good Lord. The smell of him. I don’t think he’s seen a bar of soap in ages. Dirty fingernails and hands. I couldn’t stand another minute in that room with him.”

“He liked you,” Lillie said. “Told you to call him the next time he was in Gordo, that y’all could grab some beers.”

“The next time I see that man, I want to be leading him into the courthouse.”

“He did the job,” Lillie said.

“Of course he did.”

“But he wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it.”

“And neither will Mickey Walls and neither will Kyle Hazlewood, wherever he’s gone to. Why didn’t we arrest Kyle, like you said? If we had him, we could have applied some good pressure, got a search warrant before he cleaned up his house and shop.”

“Live and learn, skipper,” Lillie said. “No telling where those turds took that safe to bust it open. No prints on the backhoe or in the Cobb house. They probably cleaned the shit out of Kyle’s shop before we finally got to it.”

“How many calls between them?”

“Two dozen calls between Sparks, Kyle, and Mickey, and that kid Chase Clanton.”

“The chief in Gordo said that the boy had some kind of learning disability,” Rusty said. “Said his daddy was some kind of hood, serving a twenty-year stretch for manslaughter.”

“Good people,” Lillie said. “Just good ole country people.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” Lillie said.

“Did this job change you? Being around so many liars and thieves? Killers and such?”

Lillie shook her head, letting down her side window and getting some fresh air into the Jeep. “Not really. I’ve always recognized the human circus and all the wonderful creeps you meet on the way to Oz.”

“Even as a kid?”

“Yes, sir.”

A sign read twenty-eight miles to Jericho, just before another Rebel Truck Stop billboard with a big-titted woman pressing a finger to her lips.
PSST,
SEE YOU AT THE
BOOBY TRAP.
The next billboard reading
WHAT ARE YOUR EYES FIXED UPON? LET US FIX OUR EYES UPON JESUS!

“Jesus, titties, and guns,” Lillie said. “How I love north Mississippi.”

“Are other places that different?”

“You need to get out more, Rusty,” Lillie said. “See the world.”

Five miles to the Jericho exit, her cell phone rang. She picked it up and talked to Ike McCaslin for a good two minutes, then set the phone down on the console and stole a quick glance at Rusty Wise. She found a good place to slow down, a worn path in the median, to run down in a gulley and then turn back onto the southbound highway, heading down to Highway 82.

“What is it?”

“We ran those numbers for Hazlewood, Sparks, and Clanton,” she said. “Not only were they talking but all of them were pinging off the same cell tower.”

Rusty didn’t say anything, holding on to the passenger door, as Lillie bucked up onto the road and mashed the accelerator. “There’s only one tower near Cobb’s place and all three were bouncing off it.”

“Shit,” Rusty said.

Lillie smiled. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Let’s go snatch up that fat bastard’s ass and bring him back to Jericho.”

“And call back Ike,” Rusty said. “Tell him to get an arrest warrant for Hazlewood and Mickey Walls. Walls is a part of all this now.”

28.

Y
ou know I’ve been here for damn-near eighteen hours?” Chase Clanton said. “I did everything a man can do at a fucking Flying J truck stop. I ate dinner and breakfast at Denny’s, played twenty dollars’ worth of quarters in that arcade, Pac-Man and Deer Hunter, done some laundry and took a hot shower.”

“Good for you,” Uncle Peewee said. The two, sitting side by side back at the Denny’s, facing Daniel Payne Road, not but a few hundred feet from Interstate 65 outside Birmingham.

“Middle of all that, I was asked to leave the Denny’s for complaining about the food, nearly got run over by a Kenworth, and got propositioned twice by two ole truckers who thought I had a mouth like a little girl. What kind of hellhole is this place?”

“It’s a truck stop,” Uncle Peewee said, chawing down on a Denny’s hamburger. “Watch your wallet and your cornhole. These folks live on the hard side of the highway.”

“Where we headed now?”

“Don’t know,” Peewee said. “But the police in Gordo have a warrant out for you and for me. When they pulled me in, I thought they were going to toss me in a cell. Instead, some big dyke deputy and dumb-ass sheriff played Twenty Questions about my whereabouts on New Year’s Eve.”

“You tell him?”

“Hell, no,” Peewee said, reaching for a French fry. “Shit, man. You think your grandmomma raised her some retard? I told them a story that they can’t prove or disprove. But it got them thinking about them being wrong. That maybe I wadn’t in fucking Jericho, Mississippi, but in the back of my party van getting my knob shined.”

“What?”

“Fucking,” Peewee said. “I told them I met a woman and we were fucking.”

Chase sucked on his chocolate milk shake, swiping the cherry and biting it off the stem. He imagined Uncle Peewee riding some young
Playboy
model in the back of the van, the whole thing shaking up and down, about to bust the shocks. In his mind, he could see his uncle’s hairy back and bald spot, fat ass pumping that woman. The girl would be startled and gasping for air, moaning with pleasure. And Chase started to laugh, nearly choking on that cherry.

“What?” Peewee asked.

“Thought of you getting it on.”

“What’s so goddamn funny about that?” Peewee said. “You know how much sex that van has seen? I thought about marking ’em off on the fender, like a fighter pilot with kills.”