The Redeemers (6 page)

“No, sir.”

“I thought she did,” Jason said, thinking on it. “When we cooked out steaks on your birthday?”

“It was a knife,” Quinn said. “She’s very good with knives. It stuck straight in the kitchen wall.”

“Good God,” Jason said. “What’d you do to piss her off?”

“The worst thing I could.”

“What’s that?”

“Told her the truth,” Quinn said. “We weren’t ever getting married. She wasn’t the one.”

“Did she know about this other gal?”

“Nope,” he said. “That happened later. And before her, too, I guess. But it had been coming on for a long while.”

“I know the woman you’re talking about,” Jason said, grinning. “Y’all have been trying to sneak around. But neither of you are too good at it. Damn, she’s a fine-looking woman.”

Quinn nodded. He walked to the sink and filled up a coffeepot with water and spooned in some grounds in the percolator.

“But careful,” Jason Colson said. “She looks like the kind of woman who’d tear a man’s heart into shreds.”

5.

I
f he was real honest with himself, and didn’t let Jesus or his kin get in the way, Chase Clanton had to say the most important thing in his whole damn rotten life was University of Alabama football. He’d been a Tide fan since he was born, his momma making sure of it, never really knowing how his daddy stood on lots of things: family, politics, religion, or important matters like knowing whether he pulled for Auburn or Alabama. One of the first memories Chase ever had was watching the great Gene Stallings, that old rawboned Texan, roaming the sidelines to beat the hell out of Michigan in the Outback Bowl. His Uncle Peewee always said he was full of shit, as Chase was only two years old. But Chase remembers it clear as yesterday, as that was the last big team before those lean years, before they brought in the second coming of Bear Bryant—Nick Saban—to again take their place as the football machine they’d been back during the glory days.

Uncle Peewee was a Tide fan, too. He even had a red Ford Econoline van customized with special seats covered in houndstooth check and a mural airbrushed on the side of a shirtless AJ McCarron, and Nick Saban, and a smiling Jesus Christ, and, in the background, Coach Bryant riding an elephant to victory, with the stats to back it up.
323 Wins. Six National Titles.
Uncle Peewee sure loved that van, although they were taking his other one tonight, the one just like it, only it was black and had the VIN number scratched off the door. The plates were stolen, and everything they needed was inside a black duffel bag—the drills, hammers, and assorted picks—just in case they had to bail. Since his daddy took off and his momma had gotten fat and hooked up to the oxygen, Uncle Peewee had looked out for Chase.

Not only had they tailgated together at Bryant-Denny sixteen times but he’d become Chase’s own private junior college, teaching him things, ways of life, that his daddy couldn’t or never knew.

“You stick in the van,” Peewee said, hunched over the wheel. “You hear anything on that police scanner or someone coming down the road, you call me on that walkie-talkie. But don’t say shit ’cause someone might be listening in. You never know who might be tuned to our channel. You just do the way we talked about it. You remember?”

“Yes, sir,” Chase said. “I think someone is comin’ and I say ‘Roll Tide.’”

“That’s right, boy. That’s right.”

Uncle Peewee was a fat man, wasn’t any getting around that, with fat arms and fat legs and a midsection big as a whiskey barrel. He wore big gold-framed glasses and had wild hair that he never combed, making him seem like a cartoon owl. Didn’t help that he also ate a lot of pork plates from the Ole Kountry Kabin out on Highway 17. He liked to smoke extra-long Pall Malls, and on Friday nights he’d sometimes smoke a few joints with Chase, telling him stories about running with the Dixie Mafia, back when they meant something, and even more stories about all the women he’d laid. If he were to take Uncle Peewee’s word as gospel, then he figured Uncle Peewee must’ve screwed over a thousand women in his life. When Chase called him on it over the summer, Uncle Peewee just nodded his head, said that was probably true, and figured he still had time for a thousand more.

“You don’t have to worry too much,” Peewee said, hitting a hard pothole in the highway, jarring their asses up and down. “I been watching this house last two nights. Nobody’s checking their mail, and they got them lights on a timer. No dogs. Only an alarm that hooks up to the telephone line. I can cut the line before I break in the back door.”

“What if there’s nothing worth stealing?” Chase said.

“I been doing this twice as long as you been alive,” Peewee said, staring down that line in the middle of the highway from behind thick glasses. “I ain’t never been in a house that didn’t have something worth stealing.”

“How much you want to get tonight?”

“I can go back to taking her easy for a while if I get a couple thousand,” Peewee said. “That of course is minus your cut. Way I figure, that two thousand will give me just enough to fuel up my van and head down to New Orleans for an ole-fashioned pussy party.”

“You sure like the ladies.”

“No, sir,” Uncle Peewee said. “I love the ladies. Gonna buy me an extra-large box of condoms at Sam’s Club, a big ole bottle of butter spray, and a pair of handcuffs. I ain’t coming back to Gordo till the money runs out.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the Sugar Bowl.”

“If this house is like I think, I’ll get us four tickets on the fifty-yard line.”

“Four?”

“Two for you and me,” Uncle Peewee said. “And two for them strippers we gonna meet.”

“You and your strippers.”

“I respect strippers,” Uncle Peewee said, staring straight ahead, looking for the exit they’d be taking inside the Birmingham city limits. “They respect my money and I respect their titties. What I call a fair and truthful arrangement.”

On his right hand, Peewee had three large gold rings. One of them with the initials PWS for “Peewee Sparks,” Peewee being the youngest member of the infamous Sparks brothers, three of them in prison and one of them dead. Chase’s momma was the baby, a lot younger than Peewee. She told Chase she didn’t start dating till she was sixteen on account of everyone in Gordo was afraid of her family. When Chase’s dad got her pregnant after some Bible retreat in Panama City Beach, Uncle Peewee gave him the option of getting married at seventeen or getting his pecker sawed off with a pocketknife. Chase took some comfort knowing his daddy wasn’t as stupid as some folks said.

“You think you’ll let me come with you the next time?” Chase said. “I don’t like just sitting in the car. Makes my ass hurt.”

“You can come with me when you can bust a safe. Took me nearly ten years before I got good enough.”

“How’d you learn?”

“Same as you,” Peewee said. “I tagged along with this ole fella from up in Corinth, Mississippi, who’d run with Towhead White. Before that, he’d learned the trade direct from the master, a real mean redheaded motherfucker named Head Revel, in Phenix City. This going back some years—a long time back.”

“Momma doesn’t know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, she knows.”

“She says she doesn’t,” Chase said. “I think she just likes me going to your house so I ain’t sitting around playing Call of Duty all day. She says I’m stealing the TV, keeping her from watching her stories. You know how much she loves
Days of Our Lives
.”

“You see that sign up there?”

“What sign?”

“That sign coming up on the right,” he said. “My glasses are dirty.”

“Mountain Brook.”

“That’s it,” Peewee said. “Always like to hit a house with two Mercedes in the garage.”

“Why don’t we steal the cars?”

“Been there, done that,” Peewee said. “Ain’t no decent chop shops in west Alabama no more. We cross over into Mississippi and then they get us on federal. Ain’t worth the risk. I’m no car man. I’m a safe man.”

Chase smiled as the black van turned onto a gentle curve and then wrapped back under the highway bridge. They passed through a little downtown full of jewelry stores, fancy-ass clothes stores, and restaurants, all looking like pictures he’d seen of Germany. Uncle Peewee reached for his pack of cigarettes and lighter. As he got one going, he tossed Chase a folded-up piece of yellow paper with directions and an address on it. “All right, tell me where I’m turning next.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Remember what I said about the walkie-talkie.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t forget what I said about the snatch down in NOLA, neither,” Uncle Peewee said, cracking a window and driving low and slow. “Ain’t nothing like it nowhere.”

In the console by his cigarettes and Bic lighter, his cell phone buzzed and shook, vibrating the loose change and bottle caps around it. Peewee picked it up for a minute and then turned it off. Chase didn’t see a name, just a location.
JERICHO, MS
. Wherever the hell that happened to be.

•   •   •

I
f you think I’m hanging around for this shit show,” Lillie said, “you’re wrong as hell.”

“So you’ve told me,” Quinn said, looking up as he loaded more boxes, making sure the office was cleared by tomorrow. He didn’t have much—mainly, some books, some personal photographs, and a dozen or so weapons. “It’s not a bad deal. Rusty wants to keep you on as assistant sheriff at more pay than you’re getting now.”

“Well, I’m not working for that moron,” Lillie said. “He’s got no business being in law enforcement. That son of a bitch just tried to sell me a life insurance policy this spring at the Fillin’ Station. Did you see his ad on those fucking billboards on Highway 45? With his kids, wife, and goddamn dog?”

“Unfortunately, most of this county doesn’t agree with you,” Quinn said. “I appreciate your loyalty, but you need to think about your family. You’ve got a mortgage and a daughter. Saying ‘Fuck it’ isn’t as easy as it used to be.”

“Rusty said he’d hire you on, too?”

“He did,” Quinn said. “But I think he was just being polite. I can find other work.”

“In Jericho?” Lillie said. “I hear they’re looking for greeters at the new Walmart. You can wear one of those
PROUD VETERAN
hats with American flag pins. Folks can salute you as they’re leaving with their big-screen TVs and buckets of beef jerky.”

“Overseas work,” Quinn said. “An old friend from the Regiment does some consulting back in the AFG. I’ve been in touch.”

“But you won’t go back to the Army?”

“I haven’t ruled it out,” Quinn said, reaching for a stack of books on his desk. The
Nick Adams
Stories
, the
Legends of King Arthur
,
Greek Myths
, and a field guide to tracking animals. “I’d have to go back through selection. But I could return to Fort Benning and instruct.”

“I thought you hated the idea of being an instructor,” Lillie said. “When I came to find you at Fort Benning, you said you’d rather—”

Quinn held up his hand. “Things have changed from what we discussed. I’m getting older. I got to go back to what I know best.”

“Shooting people?”

“Something like that,” Quinn said. “Rangers do other things, too. We do a shit ton of push-ups, sit-ups, and run all day long.”

“Thank God, you didn’t shoot those bastards this morning,” Lillie said. “We’d still be filling out paperwork.”

“Is that all that would bother you?”

Lillie nodded, moving closer to the desk. She was back in uniform, slick
SHERIFF’S OFFICE
coat, dark green ball cap with a star logo, and shitkicker boots. “How’s Caddy?”

“Resting.”

“What’d Luke say?”

“He said if you hadn’t found her, she’d be dead,” Quinn said. “I appreciate you pulling in those favors.”

“She’s my friend, too,” Lillie said. “A royally fucked-up friend is still a friend. Is she with your momma?”

“No, my dad’s watching her,” Quinn said. “Momma’s coming over tonight.”

“And little Jason?”

“Keeping him far away,” Quinn said. “We’re working on getting her into a good place in Tupelo. But she says she won’t go. She alternates saying she’s fine and saying she doesn’t deserve to live. She’s a goddamn mess, Lillie. I don’t know what to do. I want to just force her into the detox, but I think she’ll try and escape.”

“I’d do what Luke says,” Lillie said. “He’s smart. Maybe the smartest guy I know. I’d trust him.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Y’all get into it?”

Quinn shrugged. He walked over to a far wall and pulled a framed flag that his friend Colonel George Reynolds had presented him. The flag had flown at Camp Spann in Afghanistan, where Quinn’s platoon had operated for a few weeks. There had been a lot of patrols. A Ranger private from Tennessee had gotten his leg blown off and there was a hell of a fight to get him back to the camp before he bled to death. The flag had been flown to honor Quinn for his integrity and commitment.

“What’s your dad saying about this whole mess?” Lillie asked.

“Not much,” Quinn said. “We ate bacon and eggs, and he told me about a three-way he’d had with some hippie women up in the Hollywood Hills.”

“Jason Colson,” Lillie said. “A real charmer.”

Quinn taped up the box. He set it beside four others by the door. The door was one of those old-fashioned ones with a frosted-glass pane at the top reading
QUINN COLSON, SHERIFF
. Before that, he’d had to scrape the name of his dead uncle off the same glass. Now it would go to Rusty Wise, and things just kind of marched on like that. You come back home, shoot it out with some skinheads in the woods, run off a bunch of Mexican gunners, chase down some escaped convicts, see the town through a tornado, solve a couple horrific old murders, run off a biker gang, and the voters send you packing anyway.

Three pink slips had been set on his desk by the new dispatcher, a black woman named Cleotha who’d been in Quinn’s high school class. All the slips read “Anna Lee Stevens.” Quinn looked up at Lillie to see if she’d noticed. “Don’t quit until you’ve found a new job,” Quinn said. “Promise me that.”