The Ranger (10 page)

“Do you have any idea where she could have gone?” Lillie asked, her hands held tight in her lap. Quinn shuffled in his seat and put down the coffee, feeling hot in the small room with all its plaques and religious posters, a purple robe hanging on a hook by the door with two umbrellas and a baseball cap.

Bullard shook his head and looked at his hands.

There’d been a time when Caddy had gone down to Panama City with some friends and had disappeared for about eight days. Quinn’s mother about lost her mind, and Quinn had to get a special pass to leave Fort Benning. He and another Ranger who wanted to come along had searched in and out of every shithole along the Miracle Mile until they found her passed out in a daiquiri bar, two boys from the Navy base trying to ease her back to their car.

He and his buddy nearly ended up in jail for whipping the shit out of those sailors. Four months later, Caddy disappeared again.

“She used to call and ask for money,” the preacher said. “I didn’t even know that she’d been in Tibbehah County. I figured she was still in New Orleans.”

“Does your wife know we called?” Lillie asked.

“No.”

“You think she might know something?” Quinn asked.

“She knows less than me,” he said. “The last time I saw her was in New Orleans. I had wired Jill money at a grocery store on Royal Street. I waited till she came and picked it up, and followed her out. She looked just wild, with her clothes and hair. She didn’t seem to know me at first. When she did, she made wild accusations and said very hurtful things. She’s not my daughter. I don’t know who she’s become and would never want my wife to feel what I had felt.”

Quinn stood, feeling like he could not breathe.

“Now we have a name,” Lillie said, still sitting looking up at him. “We’ll try and run her through the system.”

“You understand if I don’t want to be notified,” the preacher said.

Lillie laid down her card and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “If you hear from her, please let us know.”

Quinn shook his hand with speed and left the building, finding some comfort out in the chilled early morning air. He wanted to punch the shit out of something but tried to calm his thoughts with breathing.

They always said that shit worked, and sometimes it did.

Lena had spent
the last three days at a women’s shelter in Jericho, where they fed her three meals a day and gave her a bunk in the basement of the Baptist church among rows of folding chairs, golden choir robes, and two Ping-Pong tables. The fat wife of the preacher had taken particular interest in her, coming down the steps late at night with cake or pudding, high on the glory of the Christmas season, reading tracts of Bible stories from old
Guidepost
magazines and comparing Lena’s plight to that of the Virgin Mother. She told the fat lady she hadn’t been a virgin since she was thirteen, thank you very much, but she did appreciate the pudding. The woman would smile at her and pat her on the head, and for most of the day Lena was free to help out with dishes in the kitchen after prayer breakfasts and fold laundry of the other gals who were there, including a woman in her forties with a busted lip and a black girl about her age who was just about as knocked up and said she wasn’t no virgin, either. On that Sunday afternoon, after a supper of baked chicken and peas and sweet tea, Lena took a walk, promising the local counselor that she only needed some air and would not smoke, drink, or do intentional harm to herself or the baby.

She found herself in downtown Jericho, the sun headed down not long past four. The bare trees and old rusted tower looming over the squat buildings were dark and shadowed, as if they’d been sketched in pencil. With the four dollars left in the quilted coat she’d been given, sewn by the good sisters of the church, she ordered a hamburger and small milk shake at the Sonic Drive-In, sitting at a table up by the kitchen window, while the slots were filled with white boys’ muddy trucks and black boys’ sporty sedans jacked up on high silver rims.

The milk shake was what she needed, and, with less than a dollar left, she asked the waitress for an order of fried pickles. The woman set them down and didn’t even ask to be paid, Lena left somehow thinking that she’d been in a similar spot at one time or another.

Visiting hour was tomorrow, and if Jody, or Charley Booth or whoever he really was, didn’t want to see her again, she guessed she’d hand-crawl her way back to Alabama and ask for some forgiveness from her father, although her daddy had made it pretty damn clear she was not much use to their family as a common whore. She figured maybe she could stay at the church and work, but the ladies had already tried to place her with a program in Jackson that sounded like a place that a girl left without her child.

If she could just have the kid and get back on her feet, she could take care of it. She had a sister in Birmingham who could watch the baby if she could find work. Her momma could help if she could find where she was living, the last place being Tampa, where she’d been working as a dancer. She figured she just needed to settle this thing with the boy since it was him who’d told her that he’d loved her and that she sure made him whole, and all of that had sounded pretty solid over some cold beer and weed, but sober, rattling around her head at the Sonic, it sounded pretty much like horseshit off a greeting card.

She tried to keep the last few pickles, them cooling off fast in the wind, when she saw the black Camaro, the one from the jail the other day, whip into the parking lot and slide right into a slot by an old Ford.

That muscled guy with the shaved head and the stubble mustache and goatee leaned out the window and pressed the red button, calling out what he wanted just as if they didn’t have an intercom and kind of laughing about it to some girl that sat next to him, shadowed in the front seat. The man said he wanted a country-fried steak sandwich, some tater tots, and a large cherry limeade.

“Oh, and a sundae with that cherry toppin’,” he said.

Lena watched him, noticing his large, veiny arm, lined with tattoos, and the way he turned out the window again and dug a lump of dip from his lower lip, flinging it down onto the pavement and turning his black eyes right on her.

She sucked on her milk shake, not backing down for one damn minute. She’d paid for her food and would enjoy it, even longer than she’d expected. She turned away and watched a man in white working the grill, flipping over patties and checking some fries in a grease trap.

Lena placed her hands in her little knitted coat, feeling the wind kicking up over her back.

“I love the look of a woman with child,” a man said. “Y’all got that glow.”

She craned her head.

He smiled at her, wearing a black T-shirt with no sleeves like it wasn’t about forty degrees out, and reached out and grabbed her last two fried pickles and put them on his fat tongue, sliding into the seat in front of her.

“Don’t look at me like that, girl,” he said, scratching the stubble on his chin, his teeth yellowed. “You can forget that Charley Booth. Right now, I may be the best friend you ever had.”

10

Quinn bought a bag of dog food in Bruce and left
out a bowl for Hondo at the farm before picking up his old truck and calling home, letting his mother know that he wouldn’t be able to make that church service. He had to pull the cell away from his ear at her response. “It’s important,” he said. Words were said about the chickenshit casserole and the preacher dropping by and some kind of plaque that had been arranged. She made him promise three times to at least make the lunch and all three times he’d agreed.

“Okay,” she said, finally.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“Love you, Momma.”

He headed east back to the truck stop, finding the lot pretty bare, maybe ten or so trucks chugging out those diesel fumes. The drivers catching some fuel and rest for a couple hours before heading on. The whole scene reminded him a bit of some staging areas in Iraq, when getting supplies down highways had been a major operation and strike teams were sometimes needed to clear the way. You could kind of feel the expectation in that silence.

Quinn walked the ground between the trucks, seeing no one. Even the cabs were empty, with the truckers sleeping or in the diner eating. He walked the rows twice and then walked inside the Rebel Truck Stop, ordering a plate of eggs and hash and black coffee. The truck stop was a massive operation, with an adjoining Western shop where they sold hats, boots, and big belt buckles with horses and bulls on them. You could buy Mexican blankets and bullwhips, and John Wayne movies on DVD for five bucks. Dirty movies for ten.

Quinn paid his tab and walked back out into the cold. The morning light shone hard and bright white across the blacktop.

He walked the rows again. A couple trucks pulled away, leaving only a handful, and it seemed to him that the night’s action had probably picked up and left. Sunday, even for some hard-up truckers, wasn’t the best time to get laid in Mississippi.

About halfway back to his car, he saw her.

At first he thought it was Kayla again. The girl using the pay phone was dressed in a jeans skirt and T-shirt, some black tights the only thing protecting her from the cold. She wore big black oversized glasses, but as he approached he saw it was the girl from the other night that he damn near hit on Highway 9.

She turned to him and then back to the corner of the pay phone, the wall scrawled with keyed crude drawings and biblical passages. He tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned and said, “What?”

He stood there. She hung up, the change rattling down in the return.

She scooped it out quickly.

“How you making out?”

“Fine,” she said, hugging her arms up over her extended belly.

“You look cold,” Quinn said. “Can I buy you something to eat?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m with a friend.”

“Jody?”

She shook her head. “Another friend.”

“You look like you’re getting close,” Quinn said.

She nodded.

“Don’t you think you better put on a jacket?”

“I can round up the money for that motel room,” she said, shifting from leg to leg in the cold wind.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She nodded and turned back to the glass door of the truck stop. Quinn watched her move to a back booth, removing the glasses and showing off a nasty black eye. A waitress put a menu in her hands, the girl folding the glasses and then unfolding them, placing them back on like blinders. Quinn walked back inside and went to her table. He didn’t say anything but leaned down and wrote out Luke Stevens’s cell phone number on the back of a book of matches. Underneath he wrote QUINN and his cell number.

She looked at him and frowned, leaning into an open hand propped on an elbow. She didn’t make a move to pick up the matchbook.

“This doc is a friend of mine,” he said. “You get that baby checked out. I’ll make sure it’s paid for.”

“I don’t know you.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Quinn said. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“Not really.”

“My name and number is written there, too.”

“Why are you doing this? You want somethin’?”

“Don’t be so tough that it makes you stupid.”

“You go to hell.”

Quinn tipped the edge of his baseball cap and left.

He sat in the cab of his truck for a long while, getting a nice view into the diner, the place like the inside of a fish tank. The girl sat alone, drinking a Coke, until a man entered from a side door and took a seat across from her. He was a decent bit older—or looked older—with a shaved head lined with black stubble, the same length as the hairs under his nose and on his chin. He had a lit cigarette in hand and kept his arm around the back of the booth while he made rapid, wild gestures and pointed. The girl just looked down at the tabletop, reaching for some sugar and putting it into her glass, finding some kind of interest in the way it dissolved.

The man wore a sleeveless T-shirt, his arms thick with veins and muscle. Every few minutes he’d reach for his phone, talk for a bit, then slam it down. He kept picking it up, looking at the face of it, and typing on the keys.

He didn’t speak to the woman as he ate, and then he moved for the back door, Quinn cranking the engine and driving slow to the diesel pumps, where he saw the man, short but powerful-looking, approach a dually Chevy with the back window obscured by a large decal of an evil clown’s face.

Quinn kept driving to a decent vantage, no one even looking at his truck, and he killed the engine. The man leaned into the open window of the truck, revealing a .45 tucked into the back of his tight ragged jeans. When he turned back, he was still laughing, walking along with a rotten smile on his face, his breath clouding in the cold, a fat green shamrock tattoo across his neck.

The dually Chevy cranked to life and worked a fast U—turn, passing Quinn.

The driver was a skinny fella who wore a homemade splint of silver duct tape on his left wrist.

Jericho had always
been a lonely town on a Sunday. About the only place open was the truck stop; the Fillin’ Station and all the downtown was closed. There was a new storefront church in the old town movie theater where a hand-painted piece of plywood advertised the services of Brother Davis. Only two movie posters were under the glass; one for a film starting Kirk Cameron about saving your marriage and another showing a large airliner advertising the LAST DAYS OF MAN. Half that parking lot was filled, and with the windows cracked Quinn could hear the singing and electronic-piano music inside. He drove east, knowing he had to be back by one to his mother’s, feeling like he didn’t want to face the farmhouse alone and hear those dull, empty spaces when he talked and shuffled, feeling like the cavern needed to be filled up with something new, pushing out the dead and hollow.

Ribbons and ribbons of country highway opened up under him, splitting off Main and heading up toward the town cemetery, Quinn half thinking he should visit his uncle’s grave but not really wanting to stop, just driving past a volunteer fire station and an old cotton gin that had been closed for years. He passed the old ammunition factory and a transmission-repair shop, and everything kind of ended there, past the original town cemetery, where Civil War soldiers had been buried when Jericho had been a hospital during the war, Quinn recalling all the stories and visits with his uncle while his father was away, chasing another business scheme or shooting a movie.