The Forsaken (17 page)

Ringold was just a shadow on the ridge over the tattooed freak’s shoulder. Stagg just now caught the glimmer of a rifle scope from above. Money well spent.

“Might be true,” Stagg said. “Might be true now.”

“We didn’t come for trouble,” the man said. “We came to eat country chow and see some big ole titties. If they ain’t dancing now, you better go wake them up and say you got company. Shake ’em hard and long.”

“We don’t open the Trap till four.”

“The Booby Trap,” the man said. “That’s clever as hell. You think of that all by yourself, Mr. Stagg?”

“I sure did,” Stagg said. “And it’s made me a rich man.”

“But you didn’t get really rich until about twenty years ago,” the man said. “I was there. I remember. You just don’t remember me, do you?”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Animal.”

“Your momma name you that?”

“It’s what you’ll call me from now on,” the man said. “And, sir, we’ll be regulars here for a while. Just getting things ready.”

“I’ve been expecting y’all,” Stagg said. “As long as you tend to your manners, there won’t be no trouble. Buy your gas, buy a plate lunch. Y’all can go in like normal folks to the Booby Trap when we open. But, son, just don’t try and get tough with me. I got myself a real weak stomach and the indigestion.”

“You know that hell is coming,” Animal said. “Right?”

“I’ve gotten his letters from Brushy Mountain,” Stagg said.

“This is our county now,” he said. “Understood?”

“Is that so?” Stagg said. “Hmm.”

“Goddamn right.”

“OK,” Stagg said. “But I sure would be careful about gloating too much on your big ole fucking hog. There’s a high-velocity rifle aimed right at your head, boy. Have you ever seen what one of them things can do to a watermelon? When it explodes, it makes a hell of a goddamn mess.”

The man, Animal, kind of laughed. But when he turned to look over his shoulder, his face turned a few more funny colors. He didn’t say jack as he walked back to his men and their rows of shiny chrome Harleys.

Stagg flipped a peppermint into his mouth, crunching it with his back teeth.

D
iane noticed the old truck following her not two seconds after leaving the Jericho Farm & Ranch. Not that a beat-up white Chevy was strange, but it was clear to her the driver had been waiting. He’d been parked on the gravel, westbound on Cotton Road, and after she drove east, he made a U-turn and kept on her truck real close. She’d promised that these bastards wouldn’t spook her any. She’d decided just to pretend they weren’t even there unless they got too close and she’d call the sheriff to get them off her ass. She headed on to the town square, following up and around, and then spit out the other side of Cotton Road, toward Highway 45, following it past where the old Hollywood Video had been and the Dollar Store, coming up into the lot of the Piggly Wiggly. The storm had torn the ever-living shit out of the Pig, the metal roof of the store sucked into the tornado and most of the goods either taken or given away.

But now, it looked like the same old Pig that had been there since the late sixties. Diane parked in the lot, saw the white Chevy roll past her, up and around the lot, and park back toward the Shell station.

Diane would not let the bastards scare her or change her routine. She wanted to pick up some beef cuts, potatoes, and vegetables for a stew. If
someone wanted to make something of it, she had a fully loaded .38 Taurus in her handbag.

Despite all the repairs to the roof and the foundation, not much had changed inside the Pig. They had the same old registers, the same manager’s box perched above the gumball machines, and a little café where they served fried chicken and biscuits. Diane started off in the produce, getting some red potatoes, carrots, onions, and some celery. She wished they had a good bakery in town, tired of all this crummy, tasteless white stuff they kept. She’d never made bread herself, but maybe she needed to learn.

Diane looked over her shoulder, not seeing anyone or anything, and kept on heading over to dairy. She loaded a jug of milk and butter into her cart. The speakers above her were as new as the ceiling, but the manager still played the same music, that soft elevator stuff of not-so-recent hits, an instrumental of Kenny and Dolly’s “Islands in the Stream.”

The butcher shop was along the far back wall and she searched through the plastic-wrapped packages for something cheap, but not too tough, that she could leave simmering in a Crock-Pot. A woman at her church once told her you could leave an old shoe in a Crock-Pot and make it soft. But that wasn’t altogether true. The meat was the base for everything and you might as well spend a little extra.

“Y’all having steaks tonight?” said a man behind her.

She turned to see a short, odd, crummy little guy in thin Liberty overalls wearing a trucker hat. He was somewhere in his seventies and had a nose that looked like a rhubarb.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “do I know you?”

“E. J. Royce,” the man said, smiling.

“Mr. Royce,” she said. “I apologize.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “It’s been a while. I switched over the Co-op on account of it being closer to my house.”

“So I see,” she said. Royce had on a Tibbehah County Co-op trucker’s cap.

“How your boys?”

“Moved away.”

“How old are they?”

Diane told him, and she placed the package of stew meat in her cart and started to turn away. “Good seeing you.”

“And your momma?”

“Not well,” she said. “She has Alzheimer’s.”

Royce edged his cart gently in front of Diane’s, cutting her off, the old man smiling, face chapped and worn. His flannel shirt so thin, it didn’t look like it could stand another washing. “Listen,” he said, “Miss Tull.”

Diane stared at the man. The music above them playing more instrumentals, “Always On My Mind” sounding as syrupy-sweet as possible. She backed away the cart but studied the old man’s face and the eager look in his faded blue eyes. “Did you just follow me?”

“Me?” he said. “No, ma’am. I just came in here to get me some of them Hungry-Man dinners. I swear to you, you don’t need to cook nothing. They make a hell of roast beef and potatoes. But their chicken and gravy is just like something your grandmomma might make.”

“Do you drive an old beat-up Chevy truck?”

“Ma’am,” Royce said, “I don’t want to take much of your time. I just seen you in here and thought to myself, ‘Yep, that’s Diane Tull.’ I was just talking about you the other day with some old buddies. You know, I used to be in law enforcement. I proudly retired after twenty-five years of commitment to this county.”

“What do you want?”

Royce removed his hat, showing he didn’t have hair except on the sides, and scratched his bald head. He didn’t have anything in his cart. She moved back her cart another few inches, wanting to get away but at the
same time curious about why Royce was following her. A bearded young man on a motorcycle. And now this old coot. Maybe she just attracted the crazy folks like those bugs to her porch light.

He slid the hat back on his head, leaned his forearms on the cart’s basket, and looked in either direction. “I hear you gotten curious about some things might have happened after y’all had all that trouble.”

Diane Tull looked at Royce right in his cataracted eyes. “What of it.”

“Don’t blame you,” he said. “You may not recall, but me and Sheriff Beckett were the first ones who got to you, after you walked a spell out on Jericho Road. That trucker seen you all bloody and called it in on his CB.”

“I remember.”

Royce nodded, all serious. “God help y’all for what you girls went through.”

“I just came here to make some stew,” she said. “I don’t need anyone laying their hands on me in the meat aisle. I don’t think Jesus makes visits to the Piggly Wiggly.”

“I just think you need to be more appreciative to those who took care of your troubles.”

“Come again?”

“You don’t need to embarrass the folks who looked out for you and Miss Stillwell when y’all needed them,” he said. “You weren’t in no shape to be put through a trial. Things got done that needed to be done.”

“I can’t believe it,” Diane said. “I can’t fucking believe it. You’ve followed me into town to tell me to shut my mouth about y’all hanging an innocent man.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Royce said. “You were nearly dead when they found you, bled-out.”

“I saw the man who did it,” she said. “I saw him six weeks after y’all hung that poor man from the big oak.”

Royce nodded, backing his cart away, showing a path for Diane to
follow if she wished. He thumbed at his nose and said, “I think you’re misremembering some things. I think you need to know what was done was in y’all’s best interest.”

“Says who?” Diane said. “I never asked for any of that.”

A fat man on a scooter zipped down the aisle past them, cart loaded down with cookies, white bread, Little Debbie snack pies, and two liters of Diet Dr Pepper. “Good seeing you, ma’am,” Royce said, raising his voice a little, nodding.

“You need to stay away from me.”

“I’m just the messenger, ma’am,” he said. “Some fine folks did the right thing. Don’t go dragging names through the mud. Thank the Lord we had people in this county had the sand.”

Royce rolled the cart away, heading down the cereal aisle to the tune of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”

•   •   •

“You want
a beer?”
Lillie asked.

“Yep.”

“Aren’t you still on duty?” she said, walking into her kitchen.

Quinn loosed his tie and yanked it off his neck, tossing it onto a chair. “Kenny and Dave Cullison are on patrol,” he said. “They’ll call if they need us.”

“You want a Coors or a Bud?”

“Long as it’s cold,” Quinn said.

He sat in a chair in Lillie’s living room, her daughter Rose, now almost two, watching him with suspicion from a big overstuffed sofa. The little girl turned her head to
Dora the Explorer
, a personal favorite since the little girl found some kind of kinship with the character. They were both brown-skinned girls with brown hair and brown eyes who spoke Spanish. Lille had rescued her from a filthy trailer in north Mississippi in a
human-trafficking case and later adopted her as an infant. It had been important to Lillie the girl learned her native language, along with some choice English expressions that were pure Lillie.

Lillie handed him a beer and sat down next to Rose. Lillie had a beer, too, and took a swig. It was nearly 1700. Quinn had to be at the county supervisors’ meeting in an hour to present the monthly crime stats and the budget for the New Year. He would’ve been more excited about a visit to a proctologist.

“When I came home, after my mom got sick, I told myself I’d never stay,” she said. “I had friends and a life in Memphis. This was a job and temporary. But then Sheriff Beckett died and you came home. And now there’s Rose.”

“Lots of ungrateful people.”

“I should have had Sonny Stevens cataloging everything in my home,” she said. “We should have tagged everything in the house so they couldn’t pull that shit.”

On TV, Dora had just befriended a magical talking llama. The llama was apparently also friends with a Spanish-speaking flute.

“They would’ve found another way,” Quinn said. “They would’ve searched the SO’s office and thrown it down there. They had the gun and would have made it work.”

Lillie put her hands over Rose’s ears. “So these goddamn shitbags,” she said, “are working with and knew that sniper.”

“Yep.”

“That sniper not only shot back at me, he was trying to punch your lights out, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said. “He continued to shoot after I got Caddy and Jason in the truck. He was there to tie up loose ends.”

“I hate this,” Lillie said. “But they sure got us beat.”

Lillie took her hands off Rose’s ears. Rose was so intent on the cartoon
that she’d barely noticed they’d been talking. The evil Swiper, a bandito fox, lurked in some bushes, waiting for Dora, the magical llama, the flute, and Dora’s monkey.

“How’d you like to attend the county supervisors’ meeting with me?”

“That’s tonight?”

Quinn nodded. He drank some more beer. “Maybe if I keep on drinking for the next hour, I can show up drunk. And they can fire me.”

“They’re going to try and do that anyway.”

“They’re going to try and embarrass me tonight,” Quinn said. “You, too.”

“They may wait for the charges to come.”

“No,” Quinn said. “It’s tonight. Boom heard a couple those sonsabitches conspiring at the County Barn. They have a quorum to ask me to step down until the investigation of us is completed.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Nope,” Quinn said. “But this is the official launch of the mudslinging.”

Lillie tipped back her beer. Her home was a small cottage with beaded-board walls and clean, spare rooms. She had a lot of antiques from her mother, lots of old photos of people who’d lived in Jericho a long time before Quinn and Lillie. Men with big mustaches and boiled shirts and women in thick, ruffled, uncomfortable-looking clothes and tall lace-up boots. On a side table was a framed picture of Lillie and some woman Quinn had never met, dressed-up and seated in some nice restaurant.

“They’re hoping you’ll turn,” Lillie said. “That’s what the talk of manslaughter is about. They want to get me for killing Leonard’s stooge, Burney, and probably try and make that convict my accessory.”

“That’s something,” Quinn said.

“How so?”

“That they are so goddamn stupid, they think I’d sell you out,” Quinn said. “I can’t imagine what they’re hoping to accomplish. What’s their objective here? Just to get us both gone?”

“That seems like a done deal.”

Lillie leaned back into the sofa and reached for a throw to cover Rose’s small body and bare feet. The girl was bright-eyed and beautiful. As she grew, her Indian features became more pronounced. The large black eyes, the nose and high cheekbones. She’d been a miracle for Lillie, even with the tantrums and the night terrors and the screaming that came out of nowhere and grew more intense. Sometimes, Lillie said, she seemed completely detached, trapped inside her own head. They had seen specialists from Jackson to Memphis, everyone realizing whatever abuse and trauma the girl had experienced, even as an infant, wasn’t done with her.

But now, in front of the television, cuddled with Lille and watching
Dora
, she was happy.

“I got to go,” Quinn said, rising.

Lillie looked up at him, her eyes meeting his, and said, “Give ’em hell.”