The Broken Places (13 page)

“Come on, baby,” Jamey said.

“I trust you,” she said. “Always have. But don’t bring my son into whatever kind of deal this is.”

“Ain’t no deal,” Jamey said, sliding into his playful country twang he could put on or take off.

He wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled his chin over her shoulder as she turned. “Those boys were just trying to scare you,” he said. “I find them, I’ll give them a talking-to.”

“I don’t want Jason to ever be scared. I don’t want them nowhere around us.”

“Like I said, those men were with me in Parchman,” he said. “They heard about my church and see I’m doing well and they want a piece of it. It’s that simple. I offered them a place to stay, a way to work for food. But that’s not how they see the world. They believe that I and everybody else owes them something.”

Caddy studied the reflection of the two of them together at the sink in the little picture window. She smiled despite herself. “Don’t get hurt.”

“I won’t.”

“Or go all redneck on me.”

“I can be persuasive.”

“I can call Quinn,” she said.

“And him learn about a couple convicts hanging out by The River?” Jamey said. “I’d rather for that not to happen.”

She turned and faced him, both his hands wrapping her. “I do love that hymn y’all were singing,” Caddy said.

“Uncle Van did say he can do a killer ‘Heard It in a Love Song.’”

“How would that sound in church?” she said.

“Not too bad,” he said. “Hell, why not? Who made up all these traditions, anyway? It sure didn’t happen in Jesus’ time. My Jesus would dig Marshall Tucker more than some slick contemporary.”

“And Uncle Van, too?”

“Especially Uncle Van.”

The house shuddered a bit from the wind and rain, bringing a strange safe comfort to her. She placed the pork chops in a bowl to thaw and heated the skillet, while the songs in the parlor started again. Everything would be just fine. She was almost sure of it.

“What the hell I don’t understand is how this son of a bitch knew about this dang armored car if he wadn’t in on the job,” Dickie Green said.

Esau eyed him, tossed his cigarette butt, and took a breath. “I told him.”

The men stood down in a valley about four miles from the hunt lodge. Dickie had found an outbuilding for a construction company with a big-ass back bulldozer and a trailer that would hitch up fine on the Toyota. He wasn’t sure if the Toyota could haul it, but Dickie said it’d be plenty of power either way. Power enough in the Tundra and power enough in the CAT to pull out the damned Wells Fargo car. Bones and Becky were going to meet them at the pond with some chains.

“That doesn’t make a fucking bit of sense to me,” Dickie said, swilling a Coors, stifling a belch. “I mean, shit. You and Bones were the ones who robbed this thing.”

“Yep.”

“And y’all executed a perfect fucking job,” Dickie said. “Y’all didn’t get caught for it and for them other jobs, but got nailed for what?”

“Robbing a Best Buy.”

“How’d you get caught for it?” Dickie said, tossing the bottle over his shoulder in a big mess of pea gravel. The bottle shattered. Didn’t matter, there wasn’t jack around this place for miles.

“I forgot to get Becky’s little sister an iPod and ran back in.”

“You shitting me?”

“Nope,” Esau said. “She liked listening to that Britney Spears.”

“Man, that pussy will trip you up.”

“I’d appreciate you not talking about my woman like that in my presence.”

“I apologize,” Dickie said. “But you got to admit it’s kind of funny.”

The outbuilding and the gravel pits were situated at the dead center of the small valley. Up and around the bowl dotted with big oaks and old-growth pine, lightning flashes zipped up and around, only the tops of the trees bucking kind of nervous. The thunder was sparse but powerful.

“So, why’d you do it?” Dickie said. He’d taken to wearing clothes he’d found inside the lodge. He had on camo pants and a black-and-red flannel worn open with the sleeves cut off, his small, tattooed belly hanging out the front.

“Do what?”

“Tell Dixon about where to find the money?”

“He was supposed to get it when he got out,” Esau said. “He was from here. Knew people. And he got to keep a third of it and use the rest to get me and Bones a good lawyer.”

“What’d he say about that?” Dickie said. “When y’all found him and probably made him shit his drawers.”

“He said he didn’t want to have nothing to do with it,” Esau said. “He said that plan was over when he got pardoned. Said our plan only meant something if he’d gotten out five years from now like we’d talked about.”

“Were y’all like queer lovers or something?”

Esau knocked Dickie to the ground with the back of his hand. Dickie cackling, laughing, and bleeding just the same on the ground. “Well, good goddamn. I was just funnin’ with you. Hell.”

“Me and him had a deal.”

“I seen one boy in my pod who’d take it in any hole for a dollar,” Dickie said. “He wasn’t queer. He just was addicted to eating candy bars and sweet things. He’d sure do anything for one of them Butterfingers.”

Dickie laughed and wiped the blood off his lip.

The thunder came again, the tops of the trees moving. The sun had set, but the sky was even more of a full black now, almost like smoke blocking out the sun. It was like nothing else existed outside that little valley, making the world hell if he was stuck with Dickie Green for the rest of eternity.

“What on God’s green earth could someone like Jamey Dixon do for you?” Dickie said. “I don’t recall him doing shit but talking to us a few times about Jesus and the apostles. He always looked like one of them Nashville fags to me. Like Keith Urban or another one of them boys who don’t know shit about being country but got to tell you all about how they is.”

“What if I said he saved my life?”

“I’d say that sounds like bullshit.”

“He gave me work.”

“How?”

“He had pull with the guards.”

“Shit,” Dickie said. “Hey, can I have a smoke?”

Esau gave him one fresh from the pack. Dickie fired it up.

“Gave my life some purpose,” Esau said. “I was wasting away on that bunk. I walk from bed to chow to sitting there watching that fifteen-inch television set, trying to know whether to be a Gangster Disciple or Crip. Time is hell. I hate the smell. I washed in vinegar last night, and Becky says it’s still on me.”

“Funny, before I got to jail, I thought those gangs were just for the blacks.”

“There was one guard, dull-eyed and dumber than a fucking stick,” Esau said. “He’d work me out in those fields. Didn’t matter if it was legal or not, he did it for sport. Cotton. Corn. He’d run and run me. Keep me in close at Unit 37 before they closed it. One night I figure it got up to a hundred and forty degrees.”

“And so John the Baptist got you another ticket?” Dickie said.

“Something like that.”

“That how you come to work at the canteen and in the restaurant for families?”

“Yep.”

“So you got all the bubble gum and Fritos you could stand?”

“He gave me purpose,” Esau said. “You know anything about that? That guard wanted to kill me for sport. I just wouldn’t die.”

“So why not leave it all for the preacher?” Dickie said. “He did that much.”

“’Cause we had a deal,” Esau said. “Plain as anything. We even shook on it.”

“You know what they call a handshake in prison?”

Esau watched the dark clouds cross the rim of the valley to the west. A splattering of a fast rain on leaves, even harder, maybe hail.

“Second base.”

Dickie laughed at that, showing his bad blackened teeth, flannel shirt blowing about him like a damn cape. “Ah, hell. Get a sense of humor.”

“You get that dozer up on that trailer,” he said. “We ain’t got much time till that shitstorm gets here. And I’d just as soon not work in the mud.”

“Where we live, brother,” Dickie said and hopped up in the cabin of the CAT with a screwdriver and a set of needle-nose pliers.

•   •   •

Quinn was awake at 1630
and pulled on some PT gear and hit the fire roads and deer trails on the ridge by his farm. The trails zigzagged for nearly five miles up through scrub pines and an old dead pond where he used to play as a kid. Hondo jogged at his side, Hondo being the lucky one not carrying a rucksack loaded down with fifty pounds of sand on his back. Quinn had done his best to keep his body sharp since leaving the Regiment; softness of body led to softness of mind. And as an old sergeant had said to him, it’s easier to maintain than get it back. He didn’t use weights, mainly sticking to what he knew. Push-ups, pull-ups, and flutter kicks. He had hung a heavy bag from an old oak tree in his side yard to practice some Muay Thai he’d learned from a Bangkok-born RI.

He finished up the run on the heavy bag, took a shower, and within fifteen minutes was back at the sheriff’s office, a pot of coffee brewing at Mary Alice’s desk.

“You must bleed Colombian,” Lillie said.

“Probably.”

“Regret taking the night?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t want to call you out to the Rebel,” Lillie said. “But you said any business with Johnny Stagg was worth a call.”

“And now it’s a homicide.”

“Lovely.”

“I’m supposed to meet with Ophelia Bundren in twenty minutes over at the funeral home,” Quinn said. “Want to join me?”

“Wow. You really mean it?”

“I’d feel better if you came along,” Quinn said.

“Look less like a date?”

“Being that funeral homes are such romantic places,” Quinn said.

“Maybe they are to Ophelia Bundren,” Lillie said, reaching for the pot and pouring a cup. Lillie smiled and handed the cup to Quinn, who walked back to his office. “OK. OK. What’s she got now?”

“Says she’s got a witness to her sister’s killing,” Quinn said, turning at the door. “May be worth it to get on record.”

“How many ways can you explain it doesn’t matter anymore?”

“Just in case we need it.”

“You worried about Caddy?”

“Are you coming or not?”

Lillie stood there and stared.

“Sometimes I think you’re confused who is in charge here,” Quinn said, with a slight grin.

Lillie saluted and headed back to her office. “Roger that, Sergeant.”

They sat together in a room reserved for grieving families, with plenty of Biblical verses in gold frames, fake flowers, and neat folded tracts on grief. Ophelia, her mother, and brother tight-knit in folding chairs with Quinn and Lillie. A young skinny man in one of those Ed Hardy shirts—this one with a skull with flaming eyes wearing a top hat—joined them. He had scruffy facial hair and wore his ball cap cocked at an angle. Quinn used restraint to not remove the hat from his head or at least straighten it in the proper direction.

The man’s name was Dustin. He was twenty-eight, with three kids, and unemployed. Within two seconds, he blamed his problems on the president of the United States.

Lillie took a deep breath.

“So you saw Miss Adelaide that night?” Quinn said.

“Uh-huh.”

No
yes, sir
. No
yes
. Just kind of a grunt.

Dustin scratched his chin. Ophelia and her brother and mother waited. Her mother was portly and dressed in black, lots of thick makeup and dyed black hair. Ophelia’s brother was just a kid, still in high school, wearing his Tibbehah Wildcats letterman’s jacket. Quinn had heard he was set to play quarterback in the fall. He must’ve been about nine or ten when his sister died.

“What did you see?” Lillie said.

“I saw Jamey Dixon,” Dustin said, eyes flicking to the face of Ophelia and her mother and then back down at his hands. “I saw him run out after her. They were cussing at each other. She was running from him. Screaming.”

“And what else?”

“That was it,” Dustin said. “I was trying to get to work. People had jobs back then.”

“Where’d you work?” Quinn said.

“Ammunition factory, before it moved to China.”

Quinn nodded. “You tell anyone?”

“I didn’t know who it was,” he said. “She had blood on her face. Screaming and shit.”

“And you didn’t stop?” Quinn asked.