The Redeemers (41 page)

“You plan on running into a combat situation out here?” she asked. “You can shoot an elephant at maybe a thousand yards.”

“I didn’t care to come out in nature with my pants down.”

“But you could make a shot that far?” Lillie said, walking side by side with Caddy Colson. “On a clear day, good light, and the right wind, you could make that shot.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You better believe it.”

“Especially if you set up shop real high,” Lillie said. “Looking down into a valley. Maybe an old airstrip where some good ole boys had gathered for a little fun.”

Caddy cut her eyes to Lillie but kept walking, mouth hanging open.

“Man took a hell of a shot like that a couple years back,” Lillie said. “After the twister. Could never find him. Some folks even pinned the mess on me and Quinn. Saying I’d been the one up in the hills with a fifty-cal, making that shot. You do know I was a member of the Ole Miss Rifle Team?”

The man didn’t answer, turn to look, or acknowledge Lillie in any way. He just kept on following a deer path through the high weeds to that old barn. The weeds were bunched tight in the ice, boots crunching over the brown, lifeless grass.

“Figured you wouldn’t,” Lillie said. “You don’t look like a fan of higher education.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” the Trooper said. “And drop your weapon. You raise that peashooter at me and I’ll blow a hole through your chest the size of a softball.”

Caddy had turned white. Her shoulders shaking like a little girl from a long way back. “It’s fine,” Lillie said. “It’s fine.”

“Drop the goddamn gun.”

Lillie dropped the rifle, put her arm around Caddy, and kept on moving through the weeds and briars, the scraggly pine trees. About halfway across the meadow to the barn, Lillie could smell smoke.

Someone had a fire going in that warped old structure.

•   •   •

Q
uinn lifted his head as the three of them entered the mouth of the barn. Two women and a man. They walked closer and he knew it was Caddy and Lillie. There was a hard-looking man with a gray crew cut holding a big-ass rifle, not pointing it at them but walking with it. The man raised the gun with both hands as Caddy ran toward Quinn. She was crying as she fell to her knees and touched her forehead to his. His sister hugged him close, sending a shock of pain through the bad arm, but he almost didn’t mind. The heat, the feeling, was coming back into his body.

She held him closer and touched his face, telling him he had blood all over him. And he shook his head, saying he’d been shot but was fine. Quinn lifted his head at the man with the crew cut. “Who are you?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Your men are dead,” Quinn said. His voice sounded hoarse and very far away.

“I know it.”

“I killed them.”

“Makes us about even, then,” the man said.

Lillie tossed her chin at the man. “This turd killed Rusty Wise and Jamey Dixon.”

Caddy’s eyes shot up to the man with the gun. Quinn reached for her hand under the cover of the blanket, touching her warm fingers and squeezing her hand. The fire had kicked up a little in the wind, sending more little sparks into the barn. Ringold had busted up some old barn wood and set it beside Quinn before he left. There was plenty of heat in the cold barn. The big twin doors had fallen off long ago, leaving nothing but a big square hole showing the dark gray light of the end of the day.

“The woman’s talking crazy,” the man said.

“That’s the same type gun seeded in my house,” Lillie said. “Dumb shit’s not smart enough to at least get another model.”

“Women shouldn’t be the law,” the man said. “Got more emotions than sense.”

“Did you kill a man named Jamey Dixon?” Caddy said. “Did you?”

“Sister, I ain’t never heard of no man named Jamey Dixon. Sounds like some country singer outta Nashville.”

“Oh, yes, sir, you sure did,” Lillie said. “And I’m going to nail your old withered ass for it.”

Quinn touched his sister’s fingers and passed his Beretta into her hands, letting the weight of it fall to her. “He was a good man,” she said. “He helped a lot of people.”

•   •   •

I
never thought I’d come back to this place,” Caddy said. Lillie watched her eyes, Caddy talking as if she and Quinn were the only two in the barn. “I feel like I can’t breathe in here. I knew you’d come here, Quinn. I knew it.”

“Who else knows?” the Trooper said.

“You and me walked that whole way,” Caddy said. “That man pushing us on with his gun and the rope. Remember how he threw away your rifle? What happened to that gun?”

Quinn shook his head. He looked skeletal, little blood in his face or much life in his eyes. His back rose and fell with each breath. There was a lot of tin leaning against a far wall. Feed signs and scraps of roofing. Some leather tack had been nailed to the wall and petrified. The wooden walls had separated, leaving a good three or four inches between them, soft white light crossing paths.

“He told me you were going to jail,” Caddy said. “Can you believe that? He said he was going to take a ten-year-old boy to jail. For what? Killing some deer? Why did it bother him so much? What was it that just ate at the man?”

“I cut his tires,” Quinn said, mumbling. He grinned with the memory.

“Who else knows where y’all are at?” the Trooper said.

“I can smell his breath,” Caddy said. “Even now. I can smell that rancid, horrible shit in my face. And that beard nuzzling my little neck, the weight on top of me. I couldn’t breathe. He was so fat and, god damn, it hurt so much. Thank you, Quinn. Thank you for what you did.”

Somewhere far off, Lillie heard a helicopter. The Trooper heard it, too, the
putt-putt-putt
sounds of the rotors growing closer, night coming on fast out the mouth of the barn. “I came to help y’all,” the Trooper said. “I’m a goddamn hero. Has everyone lost their mind?”

“At first, he couldn’t do it,” Caddy said. “He groaned and growled. Like an animal. Pissed as hell. He spit on his hand and worked on it as he pinned me down. I just knew I was going to die. I felt like my insides would split apart.”

“Come on,” the Trooper said. “Get up. Get up. I don’t give two shits about this mess.”

“Why would a grown man do that?” she said. “What kind of horror turned him into walking evil?”

Caddy stayed at Quinn’s side, arm wrapping around her older brother, Quinn’s shivering, almost in a palsy, under the blanket. Through the fire and smoke, he looked up to Lillie and then with dead eyes over to the Trooper. He nodded slow and with purpose to Caddy. Caddy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I don’t pray anymore,” she said. “I think I’ve forgotten how.”

“I didn’t kill nobody,” the Trooper said. “I didn’t rape nobody. Come on. Let’s go. I’ll make sure Colson is tended to. He’s in rough shape.”

“He loved me,” Caddy said. “God damn you. He gave me purpose.”

“Who the hell you talking about?” the Trooper asked.

“His name was Jamey Dixon,” Caddy said. “He had a real light about him.”

Lillie saw the movement under the blanket, Quinn’s resigned look at the Trooper. The Trooper recognized it and brought up that big, heavy fifty-cal. But not in time for little Caddy Colson.

Little Caddy fired twice. Only one hit him.

But it was enough. He fell hard into the fire, smothering it under his body.

•   •   •

C
hase liked the car. A Hummer was one hell of a ride—black leather, sunroof, satellite radio, and heated seats. Never in his life had he driven such a vehicle. Uncle Peewee’s van was something special, like some kind of mythical beast, but this was riding in style. A man could get drunk just on the smell of that leather. Chase checked the fuel, nearly full, and turned on the radio, finding some sports talk radio on the ESPN channel. With all that money and all that fuel, he might not even have to stop until Texas. Maybe Mickey was right. Maybe Mexico was the place for him.

Or maybe the man was talking out his ass ’cause he knew that Chase was about to drop the hammer. He tried to keep the boy off guard, see his reaction, see how the money situation worked out. He would’ve hated to kill the man and find out he’d been left with a few hundred bucks and some torn-up newspaper.

But deep in that shithole, Chase had found his future. Sure would be a sweet ride to the west. He wouldn’t miss Gordo, Alabama. Not one bit. He had cut the money, shook Mickey’s hand, and then called the play, dropping his ass right then and there. Perfect call.

“There’s no way Alabama can finish next year in the top ten. It was a hell of a run, but Saban’s done lost his edge. Maybe he can do the same at some other school. I think it’s time he moved on.”

“Next caller?”

“Well, if he’s gonna try and make things right, Saban needs to fire his special teams coach. That joker cost us the game against Ole Miss.”

When he hit the Louisiana line, Chase had damn near had enough of all this crap talk. He’d gone through two different shows over the last few hours. This time some shit-for-brains was running down Alabama’s recruiting and, hell, it wasn’t even close to signing day. Chase picked up a burner phone he’d taken off some black guy in New Orleans and called the number for the station. After two tries and another half hour, they finally patched him through, night rolling along on Interstate 10 to the Big Easy and on toward Houston.

“That train’s gonna roll in T-town, you peckerhead,” Chase said. “A bad ’Bama can kick the shit out of most everyone else. So before we all start crying in our cornflakes, how about we look to the future? And I don’t want none of this Saban can’t adjust to no hurry-up spread horseshit. You take what comes at you in this world and turn it around in the second half. I seen it happen time and again. That’s what makes a man a goddamn winner.”

37.

I
t only took one year and nearly three months before Caddy asked, “How come you got all the credit for shooting the son of a bitch?”

“Did you really want to be dragged into that mess?” Quinn asked. “Jesus, Caddy. You have a record. You’re still back and forth in rehab. How’s that going to look?”

They were standing side by side on the fence railing, watching the newborn cows and a couple new horses Jason had just bought without telling Quinn. “I’ve been clean and sober now for ten months, thank you, sir,” Caddy said. “Being an addict doesn’t make me a weak person or a bad person. It’s just who I am and what I’ve got.”

“But it would have confused the issue,” Quinn said. “A bad man got killed. Nobody needed to muddy that water.”

It was spring again. Quinn had been gone for six months, back over to Afghanistan for a good-paying job—protection, and some training of local fighters. He might go back or he might stay in Tibbehah. He hadn’t really decided. There was a special election coming up in May, the second one in six years, and he’d been asked to run. Lillie was acting sheriff, but she didn’t want to run—she didn’t think she’d win. She said she talked too plain and honest to make friends. Right now, Quinn was just watching the cows in the pasture. Some new calves, jumping around and nuzzling at their mothers. The trees were green again, blackberries and honeysuckle had started to grow wild at the edge of the woods.

Quinn smoked a La Gloria Cubana from a box that had been sent to his home. He still didn’t know Ringold’s real name. Nor had it been divulged during the inquest that followed the deaths of four known hoods and a corrupt captain with the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

“Maybe if I had been involved, it might have shed more light on Jamey’s murder,” Caddy said.

“That Trooper’s dead,” Quinn said. “He never wanted Jamey Dixon to talk, like he didn’t want me or Rusty to talk about what we knew. The way of Mississippi. Corruption is all good unless someone shines a light on it. Then they scatter like fucking rats. Dixon was a good man and I’m sorry, Caddy. I don’t know if I ever told you how sincerely sorry I am for your loss.”

“Quinn?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A couple calves walked, cautious and slow, to the fence line, confused by the people watching them. They were pure white but splattered with mud, big eyes curious. Their ears twitched with the unfamiliar sounds.

“I wish you’d stay.”

“A lot of shit has happened,” he said. “I got a lot to think about.”

The things Quinn noticed most after being back were the colors: all the bright greens and the deep brown of the soil. Not the dull brown-beige of rocks and sandy earth. Home smelled different, rich with growing grass and ripe cow manure. There was no more fertile place than north Mississippi in the spring.

“So that’s the plan?” Caddy said. “Just sit on the front porch in a rocking chair, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey? Maybe something will come to you from some old Lefty Frizzell record. And, right then and there, you’ll know.”

“Maybe so.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” Caddy said. “I take this shit one day at a time. I do believe in a Higher Power and I hand that smoldering crap of problems over to him every morning. I know what I can take on and I send on the rest.”

“Next time you talk to Jesus, ask him about the election,” Quinn said. “I’d like to know my chances.”

“You bet I will,” Caddy said. “Have you talked to Anna Lee?”

“No,” Quinn said. “Haven’t been home that long.”

“You been home long enough,” Caddy said. “Y’all left it pretty rough last time.”

“She wants me but doesn’t know what to do with me.”

“Hard to leave alone,” Caddy said. “You want to leave it, know you should, but you just can’t.”

Quinn turned to look at his sister’s face. Small and delicate under short blonde hair. Little scars along her jawline and on her thin arms and wrists. “How’d you know that?”

Caddy smiled and patted his arm. “Addiction is a hell of a thing, brother.”

•   •   •

T
he letters had come even while he’d been gone, stamped from the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama. Quinn had gotten fifteen of them from “Johnny T. Stagg,” with his inmate number and new address far away from the Rebel Truck Stop. The truck stop shut down a year ago, with plywood over the windows and shopping bags over the pumps. Stagg wanted Quinn to come see him. He said they needed to talk person-to-person. Man-to-man. The phrasing of it depended on the letter.