Anna Lee was asleep, naked except for a pair of white socks, in Quinn’s bed. He’d awoken when Hondo nosed open the bedroom door, letting in the hall light, and then sat there on his haunches, studying Quinn. Quinn, getting the idea, standing to find his Levi’s and a clean white tee from a pile of twisted clothes. From the window, he watched Hondo make his rounds in the cold rain, taking careful aim on each tree as if it wouldn’t all be washed away come morning.
Quinn took an aspirin, drank water from the tap, and let the dog back in the door.
He shut Hondo out of the room and sat on the edge of the bed, covering up Anna Lee’s bare shoulder. She stirred a bit, both of them falling asleep after a lot of clothes-tearing and moving from living room to kitchen to bedroom. His neck felt raw and bruised where Anna Lee had kissed him and then bit some. She’d gripped his wrists. She’d clawed at his back. The last few months had been tough, keeping apart. Tonight, all the cruel and hard stuff just broke free.
“Hi,” she said, turning over on her back, staring at him.
He handed her the glass of water as she pushed up on her elbows, the sheet and the quilt covering a single breast, and drank a few sips. Anna Lee asked for more and Quinn returned to the kitchen and then back to the bedroom. An outdoor light shone on the side porch, letting in a soft white glow through the gauzy curtains. In the fireplace, the logs had burned down to a nice, even orange, the metal box radiating heat.
She set the glass on a side table and reached back with both hands to pull her hair back behind her ears. The sheet fallen away now, showing off her good shoulders and long arms, modesty not a factor. Anna Lee never being a shy girl who covered up. She’d always been proud of her strong body.
“Come back to bed,” she said.
“Can you stay?” Quinn said. She’d never been able to stay. When they’d been teenagers, there’d been curfews. And, now, her daughter and a whole lot more responsibility.
“Mom knows I’m out all night.”
“She knows where you are?”
Anna Lee nodded. Quinn moved in closer and rubbed her bare back and shoulders. She had sun freckles down her arms and across her chest. “How’d she feel about it?”
“Didn’t say a word,” Anna Lee said. “I swear to God.”
“She never liked me much.”
“Are we talking high school now?” she said. “When you stole the city fire truck or that time you flipped your truck mudding? You might’ve been the worst boy in the whole damn school.”
“I wasn’t the worst,” Quinn said. “The worst boy in Tibbehah was Junior Lindsey. That dumb son of a bitch broke into the First Baptist Church and stole two television sets, a VCR, and a microwave. He held a damn party at his trailer so we could all watch Under Siege 2. He was smoking dope, doing karate, and telling us how he could whip Steven Seagal’s ass anytime, anyplace.”
“I’m not talking truly bad,” she said. “I’m talking shit that makes a mother worry herself.”
“You mean the kind of boy who’ll talk you into getting buck-ass naked?” Quinn said. “Maybe gets you to go skinny-dipping with him in a creek one summer, play around a bit in the water, and then try things out, see how they worked.”
“Yep,” Anna Lee said. “That kind of boy. God help us. I really don’t know how I didn’t get pregnant.”
“We were careful.”
“That first time?” she said. “At the creek? That was careful?”
“I did my best,” Quinn said. “Some wildlife might have been injured.”
“Shit.” Anna Lee laughed and then held her head. “I haven’t had that much to drink in a long while. It’s gonna suck tomorrow. Sweet Jesus.”
Hondo scratched at the bedroom door, whining. Quinn got up and let him in, the dog finding the old wool rug where he slept by the fire, circling around four times and lying down. Quinn stood up, added a couple more logs. The dog lifted his head, sparks flying in the fireplace, and then set it back down.
“You feel bad?” Quinn said. Anna Lee pulling up the sheet and the cover back over her, turning on her side.
“No,” she said. “Should I?”
“You will,” Quinn said. “Soon as light hits, you’ll be full of a hangover and regret.”
“No, sir.”
“I can sleep on the couch,” Quinn said, standing over her. “I won’t make this tough. OK?”
Anna Lee watched his face and then smiled. “It’s not the same,” she said. “Not now.”
“Time will tell.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know what your friends think of me. Lillie. Boom. Your momma and daddy. Shit. Everybody.”
“Not Jason Colson,” Quinn said. “He said you’re a hot little pistol. Said I’d be a fool not to nail you down.”
“Everyone thinks I’m going to fuck you up.”
“If jumping out of airplanes and shooting people didn’t fuck me up,” Quinn said, “I think I can handle coming home. Coming back to this. To you.”
“What?”
“The best tail in north Mississippi.”
Anna Lee picked up a pillow and launched it at Quinn. He caught it and sat back down on the bed. “You bastard,” she said.
“I know this is complicated as hell. Your divorce isn’t final yet. They think you’ll go back to Luke. Do right for your daughter.”
“They aren’t us,” Anna Lee said. “This isn’t their life. I think Caddy knows. Caddy understands what we have. She’s told me so.”
“Caddy’s got enough shit to worry about.”
Anna Lee nodded, not saying anything more, no one wanting to discuss Caddy’s latest turn.
“We should go at things slow,” Quinn said. “Everything is changing. Until it’s all final.”
“Luke knows,” she said. “He told you himself. He understands I love you. He’s mad and he’s hurt, but he knows it’s something that’s never changed. I don’t think he figured on you ever coming home.”
Quinn nodded, fingering away the blonde hair from her brown eyes. He leaned down and kissed her, lingering there on her lips and breaking away slowly. “We’ll get things right, the way they’re supposed to be,” he said. “OK?”
“This is right,” she said. “You know it. I know it.”
“We might be the only ones.”
“This doesn’t concern anybody else.”
Quinn smiled, listening as the rain turned to sleet, pinging hard as hell on the tin roof. Anna Lee reached out and grabbed his hand, Quinn thinking he should leave the room and sleep on that couch. Let her make up her own mind in the morning light. As he stood, she pulled back the covers from her naked body, nothing on but that pair of tall white socks. “Show me how it’s supposed to be, Quinn Colson,” she said. “You make it right.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said. “I’ll do my best.”
Anna Lee smiled, pulling at him and tumbling with him into the old iron bed. Quinn unbuttoned his pants and pulled off his T-shirt. The sleet fell faster and harder above them, Quinn wondering if it just might tear off part of the old roof.
• • •
Lillie had stopped by Miss Magnolia’s house not long past midnight. She’d seen the front porch light and lights on in the old unpainted house—the old woman didn’t seem to know when it was day or night. She’d promised Quinn to check on the woman, bringing her a sack of chicken biscuits from the Dixie Gas station. Miss Magnolia, pleased with the bounty, sat in her big recliner, a massive amount of pills and ointments on a TV tray beside her, eating while the TV played an episode of that old show 227.
“Good biscuits,” Miss Magnolia said. “You make these?”
“No, ma’am,” Lillie said, holding her police radio in her lap. The whole house smelled of the propane that was burning off in a space heater on the wall. The woman smiling and laughing at the antics on the show. “That Jackée,” she said. “Ain’t she something?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lillie said. “You doing OK?”
“I am,” she said. “’Course I am. Who told you I wasn’t?”
“Sheriff told me you’d been wandering some,” she said. “I don’t want you going outside without your grandson. OK? It’s sleeting out there tonight. Pretty rough and cold.”
“Sleet?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Fine man.”
“Who’s that?”
“The sheriff.”
Lillie nodded, hearing dispatch sending Kenny to check out a traffic accident on 281. A car had slid off the road and into a ditch, no injuries, but the driver needed a tow. Lillie needed to get back on the road, on patrol, but knew she’d have to listen to Miss Magnolia ramble a bit about Hamp Beckett, as she couldn’t tell the uncle from the nephew, not knowing if it was 1977 or 2014.
“He’s taken a shine to you,” she said. “I can see it.”
“Sheriff Beckett is an old man, Miss Magnolia.”
“Sheriff Beckett?” she said. “Who said something about Sheriff Beckett? That man died years ago. I’m talking about Quinn. Jason Colson’s boy.”
The radio popped on again, dispatcher telling Kenny to meet the vehicle’s driver at the Shell station, where he’d walked. Kenny came back on the radio, giving a “Ten-four,” annoyed he was having to reverse direction and head back into town. Miss Magnolia’s blued cataract eyes had turned on her. She smiled, chin up, appraising Lillie. “You telling me you don’t have no interest in that man?”
“In who?”
“In Quinn,” she said. “Who the hell we talking about?”
“He’s the sheriff,” she said. “Or was the sheriff. I work for him. He’s my boss.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Lillie smiled at the old woman, the woman chewing away on her second biscuit, turning her head back to the TV, where Jackée was sick, lying on the sofa and holding a teddy bear. She told another woman that she had “aches, pains, and day-old nail polish.” That seemed to make Miss Magnolia chuckle a bit. The old woman reached over to the TV tray for a bottle of some pills and unscrewed the top while she coughed a few times.
“If I was a young woman, I’d do him.”
“I don’t have any interest,” Lillie said, feeling her face flush.
“I see how you look at him,” she said. “I may be old, and sometimes I get confused. But that’s just as plain as day.”
“It’s sleeting outside,” Lillie said, standing. “Freezing weather. Can you lock yourself in, ma’am? I can check up in the morning.”
“It is morning,” she said. “Damn sunrise. I sure appreciate these biscuits. You know how to make ’em.”
Lillie started to correct her but she decided against it, leaving the old woman turning back to the television and laughing along with something going on with that other old woman, the old woman from the sitcom, hanging outside her window and yelling at some kids. That seemed to really tickle Miss Magnolia.
Lillie got back into her Cherokee, checked off the wellness stop, and started the engine. Sleet tapped on the windshield as dispatch called for Tibbehah 2, Tibbehah 2 being her. She called back to dispatch, letting Cleotha know she was off the check and back on patrol. “Tibbehah 2, we’ve had two neighbor complaints of noise at Number 7 County Road 334.”
“Didn’t Kenny just check out the lumberyard?”
“Two more calls since then,” Cleotha said. “We got a call that someone is driving a backhoe up the hill.”
“Jesus Christ.” Lillie shook her head, awaiting a certain type of drunkenness and stupidity that comes with working the New Year’s Eve shift. She called Kenny on the radio and told him to meet her at the Cobbs’ house. “Wait on me.”
She hit the flashers and mashed the accelerator.
• • •
This is fucking awesome, man,” Chase said. “Fucking awesome.”
He was back down in the lumberyard, watching Kyle start up the backhoe and head on up toward the Cobbs’, not worrying a damn bit about going to the main road but instead just crashing up and over a chain-link fence and hitting the gravel drive up to the house. Chase had his cell phone up to his ear, telling Uncle Peewee to get his ass ready.
“He got it started?”
“Hell, yeah, he got it started,” Chase said. “He crashed through the fucking fence and is headed your way. He said to turn the van around and open them doors because he’s gonna drop that safe inside like a fresh egg.”
“Hot damn,” Peewee said. “That boy’s got big ole nuts.”
“You think you can bust it?” Chase said. “If you got some more time and space? I know it was hard to work in that fucking closet.”
“Hard to see,” Peewee said. “Hard to manipulate that keypad. I get that safe back to my shop and I’ll bust her open wider than a drunken cheerleader.”
“And then we get down to New Orleans.”
“Yes, sir,” Peewee said. “Temptations, here we come!”
“And the Sugar Bowl?”
“Cold beer and warm whores, kid,” Peewee said. “Now, come on and run up the hill before the law gets here. It sounds like a fucking John Wayne movie outside. You got to wake up half the county?”
“Yes, sir,” Chase said, slipping the cell back in the front pocket of his ’Bama hoodie and following the trail of busted fence and ruts in the road, the backhoe rolling on ahead of him, turning the final curve of the hill up to the house. As Chase ran, the sleet fell like tiny little needles on his face, but he was so damn pumped-up, so fucking happy, that it didn’t matter. He and Peewee had pulled it off. Sugar Bowl, here we come.
The cell phone and the gun were jingling in his pocket. He took out the gun, feeling tough and in charge, as he ran up the hill to that ranch house. He stood at the top of the drive, catching his breath, watching the soft light around the bushes and little trees. The house was one story, with a long, nice roof, brick walls, and red shutters. Lots of Christmas decorations around the door and windows, a plastic snowman lit up by the front door. Everything calm and peaceful in that sleet until damn crazy man Kyle headed right for the damn wall where the fat man’s closet was. He didn’t even hesitate, running that little backhoe right into the wall, knocking down bricks and part of the ceiling, using the scoop to push away all the mess in his way, all that clutter of timber and clothes, eating through half the room, rolling over a bed and chairs, flat-screen TV sparking off the fucking wall, until he got to something, let down the scoop again, and backed up and over all the shit, holding the safe in the bucket, coming backwards and then forwards over the lawn and dropping it nice and neat, with some kind of precision, in the back of the black van. Kyle backed up the backhoe, killed the engine, and helped Peewee shut the back doors.
“Come on, kid,” Kyle yelled. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Chase could hear the sirens—some law was sure as hell headed their way now. He dropped around to the side of the van, opening up the door and about to jump inside. Peewee cranked the motor and drove forward, not even waiting until Chase had both feet in the van and the door closed.
They didn’t get a quarter way down that hill when those flashing lights met them. Through the windshield of the van, he saw a patrol car and blue lights. A door opened and a shadow got out, walking toward them.
“Fuckin’ A,” Peewee said.
There wasn’t a way around the vehicle, only through it. But Peewee didn’t have it in him. His lazy-ass uncle knocked the van into park and killed the engine. Chase was mad as hell now, opening up that side door and telling Kyle and Peewee to wait right there, he’d straighten out this whole mess.
“Hold up,” Peewee said, turning back inside the van. “Shit. Hold up, boy. Don’t you do it. Don’t you fucking do it.”
But it was too late. Chase had out his sweet little gun and headed right toward that shadow, walking with the weapon hanging low and out of sight behind his back.