You know I’ve been here for damn-near eighteen hours?” Chase Clanton said. “I did everything a man can do at a fucking Flying J truck stop. I ate dinner and breakfast at Denny’s, played twenty dollars’ worth of quarters in that arcade, Pac-Man and Deer Hunter, done some laundry and took a hot shower.”
“Good for you,” Uncle Peewee said. The two, sitting side by side back at the Denny’s, facing Daniel Payne Road, not but a few hundred feet from Interstate 65 outside Birmingham.
“Middle of all that, I was asked to leave the Denny’s for complaining about the food, nearly got run over by a Kenworth, and got propositioned twice by two ole truckers who thought I had a mouth like a little girl. What kind of hellhole is this place?”
“It’s a truck stop,” Uncle Peewee said, chawing down on a Denny’s hamburger. “Watch your wallet and your cornhole. These folks live on the hard side of the highway.”
“Where we headed now?”
“Don’t know,” Peewee said. “But the police in Gordo have a warrant out for you and for me. When they pulled me in, I thought they were going to toss me in a cell. Instead, some big dyke deputy and dumb-ass sheriff played Twenty Questions about my whereabouts on New Year’s Eve.”
“You tell him?”
“Hell, no,” Peewee said, reaching for a French fry. “Shit, man. You think your grandmomma raised her some retard? I told them a story that they can’t prove or disprove. But it got them thinking about them being wrong. That maybe I wadn’t in fucking Jericho, Mississippi, but in the back of my party van getting my knob shined.”
“What?”
“Fucking,” Peewee said. “I told them I met a woman and we were fucking.”
Chase sucked on his chocolate milk shake, swiping the cherry and biting it off the stem. He imagined Uncle Peewee riding some young Playboy model in the back of the van, the whole thing shaking up and down, about to bust the shocks. In his mind, he could see his uncle’s hairy back and bald spot, fat ass pumping that woman. The girl would be startled and gasping for air, moaning with pleasure. And Chase started to laugh, nearly choking on that cherry.
“What?” Peewee asked.
“Thought of you getting it on.”
“What’s so goddamn funny about that?” Peewee said. “You know how much sex that van has seen? I thought about marking ’em off on the fender, like a fighter pilot with kills.”
“I just saw a show on television about a man about your age,” Chase said. “He was having a hard time meeting women so he went and ordered one of those Japanese sex dolls. Damn, those things look real. A few of them are the same shape and size as porno stars. One of the fellas said he liked having a sex doll better because a rubber woman don’t sass him. He dresses her, bathes her, takes her out in a wheelchair. Can you believe his family supports him? Calls it his life decision?”
“What the hell are you talking about, kid?” Peewee said, pushing the rest of the hamburger and fries away. “God damn.”
“I’m just saying it must be hard and all to meet girls.”
“I meet them all the time,” Peewee said. “I meet most of them online. It’s easier than ordering a pizza. You also go to places where you can get on a pussy hunt. Like a beer joint or Bible study. Places women go to find a man. I had lots of luck there. I met this one woman at the Baptist church who’d just lost her husband in a chainsaw accident. Damn, I never met a woman more raring to go. We was reading from the book of Colossians and got to that passage about how a woman should service her husband.”
“Don’t you mean ‘serve’?” Chase said. “I never read nothing about a man getting serviced in the Bible.”
“Same damn thing,” Peewee said. “When the pastor got to that part, all of us sitting in a big wide circle, her eyes met mine and we were on, brother. I knew right then and there it was a damn done deal. Hard part was waiting through all that talking and praying, drinking coffee and eating cookies, until I could walk her out to the parking lot.”
“And she just jumped into the van?”
“You better believe it.”
Chase slurped some more of the shake, watching all the cars and big trucks go past on the boulevard, snaking out toward the interstate to Birmingham, down to Montgomery, and on to Mobile Bay. “Uncle Peewee?”
“Yes, sir?”
“What the hell are we gonna do?”
“Don’t know.”
“We got blood on our hands.”
“Hush up.”
“What we did with that fella’s body,” Chase said. “Sweet Jesus.”
“I said hush your mouth.”
“We ain’t going back to Gordo,” Chase said. “Are we?”
His Uncle Peewee just shook his head, not saying nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything in particular. He raised his hand and asked his waitress if he could get a refill of his Pepsi.
• • •
Stagg found Ringold out back of the Rebel, loading hickory wood into the barbecue pit with big black Midnight Man. Both men were sweating, as they’d chopped and stacked a cord of wood, keeping the fire going good and stoked orange-hot. Stagg never trusted a barbecue joint that didn’t smoke their meat each and every day, the smell of the pit the best advertising a place can have. “How you doin’, boys?”
“Smokin’ turkey legs,” Midnight Man said in that gruff, deep way of speaking. “Ribs. Cracklins. You want me to save you some?”
“I’d appreciate that, sir,” Stagg said, patting Midnight Man on the back of his sweaty white undershirt. The man wandering on into the kitchen, knowing Stagg didn’t come to Ringold to talk about pork plates.
Ringold slid his tattooed arms back into a green canvas jacket. He wore a ball cap that day, WINCHESTER ARMS. “Yes, sir?”
“Police issued four warrants,” Stagg said. “Couple turds over in Alabama. And Kyle Hazlewood and our buddy Mickey Walls. Heard anything from Walls?”
“We didn’t leave our last meet on good terms.”
“You hurt him bad?”
“Didn’t leave any marks.”
“But you got his attention?”
“I did,” Ringold said. “Although he kept on denying any part in it.”
“Sheriff’s office got hold of some cell phone records that show all four of those turds were working together,” Stagg said. “They believe Mickey Walls orchestrated the whole thing while screwing Cobb’s daughter down in Gulf Shores. How’s that for getting back at her daddy?”
Ringold just nodded. Most of the time, Stagg could get a good read on a person, but with Ringold it was damn-near impossible. His eyes were a cold and clear blue, almost washed of all color at all. He never knew the man to laugh or be pissed-off, living in a state without any emotion at all.
“I talked to Walls twice,” Ringold said. “Next time, he’ll have to bleed a little more.”
The iron door to the barbecue pit was open and Stagg watched the new pieces of hickory catch fire and burn down to embers. Stagg walked over to the fire, squatted down, and rubbed his hands into its warmth. The chimney above the truck stop pumped out hickory smoke just in time for the lunch rush. “Leave him be,” Stagg said. “Now that the law is involved, I don’t want us nowhere near him. I’ve done business with Walls. He ain’t that smart, but he’s no moron, either.”
“He won’t admit to a thing.”
“Just how did you try and get his attention?” Stagg asked, grinning a little.
“Laid his hand on a tile saw and threatened to slice off a few fingers.”
“How’d he like that?”
“He screamed a little,” Ringold said, reaching into his pocket for a cigar and burning the tip with a big stainless steel lighter. There was something in the gesture of the lighting, the tobacco smoke trailing from his mouth, that reminded Stagg a great deal of Quinn Colson. He got up off his haunches and placed his warm hands into his khaki pockets, rocking back on his heels.
“All you Army boys smoke or dip?”
“Keeps your mind sharp,” Ringold said.
“In some ways, you and Colson are cut from the same cloth,” Stagg said. “The attitude. The training. Y’all have similar characteristics.”
“Maybe,” Ringold said. “But we think a lot different.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m a realist, Mr. Stagg,” Ringold said, grinning. “Colson just could never wrap his head around what a good deal he could’ve had.”
• • •
How can anyone live like this?” Lillie said. “This place is a complete shithole.”
“Certainly misses a woman’s touch,” Rusty Wise said, standing next to Mickey Walls’s eighty-inch television and surveying the mess of beer cans, pizza boxes, and empty bottles of Jack. Lillie acted as if she hadn’t heard him, just trying to take in the kitchen, the living room, the two bedrooms piled high with more shit they’d have to search.
“It misses a human’s touch,” Lillie said. “Pass me that bottle next to your toe. If he and those boys were knocking a few back, maybe we can get some prints.”
They’d been there nearly an hour with Ike McCaslin and two men from the MBI in Batesville. They were walking Walls’s backyard with some kind of electronic tools to spot if anything might have been buried. “What the hell is this?” Rusty said, reaching for a DVD on the coffee table. “Lesbian Cheerleaders 4? I don’t know Mickey real well but never figured him for a pervert.”
“Maybe it’s an art movie.”
“Not from the looks of the pictures on the back,” Rusty said. “Lord Almighty. Looks like she’s getting a pelvic exam.”
“I get the idea, Rusty.”
“Reminds me of a gosh-dang frat house,” Rusty said. “No rules. No one giving a damn about picking up their clothes or food. No Momma telling them what to do. You see the mess of bills by the telephone? Looks like some creditors onto him real hard.”
“He was about to lose the flooring business,” Lillie said. “At least that’s what Larry Cobb says. Cobb says he was about to cut off his supply. If you were him, where would you hide that money?”
“Well, we’ll know more when we get his bank statements,” Rusty said.
“You think he rolled on up to the teller and unloaded a few hundred grand?” Lillie said. “If he did, I hope to hell he got a free toaster. Or at least a sucker.”
“What would you do with that much money?”
“I’d get the hell out of Jericho,” Lillie said. “I’d change my hair and my name and leave the damn county. I’d go and raise my daughter in a better place.”
“Shoot,” Rusty said. “You know that’s not true. You know you love Jericho and Tibbehah County more than anyone. You wouldn’t do all this hard work for nothing. This is your home. You want to see that folks follow the law.”
“That’s me, Lillie Virgil, goddamn civic leader,” Lillie said. “Remember that shit at the next pancake breakfast.”
Rusty laughed and shook his head, looking a bit lost in Mickey Walls’s swirling chaos. In a back room, Ike McCaslin was searching in closets and under the beds. Lillie knew one of them, probably not Rusty, was going to have to crawl under the house next. In her mind, she could see Rusty getting stuck under the crossbeams and her having to hook his boots to her Jeep and pull him out.
Lillie had started to unzip couch cushions, knowing she wouldn’t find anything but some bottle caps and old pretzels, but wanting to go through the process. Room by room. Inch by inch. She wanted everything done right before they allowed Mickey to come back. Rusty had moved on back to the kitchen and took a handful of bills and loaded them into a cardboard box. “Lillie?”
She looked up.
“I wanted to apologize for my behavior the other day,” Rusty said. “What I said wasn’t any of my business, one way or another. I was trying to make a point, but sometimes my words get jumbled up in my mouth.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I meant what I said about you loving Jericho,” he said. “It might be as corny as all get-out, but I love it, too. When I moved down to Columbus, it wasn’t home. I liked being a lawman and not having to sell dang insurance and all. But coming back here, raising my family where I was raised, really means something. Y’all are my people.”
“Was it the new Walmart that sold you?”
“Shoot,” Rusty said. “You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Lillie said. “This place definitely has a peculiar kind of charm. Where else could you meet creeps like these?”
“You think Mickey’ll talk?”
“Let’s give him some time to think on things,” Lillie said. “We both know it’s going to take a good long while to find that money. But he doesn’t know about those cell towers placing his three boys near the Cobb place.”
“Calls back and forth to Hazlewood ain’t enough.”
“Nope,” Lillie said. “But that dumb son of a bitch doesn’t know it. God damn it. If we could just find Kyle, I’d play those bastards off on one another. It could be beautiful.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“For Kyle?”
Rusty nodded. He lifted the box up in his chubby little arms to take it back out to the sheriff’s truck.
“Do you really want me to say it?”