The bald-headed lawyer had been worth every nickel. The only reason Mickey had used him was because he’d remembered the jingle from the commercial, with all the rapping and dancing, the 901 area code plus the number. But he’d gotten him sprung, Mickey having to come up with ten grand in cash and a hundred-thousand-dollar bond, the lawyer arguing to the judge that his client wasn’t a flight risk. The man had even given Mickey a ride back from the Tibbehah County Jail, stopping off at Captain D’s for a deluxe seafood platter, plus an extra order of butterfly shrimp, and a Diet Coke. Mickey walked in the house, set the paper sacks on the counter, and turned on the lights. Jesus Christ, he needed a shower.
“What you got there?” a boy said. “Sure smells good. I’m hungry as hell.”
Chase Clanton was sitting on his sofa, watching the big plasma TV, Mickey and Tonya on their honeymoon trying out different and unique positions.
“What the hell you doing here, man?” Mickey said. “Are you crazy? I hadn’t been out of jail but an hour. You know the cops are watching my place. Son of a bitch.”
“Don’t worry,” Chase said. “I left my vehicle down the road. I just figured it was high time me and you talk.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Chase said. “That’s right. I’m tired of you wiping your ass with me and Uncle Peewee like we just the hired help.”
“Y’all were the hired help,” Mickey said. “You were paid to do a job and get lost.”
“And dump a body for you,” Chase said. “God damn. You forget about that part? You should’ve heard the big splash Kyle made into the Tombigbee. I watched him sink on down to the bottom and out of sight. I think that shit kind of makes us partners.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Mickey said. “I swear to Christ I’ll call the law right now. They’re already looking for you. Me and you are done.”
“What’d you tell them about me?”
“Nothing,” Mickey said. “Shit. Just leave. Get out of here. My fucking seafood platter is getting cold. I don’t want no cold shrimp. I been hanging out with every shitbag in Tibbehah County, folks asking me all about the safe, how much we’d get, how’d we do it, and all that mess. One of the fellas in the can used to go to my church. He trimmed the hedges.”
Chase had not moved on the couch, dressed in gray sweatpants and a maroon football jersey with the number 12 on the front. He had his hands down his pants, fiddling around, like it was helping him think some. On the coffee table was an open bag of Golden Flake Sweet Heat BBQ Fried Pork Skins and a can of Milwaukee’s Best. They kept silent for a moment, the only sound in the room coming from the television and Tonya’s groaning and giggling.
“Why don’t you turn that shit off?”
“Y’all are good,” Chase said. “Nothing to be ashamed of. If you let me back it up a moment, I’ll show you one hell of a play. That woman—I figure it’s your wife—does a scissor kick and turn, landing on her tummy, so you can try out a different approach. I mean, it was real effortless. I could tell she had some real natural talent.”
“Turn it off,” Mickey said, digging into the bag for some shrimp. Damn, they were cold. “I had to listen to her bitching at me all morning. Last thing I need is to hear more screaming.”
“How’d she get so tan?”
Mickey leaned against the counter, watching a side view of him and Tonya, not really thinking much about him on that eighty-inch, thinking more how’d he get this brain-dead hillbilly back on the road without calling the sheriff’s office. “She owns a tanning parlor,” he said. “It’s more than that. You can get coffee there, too. But she likes to tan.”
“Even in the wintertime?”
“Especially in the wintertime,” Mickey said. “Look, Chase? Come on over here and get you a piece of fish and some fries. Get a hot meal in you and then go boogie on down the road. This looks bad. Real bad. Someone catches us together and we’re looking at a better case, added time. I can drive you back to your car. But just get the hell out of Jericho.”
“I want my money.”
“What money?”
“Half of what you pulled out of that safe,” he said. “I want half of what you promised my Uncle Peewee.”
“Take it up with your Uncle Peewee,” Mickey said, sifting some fries onto a plastic plate and thunking down a cold piece of fish.
“I can’t.”
“Why?” Mickey said, heading to the refrigerator and pulling out a cold beer, popping the top, and taking a long sip.
“’Cause I killed him.”
When he turned, Chase had a gun on him.
On the television, it was Tonya’s big brown ass shimmying like two old ham hocks. Big Daddy. Big Daddy. Yes, sir, Big Daddy. Oh, hell.
“I’ll get straight with you after all this mess is done.”
“You’ll get straight with me now, Mickey Walls,” Chase said, grinning. “It’s high time you go and make things right.”
• • •
Lillie drove her Jeep Cherokee down the dead-end road, past the men with rifles eyeing her, huddled around two pickup trucks, and beyond Quinn’s old Ford to where the road just stopped cold in a hill.
“Who were they?” Caddy said.
“I don’t know,” Lillie said. “I was told they were with highway patrol.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“No, ma’am,” Lillie said. “I don’t know. We got folks on the way. But I’d just as soon not stop and chat. Let’s keep on moving ahead of them and get to where we’re going.”
“It’s just an idea,” Caddy said. “I can’t be sure. But it’s so close to where we got lost. If I were Quinn, that’s what I’d be thinking about.”
“Maybe he knows,” Lillie said. “Maybe he figures you and I would talk?”
“I think Quinn hasn’t figured me into the process for some time,” Caddy said, Jeep window cracked, spewing smoke outside. “I think he figures me pretty much worthless.”
“Come on.”
“I’m not crying on it,” she said. “But it sure would be nice to prove him wrong.”
Lillie opened the door and walked around to the Jeep’s hatch. She pulled out a backpack, her Winchester, and a handheld GPS. Cell phones didn’t even register out this way. Lillie pointed into the thick woods and the gentle rising of a hill to the north.
“That way?”
“I’m not Quinn,” Caddy said. “Can you show me? On the map?”
Lillie laid out the map on the hood of the Jeep, the small acre pond circled in red. She said it was a good mile into the deepest part and another mile and a quarter up to the top of the ridge.
“I have good boots,” Caddy said. “Come on.”
“I don’t know about these folks,” Lillie said. “We could wait for some help. Go in later.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Lillie said. “If we get stopped, let me talk. Don’t open your fucking mouth.”
Caddy nodded. She had on a waterproof woodsman camo parka and a pink Carhartt hat. Lillie figured maybe the pink would stop them from being confused with Quinn. And maybe help them from both being shot. After all, they were just helping in the search, walking the ground and marking off the grids. If there was too much trouble, Lillie had a radio. She could contact the deputies or Ringold. Ringold had moved on ahead of them to find Quinn.
Lillie kept to the GPS, heading due north, not seeing anything, not even wildlife in the frozen patch of woods. Sunlight had come on weak and white through the treetops, and every so often an icicle would drop onto the moldy wet leaves. The cedars were encased in ice, and big spread oaks seemed to be made of glass. Somewhere, far off, she heard the growling motors of ATVs, and even farther away the sound of an airplane and then a helicopter. She wondered if it was the copter she requested from Tupelo. A mile in, she and Caddy changed course and headed up into the hills and the ridge that would take them up and over into the National Forest and what Caddy called the Big Woods.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Lillie asked. “Because in all the time I’ve known Quinn, he never told me the whole story.”
“He blames himself,” Caddy said. “But he saved my life.”
“From that man?” Lillie said. “The game warden?”
Caddy nodded under the pink hat as they walked. She kept her hands in her pockets. Lillie’s hands were free and growing cold. Every so often, she’d switch up the hand holding the gun to keep the shooting finger warm, pliable, and ready. Ever since they’d found Rusty in that stand, she could not wait to use it. She didn’t need much of an excuse.
“That man is dead,” Caddy said. “Quinn killed him.”
“He never told me that.”
“He’d followed me and Quinn up to the pond up yonder,” she said. “We had made a little fort with limbs. I fashioned a little broom out of weeds, sweeping the dirt floor.”
“And what happened?”
“He tossed away Quinn’s gun, smacked him around, tied us both up and made us walk,” she said. “He told us he was taking us out and that Quinn would have to go to jail for killing those deer, running from the law. The whole time, I felt his eyes on me. Do you understand what I mean? I was only eight, but I knew what he was thinking.”
Lillie didn’t say anything, the hill getting a little more steep, seeing her breath come out frosty and quick, listening, watching the trees and the growth around them. She would turn and look back every so often, expecting to see one of those shitbags from the road following them. Maybe even kind of hoping that they were.
“It started to rain and that’s when we found shelter in that old barn,” Caddy said. “I guess the National Forest used to be part of some old farms. I didn’t see a house, only the barn.”
“And that’s where you think Quinn will head?”
“I think if he’s hurt, like you say, and cold, that’s where he’d go to hide out.”
“Or maybe he’s leading some folks that way,” Lillie said. “Quinn has taught me that it’s always best if you can control a situation. A barn would be a solid enclosure for him to wrangle the bad guys into a tight space.”
“It’s almost pretty out here,” Caddy said. “Everything seems so clean. I can breathe.”
“How was rehab?”
“That’s the path,” Caddy said, ignoring her and pointing. “I know it. The trail we followed. Jesus Christ, that seems like yesterday. How can something be so far back but so close in your mind?”
“Bad stuff is like tar,” Lillie said. “It’s hard to wash off.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Caddy said, walking faster, hands in her pockets. “It was as bad as it gets.”
The light seemed brighter across the ridge. Morning light shining through the ice in the trees, nearly blinding, as she crested the hill and stood at the rim of the old pond. Only it wasn’t a pond. It was just a big ugly mud hole with pockets of ice spread across.
“This is it?” Lillie said.
Caddy nodded.
“You sure?”
Caddy walked to the edge of the mud and ice. She stood there and looked all around her, her face frozen in cold or maybe the memory of that time. “That motherfucker raped me,” she said. “I was eight years old. He’s dead and gone, but I can still smell his breath every morning I wake up.”
“But Quinn took care of it.”
“Why should a ten-year-old need to make things right?”
“And Hamp?” Lillie said. “How’d he play in this?”
“He found us,” Caddy said. “He buried the son of a bitch, took me home and got me cleaned up. Quinn got to hike out on his own. That’s what happened. How he became the little lost boy who was a hero. It changed him.”
“Changed you, too,” Lillie said. But she wasn’t sure Caddy heard her. A sharp wind cut across the top of the hills just as Caddy exclaimed a giddy shriek. She smiled big and pointed into the nothingness of the pond.
“He’s alive,” Caddy said. “I told you. He is here.”
Lillie walked up to Caddy’s shoulder and stared down into the pond, seeing an ugly man staring, flat-faced, against a thin sheet of ice. He looked bluish, taking on a quality like he’d been cured and pickled.
“Yeah, that looks like Quinn’s work.”
“Come on,” Caddy said, walking around the pond, heading west. “Come on.”
• • •
Hypothermia or some other bad shit overtook Quinn about midday. He started to shiver and his breathing came too fast, him straying off course after sighting a tree a hundred meters away. His teeth chattered, and his mind would wander, thinking back on times he’d tracked rabbit and deer in these woods with Boom. He would recognize a little creek, an oak now doubled in size, some moss on the side of a rock. Sometimes there was the smell of the rabbit over a fire, the warmth of the stones. Other times he’d be back on some rocky ledge in Kandahar Province that looked like a vista from a John Ford film, bullets ricocheting off rocks, earth shaking from air strikes. He would jolt to attention as if touched by a live wire, snapping his head to the far reaches of the Big Woods. One step at a time. Move, move, move. Come on, Ranger, get your ass up. Seventeen miles. Seventeen miles was a brisk jog before breakfast. Nobody cared if you were hungry or thirsty. Cold or busted-up. Come on, Ranger. Keep moving. Don’t you slow up. Don’t quit. Don’t you fucking quit. This is a paradise. Do you know how goddamn lucky you are?
He was back on the Darby Queen obstacle course at Benning, on top of the Haditha Dam on night patrol with his platoon, watching a bright red setting sun as mongrel dogs ate dead Iraqi soldiers, heart sinking as Anna Lee gave him a secret smile and turned her back, driving his old ’89 Ford full tilt and spewing mud, with Boom laughing at his side, and then that endless twenty-one-gun salute to old Hamp Beckett as they lowered his broken self into the ground. Quinn heard the shots and stumbled into a ravine, falling, but catching himself with one hand. The water ran under a thin sheet of ice, reddish mud covering the front of his jacket, his boots slipping, not finding purchase. Come on, Ranger. Fucking move. Get up. Go. Go. Go. Jason Colson gave a thumbs-up, put the pedal to the metal, and jumped that cherry-red Firebird over a broken bridge and a crooked Alabama river. Yee-haw.
Quinn felt like he was about to throw up. He dry-heaved and wavered on his boots, trying again to get the hell out of the crevice. He found a foothold in the ravine and was crawling up with one hand until he sighted another hand with dirty fingernails reaching for him, grabbing him by the barn coat and tugging him up onto the hard frozen ground.
“Stay down, motherfucker.”
Quinn got to his knees and looked up at two men. They didn’t look friendly. Both held hunting rifles and wore green puffy coats similar to the man who’d tried to kill him back at the pond. They were both white, smallish, and stubby, with red-chapped, unshaven faces. They smelled like body odor and stale cigarettes. Quinn couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t smelled them a mile away. They had the look of men who lived in the woods and lived to hunt. One of them carried a GPS, his jaw fat with tobacco.
Quinn gave them a hard look, about to reach for the gun at his hip. One held a rifle on him while the other pulled the Beretta and snatched the .308 off his back, slamming the ever-living shit out of his broken arm, bringing tears to Quinn’s eyes and his mind back to full focus and sharpness. One of the men, just as short and ugly as the other, pulled a radio from his pocket and announced that they’d gotten the son of a bitch. “About half-dead.”
The one in front of him had pocketed Quinn’s Beretta. The other man had slung both rifles over his shoulder so he could work the handheld radio, cocky and sure his buddy could control the ragged-looking man in front of him. Dead-eyed and one-armed. Quinn knew he was covered in dried mud and Rusty’s blood.
Quinn kept staring at the man with the gun. He listened to the other. The pain in his busted arm was sharp and raw and felt as if the bones had ripped through the skin. His bad hand hung in a twisted and bizarre way, fingers turning black and purple.
Maybe three feet away, the man pointed his rifle at Quinn’s chest. Quinn bent at the waist and started to puke, dry-heaving up a little water, retching until hollowed-out. Coughing and gagging as he looked at his boots and then at the other man’s boots moving in closer. That was close enough. The men were hunters, men who lived in the woods and could follow a trail and stalk their prey. They were patient men who could walk quietly and live off the land.
But they weren’t soldiers. They were sloppy and nervous, shifting from foot to foot.
Quinn came up with the bowie knife and stabbed the gunman up under his jaw and well into his head. The knife stuck hard and Quinn let go of the bone handle as the man fell, reaching into his pocket, the man going slack as Quinn snatched back his Beretta. He squeezed off four rounds into the man with the radio and another two into the man he held, before dropping him to the frozen ground.
Blood poured from the man’s mouth as he flailed, rolling back and making a deep internal scream. Soon all his motion and rage stopped.
Wind came fast and hard off the western side of the rolling hills and down into the wide expanse of the forest. The trees were much older here, untouched by loggers for decades, the land growing up tall and strong and healing over the scars men had made. Everything was still and peaceful as Quinn tried to just breathe, slow himself, come back down from wherever the hell he’d been. He had blood all over his right hand and across his jacket.
“Where are you?” the radio on the ground asked. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck’s going on out there?”