The Ranger - Ace Atkins [100]
Her hands shook. Even Gowrie wouldn’t shoot a girl with a baby.
She’d point that ole peashooter at him and give him a talkin’-to. She would leave with her little fat boy, money or not.
She didn’t want their goddamn money and would tell him so.
She reached for the crying baby and got out of the car, holding Joy and that .22 so tight. She felt like she was walking all sluggish in water, her blood running so fast, her mind a hot tangle of thoughts. She heard a man crying but saw no one until she looked up from the pulpit.
There she saw golden-mouthed Brother Davis hanging from the cross, the cross swinging like a pendulum from a mess of chains.
“Help,” he said. He was bleeding bad, gray-faced and dying.
“Where’s Ditto?”
“Please,” Brother Davis said, screaming. “He took all I got but said it wasn’t enough.”
“Where are they?”
“Help me.”
“Speak, you old wretched man.”
“They gone to the bank.”
34
Quinn stood up from the hospital bed wearing one of those paper nightgowns that left his naked ass hanging out as he made his way to a water pitcher. He was weak and light-headed, not feeling much in his body at all, his right leg stinging like it was asleep and fingers fat and clumsy in a sling. He’d watched Luke Stevens dig the buckshot out of his leg and ass and then work on that bullet in his shoulder, saying the blade had been cracked and Quinn would need to see a surgeon in Memphis or over in Columbus. Luke wanted to knock him out for the whole thing, but Quinn wanted only something local for the pain, to have that shit dug out of his body and be sewn up. Of course Luke tried to explain to him that the process was a little bit more complicated. Quinn’s muscles had been torn, bones cracked, and he’d lost a damn good bit of blood.
Quinn drained the water glass and eased his way to the bed.
That was about the time Johnny Stagg walked into the room.
“Son of a bitch,” Quinn said, closing the back side of the gown. “You got to be kidding me.”
“Judge called Benning,” Stagg said. “He wanted me to relay that.”
“What’d he tell them?”
“Said you’d been ambushed by some poachers.”
Stagg wore a checked button-down shirt with a V—necked tennis sweater tucked into a pair of pressed gray pants. He looked like the gardener who’d stolen the millionaire’s clothes.
“Y’all make for a nice pair.” Quinn laughed. “You know what happened to my damn pants?”
“I imagine they cut ’em off you,” Johnny Stagg said, nodding down to the wound on the back of Quinn’s leg. “That don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, it stings a little when you get shot in the back,” Quinn said. “You gonna leave or you want to be tossed out of the window?”
“I wasn’t a part of this,” Stagg said, looking down to his tasseled loafers or maybe the worn linoleum floor. “I wanted to look you in the eye and tell you.”
Quinn held up his hand and shook his head. “What do you want, Johnny?”
“Gowrie and me weren’t partners,” Stagg said. “All I wanted to do was jump-start the economy of this old town. There was gonna be a regional hospital taking over for this old rotting place. A Walmart, too. You got my word.”
“True gold.”
“If we’d known what was going on . . . I wouldn’t have made a deal for nothin’ in the world.”
“One of my best friends was just gunned down in front of my face,” Quinn said. “Gowrie shot him in the head and heart right after he’d turned on me. I guess you wouldn’t know a thing about that.”
“What Wesley done makes me sick to my core, but he doesn’t stand alone,” Stagg said, looking solemn behind that craggy mask. He reached into his pocket and unfolded a letter, placing it in Quinn’s hands. “This belongs to you and your momma.”
Quinn knew it instantly as his uncle’s handwriting.
“I was gonna burn it,” Stagg said.
Quinn read the short note written to his mother, flecked with blood:
I walk a lonely road, Jean. It’s never been a straight path and you loved me despite it. I killed a young woman named Jill Bullard. She was a witness to a fire in a drug house. She kept coming back for