The Ranger - Ace Atkins [107]
Lillie Virgil was down, shot in the calf. Judge Blanton was flat on his back on the cracked asphalt, blood around his head like a halo.
Gowrie crawled back into the gas station and slammed the glass door shut behind him, breathing like a caught fish. The clerk had made a run for it, leaving the back door wide open, the wide expanse of a muddy field showing in a clear frame.
Gowrie saw the shadow of a man enter and then disappear like a wraith.
“Hey, soldier,” Gowrie said, yelling, spitting blood. “Come on down and we can hammer this shit out. I didn’t kill your uncle. You hear me? I didn’t kill him.”
Quinn wanted to ask him about Wesley Ruth and Johnny Stagg and those men from Memphis but instead just hobbled around the aisles of the darkened convenience store, holding a fully loaded M1, hearing Gowrie breathing and cussing. His mouth giving him up as Quinn passed by a NASCAR display for Pepsi and bags of potato chips and pork rinds.
Quinn wanted to kill him.
He’d figured on killing him.
Quinn eyed Gowrie in the wide picture of the shoplifting mirror. Gowrie was on his ass with a pistol, holding his bloody stomach and spitting blood. The floor was slick with all that blood where he’d been crawling on his belly.
“How you doin’?” Quinn asked, limping slow.
“Peachy, soldier.”
“You know, you remind me of a fella I once met in the Kandahar Province,” Quinn said. “You ever hear of that place?”
“I ain’t stupid.”
“He ambushed me just as I was about to get on a helicopter,” Quinn said. “Tried to slit my throat.”
Gowrie didn’t say anything.
Quinn wavered from the pain and gritted his teeth as he crept down the aisle, realizing he was dragging his back leg. “Even after I shot him and cuffed his hands, he kept asking me to kill him. Why do you figure?”
Gowrie was silent, and then said: “You gonna shoot or teach me a goddamn parable?”
Quinn could turn on the next aisle and aim straight down the row with that old M1. Gowrie was already immobilized and sitting pretty. He could take the shot so damn easily.
Quinn stepped back, feeling as if a knife had sliced his hamstring and ass while he retraced his steps back down the aisle. The shot would’ve been so easy and quick.
“Do something,” Gowrie yelled.
Quinn looked up at the round mirror at Gowrie, eyes closing and opening, spitting blood, and trying to keep from passing out. Quinn shook his head and limped forward.
With his good arm, Quinn pushed over the candy-and-gum display, the old metal cage crashing on top of Gowrie. Gowrie kicked and flailed to get loose and rush Quinn.
Quinn staggered over to him, swinging the butt of that ancient rifle at Gowrie’s head, the shitbag’s pistol clattering to the floor. He punched Gowrie in his throat and bloodied chest. Quinn clenched his jaw in a mess of pain that almost brought him to his knees. He dropped on top of Gowrie, grinding his knee into the spot he’d stuck with an arrow not long ago. “You want it bad, don’t you?”
“What the fuck? Goddamn.”
“You want to be somebody.”
Gowrie’s mouth rushed with air, eyes watering. The smell of him was something tremendously sharp and rotting as Quinn held him down flat to the floor. Lawmen filled the room, Lillie limping behind them.
“You’ll be sorry you didn’t pull the trigger,” Gowrie said, whispering with a bloody smile. “You think those boys are the best I got? I’m coming back to kill you.”
“Counting on it.”
Lillie helped Quinn to his feet as two deputies wrestled Gowrie from the floor. When he was gone, only a slick trail of blood left, she turned to him. “The judge is dead.”
Quinn nodded. He picked up the old man’s gun and walked out into the daylight, the Dixie Gas sign reminding him of a flag.
36
Lena took a job at a barbecue house between Tupelo and Birmingham, a little choke-and-puke perched on the side of a sloping green hill, everything coming on green in the early spring, where they paid her a decent wage and she could afford to keep a trailer, saving up for a little car, maybe heading on sometime. But the people who owned the restaurant were good people,