The Ranger - Ace Atkins [16]
He gripped Quinn’s shoulder and led him back to the front porch.
Outside, Mr. Jim handed him the cigar and his old Zippo to get the damn thing going again.
Lena didn’t get to see the man called Charley Booth till Saturday morning, during what the acting sheriff called “family time” outside a chain-link fence where prisoners got to kiss through the wire and accept packages of food and cigarettes, some sly groping between the slots. A guard watched all the time, seeming to be more concerned about pot or pills than weapons. But Lena saw Jody right away, knowing it was him from the way he stood, too cool for everyone, smoking a cigarette, with shorter, spiky hair now, but looking skinnier and more pimply than when she’d known him in Alabama. He was talking to a black guy in a far corner, both laughing, Lena noticing for the first time a tattoo on the side of his neck and wondering just when he did that to himself.
She called for him. The tattoo was of a flower or a wolf head.
He turned to her but looked away as if he didn’t recognize her. She’d worn her best clothes, a sparkled Miley Cyrus matching outfit she’d bought at the Walmart outside Tuscaloosa where she’d stopped hitching for a day or two and spent her last forty dollars on a cheap motel. That’s where she’d learned Jody had left town for this nowhere spot called Jericho, Mississippi, and she’d had to make the choice whether to go back home or see the thing through, and that little kick in her stomach made that decision all the easier.
Jody finally got the idea that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him and bugged off the black guy and walked over to the fence separating them. She hung her hands up on the little diamond of wire and smiled at him, but he just shot her a glance and said in a low voice, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
She couldn’t answer, her voice seizing up in her throat.
“You need to get your ass back home, girl. I’ll call.”
“Hell you will.”
He looked away, and she noted the leanness of his jaw, his teeth looking looser and more askew in his mouth, almost as if he’d aged a decade in months. He rubbed his sweating neck and bristly beard on his skinny face. He spit onto the concrete and breathed hard out his nose.
“I have your baby in me.”
“How do I know it’s mine?”
“Goddamn you to hell, Jody.”
“Hush.”
“Just who the hell is Charley Booth?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Just go.”
“You don’t believe it’s yours?” she said. “You should know I come for you with a gun. Guess I don’t need it now you’re locked up.”
“You need to shut up.”
“Listen,” she said, reaching through the fence with her skinny fingers and grabbing his orange coveralls and pulling him close. “I don’t care what they say you done.”
“I ain’t done nothin’.”
“We’ll get through this. All of us.”
“Oh, hell.”
And she believed for a moment he was still speaking to her but then saw the glint in his eyes as he followed some movement behind her, back along the parking lot by the long, winding railroad tracks. She turned to see two men crawling out of an old black Camaro, both of them lighting up cigarettes, one of ’em as skinny as Jody and the other thick and muscular. They were dead-eyed, wearing T-shirts cut off at the shoulders and jeans so tight it was obscene.
“Who are those men?”
“Alpha dogs,” he said, moving away. “Go. Get lost. I don’t want you or that damn baby.”
“I thought you’d quit messing with all that shit? Jody? Listen to me.”
But he’d turned and walked up to the guard, who nodded him back inside out of the cold, where she was left shivering in a glittering shirt and ruffled dress that hugged her expanding butt. As she backed up, the sadness feeling like an animal clawing her chest, she passed by the two men. Her eyes met with the thicker of the two, black-eyed and scruffy-faced, with hollow cheeks and corded animal muscle on his skinny frame. His hair was buzzed down to the scalp, and the T-shirt he wore had the U.S. Capitol on it topped with a Rebel flag and read I HAVE A DREAM,