The Ranger - Ace Atkins [19]
“But they were talking,” Quinn said.
“Ain’t but one reason to talk to a woman like that and that’s to haggle over the price.”
“Maybe he was going to arrest her?” Quinn asked.
Van shook his head.
“You’ve seen the girl? You know her?”
“They call her Jasmine. Like the plant. I know’d ’cause I kidded her about it.”
“That’s it?”
“Just leave me out of this. Okay? I’m trying to get a job with a road crew.”
Quinn stood up and checked his watch, noting it was coming up on five. He saw Lillie on the other side of the glass door, leaning against the handmade railing and smoking a cigarette, checking her watch, too. Quinn offered his hand to his uncle and thanked him for getting in touch.
“Hey, Quinn. Listen, since the plant closed, things been a little rough. Wonder if you might give your old uncle a loan till I get straight?”
Quinn reached into his pocket and pulled out forty dollars, mashing it into Uncle Van’s hand. “Will that hold you?”
“You were always my favorite,” Van said.
The Rebel Truck Stop had occupied the same piece of property since the late fifties, not a half mile off 45, the old highway that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up to Lake Superior, cutting through the eastern edge of the state of Mississippi and along the eastern border of Tibbehah County. The station used to be known for the billboards advertising a pair of Bengal tigers caged by the pumps, a sign above them reading DO NOT TAUNT OR FLICK CIGARETTES ON THE ANIMALS. But by the time Quinn was a child, only one of the tigers was still alive, slow and toothless, rottenly depressed and living in filth, dying a little while later.
That was about the time Johnny Stagg got the idea to open a truck stop strip club, a little shack called the Booby Trap. The county tried to shut him down dozens of times and failed, with Stagg lining the pockets of the supervisors, thriving for years until someone set fire to it, most believing it was Stagg himself. Stagg rebuilt bigger and bolder, with a place for truckers to get showered and fed, buy spare parts for their eighteen-wheelers, or rest for a while in a big-rig parking lot that stayed full most nights. Maybe a hand job before they got back on the road.
Quinn parked up toward the restaurant. The strip club was housed in a separate building visible from the highway, a big neon sign plastered on the broad side with a Confederate flag and the outline of a curvy woman, the kind you see on mud flaps.
He waited with Lillie in the truck about twenty minutes until they saw what they were looking for, a girl in a short plaid skirt, cowboy boots, and a pink ski jacket jumping down from the cab of a big rig and counting the cash in hand.
Quinn nodded to Lillie and followed the girl into the truck stop, bustling with tired folks cutting into leathery steaks and wilted salads. The girl asked a cashier to break a twenty and found a spot at the diner’s counter, ordering a slice of pecan pie and a chocolate shake.
The girl was black-headed and very pale, with pockmarked skin and skinny legs. She ate the food fast and went back out into the cold, strolling through the long rows of parked big rigs, sometimes craning her neck up to an open window to talk, then moving on to the next row. Quinn caught up with her as she turned a corner, smiling and waving her down, dozens and dozens of trucks chugging around him in the cold, the air smelling of diesel. Parking lights almost looking like holiday decorations.
“Hey, I’m not hustling anyone. I’m looking for my boyfriend.”
Her eyes were brown and strangely narrow, her nose stubby. Quinn offered her a twenty-dollar bill. She shook her head.
“I just want to talk.”
“I don’t go nowhere for less than fifty.”
He paid her, tapping out his wallet for cash.
“Where’s your rig?”
He led her back to the F-150, Lillie in the passenger seat. The girl not seeming to mind there was someone else in the cab,