The Ranger - Ace Atkins [26]
“She was babysitting Caddy’s boy, and I stopped by.”
“Your momma is a saint for helping out Caddy.”
“I don’t think she had much choice.”
“Caddy was a wreck when she finally left Jericho,” Wesley said. “I picked her up twice for driving drunk and high. Took her straight home.”
“Can we discuss the matter at hand?” Quinn asked.
“Does Anna Lee still make it hurt?”
“How old are you?”
“You know, every time I see Meg I still want to take her to bed.”
“We weren’t married.”
“But it still hurts,” Wesley said as he walked to the porch edge and tapped the ash. “Even when she’s chewing my ass out. I’d even say especially when she’s chewing my ass out.”
“What happened?”
“Let’s not share a special moment. Okay, Quinn?”
“Just asking,” Quinn said.
“I think she got something different than what she signed up for,” Wesley said, a hard flash in his eyes. “She was counting that NFL money before my junior year.”
“She wasn’t like that, man. Not that I recall.”
Wesley just looked at Quinn, smoking down the cigar, dropping it to the front steps, not even half spent, and crushing it out. “Shit.”
“Can I show you something?” Quinn asked.
Quinn found a kerosene lantern in the shed and set it on top of the kitchen table, which was covered in checked oilcloth. He pointed out the patterns of blood that he’d seen on the wallpaper, careful not to touch any of it. The spatter—which someone had tried to blot away—looked like an enormous halo, flecks of dried blood across the flowered print.
“What’s this tell you?”
“That Leonard didn’t clean up what I asked him to clean up.”
“But all this was examined with whatever you people do?”
Wesley nodded. “We do have a little sense around here.”
“How long does that take?”
“Could take several weeks. Maybe a month. State lab is backed up.”
“You know what happened to the gun?”
“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Wesley said, holding on to the edge of the table.
“Johnny Stagg says he owns all this land,” Quinn said. “He’s putting a lien on the property.”
“I know you don’t like the idea of Stagg finding the body, but they’d been friends for the last few years. Stagg would come over just to check on his equipment.”
“And make loans.”
“I wouldn’t be telling folks about your uncle’s gambling problem,” Wesley said. “What good would it do?”
“Since I’ve been back, everyone seems to want to tell me my uncle was a great man before they whisper secrets in my ear.”
Wesley shrugged, every movement in the old house magnified in the emptiness. The men turned down the hallway back to the front door, moving back outside, the screen door slamming behind them.
“No ideas on those shitbags tonight?”
“The cattle rustlers? I’ll think on it.”
“No offense,” Quinn said. “But you don’t seem to know a hell of a lot.”
Wesley leaned on the door of his patrol car and nodded. “Oh, I know who they are. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to tell you. We got it, Ranger.”
“Nice jacket.”
Wesley looked down at the old letterman’s jacket and all the gold pins that covered the big T and smiled. “I earned this son of a bitch. And hell, it was the first thing I could find when you woke me up. You mind if we both get some sleep?”
Quinn got to sleep for ten minutes before he heard a car roll into the drive. He checked the window, seeing a sheriff ’s cruiser, thinking that Wesley had changed his mind.
But when Quinn went to the door, he found Lillie Virgil, dressed in uniform and holding a flashlight up into his face.
“I thought you were Wesley.”
“Do I look like Wesley?”
“Nope.”
“I got a lead on the lot lizard. We gotta head up to Bruce. Are you sober?”
“I’ve been drinking coffee for two hours.”
“Good,” she said. “If we leave now, we can make it to church.”
9
Bruce was about thirty minutes out of Jericho in the northern part of Calhoun County. A lumber mill dwarfed the small downtown—a road sign reading WELCOME TO BRUCE WHERE MONEY GROWS IN TREES—and even at dawn the metal buildings were lit up, with mountains of logs waiting in piles to be cut down into planks, plumes of steam rising