The Ranger - Ace Atkins [30]
Quinn paid his tab and walked back out into the cold. The morning light shone hard and bright white across the blacktop.
He walked the rows again. A couple trucks pulled away, leaving only a handful, and it seemed to him that the night’s action had probably picked up and left. Sunday, even for some hard-up truckers, wasn’t the best time to get laid in Mississippi.
About halfway back to his car, he saw her.
At first he thought it was Kayla again. The girl using the pay phone was dressed in a jeans skirt and T-shirt, some black tights the only thing protecting her from the cold. She wore big black oversized glasses, but as he approached he saw it was the girl from the other night that he damn near hit on Highway 9.
She turned to him and then back to the corner of the pay phone, the wall scrawled with keyed crude drawings and biblical passages. He tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned and said, “What?”
He stood there. She hung up, the change rattling down in the return.
She scooped it out quickly.
“How you making out?”
“Fine,” she said, hugging her arms up over her extended belly.
“You look cold,” Quinn said. “Can I buy you something to eat?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m with a friend.”
“Jody?”
She shook her head. “Another friend.”
“You look like you’re getting close,” Quinn said.
She nodded.
“Don’t you think you better put on a jacket?”
“I can round up the money for that motel room,” she said, shifting from leg to leg in the cold wind.
“Don’t worry about it.”
She nodded and turned back to the glass door of the truck stop. Quinn watched her move to a back booth, removing the glasses and showing off a nasty black eye. A waitress put a menu in her hands, the girl folding the glasses and then unfolding them, placing them back on like blinders. Quinn walked back inside and went to her table. He didn’t say anything but leaned down and wrote out Luke Stevens’s cell phone number on the back of a book of matches. Underneath he wrote QUINN and his cell number.
She looked at him and frowned, leaning into an open hand propped on an elbow. She didn’t make a move to pick up the matchbook.
“This doc is a friend of mine,” he said. “You get that baby checked out. I’ll make sure it’s paid for.”
“I don’t know you.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Quinn said. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“Not really.”
“My name and number is written there, too.”
“Why are you doing this? You want somethin’?”
“Don’t be so tough that it makes you stupid.”
“You go to hell.”
Quinn tipped the edge of his baseball cap and left.
He sat in the cab of his truck for a long while, getting a nice view into the diner, the place like the inside of a fish tank. The girl sat alone, drinking a Coke, until a man entered from a side door and took a seat across from her. He was a decent bit older—or looked older—with a shaved head lined with black stubble, the same length as the hairs under his nose and on his chin. He had a lit cigarette in hand and kept his arm around the back of the booth while he made rapid, wild gestures and pointed. The girl just looked down at the tabletop, reaching for some sugar and putting it into her glass, finding some kind of interest in the way it dissolved.
The man wore a sleeveless T-shirt, his arms thick with veins and muscle. Every few minutes he’d reach for his phone, talk for a bit, then slam it down. He kept picking it up, looking at the face of it, and typing on the keys.
He didn’t speak to the woman as he ate, and then he moved for the back door, Quinn cranking the engine and driving slow to the diesel pumps, where he saw the man, short but powerful-looking, approach a dually Chevy with the back window obscured by a large decal of an evil clown’s face.
Quinn kept driving to a decent vantage, no one even looking at his truck, and he killed the engine. The man leaned into the open window of the truck, revealing a .45 tucked into the back of his tight ragged jeans. When he turned back, he was still laughing, walking along with a rotten smile on