The Ranger - Ace Atkins [32]
“It was him.”
“What’d the other one look like? The one with the girl?”
Quinn gave a description of the sleeveless muscle shirt and the shaved head, the bad teeth and the .45. “And he had a tattoo of a shamrock on his neck. Must be Irish.”
“That or he’s in the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“That’s their symbol?”
“Yeah. The peace sign was taken.”
“Sound familiar?”
Boom nodded, adjusting his large weight in the cab of the truck, reaching down to roll back the seat and pulling at the seat belt with his left hand. “That motherfucker’s name is Gowrie. His people moved in here about two years ago. He is bad news, man. He’s plugged into the Memphis scene, cooks meth all around the county, and fucks with anyone who gets in his way.”
“Why do you think Wesley wouldn’t tell me that?”
“’Cause he got a little bit of sense,” Boom said. “And knows you.”
“So what’s in this for Johnny Stagg?”
“Here we go,” Boom said. “Fuckin’ with things. Quinn, you just can’t help but fuck with things.”
11
So he hit her. Lena wasn’t all that surprised by it after she spat in the man’s face, but she was surprised by him handing her a wad of twenty-dollar bills and saying for her to get cleaned up. He’d taken her back to where he lived, where they all lived, and she found out his name was Gowrie. She wasn’t sure if that was his first or last name or just something folks called him. He and his boys had five trailers laid down in this big gully wash off some back road north of Jericho. He’d told her they planned on getting Charley out real soon—Lena still getting used to folks calling him Charley, or sometimes Slim—and that if she’d just stay put, they’d take care of her. They were Charley’s family, and now that he’d planted his damn seed, they were Lena’s family, too. The smack in the face happened only once, when she got kind of hysterical. She said she’d sit in the car, and then he just started to drive, taking her up and around the Square, and then flat out hitting it on the main road north. She’d reached for the handle of that black Camaro and, the next thing she knew, she felt like she’d been kicked by a mule.
They had electricity out at the trailers, something she was surprised about because it was so far off the main road. But she heard the loud humming of generators and saw a mound of red gas cans by the mouth of a leaning barn. The trailers were all rusted and worn, looking like they’d been picked up and set down plenty, the steps fashioned out of scrap wood, some just loose bricks laid down in the mud. A long sluicing ravine fed into the mouth of the old barn, that looked like something that had been there for a hundred years, and by midday she found this was a place where the men, about fourteen or sixteen of them she was pretty sure, would gather. Some of them brought their women and children. Some were alone. Most of them smoked weed or chewed tobacco, circling around Gowrie as he spoke to them, Lena waiting for a sermon but instead learning of a world that was about to collapse in on itself due to all the Mexes and niggers in their midst. And if they didn’t get to work, get some money to buy more weapons, they’d be swept up in a darkness that would descend on the land like locusts.
Gowrie was geeked-the-fuck-out. She’d seen plenty of folks with their minds burning on that crank. But Gowrie was wild-eyed overtime. One time he just flat out kicked a boy from a folding chair when he thought the boy’s attention had wandered. It was that kind of speech, Gowrie walking and spilling out all matter of hateful things, wearing a T-shirt reading WHITE PRIDE, WORLDWIDE over a Celtic cross.
Lena grew restless in the chair, wanting to get up, her feet hurting, growing hungry, but afraid to move. The damn thing finally broke up after what seemed like forever, and trucks and four-wheelers started, Lena noticing more shithole trailers up into the scrub oak and pine. They lit a fire and gathered around it, passing around whiskey, and crank to snort. The day was cold but bright.
No one spoke to Lena for a while, and she was