The Ranger - Ace Atkins [42]
“Where’d your son serve?” Quinn asked.
“He was in the invasion of Iraq,” she said. “He carried a Rebel flag on his tank when it rolled into Baghdad. I have pictures.”
“Was Shackelford part of his unit?”
“You’d have to ask him,” Connie Price said. “I don’t exactly know when they met in the service.”
“I’m afraid he’s dead, too,” Lillie said.
“When?”
“Right after the fire.”
“That’s a lie,” Connie Price said. “He may not be much to look at, with those burn marks across half his face. But I just saw him last week.”
14
Lillie got an address on Shackelford from a previous arrest, and they found it strange that it was down in Sugar Ditch, the black district of the county. She called back to dispatch to verify, and apparently he’d been living with a black female who’d been arrested at the same time for possession of crack. The house wasn’t more than a shed painted a putrid green with a failing roof and asbestos siding. A few hard knocks on the door brought out a scared old black woman who found the law on her poorly screened-in porch. The house smelled of clean laundry, and the floorboards hummed with an unbalanced load. The old woman said she didn’t know the white man, had never met the white man, and didn’t want to meet him in the middle of the night. Lillie asked about his girlfriend, and she shook her head more, saying she’d only rented the house six months ago. The arrests had taken place two years ago.
“You take the east side of the street and I’ll take the west.”
“For what?” Quinn asked.
“Ask them if they’ve seen Shackelford or his girlfriend.”
Quinn nodded.
“And Quinn?”
He turned.
“Don’t act like a sergeant.”
“Roger that.”
Quinn found people at only two of the six houses where he knocked. One of them remembered the girl—named Latecia—but couldn’t recall ever seeing a white man in the neighborhood. Lillie pretty much found the same thing, only learning that Latecia left more than a year ago to move up to Chicago. One woman, she’d said, recalled a white man but never spoke to him.
They made their way back to the Jeep and climbed inside, Lillie calling back to night dispatch—dispatch being Mae, a portly country woman who’d worked for the county as long as Quinn could remember—to get her to run both names through the state system.
Lillie wheeled the truck around and saw a short black man carrying two armfuls of groceries under the streetlamps. She slowed to a stop but kept the engine running while she got out. Quinn stayed put, seeing her talking to the man but not hearing what she said. Lillie was smiling, and the man laughed, and then he said something to her and pointed back down the road and then again to the south.
Lillie climbed back behind the wheel.
Quinn waited.
“He said he’d seen Latecia last month at the Fast Stop.”
Quinn nodded.
Lillie turned north again, picking up the county road and heading through the slum district of burned-out trailers and houses rotting along the dry gulley that gave the neighborhood its name. During the summer after the rains, the smell of the sewage and garbage became so foul that it gave the air a kind of rotting sweetness.
Lillie punched the cigarette lighter and let down the window an inch.
“You mind if I ask you something?”
“You’re going to ask anyway.”
“Why’d you and Anna Lee break up?”
“We never really did.”
“Come back?”
“When I joined the Army, we made a promise we’d stick together,” he said. “But about six months in, the letters stopped coming, and she wouldn’t return my calls.”
“You didn’t want to know?”
“You can’t make someone love you,” Quinn said, watching the old houses and trailers converge at a corner grocery, with barred windows decorated with beer advertisements. They sold fried chicken and pizza, barbecue on Saturdays.
“I would’ve wanted an answer.”
“Never got one.”
“You want one now?”
“Not really.”
Lillie killed the engine.
“What if I said you were lying?”
“I’d say that’d be your right.”
He got out of the Jeep, Lillie trailing him as