The Ranger - Ace Atkins [43]
“You know a woman around here named Latecia?”
“I know four.”
“Last name is Young.”
Miss Williams shook her head and took a seat on a metal stool behind a glass case filled with overcooked chicken and pizza drying out under the heat lamps.
“She’s got a tattoo of a rose on her arm.”
The old woman nodded. “Seen her last week.”
“You know where she stays?”
“I cashed a check for her.”
“Got an address?”
“Sent that check to the bank.”
“You mind calling me if she comes back in?” Lillie asked.
“What’d she do?”
“Nothing. Trying to find her boyfriend, but I’d appreciate you not telling her that.”
Lillie handed her a business card, Miss Williams nodding and placing it on the lip of the cash register. She turned and looked up at Quinn for the first time and smiled, her right front tooth made of gold. “You Jason Colson’s boy.”
He looked at her.
“Your daddy was just plain crazy.”
“How’d you know?”
“You look just like him.”
“And how’d you know him?”
Miss Williams laughed. “Boy, I used to change your diapers.”
Just as they made it back to the Jericho city limits, Lillie had a call: a horse had escaped its fence and was running down the middle of Highway 9. She dropped Quinn off at the farm and sped off, lights flashing, toward the town Square and away. And Quinn was left there, shaking his head and smiling, deciding to drive back into town to see his mother, maybe stay the night.
Ten minutes later he walked up the driveway on Ithaca Road and spotted two shapes moving by the windows of the little ranch, his mother and some man he’d never met. The thought never occurring to him that she may have been dating, that there could be someone else she’d spent her time with in between taking care of Jason and going to church.
Quinn checked the time. Twenty-one hundred hours.
The man was tall, with a wide, full stomach, and wearing a baseball cap. His mother brought him a plate of pie and he smiled up at her. She took her place across from him, and they sat and ate, not seeming to say a word to each other.
Twenty-one hundred.
Quinn wondered if the action had started to heat up at the Rebel Truck Stop.
Quinn grabbed a cup of coffee at the diner and sat behind the wheel of his truck for a while. The coffee was terrible and weak, and reminded him of the chow hall at Benning. He’d learned to appreciate strong coffee out on maneuvers, grounds and all, and wished he had some now. But sometimes coffee is just warm company, especially when it’s cold with the heater off in your truck, and he sat there in a dark corner out by the gas tanks, watching the rows and rows of trucks, parking lights on, but otherwise pretty still.
His cell rang.
“Where are you?” Lillie asked.
He told her.
“Your mother’s worried.”
“Didn’t know I had a curfew.”
“You want me to join you?”
“Nah,” Quinn said. “I don’t think this is worth your time.”
“You looking for Kayla?”
“Yep.”
“Think she knows some more?”
“I do.”
“You want to call me if you get something?”
“You miss me?” Quinn asked.
Lillie hung up.
He spotted Kayla nearly an hour later, making her way between trucks, hopping up into cabs or craning her head up to windows, smiling and talking, and moving down the line with a few rejections. She had on tight white jeans and that same puffy pink coat and carried a child’s backpack over her shoulder. Quinn followed her, turning down a row of trucks and then losing her, crossing behind an eighteen-wheeler, chugging exhaust in the dark, and then coming up on her.
She was talking to a skinny man in a flannel shirt and ski hat. She handed him some cash and then turned and noticed Quinn. Quinn stood maybe ten yards from her and nodded back. The man looked back to Kayla and then to him.
She started to walk, and the man held her arm, pulling her back, and came toward Quinn.
“Who are you?”
“I want to see Kayla.”
“Why?”
“That’s between