The Ranger - Ace Atkins [45]
He didn’t bother to go after Kayla.
He knew the girl.
Caddy.
15
Sometime in the early morning on Monday, just as light was coming on, something woke Lena in that old trailer. She turned and saw the door was open, nothing in the frame, the girls gone now. She rolled back over, eyes closed, and then opened them to find the old man—Daddy Gowrie—standing over her, his pants unhitched to his bony knees, and saying, “Shh. Shhh.” Over and over.
Lena wanted to scream, but the sound caught down deep in her throat. She pressed herself against the mattress and dug her heels into the coils, trying to get free of the blankets. As she scooted back, she felt hard steel and reached down and found a pistol—guns seeming to grow like mushrooms around the trailer—and she pointed it right between the man’s legs, down to his flaccid place, and told him, without any kind of thought, that she’d be happy to remove what was troubling him.
He kept saying, “Shh. Shhh,” until another man rushed the door, and the old man nearly tripped over himself while he hitched up his pants and turned to run. Gowrie yelled, “Pa!,” and then, seeing him fiddling with his pants, Gowrie coldcocked the old man across the jaw, sending him down to his knees. Gowrie kicked his ribs twice so hard that Lena screamed, getting her breath back, as she steadied the gun in her hand.
Gowrie turned to her and held out his hand, his head wrapped in a red bandanna, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans, no shoes, making her know that he’d run from somewhere to find the situation.
“He’s a sick man,” Gowrie said. “Git.”
He kicked his father again, and the old man scrambled to his hands and feet and skittered out of the room and down through the open front door. Gowrie reached for a lighter on the kitchen counter, clicking flame to cigarette, and then looked back to Lena, studying her with more appreciation. The wind seemed to enter the room and pull out every breath, the whole space feeling more empty than anything she’d ever imagined.
“Next time, pull that trigger. That old man has had so many weapons aimed at him, I think he’s gotten used to it.”
The front door battered against the trailer wall in the cold morning wind. Gowrie stood there, smoking, as she lowered the gun. And in walked Ditto, out of breath and red-faced, his eyes flitting from Lena back to Gowrie, standing there with some measure of toughness but still too damn afraid to ask questions.
Quinn and Lillie were back down in Sugar Ditch searching for Keith Shackelford’s girlfriend, finding nothing new from Miss Williams but meeting a teenage boy in the Fast Stop who knew her. He said he’d seen her down at a yard sale a couple days back, and after getting a decent idea of where he was talking about, they piled back into the Jeep and headed deeper into the Ditch, finding an empty lot where a fat man was sitting in an easy chair. The fat man wore sunglasses in the weak winter sunshine, holding court by a camper behind an old pickup and two long tables filled with about anything you could imagine: old clothes, dishes, hats, CDs, microwave ovens, and a couple television sets. Lillie let Quinn do the talking this time, Quinn getting a feeling that Lillie was testing him to see if he could handle not being a hard-ass. He greeted the fat man and introduced himself, asking about Latecia.
“She bought two pairs of shoes for her kids.”
“You know where she lives or works?”
“Where she gonna work ’round here?”
“Who was she with?”
“Boy named Peanut.”
“You know where I can find Peanut?”
“What you want with Peanut?”
“We just want to talk to Latecia. She’s not in any trouble.”
“I heard that shit before.”
But the fat man told Quinn, with a grunt, not ever leaving the folding chair, and pointed them back the way they’d come, a block over from the Fast Stop, where they could find Peanut playing spades under an old pecan tree.
“Thanks,” Quinn said, offering his hand.
The man looked at his hand