The Ranger - Ace Atkins [49]
“How many kids?”
“I got a boy and a girl. The boy is six and the girl is eight.”
“Who’s got them now?”
“They with a foster family,” she said. “They father was worse than Keith. Used to beat me if I even thought about leaving. How you get into these things? I can’t think right for myself.”
“Did you know Jill Bullard?”
She shook her head, looking down at her untouched dinner.
“What about Keith and Jett Price? They spend a lot of time together?”
“Sure.”
“What’d they do?”
“Drank, smoked weed. Talked war and drank. Jett sold guns, I think. They used to sit around all day in their underwear and play video games till they’d get a call and git gone.”
“Where?”
She walked over to a chair where she’d hung her purse, reaching inside for a cell phone and scrolling through the numbers. She repeated the number to Quinn.
He memorized it.
“Don’t you tell him where you got this.”
“No, ma’am.”
“What’d he do now?”
“I don’t think that fire was an accident.”
“Lots of folks wouldn’t mind seein’ Keith dead.”
“Like who?”
“Are we finished? This may be shit, but it’s my goddamn dinner.”
Quinn called the number, and Keith Shackelford picked up on the first ring.
“Jett Price’s family wanted to check on you,” Quinn said. “Make sure you didn’t need any money.”
There was a long pause.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“I’m a friend of the family,” Quinn said. “The church took up a collection. But, sorry to bother you.”
“Hold up. Hold up. How much we talkin’, preacher man?”
Quinn picked up Lillie, and they drove northwest about thirty minutes into Webster County and the town of Eupora. There wasn’t much to Eupora besides a big gas station coupled with a McDonald’s, a run-down motel, a family fish buffet, and a pizza joint by the railroad tracks. The address Shackelford gave had them turning off Highway 9 onto a side street behind a state mental hospital.
Shackelford lived on one side of a tired old duplex, the other apartment looking abandoned, with a plywood-covered window and a screen door hanging loose from the frame. They passed the house once and then parked down the road, walking back, Lillie saying she wasn’t happy with how Quinn had set this up.
From across the street they could see in the apartment’s long shot of hallway, running from front door to back, a shadowed figure looking out from the frame.
“You see that?” Quinn asked.
“He see us?”
“I think he sees that uniform.”
“Son of a bitch.”
The shadow turned and darted full speed down the hallway, hitting that back door at a rush, and ran into a wide, open field chest-high with dead grass and junked cars. Quinn took off at a sprint, running around the house, spotting the figure, swallowed up by the field, moving in slow motion, feet weighed down.
Quinn caught him by the collar of his T-shirt and wrestled him down into the winter mud.
Keith Shackelford wasn’t much to look at, but most people in the gas-station restaurant couldn’t keep their eyes off him. Half his face had been ruined in the fire, with bright red skin and deep rubbery scars across his throat. Both his ears had burned to nubs, and he had no eyelashes or eyebrows to speak of. His hair had been burned away, although he kept a ball cap down over his eyes, black and red in honor of Dale Earnhardt. Quinn couldn’t figure out for the life of him how Keith Shackelford could then pop a cigarette in his mouth and click open the lighter.
“I appreciate you coming with us,” Lillie said.
“Didn’t know not coming was an option,” he said, turning his eyes toward Quinn.
“You had a choice,” Quinn said.
“So I guess there ain’t no donation plate.”
“Sorry about that,” Quinn said.
“And you ain’t no preacher.”
“Nope.”
They drank coffee in the rear corner of the little McDonald’s connected to the gas-station convenience store. Keith took a seat in the very back, eyes down, trying not to lift them off a paper cup that he didn’t touch.
“How well did you know Jill?” Quinn asked.
“How’d you find me?”
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged. “She was around. With Jett a lot. I think he liked her a hell of a lot