The Ranger - Ace Atkins [59]
Anna Lee drove over to the farm at four a.m.
Quinn hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking about Caddy, standing there pissed off in a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s outfit and a fake-fur coat, bragging about her new convertible and what a good mother she’d been. He sat outside on a rocking chair in the cold silence, covered in horse blankets and smoking a cigar. Hondo had wandered on in from the back field and now stood barking at Anna Lee’s car, hair raised, the night brisk and clear, with a moon so huge that it lit up the pasture and glowed off the tin roof of the barn.
Quinn’s aunt’s old laundry line stood bent and crooked on the hill like some kind of crazy Calvary.
Anna Lee stepped out in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knit hat and gloves, and made her way up to the screen door, spotting him sitting there in the dark, giving her a little start, before she stepped inside and sat down in a chair opposite him.
“You hear from Luke?”
She let out a breath and shook her head. Quinn could tell she’d been crying. Hondo sniffed her and sat back down.
“I called Wesley.”
“Wesley said he drove over to that compound, or whatever in the hell it is, and he wasn’t there. Said the girl wasn’t there, either.”
“You ask folks at the hospital?”
She used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. “No, Quinn. I didn’t think of that. Hell, I’ve been calling every thirty minutes.”
“Sorry,” Quinn said. “The girl needed to see a doctor. I didn’t see any harm in that.”
“I didn’t mean to jump your ass.”
“Old habits.” Quinn smiled at her.
She took off her hat and leaned forward in her chair. “If she’d gone into labor, Luke would’ve called an ambulance.”
“Maybe there wasn’t time.”
“If the delivery was rough, he’d need help.”
“You know, I got holed up in this Afghan village one time with two pregnant women, both going into labor from stress, thinking soldiers were there to kill everyone. I’ve never heard more screaming and pain in my life. We were blowing up a mess of ammo the Taliban had stashed and we could still hear those women.”
“Luke would’ve called.”
Quinn nodded. “Shit. Okay.”
She wiped her face and nose with the hat and blurted out a nervous laugh, nodding. Pulling her hair away from those wide brown eyes, she said, “You will?”
Quinn put his hand on her knee and smiled at her. “I’ll find him.”
Quinn found the back door to his mother’s house unlocked and slipped in again, just like he had as a teenager. She was asleep on the couch, same as she’d always been back then, an empty wineglass by the remote, the television showing the menu from a DVD of Hooper. His dad had worked on that film, jumping the car over that gorge, playing stunt driver for Burt Reynolds, several years before Quinn was even born. He remembered watching that movie and Billy Jack and a mess of Southern-chase drive-in movies, where his dad had stunted as moonshiners and hell-raisers, maybe the best time in Jason Colson’s whole sordid history.
Quinn left the television on and slipped back into his old bedroom, finding the old footlocker he’d kept as a boy, his grandfather’s old WWII issue, the key hidden behind an old photo of Anna Lee.
He turned the key and found everything as he’d left it six years ago: washed and dried hunting camos, so worn they felt soft to the touch, and an old pair of Merrell boots. He pulled out the gear, along with two double-edged knives, and then felt the sides for the loose board he’d fitted as a false bottom. Underneath, he found his dad’s Browning .308 hunting rifle, with a sling and four packs of a dozen bullets. He slipped all of them from the Styrofoam cases and into the pockets of his hunting jacket after he’d dressed.
He moved back out the way he’d come in and walked down Ithaca Road to his F-150 and cranked the ignition. It was nearly five a.m.
He called Anna Lee again.
She hadn’t heard from Luke.
Boom lived in an old shotgun shack at the edge of hundreds of acres of cotton farmed by his family for the last two generations. He didn’t come out for several minutes after