The Ranger - Ace Atkins [60]
“Son of a bitch.”
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“I said come on.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“You can sleep on the way.”
Quinn was already halfway back to his truck. That big moon hung way out there over the fields, the dead cotton plants brushing against one another in the wind. Boom’s New Holland tractor sat parked under a crooked barn roof.
“Where we headed?” Boom called out from his doorway.
“Hunting,” Quinn said.
“Bullshit.”
“I need some help.”
“You mind me putting on my pants first?”
“I’d prefer it.”
They drove north through the heart of Carthage, nothing more than a defunct general store, a rotting building that had been a post office, and a corrugated-tin building that housed a volunteer fire department. Boom fed bullets into Quinn’s big-ass Colt Anaconda with incredible dexterity in that one hand and then loaded another deer rifle Quinn had brought from his uncle’s stash.
“How many guns?”
“I got my old .308. And my .45. Can you balance your rifle on a limb?”
“Yeah. But you got a plan?”
“Just want to look around is all,” Quinn said. “I promised.”
“Why’d Anna Lee come to you?”
“She blames me.”
“This would work better at night,” Boom said. “Sun will be rising soon.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Then how come you need me?”
“I need you to watch my six.”
“Sure,” Boom said, reaching into a red-and-black-checked coat with his hand for a cigarette, popping it in his mouth and then going for the lighter. “I can watch your ass. This big .44 is pretty sweet. I think I can handle that kick.”
“These folks are living on Mr. Daniels’s land,” Quinn said, hanging a left on County Road 29.
“Mr. Daniels’s been dead a long time,” Boom said, face lighting up in the glow of the cigarette. “His kids divided the land, logged it out.”
“Gowrie bought it?”
“I don’t know who owns what. Down that fire road, his people brought in a mess of trailers. They got signs up and all kind of shit. You got to walk to get down there.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Figure a mile. I don’t make a regular visit.”
“How come?”
“They got a sign that says they don’t appreciate people of color. You see?”
“Yeah, I saw the sign.” Quinn had half a cigar down in the tray. He reached for it, punching the lighter. “Nice.”
“How you know Luke’s down there?”
“I saw the girl with Gowrie at the truck stop. She’s broke, and I think she took up with his people.”
“Maybe you lookin’ for an excuse?”
“Maybe.”
“Good excuse.”
Quinn, having hung a left onto County Road 29, killed his lights, shut off his engine about two miles down and coasted to the bottom of the hill. He found a little patch of cleared land, where he parked behind a thick mess of privet bush and tangles of dead kudzu.
“Luke could still be deliverin’ that baby.”
“Sure.”
“But you want to call on ’em anyway.”
“I just want to look around,” Quinn said. “You don’t have to go.”
“You callin’ me a pussy?”
“I just said you didn’t have to go.”
“Goddamn. Are we friends or what?”
21
Rangers have always prided themselves on their skills in the woods. Although Quinn had never been on a single mission that wasn’t in the desert or up a mountain, he’d been trained for years at Fort Benning to move through the deep woods at night, up, down, and around those red clay hills of the Cole Range, being smoked to shit by his instructors until they damn near killed him. He’d marched the range so many times by himself or with his platoon that he could move blindfolded, feeling each twig and branch, moving from tree to tree, always forward, always toward the objective, the SLLS still resonating in his brain. STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. SMELL. You do this a thousand times, a million times, as a Ranger, it becomes so commonplace that you stalk men and encampments as well as you breathe.
Behind him, Boom sounded like an elephant, hitting branches and tangles, but Quinn never thought for a moment they’d be heard. When they got close, he’d search for a decent vantage point, never asking Boom