The Ranger - Ace Atkins [63]
Goddamn, she hurt, but then she started to notice the soft light around the doc’s face, such a soap-opera hero, with nice clothes and smelling clean, not like those rats who hung out at the barn down the hill. Not like Jody. Two of them dumb girls were cooing and carrying on about something in one of them’s arms, and she couldn’t see it but it seemed to be bringing them a mess of pleasure. Goddamn, she hurt.
Lena tried to right herself in the bed, her legs feeling slick, body just filled with nothing but air. “I’m dying. I got things blowing up in me.”
She was alone and standing on a hill and looking down into a valley covered in nothing but corn and sunflowers in the wind. The hills had snow, and a man with no eyes held her hand. Blood rushed through her ears, sounding like a heartbeat. Her body felt hollow as she opened her eyes, the world coming back into focus.
“You want to hold her?” the doctor asked.
“What? Hold what?”
“Your daughter,” he said, his profile coming into view as he turned to her and handed her that little baby wrapped in a towel decorated with beer bottles and Mex hats. “That’s your baby.”
“I hate you, Charley Booth,” she said, her eyes closing again and then opening. “I hate you.”
“We need to get you out of here,” the doctor said, whispering into her ear where those tramps couldn’t hear.
Quinn saw Luke come outside a trailer, wiping blood off his hands with a dish towel and having some words with Gowrie in the cold. Gowrie smoked down a cigarette as he listened and then tossed it, growing wild-eyed and ranting. He snatched up Luke by the arm and screamed at him.
Luke pulled his arm away and reached for a cell phone in his pant pocket, yelling back at Gowrie before Gowrie took the phone and threw it as far as he could out into the woods.
Luke started to yell some more.
Gowrie pushed him flat on his ass and pulled a Glock from his branded belt, tapping the barrel into Luke’s forehead.
Luke calmed down.
He sat there, white dress shirt covered in blood, propped up on his elbows, and nodded. Gowrie grabbed him by the front of his shirt, yanked him to his feet, and opened the door, throwing Luke back inside the trailer.
Quinn readied himself, lowering the rifle and throwing it back over his shoulder with the sling, taking the .45 from his belt. He could hear the blood flush with excitement in his ears, feel a smile on his face. He’d seen all he needed.
He’d be an easy target running from the concealment of the woods to the trailer, about twenty meters, to get the girl and Luke and bring them all the way back to the county road where he’d parked the truck.
He looked across the way to Boom and nodded. Boom had his six.
The generators hummed up the ravine from the leaning mouth of that old barn, where two pit bulls were staked to chains. If they let the dogs loose on him, he’d have to kill them, but he hated to do that. He could take out an enemy with little remorse, but he figured a dog was a pawn in the situation.
Quinn reached into his pocket for an old nickel-plated Zippo and took the long way around to the barn, finding an easy trail, the dirt of it smooth and silent under his old Merrells. He moved up and over a grouping of trailers, hearing a television going, some men playing cards—spotting them through an open window that was letting out the stink of dope. All the men soft and lazy. Trash had been dumped down into a gulley, and it smelled like this is where they’d been dumping their shit, too.
The sky through the leafless trees turned a soft gray and blue. Quinn moved to the back of the barn in that first light, finding a soft, easy way, so quiet that the pit bulls didn’t even lift their heads. Two large Honda generators sat, thumping and shaking, among piles of gas canisters. In a mess of junk he spotted a cord of hemp rope and he cut off a solid two feet of it with his buck knife, opened the tank, dipped one end in like a wick, and slid the other end into the tank.
He lit the end and moved back out to the woods, taking the same path he’d walked before, listening to the men