The Ranger - Ace Atkins [77]
The little girl watched the whole thing half asleep, and cocked her head at one point, looking at Boom, and said, “Where’s your arm?”
He bent down and smiled at her. “I guess I forgot to put it on.”
The little girl, dressed in pink pajamas, grinned at him. “You shouldn’t do that.”
At the other trailers, folks were kicked to the floor and bound at the wrists with thick plastic binders Quinn had brought. There had been a scuffle with one skinny man, but Quinn had twisted his arm behind his back until a joint cracked and kicked him in the head. The man got real still after that and rolled over like a good dog, holding up his wrists, guessing they were cops.
Quinn and Boom never said any different.
They didn’t cover their faces. Quinn wanted them to see him. What would they report? Two men had broken into their trailers, robbed them of their meth stash, and took their cook pots and chemicals, guns and knives?
Rangers trained every day they weren’t on a mission. At Fort Benning, Quinn would send his platoon into the shoot houses—often with other soldiers sitting in chairs and tables—and they’d have to shoot all around any friendlies, dropping bad-guy targets, live ammo flying around them. You kicked in doors, you broke windows. You hit them hard and fast, and often no one could react in time. It was all the element of surprise, that damn fist knocking you in the gut before you could find your pants.
He missed the flash bangs and his Remington pump. But, what the hell. He could’ve cleared these rooms with a butter knife.
It was only at the last house that someone fired a gun at Boom, a fat kid with a shaved head sitting in a La—Z—Boy, smoking dope and holding a .38 straight at the one-armed black giant before him.
Quinn shot the hand with the weapon, the fat, bare-chested baby falling to the floor, searching for a lost thumb, blood across the white leather of his couch.
“Oh, shit,” Boom said, laughing.
They threw the boy a towel. The last time he’d seen the fat man, he’d been in the back of an empty cattle trailer, cocky and proud, as Quinn had just tossed them from his land.
“You tell Gowrie something?” Quinn said.
The boy’s face had turned gray. But he looked at Quinn and nodded, the dish towel soaked in blood, as he rocked back and forth, trying to find some kind of end to the pain and shock. He was crying and calling Boom a “no-’count nigger.”
“Tell him I’m waiting for him.”
“Shit,” the boy said, almost screaming. “You think he’s goin’ for that? Y’all are dead men.”
Boom patted the boy’s bald head like you would a dog and said, “Shut up, Porky, while my buddy puts these cuffs on you.”
Ditto shifted awake when he heard the cars sometime early in the morning. It was cold, and he slid into his mud boots and grabbed an old jacket and his gun—Gowrie telling the boys to always carry a weapon or he’d whip their ass—and scrambled down the wood porch of the trailer to the burning oil drum, where the boys always met. Gowrie was wild-eyed and mad as hell, not wearing a shirt, only jeans and boots, and screaming, wanting to know what the hell happened, people were supposed to be watching out instead of fiddling with their dicks.
Ditto knew they’d been hit.
All the screaming woke Lena, too, and Ditto saw her emerge from the trailer she’d been sharing with Charley and another couple boys. She stood on the railing in a puffy blue coat and watched them, listening to Gowrie scream and rant, until she rolled her eyes and went back inside and Charley took her place, wiping sleep from his eyes and stumbling down the long, endless hill, sliding down into Hell Creek. You could warm yourself by the fire and have a drink, while Gowrie said everyone needed to load up and prepare because this shit would not stand.
They’d had some kind of fun getting