The Ranger - Ace Atkins [80]
Half the group yelled and charged up the hill. A half-dozen more loud cracks from Boom’s Browning .308. That was a hell of a gun.
“You chickenshit motherfucker,” Gowrie said, screaming. “You shot me in the back.”
Three of his men had started to crawl through the dead leaves and muck toward him, the air cold and silent. He could see the hot breath of the men coming from the ground, each of them so damn easy to pick off that it wasn’t even worth it, served up on a platter in that kill zone. Two more shots from one of Gowrie’s boys, and a big fat plug of oak splintered by Quinn’s ear, sending him flat to the ground in a roll. More shots. Gowrie laughing and yelling for them to kill that son of a bitch.
“Come on out,” Gowrie said, yelling.
Quinn crawled on knees and elbows back behind a row of privet and dead kudzu and moved up and around the men. The bow didn’t weigh much more than three pounds, and he could crawl as he entered the tree line again, swallowed up into the cold and mottled darkness and light, seeing the back of Gowrie’s shaved head as the man screamed at his boys to keep going into the hills, keep shooting, kill the bastard.
The light flickered through the dead branches and onto the cold ground.
Quinn kept his breathing light, moving soft over branches and leaves, Gowrie making it so damn easy with all the noise, until Quinn was maybe twenty meters from him, watching the man aim his AK up the hill and yell for his boys, who’d gone over the crest and met Boom’s gun.
One yelled back that they couldn’t see the shooter.
“Who’s dead?” Gowrie said.
“Jessup’s shot. He’s bleeding bad.”
Down the hill, three of the men found the big old oak where Quinn had watched them, and they circled the ground with weapons raised, spotting his tracks in the mud. They kept moving past the old oaks and into the cleared ground toward the old house. Gowrie walked into the open ground, feeling Quinn had been flushed. When Gowrie turned, Quinn was on him, putting him onto the earth, facedown in the mud, his hand over Gowrie’s mouth, with a knee into the base of his neck, and whispering:
“Why’d you kill my uncle?”
“Fuck you.”
Quinn increased pressure on Gowrie’s neck, feeling the vertebrae stretch and crack. High on Gowrie’s shoulder, almost at the pit of his arm, the arrow had entered and stuck, the shaft still sticking out of him like a pin, Gowrie not being able to pull the hunting tip from his flesh.
Quinn grabbed it and turned, Gowrie screaming. Quinn kept his hand over his mouth, muffling the shouts.
He again asked him the question.
Gowrie’s face was hot and red, and pain tears streaked his filthy face. “I didn’t kill him.”
“You work for Stagg?”
“I work for myself.”
“You do business with Stagg.”
Gowrie tried to buck Quinn off, but Quinn had a tight hold of his throat, knee still in his back, holding that arrow like a handle, while Gowrie’s boys scattered and crept over woods that he and Boom had been hunting since they were boys, knowing every stone, every tree, every break in the land.
He heard feet behind him but without even turning said: “You kill him?”
“He’s not dead,” Boom said. “Shot him in the leg.”
“We don’t want to kill you pieces of shit,” Quinn said. “We want you gone. You leave here, and I won’t follow. You stick around town, and I’ll start blowing shit up. It doesn’t really matter to me.”
Gowrie was gasping with pain, and Quinn worried that he might pass out. He twisted the arrow a slight turn just to make sure he had his complete attention.
“I think Stagg lets you work here for a cut,” Quinn said. “You boys come down with an invitation from some folks in Memphis. Isn’t that right? You can do what you want in Tibbehah County and it doesn’t mean shit. That’s why y’all killed my uncle and Jill Bullard.”
“Get off me,” Gowrie said. “The sheriff killed the Bullard girl.”
Quinn looked back at Boom. Boom to Quinn.
“Say that again?”
“He shot her ’cause she wouldn’t shut the fuck up.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Kill me, then,” Gowrie said. “You the same as him.”
“You got two minutes to collect your men and