The Ranger - Ace Atkins [89]
“Keith Shackelford called for you.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“What happened?”
The kid told him. Quinn looked to Lena, seeing she’d been crying. She just sat on her ass in the cold, keeping the baby tight to her chest and inside her coat, her breath fogging up around her.
“You need to get that baby somewhere,” Lillie said. “It’s thirty degrees.”
“We ran out of gas,” the kid said.
“Where were you headed?” Quinn asked.
The kid shrugged.
“Where’s his body?”
“In the shitter.”
“Excuse me?” Quinn asked.
“I tried to get him cleaned up and he died on me in there,” the kid said. “I just propped him up on the commode, didn’t figure on staying till the car died on us. I kept it running so the baby would get some heat.”
“You get that baby inside.”
“That man in there told us we couldn’t hang about. He thought we might steal something while he was watching television. He figured right ’cause we needed some cheese crackers and milk.”
“Get that baby inside,” Quinn said, some force in it. “We’ll get the police down here.”
“Oh, hell no,” the kid said. “Those police in Tibbehah are crooked as hell.”
“Who are you anyway?” Lillie asked.
“People call me Ditto.”
“What’s your real name?”
The boy told her, and Lillie grabbed his arm and pulled him aside, telling him his short list of options. He nodded along with her till she let his arm go and he wandered back to Quinn. “You want to see him?”
“You see all this or he tell you?”
“I seen it.”
“You beat on him, too?”
“Oh, no, sir,” Ditto said. “No, sir. I tried and get him out. He wouldn’t go to a hospital, said he was fine.”
Quinn followed the boy back around the gas station, beyond the stacks of plastic crates and piles of bagged garbage waiting for pickup. The boy toed open the door and flicked on the lights, and they found Keith Shackelford seated on the toilet, shirt and pants bloody. His mouth was open and his eyes had been swollen shut. In a gesture of respect, the boy had placed that Dale Earnhardt cap atop Shackelford’s head.
“He don’t even look human.”
Quinn regarded the dead man in the filthy stall, floor coated in grime and piss, and lightly shut the stall door. “You don’t let anyone in here till I come back. You hear me?”
“You want me to stay here in the shitter with a dead man?”
“You stay here till I come back.”
Quinn ran outside, Lillie walked back out from inside the station, shaking her head, calling the attendant a certified moron. “She’s holding a child, for God’s sake.”
“You call Wesley?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry, Quinn. Jesus.”
“If Gowrie had been in jail, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You thought Shackelford had left the state.”
“That kid said he’d gone to visit an ex-girlfriend who was a pump for Gowrie. What a dumb shit.”
“Thirty degrees, and outside with a baby,” Lillie said. “Kids this dumb shouldn’t procreate.”
Quinn nodded. “I brought him back into this.”
“We both did.”
“They worked the shit out of him,” Quinn said. “Kid said Shackelford was beaten on until Gowrie got tired and winded. His face looks like hamburger. Man makes it through hell and back and gets into this.”
“You think they’ll testify?”
“Both of ’em are scared shitless.”
About that time, Quinn’s beaten truck cranked and worked into a wide U—turn, heading past the pumps and hitting Highway 45 south, driving hell-bound for nowhere. Lillie was already on the phone to the local sheriff as Quinn jogged to the road’s edge, seeing the silhouettes of Ditto and Lena, watching the red taillights of his truck disappear into the early morning.
30
Quinn had a hell of a breakfast a few hours later at the Fillin’ Station with his mother, country ham with eggs and grits, black coffee and orange juice on the side, although Jean Colson didn’t touch her plate. She drank coffee and picked at her eggs, passing a biscuit to Jason and leaning in every once in a while and asking, “How can you eat right now?