The Ranger - Ace Atkins [91]
“Call me if you find that girl,” Quinn said. “And my truck.”
“What are you driving now?”
“A pretty sweet black Camaro.”
Wesley nodded, eating more. His mouth too full to speak.
Ditto came back to the motel, counting out the sixty dollars he had left from selling Quinn’s hunting rifles to those blacks at the feed store. He’d thought about ditching the truck in a creek or river but didn’t have the heart and instead found an old barn, nearly toppling over from rot, where he slid her inside and left the keys in the ignition. It was nearly a three-mile walk back to the motel, them heading north instead of south like they had planned. They were holed up in a little town up in Yalobusha County called Water Valley.
Lena had drawn the curtains and passed out in bed with the baby. The baby still not having a name days after birth couldn’t be a good thing, but Ditto didn’t study on it too long. He was too busy thinking about how to make those sixty dollars last beyond sunset tomorrow.
He could sell the truck, but it would have to be to someone who didn’t care too much about registration and all that mess. He needed someone he could trust who wouldn’t be a good citizen and alert the law.
Ditto sat down at a little table in the dark, the heater blowing out air that smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke, and ate the last bit of the banana pudding and chicken they’d bought at the town’s Piggly Wiggly.
As long as he could get free from Gowrie, it was a good day for him.
He could find a job, didn’t matter what it was. Only reason he got mixed up with Gowrie’s boys was on account of that stretch at Parchman for burglary of a Goodyear store outside Tupelo. He’d been worried about finding a new set of mud tires for his truck and come out two months later with the Lee County judge sending him down to worry about getting cornholed by all them blacks. Not that he had a real hard time with niggers, he’d been around them his whole life. But a man who hadn’t spent time in a state facility had no way of knowing how you had to make your decision on where you stood, and if you just waited there in the middle of the road, you’d find yourself bleeding out your backside or dead. The Brotherhood was a family. You come in with them and you were inside an electrified fence of protection. Any man who judged him for that was an ignorant man at that.
He never wanted to be back there. But when you’re headed to the state line with your vehicle running on fumes, sometimes a little prayer wasn’t a bad thing.
He slid into bed, counting out the sixty dollars one more time for good measure and then turning to Lena and that sleeping baby, thinking her name was Joy because that was the word that had popped into his mind.
His kissed the girl on the forehead, and then the sleeping child with the sweetest breath he’d ever smelled, and wondered if this wasn’t the cleaning of things in his whole life.
You couldn’t be Ditto on everything.
Maybe now he’d come back with his own goddamn answer.
The men from Jackson arrived at the Tibbehah Sheriff’s Office at four p.m. in their brand-new state cars with handguns and rifles that shone fresh with oil and seemed to be lifted straight from the box. They dressed in civilian clothes, suits for investigators and jeans for those in narcotics, all of them wearing heavy hunting jackets bulging from their Kevlar vests. Wesley Ruth brought them all inside, where they talked in the interrogation room, a spot usually reserved for the coffeepot and open boxes of doughnuts, old file cabinets lining a wall, a stack of unsold calendars to raise money for the volunteer fire department.
“How many?” a gray-headed trooper asked.
“No more than twenty,” Wesley said. “I think it’s less.”
“All of ’em armed?” asked a younger narc guy, sporting a mustache and chewing gum.
“They got some shotguns and rifles,” Ruth said. “I believe they may have a couple assault weapons. There’s two entrances to where they live, some trailers down by Hell Creek that I’ll show you on the map. I’d say some