The Ranger - Ace Atkins [97]
Quinn didn’t listen, coming from around the back of the Camaro and finding Gowrie and the skinny boy with the broken wrist threading through the two trucks. A third fella, fat and slow, with a bloodied hand and dead eyes, wearing a rotten smile, held a 12-gauge.
Quinn was unarmed, feeling like his pants were down.
He looked to Wesley. Wesley eyed him for a moment.
“Sorry, Quinn,” he said, spitting on the ground and giving Quinn his back. “I promised to keep the peace.”
“You son of a bitch” was all Quinn got out before Wesley joined the men, and Gowrie and the boys started shooting.
The fat boy unloaded with the 12-gauge, hitting Quinn hard with buckshot in the leg and ass, and Gowrie fired off a pistol, a bullet grazing his side. He fell ragged and hard on the gravel.
“Mornin’, soldier,” Gowrie said and laughed.
Quinn crawled behind the Camaro, the engine still running. He heard the men talking, Wesley saying something about keeping the deal, and Gowrie said, “You bet.”
“Go ahead and make it look real,” Wesley said. “Shoot for the calf or my ass. I brought this little .22.”
Quinn sat on his butt, leaning against the Camaro.
He looked around the edge of the muscle car and saw Wesley’s back, hand reaching out with a small .22 pistol to hand to the fat man.
Gowrie stood there with his jeans tucked into his boots, loosely holding a .45 auto and smiling. “You bet, boss.”
Gowrie lifted the gun and shot Wesley Ruth right in the head and heart with the .45, dropping the big ex–football player to the road.
“Where you at, soldier?” Gowrie said.
Quinn heard the men’s feet walking across the gravel, coming around the Camaro, Quinn wondering where Wesley had dropped his gun. He thought about approaching from the other side of the car, thinking maybe he could lift a gun from Wesley’s belt and sneak up on the men from behind. But even if he made it, all of them were armed, and he wouldn’t have time.
He searched out a tree line, maybe ten meters away, where all kinds of junk had been dropped off by lazy country folks. Old refrigerators and stoves, cans and bottles and toys, and deer skeletons left to rot, meat smelling sickly sweet.
They would hit him, but he could make it to some concealment, maybe lose them back in the woods.
Quinn ran for the forest and the dumping ground, feeling bullets pass his ear as shots zipped around him.
He kept moving. You always kept moving.
Another shot ripped through his back, his shoulder feeling as if it had cracked clean, and he fell down hard on his face, dragging himself through the heaped piles of rotten newspapers and deer guts, beer bottles and car parts. He backed himself behind an old stove, looking down the ridge through a head-high growth of newly planted pines.
He could maybe crawl his way through, make it back down to the county road by his uncle’s house and wait them out until he could find some help.
Gowrie whistled, and told his boys he’d seen Quinn run into all that shit yonder.
Quinn felt light-headed as he moved away from the stove, his leg covered in blood, thinking a femoral artery could have been hit, and in that case he was fucked. He ripped the arm off his shirt and twisted it tight around his thigh. His back was covered in blood, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about that. He couldn’t raise his left arm, but he could use his fingers.
In the field, they’d cut loose his uniform and get some QuikClot into that son of a bitch, that powdery shit saving his life at the Haditha Dam and again along a rocky ridge in the Arma Mountains.
This time, he didn’t have body armor or a weapon. You didn’t get a Purple Heart for dying in a junkyard.
He heard the fat man breathing before he heard his heavy walk. The skinny fella with the black eyes, still wearing a makeshift cast on his arm, walked in front of Quinn first, kicking at his bloody leg. The fat man followed, out of breath and sweating, mopping his face with his shirttail, showing his blubbery white belly.
“How’s it feel?” the fat man asked, unwrapping a stump