The Ranger - Ace Atkins [99]
Brother Davis: “That feisty girl? I sure like a girl with spirit.”
Ditto nodded. Brother Davis licked his cracked lips.
“Y’all intimate? Did she get nekkid yet?”
“Can I just borrow a little?” Ditto said.
Brother Davis stood and closed his book, finding the stairs to his pulpit and leaning into the podium. A big cross fashioned from stripped and shellacked cedar beams hung from chains. “Let me see the girl.”
“Why?”
“She needs to be taught a lesson.”
“Good-bye, Brother,” Ditto said. “Good luck.”
“Just give me five minutes,” Brother Davis said, his dirty eyeglasses and golden smile catching in the weak movie-house light. Ditto thought how strange it was that the cross above him had been fashioned from fallen logs and chains from a hardware store. Didn’t look too fitting.
“Oh, shit,” the preacher said.
Ditto turned.
Up the aisle, a door with a diamond window was kicked open, and walking down the aisle was Gowrie himself, Ditto nearly shitting his drawers, but Gowrie walked right past him and approached the preacher standing in the pulpit. He raised a gun before the homemade cross.
Gowrie wore a ski hat, his eyes wide and electric on that ole meth.
“They got state people down here,” Brother Davis said. “They was like fire ants all over your place last night.”
“Where’s the money?”
“It ain’t ours.”
“You give it to Stagg?”
Brother Davis shook his head sadly. “Belongs to them boys in Memphis.”
“And you’re gonna let ’em have it?”
“Don’t have no choice.”
“Bullshit.”
Gowrie shot him in the shoulder and leg, the old man falling to the ground. Gowrie hopped up on the stage like a damn cat and started to kick the old man, asking him again where he’d put the goddamn money. He walked to the edge of the stage and unhitched the cross from the chains, it falling down near the preacher’s head.
“Them folks will kill me.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“It’s done.”
“You lyin’ shithole preacher, where’d you put the money? You lyin’ shithole preacher.”
The old man pointed with a bloody hand behind the curtain and said something about the cash being in a box of hymnals by the door. Gowrie squatted down and checked the box, counting handfuls of cash in his thick little hands.
“This all you got?”
“We never had no more.”
“You damn liar.”
Gowrie stood over the old man, kicking him in the head again and dragging his bloody ass to the cross.
Gowrie wrapped the old man in the chains and hoisted him into the rafters of the old movie house. Ditto breathed his first breath, thinking maybe the son of a bitch had forgotten about his presence.
“Come on, you little fat shit, and help me get what’s mine,” Gowrie said, tying the chain to the wall, leaving the gold-toothed preacher hanging and dropping blood to the wood stage and searching for just the right prayer to set himself loose.
Ditto scrambled to his feet and ran to follow, wiping his sweating hands on his pant leg, mouth trembling, and pissing a bit on himself.
“Where we headed?”
“Where Johnny Stagg got my goddamn money.”
Lena saw Gowrie park behind the movie house and come right through the front door. She slid down in the seat of the car, closing her eyes and shushing her baby, who’d taken that very moment to start wailing, now calling the baby Joy, something that Ditto had come up with, maybe the first sensible name she’d come across in some time.
Ditto inside with the preacher, Gowrie coming in the rear.
Not an ideal situation.
But the boy had left the motor running, and she could just slide on over and get as far gone from Jericho as a half tank could get her. Instead, she just waited there, closing her eyes and praying a bit, hoping the Lord would find her thoughts a lot stronger than Brother Davis’s. She waited to hear gunshots and prayed that Ditto would make it through. That little fat boy had more guts than any man she’d met in her life.
A good ten minutes passed. She heard gunshots.
She crawled behind the wheel, holding the baby in the passenger seat with her right hand, using a pillow from the motel to corral her on the seat. She knocked the car into gear and