The Forsaken (33 page)

T
he nurse brought Johnny Stagg a cup of water with a straw and held it up to his mouth. An early gray light filled the hospital windows as she checked the monitors and took his temperature, plumping up his pillows and asking if he needed to take a pee-pee. He said he did but could use some help. The woman, who was black and stout, helped him throw his legs to the side of the bed and held him up while he walked. She was trying to be gentle, but the feeling of those busted ribs and that fractured leg bone brought tears to his eyes. He leaned on her to keep pressure off the left leg.

“You need to sit on the commode and make a deposit?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. She held him up as he did his business, the woman saying not to be shy, she’d seen it all. She walked back with him, supporting his weight, as he moved slow, with her helping him settle into the bed.

“You need something, Mr. Stagg, just press that red button,” she said. “You see it on the side? Yes, sir. Just press that button you need to go again. They’ll be around in a little while with breakfast.”

Stagg figured he could send Ringold to the Rebel for some good food, hopefully not having to stay here for long. He’d hire some help at the
house. And he’d hire more help for himself. If he could get a man like Ringold, he could get a dozen just like him.

He’d be rid of LeDoux and rid of Colson. He wished things could’ve been simpler, easier. But with the Mexes coming in, cutting off a man’s head and such, he needed violent men to do violent chores.

An orderly lay down a tray on the rolling table. She opened the cover as if revealing the finest meal ever made—some runny eggs and watery grits. The coffee was the color of river water. The orderly began to spoon up some egg and lift it to his mouth.

“Ma’am,” Stagg said. “I’m not hungry just now. Do you mind?”

The woman left and Stagg lay there, watching the morning news from Memphis, waiting to hear maybe some news about Craig Houston or the burning of those biker clubhouses. Surely Houston’s people were ready for more. But there was nothing, only talk about the rain coming in later that day and Grizzlies returning to top form.

Stagg thought of the humiliation of being beaten down by that biker and those Mexican boys. He recalled his daddy taking him behind the woodshed and taking a fat branch to his exposed backside, whipping him good until the welts began to bleed.

Stagg reached for the fork, hands shaking, having to bend his mouth down to the food because his shoulder and elbow weren’t working so good. He scooped up a little bit more the next time, some grits with eggs, and lifted it slightly higher. He chewed and swallowed, a little bit more light shining from outside that hospital window.

He’d just as soon burn down all of Jericho than surrender to them bikers and bean eaters.

•   •   •

Quinn, Lillie,
and the deputies
tried to make it to their vehicles but had to turn and run into the Born Losers clubhouse, toting the two bikers and Chains LeDoux, when the bullets started to fly. The bikers—Quinn
counting fifteen—had rode into that gravel space off Jericho Road and opened fire on the Big Green Machine and the two county patrol cars, automatic rifles busting up glass and sending rearview mirrors flying, tires flattening real quick.

Lillie was talking with dispatch, telling Mary Alice to get those troopers down here fast or she’d be cracking some fucking heads in Jackson when this thing was over.

LeDoux was laughing, where they’d tossed his ass by a ratty old pool table.

This wasn’t the scenario Quinn had planned. He’d readied for a tactical operation, quick and clean, getting LeDoux and getting back to Jericho. They were armed with handguns and shotguns, only Lillie bringing a rifle with her. She’d busted out a window facing the road, checking the situation through the scope. “I can get six of them easy,” Lillie said. “You think the DA in Oxford would say we were being impulsive?”

“I’ve gone past giving a shit about that,” Quinn said.

“Y’all are on our property,” LeDoux said. “Our land. Y’all are the invaders.”

His two boys had been hog-tied and left in the middle of the clubhouse. They hadn’t said a word or moved from where the deputies had left them.

Lillie steadied the weapon inside the clubhouse, the space smelling of stale cigarette smoke, urine, and vomit. The walls were adorned with pictures of girls in bikinis straddling Harleys and posters advertising beer. Above a makeshift bar was an old velvet painting of a black woman with enormous breasts lying sideways and smiling. It was a well-worn space that smelled and felt abandoned.

Lillie took the shot. And then three more.

“Ha!” she said, reloading.

“Hell is coming,” LeDoux said. “Hell is coming.”

Quinn twisted his shotgun to full choke. He had his Beretta 9 out on a beaten pool table, away from the windows, laying down an extra
magazine from his pant pocket. Dave and Art had set themselves up by the other window, just two industrial-glass panes facing the front. Kenny was now on the cell with Mary Alice while Ike McCaslin checked a back door and barricaded it by pushing over an old cigarette machine on its side. Dawn had come on and hard yellow light filled the road, the bikers finding cover out in the trees, parking their Harleys in the middle of the road to discourage anyone coming in or out.

Lillie took another shot.

Quinn saddled up next to her. From the window, he could see two bodies in the road.

She reloaded the rifle with bullets from her pocket. She handed her weapon to Quinn and he used the scope to see a bald-headed man with tattoos crawling near the cruisers, carrying an AR-15 and aiming it toward the clubhouse.

“They’re coming up through the tree line,” Lillie said. “I’ve got six of them behind your truck.”

“How bad’s my truck?”

“Boom is an artist,” Lillie said, “but he’s no magician.”

Quinn yelled for Art and Dave to get down just as glass shattered and Dave was thrown back, writhing on the floor, smearing the concrete with blood. Quinn ran for the deputy, ripping off his jacket and pressing it to the shoulder wound, as Lillie lifted up her weapon and fired six times.

The automatic weapon was silenced.

Kenny crawled to where Quinn lay with Dave flat on his back, white-faced. Quinn pressed hard on the wound, Kenny now telling Mary Alice they had an officer down and they needed medical help to roll with the cops coming over from Pontotoc and Lee County.

“How many shots you got left?” Quinn asked.

“Don’t ask,” Lillie said, “unless you want to walk out to the truck for my tac bag.”

“They get an inch closer and shoot them,” Quinn said. “Art?”

Art had his Glock leveled out the broken window, the cold air battering the ragged blinds against the wall. Nearby, Confederate and Nazi flags fluttered from the ceiling. Dave was clenching his jaw, body convulsing, breathing slowed.

“They’re inching around,” Art said. “Lillie?”

Lillie fired just once.

“Nope,” Art said. “That shit’s stopped.”

Dave was conscious but in shock, Quinn’s jacket was a bright red and he wished like hell he’d brought some QuikClot. The pressure, depending on the wound, would only help for so long.

Someone was pushing against the back door and hitting the cigarette machine. Ike McCaslin fired into the open space. The pushing stopped.

“How’d they know?” Lillie said. “How’d they fucking know?”

LeDoux was still laughing where they’d left him. Lillie told him to shut the fuck up or she’d kick him right in the throat. The other two boys were silent, tossed together in a trash pile by the bar. “Y’all are dead,” he said. “Don’t you see it?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lillie said, “or I’ll shoot your ass right now. You hear me?”

She turned the rifle on LeDoux to make her point. Quinn had made his way to the window, checking out the bikers hiding behind the county vehicles at the tree line. Dave was bleeding out on the floor while help from the other counties was a long time coming.

Quinn peered out again as four more shots cracked off, breaking out more glass.

He walked back to where Dave lay. Lillie exchanging more shots. Even if they could get most of them, it was a long walk back to Jericho. More wind whistled through the busted windows. The old clubhouse felt hollow.

“Sheriff!” a man yelled from out by his truck. “You hear me?”

Quinn looked back over to Lillie.

“They got you,” LeDoux said. “They fucking got you.”

Lillie walked up to LeDoux and kicked him hard in the side. He yelped but laughed at the same time.

Outside, beyond the vehicles, stood a muscular bald man with a tattooed face. He held an AR-15 aimed at the clubhouse. “Send out Chains,” he said, “and we won’t finish y’all off. Y’all got about sixty seconds.”

Quinn turned to Lillie and handed her the weapon. The pushing was starting again on the back door, the cigarette machine skidding on the dirty floor. The AR-15 scattered bullets across the front of the clubhouse. From the edge of the window, he could see four, five, eight men, at different vantage points.

God damn, everything was so quiet.

So quiet until they heard the revving of a big car engine rolling straight down dirt road. Quinn could just make out the early-morning light glimmering off the windshield as it barreled straight for the gauntlet of Harleys and the clubhouse. The engine gunned harder as it approached the bikes and ran right through them, scattering some and rolling over others. It was a big car, a black SUV. It skidded to a stop sideways and a figure in a black ski mask holding an automatic weapon similar to the bald man’s opened fire.

He shot several bikers, taking out the big man with the bald head first, the bald man firing off a couple shots before the bullets hit him in the center mass and left him sprawling. The other bikers behind the cruisers started to run instead of staying with their cover. More shots from the man in the mask and they were down, too.

Quinn ran to the back door to help Ike and Art move the cigarette machine. Lillie was now providing cover for the man in the ski mask, whoever he was, while Kenny kept the compress on Dave’s shoulder.

Art shot a skinny bearded man who raised a shotgun to them. As they rounded the corner of the clubhouse, there was a stillness on the lake. The
shooter ran back toward the black Suburban and drove off just as fast he’d ridden in. The ducks and geese that had scattered at the gunshots landed back on Choctaw Lake. The birds started chirping again.

The bikers who were left walked from the woods with hands raised. Quinn could hear an ambulance siren.

I
believe about everyone I know is pissed at me,” Quinn said five weeks later, sitting on the farmhouse porch with Ophelia Bundren. It was a warm morning, grass was turning green again, trees beginning to leaf, and out in the pasture three new calves had been born. They nudged up under their mothers, nursing, knee-deep in mud.

“I’m not pissed at you.”

“My momma won’t speak to me on account of me talking to my dad,” Quinn said. “Caddy and I have a strong difference of opinion on a great many things, most of all our dad. You know that’s why she moved out?”

“She moved out because she found a house to rent near The River,” Ophelia said, sitting on an old metal chair beside Quinn. “Y’all need your own lives. And privacy.”

They’d finished an early breakfast, blue and green Fiesta plates, cleaned of biscuits and country ham, sitting on top of an old whiskey barrel.

“I miss Jason.”

“I know you do,” Ophelia said, reaching out touching Quinn’s hand. “But he didn’t move to China. Y’all went fishing yesterday.”

“I still can’t believe Jean won’t talk to me,” Quinn said. “She knows how important it is to do this the right way.”

“It’s the honorable thing to do,” Ophelia said, “she understands that. She just doesn’t know why you’re taking your father.”

“But you do,” Quinn said, reaching for an Arturo Fuente and getting it going with the stainless Zippo, clicking it closed. It would be his last smoke for a bit, a long time on the road ahead, eleven hours’ straight drive to the long-dead soldier’s hometown in Statesville, North Carolina. There would be a proper burial there. He’d been Army, 196th Infantry, a sergeant like Quinn. Quinn and Ophelia had talked a while about the man, what they knew, and some about how he’d died.

“Why’d he come to Jericho?”

“He’d met a woman,” Quinn said. “He’d been part of the last combat brigade to leave Vietnam and came home not the way he left. I’m not really clear on all he did, but I know from his family he saw a lot of action.”

“They seem like nice people,” Ophelia said. “When we got the dental records match, I was on the phone with his sister for nearly an hour. His parents are dead. The siblings lost touch with him for nearly two years before he wound up here. He just kind of roamed the country, I guess.”

“They invited us to the funeral.”

“Do they know about your father, his connection to all this?”

Quinn shook his head, ashed his cigar, looked out in the greening pasture, listening to the birds and the cow gently moaning out toward the creek. “But he wants to tell them,” Quinn said. “It’s important to him. He needs it.”

“Your momma said he’ll take off before the trial,” Ophelia said, squeezing Quinn’s hand again. She was wearing one of his old gray Army T-shirts, her bare legs pushed up under the shirt and against her chest.

“Jean and I have some strong opinions on that,” Quinn said. “She always gave me the simple explanation of why he left. Turns out that wasn’t true. It was a hell of a lot more complicated.”

“But he could have come back,” Ophelia said. “LeDoux’s been in jail for twenty years.”

“It’s a long way to North Carolina and back. Plenty of time to hear his side.”

“So you’ll give him a chance?” Ophelia asked. She smiled at him, looking hopeful and young with no makeup, hair in a ponytail. She looked all of eighteen, not a woman who exhumed bodies and X-rayed skulls and dealt with the dead on a daily basis and really enjoyed her work.

“I appreciate you,” Quinn said. “You did good.”

“You, too.”

“Does that mean I have your vote?” Quinn said. “Might be my only one.”

“How about we go back into the house and I’ll let you know.”

Quinn smiled, put down the smoldering cigar, and they walked back inside, leaving the front door wide open.

•   •   •

“I have
to admit
I’m getting a little tired of looking at pictures of killers and rapists every other day,” Diane Tull said, driving her old truck, windows down, engine knocking a little. Caddy Colson sat beside her, after making a run down to The River with five sacks of 13-13-13 fertilizer to jump-start their spring garden.

“Lillie said it might take a while,” Caddy said. “She said you’ve already looked at nearly a thousand.”

“Or more,” Diane said. “You know what it’s like to clutter up your mind with those folks?”

Caddy didn’t say anything. And just as soon as it was out of her mouth, Diane wished she hadn’t said it.

Caddy’s car had broken down, again, and she needed some help running a few errands, now wanting to go with Diane to the sheriff’s office. She said she’d like to offer some support, but Diane knew she just wanted to see Quinn, let him know all was well with Jason, their new home, and improvements out at the church.

“What if you never find out?”

“I’ve lived my life never letting that man take a day from me,” Diane said. “That won’t change. I think about Lori Stillwell every day. I don’t think about that man.”

Caddy pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office, Lillie waiting inside the conference room. She had several thick books out on the table. They looked old and well-worn. “I have some more photos on my laptop,” she said. “But these weren’t in the database. I got these from Alabama Department of Corrections.”

Diane took a deep breath, removed her purse from her shoulder, and sat at the table. Caddy asked Lillie if Quinn had been in yet.

“Haven’t seen him,” Lillie said. “We’re both working days, but he said he had some business needing tending to.”

Diane flipped through the book, page by page, looking at each photo, studying and dismissing them, one by one. She tried not to look at the list of convictions below each picture, as Lillie had sorted them by the most likely possibilites from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Similar crimes, similar assaults on young girls. My Lord, there were a lot.

“Have we exhausted Mississippi?” Diane said, brushing back that gray streak from her eyes.

“Yep,” Lillie said. “I think we flushed that toilet. And Louisiana, too. I would have thought for sure that this piece of shit would have floated upriver.”

Diane got through a dozen, two dozen, photos of many men, most of whom had been housed at Kilby Prison. Lillie brought her some coffee, Caddy sticking around, waiting for Quinn, talking in whispers about raising children, the new Walmart being built, and some kind of reality show they’d been watching. Diane drank the coffee and checked the time. Carl was running things at the Farm & Ranch, but she needed to get on soon. He wasn’t the best on the cash register.

She was halfway through the book, about to quit for the day, jumping
two pages ahead, but then something made her flip back. She looked at the mug shot of a man convicted and sentenced in 1980. There was something in the eyes and the self-satisfied grin. And he had those scarred marks on his face. She kept the page open, thinking back to Jericho Road and that slow-moving black Monte Carlo. The way he had snatched her hair, Lori’s weeping, being pushed to the ground. Humiliated. “Run,” the man had said. “Run.”

Lillie was standing over her shoulder. Caddy had walked off to talk to Mary Alice at the front desk.

“Look at that ugly son of a bitch,” Lillie said. “Jesus, I hate to put you through all this. That may be the ugliest one I’ve seen.”

She reached over Diane’s shoulder, Diane unable to take her eyes away from the photo, Lillie’s finger finding details of the man printed out on old-time typewriter. “Got burned up in a prison fire in ’83,” she said. “I bet it was another prisoner tossing gas on him in the cage. Damn, what a way to go.”

•   •   •

Quinn drove
north
on the Natchez Trace and stopped off at the green rolling mounds built by the Natives about a thousand years after Christ. He parked his truck, a loaner, as the Big Green Machine was still with Boom. It required a lot of body work, repainting, and a brand-new door on the passenger side. He got out and stretched, walking to the sheltered picnic tables looking out on the three mounds. The cigar he’d started that morning with Ophelia was in his pocket and he lit up, sitting there on top of the picnic table, staring out at the biggest of the mounds, knowing it had been some kind of ceremonial center or residence of someone of high rank in the tribe. He’d seen some artists’ renderings, way back when he was in school, of some kind of wooden hut perched up high, a holy man speaking to the masses.

Quinn blew out a long stream of smoke, thinking of the warriors back then, all that was left of them buried in those mounds. Long, pointed arrowheads and rocks used for killing. The leader had lived on the bodies of those men and their weapons, standing tall, offering up plans, ideas that would turn to shit in about five hundred years with the white man.

Quinn had smoked down to the cigar band when the big black Suburban drove up and parked beside his truck. The man who walked behind Stagg, Ringold, hopped out from behind the wheel and approached the picnic table. It was a soft, gray day. A light rain had fallen earlier and looked as if it would fall again. Everything was so bright and green, the air charged with gentle warmness that would last a couple months and then turn to an unbearable heat that would bake the streets of Jericho.

“There must’ve been some incredible battles,” Ringold said.

“You know it.”

“Never written,” he said, “never known. Just those old bones and bits of sharpened rock.”

Quinn nodded, tearing the band from the cigar, smoking it down to the nub. Ringold had on a black T-shirt, jeans, and desert boots. The completeness and color of his sleeve tattoos coming right to his wrists, hands clear as per Army regulation.

“You know what I have a hard time with?” Ringold said.

“Being around Stagg?”

“After the service,” he said, “I had a hell of a hard time slowing down.”

“You call what you do slowing down?” Quinn said. “Being a Fed isn’t exactly selling women’s shoes.”

“It ain’t jumping into Kandahar,” Ringold said.

“Nope.”

“You fucking Rangers,” Ringold said, “y’all would rather blow shit up and leave it all in pieces on the ground than try a little finesse.”

Quinn tossed down the cigar, stood, and ground it out with the toe of
his cowboy boot. “That what you were doing with those bikers out at Choctaw?”

“You complaining?”

“No, sir.”

Ringold smiled. “I wanted to let you know, all that shit with the local DA has gone away,” he said. “All charges have been dropped. AG has been informed of what you got facing you and some real problems within the highway patrol.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Stagg called it,” Ringold said. “I heard it straight from the hospital bed.”

Quinn nodded. “Appreciate you letting me know,” he said. “Can’t force this election, but we’ll see if I’m still around to do anything about it.”

“You’ll be around,” Ringold said, nodding. “Stagg thinks you’re in his pocket. He’s adding five grand to your reelection campaign.”

“Which I’ll send back,” Quinn said.

“Keep it,” Ringold said, his jaws clenched. Medium height, compact, and muscled. His bald head and black beard made him look like some kind of wild priest. “You want him to think he’s protected.”

Quinn nodded. They both turned and walked back to their vehicles. A light mist had started to fall. A thin white sun burned hot through some ragged clouds.

“We got a lot of work ahead,” Ringold said. “Stagg’s got some big plans for this county.”

Quinn nodded. He shook Ringold’s hand and the men drove off in opposite directions on the
Trace.

•   •   •

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