The Redeemers (28 page)

Tall and lean, old, gray crew-cutted Luther Varner leaned over the counter, packs and packs of cigarettes, custom knives, and ammunition stacked behind him. The tattooed skull jarhead popped from his veiny forearm, a long cigarette between his fingers. “Y’all been looking for Kyle Hazlewood and Mickey Walls?”

Quinn nodded. Boom sidled up to him, his hand filled with some beef jerky and carrying a Mountain Dew in the crook of his arm. He set it down for Varner to ring up. Varner, still leaning over the counter, nodded his head to the back door, toward the kitchen where Miss Peaches cooked. If you lived in the north part of the county, Varner’s was the last stop for supplies. A modern general store with an ICEE machine and two fancy coffeemakers that could make up the worst shit in north Mississippi.

“Can I ask what y’all are doing?” Varner said.

“Thinking of refinishing the heart pine at the house,” Quinn said, smiling.

“Bullshit,” Varner said. “Those two shitbirds are mixed up with this Cobb business.”

“Haven’t you heard,” Quinn said. “I’m no longer sheriff.”

“Yeah, I heard something like that,” Varner said. “But I’ll bet a hunnard dollars you still got a gun on your hip.”

Quinn smiled.

“That shit don’t go away,” he said. “Never does.”

“I’m asking around for a friend.”

“Sure,” Varner said, plugging the long cigarette in his mouth. “That’s good. Because Peaches won’t talk to no one else. Sure as shit not to some fat turd insurance adjuster.”

The old black woman was still frying chicken in back of the store. She lifted up some brown chicken parts from the fryer and dumped them into an aluminum tray lined with paper towels. A big stainless steel bowl of coleslaw sat on a nearby table, a wooden spoon stuck in the center where she’d been stirring. Peaches was a big woman, with thick arms and chest, a plump face and gold glasses. As usual when she worked in the Quick Stop kitchen, she wore a red apron and a plastic cap over her hair.

After she put down the chicken, she walked over to Quinn and gave him a hug. “How your momma and them?”

“Good,” Quinn said. “Everyone’s fine. How about Bobby?”

“Just got him a job at FedEx,” she said. “Gonna be driving a truck over in Batesville. But he’ll get home twice a week. Got Mondays off. You want something to eat?”

“My mom’s making supper.”

“You saying your momma a better cook than me?” she said. “Don’t you mess with me, Quinn Colson. I remember when you, Boom, and Bobby was in kindergarten. Playing grab ass out by the lake. Shootin’ BB guns and raising hell.”

“You really want me to be full at Miss Jean’s house?”

Peaches smiled and picked up the tin of chicken, shaking it around on the paper towels to drain off the grease. “Luther tells me you been looking for Kyle Hazlewood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s that boy into?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Is this gonna get me into any trouble?” she said. “’Cause I don’t need no headaches right now. If it comes down to it, I’ll swear on it. But I watch my grandbabies after school. And if someone was to—”

“Miss Peaches, I’m not sheriff anymore,” he said. “Just trying to make sense of something.”

She nodded and grabbed a paper plate. She added a fried breast and some coleslaw, a handful of hot French fries. Boom had followed him into the back and Peaches didn’t say a word to him as she made the same plate, only with more piled high, and handed it to him. “Y’all growing boys,” she said. “Don’t you dare tell Jean.”

Boom took the plate to a little table by the fryers and started to eat.

“You talking about last night?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I seen Kyle outside the fire station in the middle of the night,” she said. “He was loading up something into his truck. I didn’t stop, but I waved at him. He just stared at me as I passed. Like he was mad as hell about something.”

“You sure it was him?” Quinn said.

Peaches just stared long and hard at him. “I don’t know what that boy was doing, but I knew it didn’t look right.”

“About what time was this, ma’am?”

•   •   •

C
hase Clanton tilted back the bottle of Rebel Yell and took him a good, long swallow. Wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve, he passed it back to Mickey Walls. The man drank most of the whiskey, relaxing in the back of the party van like they was old buds. Uncle Peewee swiveled to and fro in his captain’s chair, trying to make plans, hatch ideas, on how this new deal was going to work out. “I ain’t trying to rob you, Mr. Walls,” Peewee said. “I’m just trying to fill my belly, make things right.”

“Shit,” Mickey said. “Just like every other son of a bitch in the world. ‘Make things right.’ You know what? I don’t even give a good goddamn for the money. You know why I wanted to hit Cobb’s house?”

“’Cause he got a million dollars?” Chase said. “And watches, guns, and shit?”

“Shhh,” Peewee said. “Let him talk.”

“The man rebuked my goddamn honor,” Mickey said. “Here. Pass me back that bottle, kid. Shit. That’s some rough stuff.”

“You don’t like it,” Chase said, “then don’t drink it.”

Chase had been the one to buy the bottle and offer to share it. The man acting like it was his. Chase still didn’t understand why he and Uncle Peewee had to drive all the way down to Columbus for them to meet. If the man wanted them books that goddamn bad, maybe he should’ve driven his ass over to Gordo. He wasn’t real wild about Peewee taking the wheel after downing a half bottle.

“I’ll give you another ten thousand,” Mickey said. “How’s that sound?”

“Fifty sounds better,” Peewee said, not skipping a beat.

Mickey tilted back the whiskey and passed it on to Uncle Peewee. Peewee chugging that bottle, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, like he was drinking a pitcher of sweet tea.
Whew.

“OK,” Mickey said. “What the hell. Like I said, it ain’t about the money. I’m just trying to fix that son of a bitch for what he’s done.”

“What’d he do?” Peewee said, Chase not giving a good goddamn. He found a good spot to lay down in the van between the center seats and stared up at the roof. Uncle Peewee had pasted a bunch of
Playboy
centerfolds up there and then covered ’em up with an inch of shellac. The shellac had started to yellow and age, but you still could get a nice look at all those women with big hair and titties. One hell of a view.

“Y’all ever heard of reclaimed wood?”

No one said anything.

“Well, I got the idea a few years ago to start tearing down ole barns in the county that no one used anymore and selling the planks to rich folks up in Memphis,” Mickey said. “Me and my buddy Lee would strip the wood and then Larry would run it through at the mill. We got to be partners in the deal and were doing pretty good until me and Tonya started getting into it.”

“Who the hell’s Tonya?” Chase asked.

“My ex-wife.”

“The one he was screwing last night,” Peewee said. “He said she got big ole brown titties. I’d love to cover her ass in some butter spray. Haw, haw.”

Chase kept on looking up at all those California women he’d never meet, getting a little tickled about things being said, and started to laugh. “Big ole brown titties,” he said. “What, is she Mexican?”

“Hell, no, she ain’t Mexican,” Mickey said. “I’m just saying me and Cobb had ourselves a partnership until he didn’t like me no more.”

“Why’d he sue you?” Peewee said.

“He accused me of cheating him and then got some goddamn CPA to root around in my asshole until he could make it so,” Mickey said. “He was a liar. The damn accountant was a liar. It was a fucking witch hunt. Cobb didn’t have no right to half the profits. He was only milling the timber. I was reclaiming the goddamn wood. I was transporting up to Memphis. I ran all the sales out of Walls Flooring. Half the installs I did myself.”

Peewee handed Mickey the bottle, knowing the man sure could use some whiskey. Uncle Peewee was wise like that. A damn born leader, not unlike Gene Stallings. Mickey took a big old swallow and then passed it on to Chase. Chase raised it up and drank, Rebel Yell screaming down his throat and into his belly. “Whew,” he said.

“You really think your boy is gonna crack?” Peewee said.

Mickey didn’t say anything, staring straight ahead into the dark parking lot of the Mickey D’s. Chase handed the old man the bottle to take another hit. Old Mickey Walls sure did look like shit warmed over, bad things that had happened, or might still happen, turning over in his mind.

“We can’t have the law after our ass,” Peewee said. “You can have them damn books. But I think we need to reconfigure our fucking situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, right now ain’t nobody ever heard of Peewee Sparks in Jericho, Mississippi, and I plan to keep it that way.”

“I ain’t saying shit,” Mickey said.

“I trust you and know you are a man of honor.” Peewee swiveled around a bit in the captain’s chair, scratching his chin. “But I would prefer to keep our secret among the folks in this here van.”

“Shit.” Mickey snorted, glass-eyed. “And just how the hell do you aim on doing that?”

25.

T
hey drove as they always did, Stagg in the passenger seat and the Trooper behind the wheel, running his cruiser upward toward ninety, then a hundred, as they headed south this time on Highway 45. The Trooper hadn’t said a goddamn word since the Rebel, listening to Stagg lay out what had been going on with Larry Cobb and who probably took those books with all those facts and figures. The Trooper shuffled in his seat, reached up for his dip cup, spit, and said, “People wondered how long it would take for you to fuck yourself, Mr. Stagg.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Things hadn’t been right since the storm,” the Trooper said. “You gotten sloppy.”

“Did you hear a fucking word I said?” Stagg said. “It was Larry Cobb that got us into the shitter. It’s his safe and his doings. I didn’t know he’d been keeping books on our deals.”

“But you suspected it,” the Trooper said, mashing the accelerator, moving up and around two pickup trucks, dark night flashing by the windows. “Reason you called me first off. If you hadn’t known, how come you hit the fire alarm?”

“I asked you to pass things on,” Stagg said. “I don’t want any more trouble. I want to make things right.”

“You brought Cobb into this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You vouched for him,” the Trooper said. “I was at that party at the man’s hunt lodge with the booze and cooze. You said Larry Cobb was a solid man and a fella we could all trust. You put your damn name on his. God damn it. Now you just might’ve fucked us all high and hard in the ass. Don’t you get it? Son of a bitch.”

“I never asked you to do nothing,” Stagg said. “Besides, I don’t ever recall you ever bein’ a part of our dealings.”

The Trooper nodded, spit in the cup, and took the cruiser on up to past a hundred. He reached down and fiddled with the heater, getting the air going hot and fast. Stagg feeling a little sick in his guts, reaching for the control to let down the window but finding it was stuck. The bastard noticed but didn’t say nothing, just kept on dodging around all those cars, taking them down, out of the bottom, and into the next county, big signs for the Choctaw bingo parlors and luxury hotels and casinos. The world of Chief Billy and Fannie Hathcock.

“Can you let down the fucking window?” Stagg said.

The Trooper hit the control, window sliding down, and Stagg could breathe again, fingering at the second-to-top button on his dress shirt. Man tries to do the right thing, notify the right folks, and then he gets treated like he’s the one who caused the mess. Ringold had given that Mickey Walls a long leash to fix it, but now Stagg wasn’t so sure. If he turned over the whole thing to this buzz-cut leather brain, Tibbehah County could become a goddamn bloody mess.

“Man drank a bottle of Vardaman’s finest hooch and then passed out on the toilet,” the Trooper said. “He’d left one of your girls tied to the bedpost. She nearly had to nibble off her foot like a trapped coon.”

“I never said the man had class,” Stagg said. “I said he could get things done. Get everyone paid. He could get the equipment, put together a nice deal for all of us.”

“God damn us.”

“Just pass on the message.”

“God damn you.”

“I’m not dealing with you anymore,” Stagg said. “Something’s broken in your goddamn head. You do know that? Don’t you ever speak to me like that.”

The Trooper spit one more time into the Styrofoam cup and then turned the wheel hard and fast to the right, hitting the brakes, spinning out, leaving smoking tire across Highway 45. A goddamn semi barreling down the road, horn blaring, nearly broadsiding the cruiser. Stagg gritted his teeth and was about to tear the Trooper a new asshole when the man pulled a sidearm and stuck it right into Stagg’s mouth.

“I don’t need no one’s brain splattered into my vehicle, Johnny,” the Trooper said, more cars zipping around the cruiser. Blue lights flashing in the fast lane where he’d idled the vehicle sideways. “But you better come through with this shit. Don’t you dare track mud into our fucking house. You ain’t nothing but country come to town.”

Stagg wanted to speak, but the barrel of the pistol was shoved deep into his throat. He could taste the blood from a cracked tooth.

“You understand the situation, Johnny Stagg?” the Trooper said. “We brought you in from the wild and you just shit all over the floor.”

The thickness and metallic taste of the pistol brought tears to Stagg’s eyes. He couldn’t breathe and knocked the man’s hand and the gun away.

Another eighteen-wheeler blew past, the Trooper’s breath coming out rough and asthmatic like a smoker, before he knocked the vehicle in gear, crossed over the grassy median, and sped on back to Jericho.

•   •   •

H
ow was supper?” Lillie asked.

“Country-fried steak with peas and greens,” Quinn said. “One of the few things little Jason won’t turn up his nose at. He sure hates her meat loaf.”

“Can I admit something?”

“Shoot.”