The Broken Places (16 page)

She wished her mother and Quinn could have come.
Why won’t they open their eyes?

She and Jason sat at the table with Jamey and Uncle Van and Bobby Pickens, one of the county supervisors, and a waitress from the Fillin’ Station who’d been seeing her uncle at the time he’d decided to kill himself. Black families and white families ate side by side, which wasn’t unusual at all for Jericho except at church time. Reaching out to the black community, many of them coming from the hardscrabble Sugar Ditch, was key for Jamey.

“Y’all have such a beautiful family,” said an old woman who had paused by the table, complimenting Jamey on the sermon. Caddy turned for a moment, not sure who she was talking about, and then her face colored when she realized the old woman was talking about the three of them. The woman with fuzzed cataract eyes placed her hands on Caddy and Jason’s shoulders, saying family was everything in this world.

Jamey looked up from his plate and thanked the old woman.

“Yes,” he said, winking at Caddy. “I do have a wonderful family.”

Caddy swallowed and looked back at her plate, holding tight to Jason’s knee under the table.

•   •   •

Lillie called Quinn
at the sheriff’s office.

She was headed on duty. Quinn was headed off.

“Can it wait?” Quinn said. “I heard about this thing called sleep and I’d love to try it out.”

“Not really,” she said. “Better tell Jean you won’t be making church, either. We got ourselves a first-class clusterfuck this morning.”

“I’ll make sure to use those exact words.”

Quinn was rolling onto Highway 9 five minutes later. He’d brought Hondo with him that morning, the dog’s head hanging out the window as Quinn crested a long, flat hill right where the road made a T with Horse Barn Road. Lillie’s Cherokee and the cruisers of Kenny and Ike McCaslin were parked up into a pasture set back from a large bass pond. Quinn turned onto a narrow dirt road leading up to the pond. As he drove closer he saw the large, mud-slimed truck and a yellow bulldozer at the pond’s edge.

Hondo jumped out the window as he slowed. A light warm wind blew over the water and deep into the rolling fields. Yellow light shot from the clouds and down onto the armored car with back doors wide open.

Lillie led him around the side of the truck to where a little skinny man with a bald head and tattoos lay dead on the ground. Hondo sniffed at him, and Quinn told him to back up. The man’s eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he were about to scream but was caught in the act. “You already call the techs in Batesville?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Got a couple more tracks running from here. Be careful, this road is a mess. Supposed to stay dry enough to make some molds. Maybe this sun will dry it out a bit. And we got some clear tracks closer to that CAT, look like some mud tires.”

Quinn twisted his head and studied the dead man’s face. He was as ugly in death as he’d probably been in life.

“Our boy from Parchman?” he said.

“Richard Green,” Lillie said. “Friends call him Dickie.”

“What’s that tat say?” Quinn said. “On his chest.”

“
CELTIC PRIDE
beside the swastika and another one that reads
PISS ON IT
.”

Quinn stepped back. “How long you think that Wells Fargo truck’s been down there?”

“Tennessee tag. I’m sure the bank noticed it missing. But I don’t recall a truck going missing here. Looks like a couple years before my time.”

Kenny and Ike McCaslin were unspooling some crime scene tape around the truck tracks and footprints on the muddy banks right by tracks for raccoons and deer. The breeze felt warm and sluggish. Overnight there had been a chill. A push and pull of currents that left you hot and cold within the same hour.

The bright light was gone for a moment and then back on them, shining in a long slanted curtain across the greening hills.

“I didn’t open the door,” Lillie said, “but I’m pretty sure we got the two guards still up front. The condition of the bodies doesn’t look pleasant. I’d just as soon have the state techs deal with that mess.”

“I’ll call the Marshals in Oxford,” Quinn said. “I’m sure they’d like to hear about the convicts.”

“You know they’ve got to be long gone now,” Lillie said. “Looks like they got what they came for.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re still not close,” Quinn said. “Anyone see or hear anything? Hell, that dozer must’ve made some noise. I wonder who owns it.”

“The land belongs to the Hardins,” Lillie said. “You call Mrs. Hardin. I’d just as soon not deal with her, too. She is batshit crazy. You remember when she thought some young man was looking into her windows? I still say it wasn’t worry, more of wishful thinking.”

“Go ahead and get as many photos as you can,” Quinn said. “Just in case we get more rain. I’ll head back and check in with the Marshals’ service and Wells Fargo. And I’ll tell Mrs. Hardin to call you at home if she has any questions.”

“Appreciate that,” Lillie said.

Quinn stood on a little hill as McCaslin and Kenny tied off the scene with some wooden stakes Kenny pulled out from the trunk of his cruiser. He whistled for Hondo, and the dog headed straight for Quinn’s truck. Lillie walked at Quinn’s side. “You leaving me here?”

“You’re in charge,” Quinn said. “Why? You think I could do better?”

“Nope.”

“That’s what I figured,” Quinn said. He opened the passenger door for Hondo and walked around to the driver’s. He wondered just when he might get some sleep, federal people coming to the town, state people coming to run the crime scene. He’d need to call Parchman, too, and update their superintendent.

He scratched Hondo’s head as the front of his truck bucked up and over a little hill, turning out from the Hardin property and heading back into Jericho.

Nothing like three bodies to really screw up a Sabbath.

Caddy ran into her house, wanting to change out of her new dress before she met up with Jason and Jean at the El Dorado for lunch. It never failed for her to spill some salsa or queso onto herself, and no matter the dry cleaning, it would never come out. She grabbed a pair of jeans and a fitted Dixie Chicks T-shirt, reaching under the bed for her buckskin boots. She’d been working so hard on making sure that first service had launched that her little house had become a mess. The living room still had open beer bottles and pizza boxes from Jamey’s rehearsal. The kitchen sink was overflowing with dishes. Even Jason’s room was nothing but a rat’s nest of tangled sheets and toys. As soon as they got back from the El Dorado, they’d get down to work. She’d get Jason to put away his toys while she got into the wash, thinking Jamey would probably want to cook out tonight, drink a beer and reflect on the big day.

She pulled her dress overhead and hung it up onto the oval mirror by the closet. She turned this way and that, examining her body, the embarrassment of a blue tattoo of an angel at the small of her back. She huffed and turned to grab her jeans when a man came from the closet at damn near full tilt and placed a big hand over her mouth and face and rushed her down onto the bed. She screamed and tore at him, but the man was large and heavy, red-bearded and muscle-bound, telling her to shut the hell up, that he had more important things on his mind than her nekkid bony ass.

She tried to fight more. He just held her there, as easy as he would a kitten or a puppy. His breath smelled of cigarettes and onions.

“I’ll stay here all day,” he said.

She bit at his hands.

He knocked her hard against the face. She could taste blood in her mouth, the one window of her bedroom half cracked, lace curtains flowing over the writing desk where Jamey wrote sermons.

Three steps, maybe four, was the closet. At the top of the closet was the gun.

“Listen,” he said. “Where’s your boy?”

She shook her head. Her mouth was awash with the blood.

The breeze rushed on into the window and cooled off the room. The smell of his breath and testosterone all over her. He had narrow eyes nearly yellow.

She shook her head some more.

“Where’s Dixon?” he said.

She lay still, body slowly starting to relax, knowing and feeling he hadn’t come for her but Jamey. The man was too calm, not even looking once at her in her bra and panties, not putting a hand on her except to pin her down and shut her mouth. The curtain fluttered over the writing desk and one of Jamey’s old Bibles.

“This ain’t no complicated deal,” the redheaded man said. “I want you to explain to Dixon that I want to see him. I gone to that church after it let out and he was gone. ’Least I got something to eat. Me and my buddy were pretty hungry.”

The man sat at the edge of the bed just as calm as you please, almost like they’d been lovers or friends, talking over old times. Just Caddy Colson in her underthings, not worried about nothing. He slowly removed his hand from her mouth. She tried to move upright, but he placed a rough hand onto her throat and eased her down against a pillow. “You sure are a wildcat,” he said. “How in the hell did you fall for a piece of shit like Jamey Dixon? You can do lots better.”

“Get your hands off me, or I’ll goddamn kill you.”

“Come on, baby,” Esau said. “Come on.”

And with those hot breathed words in her ear, she was eight years old again in another old barn in another part of the county. She was flat on her back, pinned down, unable to move, a heavy whiskered man pressing her against the rotted hay, telling her how pretty she was as he unbuckled his trousers and did his business. You press it hard from your mind and try to fill it with other things, but he and that man from all those years ago were made of the same stuff. “I’ll goddamn kill you.”

“That’s fine,” Esau said. “That’s fine. But before you do, I want you to tell Jamey Dixon that Esau is coming for him. He wants what’s rightly his and what he’s had stoled from him. You tell him that?”

“He didn’t take nothing from you.”

“Ask Dixon,” Esau said, grinning. “We want what’s ours, and we coming for it tonight. If he runs, we will follow him to goddamn China. He calls the law, and they get us, we give up all his rotten shit and that pardon’ll be worth as much as yesterday’s toilet paper.”

“Get your hands off my neck.”

The man called Esau did. He stood up from the bed; a large pistol hung in his leather belt. He looked her over as she reached for a T-shirt and pulled it on, eyeing him walking back, trying to find a way to get around him and get that gun. She could end it right here. She’d kill him just the same as Quinn had killed that diseased man all those years ago. She and Quinn were the same. They could kill if things came down to that sort of situation.

Caddy spit on the floor. “You mind if I get my pants?”

“Right there on the bed, doll.”

“I need a pair in the closet.”

Esau looked her up and down, thinking on it, and then finally nodded and stepped back. Caddy walked to the sliding door, calmly went through some hanging clothes as if deciding, and then ever-so-gently slid her hand up to the top shelf, knowing she’d loaded at least three shells in the chamber. She knew she had it set and ready and all she’d have to do is point, pull, and be done with it. The hell of it would be cleaning up after.

The big hand was on her wrist, yanking her backward, backhanding her down to the bed.

He pulled the 12-gauge, checked the breech, and then slammed it shut.

“Been needing one of these for what we about to do,” he said. “Tell your boy he got till nightfall. We’ll come to the church. He’ll bring our cut of the money. He does what we say and he’ll never see us again. Y’all be drinking fruit punch and singing hymns until Judgment Day. You tell him.”

She nodded.

“What’s your name, girl?” Esau said.

She shook her head.

“Afraid to say it.”

“Caddy.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “OK, Miss Caddy. Let’s be friends. You sure as hell don’t want me to have to come back and truly make a real fucking mess of your world. Let’s make this nice and clean.”

Caddy nodded. The room felt hollow and silent and cold. His boots were heavy on the old pine floor as he took the shotgun and moved under the fluttering curtains, fleeing the room like a teenage boy at midnight.

She walked to the mirror. Her face was a goddamn mess.
How would she explain that to Jean? Or Quinn?

•   •   •

The U.S. Marshals were sitting
in Quinn’s office in less than two hours. Two men sent over from Oxford, but said they’d been just over in Lee County when they got the call. Apparently they’d had a pretty good sighting of Dickie Green at the Barnes Crossing Mall eating at the food court. Quinn told them he was pretty sure it hadn’t been Dickie Green, explaining details from what he’d seen out by the pond.

The Marshals’ names were Buster Wilson and Toby Sisk. Sisk was short and stocky and kept a neatly trimmed black mustache that influenced the way he spoke. Wilson was larger and kind of doughy, clean-shaven, with saggy skin and windblown hair. Sisk took the lead, spitting some snuff into a foam cup as they discussed Esau Davis and the man named Joseph “Bones” Magee.