The Ranger Read Online Free

of darkness to take a job in Jericho on account of a mother dying of cancer.
    “I was sorry to hear about your mom.”
    “She suffered a long time,” Lillie said. “I got your letter.”
    “You want me to follow you?”
    “You ride with me,” Lillie said, smiling, as Quinn pulled into a plain white T-shirt and reached for a flannel shirt, buttoning up. “I’m supposed to be on duty, and if someone sees my car out here, someone is going to complain. And if someone complains—well, you’re the military guy. Shit rolls one way.”
    “Who’s in charge now?”
    “Wesley Ruth is acting sheriff.”
    “God help you.”
    “Amen.”
    “How ’bout some coffee?”
    “Dixie Gas opens in two hours.”
    “Couldn’t this have waited?”
    “Nope.” She shook her head and walked out, leaving the door wide open, crawling into the Jeep Cherokee marked TIBBEHAH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE to wait.

    The night flew past back roads and trailers and endless fields of harvested cotton, spindly and dry in the moonlight. The rain had let up, and steam rose from the fields like wispy phantoms. Lillie rolled down the windows, and Quinn could smell the damp earth and decaying crops, and all of it felt oddly comfortable in the cab. The scanner crackled while Lillie remained silent, one hand on the wheel while she took slow, gentler turns on country roads, breaking through patches of fog. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window.
    “Who’ve you seen?” she asked.
    “The Three Wise Men . . . My mother.”
    “I saw her this week. You knew she wouldn’t go to the service. She had it out with your uncle over Caddy’s baby. Hamp was an old man, and that kind of thing, the child being black, didn’t set too well with him. You know what your mother said?”
    “I can only guess.”
    “She said that Elvis Presley used to go to black dances down in the Delta and that he would’ve been a black man if he’d had a choice.”
    “Yep, that’s what she’d say.”
    “She say what happened to Caddy?”
    “She didn’t know.”
    “She’s in Memphis.”
    “I don’t want to know.”
    “Strung out.”
    “Not my concern.”
    “Jesus, Quinn. You sure grew hard.”
    “After a point, you have to give up on some people. People wear their own paths. Just where are you taking me?”
    “You know, a lot of folks want to see you,” she said, flicking the cigarette butt out into the night. “Boom didn’t mean to miss the funeral. He wanted you to know he had to attend to some personal issues. Between me and you, he’s having a mess of adjustment problems, and who can blame him after all he went through. But he’s going to be okay, I believe.”
    “Which arm did he lose?”
    “His right,” Lillie said. “You know, they gave him weapons training at Walter Reed to help him adjust. He can drive but won’t. For some reason he hates being behind the wheel.”
    They turned off 9W and onto a county road, taking a hard turn into a long valley filled with cows, grazing in the headlights, a long stretch of barbed wire on cut cedar. She headed west at the crossroads and shined her lights up onto the dark house. His uncle’s home was a two-story white farmhouse built in the 1890s by Quinn’s great-grandfather, a hardened farmer who’d once shot a man dead over ownership of a creek.
    “I loved your uncle.”
    “He knew you were too good for this place.”
    “He didn’t kill himself, Quinn.”
    “Oh, hell,” Quinn said. “Do you realize that every time someone sticks a gun in his mouth, someone doubts it? What’s the official version, ‘He was cleaning his weapon’? I knew a kid in basic who’d been in and out of juvie, obviously off his medication. He offed himself in a toilet stall. How many people clean their weapon sitting on the john? You don’t need to protect my feelings. I’m not religious. I don’t believe he’s burning in hell.”
    “Would you shut up long enough for me to explain?”
    Quinn shut up.
    “Johnny