The Ranger Read Online Free Page A

Stagg found the body,” she said. “You know he’s on the board of supervisors now?”
    Quinn didn’t speak. Johnny Stagg was the poster child for white trash who’d crawled their way out of the backwoods. The man, now in his fifties or sixties, started out working angles at a shithole retirement home, getting the elderly to sign away their family land for his comforting friendship. People say Stagg logged out half the county that way, raping the earth down to the soil and trying to make himself respectable in the process.
    Lillie said, “He called the funeral home to fetch the body.”
    “What else could you do?”
    “I saw your uncle. Crime scene was a mess with dumb shits tramping over everything. State people should’ve been brought in.”
    “What difference does it make?”
    “We won’t know now,” she said. “Wesley called it an accident and said any further questions would only sully Hamp’s reputation.”
    “Maybe he’s right.”
    “I found that .44 way out of reach, and an entry point that wouldn’t make sense to a blind man.”
    “You’re a loyal friend,” Quinn said. “But my uncle wasn’t Jesus Christ.”
    “Did I say that?”
    Lillie got out of the Cherokee, still looking tall and athletic in blue jeans and a slick brown sheriff’s office jacket. She moved up the steps, motioning at Quinn to come the hell on, opened a screen door, and then ripped through some crime-scene tape.
    “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Quinn said, not really sure he wanted to face that kitchen where the old man had stumbled with the .44 and contemplated the world being so damn unlivable that he’d just as soon check out. There would be reminders, as Quinn knew a person can hold a lot of blood, and that shit isn’t just a grease stain on this world.
    “Suit yourself,” she said, holding the key in the palm of her hand. “These are yours now.”
    “Come again?”
    “He left everything he owned to you. Didn’t your momma tell you?”
    Lillie Virgil handed Quinn the key. Quinn shook his head and stepped up to the front door.

3
    Lena hoped she’d found Jody when the trucker dropped her off at the pulp mill just outside the Jericho city limits. She’d met the old, gray-headed guy at the Rebel Truck Stop off Highway 45, where he’d said sure he’d be glad to take her to town, and the man had seemed all fatherly and simple till he began to massage her skinny knee between gearshifting. She began to talk of her morning sickness and diarrhea, and the knurled fingers moved, and he kept his eyes on the blacktop before letting her out. She walked the rest of the way, the walking keeping her focused and sane and of the right mind to get to Jody, to ask him why he’d left her like he did, promising to return when he made a little money and make right by her.
    The company road wound for a quarter mile, the air smelling rotten as an outhouse, till she found the office, a busted trailer up on concrete blocks. Wasn’t anyone there when she knocked, and she kept walking toward the corrugated-tin building and the smokestacks blowing out the rotten air. She used a red bandanna to cover her mouth, soon spotting three men on lunch break, sitting atop blocks and eating sacks of hamburgers from the Sonic Drive-In. They were skinny and wild-eyed and didn’t say anything to her, averting their eyes from her long legs and bulging stomach.
    “Y’all know a boy named Jody?”
    She described him, placing her hands on her hips.
    They shook their heads.
    “Heard he may have been working here.”
    She described him again right down to the long blond hair, jug ears, and pimples on his cheeks. She told them he had a tattoo on his left hand of a Chinese symbol of some sort.
    “There’s a boy started with us couple months back, but he don’t go by Jody.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Booth. Charley Booth.”
    “Is he here? Can I see him?”
    One of the men chewed his hamburger for a good long while before answering, the other