The Ranger Read Online Free Page B

workers looking to one another with little grins on their filthy faces.
    “I guess,” he said. “He’s still in jail, selling drugs to some black folks. Does that sound like your boyfriend, miss?”
    The men snickered like a bunch of kids.
     
     
    Lillie dropped Quinn back at the Traveler’s Rest, where he got in his old truck and drove toward the Fillin’ Station diner at the edge of the Square. A group of old farmers sat at a back table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking crops and local politics in a mixture of grunts and coughs. Many of them had mud and cow shit stuck to their rubber boots, and the texture of their skin was like parchment. They complained about cattle prices and the rain that had ruined the cotton crop. Quinn could see their battered pickups parked outside like horses tied to the post.
    The waitress—the older woman who’d accepted the flag from Hampton’s casket—kept refilling their coffee in thick mugs and shuffling back to the kitchen before bringing Quinn out a plate of country ham and eggs.
    Quinn introduced himself. She said her name was Mary.
    Mary was of medium height, medium weight, with pale blue eyes and hair dyed an unnatural brown. She looked like dozens of people he knew. About the only thing of note about her was the strong perfume she wore that cut through even the scent of bacon and cigarettes.
    “Your uncle kept newspaper clippings about you in his family Bible.”
    Quinn nodded and sliced off some of the thick, salty ham and placed it between a split biscuit.
    “You check on that dog of his?” she asked.
    “Didn’t know he had one.”
    “Dog’s name is Hondo,” she said. “Got one blue eye and one yellow.”
    “You want the dog?”
    “Me and Hamp were not cohabitating.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “Just figured you might want him.”
    “He’s a good dog,” she said. “I sure like that dog.”
    “I’ll keep an eye out.”
    “You want a refill?” She walked away, looking as if she might cry.
    Old photographs of Little League teams and old football champs, dead city leaders with their obits attached, and publicity photos of celebrities who’d once stumbled into Jericho hung on the old paneled wood. People his father would’ve known, most local country music singers or television anchormen. But he’d heard Johnny Cash had once stopped in town, back when the town diner had been on the Square, before the meeting spot became the Fillin’ Station. Quinn didn’t even realize he’d stood up as he searched for Cash’s photo, following that long wall of the town history, some of it his own: the story from the Memphis paper about the ten-year-old boy who’d survived two weeks alone in the woods after being separated during a hunt, the headline reading COUNTRY BOY DID SURVIVE. Quinn saw a younger version of himself standing between his father and his uncle. Uncle Hamp being the one who’d searched for him in what had seemed like a thousand miles of forest where Quinn had fished and hunted and made fires and for a long while thought the whole world had caved in on itself and this was all there was left. A second yellowed newspaper from 1990 read LOST LOCAL BOY FOUND.
    Mary returned and found a pack of cigarettes in her apron, quickly lighting one with a pink Bic. She waved the smoke out of the way and watched Quinn sit back down, having an almost motherly look about her as she saw him grip another ham biscuit. “You get his guns?”
    “Not yet.”
    “What about his .44?”
    “I imagine the sheriff’s office has that.”
    “Wish you’d get it melted. Would you do that for me?”
    “I will.”
    Mary looked over her shoulder, and the old men stared back at her, knowing she should head back to the kitchen and bring back their damn free coffee. But she finished the cigarette, seeming to not give a damn, her face seeming like it just might break but then suddenly finding composure.
    “You see this comin’?” Quinn asked.
    “No, sir, I did