The Ranger by Ace Atkins Page A

screen door slamming behind them.
    “No ideas on those shitbags tonight?”
    “The cattle rustlers? I’ll think on it.”
    “No offense,” Quinn said. “But you don’t seem to know a hell of a lot.”
    Wesley leaned on the door of his patrol car and nodded. “Oh, I know who they are. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to tell you. We got it, Ranger.”
    “Nice jacket.”
    Wesley looked down at the old letterman’s jacket and all the gold pins that covered the big T and smiled. “I earned this son of a bitch. And hell, it was the first thing I could find when you woke me up. You mind if we both get some sleep?”
     
     
    Quinn got to sleep for ten minutes before he heard a car roll into the drive. He checked the window, seeing a sheriff ’s cruiser, thinking that Wesley had changed his mind.
    But when Quinn went to the door, he found Lillie Virgil, dressed in uniform and holding a flashlight up into his face.
    “I thought you were Wesley.”
    “Do I look like Wesley?”
    “Nope.”
    “I got a lead on the lot lizard. We gotta head up to Bruce. Are you sober?”
    “I’ve been drinking coffee for two hours.”
    “Good,” she said. “If we leave now, we can make it to church.”

9
    Bruce was about thirty minutes out of Jericho in the northern part of Calhoun County. A lumber mill dwarfed the small downtown—a road sign reading WELCOME TO BRUCE WHERE MONEY GROWS IN TREES—and even at dawn the metal buildings were lit up, with mountains of logs waiting in piles to be cut down into planks, plumes of steam rising up into the cold air. Lillie pulled into a service station and grabbed a couple more coffees; they’d arrived in town thirty minutes early and were supposed to see the minister at his church at seven. Quinn and Lillie sat in her Cherokee for several minutes, watching the logging trucks bumping their way down a gravel road and leaving the mill’s chain-link gates. The light turned from slate gray to a brilliant purple while Lillie, making a face at the weak coffee, confessed to not stepping foot in a church for ten years.
    “The only people who are brave enough to pay me a visit are the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said.
    Quinn blotted a napkin at the busted skin on his knuckles.
    “You should wrap that up,” she said.
    “I will when we get back,” he said. “Do those men sound familiar?”
    “We’ll look at some photo packs back in Jericho,” Lillie said.
    “Wesley said he knew ’em but won’t tell me.”
    “Wesley is often full of shit.”
    “You think Stagg sent ’em?”
    “What do you think?” Lillie started the cruiser, and they made their way through the old downtown, not all that different from Jericho, and along a small street to a Baptist church with a parking lot that was empty except for a Buick parked in a space reserved for the minister. After Lillie had left Quinn at his mother’s last night, she’d made some calls to people on the Calhoun County school board, finding two girls named Beccalynn younger than ten. She’d spoken to the first girl’s mother, finding the woman at home with three other children. The second call yielded the Bullard family, and a long pause when Lillie asked questions about young Beccalynn’s mother, whose real name, it turned out, was Jill. The man, a pastor, asked if they could meet in person.
    “How long has it been since her family saw her?” Quinn asked.
    “Three months,” Lillie said.
    “How long has their granddaughter been living with them?” Quinn asked.
    “More than a year.”
    They found Reverend Bullard in his office with an open door, the church offices smelling of musty old Bibles and cleaning supplies, that familiar church scent. He had them sit in a little grouping of four chairs, where Quinn assumed he did counseling. Lots of brochures on alcoholism and domestic violence on a table between them. He offered them coffee and they took it, pretty weak, but they couldn’t complain, waiting for him to come to the