Free The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins Page A

said.
    “I suppose you’ll have questions.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said. “Lots. Maybe I could buy you lunch.”
    “I’d like that.”
    “SO YOU BUY HER LUNCH?” Boom asked.
    “Bought her a hot dog at the Sonic.”
    “Bullshit,” Boom said. “You took her to the Sonic?”
    “Fillin’ Station.”
    “That place just as bad.”
    “They do a mean blue plate,” Quinn said. “Special was meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans for five bucks. Sweet tea and corn bread.”
    “You been in the Army too long,” Boom said. “Eatin’ MREs and shit on a shingle. Anything tastes good to you. She say she like it, she just bein’ nice.”
    “Maybe so.”
    “She really look that good?”
    “She did.”
    “Red hair and freckles. Nice body?”
    “Yep.”
    “You think she really a redhead?” Boom said, grinning a little.
    “Didn’t get that far,” Quinn said. “We were talking about Mexican drug gangs.”
    “You gonna try?”
    “Kept her card.”
    Quinn had picked up Boom at his shotgun shack out toward Drivers Flat. The house wasn’t much, just a ramshackle tin-roofed job built by his great-grandfather, one of the original black landowners in the county, but it was surrounded by five hundred acres of cotton. The cotton would be ready for the gin in a few weeks, and Boom would work the tractor till every plant was harvested, splitting his cut with his father and eight brothers and sisters. By the time it was all divided, he barely had enough to live.
    “Come out to my church Sunday and I’ll get you fed,” Boom said.
    “Or you could come to my mom’s house and get some, too. Without the three-hour service.”
    “White churches got an eye on the clock the whole time,” Boom said. “Your mom can cook, though.”
    “How about tonight?”
    “What’s for dinner?”
    “Does it matter?”
    Boom shook his head. “Where you taking me now?”
    “Got a proposition for you.”
    “I ain’t into that kinda shit, Quinn.”
    “Business proposition.”
    “OK.”
    They cut up off Highway 9 through more acres of cotton in the little bit of flat land that there was in Tibbehah County and up over the Black River bridge, afternoon light gold and thick on the sandbars and dying leaves. The sluggish water moved under extended limbs of fat oaks and on past a rusting collection of junked cars piled ten high in Mr. Hill’s pull-a-part junkyard. Quinn drove a mile or so east past the VFW Hall and turned south into some land that the county still owned. A sign reading county barn, with arrows hand-painted on scrap wood, showed the way a good half mile down a twisting dirt path. The truck bucked up and down off the potholes, Quinn straddling over a dead raccoon surrounded by vultures. The carrion eaters kicked up onto a cedar tree until they passed.
    “You ain’t takin’ me to no goddamn intervention,” Boom said, “are you? Bring my family out and my preacher and my tenth-grade teacher cryin’ and all that. I like to get fucked up. OK? I ain’t no crackhead. Me and you just got a little lit last week, you don’t see me callin’ up Miss Jean and your uncles to come out and lay hands on you and all that mess.”
    Quinn didn’t answer him, just slowed on the dirt path and turned up toward a big sheet-metal barn with two old gas pumps out front. A school bus with flat tires and three old sheriff’s cruisers up on blocks sat in a weedy parking lot. A light fall wind brushed over the tops of the weeds, the whole space still and quiet. Someone had built a fire pit in front of the school bus, the ground littered with liquor bottles and cigarette butts.
    “How much you payin’ to clean this shit up?” Boom said.
    “I’ll get some folks to help,” Quinn said. “But I need someone to run this place.”
    “Run what? This place is fucked up.”
    “Used to be the maintenance shed for all the county vehicles,” Quinn said. “I’m going to the Board of Supervisors next week to get them to