Free The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins Page B

open it back up. We’d save a ton of money buying our own fuel and servicing our own vehicles. I got three years of receipts to prove it.”
    “What’s this got to do with me?”
    Quinn kept walking into the open bay door of the old barn. Inside, the barn was deep-shadowed and colder. The wind kicked up the grit and dirt at the mouth’s edge, and you had to adjust your eyes to see in the deep corners. Chains hung from engine hoists, and large old metal barrels stood filled to the rim with filthy oil. Over an old workbench, someone had left a Playboy calendar from 1987, and the pages fluttered over sun-faded images of naked women. Boom walked to the bench and picked up a few tools with his good hand.
    “Need me a mechanic.”
    Boom laughed.
    “I’m serious,” Quinn said. “I met a guy at Camp Phoenix who had a prosthetic hand with fitted spaces for ratchets and screwdrivers. He said once he got used to it, he could work the same as before. You know, the VA has to pay for that.”
    “I don’t want no goddamn Edward Scissorhands. This won’t work.”
    “So you just want to keep pissin’ away your Guard check on shit whiskey and busting heads at the juke?”
    “Maybe I like bustin’ heads.”
    “What’s that pay?”
    “Jack shit.”
    “You want to keep bullshittin’ or do you want to get to work?”
    “I don’t need no fucking charity.”
    “Ain’t charity, Boom,” Quinn said. “It’s good ole-fashioned cronyism.”
    Boom nodded. He picked up a wrench in his good hand. The wind jangled the loose chains hanging from the ceiling. The oil stains splattered on the concrete floor were thick with fine gray dirt and leaves. Boom stayed in thought, standing there, chains turning.
    “You scared it just might work out?” Quinn said.
    Boom stayed silent for a moment, and then said, “Your truck does need work. You shoulda kept that Dodge Big Ram Stagg tried to give you.”
    “I keep hearin’ that,” Quinn said. “Can you do anything with that old Ford?”
    “Nope. But I know where you can get a better one cheap. F-250. Put on a roll bar and a winch. Paint it myself. How’s Army green sound?”
    Quinn walked up to his friend and offered his left hand.
    Boom took it.

12

    JOHNNY STAGG DROVE NORTH TO OXFORD SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND then west into the Delta, not talking much, only playing his easy-listening music, humming along to Pat Boone and Don Ho, as they crossed into the flat land of the Delta to a hunt club where they’d meet his people. Stagg never said names, not that Donnie had asked. He just talked about these people with a lot of respect and admiration. Stagg was like that, thinking that men who were whoremongers, gun dealers, and drug pushers could be admirable because it brought them nice clothes and big houses and hunt clubs in the Delta. Stagg didn’t have a conscience, believing a man’s wallet is all that separated him from others. A preacher might disagree, Stagg said, but in the end, money is what gets respect.
    “What’s in this for you, Johnny?” Donnie asked.
    “All I want is a finder’s fee,” Stagg said. “How’s forty percent sound?”
    “Twenty sounds better.”
    “Let’s say thirty, ’cause if not, it’s just chickenshit and not worth the time.”
    “Thirty,” Donnie said. “But Johnny, just give me your word that you won’t cornhole me. You do, and I swear I’ll come for you in the middle of the night.”
    Stagg smiled and kept on steering his big Cadillac as if he was steering a ship, cutting north on Highway 316 through Jonestown. The ragged old place looked like something out of a western movie except it was all black; the whole town made of clapboard and brick, broken windows, and ragged trailers. Rangy old black men in dirty T-shirts wandered out onto the stoop of a pool hall as they passed, holding cues and cheap whiskey bottles, eyeing Johnny Stagg’s El Dorado sailing through to Highway 61. Don Ho sang “My Little Grass Shack,” Johnny reaching down