The Broken Places by Ace Atkins Read Free Book Online

father to Jason.
    “I’m sorry I couldn’t make dinner,” Jamey said.
    “Were you really working?”
    Jamey was quiet. His arms held her close and she could smell the nicotine and Lava soap on his fingertips. “No.”
    “My family will come around.”
    “At least your mother now says two words to me.”
    “She likes you.”
    “But Jason still doesn’t feel comfortable unless you’re there.”
    “Not true.”
    “He sees how Quinn reacts to me, and he follows his lead.”
    “Quinn has been lied to,” Caddy said. “There is still a part of him that can’t accept that our uncle was corrupt as hell, no matter that he found the proof. And if Uncle Hamp helped out some drug dealers, he sure would set up a man like you.”
    “He’d been wanting to for a long while.”
    The rain on the roof was so comforting. The gentle shift of oak leaves, winds through the blood-red azaleas by her bedroom window. “I’m so sorry,” Caddy said. “Did I ever tell you that? You don’t ever seem to take notice of the way people act around you, good or bad. You just remain yourself. How in the world do you do that?”
    “I may have talked a few times about this guy Jesus.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Caddy said. “I’m so very sorry that happened to you.”
    Jamey maneuvered off his back, propped himself on his elbow, and ran his middle finger between her breasts and down along her ribs. Her skin contracted with goose bumps. “I don’t care what people say,” he said. “I’m where I want to be. This is the place.”
    The wind rattled the tin roof and the rain fell harder against the glass. Caddy pulled him in closer. “Where do we go from here?” Caddy said. The words fell from her mouth, escaping thoughts she had held close.
    “We start over.”
    “For how long?” she asked.
    Jamey sang a few lines from “When My Last Song Is Sung.” His voice was deep and weathered and earnest. Caddy laughed. “Just like Haggard.”
    •   •   •
    Quinn got the call from dispatch to meet Kenny out on County Road 381. He’d barely climbed from his truck when Mrs. King came out into the dark, garden hoe in hand, held like a royal staff. Kenny nodded in agreement as she explained she’d heard one of her dogs barking and came out to find a fella tossing turnips into the bed of his pickup truck. When she yelled for him to stop, he jumped in the truck and nearly took out one of her pecan trees.
    “How many you think he stole, ma’am?” Quinn asked.
    “You the sheriff?” asked the old woman. She was still in her nightgown, hair in a pink shower cap.
    “I am.”
    “I knew your uncle real well,” she said. “Me and him went to school together before they built the new high school. We just had one big school for everyone in Jericho. That would’ve been back in 1953. Everybody loved Hamp. Respected him. Went off to Korea.”
    “Yep.”
    “And now you’ve taken over?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “How is Hamp doing?”
    “Not good.”
    The old woman studied Quinn’s face.
    “He died.” Quinn decided not to explain that his uncle had shot himself with a .44 out of self-pity and shame and for throwing in with the worst man in the state of Mississippi. If the woman didn’t know that already, or had forgotten, then what was the use explaining?
    “Sorry for your loss.”
    “And yours,” Quinn said.
    “Nobody died.”
    “You lost your turnips.”
    “Yes, sir,” the old woman said. “That son of a bitch.”
    Kenny shook his head, sure-footed and Barney Fife–serious about the whole thing. If he asked Quinn to dust for prints, Quinn decided right then and there to go straight home and pour himself a double Jack Daniel’s.
    “You recognize the vehicle, ma’am?” Kenny asked. He was a portly guy with a thick stomach and a mustache and goatee to hide a weak chin.
    “I didn’t. It was a white truck,” she said. To Quinn, “You know, you sure favor your uncle.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I get that a