“It would be in y’all’s best interests.”

“How do you figure?” Quinn said, smoke filling the air.

“Mr. Stagg has a proposition.”

“Should have said it tonight,” Quinn said. “I don’t make deals in back of a jerk shack.”

“You’re a hard one, Ranger,” Ringold said. He grinned a little, wearing a snug-fit denim jacket, Carhartt khakis, and tan combat boots. He kept a chrome Sig Sauer on his belt, as was his right. There was no doubt the man had a permit, but he’d check anyway.

“Good night,” Quinn said.

“Which battalion?”

“Third Batt,” Quinn said. “Fort Benning.”

Ringold nodded. “I knew some of you,” he said. “You know Ricardo Perez?”

“I do,” Quinn said, hanging there, door open. Hondo moved up to the driver’s seat and stood there, poised, growling nice and low.

“I figured,” he said. “I knew him at Fort Bragg.”

Quinn nodded. Ringold waited a beat, like he wanted Quinn to ask him about Bragg and the Special Forces, but Quinn stayed silent, staring at him. Quinn had heard Ringold had been 82nd Airborne and then Special Forces, but him knowing Ricardo was the first proof of it. Ringold brought it up because he wanted Quinn to know who he was dealing with.

“Can I ask you something, Sheriff Colson?”

Quinn nodded.

“Ain’t it hard to slow down?” Ringold said. “Some days, I feel like I’m just itching out of my skin for a little action.”

“What you do now is your call.”

“And what is it that I do?” Ringold said, a streetlight shining off his bald head. He rubbed the stubble on his beard and grinned.

“You walk behind Stagg,” Quinn said.

“Sure,” Ringold said. “But not too far, Sergeant.”

Quinn shrugged. The man was compact and hard, short and muscled, still dressing as if he were on patrol in Kandahar. His eyes were very light, with a strange intensity that was either high intelligence or batshit crazy.

“So you’re saying no to a meet?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Mr. Stagg is a man of compromise.”

“We could sit here for the rest of the night and debate what Mr. Stagg is a man of,” Quinn said. “But I’ve got better plans.”

From the reflection in his truck’s side mirror, Quinn saw Ophelia Bundren wandering out of the county building, speaking with Sam Bishop, Jr., and Betty Jo Mize of the Tibbehah Monitor. The old woman leaned into Ophelia, whispered in her ear, and Ophelia walked away with a smile. She joined Quinn at his truck and he opened the passenger door, helping her up into the seat of the tall truck.

Ringold nodded to Quinn as Quinn passed him at the front bumper, neither man moving out of the way, Ringold closing in on Quinn’s personal space. Ringold just stood in Quinn’s headlights, flat-footed and immobile, as he backed out and turned out of the lot and onto the road.

“Just what was that all about?” Ophelia said, staring.

“He wanted to give himself a proper introduction,” Quinn said.

Do you think we might have a normal night, Quinn?” Ophelia asked. “We both turn off our cell phones. I’ll make us some supper and we can sit on the couch and watch some television. No interruptions. No professional talk. We just act like regular folks.”

“I’ll turn off the scanner,” Quinn said. “But I better keep my cell on.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Son of a bitch. I better, too. I just figured I’d try.”

Ophelia had on a pair of faded Levi’s and a tight black shirt. She’d twisted her brown hair up into a bun at the top of her head and had kicked off her shoes. Her toenails a bubble gum pink.

“What’s for supper?” Quinn said.

“Well,” Ophelia said, “I’m not cooking that greasy old Southern food like your momma. How about some pasta and a healthy salad? I have a bottle of red wine somewhere around here. We can sit on the couch and watch The Bachelor, forget all about those shitbag supervisors, Johnny Stagg, and murders from long past.”

“What the hell’s The Bachelor?”

“It’s a show where one guy gets to date twenty-five women over a few weeks,” she said. “At the end of the show, the bachelor gets to decide which one he’s going to marry.”

“In a few weeks?”

“Yeah, but they go on a bunch of dates at beaches, travel to exotic countries, and listen to a lot of crappy bands the producers are trying to promote. If you get picked each week, he gives you a dethorned rose. The only trouble comes when the bachelor, or sometimes it’s a bachelorette, starts to make out and grub with multiple folks. You’ll see drunk crying, catfights, people screaming at each other and throwing shit.”

“I want to see that, I’ll just go back on patrol.”

“What’d you rather see?”

“I heard 3:10 to Yuma is on tonight,” Quinn said. “The real one, with Glenn Ford, not that god-awful remake.”

“Don’t you watch anything else besides westerns?”

“When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of action movies from the seventies,” Quinn said. “But then Caddy pointed out that all I was doing was looking for my dad, running all the stunt sequences in slow motion, trying to get a glimpse of my father. After Caddy brought it to my attention, I just stopped.”

“What about war movies?”

Quinn shook his head. “Hell no.”

“Suit yourself,” Ophelia said. “But you’d really like The Bachelor. Half the time the women are wearing flimsy little clothes or bikinis. They had one girl a few weeks ago that walked around the house without a stitch of clothes on. Of course they had her privates all blacked out. But, can you imagine doing that on national TV?”

“Pasta?”

“And salad,” Ophelia said. “And red wine.”

“Just me and you?” Quinn said. “On the couch, pretending to be normal people with normal jobs?”

“And Hondo, too.”

Hondo was already on the couch, making himself at home, resting after a long day of roaming the farm and chasing deer, cattle, and rabbits. Ophelia uncorked a bottle, Quinn not being one to drink much wine but not wanting to make a thing of it. She poured each of them a glass and then started to cut up the vegetables for the salad. Ophelia, as she should, showed excellent precision with the paring knife.

“I don’t want to complicate plans,” Quinn said, “but you did leave me a message about something you’d found?”

“I found something in that file you gave me,” Ophelia said, chopping and slicing carrots with a lot of dexterity and speed. “May not mean anything given the time frame. We can talk about it later, if you like.”

Quinn drank some wine. Wasn’t bad. But he would’ve rather had a cold Bud or Coors anytime. “I’d like to know.”

“There was some correspondence between your uncle and the FBI office in Jackson,” she said. “In the letters, it appeared that he’d sent them the remains of the dead man’s burned clothes and a pair of boots that were pretty much intact. It seems like old Dr. Stevens did take a dental record or at least tried to. The body was a mess and back then there wasn’t any DNA testing or reason to take tissue samples.”

“What happened to the body?”

“Potter’s field,” Ophelia said.

Quinn drank some wine and his face must’ve shown something, because she reached into the refrigerator and popped the top of a can of Coors.

“Gracias.”

She poured the rest of his wine in her glass and then got out a pot to boil some water. Quinn stood there with her, all of it feeling nice and normal. Ophelia could fill out a T-shirt, and her bare feet were cute as hell. Something really comfortable about her little place, all the low light and the sparseness of the rooms, with paintings of old barns and pastures and wildlife. Quinn just hoped the damn cell wouldn’t ring in the next few hours, which would be a minor miracle.