The Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page B

who want to.”
    “What about Nito Reece?”
    “Ole Ranito?” Mills said, laughing. “Hadn’t seen him in a long while.”
    “Hard to find Ordeen without Nito nearby,” Lillie said. “When we arrested Ordeen, Nito was in the backseat. It was Ordeen’s car. He had the weapon on him.”
    “Nito is another story,” Mills said, grinning. “I’m not coming here and vouching for Nito. I kicked that boy to the curb last season. He embarrassed everyone. Smokin’ dope and putting it out there for the world to see on the Internets.”
    Lillie looked across the desk at old Bud Mills, hero to Tibbehah County, the name on the sign when you hit the county line. Two-time State Champs. He smiled back at her as she stared, reaching for his spit cup again, taking a big breath, waiting to hear the game plan.
    “You can talk to the prosecutor, Coach,” Lillie said. “But Ordeen and Nito scare the hell out of me. They got a hell of a bad thing going. And either you’re gonna have to start mailing ’em cheese and crackers to Parchman or visiting them at the cemetery. But they’re long down a fucked-up patch of road.”
    “You sure talk straight for a woman.”
    “A woman should talk around the point?”
    “I sure loved your momma.”
    “That’s what you said.”
    “And I like to believe in the good side of people, Lil,” he said. “It’s served me well in the last twenty years. People in this county look out for one another. Maybe a time when you might need to reach out to me for a favor.”
    “The gun was loaded,” Lillie said. “He never told my deputy until he took it off him.”
    “Weren’t you young once?” Mills said. “Running wild and free. Making boneheaded mistakes?”
    “Maybe,” Lillie said. “But I was too damn busy shooting in tournaments to be fooling around with stolen guns.”
    “He didn’t know it was stolen,” Mills said. “And you just might think about how people still love that boy around here. We wouldn’t have ever made the play-offs without him. I’d think on those things, Lillie.”
    “Because of the election.”
    “Because of the election, and because of the way people might view a woman running for office,” he said. “Has there ever been a woman sheriff in Mississippi?”
    “Mississippi is a state that needs a lot of firsts, Coach.”
    Coach Bud Mills stood, stretched, and tossed his Styrofoam cup loaded with brown spit in her trash. “Well,” he said. “Can’t blame me for trying to do some good around this town.”
    •   •   •
    H ow long?” Caddy Colson said.
    “Six weeks,” Quinn said. “Maybe eight. Depends on the next job. How many trainers they need.”
    “You like being a contractor?”
    “I’m not a contractor,” Quinn said. “I work for the U.S. government and NATO. It’s an organization put together by General Petraeus. Men come to train and return as part of the Afghan local police. Officially, they don’t have arrest powers. But they protect small villages where we’re pulling out and the national police can’t reach. We teach ’em how to shoot, look for IEDs, that kind of thing.”
    Quinn stood out in a barren field with his sister, after spending the last two hours running his uncle’s old International Harvester tractor over the dead corn stalks and a big patch where there’d been rows of tomatoes that had burned up in the heat. Caddy had cut her hair boy-short again, bright blonde, almost the color of straw. She had on a Merle Haggard T-shirt saying MAMA TRIED , blue jean shorts, and muddy work boots. The MAMA TRI ED would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been so damn true.
    “You feel like you’re doing some good?”
    “Contrary to some folks who never left Mississippi, all Muslims aren’t terrorists,” Quinn said. “We help locals look out for their own. There are so many different dialects over there that some Afghanis can’t even talk to each other.”
    “Kind of like sending someone down to Tibbehah from New