“Okay, then?” TJ asked. “Are we good?”

“Maybe.” The girl smiled. “Let me think about it. One of y’all outlaws got a light?”

*   *   *

To call Tabitha Threadgill unattractive might be a little too generous, Quinn thought. She had to weigh well over three hundred pounds with a face like a bulldog and a temperament to match. The woman started most conversations with “What the fuck do you want?” or “That bitch told you what?” So many crazy women out on her land. For as long as Quinn had been sheriff, Tabitha had always had a string of steady girlfriends, most of them partners she’d met online and coerced to come and stay with her down home on her “Mississippi Ranch.” Her ranch being sixty acres of logged-out hills and a narrow patch of skinny pine trees where she lived in a one-story house of indeterminate style or shape, mainly held together with duct tape, Visqueen, and spit.

Quinn turned off the main road and headed onto the woman’s land, the small, ramshackle house coming into view. As he parked, he noticed a nice collection of new toys around the trailer. A new aboveground swimming pool covered for the winter, a speedboat up on a trailer, and two matching jet skis.

Quinn walked up the wooden steps and knocked on the door. He heard a television inside and soon some shuffling steps before the dead bolt slid back on the door. A skinny girl, late teens or early twenties, opened up. She had bug eyes and stringy red hair, wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt that came down past her knees. The T-shirt read: big boobed and tattooed. The young woman didn’t appear to be either of those things.

“Miss Threadgill around?”

“You mean Big Momma?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s out hunting with the girls,” she said.

“Hunting season ended last week.”

“Really?” the girl said, folding her arms over her small chest, shivering a bit. “Maybe they’re just out mud riding. Big Momma’s been racing them things around ever since they got here Christmas morning.”

“And what’s your name?”

“Jenny.”

“What do you do, Jenny?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just came down for the weekend. A little fun in the country. Cook a hog. Shoot some guns. You want to come on in, good lookin’?”

Quinn shook his head, about to head back to his truck, when he heard the rumbling of a four-wheeler racing down from the hills and zigzagging through the skinny pine trees. He stepped off the porch and down to the dirt path as he spotted Tabitha Threadgill herself behind the wheel of a big four-wheeler, another skinny young girl riding behind her, arms stretched around the big woman’s waist. Two more four-wheelers, same make and model, followed with two heavyset women driving in a straight line behind her.

Tabitha rode up hard and fast to where Quinn stood, kicking up some rocks and dust. She had on a pair of red pajamas with unlaced mud boots and a big green Carhartt coat. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. “The fuck you doing here, Quinn?”