TWENTY-THREE

I’m sorry,” Tashi Coleman said. “I shouldn’t have trusted E. J. Royce.”

“No,” Quinn said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Why would he make something up like that?” she said. “He was damn specific about the details. You and Brandon Taylor mortal enemies, fighting over land to hunt?”

Quinn didn’t answer, both of them sitting in his truck outside Hubie Phillips’s house on St. Nick Drive in east Memphis. Mr. Phillips wasn’t home and they’d decided to wait a while to see if he’d show up, Phillips being the one and only connection between Brandon Taylor and Ansley Cuthbert. He and Tashi had spent a good deal of the afternoon trying to track down Ansley without any luck, even using some information Lillie Virgil had provided. The best Quinn could tell, the girl had just skipped town.

“Betty Jo Mize had a lot of nice things to say about you,” Tashi said, sitting still in the shotgun seat, typing fast on her iPhone while she spoke. “She said Jericho was a ghost town before you came back, eaten up by corruption and greed. I heard a lot about you and that man Johnny Stagg and how everything started to get better a few years ago.”

“You don’t know me,” Quinn said. “Like you said, you only know what the records say, what I used to do when I was a kid. I guess if I’d been in your position, I might have been inclined to listen. I may have crossed on the Hawkins land once or twice. I really don’t remember.”

“Caddy and Ansley Cuthbert set us straight,” Tashi said. “We were being used. We’ve been being used in one way or another since before we came to town. I don’t even know what Ansley wants out of this. I mean, does she know what happened to Brandon? And if she does know, why the hell won’t she tell us? I think whoever was working Royce took advantage of us not understanding Southerners, not knowing how the wheels turned beneath all those smiles and the hospitality. You must think we’re pretty dumb.”

“To quote the late, great Burt Reynolds,” Quinn said. “Exactly how dumb you are largely depends on what part of the country you’re standing in.”

“So noted,” Tashi said. “Is it really true your father was his stunt double? I heard that from a lot of people, but we haven’t been able to confirm it yet.”

“My father lied about a lot of things,” he said. “But seldom about his days in Hollywood. It’s true. Give or take a lie or two. I know he worked on Smokey and the Bandit, one and two, and Hooper. He did a lot of stunts with a deaf, half-Cherokee woman named Kitty O’Neil. I always thought I’d meet her one day and maybe get the whole story.”