All the Beautiful Sinners (19 page)

Jim Doe was in one of the two booths of the convenience store at the edge of town, a paper boat of potato wedges before him, from under the heat lamp. But they’re not what he was studying.

What he was studying was the folder of one of the reports that had trickled in. From Kansas.

Agnes had just walked into the station, taken it.

“The presumption of widows,” she’d called it, clipping her words like she probably had for whoever had asked what she was doing in the official papers.

Jim Doe had nodded, kind of understood.

He was still on paid leave.

When the tornado had flipped the box car over in Earth that day, it had broken his arm in three places, and unseated his shoulder in a way they said was going to need surgery. But he hadn’t let go of the bundled kid he’d been holding. Who’d turned out not to even need holding.

It didn’t make sense.

McKirkle and Maines were heroes in the news for taking down the twenty-year serial killer. Their hats were crisp and new, and, as far as Jim Doe knew, the big F5 had swallowed their truck forever.

It meant they couldn’t jam him up for stealing it, anyway.

Sometimes it’s the small things.

And the storm had spared Nazareth, too. That was kind of more than a small thing.

The news would have had fun with it, just the name, all the bible jokes waiting to happen, but, with the Columbine Massacre, things were more somber on the networks this summer, so far. But at least that building in downtown Lubbock had survived again, somehow. The ‘Molly Brown of office high-rises,’ the stations were calling it.

Whatever.

All that mattered was that Nazareth hadn’t died. And that the Tin Man had.

Except.

Sarina had bobbed to the top of Lake Meredith, just up from Amarillo. Only she wasn’t Sarina, was a Winnebago woman who had been taken from Verdon, Nebraska. A mom.

And now that they knew what lake to drag, they’d found the longhair too, in the Dolphins jersey Jim Doe had told them about.

Unlike the mom who wasn’t Sarina, his hands hadn’t been chewed down by catfish.

It was why Agnes had agreed to get the report.

Jim Doe finally opened it. After driving around all afternoon with it on the seat. Cruising by all the old places. Parking by the cemetery for too long. Out where he’d been when Gentry called him, about the longhair.

But then, “James!”

He turned and it was Terra.

Benjamin Donner was immediately behind her, already had his thick hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to the cooler for the blue sports drink she always had to have, that tasted like melted popsicles.

Jim Doe lowered his face as if nodding to them, tried to read what didn’t make sense: the prints from the longhair in the lake, they didn’t match the prints he’d sent in the brown envelope to Sheriff Debs. The ones in red paint, from the side of the Bronco, that had already been washed off before he even get back to town.

But they
had
to, right?

Except, the bundle he’d cradled to him so hard in the box car, trying to save at least one kid, it hadn’t been a kid at all, had turned out to be a wall blanket taken from the exploded booth in Earth, one that had the lush black and white polyester fur of a panda, even half marbles for eyes.

Why take that?

Nobody else knew about the report, either, as far as Jim Doe knew. It was between him and Debs, and Debs was dead. To everybody else, it was just a mis-identification—trying to run prints you’ve only taken a picture of is gamey at best, and, coupled with all the weathering that had happened to them, being on the side of the truck like that . . .

But still.

Jim Doe looked up, caught Terra sneaking a look at him up the candy aisle.

Behind him the cowbell above the door dinged again.

Jim Doe didn’t look, was trying to just study the page, not have anything to do with Benjamin Donner.

This page was the last page, where the prints from the truck had come up indeterminate. It was standard procedure, to run them against the database when they weren’t fitting.

There had been one sixty-percent match, though.

Gerald Cojas.

Jim Doe had to hold onto the sides of the table.

Gerry Box, his prints in the system because he was a lost child.

It made Jim Doe breathe hard. Look out the window.

The new car nosed up to the curb of the store was a fleet car, one of hundreds circling the South Plains now, bureaucrats on wheels. This guy was a licensed radio operator, though, had the big antenna on the back of his car, the plates to match, his handle there like they all did, like it meant anything to the real world: GB4HK.

Jim Doe tried to make a word from it, a name, couldn’t get anything so just closed his eyes, saw the Tin Man at the very end, before the F5 took him. Saw him opening his hand, that roll of cloth unrolling from his hand.

It was gauze, wasn’t it? Couldn’t it have been? Like from the Blue Kettle memorial service.

It’s all he’d been thinking for the past week.

That didn’t mean it was definitely Gerry, but it definitely didn’t hurt. Gerry, who didn’t die in the lake. Gerry, trying to steal away into forever with a panda blanket. Gerry, the one not-Indian the Tin Man had ever taken, raised into a killer, made to do things he never would have done otherwise.

It was why, at the pow-wow in Oklahoma, he’d been reaching for the arena floor the same as Jim Doe.

He had been reaching for Sarina. Trying to go back, too.

On the radio now, a caller was calling Lubbock ‘the town God hated,’ because it had sent the storms down on it twice already, which couldn’t be any accident. Like maybe it was Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one.

The DJ dial-toned the caller and somebody in the store clapped, and through it Jim Doe heard a voice at the counter finishing a joke, and realized he knew the punchline.

It was about Indians, and horses, and how you get your name.

He cocked his head, looked to the counter, to the tall thin man with the foil-wrapped burrito on the counter, a smile on his face, a tuft of white cotton in his ear that finally clicked for Jim Doe, had been haunting him since that day in Earth: when the Tin Man—when
Gerry’s
helmet had slung off, he’d been bloody from throat to groin, and getting worse, but the side of his duct-taped head, when Jim Doe zoomed in on the memory, it wasn’t caked with blood like he’d seen when the Tin Man had been slamming through that tank in Olton.

The man seemed to feel Jim Doe looking, or to have been aware of him already.

There was a grin in his eyes, maybe from this joke he knew the punchline of, had told a thousand times, or maybe from what he was getting away with here.

Jim Doe rose as if on a string, made his way to the counter.

The fireman silhouette that had become the news’s icon for the serial killer called Tin Man was over the anchor’s shoulder right now.

Jim Doe pointed to it with his face, his eyes never leaving this joke teller— slacks, short-sleeved dress shirt, loose tie, late forties or so, rumpled and neat both, normal enough he looked more FBI than anything else—and said, “They never figured out why they called him that, did they?”

The man turned to Jim Doe, a tolerant look on his face, like he was prepared to smile here if necessary.

Jim Doe shrugged, leaned back against the counter, and said, like it was a secret, “It was because he liked to wear this stubby little funnel on his head, like this,” and he reached down, palmed one off the counter—ninety-nine cents—set it up on the man’s head, or tried to.

“I don’t think so,” the man said, letting the funnel rattle down to the floor, then he leaned in like he had his own secret, said, “It was because he didn’t have a heart.”

Jim Doe smiled his best fake smile, just buying time to get his words right, then said, directly from the middle of nowhere, “I remembered your voice just now. Not from the boat, but kind of from there. You called her Dorothy. You couldn’t have know that unless you’d heard this punk kid call her that seventeen years ago, yeah?”

The man kind of squinted all around, maybe for witnesses, and, when there was only the clerk, laid three dollars on the counter by his burrito.

“Dorothy?” he said, his voice completely innocent.

Benjamin Donner and Terra sidled into line behind him then, Terra biting her lip, Benjamin Donner’s eyes hard and flat.

But Jim Doe wasn’t interested.

“Tell me you aren’t who you are,” Jim Doe said to the man, slapping Sarina and Gerry’s school photos down on the counter. “Tell me you didn’t make Gerry think he was Indian. Tell me you didn’t—”

“He was more Indian than any of you,” the man said, then pursed his lips. But it was too late. He’d said it.

Jim Doe let his fingers wrap around the chrome brick the napkin dispenser was.

“Now that we know who are,” he said.

“I can bring you to her,” the Tin Man said back, just for Jim Doe. “We can go to her right now if you want. Don’t tell me you don’t want to, that it hasn’t occupied every thought since—”

“You paid twenty-two hundred dollars for her,” Jim Doe cut in, and came around with the napkin dispenser, aiming it right at the Tin Man’s face.

The Tin Man caught it, though.

It gave Jim Doe precisely enough time to reach into his complicated sling, come out with the big .44 he’d had Agnes lend him, from Gentry’s old stash.

He held it right against the bridge of the Tin Man’s nose, the hammer already drawn back, his finger pulling back more and more.

“She’s still alive,” the Tin Man, whoever he really was, said, his hands out to the side, and Jim Doe said to Terra, “My cuffs, they’re on my belt. Give them to him.”

She did, moving slow.

“Put them on, around that pole,” Jim Doe said to the Tin Man, angling his head, not the pistol, down to the iron railing bolted to the floor.

“Just do it,” the Tin Man said, about the .44.

“You know how they work,” Jim Doe said about the cuffs, stepping back with the pistol.

“Okay, okay, I tied her legs to a tractor, wanted to see how far—” Jim Doe stopped him with the side of the pistol, slammed into his face.

The Tin Man fell to his knees, dropped the cuffs.

Jim Doe kicked them back to him.

“Put them on,” he said. “I’ve got all day here, but you’ve only got one face.”

The Tin Man looked up to Jim Doe, scanned the people around—the clerk, Benjamin Donner, Terra—and took the cuffs, bit them around one wrist.

“Sure it’s him?” Benjamin Donner said to Jim Doe.

“Do it,” Jim Doe said to the Tin Man, his finger tightening on the trigger again. “Do it, I don’t want to shoot you until you’re properly restrained.”

The Tin Man studied Jim Doe, studied the big .44, then nodded about this new deal, cuffed himself tight.

“All right,” he said then. “But first I want you to know that I—”

“No speeches,” Jim Doe said, and brought the pistol hard into the Tin Man’s forehead, dropping him like a rag doll.

After it, Jim Doe was breathing hard. His fingertips twitching.

He slid the pistol across the counter to the clerk, said, his voice a completely manufactured thing at this precise moment, “Still got those dominoes back there, Ned?”

The clerk took the pistol, traded the dominoes back, patted them like to keep them in place, or to show they were on the house, something.

It didn’t matter.

Jim Doe nodded thanks, couldn’t say anything else, just walked through the new silence, took them back to his booth, spread them down onto the tabletop.

A moment later, Terra sat across from him, on the very edge of her seat, took her seven.

Jim Doe sucked his top lip in.

Before she could even lay her first double down, though, Benjamin Donner was standing over their booth, his hands balled into fists.

“Terra,” he said. Just that.

She looked down onto the tabletop, all innocence and mischief, and Jim Doe, without looking up, tilted his head out to the parking lot, to Benjamin Donner’s truck, said, “You need to roll your windows up there, Ben. It’s about to rain.”

Benjamin Donner squinted out through the window at this blowtorch of a day, said, “This some Indian trick? You can hear the clouds now?”

“Something like that,” Jim Doe said, and pushed his domino out onto the table, even though it weighed exactly ten thousand pounds.

Terra nudged one of hers up to it, connecting them after all these years, and then the first heavy drops hit the plate glass window, rolled down through the dust, and the DJ on the tinny radio was chuckling into the mic about that last caller, saying how all you beautiful sinners out there on the South Plains, if you can keep from raising too much Cain over this next spot of commercials, he might just play something local, and Jim Doe smiled without having to think about it, looked out to the rain coming down in glass sheets now.

They shattered over Nazareth, washed it clean.

Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma is the home of the first

successful tornado prediction. Wireless telegraph is

how Frank Baum purported to communicate

with the Land of Oz. ‘Nazareth’ is from

the Hebrew word for ‘watch,

guard, keep.’ And Joan

Gay Croft is still

missing, yes.

This book

is also

dedi-

cated

to

her

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