All the Beautiful Sinners (4 page)

Three hours after letting him into the Bronco, Jim Doe and the old man pulled into Garden City. It was back to the south, towards 156. The wrong way. There were already flyers of the longhair in the windows of some of the stores. Jim Doe had taped them there. The high school the old man directed them to was circled by probably eighty cars. They were Indian-issue. Hardly any of the fenders matched, and the only speed they had was leaning forward all the way, somebody’s hands on the wheel at one and eleven, just wide enough for them to set their face, see. Jim Doe had heard some joke like that. People were always bringing them to him, Indian jokes, like he was supposed to laugh. He never could remember them until it was too late, though—until whoever’d brought it was leaned back, launching off into the punch line. Then he’d get it, Jim Doe, dread it, turn away because he’d always thought the side profile of his smile was less insincere than head-on.

Garden City. Like Eden.

Jim Doe trolled up one aisle of cars and down the other, and suddenly, impossibly, close enough that it had to have gotten there early, there it was: the Impala. Different plates, but the pattern of rips in the rotted vinyl top was burned into the back of Jim Doe’s retinas. And there was a ragged dog nosing around the trunk, already slinking off.

The old man looked behind them and beside them when Jim Doe killed the truck right behind the Impala. He looked over to Jim Doe.

“You sure?” he asked.

Jim Doe nodded.

Jim Doe climbed down into the parking lot. He’d parked close enough to the Impala that he had to leave his door open for the old man to come out his side. He didn’t wait for him.

The car.

He ran his hand over its lines, the tips of his fingers not even touching the snow enough to mark it. He wanted to call the DPS, the FBI, an airstrike. And Agnes. But bringing a white cop in an Indian place like this. Or,
cops
. All the men would fold themselves into lockers, spin the locks from the inside, stay there as long as they had to. And he wanted to bring him in himself, anyway, the longhair.

The rear door was still dented where Gentry had thrown him into it.

The steering wheel was rubbed shiny across the horn, right where your palms would rest if you were wearing handcuffs.

There was no rearview mirror.

Jim Doe looked up, remembering he wasn’t alone here. Not quite. The old man was standing off, one car over.

“Thanks,” Jim Doe said.

“You could hear it, couldn’t you?” the old man said, and when Jim Doe didn’t get it, the old man dropped to one knee, dipping his ear to the ground, the tips of his grey hair brushing the snow.

Jim Doe left him like that. Turned back to the car. With one of the teeth of his truck key he hissed the air out of all four of the Impala’s tires. The snow crunched as the radials settled down over it. They were all brand new, a matching set. At the front bumper, where the overflow hose ran, was a green-crusted hole. Radiator fluid, very clean. At the rear bumper, the tailpipe was cold, the inside scorched black.

But the trunk. Jim Doe looked at it for a long time, the wind swirling around his legs, then turned his face up to the gym.

He was here, the longhair.

Jim Doe palmed his wallet for a five—the seventeen hundred still bunched in the envelope in the truck—and gave it to the mother sitting her table at the door. She pulled hard on a cigarette, all the smoke rushing out of her mouth, into the haze inside.

“Who’s playing?” Jim Doe asked, nodding towards the stands.

“Funny,” she said, and gave him three dollars change. One of the bills had a sharp blue Colonel Sanders goatee drawn on George Washington. Jim Doe folded it into his wallet with the rest, let her stamp his hand with a red wagon wheel with one broken spoke, then stepped all the way in. The warm air stung his eyes and he blinked, blurring the crowd, smelling the dried saliva he always smelled at gyms, from people spitting on the floor, rubbing the soles of their shoes in it.

The longhair, though. That was all he was thinking, all he was trying to think.

He shook out a copy like the one he’d been taping up, but, as he was smoothing it, a group of four fifteen-year-olds slouched past, round-shouldered, their hands not so much buried in their pockets as thrust. Three of them had hair most of the way down their backs. The other was shaved bald, a tribal design tattooed into his scalp. He stared at Jim Doe, bared his teeth at the last possible instant, then passed. Jim Doe only flinched on the inside.

He turned back to the mother’s table.

“Yeah?” she asked, taking the flyer in in a glance, and not interested.

“Old man come through here?” Jim Doe asked. In defeat.

“He your grandpa?” she asked back, opening her till.

Jim Doe paid for the old man too. Didn’t ask why she’d let him through. To keep him out of the cold, probably.

The mother closed her metal box then pointed at the two doors leading up into the stands—where the old man had maybe gone. Jim Doe thanked her, walked across the cafeteria floor. For some reason he felt certain there was an institutional fork stuck in the ceiling tile thirty-four feet above him. Waiting for him. But if he looked it would fall into his eye, and then he’d have that to deal with.

He went back to the mother at the table again.

“There any other way out of here?” he asked.

“He’s probably just getting nachos or something, think?”

Jim Doe stood, scanning for a side door. Because the longhair was going to see the sheriff jacket, the pistol.

Jim Doe took the jacket off, folded it over his arm, on the side his pistol was on.

“What if there’s a fire?” he asked.

“I’ll come tell you personal,” the mother said back, and blew a line of smoke between them.

Jim Doe nodded thanks, eyeballed the one fire door in the cafeteria then made his way through the second set of doors with everybody else. The noise of the crowd rushed up the hall all around him. He stepped up onto the first ramp there was, to the gym floor, then stood against the rail like he was here for the game, nothing else. In Nazareth he would have tipped his hat back to show he was just him, not a Deputy. But he still didn’t have a hat.

The game was an Indian school and a white school. A replay of last year’s regional finals, the posters and signs said. There was fry bread in the air. During a free throw, when everybody was on the edge of their seat, leaning forward for him, Jim Doe turned around to catalogue faces but hadn’t gotten anywhere before they exploded up, screaming. He turned back to the game, felt more than heard the scoreboard click another Indian point up, and then, from the corner of his eye, an old
Hysteria
shirt eased past.

It didn’t even register for a full ten seconds—Def Leppard—but when it did he turned so fast he spilled a woman’s coke. It slung all the way into the first row. He tried to catch her popcorn, but there were too many kernels, too much space between his fingers. Everyone for five people deep was looking at them. At him. And Jim Doe just didn’t have time right now. He stuffed three dollars from his wallet into her hand and took long steps back down the ramp, made the fire door at a run. It was closed. He ran his fingers along the rod that drove into the cylinder, to keep it from ever slamming. It was cold, frosted over a bit, even.

Good.

And he wouldn’t have gone out the main door. There was a knot of white people there, real churchgoers, all going the other way with their foam hands and plastic hats. One of them had a balloon feather tied to the back of his head, even, and lipstick under his eyes.

Jim Doe turned away, back to the hall, followed it into the lightless bowels of the high school. His heart was hammering in his shirt; the catch was off the hammer of his pistol. Soon he was running across the low-pile carpet, rounding corners onto rows and rows of lockers. But always there was sound just ahead of him. And then it was all around.

He followed it to the practice gym.

The lights had been hit but weren’t warm yet, were still wriggling worms of heat far above.

Below them, at half court, was what looked like two people at first, but then it was just one. He was thrashing around on the floor like he was hurt. Or a seizure. He tried to stand but fell to his knees, tilted his head back, his hair touching his heels behind him, and screamed an animal scream, his voice ragged at the edges, booming over the hardwood.

Jim Doe held his hands over his ears, trying to make sense here, his mouth open too, like he was going to scream, or needed to. The only handle he could find on the situation was the handle of his pistol.

He drew it when the lights finally came on all at once, blinding him, and then held it loose before him, shielding his eyes with his other hand, angling the barrel in the general direction of half-court, and didn’t realize what a mistake that was until the folded, metal chair came up to meet his face, and the last thing he knew was his pistol, spinning on its side across the waxed floor, and then he didn’t know anything anymore. Just what a soft place the world was. How little it hurt to fall.

Walter Maines toed over a shingle lying by the gas pumps. There was nothing under it. He cut his eyes up to McKirkle, watching the street. Their dull Texas Ranger badges were flapped open on their shirts, in case anybody asked. But nobody would. You could tell they were law from fifty feet out.

The kid, Taylor Mason, had been discarded in the pit of the first bay. The slag hammer was buried in his forehead. There were no prints on the spring-handle, either. Taylor Mason’s eyes were open, as if locked on the hammer, still not believing it. “Love tap,” McKirkle had called it, the two of them standing in the dark of the bay. Maines had cocked his head over in agreement, spit down into the drain.

The blood on Tayler Mason’s face was already black. Little ants crawling across it, even though it was too late in the season for ants. This was Kansas, though. Fucking Wizard of Oz. Anything could happen.

Still, it was better than New Mexico.

Maines walked around the station again, looking for anything.

The cash register was out in the weeds, empty.

The radio in the garage was blaring. Maines hadn’t been able to find the main control yet, so the cassette in the deck—wherever it was—was just looping through itself over and over.

“What do you think?” McKirkle called across the lot.

Maines didn’t answer, just picked his way through the weeds to the power box bolted to the side of the gas station. No lock, even. He shook his head with wonder, opened the box, killed the power.

The music spooled down, dragged to a stop.

McKirkle lifted the crown of his hat in sincere thanks, leaned over to spit out into the road.

Maines shut the box.

There were no surveillance cameras here, of course.

There were tire prints, but it was a garage.

There was Taylor Mason, dead.

The only witness who hadn’t driven through to Colorado by now was a man across the road, who remembered going outside for a cigarette after dinner and seeing the garage lights still on. Like Taylor Mason was working late, on his own car probably.

There were prints all over the hand tools, like you’d expect. Maines could see them even without a kit. Some of them were already black. In the soaking tank at the back of the second bay—the only empty bay—was a spun-out water pump. It had been soaking. To get the gasket off, maybe. Except that it was shot, its race turned to steel wool, was only worth anything as a core now, if that. Maines had fished it out with a cat bar. The parts number on the side had been rubbed off with the grinder. The gouge was still raw, fresh. Meaning the local boys were going to have to get a mechanic in here, see if the pump was GM, Ford, or AMC, then work backwards from there. It would take days, though, and even then they’d have to check it against Taylor Mason’s work orders, and whatever work he did for people
off
the book.

Pissing into the wind was what it would be.

And now there was some tub of a Garden City sheriff standing up from his cruiser at the edge of the lot, peeling his movie sunglasses off to talk to McKirkle. Leading with “Little far from home now, aren’t you, boys?”

Boys
.

Maines hid his smile behind his hand, didn’t need to hear what-all McKirkle had in store, here.

He looked back to the station again.

The coroner’s wagon was on the way.

Maines walked past the last island of pumps, stepping over the air hose, and was about to cut back in a wider perimeter when he saw it, scrunched up in the tall grass just past the bathrooms.

It was a piece of paper, not as weathered as the rest. Eight by eleven. Crumpled up on purpose, then tossed aside.

Maines uncrumpled it.

It was grainy, but it was the Indian from Gentry’s video. Long hair, like he never intended any honest work. Like all he’d ever planned was to show up on a wanted poster.

Maines stood with the flyer, looked across to the Sheriff, beating it back to the lounge chair his front seat had become, over the years. Trying to stab his movie sunglasses back on, keep on pretending he had some authority.

Maines smiled, shook his head. Man should have known better.

“What?” McKirkle said across the lot, his voice carrying, his tone already saying that that sheriff had got nothing he didn’t already have coming.

They met at the pump island. Maines passed the flyer over.

“Yeah,” McKirkle said, his eyes flat like a lizard’s, studying the face, “like the rest of them. So?”

“They look the same,” Maines said, not losing McKirkle’s face about this. “Less hair, but that’s all.”

McKirkle got a different angle on the flyer, said, “The kid deputy, you mean. The one
made
this.”

“He’s grown up now, Bill.”

“But he don’t remember.”

Maines shrugged, couldn’t speak to that.

“I’m saying there’s a resemblance. We couldn’t tell back then. Didn’t know to look. Couldn’t have if we’d wanted.”

He crumpled the flyer back up.

“Course there’s a resemblance,” McKirkle said. “Not enough of them left to look that much different.”

“I’m saying we might be on a different trail than we thought. An older one. Better one.”

McKirkle rubbed at the corner of his right eye, stared off into the distance.

“Wrong time of year,” he said, finally.

“I’m just saying,” Maines said. “And, it’s early, yeah. But not that early.”

They studied the bank of clouds to the north.

Finally McKirkle said, “We trusted Tom to keep an eye on his ass. Not to treat him like goddamn family.”

“Everybody takes a puppy in, time to time.”

“But, deputy sheriff, that’s next in line for temporary sheriff,” McKirkle said. “And temporary sheriff’s getting close to permanent sheriff.”

“Not complected like that,” McKirkle said, scooping the dip from his lip, letting the wind have it. “Not on my watch.”

Maines limbered his can out, packed it on his wrist.

“Still,” he said, passing the can across, looking north, “thought we chased all his kind out a hundred years ago?”

McKirkle laughed, said, “Then it’s them broke the treaty, not us,” and with that they climbed back into the king cab. On the way out of town Maines tipped his hat to the sheriff, parked at the city limits sign, exactly where McKirkle had told him to wait.

The sheriff didn’t tip his hat back.