All the Beautiful Sinners (2 page)

Then he raised his hands, just to see what his insides looked like after all these years.

His hands were clean.

He looked at his shirt.

It was clean too. Dry.

The driver’s snub-nose had misfired. They were both looking at it now. Tape on the hammer, something like that.

Gentry’s hat touched the hood once when it blew off his head, the storm pushing in, and then it was gone.

He grubbed around in the gravel for his gun, came up with it, walked behind it to the driver, the longhair, and calmly took the snub-nose, set it on the peeling vinyl roof of the Impala. And then he went to work. With his hands, and his knees, and finally the sharp brass bead on the topside of his pistol, and the blunt, checkered plate of the handle, and the heavy door of the Impala.

The longhair was on his knees, then on his stomach, then pulled to his knees again, then slammed into the side of the car, his hands cuffed behind him. He sagged to the ground, some of his hair catching around the post of the antenna, holding his head up at a wrong angle, the rest still hiding his face.

Gentry leaned into the Impala for more guns, then, evidence, a
reason
, and when he ripped the feather from the rearview, the mirror came with it. He stood from the car with the keys in his hand, walked close enough to the longhair to knee him in the chest, and popped the trunk.

It took his eyes—his mind—a few breaths to make sense, and then he backed up, dry-heaving.

It was two children. They were dead, decayed, and had been for some time. For years.

Gentry steadied himself on the hood of his car, the large, early drops of rain leaving wet spots on the dusty rear window of the Impala.

He followed his hands along his hood to the dummy light of his cruiser, to call this in—the Army, the Navy, the National Guard—but stopped at his door, the skin on the back of his neck tightening with knowledge, awareness of the Indian balled up sideways on the ground, edging the chain of his handcuffs down the back of his legs, across the soles of his feet, then rising beside the Impala, the snub-nose in both hands.

“Don’t—” Gentry said, and that was all he got out.

The snub-nose didn’t misfire this time.

Down the road, Mary and Janna Watkins raised their voices above the sound and Gentry heard it as the first slug slung him around, then the second. A pirouette, his arms flung out for balance, coming together over the holes in his body, leaving him half on the car, half not.

And then the rain came.

The Indian. He’d got the Impala the old way—just led it away from its dirt lot in Kearney, Nebraska. It was where the mechanic put vehicles that still had outstanding bills. Nobody would miss it from there for weeks, and when they did, the mechanic would say the owner had an extra key, drove it away one night,
stole
it, and the owner would say that the mechanic chopped it after hours, sold it onto Rosebud or Pine Ridge. Nobody would look for the actual car, though, except the insurance company that finally got stuck with it, and that would be after all the claims got filed, the police reports filled out, and still, it would just be a thing of principle. Because nobody really wanted it. Except him.

He took it because it was Chevrolet, and he knew GM ignition systems. He led the Impala out to an oily streetlight. It took him eight minutes to get it started. That was too long, he knew—unacceptable—but he kept blacking out, and his hands were shaking, or his eyes, or the world itself.

He sat in the driver’s seat and idled down a half block, lights off, the sole of his sneaker skimming the surface of the road. His other car was there. It was a Thunderbird, from when they’d been long and heavy. It hadn’t been his first choice. But the trunk. He could have kept
eight
children in there, then curled up beside them, pulled the lid down.

He backed the Impala up to the Thunderbird—already facing the other way—and once he’d worked both trunk lids open, they were a roof for him. He held the two bodies close when he moved them, and for too long, touching their dry cheeks with the inner skin of his lips, whispering where they could hear.

The Thunderbird he left idling, to make sure somebody would take it, even if just for a little while.

At the first gas station, the first strong lights, he checked under the Impala’s hood. The mechanic had put a new fan clutch on it. He should have put a water pump too, while he’d been in there. But it was free. He cleaned the windows, wiped down the handle of the squeegee, then turned the speakers on the back dash upside down, to fill the trunk with music. For the children.

The car was blue, the vinyl top in ribbons.

He loved it.

He thumbed the tape in from the bag he had. They were all the same album, all taken from the same rack set near the front door of one of the drugstores he’d hit. They’d had the rollgate down over the pharmacy window, though, meaning no phenobarb, no Dilantin, so he’d had to make do with over-the-counter sleep aids. They were almost enough to keep the seizures down, inside him, so that he was only convulsing
under
the skin.

He drove, and tried not to think.

Nebraska at night was too black, though. Twice he slept; once he skated the chrome bumper of the Impala along a concrete holding wall. He didn’t hear it until miles later, when Lincoln was finally spitting him out into a tangle of single-lane construction. It became 77 after a while. And a state police was behind him now, just pacing. Like the trooper knew, was calling the Impala in right now, rousing he mechanic from bed.

Around Beatrice, he slipped into residential and back out again in a part of town he’d never seen. Like he’d stepped through into a story. A story with no troopers. It was the best kind. He lifted a set of Nebraska plates from the bathroom wall of a breakfast place, where they were decoration, then watched the blue lid of his trunk as he screwed the two bolts into the rear bumper. There were flies at the keyhole. He drove slow through the rest of town, letting them keep up, the flies, but then they pushed him where he didn’t want to go, where he was always going: the firehouse.

He shook his head no, no, wanted to swallow his tongue on purpose, to hold the lighter to his chest, to do anything but be here. It was like a church he had to go to though, park at, stare into. The firehouse.

He held the wheel with both hands and stared hard at the windshield, just the windshield, and then there was a hand on his shoulder. It was later already. There was saliva dry on his chin now, the kind that had been foamy, spit up from deep inside. Medicinal. His first thought was of the flies, then the children. Then the hand.

It was a fireman.

They were all out washing their big red truck.

“You okay, buddy?” he asked.

Buddy.

He stared.

“I’m not Buddy,” he said.

The fireman stared back at him. He was wearing rubber pants with the reflective stripe down the side, the big boots, the helmet, against the distant fire of the sun. Just a white T-shirt, though, the kind you buy folded in a plastic bag. And not any gloves.

It was the no-gloves that did it. The hands, the
hand
, held out to him.

He worked his fingers into his pocket for whatever bottle was there, swallowed a handful of pills dry. His throat bled from it, and he swallowed that too.

“I’m okay,” he told the fireman, making his fingers into a careful okay, then pulled away, the fireman standing there behind him, watching him.

At Silver Lake, just outside Topeka—how had he got so off course?—there was another cop, a city one. He flashed his lights once in the Impala’s rearview then turned around. Like it was a game. Like they were all playing with him. He could feel the miles accumulating inside him, a hard black knot.

He took to the small roads to hide it, to keep it down, skirted Topeka and headed back southwest on 335 until it became just normal 35, and then he closed his eyes and stayed exactly on 35 until Texas. The Impala heaved from ditch to ditch, drunk with sleep. He turned the stereo up.

At the big truck stop in Weatherford, he ran pink soap between his fingers, massaged it in. He was humming the song from the tape, content just to wash his cuticles, the hollow space on the backside of his wrist. But then a truck driver approached him in the mirror, his boots heavy like a fireman’s, and time dilated around them, the instant blooming open, and he ran out past all the slowed-down people, down the snack aisle, shielding himself from the candy, then past the register girl with the sharp teeth, and finally to the car, but just the passenger side. Because the glove box was open now. Had opened itself. Maybe that’s where the flies had all gone, or been hiding.

He walked past the car like it wasn’t his, like he could trick it, then crept up again, on the driver’s side. The same. He settled into the seat. In the cardboard back of the glove compartment were two things: a black comb, with the teeth getting thinner and thinner towards the end, like piano keys sound, and a set of keys tagged WHITE. They fit the door and the ignition and the trunk. He wired the ignition back in for them—because it looked good to have keys, especially with out-of-state plates—and screwed the backrest of the backseat in all the way too, because he could just use the key on the trunk lid now, not have to go in the back way anymore.

It took forty-two minutes to get it all done, and then the on-ramp for 20 was right in front of him. He took it, flew across the flat land, to 87 heading north.

South of Plainview, though, he saw the sign—Nazareth—and then the fireman rising up from the yellow stripes in his rearview. He was chasing him, his footfalls heavy enough to send great clumps of asphalt up into the night, where they became birds.

“I’m White,” he said into the mirror. “You don’t know me.”

Maybe it would work.

He had found him before, though.

But Castro County. It was historical, where it had all started.

He walked through its stores, looking for something. He wasn’t sure what. Just looking. It was almost familiar. He smiled at the girl with the normal teeth as he lifted the chocolate bar. Not that he would eat it, of course. Do that to his teeth, his gums. He just wanted her to see him take it, was all. Because then she wouldn’t see the bottle of Nyquil tucked into his rear pocket, upside down.

She smiled back.

“You kin to that deputy?” she asked.

He narrowed his eyes at her, started to tell her she didn’t know him, that he was White, but then walked out the front door instead. The children were waiting for him in the car. Just staring.

“Soon,” he told them, and closed it again, and then on the way out of town he passed a border patrol going the other way, and watched in his rearview for the sick-green car to turn around, follow him. Call the helicopters in and describe him on their radio. He slowed down for it to catch him. Out at the church, one of them finally did. It was a sheriff car. He smiled. This had been coming for four states now—all the cops gathering in his rearview, finally balling themselves up into one fat one, with heavy hands.

On his shirt, the brass plaque on his shirt pocket:
Gentry
.

“Got some ID?” he said, because he somehow couldn’t hear the children through the metal, chanting
A
-
mos
,
A
-
mos
,
A
-
mos
.

It was his first time to kill in two years.

He pulled the trigger again after the cop was dead, just to dance him around, and the shadow he threw dying like that had coattails, a helmet, and this was so right.

Pulling away, he leaned down to his side mirror, to see his teeth.

They were all there. He was Amos again, Amos Pease.

He smiled, turned the radio up with both hands, the right dragging the left across the dials, the handcuff chain glinting between. By Oklahoma his front passenger side tire was throwing sparks. He could see it reflected in the shiny sides of cars he passed at night. He liked it.

Gentry’s funeral glittered with badges. Jim Doe hid behind his sunglasses for most of it, like everybody else, and tried not to look in the part of the cemetery that held his sister’s headstone.

It should have been him here, instead of her.

And now it should be him instead of Gentry.

And everybody knew it.

Maybe it could have all played out different, even, with another Indian on the stop. Maybe it wouldn’t have exploded into Gentry being dead.

Agnes, Gentry’s widow, sat in the front row, her hands in her lap. Her two daughters were to either side of her. The sky above them was empty. If he tried—and it was the only good place to go, really—Jim Doe could remember driving back from the station house finally, after twenty-eight hours, how in each driveway along Bedford there had been a person standing, watching the clouds surge, the leading edge wisping up the grey face, to where it was darker still. They didn’t know about Gentry yet, then. Jim Doe had waved, his hand slight against the chrome of his mirror.

And the blue Impala. Its junk plate had turned up in a trashcan in Dumas. Dumas was in a straight line north from Nazareth into the panhandle of Oklahoma, all thirty-seven miles of it. Then the road opened up onto the flat grasslands of Kansas, the corn and the wheat and the sorghum swaying like a single, beaten sheet of gold.

The highway patrol had ferried two grim-faced Texas Rangers—Bill McKirkle and Walter Maines—up to the Texhoma, where 54 crossed, and Jim Doe could almost see them standing there on either side of the blacktop, the butts of their rifles angled into their thighs, their helicopter pilot sitting his bird down in the pasture behind them, waiting for the show, his toothpick rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other. It never came, though, the show. The longhair slipped them, had maybe sidestepped off the Llano Estacado into Oklahoma proper, where his skin and hair wouldn’t give him away.

After the funeral, Jim Doe stood, first on one leg, then the other, rolling the brim of his hat and letting it out again. Agnes was still there, the girls gone back to the house. Through the chain link of the cemetery, framed by the white brick of the school, third-graders were sliding on their slides and rushing through the air on their swings. Jim Doe didn’t remember ever looking over here when he had been in elementary.

“I’m sorry, Agnes,” he said.

She was standing at the edge of the grave.

When she didn’t turn her head up to him, he finally just left, hating that his truck was so loud, that he couldn’t at least give her some peace out there. She still wasn’t crying, was the thing. It scared him.

Five hours later he was on the other side of the school, dribbling a basketball into the slick concrete, shooting free throws. They made sense. But then Gentry’s oldest daughter Sarah was there.

“If you make ten in a row this time, will none of it have happened?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question, more just her showing him that his skull was made of glass, that she could look right in. She’d learned it from her mother.

Jim Doe looked over at her. She was four years older than him, had been in the homecoming court when he was still waiting to get his learner’s permit.

“Hey,” he said.

She nodded, took the bounce pass.

“They say he’s gone,” she said—the longhair. “Just . . . poof.”

Jim Doe chased her rebound down, held the ball between his hands.

“What about the video?” she asked.

“You can’t see anything.”

“Not now,” she said. “No. Not like it is.”

He shot. “You’ve been seeing too many movies, Sare.”

“They have to be based on something.”

“This is Castro County.”

“
Jim
.”

He looked to her. She had the ball now.

“It won’t bring him back either, you know,” he said, trying to use her line against her.

“It’s not him I’m worried about,” she said back, chest-passing the ball at him, hard, her thumbnails clicking together on the follow-through, her eyes fixed on him already.

He said it again after she was gone—
it
won’t
bring
him
back
—but this time it was for himself, so he could hear what he’d sounded like to her, what he hadn’t.

#

He was there before classes started the next morning. Seven-thirty, the audio-visual room. The heaviest, thickest door in the high school.

“You want
what
?” Weiner said, his chair skittering across the room on its plastic wheels.

Weiner ran the projectors, the cameras, all of it. He was a sophomore. There early, even.

Jim Doe looked back at the door, then handed Gentry’s tape across. He was supposed to have it hand-delivered to Shirl at the post office by three, addressed to Lubbock, who, if they didn’t have the right equipment, would probably send it down to Austin, who’d get back some time next year.

“Just enhanced,” he said. “You can do that, right?”

It was hard to say Weiner’s name right, so he was trying to just not say it at all. At any moment Terra could appear in the doorway, too. He hadn’t seen her since she’d sat in Interrogation Room B the afternoon of the twenty-first, waiting for her father to pick her up, the hall through the one-way glass full of law—Gentry’s friends and family from three or four counties in either direction, Midland to Amarillo, DPS to SID, eighteen to seventy-five. When Jim Doe had walked through, his shirtfront congealed to a dark black, they had quieted, just let him pass. For the moment. He could feel it, though, that they’d already listened to Monica’s audio of it. That they knew he hadn’t been there. And that Terra had been with him.

And then her father had walked in.

Jim Doe closed his eyes to make himself concentrate on Weiner, on
now
.

“I’ll be late for class,” Weiner was saying, taking the tape.

“It’s police business,” Jim Doe said back. “I’ll write you a note.”

Weiner turned the tape over, never looked up when he spoke. “This is the original,” he said, impressed. Then he looked up. “Thought you were mailing this one off?”

“You hear this on the radio, or what?” Jim Doe said, then remembered who he was talking to.

“Why not just wait, then?” Weiner said. “Lubbock has better equipment, you know.”

“Because I wanted you,” Jim Doe said, still watching the door.

And because they might not think to show it to me when it comes back, he didn’t say. If he even still had a badge, then.

“He’s getting away . . .” Jim Doe said, hooking his chin out to the road, to the north.

Weiner stuffed the tape into the editing machine.

“I can’t promise anything,” he said. “This isn’t the movies, you know?”

Jim Doe smiled. “Pretend it is,” he said.

Weiner shrugged, bent to it.

By ten, he had something. Jim Doe had locked the door a long time ago. A fire hazard, but what the hell. The school hadn’t burned down from cigarettes or prayers in forty years already. Maybe this would be forty-one.

Weiner eased the mouse around the tabletop.

The tape was a digital file now. It had taken two hours just to convert forty-eight seconds of visuals. But now they were ready. And it
was
like the movies: Weiner would select a portion of the field, zoom in, repeat, repeat, then let the algorithm smooth the edges until the blurry fabric of Gentry’s khaki shirt dominated the screen.

“Try the shooter,” Jim Doe said, leaning over.

“I was,” Weiner said, through his teeth.

He backed up, eased in again. It made Jim Doe think of an inchworm, reaching out, pulling the ground closer bit by bit.

Finally they got the back of the shooter’s head, a real tight shot of hair so black it would had to have been inked blue in a comic book, just to look real.

“Like yours,” Weiner said.

“Back up again,” Jim Doe said.

Weiner did, undoing the enhance, a Def Leppard shirt coming into focus for a moment—HYSTERIA—then backed the time index up too, to when the shooter was getting back into his car, that fraction of a second before he leaned over the hood to look into the camera, out at Agnes and Jim Doe one last time.

The longhair had looked back to make sure Gentry was staying down.

Jim Doe smiled. Of course:
he
had just risen after being put on the ground. He probably expected Gentry to as well.

Weiner paused the frame.

“Hollywood,” he said, and inched in, enhanced, inched in some more.

Soon the shadowy shape of the longhair’s face filled the monitor.

“Sharpen it again,” Jim Doe said.

Weiner cocked his chin to the side in hesitation. “Half of it’s already made up by the computer, man. I don’t know.”

He tried anyway, and the image degraded into watercolors, the vinyl roof of the car leaking over into the longhair’s face, both his eyes merging into one raccoon smear.

“Okay,” Jim Doe said.

Weiner backed up, screwed the contrast up some then did a color-replace on the shadowed part of the face. He used a pixel of the longhair’s neck skin as the base. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t real—evidence—but it wasn’t bad.

“You can print that?” he asked.

“It’s anybody,” Weiner said. “You. With hair, I mean.”

They ran it through the printer anyway, and Jim Doe stood waiting for it, then held the curling sheet in both hands, fanning it to dry. The longhair. He was an Indian male, twenty-two to thirty-five, no identifying tattoos, indeterminate tribal affiliation. Armed and dangerous. Two corpses in his trunk. Heading north.

Jim Doe walked out into the eleven o’clock glare, covered his eyes with his glasses again, and held the picture to the light, to see if it looked any better out there. It didn’t.

#

“Indian Joe,” Agnes said through the screen door, by way of greeting. It was what Gentry had called Jim Doe, when Jim Doe was in elementary. The post office hadn’t even been rebuilt then. Jim Doe stepped in, taking his hat off without having to think about it. There was food mounded everywhere, so Agnes wouldn’t starve herself, maybe. Try to feed off her grief and nothing else.

“Sarah?” he asked.

“Beaumont,” Agnes said.

It was as far away as she could get and still be in Texas.

Lisa, the other sister, was standing under the red, slanted awning of the Dairy Queen, soaking up the night. Jim Doe had seen her on the way in. She was with some of the people she’d graduated with. They were looking at each other like dogs in the pound, and drinking cokes through narrow, blue-striped straws.

“It’s your anniversary,” Jim Doe said.

He had a foil-wrapped present in his hand. The date had been on the calendar on Gentry’s desk. He set the present on the mantel. It was nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I know,” Agnes said.

They sat at the kitchen table.

“Is it serious?” Agnes asked, “at least?”

Jim Doe looked up. “What?” he asked.

“That girl.”

He looked away. “It’s not like that,” he said, then, just “no,” quieter, then that he was sorry again.

“You said that already,” Agnes said, touching his hand where he’d left it, on the table before him. “I
know
, Joe.”

“Jim.”

Agnes smiled.

It was their usual routine.

Jim Doe looked up at her. She was looking at the food, so he did too. And then he got it: for Agnes, the act of cooking would remind her of Gentry, remind her that she was just cooking for herself now. So people weren’t going to let her cook for a while.

“I should have been there,” he said.

Agnes was still studying the food. “Tom carried a gun, Joe. Because he expected somebody to shoot at him someday. He always used to say that. I’m just glad it wasn’t anybody from town. Anybody we know.”

Jim Doe nodded.

“He won’t get away with it,” he said. “I won’t let him.”

Agnes smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But, Joe. Let the state police handle this. Walter Maines said—”

“Tom never hired Walter Maines or Bill McKirkle when it was that or the Air Force, Agnes. Or worse.”

“He told your dad he would take care of you,” she said.

Jim Doe didn’t say anything. His mouth was too full. And then a pair of headlights washed across the back of the kitchen curtains, and for an instant he’d never expected, he saw Agnes as she must have been when Tom Gentry married her. As a bride. A young woman waiting for her husband to come home again, like at the end of every other normal, ordinary day. It was the way she held her head to the window. Like those were
his
headlights. Like none of this was real, like everything was going to be all right.

It wasn’t Walter Maines at the door, though, with a trophy. Or Bill McKirkle. Either would have been better.

It was Benjamin Donner. Terra’s father.

There was just a screen between him and Jim Doe now. And they weren’t at the station anymore.

Jim Doe looked back at Agnes, held his hand up for her to stay there, then stepped out onto the porch.

“Ben,” he said.

His hat was back on his head already.

“How’d I know you’d be out here?” Benjamin Donner said.

Jim Doe shrugged. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said.

“You mean you and my underage, only daughter?” Benjamin Donner asked.

Jim Doe nodded like he had to, and when Benjamin Donner came back it was with the backside of his thick forearm. It caught under Jim Doe’s chin and pressed him up against the weathered clapboard of the front of Gentry’s house.

He could have stopped him, probably. But he didn’t. His pistol was still on his hip.

“Ben,” he said as best he could, one of his hands on Benjamin’s sinewy wrist, the other on his elbow. So his chin wouldn’t have to support all the weight.

Benjamin was just staring at him.

Jim Doe’s hat was brim-down on the porch. The wind pushed it to the edge, then it cartwheeled off. Benjamin looked up at Jim Doe’s hair. It wasn’t regulation. By about three months.

Benjamin laughed again.

“Just like him,” he said.

The longhair.

“You probably knew him, right?” he said.