All the Beautiful Sinners (8 page)

He would be on the monitors for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The tape was recording at extended play. The morgue was stainless steel. A funhouse. The cameras were new. This was their test.

The one over the door looked out onto the parking lot.

It caught the 1981 Bonneville Brougham rolling in, headlights off, driver’s side door already open, the sole of a shoe skimming the gravel top of the asphalt. And then he stood up on the other side of it, the Indian who’d done Tom, letting his eyes adjust. It was military almost: using the car’s body to shield him. But then he walked around it, with purpose. In his hand was a bat. His face was painted. His shirt read HYSTERIA.

He looked up to the camera and smiled, then the round end of the bat was at the lens. It just nudged it—the camera—over, to the trees. It was on an actuator, though, had only been still because he’d been moving. When he was inside and there was no more movement, it continued its cycle, sweeping from one side of the parking lot to the other.

And then it was the Reception Area.

The camera here was behind the bulletproof glass.

The station was empty, the graveyard shift mopping up in back.

The Indian hitched the narrow handle of the bat through the long handle of the door, reached through the reception window, buzzed himself in.

He was smiling.

At the edge of the first hall camera’s frame, he met the first attendant. A Ronald Sepps. Ronald Sepps dropped the clipboard he’d been leading with, and flattened himself against the wall. For a moment it looked like that was going to do it—that all the Indian wanted was to get by—but then, a half-step past Ronald Sepps, he spun on his heel and drove the butt of the bat handle into the attendant’s midsection. Ronald Sepps folded around it, his glasses arcing out across the tile. It was slick and shiny, the tile. The bat was wooden.

When Ronald Sepps was down, the Indian hit him again.

For eight blind seconds, then, he was moving along the hall, from Entry Hall Cam 1a to Entry Hall Cam 2a. It was what the security company had labeled them with masking tape. The monitors had cost too much, though. All the cameras just fed into the video recording unit in the ceiling. It wasn’t real-time protection, wasn’t really for intruders at all, but for the morgue attendants. Because of alleged impropriety with the dead.

The Indian pulled Attendant Marcy Stonecipher into Entry Hall Cam 2a’s field of view by the hair. She was bleeding from the face. Later it would be a skull fracture, reconstructive surgery, therapy.

All the doors in the hall of the morgue were steel, with glass windows, wire buried in the glass like circuitry. The Indian passed each—going to cameras 3a and 1b—and shattered them inward as he passed. In slow motion, the arc the tip of his wooden bat left was traced perfectly by his hair, following the motion.

There were no more attendants until the last room. And then it was all of them. This was the one room without a smoke detector. Iris Caine, Buddy Colbert, and T. Elliot Mase were all mopping in there, over and over. The floor was like ice. They called it the Cooler. On the wall behind them was a bank of body-sized drawers. Buddy “Bud’ Colbert’s cigarette hissed to the floor. The cameras didn’t get sound, but still, Maines could tell it hissed, with the Indian standing in the door, his bat held low and bloody.

Iris Caine said something then, and the Indian slung his hair over his left shoulder, looked at her. They were at opposite sides of the Cool Cam 3.

Maybe she asked why his face was painted, or what he was doing here, or that now somebody was going to watch this tape, see them smoking around all these people who couldn’t get cancer anymore. Or maybe she explained why they all smoked: the smell, the idea of the smell, of particles rising off the dead, invading your body through the tympanum mucosa high up in the nostril. Or maybe she just said her first please. To get it over with.

The Indian held his bat out and she stepped forward, and he tapped her once on the head, getting the spacing down, then put his shoulder into it.

Buddy Colbert leaned on his mop and watched her fall.

T. Elliot Mase slammed himself back into the drawers, scrabbled on the countertop for something, anything: a saw that glinted in the fluorescents.

He used it like a hay hook in a horror movie, windmilling high over his shoulder, the tip trailing the ceiling, bringing flakes of white down after it. The Indian caught the blade on his bat. It hardly bit. He flung it away, used the handle end of the bat like the flat cap of a bo stick, right to T. Elliot Mase’s chin. Mase crashed back. Buddy Colbert was running by now, pushing his mop bucket over behind him. The Indian nodded, let him run, let the water wash over his feet, and then he closed the door, wedged a chair under it, and started opening drawers.

The children were in the third and fourth up, on the end.

The camera was right on the Indian. He closed his eyes, his lips moving in apology, in song, then cradled them out, set them on the floor. Applied the bundle of sage or marijuana or jimsonweed or whatever it was. He moved like they were moving with him, too, or like he thought they were. Maines could only tell after watching it four or five times, but once you saw, it was unmistakable.

When the Indian looked up to the camera again, his tears were black.

He lifted the girl onto a gurney, the boy onto a coffin trolley, then rolled them back down the cameras, to the front desk, and buzzed himself out. The Bonneville Brougham was parked angled slightly away from the outside camera, but, frozen and enhanced, the trunk the Indian set John and Jane Doe into already had a John and Jane Doe. They were black and staring.

“He’s goddamn getting them somewhere,” McKirkle said, pushing away from the small television.

McKirkle leaned over to spit into a plant he’d pulled over, said it again—“six hours,” how much they’d missed this by—and then the Bonneville Brougham pulled away, still no lights, and in its wake Buddy Colbert rose, still holding his mop, and looked up to the camera, and the only statement he had for the responding officer was that Indians were mad again, it looked like. And that the Lincoln morgue needed better security.

Jim Doe woke to the sound of a door shutting. He was on the side of the road, close enough that the big trucks still rattled his dash. He had been making himself sleep, making himself wait for the gas station in Pawnee City to wake. The pump would take a card, but he was paying cash. But now there was a woman at his window, looking in, her hair dark around her narrow face, grey at the edges.

He blinked, she remained, and he said his sister’s name before he could stop himself, in his head.

It wasn’t her, though. Two years older than Jim Doe wasn’t old enough to go grey. And anyway, she was Indian, wouldn’t go grey until after everybody else.

Behind her, strung out on the road, was her caravan. Ragged trucks with antennae sprouting out at odd angles, compact cars thick with laundry. A twenty-six foot Airstream camper with TAMBOURINE SKY stenciled on it in vivid blue, propane tanks clustered at the nose. Stormchasers.

Jim Doe stood, steadying himself up with the roof of the LeMans. It left dry crumbs of vinyl on his hand. He held his palm open and the crumbs lifted away.

The woman was looking at him like she was trying to recognize him, remember him. She was hard, angular, not born to this land but part of it now.

“You’re that one everybody’s looking for,” she said.

“I’m the one looking,” Jim Doe corrected.

She stared at him like she wanted to believe this.

“Just wanted to see if you were alive,” she said, finally.

Jim Doe looked at his car, sitting at a slant in the ditch like it had just thawed out of some big drift.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

She stared at him, studying him. There was still sleep in her eyes too, in her breath. She shrugged, started to say something, didn’t, then just looked past him at the LeMans, like she had some advice to give him about it. Some warning about that particular model. But then she kept it to herself, turned, left. The people in her gypsy train were ragged and roped with veins, had been living on potato chips and hope for too long, it looked like.

Jim Doe watched them pass then turned around and peed into the tall grass of the ditch. It steamed. He closed his eyes. A horse was watching him.

“Tambourine Sky?” he said to the horse.

The horse just stared.

Under the front seat of the LeMans was a bulky .44 revolver. He’d had to pay extra for it, because he didn’t want the man behind the glass counter at the pawnshop to run his license. Or ask any questions. So they’d done it person to person, instead of shop to customer. There was no tax. Four hundred dollars on the counter. That was South Dakota, Rapid City, when he’d decided he could get ahead of the longhair, maybe. The news reports told him he hadn’t, so now it was Nebraska again.

He sat back down behind the wheel and pulled his new hat on, snugged it down. It was pawnshop also, a lucky find, a close enough fit, but it smelled like somebody else’s sweat, too.

Still, for twelve dollars, right?

Jim Doe rubbed his nose with the side of his hand and studied the horizon. There was a system building to the east. He’d watched it two nights ago on a motel television, signed in under a different name, more cash on the counter. The weatherman’s color-enhanced image of it had it cycling slow, and wide. One of the bad ones. The good ones. The small animals knew already.

Jim Doe pulled the hat lower, woke again to the same woman knocking on his glass. It was late afternoon now. Her caravan was pointed south, and she had a canvas fishing hat clamped onto her head, held down with her left hand. And somebody standing to her right, about even with the LeMans’ trunk. A man.

“So’s it broke?” she was saying, about the LeMans.

“It’s a Pontiac,” Jim Doe said, sitting up in the seat, craning to see who was with her now.

Sheriff Debs. In uniform. Thoroughly sunglassed.

Jim Doe squinted, checked his mental map: this was Nebraska. Not Kansas. Definitely not Garden City.

“Then it’s you, right?” the woman was saying.

Jim Doe squinted, tried to catch up.

“Who’s broke,” she filled in.

He smiled, rubbed his whole face with his palm.

“What’s he doing here?” he finally got out.

Debs heard, peered over, a toothpick chocked at the corner of his mouth.

“More like what are
you
doing?” he said.

“You know him?” Jim Doe said to the woman.

“Me and Sherry go back, you could say,” Debs said, pinching his slacks up so he could squat down to the LeMans’ window, get level with Jim Doe. And also keep him from stepping out.

“But this is Nebraska,” Jim Doe said.

“I told you,” Debs said. “You’re not the only fool after him.”

“The—the longhair?”

“Other one.”

“Tin Man.”

“Tin-
what
?”

Jim Doe shook his head no, nothing.

One of the trucks in the caravan was honking.

“So . . . so she calls you whenever there’s action?” Jim Doe said, about the woman, the storm.

“I’ve helped her out of a ditch or two,” Debs said. “So is this a stakeout? You hot on a trail? Got an informant there?”

The horse.

“He knows some stuff,” Jim Doe said.

“Like that you’re driving evidence around?”

“He’s already in a Bonneville, right?” Jim Doe said back.

“Kind of doubt it, now that it’s famous,” Debs cut back, his hand stabbing up to keep his hat on his head.

“It’s coming,” the woman said, hooking her chin across the next pasture.

Jim Doe looked, and it was: a wall of pressure, black and roiling, threaded with lightning.

“So you taking me in or what?” Jim Doe said, then, to the woman: “There a reward? That why you called him?”

“She called because she knows what I’m interested in,” Debs said, standing. “As for you, just stay right here. Think what’s coming’ll solve both our problems.”

It was a joke. Debs smiled about it, stepped off with the woman, and minutes later Jim Doe, alone again, watched her string of cars and trucks loop around to try to get behind the storm, where the action would be, and then—it was majestic, biblical—he watched the storm develop in time-lapse: the anvil forming; sheets of hail in the distance; the rows of mammatus hanging onto the belly of the cloud like eggs. In the new humidity, the windows steamed with his breath, showed long, clear lines in them that had been pressed there two weeks ago. From long hair.

The lights of Pawnee City were strung on the horizon, or what was left of it.

And the horse was still watching him, its tail blowing in the wind.

Jim Doe stepped out, threw it a frito, then threw the whole bag.

Animals need salt. Especially ones about to be sucked up into the sky, spit out miles away.

At least, if Jim Doe knew anything about storms, that was what was about to go down out here.

If only people were as easy to figure.

Debs, for one.

Out here doing exactly what he said Maines and McKirkle were doing? Taking personal time to chase a legend, one who probably hadn’t even been active for ten years?

It made zero sense.

And the longhair, shit. He’d killed Gentry, he’d killed a kid in Kansas, gutted a mechanic just down the road from that, then brained some people in Lincoln, was definitely that batshit kind of crazy, on some mad dog kind of spree here, but he was also the same one the Blue Kettles had helped. The one they’d hid, given bandages too.

The same way they’d helped him?

It was all Jim Doe could think about.

That and the bodies in the trunk in Gentry’s video.

Wallace and Dot?

Why, after all this time?

A truck blasted by, rocking the LeMans. It had a mural on its forty-foot trailer, a stagecoach. The Old West. Jim Doe almost smiled: maybe when the trucker made it up to South Dakota, there’d be some Indian-muraled trucks waiting for it in ambush, the feathers outlined in chrome on their grills.

About three utility poles down the road, the truck pushed seven white birds up into the air before it. They had been in the ditch too. Probably something dead there. To sleep in. The birds rode the truck’s air up into the grey sky, and then the wind from the storm caught them, flung them back lower.

“Thanks for the information,” Jim Doe said to horse, and lowered himself back into the front seat, turned the ignition, the longhair’s tape starting up again, stuck forever in the deck, looping over and over. Jim Doe had been listening to it or to nothing for days, knew every song inside out, like he’d lived them.
I
crossed
my
old
man
,
don’t
take
me
alive
.
Clean
this
mess
up
else
we’ll
all
end
up
in
jail
.

It meant nothing. It meant everything.

He eased the LeMans up onto the blacktop and Pawnee City rose up out of the haze to meet him. Minutes later he was huddled by another ice machine with a microwaved burrito, watching the sky develop.

He had no idea where to go next, but knew it was too late to go home, anyway. Pulling out of the Blue Kettles’ a week ago, he maybe could have—turned back to Nazareth, rolled into town with his trophy LeMans, whatever forensic goldmine might be in the trunk—but there had been another option too: stay out here in the badlands, let his hair grow out, get it long enough that he could just turn himself in. Because they were both the same person, now. They’d both killed Tom Gentry. Maybe that was why the Blue Kettles had helped him.

Five minutes after the clerk who’d served him the burrito put the closed sign in the window and split for lower ground, Jim Doe pulled the black receiver of the payphone to his face, deposited his quarters, let Agnes’s number ring and ring.

When she finally picked up, Jim Doe just said her name.

“Joe,” she said back.

That she didn’t say
come
home
right off meant that his truck had made it there already. That Nazareth knew about his graveyard and shovel activities.

That’s not what he was calling about, though.

“Was Tom friends with that—with Debs? From Garden City?”

“He said he got you out of, out of your . . . troubles. Yes.”

“What do you know about him? Where’s he from?”

“Ronald? Well, just—why?”

“Did he used to be skinnier?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Tom knew about him, didn’t he?” Jim Doe said.

“About Ronald?”

“The Tin Man.”

“What are you . . . Joe, I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“He should have told me, Agnes. This all could have—”

“Joe, Joe, please, she’s not going to—” Agnes started, and Jim Doe squinted, knew what the rest of it was going to be:
not
out
there
. His sister.

Instead, the phone just went dead, the lines pulled down by the storm.

Jim Doe’s change fell deeper into the phone’s belly.

The LeMans was rocking on its springs in the wind, the first of the rain pelting clean spots in the dust.

Jim Doe ducked across the parking lot, climbed in, and, pulling back up onto the highway, nearly got flattened by an RV, barreling east, into the wind, its passenger window shattered white already, some of its plastic fairing dragging. What looked like the remains of a barbed-wire fence clinging to the exhaust.

Tambourine Sky.

The rest of the ragtag band slipped past after it, their hoods cratered from a hundred thousand hailstones.

After the last car was past—a three-quarter ton, each antenna more ill-conceived than the last, and no Garden City cruiser pulling up the rear—Jim Doe turned the Steely Dan up to fall in, go where they were going, but, waiting for a sheet of corrugated fiberglass to scrape across the blacktop, find the fence where it was going to live the rest of its life out, become shelter for generations of rabbits, he looked back to the west just long enough to see the only thing left in the world: the thick, black grill of a tall truck, almost to him.

He opened his mouth to say something and then the truck hit, spun the LeMans in lazy, curiously silent circles across the parking lot.

It didn’t make any sense, and even as he was thinking it he knew it was stupid, but all Jim Doe could think, his upper body flapping from the seat to the door to the steering wheel, was that he was dancing. That the tape stuck in the deck had finally infected him all the way, was turning him into the longhair once and for all.

And then the LeMans lodged against two of the four poles connecting the industrial-sized propane tank at the edge of the lot.

A newspaper insert blew up against the passenger side window and then that window collapsed under it, the safety glass going half in the door, half onto the seat.

It had been a grocery ad. Broccoli was on sale.

Jim Doe turned around slow, to look back to where he’d been, and the truck that had hit him—Ford, king cab, the grill definitely Ranch Hand—it was still coming.

Jim Doe tried to push back, away from the door that was about to crunched in over him, but then the truck slid to a stop with maybe two feet to spare.

Two doors opened, shut, a napkin sucking off the dash, hitting hyperspace.

“Yeah, well, thank the lord for the small things,” the driver said, still hidden by the front of the truck.

The passenger stepped in front of the grille, his pistol loose by his leg, a smile on his face.

Maines, his handlebar mustache whipping in the wind, his eyes flat.

“Hunh,” Jim Doe just managed to get out.

The Texas Rangers were here.

Wonderful.