All the Beautiful Sinners Read online

  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.

  And then Jim Doe saw it, over the padded shoulder of Benjamin’s coveralls: the dome light of Benjamin’s truck glowing on. The cab was milling with people, three at least. And there were more shapes muttering in the bed. In Texas. Where they’d chased all the Indians out a century ago, and killed all their horses just to make it stick, then sent the great-grandsons sons of the cavalrymen out a century later, to collect the bones on the weekends, sell them in town by the truckload, for soap to wash themselves with.

  “Ben,” Jim Doe said, no breath. “You don’t—Terra. It’s not what you thi—”

  Benjamin pushed forward, choking off the rest.

  “Don’t you goddamn tell me what I think,” he said, his lips not involved at all.

  Jim Doe made himself breathe, breathe, but still: his hand found the butt of his gun.

  “Listen, you’re assaulting a—” he started, then Agnes cut him off.

  She was standing beside Benjamin, holding the screen door open with her hip. Gentry’s quail gun was nestled behind Benjamin’s ear. A Browning 16 gauge.

  “Ben,” she said. “Go home.”

  Benjamin stared at Jim Doe for long moments, then finally let him slide down the wall.

  “Agnes,” he said. “You of all people—”

  “Ben,” Agnes said. “I’m saving your worthless life here. For Magritte.”

  She hadn’t taken the gun off him yet.

  When Jim Doe slid the leather catch off his hammer, Agnes shook her head no.

  “You too,” she said. “Inside.”

  Jim Doe looked out into the darkness, at the truck, the men waiting for him, all the dry, abandoned places they knew where nobody would ever look, and then he backed inside.

  Agnes came in when Ben’s truck was gone.

  She was crying. Finally.

  She went to the cigar box Gentry had always kept on the shelf, by the outdated encyclopedias Sarah and Lisa had plagiarized for all their book reports. She brought it to the table. There was seventeen hundred dollars in it, in an envelope with her name on it, an envelope she was using again, now.

  She held it out across the table for Jim Doe.

  “Take it,” she said. “You’re right. The only way they’ll . . . not be like that is if you catch him. And you know if Bill and Walter find him, God. Tom would have wanted him to stand trial, Joe. James.”

  “I’ll pay it back,” Jim Doe said.

  Agnes smiled.

  “No you won’t,” she said. “Just come back alive. For Tom.”

  Jim Doe looked back at her once, not saying anything, then pushed the door open onto the night, stepped out into it.

  FOUR30 March 1999, Kalvesta, Kansas

  He was throwing up in the ditch now. Amos. The half-digested pills rolling in the dust like punctured ticks, spilling his blood. He was screaming too, a thin line of snot connecting him to the ground, trying to pull him in, under. He raised his head, held his hands over his eyes, but the yellow jacket was there, burned into the backside of his lids. The man in it was holding a long metal pole.

  He set a fire in the ditch with the lighter from his dashboard, and he drove. Maybe the fire would slow the fireman down. Maybe all of Kansas would burn. He poured his Nyquil out the vent window and it clung to the side glass for as long as it could, beading thick against the felt weather-stripping and finally clumping over, into the void behind him. Texas. Oklahoma. Kansas.

  What was the metal pole for? He’d never had a metal pole before.

  He had to find a drugstore. This far gone, even straight morphine would do. He would shoot it into his tearduct if he had to, then let the numbness spread out from there. It would be the opposite of crying.

  He drove, and drove, and then on one of the turns on 156 the front passenger side tire went for the second time in two states and that was almost it, he was almost over, but then the road on the passenger side of the car banked up for him suddenly, so the car could lean against it instead of shooting off into the ditch, the telephone poles, the fences. Something always saved him.

  But the spare. He couldn’t get it—the children were lying on it. It would interrupt them to open the trunk. To see him frantic like this. It would scare them.

  So he drove on the rim again, one side of the car hooked over onto the grass shoulder, where it was softer. Where the rim would last, maybe. He had to hang onto the left side of the steering wheel with both hands, to keep the car straight. It was foolish. He started laughing and turned the stereo up, the mechanized hum of another world.

  A mile marker folded under the car, scraped the oil pan, to
re out the belly of the muffler.

  It didn’t matter.

  The handcuffs. He had to get the handcuffs off first. He could do it with a paper clip, he knew, but to get it into the lock he’d have to hold it in his teeth, and the sound of metal on enamel, it would bleed out his ear, and the blood would collect in the dead space over his collarbone and congeal there, and then everyone would know who he was, what he’d done.

  The dry heads of the grass were silk rubbing against the rough Chevrolet frame.

  He thought about leaving the car in low then running ahead, holding the chain of the handcuffs in the path of the rim he was pushing. The rim’s edge was sharp and raw and hot by now. He’d have to tie the steering wheel over with a rag. And set the accelerator somehow. And then pull his arm out before the rim rolled to his shoulder. And then catch the car.

  He drove.

  Fifteen miles per hour, bits of hot rubber slinging themselves up onto the hood in defeat, or surrender. Once a big truck honked at him the whole time it was passing. He stared after it, trying to memorize the mural that had been on the side. For future reference. For standing next to that particular driver at a long row of urinals, the wall before them not yet splattered with blood and grey matter, the more particular shades of regret.

  The next town was two miles away. Kalvesta. It was on the way to Lydia. Lydia was where he was going. He’d forgotten for a while—driving north and east, fast, away from Texas, any way—but now he remembered again: Lydia.

  Then, like the tire wasn’t bad enough, pushing it through the tall grass and soft earth spun the water pump out, the bearing in there reeling silver angel hair out against the race.

  He could hear it, feel all the heat building up in the engine.

  Two miles.

  The Impala limped into town on three tires, favoring the tender steel rim. He nosed it into a service station, pulled the hood open from under the dash. Steam billowed up into the sky. He still had the handcuffs on.

  Before anything else—the station attendant approaching, shielding himself from the steam with a small, red rag—he had to protect the children. He did. He turned into a white person so as not to attract attention—White—all his hair telescoping into his scalp, pressing on his brain so that he had to set his teeth against it, hard, then broke the round key off in the trunk lock, using both hands because of the six-inch chain between his wrists. He had his shirt hanging from the chain, wrapped in his hands. Like he’d used it to twist the radiator cap off a few minutes ago.