All the Beautiful Sinners (17 page)

“He deserved it.”

McKirkle spit into the brass spittoon by the chair Sheriff Debs was dead in, the flies coating his chest like a costume beard.

It was the second time he’d said that Debs deserved it.

“Trying to talk yourself into it?” Maines asked him.

McKirkle didn’t answer.

Maines sat down in the loveseat, right in the middle so he was taking most of it up. McKirkle took up a station in the front doorway. Just staring Kansas down, daring it to flinch.

They were driving a loaner car from the Nebraska State Police.

“So’s it him?” McKirkle said back to Maines, “or’s it a copy artist?”

“Or the Indian,” Maines filled in.

“Which one?” McKirkle said.

Maines shook his head in amusement, said, “Which one what? This or Nebraska? Hard to keep the hell up.”

“There’s a whirlwind out there,” McKirkle quoted.

Maines nodded that there was at that.

“The girl, though,” McKirkle said. “We know it wasn’t our Indian, anyway.”

McKirkle nodded, stared.

Where the kid deputy had been while the girl was getting killed was lying in the floorboard of the backseat of their truck.

It was stupid, careless. As far as Nebraska knew, though, the truck had gone up in the storm.

As far as anybody was going to know, too.

“It was him,” Maines said, finally.

“Just taking the moms now, instead of the kids,” McKirkle said, ever willing to argue.

“People change,” Maines said. “Have, I don’t know. Different freak needs or whatever.”

“Not saying he had to do that to the girl, though,” McKirkle said, just to be sure.

Maines didn’t have to answer.

“Or this,” McKirkle added—Debs.

“This could have been the Indian,” Maines said. “The one got Tom.”

“Then that’d mean he was in Verdon as well, wouldn’t it? That thing with the throat. You don’t do that less you’re doing it on purpose.”

Maines stared at the brass spittoon. It was the Stands Twice father’s, probably still had his spit in it, even.

No, he would just be a husband now. Unless he had more kids. Or maybe you didn’t stop being a father just because your kids got took in a storm.

And they were still in the wind, of course, the parents. The ex-parents.

Maybe the Indian
had
got them, left them behind in some ditch already.

The next time Maines looked up, there was a ragged little kid standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He’d come in through the backdoor, evidently.

“Hey,” Maines said to McKirkle.

McKirkle came around, studied the kid.

“I’ve got his name,” the kid said.

Maines swallowed, caught McKirkle’s eye for a flash.

“‘Stands Twice?’” McKirkle finally said.

“Not Lester,” the kid said, insulted. “The policeman who killed the other policeman.”

Maines deliberated on this. “You saw it?” he finally asked.

“He shot him,” the kid said, and stepped back as if holding a serious hand cannon, let one fly, his lips out to make the noise right.

Maines nodded his best grim nod.

They’d already dug the big slug from the floor. It was in McKirkle’s shirt pocket, now.

“So?” McKirkle said, stepping into the room now.

“So,” the kid said back, kind of just standing there, not at all worried about Debs.

“He wants to get paid,” Maines said, in appreciation.

McKirkle nodded, cocked his elbow back for his wallet but the kid interrupted: “You’re from Texas.”

McKirkle stopped, shrugged sure.

“I’ve
got
money,” the kid said, like money was the most boring thing. “Enough for my whole life already.”

“Well then,” Maines said.

The kid shrugged too, looked around the room.

“I take it this isn’t his first rodeo,” McKirkle said.

It took more than he expected for Maines not to smile. Even sitting in the room with a dead man.

“Well?” he said again to the kid.

“Texas, right?” the kid said. Just that.

Maines caught McKirkle’s eye again. Neither had a clue.

“You know, the, the cowboy hat,” the kid said, flashing his face up for an instant then burying his chin again.

Maines covered his hand with his mouth.

“You heard the boy, Bill,” he said to McKirkle.

McKirkle was just staring at this specimen of a kid.

“If you don’t want the evidence, of course . . . ” Maines added.

McKirkle sneered, peeled out of his hat, pretending the pop the dust off it but Maines knew better.

In the car five minutes later, McKirkle slipped the envelope he’d traded for up onto the dash, ran his hand over his freckled bald scalp.

“He didn’t know shit,” he said. “Couldn’t even read, could he?”

The envelope said
Agnes
on it, in old-lady script.

Maines worked the radio, got somebody to patch him through to a telephone. In Texas.

It rang and rang.

He worked the radio all over again, from the beginning, got a different number.

A minute later he signed off, said, “Guess where the hell he is?”

McKirkle dropped the car in gear, kept his foot on the brake.

“Which one?” he said.

“The one owes us either a truck or an explanation,” Maines said, then added, “and I don’t gather we’ll be in much of a listening mood.”

What Jim Doe told Agnes when she drove the thirty minutes to his hospital room was that he was dead, the one who shot Tom. That he was dead, and it was over. And that he was still going to pay her back the seventeen hundred.

He’d shown up in the pick-up lane of a nursing home thirty-six hours ago. Because they don’t have cameras, like the emergency lanes of hospitals do. But ambulances are in and out all day, still.

He’d been back in his right clothes, too. Couldn’t begin to tell anybody which lake to drag, for Sarina.

For seventeen years, she’d been taken by the sky, then for a few hours she’d been kidnapped by somebody who was real, somebody Jim Doe hadn’t just dreamed. Now she’d drowned, was down there now, her long hair floating up around her, deeper than sunlight.

Meaning once again the Tin Man had taken her, left him.

It didn’t make any sense.

Jim Doe rubbed at the gauze covering his right ear. The drum in there had exploded in from the firecracker, the doctors had explained to him, and his Eustachian canal didn’t seem to be working the same either. It made the base of his jaw feel strange, but other than that he was supposed to be hearing on that side of his head again soon, for the most part.

The nurse who had come on at shift change in the morning had spoken Spanish to him at first, too.

At least he understood a bit of it.

If she’d have spoken Blackfeet, he would have thought his hearing was really jacked, like the Tin Man had hit some kind of reset button in his blood or something.

The nurse who came on for the afternoon loved his last name.

He didn’t know which was better.

Just not to be here at all, probably.

To be with Sarina.

For Gentry not to have pulled the longhair over for that Driving While Indian stop. But then Sarina would still be . . . however she’d been since 1982. Since that day in the attic.

She’d seemed healthy, though, right?

Maybe the Tin Man had just transplanted her, even, made her forget who she was, then gone back, collected her for this one pow-wow, this one boatride. This one reunion with her brother, whom she probably thought was dead.

Jim Doe opened his eyes, grubbed for the institutional TV remote, had to fish it up with the thick white cable.

Dinner was stroganoff, some flavorless, antiseptic variety.

Jim Doe asked for seconds. It was punishment.

“Anything else?” the afternoon nurse asked, holding onto the doorway, standing up on her tiptoes for some reason. To try to catch her eyebrows, maybe.

Jim Doe shook his head thanks, but no.

“Just ring,” she said, and twirled away.

Jim Doe pawed through the channels.

Agnes had told him he could get ten or fifteen percent disability, she’d guess, and she knew who to talk to, but he wasn’t even sure he was coming back yet. Part of it depended on whether they’d take him back, of course. Another part depended on if the Rangers ever caught up with him.

Jim Doe went up another channel but it was wavery, so he went up again, then two more at once, finally settled on something local. The news.

There was a color-enhanced doppler radar animation on-screen.

Jim Doe sat up, to see it better.

It was swirling, chewing up the sky.

Right above them. Just drilling into the whole south plains, less like a low-pressure front, more like the hurricanes you see from above, out in the ocean. One for the record books.

In the lower left of the screen, the usual: a tornado watch.

The meteorologist explained that that meant seek cover, not just that conditions were right, and then went on with a slideshow of the last tornado to hit Lubbock, in 1971.

Jim Doe left him talking, stood, dragged his tubes and cables to the window.

Outside, the sky was pink, blowing, lightning branching down into the ground. It was like the end of the world.

“Sir?” the nurse said from the doorway, because his alarm was going off. “Mr. Doe?”

“It followed me,” Jim Doe said, letting the curtains fall back over the glass.

“What did?” the girl said, and then something hit the window hard, shattered it, Jim Doe curling away from the explosion, falling into the bed.

The next time he looked up, the nurse had her body cupped over him, was protecting him from anything else that came through the open window.

Jim Doe said to her, “You’ve got a car, don’t you?”

The Tin Man slipped up into neutral for the stop sign.

The truck was an automatic, but it was so big, too. It felt like something you’d need to shift. It even had the running lights up top, like it had some inferiority complex out on the highway, was having to pretend it was a rig, a tractor, needed to indicate itself that way. Needed to be in that class of vehicle.

In the console was a bubble light, too, with a magnet on the bottom.

And the exempt plate didn’t hurt either.

He didn’t want to drive it for long, but until this system produced, it would do. Nobody would be making traffic stops tonight, anyway.

He hadn’t even meant to come here, either—it’s always better to stake out the big towns, since they’re like hubs, with roads out to all the little towns—but he’d seen an old yellow tornado siren from the road, couldn’t stop thinking about it, had to circle back.

He pulled through the intersection, nosed into the town’s one convenience store and just sat there, watching the classic horn, the sky perfect behind it.

He’d initially thought it was going to be Castro County, maybe Lamb, or Parmer, maybe even into eastern New Mexico, where he’d never been, but this was still Lubbock County, now. And the sky had a hungry sound to it.

He killed the diesel to hear it better, and the truck idling beside him keyed off as well.

The driver was a lineman, it looked like. He nodded across to the Tin Man.

“What do you think?” he said—the sky.

“Hard to say,” the Tin Man lied.

The lineman chuckled, draped himself over the wheel, said, “You’re a chaser, aren’t you?”

The Tin Man looked over, didn’t answer.

“My sis-in-law’s the same,” he said. “I can see it from a mile away.”

“Your sister-in-law?”

“Well, yeah, you can see her from a good ways off too, hear her from longer, but the way you’re watching, man. Same way she does. No offense, I mean, but it’s kind of all hopeful. Like you want it to happen.”

“No offense taken.”

“Happened to her when she was kid, I guess. When she got bit. Storm was coming and her whole big family let the horses loose and dove for the cellar, but she had the measles then, and her aunt was pregnant, so Celia—that’s her name—she had to stand up on top of that metal door while the tornado whipped through, knocked all the houses down, dug this big-ass ditch through their field. Says there was a moment when the wind kind of floated her up, like, and she had to choose, could either grab the door’s cable or not. Been a junky for it ever since.”

The Tin Man nodded, licked his lips, said, “Celia.”

The lineman nodded, re-evaluated the Tin Man.

“So what’s your story?” he said. “Don’t mind my asking. I mean, I noticed you were law and all. Most cops I know got enough trouble, don’t need to run down storms for it, right?”

The Tin Man laughed a fake laugh.

“My father,” he said, “it’s really his fascination, I suppose. Where I—where we grew up, our base, he was the emergency response coordinator. He was the one who called in the very first tornado warning ever. I was standing right there beside him.”

“No shit?”

The Tin Man nodded like it was nothing to be proud of, really.

It felt good, telling the truth.

Still, he’d already flipped the reflection in the glass, of the lineman’s license plate. No loose ends.

But this Celia.

Just saying her name made his chest feel expansive in a new way. And when the body in the long bag on the floorboard behind his seat kind of thunked its head into the back of his seat, well. He had to adjust himself.

“Me, I’m kind of the opposite, I guess,” the lineman went, leaning forward to peer up through his windshield. “All this shit? I’m cleanup, man. Everybody wants their power, their phones, and they want it now.”

“Overtime, though,” the Tin Man said.

“Guess you’ve seen that one building, downtown Lubbock, right? Tornado thirty years ago kind of knocked it silly, but it never fell down.”

“Twenty-eight years,” the Tin Man corrected.

The lineman nodded, kept nodding. Got one of his cigarettes going, inhaled deep and closed his eyes, holding it in.

“You’re a smoker,” the Tin Man said, fascinated.

“Say again?” the lineman said. The wind was whipping through now, pulling gravel off the roof of the convenience store. It pinged against the hoods of their trucks.

The Tin Man just kept looking south, his arms folded over the wheel. “Those’ll kill you, I mean,” he said—the cigarettes.

“Like I’m gonna live that long,” the lineman said, leaning down for his ignition, and the Tin Man nodded, couldn’t agree more, and then, the lineman with his brake in, about to back out of his parking lot, he touched his own ear, to show the Tin Man about his.

The Tin Man reached up, dabbed it.

Blood.

It was running from his head now.

Something was on the ground, and close.

He nodded thanks to the lineman, lifted his hand in farewell when the lineman backed out of his parking slot, then lit his own glow plugs, waited for the big truck to rumble into life, carry him into the heart of the world, into the countless sheep, milling around in the wind.

It was their own fault if they didn’t stop him.