All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  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.

  SEVEN1 April 1999, Kalvesta, Kansas

  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.

  EIGHT1 April 1999, Garden City, Kansas

  Jim Doe opened his eyes and nothing changed. The world was still black and painful, and then a bell rang. Of a school? Wait—the gym, yes. Basketball games, they’re at gyms, and gyms are in schools, and schools have bells.

  A closet, then. Jim Doe had been stuffed into a supply closet. A janitorial closet.

  He tried the door but it was locked, leaned against it but it was solid, kicked it but it was tight. He reached for his pistol, found it minutes later in a gallon can of warm turpentine. He slung it dry, the pistol, patted it down with the tail of his shirt, touched the end of the barrel to the doorknob that wouldn’t turn, backed off two steps; fired. There was a half moon of students waiting for him on the other side. They were all wearing plastic safety goggles
. From shop.

  The gunpowder was a harsh tang in the air. Everybody half-deaf, now.

  “Officer,” one of them said.

  “Deputy,” Jim Doe corrected.

  He was still blinking, trying to adjust to all this light.

  “Is this going to be a shooting?” one of the kids asked.

  “That part’s over,” Jim Doe said.

  “April Fool’s,” a kid called behind him, as he was following the wall away, still not so sure about his ability to stand.

  The first exit he found opened onto a courtyard. There was a girl there, sitting in a windowsill, smoking. He didn’t know what his face looked like. Hopefully not like it felt.

  “Who won?” he asked her.

  “Not you,” she said, taking him in all at once.

  “The game last night.”

  She exhaled, watched the smoke. Looked back to him finally. “Who do you think?” she said.

  By the time he found the real exit, the law was there, with more screeching up. Because you’re not supposed to fire weapons on school property, on a school day. You’re not supposed to even have them. Or be there if you’re not a student. And especially if you’re not a resident of the state. Being Indian probably wasn’t going to help either.

  Jim Doe surrendered his pistol, sat in the back of a black and white and watched the crowd disperse.

  His truck was there, parked sideways to all the other cars. On the driver’s side now, half across the gas cap cover, there was a red handprint. It was the longhair’s, a coup, what it used to mean: touching the enemy while the enemy’s still alive. First blood. I can get to you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  A Sheriff Debs settled into the backseat with Jim Doe, didn’t fit very well.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  Jim Doe turned to him.

  “I almost had him,” he said.

  “You’re Tom’s punk deputy,” Deb said.

  Jim Doe shrugged, pled guilty to the deputy part, anyway.

  “Had who?” Debs asked.

  “Same one you want,” Jim Doe said.

  “I don’t want anybody, son,” Debs said, and made his cumbersome way to the front seat, took Jim Doe to a diner at the west edge of town. He said it was his sister-in-law’s place, and Jim Doe was to at least pretend to eat whatever got sat down on a plate in front of him, if he understood what Debs was saying.

  At the diner, after they’d switched sides of the booth so Debs could hear the sister-in-law, Jim Doe just said another of whatever Debs had ordered.

  “You were at the funeral,” he said to Debs, as a way to get this going.

  “Tom was a friend,” Debs said back. “We went through together, back when it was still ball and powder”

  “So this your town?” Jim Doe said, about Garden City.

  Debs leaned close across the table. “What were you doing with that high school tail, son? While your sheriff was getting killed, I mean. Enquiring minds want to know.”

  Jim Doe stared at Debs.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said.

  Debs smiled. “I saw her,” he said, cocking his head in appreciation. “You tell me what it was like, then, how about? What were you really doing at our high school, Deputy? Looking for another girlfriend?”

  Jim Doe leaned back. They were the only ones there. Ever, it felt like.

  “She reminds me of my sister,” he said, no eye contact.

  Debs’ frame shuddered with something like laughter. Or appreciation.

  “Sicker than I thought,” he said.

  Jim Doe came back to him, didn’t look away this time.

  “I almost had him,” he said again.

  “Correction,” Debs said. “You let him know somebody’s after him. There’s kind of a big difference, there.”

  “So he’ll go faster, be less careful,” Jim Doe said. “I don’t think he’s exactly all there anyway.”

  “Listen,” Debs said, unfolding one of Jim Doe’s flyers on the table between them. “And this is just because Tom trusted you enough to let you carry a big boy gun. Even if you do fire it on school grounds.”

  “Speaking of that.”

  Debs slid the pistol across to Jim Doe. It was wrapped in a handkerchief gone nearly transparent from the turpentine. Jim Doe peeled the cloth off, worked the steel with his napkin. The finish was coming off now, like a clearcoat.

  “You’re not the only one on the trail, that’s what I’m saying,” Debs said.

  Jim Doe put all the soaked cartridges in his shirt pocket. They were warm, oily. He didn’t know how they hadn’t all gone off at once, when he shot the door. How he was still here, with two hands he could open and close.

  “There’s an APB out, right?” he said, setting the pistol down by his plate, to dry. “Isn’t everybody kind of looking?”

  “I’m talking about the Rangers, son. Two in particular. A matched set.”

  “Maines,” Jim Doe said. “He was at the funeral. And that other one, that’s even bigger.”

  “McKirkle,” Debs filled in. “And you could say they’re real prideful about that ‘we always get our man’-thing. No matter who they have to wade through. I’m only telling you because I know Agnes has a stake in your coming back.”

  Jim Doe nodded. This was better than going to jail, at least. He wasn’t this sheriff’s son, though.

  Their cheeseburgers got there, on a bed of soggy fries.

  Debs nodded thanks to his sister-in-law. She blushed, scuttled away. She was the cook, waitress, and cashier.

  “How do you know Maines and that other one?” Jim Doe said, biting in. Not tasting it until it was time to swallow, then wishing he’d taken a smaller bite.

  “They come through from time to time,” Debs said. “Storm season, like. Usually not this early.”

  “Chasers?”

  “Not like you’re thinking.”

  “Then what?”

  Debs studied Jim Doe, then studied him some more.

  “It’s the one that did get away,” Debs finally said. “For them. The only one. If he’s even real, I mean. If you didn’t just make him up.”

  “What do you mean?” Jim Doe said. “The Indian?”

  He chanced another bite, immediately regretted it.

  Debs chuckled.

  “Indian who shot Tom’s too young,” Debs said. “No, this one—Nazareth’s the only time he ever came to Texas, as far as anybody knows. Nineteen eighty-two, I think it was. It’s when he got their attention. They were DPS out of Lubbock then, but still. They took it as a personal insult, I think, even if it was just Indians, no offense. Never even told the feds. They want him for theirself, if he’s even still alive.”

  Jim Doe stopped chewing, stared right into Deb’s eyes.

  “I don’t—”

  “Eat,” Debs told him, the ghost of a smile at his lips. “And think, they wouldn’t even know about him without you, now would they?”

  Jim Doe tried to swallow, dry-heaved instead, had to stagger for the bathroom, throw up into the urinal, which just made him throw up more.

  Nazareth, 1982.

  The fireman.

  He had been real after all.

  NINE19 May 1982, Nazareth, Texas

  When the world stopped turning, Jim Doe looked across to his sister to see if she had felt it as well.

  “What?” Gerry Box said, still smiling, a moth squirming under his black and white domino.

  They were in the attic of Gerry’s house, were lining dominoes on top of the rafters, were going to knock them all down at once. And Gerry’s real name was ‘Caja,’ but everybody knew it meant box, just in Spanish. He was the only boy in Jim Doe’s sister’s grade who was as dark as they were.

  “Yeah,” Jim Doe’s sister said, pulling her head down kind of like a turtle would, forgetting about her domino.

  Ten seconds ago, the storm they were hiding indoors from had been pelting the clapboard, screaming through the trees, making damp spots on the un
derside of the roof they were having to duck to keep from hitting.

  And now, now all of that was gone.

  Jim Doe swallowed, licked his lips, let his domino clap down onto the wood, barely missing all the rest they’d already stood up on end.

  He was eight, his sister ten.

  “Oh,” Gerry Box said then, when the light coming through the circle vent in the side of the house changed, went powdery green.

  Way down the street, somebody screamed, and didn’t stop screaming.

  Jim Doe’s hand made its way across to his sister’s, and she let him, and, in a whisper of contact, all their dominoes fell over against each other.

  “This is bad,” she said.

  Gerry Box stood up too fast, hit his head, his moth escaping, fluttering up against the roof over and over.

  They were supposed to be quiet, so Jim Doe’s mom wouldn’t hear they were up here. But now—it was all Jim Doe could do not to be calling her.

  Something was wrong. Something even his sister couldn’t explain.

  Walking on top of the rafters, she made her way to the circle vent, flipped the wooden slats open.

  Her hair didn’t blow. There was no wind.

  For the first time in ever.

  “Let’s go,” Gerry Box said, holding his head where he’d hit it.

  Jim Doe’s sister looked back to him, her lower lip gently bit between her side teeth, and then to Jim Doe, and then the slats she was holding open all slammed shut at once. Sucked shut.

  She looked at them like they didn’t make sense, and then the whole circle vent was sucked backwards, flipped out like a coin into nothing. Into the sky.

  And then they heard it.

  The storm wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

  For a flash, Jim Doe saw it, even, a winding black column connecting the ground to the clouds, like the finger of God reaching down, and then the roof shifted over their heads and the world was moving again. Fast, and hard.

  Gerry Box screamed, one of his legs going through the floor where he wasn’t supposed to step, and Jim Doe’s sister dove for him, to keep him from falling through, and Jim Doe just looked outside again.

  The whole sky was black.

  Where they going somewhere else, now?