All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  And then there was the one emergency personnel who had died during the storm, his name withheld.

  And there were three residents confirmed dead, all senior citizens in the same car, and police were still looking for anyone with information about one non-senior-citizen death, or in contact with the one person still unaccounted for, and there was a sketch being produced if anybody—

  Jim Doe looked at the radio for the sketch.

  People dead, missing? But this wasn’t 1982.

  He wanted to get on the horn, ask for the particulars, but couldn’t risk having to fake his location, or who he was, and wasn’t.

  If he could just see that sketch they were producing, though.

  Would it be of the suspect, the person of interest, or of whoever was missing? Or, whoever was dead under mysterious circumstances, if they needed help making that ID.

  Too many possibilities.

  He flapped open the ancient atlas, found himself close enough to Seneca, which had to have a gas station, a television behind the counter which could tell him if the sketch mattered—or if it was of him, if Jim Doe was the person of interest, creeping away from the scene—and he was already closing the atlas when he saw what else was there.

  Maines or McKirkle had been writing on it with a pencil, as light as possible, and very scrawly, shaky like it was done while driving.

  But.

  Verdon was circled, had a number 3 by it.

  Jim Doe turned back to Texas, Nazareth, almost tore the page getting there.

  There was a 1 there.

  He was breathing hard now.

  Lydia was 6, Hartman, Colorado was 8, and there were probably numbers in Oklahoma and South Dakota and the rest of Nebraska and, and—

  Vermillion.

  Not the one in South Dakota, but the Kansas one, a thumbswidth away from where Jim Doe was right now.

  It was number 2, was next after Verdon, if the longhair was counting down from Lydia. And he was, he had to be.

  Jim Doe checked the mirror, let a milk rig slam past then fell in behind it, passed it like it was standing still half a mile later, the trucker laying on his airhorn.

  Jim Doe closed the window, went faster.

  At the roadblock—there was even a helicopter there—Jim Doe didn’t have to show his badge. The state trooper working the traffic was the same one who’d stopped Jim Doe before.

  “What’s up?” Jim Doe asked, leaning out the window.

  “Just move along,” the trooper said, already throwing a grim look to the car nosed up behind Jim Doe.

  Jim Doe pulled through.

  In the ditch was a highway patrol car. And there was an ambulance, but its doors were already shut. And probably thirty uniforms.

  Jim Doe clicked the radio back on but was turning up 88 before he could make sense. Something about an officer down, maybe, but nothing on the how or who.

  A Kansas thing.

  And this was a Texas thing Jim Doe was working.

  He braked down the main road of Vermillion, stabbed into a couple of the side roads. Needed help.

  At the one grocery store he got a tall coke at the fountain and studied the bulletin board. For missing faces, for free dogs, for lawnmowing. For anything.

  He went back to the register.

  “There any Indians in town?” he asked, the straw in his mouth to show this was all just casual.

  “You,” the bagboy said.

  Jim Doe took a long drink, walked out.

  Vermillion had never recovered from its tornado, it looked like. You could probably climb the big trees and still find galvanized metal that had once been somebody’s stock tank. Out in the fields there would be hubcaps and street signs already half-buried by the years, about to go under. Somewhere there’d be a windmill twisted down on itself, beer cans all around it. Somewhere else, a granite monument to the dead and the considered dead.

  Jim Doe made the circuit around town again, this time being systematic, trying to hit each road, each turn.

  It only took fourteen minutes, and that included scoping for the Bonneville Brougham.

  He was about to give up, maybe ask around for a phonebook, when, on the last road, the one closest to the highway, where the scrub brush grew right up to the blacktop, there it was, exactly what he hadn’t been expecting: Sheriff Debs’ cruiser. Just nosed up to a house like he was visiting.

  Jim Doe backed up, parked on the main road, clipped his badge to his shirtfront and uncuffed the loving .44 from under the seat.

  He was breathing hard, had to lean against a tree to collect himself.

  This was it, though. This was where the story was going to end. Nearly twenty years, and now he was going to close the Rangers’ Tin Man case.

  It felt good.

  It wouldn’t bring Sarina back, but still.

  He should have seen it when Debs took him to the diner in Lydia, too. How he ushered him out of town instead of making a case of it. Because then everybody would see his sticky fingers.

  So, now, Debs was just parked, waiting. Had used his shield to get into the confidence of these Indian parents, their kids long gone, and he was just sitting there, waiting for whoever was on his trail to show up. The longhair, who he had to hate, for undoing all his work. The Rangers, who had been chasing him since Texas.

  He couldn’t be expecting Jim Doe, though.

  For all he knew, Jim Doe had gone back to Nazareth after the Blue Kettles bailed him out. What else would he do, without a truck?

  Well, unless he’d been talking to Agnes. Which he probably had.

  Jim Doe stopped alongside another tree, couldn’t figure a way around this. But fuck it. He had the big .44. He didn’t need to figure it all out.

  This was for Sarina, who never should have been Dorothy.

  This was for all the Indian kids the Tin Man had taken.

  Jim Doe breathed in, breathed out, and ducked down behind the Garden City cruiser.

  The porch was empty as near as he could tell.

  Breathe, breathe, he told himself, and was about to spin around, using his best TV move, the .44 leveled on the front door, when there was a distinct scuffling behind him.

  He led with the pistol.

  It was a kid, maybe eleven. He was already holding his hands up. And smiling, about to laugh.

  Either Indian or Mexican, too. Up here, probably Indian. When he talked, his voice lilting up at the ends of the words: definitely Indian.

  “You going to shoot Lester?” he said.

  “Shh,” Jim Doe said, making his eyes big to show how important this was.

  “That your car?”

  Jim Doe nodded sure, what the hell.

  The kid nodded, like that was the answer he was looking for, said then, “So this is yours?”

  What he pulled out was the envelope of cash from the seat of the LeMans.

  “It blew out the window,” the kid said, offering it across.

  Jim Doe took it, thumbed it open.

  “Hundred and twenty dollars,” he said to the kid.

  The kid shrugged, asked, “There a reward?”

  “There was more,” Jim Doe said, stuffing the envelope in his back pocket.

  “Probably it blew out already,” the kid shrugged. “And you can’t shoot Lester right now. He’s in Oklahoma, at the pow-wow.”

  Jim Doe stared at the kid, trying to process this.

  Not here? Then what about Debs?

  “Listen,” Jim Doe said to the kid, “just, go. Wherever you were.”

  “Over there?”

  The kid was pointing to a tree a few feet off the road.

  “Home,” Jim Doe said.

  The kid looked to the falling-down house directly across the street. Maybe twenty feet away, however wide the road was.

  “Here,” Jim Doe said, crumpling a bill up from the envelope, stuffing it in his pocket then just tossing the envelope across, and whatever it had left. “Go to the store. Get something to drink.”

 
The kid uncrumpled the bill: one hundred dollars.

  Jim Doe cringed.

  “I don’t care if you already have the rest,” Jim Doe said. “Just go, go, okay?”

  Jim Doe chanced another look onto the porch, and when he came back, the kid was gone. All the racket they’d just made, though. If Debs were sitting on the other side of the door, then he’d heard it, would be ready now. On alert, not just flipping through some channels.

  The kid had been right, though: the cruiser’s window was open.

  Jim Doe reached in, unlocked it, eased the door open. There was no buzzer, just the dome light. And no hundred dollar bills on the floorboard, but that was no real surprise.

  There was something else, though.

  A cardboard box of papers. An old, sturdy peach box.

  Jim Doe worked it out onto the ground beside him, laid the .44 beside it, and, what he’d been looking for in the truck, this was it: rubbings from the plaques of storm-leveled towns all across the Midwest. Pairs of names, with dates. Just that. And, paperclipped to each, school photos.

  Jim Doe shook his head no, licked his lips, but shuffled all the way to the front, to the first rubbing, from the plaque in Nazareth.

  SARINA DOE AND GERALD CAJA.

  1982.

  He closed his eyes, rested his head against the car, and felt for the slick face of her school photo.

  There she was, exactly as she had been. Exactly how she still was.

  He thumbed it and Gerry’s out from under the paperclip, careful not to scratch them, and put them in his shirt pocket.

  And then he picked the pistol up again.

  If he’d had doubts before, he didn’t anymore.

  He stood, crunched through the old gravel, stepped up onto the porch and opened the door without knocking.

  Debs was sitting there in a chair, facing the door, his service revolver in his right hand.

  Jim Doe fell back, his finger convulsing on the trigger, the .44 going off in there somewhere, throwing him back harder than he already was.

  The slug tore a gouge in the hardwood floor right between Debs’ loafers.

  Debs didn’t even flinch.

  And his head, it was too high—

  Jim Doe stumbled back another step, caught himself on the porch railing. It creaked but held him.

  Debs’ head, it was—it didn’t make sense.

  It was too high.

  Somebody had cut all around it, severing all the muscle, the bone, but leaving the trachea. There were bricks wedged in on either side. Spacers.

  And he’d been alive, at least until the blood vessels split, without any pressure from the muscles to keep them in check. Meaning Debs had known his head was too high as well, had seen his knees from a completely different angle.

  Jim Doe gagged, held it down, shaking his head no, no, then fell back off the porch, ran for the truck, carrying the .44 high.

  The longhair hadn’t done this, he didn’t have the patience, the time, you could see it in the video, and—and if Debs wasn’t the Tin Man, then that meant that the Tin Man had done this to him. That he was still out there.

  And that he was coming.

  Part III

  TWENTY-FOUR19 April 1999, Dodge City, Kansas

  Blue monkeys. He could understand them calling him the Tin Man if he had some blue monkeys, maybe.

  He’d had his thumb on the motel remote control all morning, watching the news.

  Maybe it was the axe.

  Hadn’t the Tin Man originally been the Tin Woodsman?

  He’d already been through the motel’s box of VHS tapes, looking for some Oz, to see how he was supposed to act, see if he had a big dance number in the next scene, but it had all been military movies.

  It didn’t matter.

  They could call him whatever they wanted. It wouldn’t get them any closer.

  In the small bathroom with the thin walls, the back of a head was slowly knocking on the plastic wall of the shower. To keep herself awake, maybe.

  She wouldn’t last, of course, only had immediate use, but still. It had been too long. He’d forgotten the rush of slipping through a police barricade with a body under the false backseat, and then pulling away, into legend. Again.

  And the sky, it knew he was out here again.

  If he closed his eyes, he could hear the clouds grinding past, thousands of feet overhead. Scraping across Kansas, breathing in to exhale again, and breathing in deep.

  The next time they opened, connected with the land in their tender, furious way—it was going to be one for the history books, he could tell. It was going to be another Woodward, another Super Outbreak. They were going to need some new maps after this system.

  Kansas would be spared this time, though, he was pretty sure.

  Well, no tornadoes for it anyway.

  Maybe a body or two.

  He readjusted the pillows against the headboard.

  It couldn’t be Morse she was tapping on the wall of the shower—like, at her age, she could have grown up with a radio kit—but still, he listened, to see if she were accidentally saying anything.

  Twice she almost spelled “MARS,” and he had to shake his head.

  Calling all m-a-r-supials?

  Timmy, Timmy, I’m trapped in a m-a-r-sh.

  If only I had a couple of hamm-a-r-s.

  Never mind.

  But, this ‘Tin Man.’

  It was what that Sheriff had called him.

  Standing in the doorway between the Shoots Twice’s living room and kitchen, their note about Claremore already in his shirt pocket—but Amos would know about Claremore too, he was counting on it—the Tin Man had cocked his head over, as if this could be a case of mistaken identity. And then the next two hours had happened.

  The fascination with windpipes was recent, would probably be, he knew, just another passing thing, something else to be embarrassed about in five years. Right now, though, he couldn’t deny it: he’d always been following the big wind. It had occurred to him last year, watching a nautically-oriented movie, when one of the deckhands had said it just like that, in the face of a squall: Big wind, cap’n. And he was right. For thirty-plus years, ever since he’d learned to hear, he’d just been paying attention to the storms, the tornadoes, the big winds.

  But maybe he could listen closer, yes?

  Maybe there were storms everywhere, each time a chest expanded and compressed. A tight vortex of wind, tunneling down.

  Thus far, his experiments had been crude and situational, involved cigarette smoke breathed into the participant’s throat, and then an immediate attempt to see whether the coriolis effect was happening here or not. It was supposed to be like watching the last of the water spin down into the drain of the bathtub, except the trachea, while somewhat permeable to intense light, was still too thick.

  With the sheriff, he’d of course tried scraping away at the outside of the trachea, making the usual promises that if he remained still etcetera etcetera, but then of course the sheriff had moved, with predictable results.

  So it goes.

  The world was full of tracheas.

  There was even one a few feet away right now, drumming her head meaninglessly into the wall of the shower.

  Not yet, though.

  And maybe the real trick, it would be testing on a lifetime smoker. He’d held those black lungs in his hands, of course, showed them to the children as warning, but he’d never thought to put the calipers on the wall of the windpipe.

  There had to be a difference.

  And, if there were something to take back from these experiments, something to apply to the storm itself?

  What it the tornado functioned like a windpipe for the storm, what if it itself were a throat?

  If so, then tornadoes, they might, much like the human throat, also serve dual purpose. Respiration and swallowing.

  He’d heard once that Oz, it had been an older story. One told down through the tribes, through the nations, the stories always
passing along knowledge of that dual purpose: breathing out and then swallowing up, into some other land, some other life.

  And now the story was being told to the children again.

  By the Tin Man.

  He smiled, stabbed the remote, went up two channels.

  What he was looking for now was Amos. In spite of the mess he was making, the attention he was pulling in, the course he was on, still, the Tin Man—he liked the name, yes—couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride. Amos, moving into that morgue with the hair they’d taken such good care of, securing the perimeter calmly, deliberately. Not like an automaton, but like an animal. Single purpose, concentrated effort, guaranteed results.

  The Tin Man had drilled it into him.

  The news would never show the complete clip, however, just the part in the parking lot.

  The Tin Man bumped up two more channels, then four at once, started racing faster and faster until they blurred together, starting to resolve into something else, an image greater than themselves—a low pressure system moving down across the Midwest, meeting that warm air sighing up from the Gulf—and without even meaning to, his hand was in his pants again, pulsing with the weather, and then he closed his eyes, felt himself floating up into the sky, ascending, his arms trailing, following, the light ensconcing his body.

  The only thing holding him down was his duty, his mission.

  There was still one child left.

  Maybe that had been the problem all along.

  TWENTY-FIVEApril 19 1999, Kansas

  Kansas was taking too long.

  Jim Doe eased over into the passing lane, gunned the big Ford.

  All afternoon he’d been creeping south, keeping his eyes open for a pow-wow billboard.

  There was nothing.

  And the only reason for south over north, especially when the Dakotas were north, was that Vermillion had been pretty much south of Verdon. He was hoping it had been an on-the-way kind of thing.

  It had made a lot more sense three hours ago, though.

  He stopped in the outskirts of Manhattan, broke his twenty-dollar bill on a drive-through chicken sandwich he had to hold his mouth away from while he ate.

  He peed at a gas station, read too many of the scrawls on the wall, suddenly sure there was going to be a message there for him.