All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But that was okay.

  Jim Doe smiled, just staring at her after all these years—she’d grown up exactly as she was supposed to have—and then looked past her, the sky lit with a flash of lightning, and there on the roof of the overhang was the silhouette of a tall, thin man in a blowing raincoat.

  No, in a fireman’s jacket.

  And then nothing.

  TWENTY-SEVEN21 April 1999

  The world didn’t get steady when Jim Doe opened his eyes.

  He was wearing a hood of some sort.

  And . . . on a small boat?

  He clanged the heel of his boot against the bottom, got the kind of clunk that only comes when you’re floating over eighty feet of cloudy water, generations of Christmas trees under you, catfish drifting among them like zeppelins, their eyes marbles. A lake.

  It was night, too. He could feel it on his skin, wicking away his sweat.

  As for the day—Jim Doe had no way to measure that, no way to guess. The only memories he had between the pow-wow and now was of waking some amount of times, the white cloth descending over his mouth again. Of gulping in that medicinal air because he finally had to breathe. Of learning to relax into that off switch.

  Inside his head felt like a wet cottonball. Wet with gasoline. All it was going to take was one match, one spark.

  And, Sarina. Was she here?

  And . . . was he smelling sulfur, like a kitchen match? No, no, cordite, gunpowder. It was grainy in the air, had a texture on the back of his throat. And smoke.

  He pushed back with his feet when something started to sizzle beside him—that was the only word—and would have gone over the edge of the boat, his arms still tied behind him, if a hand hadn’t hauled him back to the middle.

  The hand grabbed him by his shoulder, because he had no shirt on, apparently. No pants, just some kind of shorts. Not his own, either. Somehow that made it worse. He was just raising his bound hands to his face to try to push the hood up when it was whipped off and the sky above him was on fire, was exploding, cascading sparks.

  Jim Doe flinched away, cringed down.

  It was a bottle rocket, fading now.

  This was a celebration.

  And there were three other shapes on the boat with him, slowly taking shape.

  Two were in the bow, were still hooded, their hands tied behind them, their black hair trailing down from their hoods across their shoulders and chest. One was shortish, and male, slumped over like a feedbag in a football jersey—the longhair—and the other was more delicate, was awake, had to be Sarina.

  Jim Doe pulled his feet to himself to stand, to go to her, get her away from the longhair anyway, but between him and her, trying to light the next bottle rocket, the aluminum bottom of the boat scorched black from all the others, was the Tin Man. Literally. He was wearing a Tin Man mask, had that hesitant grin, almost a smirk, pasted onto his plastic face. The long silver nose, jointed like a knuckle. The rest of him was just in fatigues.

  He looked to Jim Doe through the mask, his eyes calm, and let another handful of fire whoosh up into the sky.

  The sparks rained down over them.

  “Independence,” he said, about it all, and his voice, it was doubled, filtered, altered.

  He was wearing one of those throat mics that the old men wear when they’ve smoked too long, have lost something vital to do with talking: voice box, lung pressure, Jim Doe didn’t know.

  It made him sound like a robot. Made him match his face.

  The speaker for the mic was on his belt, it sounded like. There was a crackle even when he wasn’t speaking, maybe from breath, or blood in his neck.

  “If you haven’t yet,” the Tin Man said then, angling his body to Sarina and the longhair, “I’d like you to meet the cowardly lion and his precious charge, the interloper in our world. I believe you know her as . . . it’s Dorothy, yes?”

  Jim Doe sat up, struggled against the zip ties on his wrists.

  “I know about restraint, Deputy,” the Tin Man said, lighting another bottle rocket, “Believe me, I know about restraint,” and with that he angled the lit bottle rocket at the bow of the boat, let it launch.

  It screamed at Sarina and the longhair, slipped between them somehow, skipped once on the water then fizzled, Sarina flinching away hard enough that the Tin Man had to lunge to keep her in the boat.

  The longhair didn’t move.

  “There’s a difference between courage and unconsciousness, of course,” the Tin Man said, his voice still mechanically split, stapled back together in the air.

  “Sarina?” Jim Doe said, to her.

  The Tin Man laughed, liked that.

  And then he hauled a car battery up onto the bench. No, a boat battery, the kind with the posts on the side, with cables already clamped to red and black, the spring-loaded jaws at the other end sparking when the Tin Man scraped them together.

  Like the torture scene in every movie.

  Jim Doe started shaking his head no. Breathed in deeper than he had been.

  Soon the sun would be up. He could smell it now, the way the air chilled just before dawn, especially out on the water.

  Then somebody out running their illegal trotlines would see what was happening out here, report it.

  Unless they didn’t want to explain what they were doing on the water this early, of course.

  “Sarina,” he said again, but her hood must have been too thick for sound. She didn’t look around.

  “Don’t you think you should be cataloguing the particular contours of the shoreline, Deputy?” the Tin Man said, sweeping his hand out to the few porch lights burning. “Charting the stars? Listening for foghorns, watching the flow of traffic, tasting the salinity or acidity of the water? Guessing at what kind of fish are under here?” He trailed his fingers over the edge of the boat to show, flicked them into the air. “Because if it’s small-mouth bass, Deputy, then what state does that suggest? Or wall-eye? Pike?” He spread his arms out. “This . . . is this even a natural lake, or a reservoir? Spring-fed or run-off? If you put your ear to bottom of the boat, can you hear the turbines of a dam? If our lion here weren’t being so stubborn, so catatonic, trust me, that’s what he’d be doing right now. Because that’s how I raised him.”

  “How were you raised?” Jim Doe said then.

  The Tin Man smiled behind his mask, didn’t answer.

  “Let’s wake him up, shall we?” he said, and, before Jim Doe could even react, the Tin Man reached across the boat with the jaws of the cable, clamped one onto the longhair’s shoulder, the other to the meat of his thigh.

  It straightened the longhair out, Sarina flinching away, and, like it was part of the plan, his spasming muscles flopped him over the edge of the boat.

  He hardly made a splash, slipping into the water.

  The Tin Man looked back to Jim Doe about this, and then the battery clunked off the bench, the positive end of the cable still hanging onto the longhair, apparently.

  This exasperated the Tin Man. He collected a loop of the cable and jerked it back, clunking the longhair into the side of the boat. He stood, pulled harder.

  A turquoise patch of the Dolphins jersey came dripping over the side of the boat.

  Jim Doe looked away. To the contour of the lights along the shore. Trying to memorize them.

  “Guess he really was cowardly,” the Tin Man said, collecting the cables, keeping the red and black from each other. “I take it from your silence that you don’t approve?” he said then, to Jim Doe.

  “He deserved it,” Jim Doe said, forcing his voice to be steady.

  The Tin Man chuckled, the mechanical voice box amplifying it. “It should have been you all along,” he said. “But it’s not too late. You can still be made over in a—a better image. A more appealing visage . . . ”

  He flourished his fingers under his Tin Man mask.

  “I’m not like you,” Jim Doe said.

  “I wasn’t like me when I was your age either, James. It tak
es work, it takes dedication. It takes commitment.”

  “Yeah, well, I think he was kind of a natural,” Jim Doe said.

  “None of us naturals, really,” the Tin Man said. “Some are just better than others. At this.”

  “Just let her go.”

  “Our Dorothy here.”

  “Do whatever with me.”

  “All she needs to do,” the Tin Man said, “correct me if I’m wrong, here, but if she can just wake up, she goes home, right?”

  “This isn’t a movie.”

  “Yet we all have our lines, little Toto. Or is that Tonto?”

  “Just let her go.”

  “Oh, I’m about to, don’t worry. Tell me, now, growing up where and how you did, you of course swam in stock tanks and in above-ground pools. But, have you ever free-dived?”

  “What?”

  “If you go down deep enough, if you make yourself go down deep enough, if you have that kind of mental fortitude, if everything in your world depends upon you kicking down just a few more feet, do you know what happens to your inner ear? All that pressure . . . ”

  Now he had the red and black jaws in his hand again. Was opening them, closing them.

  Jim Doe shrank back, was ready to go over the edge if he needed to.

  But then the Tin Man just put the cables into a mid-size red cooler Jim Doe hadn’t even noticed before.

  The battery followed.

  “Can’t be leaving evidence,” the Tin Man said, his voice lilting like a children’s television host, and then he duct-taped the lid shut.

  He hauled the heavy cooler up onto the bench, having to strain to get it there.

  “A hand?” he said to Jim Doe, and Jim Doe held his hands up as obviously as he could, the wrists bound together.

  “Of course,” the Tin Man said, and a blade opened, from a knife he’d apparently had ready.

  He held it out for Jim Doe to saw at the zip ties around his wrist.

  They gave almost immediately.

  “Now,” the Tin Man said, knife still very much in play, the rest of him scooting over so Jim Doe could get his arms properly around the cooler. “Let the younger generation do what the older can’t, right?”

  He laughed his mechanical laugh again and Jim Doe didn’t get the joke. Keeping his back away from the Tin Man’s knife—getting himself closer to Sarina, to tackle her off the edge, into the water, dog-paddle her for whatever miles were necessary—he lifted the cooler, noted the new holes drilled all into it, the fresh red plastic still spiraling out in some places.

  What?

  Still, it was better that the battery be in the water than in the boat, so he took one step over, dropped it, and, because of the holes it didn’t even bob for a moment, to realize it had the weight of the battery in it. It just sunk.

  And it took Sarina with it.

  She was tied to it somehow, by the wrists.

  Jim Doe looked back to the Tin Man, calmly lighting another celebratory bottle rocket, something particularly satisfied about his posture, and then, not even thinking to breathe deep, Jim Doe dove in after his sister.

  The water was frigid and black and all around.

  Jim Doe kicked down through it, his eyes open but there was no reason for it, and then, impossibly, his hand stabbed into a handful of hair.

  He hauled it close to him and all the bottle rockets must have went off over the boat at once. Some of the light leached down through the surface of the water. Enough for him to make out a cloudy face, painted black.

  The longhair.

  Jim Doe pushed him away, needed a breath already but dove down deeper, his head pounding with the pressure, and again, somehow, his hand found something.

  He turned, kicked for the surface, came up gasping with Sarina’s hood.

  The boat was ten, fifteen feet off.

  “I know,” the Tin Man said in commiseration, another, much thicker firecracker already lit in his hand.

  He lobbed it into the water by Jim Doe, as if tossing it to him. It wasn’t a jumbo bottle rocket, either. It was one of those little recreational sticks of dynamite, M-60, M-80, something. The fuse packed in wax.

  Jim Doe gulped air, flinched away from the splash it had made, and slipped under just as the firecracker detonated, cratering the water, a concussion pulsing all around him, something wet collapsing in his right ear, letting in water and sound and pain, like he’d been shot, like he could feel the water behind his eyes now, and always would.

  It didn’t matter.

  Sarina was gone.

  Again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT21 April 1999, Vermillion, Texas

  “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 floo
r. 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.”

  TWENTY-NINE23 April 1999, Lubbock, Texas