All the Beautiful Sinners
Page 20
The DJ dial-toned the caller and somebody in the store clapped, and through it Jim Doe heard a voice at the counter finishing a joke, and realized he knew the punchline.
It was about Indians, and horses, and how you get your name.
He cocked his head, looked to the counter, to the tall thin man with the foil-wrapped burrito on the counter, a smile on his face, a tuft of white cotton in his ear that finally clicked for Jim Doe, had been haunting him since that day in Earth: when the Tin Man—when Gerry’s helmet had slung off, he’d been bloody from throat to groin, and getting worse, but the side of his duct-taped head, when Jim Doe zoomed in on the memory, it wasn’t caked with blood like he’d seen when the Tin Man had been slamming through that tank in Olton.
The man seemed to feel Jim Doe looking, or to have been aware of him already.
There was a grin in his eyes, maybe from this joke he knew the punchline of, had told a thousand times, or maybe from what he was getting away with here.
Jim Doe rose as if on a string, made his way to the counter.
The fireman silhouette that had become the news’s icon for the serial killer called Tin Man was over the anchor’s shoulder right now.
Jim Doe pointed to it with his face, his eyes never leaving this joke teller— slacks, short-sleeved dress shirt, loose tie, late forties or so, rumpled and neat both, normal enough he looked more FBI than anything else—and said, “They never figured out why they called him that, did they?”
The man turned to Jim Doe, a tolerant look on his face, like he was prepared to smile here if necessary.
Jim Doe shrugged, leaned back against the counter, and said, like it was a secret, “It was because he liked to wear this stubby little funnel on his head, like this,” and he reached down, palmed one off the counter—ninety-nine cents—set it up on the man’s head, or tried to.
“I don’t think so,” the man said, letting the funnel rattle down to the floor, then he leaned in like he had his own secret, said, “It was because he didn’t have a heart.”
Jim Doe smiled his best fake smile, just buying time to get his words right, then said, directly from the middle of nowhere, “I remembered your voice just now. Not from the boat, but kind of from there. You called her Dorothy. You couldn’t have know that unless you’d heard this punk kid call her that seventeen years ago, yeah?”
The man kind of squinted all around, maybe for witnesses, and, when there was only the clerk, laid three dollars on the counter by his burrito.
“Dorothy?” he said, his voice completely innocent.
Benjamin Donner and Terra sidled into line behind him then, Terra biting her lip, Benjamin Donner’s eyes hard and flat.
But Jim Doe wasn’t interested.
“Tell me you aren’t who you are,” Jim Doe said to the man, slapping Sarina and Gerry’s school photos down on the counter. “Tell me you didn’t make Gerry think he was Indian. Tell me you didn’t—”
“He was more Indian than any of you,” the man said, then pursed his lips. But it was too late. He’d said it.
Jim Doe let his fingers wrap around the chrome brick the napkin dispenser was.
“Now that we know who are,” he said.
“I can bring you to her,” the Tin Man said back, just for Jim Doe. “We can go to her right now if you want. Don’t tell me you don’t want to, that it hasn’t occupied every thought since—”
“You paid twenty-two hundred dollars for her,” Jim Doe cut in, and came around with the napkin dispenser, aiming it right at the Tin Man’s face.
The Tin Man caught it, though.
It gave Jim Doe precisely enough time to reach into his complicated sling, come out with the big .44 he’d had Agnes lend him, from Gentry’s old stash.
He held it right against the bridge of the Tin Man’s nose, the hammer already drawn back, his finger pulling back more and more.
“She’s still alive,” the Tin Man, whoever he really was, said, his hands out to the side, and Jim Doe said to Terra, “My cuffs, they’re on my belt. Give them to him.”
She did, moving slow.
“Put them on, around that pole,” Jim Doe said to the Tin Man, angling his head, not the pistol, down to the iron railing bolted to the floor.
“Just do it,” the Tin Man said, about the .44.
“You know how they work,” Jim Doe said about the cuffs, stepping back with the pistol.
“Okay, okay, I tied her legs to a tractor, wanted to see how far—” Jim Doe stopped him with the side of the pistol, slammed into his face.
The Tin Man fell to his knees, dropped the cuffs.
Jim Doe kicked them back to him.
“Put them on,” he said. “I’ve got all day here, but you’ve only got one face.”
The Tin Man looked up to Jim Doe, scanned the people around—the clerk, Benjamin Donner, Terra—and took the cuffs, bit them around one wrist.
“Sure it’s him?” Benjamin Donner said to Jim Doe.
“Do it,” Jim Doe said to the Tin Man, his finger tightening on the trigger again. “Do it, I don’t want to shoot you until you’re properly restrained.”
The Tin Man studied Jim Doe, studied the big .44, then nodded about this new deal, cuffed himself tight.
“All right,” he said then. “But first I want you to know that I—”
“No speeches,” Jim Doe said, and brought the pistol hard into the Tin Man’s forehead, dropping him like a rag doll.
After it, Jim Doe was breathing hard. His fingertips twitching.
He slid the pistol across the counter to the clerk, said, his voice a completely manufactured thing at this precise moment, “Still got those dominoes back there, Ned?”
The clerk took the pistol, traded the dominoes back, patted them like to keep them in place, or to show they were on the house, something.
It didn’t matter.
Jim Doe nodded thanks, couldn’t say anything else, just walked through the new silence, took them back to his booth, spread them down onto the tabletop.
A moment later, Terra sat across from him, on the very edge of her seat, took her seven.
Jim Doe sucked his top lip in.
Before she could even lay her first double down, though, Benjamin Donner was standing over their booth, his hands balled into fists.
“Terra,” he said. Just that.
She looked down onto the tabletop, all innocence and mischief, and Jim Doe, without looking up, tilted his head out to the parking lot, to Benjamin Donner’s truck, said, “You need to roll your windows up there, Ben. It’s about to rain.”
Benjamin Donner squinted out through the window at this blowtorch of a day, said, “This some Indian trick? You can hear the clouds now?”
“Something like that,” Jim Doe said, and pushed his domino out onto the table, even though it weighed exactly ten thousand pounds.
Terra nudged one of hers up to it, connecting them after all these years, and then the first heavy drops hit the plate glass window, rolled down through the dust, and the DJ on the tinny radio was chuckling into the mic about that last caller, saying how all you beautiful sinners out there on the South Plains, if you can keep from raising too much Cain over this next spot of commercials, he might just play something local, and Jim Doe smiled without having to think about it, looked out to the rain coming down in glass sheets now.
They shattered over Nazareth, washed it clean.
Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma is the home of the first
successful tornado prediction. Wireless telegraph is
how Frank Baum purported to communicate
with the Land of Oz. ‘Nazareth’ is from
the Hebrew word for ‘watch,
guard, keep.’ And Joan
Gay Croft is still
missing, yes.
This book
is also
dedi-
cated
to
her
All the Beautiful Sinners
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Graham Jones
Cover design by Thomas Patrick Levy, Levy Media
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