All the Beautiful Sinners (14 page)

Ninety-eight gallons.

That was how much diesel Maines and McKirkle had in the number one auxiliary tank in the bed of their truck. In-line pump, readout on the dash, six foot hose and everything—courtesy of the Texas Rangers. And there was another tank built in under the toolbox. Counting what was left in the twin tanks the truck had stock, Jim Doe figured he had at least two-hundred gallons of diesel to burn.

Even if he was just getting fifteen miles to the gallon—even with ten-ply highway tires, the truck was still a dually—that was three thousand miles, give or take.

Which was good, and necessary.

When he’d stopped by the caved-in LeMans in Pawnee City, the envelope of cash from Agnes had been gone. Kids, maybe, or adults, or, with the windows shattered, it could have been birds, or rats. He’d had it tucked under the passenger seat cover where it was torn, anyway, and now the foam there was all gutted out.

They hadn’t got the .44 from under the front seat, though.

Jim Doe slid it barrel-first under the front seat of the Ford, then thought again, handcuffed the trigger guard to the seatpost down there, using the same handcuffs that had saved him in Verdon, the chrome chain hooked around the gooseneck ball.

His wrists were bleeding now, the thumbs already turning purple, the nails beaten black, but it was better than getting sucked up into the sky, and the key to the cuffs had been on the ring in the ignition, and the truck was definitely a trade up from a car there were already bulletins circulating for. And he was counting the truck as recompense anyway, for Maines and McKirkle blindsiding him, leaving him out there like a sacrifice to the storm.

No, it was recompense for 1982, for keeping the Tin Man secret all this time. And it wasn’t nearly enough.

Jim Doe opened the Powerstroke up, got the hell out of Nebraska, was thirty minutes into Kansas before a lightbar flashed behind him.

For a moment his boot hesitated over the accelerator, but there was no outrunning the radio.

He coasted over, the twin tires in back slinging gravel up into the fiberglass fenders. Hopefully cracking them.

He put his hands in view and waited.

The last Kansas law he’d encountered had been Lobicek, in Lydia. No, Debs, through the bars of a jail cell.

Neither tokened well.

Three minutes later, though, he was waiting for the glowplugs to warm, then moving on down the road.

Exempt Texas plates
plus
a Texas badge, and on a holy mission to find his sheriff’s killer? He was bulletproof. For the moment, anyway. And Maines and McKirkle must have been too proud to call the truck in, too, the same way they’d been too proud to tell the feds that that kidnapper had slipped them in Nazareth seventeen years ago. That he’d gotten away with the girl.

But they’d get him next time. Or the time after.

Jim Doe hit the heel of his hand into the dash.

None of this had had to happen.

Sarina—it still hurt to say her name—she could have helped him with his algebra all through school, had her heart broken that she wasn’t on the homecoming court, gone to two years of school at South Plains. Right now she could be deciding whether to cut her hair off or not. Trolling yard sales for a high chair. Stealing cable.

Except for the Rangers. Except for the Tin Man.

Now she was in their stupid story. Was Dorothy forever.

Jim Doe drove and tried to dial in some news about the tornado then switched to the police radio, for any developments with the longhair. With
any
Indian out there, leaving a trail of bodies behind, because that would be the longhair, would be something he could fix. The only thing he cold fix.

But then, a few miles into listening, he coasted to the side of the road again.

Even with three thousand miles in the tank, still, just driving around random was no plan.

How had the Rangers been showing up everywhere, though?

Granted, they could hear about the bodies before they made the news, but still—Verdon, Nebraska? That wasn’t coincidence. It was too far out in the middle of nowhere.

They knew something.

Jim Doe cracked into the glove compartment, the console, dug behind the visors and through the map pockets on the door.

Nothing.

Then the backseat, the duffel bags, the spotting scope, the ammo box, the empty rifle case and the 7mm Weatherby Mark IV in its plastic shell, probably sighted in at five hundred yards.

No accordion file, though, no three-ring binder, no seventeen years of paperwork and leads and maybes.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Jim Doe was tempted to take the Weatherby out, scratch the ivory and rosewood tip, pack the chamber with mud, something.

Instead, he lobbed the duffel bags out onto the yellow stripes.

Childish, but screw it.

Next was the leather rifle case, but then he jogged out for it. Truckers would run over a bag just to feel it explode under them, but they’d stop for a rifle case. Anybody would.

So he threw it out by the fence, for the rats to make a winter home in.

He couldn’t bring himself to disrespect the spotting scope, though. Scopes like that were beautiful. And the Weatherby, it was still a Weatherby, it didn’t matter who had the papers on it, and if he dumped the ammo box and a grassfire came through next year . . .

He jogged out into the road, collected the clothes, stuffed them back into the exploded duffels bags and stuffed the bags into the toolbox.

This was it, then.

He had a truck with unlimited gas, he had a free pass from the state police, and there was nowhere to go. Or, there was everywhere to go, but that was the same thing.

He dialed in the news, waved a farmer on who was slowing to see what was wrong.

Everything, sir. Police business. Personal matter. Thank you.

And the news was all about Verdon, of course. The town that blew up, the town the wind had taken away a second time, the town God hated.

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.