All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham JonesЧитать онлайн книгу.
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