All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones

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      Jim Doe held his hands over his ears, trying to make sense here, his mouth open too, like he was going to scream, or needed to. The only handle he could find on the situation was the handle of his pistol.

      He drew it when the lights finally came on all at once, blinding him, and then held it loose before him, shielding his eyes with his other hand, angling the barrel in the general direction of half-court, and didn’t realize what a mistake that was until the folded, metal chair came up to meet his face, and the last thing he knew was his pistol, spinning on its side across the waxed floor, and then he didn’t know anything anymore. Just what a soft place the world was. How little it hurt to fall.

      SEVEN1 April 1999, Kalvesta, Kansas

      Walter Maines toed over a shingle lying by the gas pumps. There was nothing under it. He cut his eyes up to McKirkle, watching the street. Their dull Texas Ranger badges were flapped open on their shirts, in case anybody asked. But nobody would. You could tell they were law from fifty feet out.

      The kid, Taylor Mason, had been discarded in the pit of the first bay. The slag hammer was buried in his forehead. There were no prints on the spring-handle, either. Taylor Mason’s eyes were open, as if locked on the hammer, still not believing it. “Love tap,” McKirkle had called it, the two of them standing in the dark of the bay. Maines had cocked his head over in agreement, spit down into the drain.

      The blood on Tayler Mason’s face was already black. Little ants crawling across it, even though it was too late in the season for ants. This was Kansas, though. Fucking Wizard of Oz. Anything could happen.

      Still, it was better than New Mexico.

      Maines walked around the station again, looking for anything.

      The cash register was out in the weeds, empty.

      The radio in the garage was blaring. Maines hadn’t been able to find the main control yet, so the cassette in the deck—wherever it was—was just looping through itself over and over.

      “What do you think?” McKirkle called across the lot.

      Maines 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.

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