All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones
Seven-thirty, the audio-visual room. The heaviest, thickest door in the high school.
“You want what?” Weiner said, his chair skittering across the room on its plastic wheels.
Weiner ran the projectors, the cameras, all of it. He was a sophomore. There early, even.
Jim Doe looked back at the door, then handed Gentry’s tape across. He was supposed to have it hand-delivered to Shirl at the post office by three, addressed to Lubbock, who, if they didn’t have the right equipment, would probably send it down to Austin, who’d get back some time next year.
“Just enhanced,” he said. “You can do that, right?”
It was hard to say Weiner’s name right, so he was trying to just not say it at all. At any moment Terra could appear in the doorway, too. He hadn’t seen her since she’d sat in Interrogation Room B the afternoon of the twenty-first, waiting for her father to pick her up, the hall through the one-way glass full of law—Gentry’s friends and family from three or four counties in either direction, Midland to Amarillo, DPS to SID, eighteen to seventy-five. When Jim Doe had walked through, his shirtfront congealed to a dark black, they had quieted, just let him pass. For the moment. He could feel it, though, that they’d already listened to Monica’s audio of it. That they knew he hadn’t been there. And that Terra had been with him.
And then her father had walked in.
Jim Doe closed his eyes to make himself concentrate on Weiner, on now.
“I’ll be late for class,” Weiner was saying, taking the tape.
“It’s police business,” Jim Doe said back. “I’ll write you a note.”
Weiner turned the tape over, never looked up when he spoke. “This is the original,” he said, impressed. Then he looked up. “Thought you were mailing this one off?”
“You hear this on the radio, or what?” Jim Doe said, then remembered who he was talking to.
“Why not just wait, then?” Weiner said. “Lubbock has better equipment, you know.”
“Because I wanted you,” Jim Doe said, still watching the door.
And because they might not think to show it to me when it comes back, he didn’t say. If he even still had a badge, then.
“He’s getting away . . .” Jim Doe said, hooking his chin out to the road, to the north.
Weiner stuffed the tape into the editing machine.
“I can’t promise anything,” he said. “This isn’t the movies, you know?”
Jim Doe smiled. “Pretend it is,” he said.
Weiner shrugged, bent to it.
By ten, he had something. Jim Doe had locked the door a long time ago. A fire hazard, but what the hell. The school hadn’t burned down from cigarettes or prayers in forty years already. Maybe this would be forty-one.
Weiner eased the mouse around the tabletop.
The tape was a digital file now. It had taken two hours just to convert forty-eight seconds of visuals. But now they were ready. And it was like the movies: Weiner would select a portion of the field, zoom in, repeat, repeat, then let the algorithm smooth the edges until the blurry fabric of Gentry’s khaki shirt dominated the screen.
“Try the shooter,” Jim Doe said, leaning over.
“I was,” Weiner said, through his teeth.
He backed up, eased in again. It made Jim Doe think of an inchworm, reaching out, pulling the ground closer bit by bit.
Finally they got the back of the shooter’s head, a real tight shot of hair so black it would had to have been inked blue in a comic book, just to look real.
“Like yours,” Weiner said.
“Back up again,” Jim Doe said.
Weiner did, undoing the enhance, a Def Leppard shirt coming into focus for a moment—HYSTERIA—then backed the time index up too, to when the shooter was getting back into his car, that fraction of a second before he leaned over the hood to look into the camera, out at Agnes and Jim Doe one last time.
The longhair had looked back to make sure Gentry was staying down.
Jim Doe smiled. Of course: he had just risen after being put on the ground. He probably expected Gentry to as well.
Weiner paused the frame.
“Hollywood,” he said, and inched in, enhanced, inched in some more.
Soon the shadowy shape of the longhair’s face filled the monitor.
“Sharpen it again,” Jim Doe said.
Weiner cocked his chin to the side in hesitation. “Half of it’s already made up by the computer, man. I don’t know.”
He tried anyway, and the image degraded into watercolors, the vinyl roof of the car leaking over into the longhair’s face, both his eyes merging into one raccoon smear.
“Okay,” Jim Doe said.
Weiner backed up, screwed the contrast up some then did a color-replace on the shadowed part of the face. He used a pixel of the longhair’s neck skin as the base. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t real—evidence—but it wasn’t bad.
“You can print that?” he asked.
“It’s anybody,” Weiner said. “You. With hair, I mean.”
They ran it through the printer anyway, and Jim Doe stood waiting for it, then held the curling sheet in both hands, fanning it to dry. The longhair. He was an Indian male, twenty-two to thirty-five, no identifying tattoos, indeterminate tribal affiliation. Armed and dangerous. Two corpses in his trunk. Heading north.
Jim Doe walked out into the eleven o’clock glare, covered his eyes with his glasses again, and held the picture to the light, to see if it looked any better out there. It didn’t.
#
“Indian Joe,” Agnes said through the screen door, by way of greeting. It was what Gentry had called Jim Doe, when Jim Doe was in elementary. The post office hadn’t even been rebuilt then. Jim Doe stepped in, taking his hat off without having to think about it. There was food mounded everywhere, so Agnes wouldn’t starve herself, maybe. Try to feed off her grief and nothing else.
“Sarah?” he asked.
“Beaumont,” Agnes said.
It was as far away as she could get and still be in Texas.
Lisa, the other sister, was standing under the red, slanted awning of the Dairy Queen, soaking up the night. Jim Doe had seen her on the way in. She was with some of the people she’d graduated with. They were looking at each other like dogs in the pound, and drinking cokes through narrow, blue-striped straws.
“It’s your anniversary,” Jim Doe said.
He had a foil-wrapped present in his hand. The date had been on the calendar on Gentry’s desk. He set the present on the mantel. It was nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I know,” Agnes said.
They sat at the kitchen table.
“Is it serious?” Agnes asked, “at least?”
Jim Doe looked up. “What?” he asked.
“That girl.”
He looked away. “It’s not like that,” he said, then, just “no,” quieter, then that he was sorry again.
“You said that already,” Agnes said, touching his hand where he’d left it, on the table before him. “I know, Joe.”
“Jim.”
Agnes smiled.