The longhair was on his knees, then on his stomach, then pulled to his knees again, then slammed into the side of the car, his hands cuffed behind him. He sagged to the ground, some of his hair catching around the post of the antenna, holding his head up at a wrong angle, the rest still hiding his face.
Gentry leaned into the Impala for more guns, then, evidence, a reason, and when he ripped the feather from the rearview, the mirror came with it. He stood from the car with the keys in his hand, walked close enough to the longhair to knee him in the chest, and popped the trunk.
It took his eyes—his mind—a few breaths to make sense, and then he backed up, dry-heaving.
It was two children. They were dead, decayed, and had been for some time. For years.
Gentry steadied himself on the hood of his car, the large, early drops of rain leaving wet spots on the dusty rear window of the Impala.
He followed his hands along his hood to the dummy light of his cruiser, to call this in—the Army, the Navy, the National Guard—but stopped at his door, the skin on the back of his neck tightening with knowledge, awareness of the Indian balled up sideways on the ground, edging the chain of his handcuffs down the back of his legs, across the soles of his feet, then rising beside the Impala, the snub-nose in both hands.
“Don’t—” Gentry said, and that was all he got out.
The snub-nose didn’t misfire this time.
Down the road, Mary and Janna Watkins raised their voices above the sound and Gentry heard it as the first slug slung him around, then the second. A pirouette, his arms flung out for balance, coming together over the holes in his body, leaving him half on the car, half not.
And then the rain came.
TWO27 March 1999, Liberal, Kansas
The Indian. He’d got the Impala the old way—just led it away from its dirt lot in Kearney, Nebraska. It was where the mechanic put vehicles that still had outstanding bills. Nobody would miss it from there for weeks, and when they did, the mechanic would say the owner had an extra key, drove it away one night, stole it, and the owner would say that the mechanic chopped it after hours, sold it onto Rosebud or Pine Ridge. Nobody would look for the actual car, though, except the insurance company that finally got stuck with it, and that would be after all the claims got filed, the police reports filled out, and still, it would just be a thing of principle. Because nobody really wanted it. Except him.
He took it because it was Chevrolet, and he knew GM ignition systems. He led the Impala out to an oily streetlight. It took him eight minutes to get it started. That was too long, he knew—unacceptable—but he kept blacking out, and his hands were shaking, or his eyes, or the world itself.
He sat in the driver’s seat and idled down a half block, lights off, the sole of his sneaker skimming the surface of the road. His other car was there. It was a Thunderbird, from when they’d been long and heavy. It hadn’t been his first choice. But the trunk. He could have kept eight children in there, then curled up beside them, pulled the lid down.
He backed the Impala up to the Thunderbird—already facing the other way—and once he’d worked both trunk lids open, they were a roof for him. He held the two bodies close when he moved them, and for too long, touching their dry cheeks with the inner skin of his lips, whispering where they could hear.
The Thunderbird he left idling, to make sure somebody would take it, even if just for a little while.
At the first gas station, the first strong lights, he checked under the Impala’s hood. The mechanic had put a new fan clutch on it. He should have put a water pump too, while he’d been in there. But it was free. He cleaned the windows, wiped down the handle of the squeegee, then turned the speakers on the back dash upside down, to fill the trunk with music. For the children.
The car was blue, the vinyl top in ribbons.
He loved it.
He thumbed the tape in from the bag he had. They were all the same album, all taken from the same rack set near the front door of one of the drugstores he’d hit. They’d had the rollgate down over the pharmacy window, though, meaning no phenobarb, no Dilantin, so he’d had to make do with over-the-counter sleep aids. They were almost enough to keep the seizures down, inside him, so that he was only convulsing under the skin.
He drove, and tried not to think.
Nebraska at night was too black, though. Twice he slept; once he skated the chrome bumper of the Impala along a concrete holding wall. He didn’t hear it until miles later, when Lincoln was finally spitting him out into a tangle of single-lane construction. It became 77 after a while. And a state police was behind him now, just pacing. Like the trooper knew, was calling the Impala in right now, rousing he mechanic from bed.
Around Beatrice, he slipped into residential and back out again in a part of town he’d never seen. Like he’d stepped through into a story. A story with no troopers. It was the best kind. He lifted a set of Nebraska plates from the bathroom wall of a breakfast place, where they were decoration, then watched the blue lid of his trunk as he screwed the two bolts into the rear bumper. There were flies at the keyhole. He drove slow through the rest of town, letting them keep up, the flies, but then they pushed him where he didn’t want to go, where he was always going: the firehouse.
He shook his head no, no, wanted to swallow his tongue on purpose, to hold the lighter to his chest, to do anything but be here. It was like a church he had to go to though, park at, stare into. The firehouse.
He held the wheel with both hands and stared hard at the windshield, just the windshield, and then there was a hand on his shoulder. It was later already. There was saliva dry on his chin now, the kind that had been foamy, spit up from deep inside. Medicinal. His first thought was of the flies, then the children. Then the hand.
It was a fireman.
They were all out washing their big red truck.
“You okay, buddy?” he asked.
Buddy.
He stared.
“I’m not Buddy,” he said.
The fireman stared back at him. He was wearing rubber pants with the reflective stripe down the side, the big boots, the helmet, against the distant fire of the sun. Just a white T-shirt, though, the kind you buy folded in a plastic bag. And not any gloves.
It was the no-gloves that did it. The hands, the hand, held out to him.
He worked his fingers into his pocket for whatever bottle was there, swallowed a handful of pills dry. His throat bled from it, and he swallowed that too.
“I’m okay,” he told the fireman, making his fingers into a careful okay, then pulled away, the fireman standing there behind him, watching him.
At Silver Lake, just outside Topeka—how had he got so off course?—there was another cop, a city one. He flashed his lights once in the Impala’s rearview then turned around. Like it was a game. Like they were all playing with him. He could feel the miles accumulating inside him, a hard black knot.
He took to the small roads to hide it, to keep it down, skirted Topeka and headed back southwest on 335 until it became just normal 35, and then he closed his eyes and stayed exactly on 35 until Texas. The Impala heaved from ditch to ditch, drunk with sleep. He turned the stereo up.
At the big truck stop in Weatherford, he ran pink soap between his fingers, massaged it in. He was humming the song from the tape, content just to wash his cuticles, the hollow space on the backside of his wrist. But then a truck driver approached him in the mirror, his boots heavy like a fireman’s, and time dilated around them, the instant blooming open, and he ran out past all the slowed-down people, down the snack aisle, shielding himself from the candy, then past the register girl with the sharp teeth, and finally to the car, but just the