horn, complaining about the screamers. It was their word. Gentry liked it.
Behind him, on the dash, he’d drawn a black cross on the notepad suction-cupped to his windshield. It meant he’d stopped at the church again. He liked to take them as far as the litter barrel, to empty his ashtray, but this Indian had too much candy in his pockets to even make it that far. Gentry smiled, leaning down the slightest bit to be sure the chicken feather was still there, on the rearview, impairing vision, endangering the lives of every other motorist for miles around. It was.
The Indian stood from the Impala when Gentry was still even with the bumper.
“—no, no, son,” Gentry said, his elbow already cocked out, the butt of his service revolver set in his palm.
The Indian was a longhair in faded jeans, a blue sleeveless flannel shirt open at the chest, a concert T-shirt underneath. Def Leppard. It figured.
“You want to be careful now,” Gentry said. “This isn’t Nebraska, now.”
The Indian just stood there.
Gentry smiled.
Maybe he was one of those mutes. Kawliga.
“You know you can’t do that,” Gentry said, hooking his chin in at the rearview.
The Indian just stood there.
“Got some identification, then?” Gentry said.
The Indian raised his head as if just hearing, just tuning in, then shrugged, leaned down into the car, across to the passenger side. Gentry stepped forward, shaking his head no, saying it—“Son, no, you can’t”—his elbow cocked again, but then the Indian stood, holding something out to him. It was white like registration and insurance should be, but it was wrong, too: a snub-nose revolver wrapped in masking tape or some shit.
He was pointing it at Gentry.
Gentry took a step back, lowering his hip to get his revolver out faster, but it wasn’t enough: the Indian stepped forward, pulling the trigger.
Gentry shuddered, felt the grill of his car digging into his back, heard his gun clatter to the ground, wondered what the Watkins sisters were singing just now—for him—and said his wife’s name: Agnes. And that he was sorry.
Then he raised his hands, just to see what his insides looked like after all these years.
His hands were clean.
He looked at his shirt.
It was clean too. Dry.
The driver’s snub-nose had misfired. They were both looking at it now. Tape on the hammer, something like that.
Gentry’s hat touched the hood once when it blew off his head, the storm pushing in, and then it was gone.
He grubbed around in the gravel for his gun, came up with it, walked behind it to the driver, the longhair, and calmly took the snub-nose, set it on the peeling vinyl roof of the Impala. And then he went to work. With his hands, and his knees, and finally the sharp brass bead on the topside of his pistol, and the blunt, checkered plate of the handle, and the heavy door of the Impala.
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
