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.
It was their usual routine.
Jim Doe looked up at her. She was looking at the food, so he did too. And then he got it: for Agnes, the act of cooking would remind her of Gentry, remind her that she was just cooking for herself now. So people weren’t going to let her cook for a while.
“I should have been there,” he said.
Agnes was still studying the food. “Tom carried a gun, Joe. Because he expected somebody to shoot at him someday. He always used to say that. I’m just glad it wasn’t anybody from town. Anybody we know.”
Jim Doe nodded.
“He won’t get away with it,” he said. “I won’t let him.”
Agnes smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But, Joe. Let the state police handle this. Walter Maines said—”
“Tom never hired Walter Maines or Bill McKirkle when it was that or the Air Force, Agnes. Or worse.”
“He told your dad he would take care of you,” she said.
Jim Doe didn’t say anything. His mouth was too full. And then a pair of headlights washed across the back of the kitchen curtains, and for an instant he’d never expected, he saw Agnes as she must have been when Tom Gentry married her. As a bride. A young woman waiting for her husband to come home again, like at the end of every other normal, ordinary day. It was the way she held her head to the window. Like those were his headlights.
