“Found what?”
“For the murders,” she says. “I think I’ve found the missing link.”
TUESDAY
8.
ORSON CALHOUN DOESN’T KNOW WHY, but he’s always been good with tools. He can’t remember where he learned to use them, or to what purpose, but they just feel right in his hands. The heft of the pliers. The surety of the wrench. The momentous arc of a ballpeen hammer, perfectly weighted and well suited to its job. It all just feels so natural, like he was born to wear overalls. He remembers something vaguely, as a kid, with his dad, in a dusty basement with small windows, and the sound of tools clattering, but that’s where his memory gets ragged. Orson’s case, the doctors told him before he entered the town, was a deep dive; the relevant memories required something like a root canal for his brain. Plus, he was one of the early ones, the original eight, back before they’d perfected the precision of the technique. Some of the newer people, they remember almost everything—childhoods, first crushes, wives, kids—except for the part of their lives they chose to forget. With Orson, they scoured most of his memories, just to be sure. So there’s a lot of empty space in Orson’s mind. It’s left him a little slow, he understands. Common objects can sometimes puzzle him, and every emotional reaction feels unexpected and brand new. But not tools—tools feel familiar. They feel good. They sound good. They even taste good, he thinks: that metallic tang you get on your tongue when you spend all day in the workshop. Which is where Orson spends almost all his time, out at the repair yard at the far edge of the main drag, in the shadow of the westward fence.
The scrubby patch of grass out front of his shop usually looks, to the unaccustomed eye, like a junkyard, with various machines in states of disassembly, their inner workings strewn across the dirt. There’s a rider mower that Sheriff Cooper located for Orson as a reclamation project, which he’s been tinkering with for weeks. There’s a rusting and broken-down washing machine salvaged from the town’s Laundromat. There’s the dormant Chevy Aveo hatchback, the town’s emergency vehicle, half-covered under a blue plastic tarp with its hood propped open, waiting for Orson to spark it back to life. It all looks terribly disordered, to anyone but Orson. Yet even from a distance, in the morning’s first shadows as Orson approaches, he can tell that something’s wrong today. What would look like the usual sprawl of the yard to anyone else looks to Orson like chaos. Parts kicked and scrambled. Tools broken and destroyed. Machines upended. And that’s just outside.
Inside, the workshop’s much worse.
Orson feels a terrible clenching as he flips on the light switch to reveal the damage.
His workshop’s wrecked. Tables overturned. Tools and parts scattered everywhere. Whoever did this even found his cache of spray paint and emptied every can, leaving vandal’s scribblings. Graffiti. Something scrawled that’s not even English. And underfoot, he notices, in among the overturned boxes of nails and screws and bolts and scattered drill bits, is a bunch of playing cards. They definitely don’t belong to Orson; he doesn’t have the attention span to play cards. His scrambled brain can barely remember which suit is which, let alone actual rules.
He stoops to pick up a card. Turns it over. It’s not a playing card.
It’s a trading card. Fresh from the pack. Bubblegum powder still on it. He picks up a few of the others. They’re cards for some movie for kids, with robots in them, scattered all over the floor of his shop.
Orson drops the card. No sense to any of it, he thinks, despairing, as he surveys the damage again. Assessing what he’s lost, he feels an ugly stirring. The kind that usually only tugs at him in the night’s last moments before he falls asleep. Something dark. A rustling in the bottomless chasm of his mind where all his memories used to be.
He fends it off. And does the only sensible thing he can think to do.
He sets out to track down Sheriff Cooper.
Sheriff Cooper will know what to do. Sheriff Cooper will help him. Orson believes in Sheriff Cooper, who’s always been very good to him.
As he’s leaving, Orson notices that a gas can has gone missing from the workshop. What the hell? Given that no one in this town has a car, except for Sheriff Cooper, what in the world would anyone in town want with a can of gas?
Dawes is waiting for Cooper at the police trailer when he arrives just before six, which is an unpleasant surprise for Cooper, since he purposefully showed up fifteen minutes earlier than their meeting time to get a few minutes to collect himself. No dice. She’s already seated in a hardback chair, hands resting on her knees, like someone in a banana republic stationed patiently outside the office of an elusive bureaucrat. She smiles at him pleasantly when he enters, and he smiles back, less pleasantly. Cooper looks around the trailer, groggy, a little hungover, a lot suspicious, and still recalling foggily how that half-drunk bottle on his kitchen table last night got whole-drunk in a hurry.
“You call a meeting for the ass-crack of dawn, Dawes, you’re at least obliged to provide coffee,” he says.
“Commissary’s not open till seven.”
“So what the fuck are we doing awake at this hour?” Cooper halts by his desk to fiddle with a cheap plastic coffee machine, then realizes there are no filters. Or, for that matter, coffee. He takes off his gun belt, coils it on his desk, and slumps into his swivel chair, which wobbles uneasily beneath him.
“A fax message arrived for you,” Dawes says, nodding toward the machine.
Cooper turns in his chair. Sure enough, a long white tongue of shiny fax paper lolls out of the machine. “What time did this arrive?”
“It was here when I got here.”
“Did you read it?” he asks, trying his best to sound casual.
“Of course not. Fax machine is sheriff’s eyes only.”
He nods thoughtfully, as though to acknowledge that she’s spoken some wise old gospel truth that they’d all be well served to remember. Then he rips the scrolled paper clear of the fax machine, turning in the chair to make sure she won’t see it, even though she’s risen from her seat, carrying a thin file folder, and come to hover by his desk. He hunches over the fax. It says, simply, 2 P.M., in handwritten scrawled block letters. He reads it again, then folds it, stands, and feeds it into Abel, the shredder, which gobbles it with a mechanical roar.
“Anything important?” Dawes asks with, to Cooper’s ear, a little too much interest.
“Just a routine ping from Amarillo, checking in on the investigation. I’ll call them this afternoon.” Cooper slumps back into his chair, the springs whining beneath him. “Now tell me about this grand theory of yours. The one that couldn’t wait until a reasonable hour.”
“It’s not really a theory. Not yet, anyway,” she says. “It’s just a name. Gerald Dean.”