“That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Cooper says. “You should consider yourself lucky. Some of the earliest people lost everything. Over the years, the procedure got more precise. They only target the parts of your life you don’t want to remember. That’s how you get a fresh start.”
King looks dismayed, like all of this is dawning on her only now, as she’s saying it. “I just can’t stop thinking about that emptiness.” She looks up at him, bewildered. “Does that feeling get any better?”
“It does,” Cooper lies.
She smiles, comforted a little bit, at least for now, and once she’s tucked away back inside her bungalow, Cooper exits her porch and lingers for a minute in the dusty street. He checks his watch—still early, still several more hours until two P.M. He considers the coming agenda for the day. Thankfully, Dawes’s vaunted theory turned out to be a bunch of nothing, just a few happenstance overlaps. Still, it’s not like he hasn’t wondered himself if maybe Colfax and Gable were connected in the real world. Well, it’s not for him to ask questions, not those kinds of questions, anyway. In the meantime, he has to go talk to Fran about this incident at Orson’s, because they found Isaac’s trading cards sprinkled all around Orson’s trashed workshop. Cooper pulls a card from his pocket to examine it. No mistake: It’s a trading card for the movie he and Isaac went to see a few months back. Which puts Cooper on a collision course with a very unpleasant conversation with Fran. He feels a painful twinge in his gut and wonders if it’s guilt or that stale pastry, then remembers hazily how he swallowed a bullet in a glass of whiskey last night. Probably some combination of all three.
Cooper’s set to leave when he notices a man on the porch adjacent, watching him but saying nothing. It’s another one of the new arrivals from yesterday’s intake. The man’s head is shaved, like a new recruit or a monk, and he’s wearing loose pants and a white sleeveless undershirt. His taut, wiry arms are covered with tattoos.
Once Cooper catches his eye, the man nods. “Good morning, Sheriff. What you got there?”
“Just a good luck charm.” Cooper pockets the card again. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, since I didn’t stick around yesterday when y’all chose your new names.”
“Now what did I end up calling myself?” The man adopts an exaggerated pose of rumination, stroking his stubbled chin with spindly fingers. “Oh, yes, Dick. Dick Dietrich.”
“Those coydogs keep you up last night, too, Mr. Dietrich?” Cooper stands in the street, cupping his hand over his eyes, squinting.
“No, I slept like a baby. Or a corpse.” Dietrich laughs. “I suppose the corpse of a baby would be the soundest sleeper of all.”
“I don’t believe I saw you at the town meeting yesterday.”
“I was busy getting settled in.”
“And how’s that going?”
Dietrich looks up and down the street, then smiles. “Already feels like home. This meeting I missed—was that about the killing you had here the other night?”
“That’s correct.”
“You see a lot of killing in this town?”
“Never before, and never again, if I have anything to say about it.”
“But that’s always the question, isn’t it?” says Dietrich. “Will you have anything to say about it? Or will something else happen instead?”
“I guess so.” Cooper’s in no mood for this, not today. “Y’all have a nice morning,” he says, then turns to go.
Dietrich calls after him. “You don’t come by that ‘y’all’ honestly, do you, Sheriff Cooper? My ear can pick out a carpetbagger at a hundred yards.”
Cooper turns back to him. “Really? Are you a Texas boy, Dick?”
“I’m from all over,” says Dietrich. “Now I guess I’m from right here. Fancy calling this place home.”
“We do our best to be neighborly,” says Cooper, with a cold smile.
“Then I’ll do my best to do my best,” Dietrich says.
“You do that,” Cooper says, then walks away. At the end of the street, he taps the trading card in his pocket again, like a talisman, then turns the corner and points himself on a path to Fran Adams’s house, which happens to be the very last place in town he wants to go right now.
The Chevy Aveo has two rear windows smashed by the vandals, but Orson’s vacuumed out the shards from the backseat and cleaned out the empty panes and covered the empty windows in black plastic. The tires are solid, the engine’s tuned, so otherwise, he explains to Dawes, the car runs good. “Once you get north of sixty miles per hour,” he says, “she’ll start to shudder on you.” Dawes assures him she takes her driving slow, which isn’t exactly the truth.
“You planning on taking a trip into town, Deputy?” he asks.
“Just curious if it’s an option,” she says. She’ll have to figure out a story for Cooper to get his permission to leave for the day, but she’s not too worried about that. She’s allowed to request a twenty-four-hour furlough in case of emergency, and she’s confident she can cook up something convincing. She just needs to get to Abilene for a couple of hours, tops. During her rounds, knocking on doors, she managed to slip in a few questions to the residents about Marlon Garner, aka Ellis Gonzalez, aka the man she was hired to replace. Aka the man who up and quit and took off the week after Colfax shot himself. Allegedly shot himself. Everyone remembered Garner, of course, though no one knew where he went. But Lyndon Lancaster remembered him talking often of Abilene, like maybe he had family there, or at least a reason to visit. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing, she thinks. A real name and a real place. It’s a start. Now all she has to do is get there. That’s where the Aveo comes in.
“It’s beautiful countryside beyond these fences, or so I recall,” Orson says. “It’s been a long, long while since they drove me in the bus to here.” He nods to the half-organized refuse in the yard. “You see what they did to my shop?”
“I’m very sorry, Orson.”
“They scrawled some foolishness, too, on the wall to scare me. You have any idea what that means?” He points to the graffiti: Damnatio Memorae.
“I don’t,” she says, another not-exactly-true statement.
“Well, if you do need the car, she’s ready to go and the tank is full. Thankfully I filled her up before my spare gas can disappeared.”
“What happened to the spare gas can?” she asks.
“Whoever broke in here up and stole it. Must have done. I’ve searched everywhere else. Though you know my mind’s not always the clearest.”
“What would someone want with a gas can?” asks Dawes, though she knows Orson won’t have an answer. And if she’s honest with herself, she knows there’s only one reason someone would steal a gas can in a town without cars, and that’s to burn something down.
10.
COOPER KNOCKS AGAIN and Isaac answers the door. He seems excited to see Cooper, which just makes Cooper feel worse about the business that’s brought him here. He considers confronting Isaac directly with the telltale trading card, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Geez, he’s just a kid, thinks Cooper, a little weird, but innocent and unruined. Or so Cooper had always assumed.