Dawes shuffles through the mail again. There’s a postcard with a photo of Lyndon Lancaster on it; real name: Sam Lemme. There’s an envelope addressed to someone named Kostya Slivko; when she flips it over, on the back, there’s a photo of Errol Colfax, who’s been dead for two months. She looks up at Greta. “This is serious,” Dawes says softly, almost like she’s reaffirming it to herself. She can’t believe this. She looks back into the box. Every one of these envelopes links a resident to their former identity, which is a fundamental breach of Caesura security. And every one of them means that someone in the world knows who’s living here, and knows how to contact them. She thinks a moment, then turns to the driver and says quietly, by way of dismissing him: “You better get those mangoes to the store.”
He glances at Dawes, then at Greta, then back to Dawes, then, without another word, steps quickly back into the cab and starts the truck, happy to escape his punishment.
As the truck trundles away, Dawes turns to Greta. “Does Sheriff Cooper know about this?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Greta gestures toward the box. “Please. People are expecting those.” She sounds plaintive now, pleading, like a child who let you look for a moment at something valuable and is now worried you’re never going to give it back.
Dawes nods toward the box she’s still holding in her arms. “Do you know what this means?”
“Sure,” says Greta. “It means someone out there still remembers you. That you had a life before this place that hasn’t been forgotten. Once you’ve been here five, six, eight years, you might understand how that feels.”
Dawes clutches the box closer to her chest and says simply, “I’m sorry.” Then she peers inside the box again. At the bottom, she spots the small paper-wrapped package. About the size of a box of matches.
She picks it out. Puts the box down. Shakes the package. Like a kid on Christmas.
It rattles.
Addressed to someone named Lester Vogel.
“You know who this is? This Lester Vogel?” Dawes asks.
Greta says nothing. Dawes turns the box over. There’s a photo. It’s Gerald Dean. Dawes can’t believe what she’s seeing yet is also not surprised in the least. She unwraps the package.
It’s a brand-new box of 9 mm bullets.
She hefts it in her hand, then holds the box up to Greta. “Is this the kind of thing you usually deliver?”
“Look, I’m not customs. I’m just the postmaster,” Greta says. “If it comes in on the truck and has a photo on it, I deliver it.”
Dawes puts the package back in the box. She closes the flaps, hoists the box in her arms, and heads off with her contraband toward the police trailer, confident that the day ahead will prove to be the best one she’s enjoyed yet here in the Blinds.
14.
COOPER HASN’T SLEPT. He hasn’t had time to change his clothes. He spent the night awake on his sofa, nursing the dull burn in his shoulder and staring at the ceiling, visited by bright visions of burning beasts turning in endless circles. A few visions of Errol Colfax, too, and the back of Hubert Gable’s head. Now, as morning beckons, he finds himself on Dick Dietrich’s porch. After last night’s commotion, he was too busy calming everyone down to deal with Dietrich—people pooling in the street, panicked and yammering, some with flashlights, some with lanterns, all with insistent questions about what the hell just happened. Some hauled buckets of water to try to stanch the burning corpses, but the water just splashed over the stubborn fires with an impotent hiss. Finally, Robinson arrived in his bathrobe, armed with a fire extinguisher, and snuffed out the fires, the extinguisher roaring. Foamy water ran in rivulets in the dusty gravel road; Cooper sees puddles of it still lingering this morning. The burned-animal smell is still on his tongue, in his throat, in his lungs, on his clothes. He recalls, too, how last night people circled Dietrich, thanking him, clapping him on the back, applauding the newcomer, stepping up to shake the hero’s hand.
Cooper’s barely finished his first knock when Dietrich swings open the door and welcomes him in.
“I heard the dogs—”
“They’re coydogs,” says Cooper.
“—the coydogs wailing,” says Dietrich, now standing in his kitchen, pouring two mugs of black coffee. “So I came out, and I saw what was happening, and I knew they were in pain. It seemed like the humane thing to do.” He hands a mug to Cooper, who’s seated in a chair, and Dietrich sits opposite him on the sofa. His feet are bare and he wears jeans and a white linen pullover shirt with an open mandarin collar, and he crosses his legs at the knee and smiles. Save for the tattoos, he looks like an annoyingly optimistic therapist. If he brought an extra stitch of clothing with him to Caesura or a single other personal effect, Cooper notes, there’s no evidence of any of it in his bungalow. There’s nothing in the room save the standard-issue furniture: the cheap sofa, the modest coffee table, a lonely standing lamp. The closet door is ajar and the closet sits empty. If Dietrich spent the last two days getting settled, it’s hard to see what exactly he was settling.
“Thanks again for your help,” says Cooper.
“Just trying to be a good neighbor, like you said.” Dietrich holds up his mug. “I’d offer you something stronger, but when I made my way to the commissary for provisions yesterday, there wasn’t much left for the taking.”
“That’s okay, it’s a little early in the day for me.”
“I thought one of the benefits of this place is that you get to dispense with those kinds of proprieties.” Dietrich sips his coffee. “That Mexican grocer told me the new shipment of goods comes today.”
“Spiro. His name is Spiro Mitchum.”
“You ever look at that ink he’s got on him? Speaks to a cartel background.”
“We don’t speculate on that kind of thing here,” says Cooper. “Besides, you’re a fine one to talk about excessive ink.”
Dietrich jacks his loose sleeves up and inspects his arms. The tattooed portraits of beatific faces crowd into one another. “I like to keep track of the people I’ve encountered.”
“That’s a lot of people.”
“I used to work in community outreach. Or so I’m guessing!” Dietrich laughs and slaps his knee. “Either way, I’m pretty handy with a firearm, if you’re ever looking for a wingman. You never know when you might need to put down another animal in pain.”
“Ex-military?” asks Cooper.
“What do I know? My memory’s been wiped clean, right?”
“Not everything. Most people remember some things. Just not the bad things.”
“I’m afraid for me that’s most of it,” says Dietrich. “The bad things.”
“Well, I already have two deputies, but thank you for the offer,” says Cooper. “Speaking of which—one of them, Deputy Dawes, found an empty gas can last night over by the coydog kennel. It had been stolen that morning from Orson Calhoun’s repair shop.”
Dietrich takes another sip, as though he’s pondering this information, like Cooper’s come to him to ask advice. “And what do you make of that?”
Cooper sets his mug aside, in hopes of signaling to Dietrich that the niceties portion of the conversation is now concluded. “As much as I’m grateful to you for helping me stop those poor animals, I’m just as interested in finding out how they got on fire in the first place.”
“It seems to me you’ve got all manner of miscreants holed up here. Any one of them seems capable of that kind of cruelty. Maybe even Spiro.” Dietrich fans his hands dramatically like he’s telling a ghost story at a campfire and Spiro is the mythical beast.