“I don’t doubt that,” says Cooper. There’s no cash exchanged in the Blinds, but people still have to account for everything they’re consuming, be it food, liquor, clothes, or other sundries. And Greta, in turn, as town barkeep, must justify every bottle she orders as replenishment. Besides which, as Cooper has learned, in this town, everyone knows everyone, so tabs of all sorts tend to get settled, one way or the other.
“Do you want me to wake up Nurse Breckinridge?” says Dawes.
“Not much she can do about this now,” Cooper says. “Just call it in to Amarillo. They’ll send out an agent first thing. Hubert here won’t be any less dead in the morning, and the cause of death should be fairly evident. Unless anyone wants to forward the theory that he was poisoned with arsenic before being shot in the head.”
“How do I—” asks Dawes.
“You can call on the fax phone.”
Dawes exhibits a flush of pride, which she tries to hide, unsuccessfully. She’s never before been authorized to make a call on the fax phone.
“What about my bar?” Greta says. “When can I open up again? I have morning regulars.”
“If you can stay closed until noon,” says Cooper, “I’d consider it a favor.”
Dawes stows her notebook in her left breast pocket, where it fits perfectly. She’s the kind of person who’s never happier than when someone’s given her a task. She’s just turned thirty, she’s only six weeks on the job, and she keeps her uniform crisp and her hair shaved close, with daily touchups from the clippers she brought herself in a little box. When she started work here, she assumed she’d be the only black person in the Blinds, but it turns out she’s not even the only black deputy. But the other deputy, Walter Robinson, is presumably sleeping soundly right now. He sets two alarms and once slept through a tornado drill, so it would take more than a far-off gunshot to rouse him.
As for Sheriff Cooper, so far he’s yet to fully warm to the presence of his new deputy. She’s a keen one, he’ll give her that. She’s wearing her uniform, even at this early hour, and she showed up minutes after the shot. No badge, though. There’s only one badge to go around, even a toy one, and Cooper’s wearing it.
“You’ll have to meet the agent in the morning,” he tells her. “I’ll be busy with the new arrivals.” He turns to Greta: “We got four brand-new residents, just arrived last night. They haven’t gone through intake so they don’t even have names yet. They came in late so I figured I’d let them get a night’s rest first, get them settled. Just goes to show what I know.”
“You think this is connected to them?” says Dawes.
“I don’t think anything yet,” Cooper says. “But since tomorrow’s intake day, I’ll be busy giving the welcome-wagon spiel bright and early. So I’ll need you to talk to Amarillo and report this. Talk to Dave Brightwell. He’s our liaison with the U.S. Marshals.”
Dawes smiles to herself. Not unpleased to get this minor assignment. “And what should I tell Brightwell when I call him?”
“Tell him the truth, so far as we know it,” Cooper says.
The truth being, he knows, that this is not going to be good for anyone, least of all for him. After eight years in the Blinds with little more than broken arms and bloody noses, this is the second violent death in the past two months. Granted, the first one was ruled a suicide, but it was suicide by firearm and, technically, firearms are prohibited in the Blinds. And now this. All of which is going to be an issue, he thinks, given there’s only forty-eight residents living in the Blinds, and there’s not supposed to be another human soul within a hundred miles of the town. And given that, theoretically at least, Cooper’s the only person in town in possession of a gun.
2.
THE SIX OF THEM SIT in the windowless room. They look ghostly, like corpses, lit only by the harsh overhead fluorescents. There’s two officers, Sheriff Cooper and Deputy Walter Robinson, along with the four new arrivals. A wall clock ticks off the minutes loudly. It’s nearly nine in the morning.
The four new arrivals sit hunched and silent at school desks, scattered around the room in exactly the random, equidistant pattern that strangers who are suspicious of one another will always arrange themselves in. The room, contained inside a large brown trailer set up on concrete blocks, is bare and dingy with whitish acoustic tiles on the ceiling and a floor covered with linoleum that’s shriveling at the corners. It looks like the kind of place you’d be sent to take a remedial driver’s course after a particularly bad accident that was entirely your fault. Which, in a way, it is.
Cooper sits at the back of the room. He’s still in the same wrinkled browns from several hours earlier. He hasn’t yet been to bed, or strayed within arm’s reach of a razor, and a person sitting close to him might smell evidence of a recent beverage not entirely appropriate to the early hour.
Walt Robinson sits on a metal folding chair at the front of the room. He wears the same brown uniform as Cooper. No badge, though. Just an arm patch that reads “Caesura” in a scripted arc over an embroidered crest of a river running through a scrubby plain. Robinson is giving the intake speech today. He’s officially the officer in charge of intake, having taken over this duty from Cooper. Over the years, Robinson’s gotten very good at the intake speech.
When the clock announces harshly with a loud jerk of the long hand that it’s finally nine on the nose, Robinson stands.
He turns his back to the class. On a large whiteboard behind him, which still bears the faint smears of dozens of previous lectures, he writes:
WELCOME TO CAESURA
Then he turns back around to face the four arrivals.
“Rhymes with tempura,” he says, then caps the marker.