The Low Desert Read online

  “You’d do that?”

  “You walk into JFK with that,” he said, “you won’t walk out.”

  Shane looked over at Hermie, who gave an affirmative nod. What the fuck went on in that guy’s fucking mind?

  “All right,” Shane said. “Set it for tomorrow afternoon?”

  “What’s your name?”

  Shane thought for a moment. “My friends,” he said, “call me Gold Mike.”

  “What do you want the doctor to call you?”

  “Mike Voski,” he said.

  Terry picked up his cell phone. “Give me five minutes,” he said and headed outside, which gave Shane a chance to snatch up Terry’s car keys from the table. He turned and looked out the window to where Terry’s Benz was parked, around the corner from where Terry stood, hit the unlock button, watched the car’s lights blink twice, set the keys back down.

  Hermie the Clown didn’t say a word, so Shane said, “You a monk or something?”

  Hermie stared at Shane for a few seconds, then said, out loud, “You ever meet a chatty clown?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “That’s part of the game,” he said. He reached over and picked up the car keys. Hit the button. Lights flashed again. Locked.

  “How about I give you fifty bucks and we call it even?” Shane said.

  Hermie said, “How about everything you’ve got in your wallet?”

  Shane had his gun tucked under his shirt and could have, he supposed, shot Hermie, done him like Han Solo did Greedo, but Shane wasn’t yet the unprovoked murdering type.

  “Not gonna be much more than fifty,” Shane said. He dug out his wallet, pulled out everything, set it on the table, sixty-seven bucks. Hermie took it all.

  “Not personal, you understand,” Hermie said.

  “Just two guys doing business,” Shane said.

  Hermie stood up, gathered up all his belongings, then pulled out a business card, everyone in this fucking place the kings of Vistaprint, apparently. It said:

  HERMIE THE CLOWN

  Parties. Charity Events. Private Functions.

  Restaurant & Bar PR.

  NO KIDS 18+ ONLY

  SEE WEBSITE FOR RATES/CELEBRITY PHOTOS

  Hermietheclown.com

  Phone: 760-CLOWN-69

  Email: [email protected]

  “I’ll be back in a few days,” Hermie said. “If you’re coming back.”

  “I’m coming back.”

  “You’d be good in the clown game,” Hermie said. “You’ve got a nice presence.”

  “Thanks,” Shane said.

  “I got my teeth capped in Los Algodones,” Hermie said. “Can’t have janky teeth and be a clown. Freaks people out. Terry hooked me up.”

  Hermie was silent again, like he was trying to get Shane to ask him a question.

  “And then what?” Shane finally said.

  “I have to do Terry favors, periodically,” he said. “Drop things off. Take out the garbage sometimes. Clean up his room. Favors. So if you’re not willing to do that, I’d say keep moving, hoss.”

  There it was.

  “He really Jewish?” Shane asked.

  “His cousin was a rabbi,” Hermie said.

  “Was?”

  “Died.”

  “Natural causes?”

  “I didn’t ask for an autopsy.”

  “Out here?”

  “Las Vegas,” Hermie said. “Everyone here is always trying to get to Las Vegas, everyone in Las Vegas is always trying to get somewhere else, no one happy to be any one place.”

  “You make a lot of sense, for a clown.”

  “You’d be surprised what a guy can learn staying quiet.” He looked outside, where Terry was still on the phone. “My Uber is here,” he said. Hermie stood there for a moment, shifting back and forth on his big red shoes. “He doesn’t have a daughter,” Hermie said, then closed a giant, exaggerated zipper across his mouth, locked it, tossed away the key, and left, into the heat of the day. Hermie bumped fists with Terry, got into a waiting Prius, and drove off.

  Shane unlocked the Benz, again.

  Terry came back in a few minutes later. “You’re all set, Gold Mike,” he said.

  “What do I owe you?” Shane asked.

  “Doctor will have a couple prescriptions for you to bring back.”

  “That all?”

  “Well,” Terry said, “you’ll need to go back for a follow-up. In which case, I might have something for you to deliver. Could be you come to find you like Mexico.”

  “I’m gonna need wheels.”

  “You beam here?”

  “No,” Shane said. “Car broke down. It won’t be fixed for a week, at least.”

  Terry tapped a pen against his lips. “Okay,” he said. “How about I have Enterprise drop off a car for you. Nothing fancy, you understand. What do you have for collateral?”

  Shane pondered this for a moment, then reached under his shirt and put his gun down on the table.

  SHANE WAITED UNTIL Cactus Pete’s was in full swing to make his move. Terry wasn’t kidding about the clientele: a steady stream of men with brush cuts and tucked-in polo shirts were followed by men and women in business suits, mostly of the off-the-rack variety, not a lot of tailored sorts doing time in Indio’s courthouse. Terry came out a couple times to take phone calls, cops and attorneys greeting him as they passed by, Shane watching from his hotel window as they all glad-handed one another, cops and robbers passing one another at the time clock.

  Shane took Gold Mike’s head, hands, and feet out of the safe, refilled the freezer bag with some fresh ice to help with the smell, zipped the bag back up, and headed downstairs. It was about seven, the sun still up, at least 105 degrees. Shane saw that there were now anthill mounds rising up through the cracks in the parking lot pavement. The lot was full, a dozen Ford F-150s with American flag and 1199 Foundation stickers in the windows, a couple Lexuses, a few BMWs, another five nebulous American cars, a surprising number of motorcycles, a couple Benzes. There was a kid, maybe six or seven, sitting on the tailgate of an F-150 parked next to Terry’s Benz, eating a popsicle, playing on his phone. Shane’s rental, a white Ford Fiesta, was parked next to it.

  “You staying here?” Shane asked the kid.

  “On the other side of the fairgrounds,” the kid said, pointing beyond the courthouse and jail.

  Shane looked down the block. There was, in fact, a giant county fairground right next to the jail and courts. Across the street was an A-frame Wienerschnitzel cut and pasted from the 1970s, a fire station, an Applebee’s, a used-car lot. He tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up here. Figured it was like anywhere else. Either you lived in a happy home or you lived in a shitty one.

  “You should go home,” Shane said. “It’s late.”

  “My dad works at the jail,” the kid said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He’s inside having a drink.”

  “What’s he do there,” Shane said, “at the jail?”

  “Something with computers.”

  So probably not a cop. That’s good. “You see anything weird here?”

  The kid looked at Shane for a few seconds, like he couldn’t be sure of his answer, then said, “I saw a clown. Like in that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “I didn’t see it,” the kid said. “But my cousin? He saw it and said it was fucked-up.”

  Shane looked around but didn’t see Hermie. “Recently? The clown I mean.”

  “Couple minutes, I guess.”

  Odd.

  “You do me a favor?” Shane asked.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to anyone,” the kid said, “cuz my dad says the East Valley is filled with criminals and pedos and losers and that’s just who he works with.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said, “that’s smart.” He pointed at his foot. He’d wrapped it in a towel and then taped his flip-flop to it, so he could walk around a bit better. It looked absurd. “Could you just ru
n over and get me a bucket of ice from the front desk?”

  The kid looked at Shane’s foot. “What happened?”

  “Stepped on a nail.”

  “Must have been pretty big.”

  “You do this for me or not?”

  The kid slid off the back of the truck and headed to the hotel’s lobby, which gave Shane the chance to pop open the unlocked trunk of Terry’s Benz, drop the freezer bag in, and then close it.

  SHANE GOT IN the Fiesta—it smelled weird inside, like vinegar and shoe leather and wet newspapers—started it up, turned left on Highway 111 out of the hotel, so he wouldn’t pass Cactus Pete’s, since he told Terry he wasn’t leaving until the morning, then kept going, driving west into the setting sun, his left foot inside a bucket of ice. He rolled past the presidents—Monroe, Madison, Jefferson—then was in La Quinta—Adams, Washington—and into Indian Wells, then Palm Desert, just another snowbird in a rental car, could be anyone, so he opened the Fiesta’s moonroof, let some air in, get that weird smell out. Then he was in Rancho Mirage, passing Bob Hope Drive, then rolling by Frank Sinatra Drive, Shane starting to feel like he’d gotten away with it, so he took out his burner, called the anonymous Crime Stoppers hotline, was patched through.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” Shane said, now in Cathedral City, passing Monty Hall Drive, a street named for a guy who spent his entire career disappointing people by giving them donkeys instead of cars, “but I swear I saw a man at the Royal Californian in Indio chopping up a human head. He put it all into a bag in the trunk of his Mercedes.”

  By the time he finished his story, Shane was in downtown Palm Springs, rolling north down Indian Avenue. His left foot was numb, but the rest of his body felt alive, sweat pouring down his face, his shirt and pants damp, even though the AC was cranked at full blast, the moonroof just cracked. He’d go back to LA tonight, get all the pills from the storage unit, then torch it, now that he was thinking straight. Then he’d turn around and go to Mexico, get his foot operated on, since he had an appointment already, and Terry was going to be in a jail cell for a good long time, maybe forever. And then he’d just keep rolling east, until he got back to upstate New York. Find his father at some Indian casino, see if he wanted to start a duo, figure out how to have a life together, Shane thinking, Whoa, what? Am I high? Shane thinking his foot was probably infected, that what he was feeling was something bad in his blood, sepsis most likely, and then he was passing the road to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, burning it out of town, the fields of windmills coming into view, Shane finally taking a moment to look in the rearview mirror, to make sure there weren’t a hundred cop cars lined up behind him, and thinking, just for a moment, that he was really fucked-up, that he was really hallucinating some shit, that he needed to get some real meds, because sitting right there in the backseat, a gun in his hand, was a fucking clown.

  THE LOW DESERT

  It was before dawn, the Saturday after the Fourth of July, when I found Jim Connelly standing shirtless on the other side of my bedroom door. He’d walked in through the front door. I didn’t bother with locks. You came in my house, you were either invited or you weren’t.

  “I’m sorry, Morris,” he said. “I’ve been outside knocking for ten minutes. Can you put that pistol down?”

  I looked behind me. My wife, Katharine, had the sheets pulled up under her chin. I closed the door and walked Jim into the family room, set my gun down on top of the TV console.

  “The hell’s going on?”

  “Gloria and I were walking the beach,” he said, “getting ready for the boat races this morning, and found something.” Connelly was the marketing manager at Claxson Oil, the company that employed us both. He and his wife, Gloria, lived across the street in the Claxson Oil Executive Housing Unit—twenty-five prefabricated houses and a few bungalows for visiting Claxson bigwigs, all cut into the desert surrounding the banks of the Salton Sea—and in direct view of the oil derricks. I’d spent the last several months working as the project’s head of security, which basically meant I was the law, the closest real cop sixty miles away in Palm Springs, which in 1962 meant we were in another world entirely. The Claxson 500, a speedboat race sponsored by the oil company, was set to start at ten that morning, launching from the northwest side of the Sea. Two hundred campers were already out at the recreation area just adjacent to the launch, and we expected another five hundred spectators to filter in by the end of the day. The race teams had been housed in trailers next to the marina the entire week, getting their swift boats ready.

  “What kind of something?”

  “A boy,” Jim said. “I think. I couldn’t tell, Morris, with all the . . .” He flapped his arms about, sputtering. “The body is pretty eaten up.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d fought in Korea, so death was something I knew how to work around. Tragedy was not as simple. Jim picked at something on his bare chest. “Where’s your shirt?”

  “Covering the body.”

  I WENT BACK into the bedroom, got dressed, told Katharine the news.

  “Have you heard about any runaways?” she asked. “From the workers?”

  “Negative.”

  The workers—a mixture of roughnecks brought in from Oklahoma and Texas, Mexicans up from the border, and a smattering of Indians from the various tribes between Palm Springs and Blythe—lived in makeshift barracks near the oil derricks along the North Shore, where we also kept office space, in addition to the digs encircling the 350 square miles of the Sea. If I showed up at any of the locations, it wasn’t good news. I’d spoken with the county sheriff, Luther Ward, the day before about a fight between a migrant worker and one of our roughnecks, guy named Dixie Cooper, a first-rate scumbag, over at a bar in Bombay Beach. The worker ended up choking on his own teeth, was back in Mexicali, could go either way. I sent Dixie back east on the train, told him to find a place where no one knew him and stay there. Or tried to, anyway. I ended up breaking both his wrists in the middle of the conversation. Which is to say: if one of the workers’ children was missing, I might not ever find out.

  “Maybe it’s a camper,” I said, “about to wake up with a problem.”

  Katharine nodded. We’d grown up, six years apart, in Granite City, Washington, where my father was the sheriff and where her father operated a fishing spot down the way on Granite Lake. This alien place in the middle of the desert was like nothing we’d ever imagined, a vast inland sea on top of an ancient salt plain; a mistake made in 1905 when the Colorado jumped its banks and flooded the region, unimpeded, for eighteen months. Except it wasn’t really a mistake. There’d been plans going back to the late-1800s to re-wild the Salton Basin, the dreamland of developers, the United States government, your basic grifters, and now oil companies. Each had a plan to change what nature had already decided: that marine life in the middle of the desert was folly. If Claxson had its way, this would be the great inland riviera of California, oil just phase one of their plans. They would harvest beneath the earth, they would build on top of it, they would populate the shifting sands, and they would own the Salton Sea. They’d already built a luxury marina and yacht club; a million-dollar hotel was next. Jerry Lewis, so the talk went, was figuring out how to get a casino in these parts. Sinatra was going to play a show . . .

  . . . provided a drop of oil showed up.

  Company geologists assured everyone it was just one more inch away, every day.

  We would all be rich.

  So here Katharine and I were living in the middle of someone else’s mistakes, though we didn’t know that then. Our plan, unlike Claxson’s, didn’t seem foolish when we began. We’d live on the Salton Sea for a few years, accumulate our nest egg, start a family, find our way back to Granite City, or maybe Seattle, or Portland, and then live through it all, whatever all of it might be.

  Katharine went into our bathroom, came out with two hand towels. “People drowned at Granite Lake all the time,” she said. She sprayed her perfume on the towels. “Take these
. Give one to Jim. He’ll need it.”

  JIM’S WIFE, GLORIA, stood a few feet from the body, keeping the gulls away. She was five months pregnant and had the neck of her T-shirt pulled up over her nose and mouth, which caused the hem to reveal the bulge of her belly.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “No,” Gloria said. She let the shirt slip off her nose, the collar resting on her chin. She’d been crying.

  “Kat’s up,” I said. “Why don’t you go over to the house. We’re gonna be here for a bit.”

  Gloria gave Jim a look. “Do you want me to stay?”

  “I doubt it will do either of us any good,” he said, towel pressed to his nose. I’d given him a denim work-shirt to wear, which he hadn’t bothered to do up. Gloria came over and kissed Jim on the forehead, then buttoned his shirt, like he was an infant.

  “You recognize him?” I asked Gloria.

  “That age? Could be anyone.”

  Jim and I watched her walk back up the dune, until she was gone. “We lost a baby,” Jim said. “Before we ever got out here.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?” Jim was a private guy. He didn’t like to bullshit and he had a problem with people who didn’t practice their faith, which was everyone out here. Jim’s faith was Catholicism. But I liked him, and he liked me, I think, and for a time that was important.

  “She told Kat.”

  “We never talk about it,” he said. “It’s this shadow over us.” He shook his head. “Let’s get to it.”

  The Salton Sea lapped at the boy’s feet, and I could see where Jim had dragged the body from the water, toes leaving tracks in the sand. The body was facedown, left arm tucked under, right spread out wide, like it was directing traffic. I removed Jim’s shirt from the head and torso and tipped the body on its side, so I could look for obvious signs of foul play. I saw no bullet holes, stab wounds, or ligature marks around his throat, though his body was covered with ragged cuts and abrasions, all of which looked postmortem. His eyes and tongue were gone, but it had been at least 110 every day since the start of July, so the Sea hovered between 85 and 90 degrees. With the salinity and the wildlife and the biting flies, anything soft was going to be devoured in just a few hours. Even the top of his scalp had been picked clean, revealing white bone at the crown, the gulls having had their way before Jim and Gloria found the body, a pile of hair not far down the beach.