Palm Springs Noir

by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

  Shane couldn’t remember if he still had AAA, but he called anyway.

  “Looks like you canceled your account six months ago,” the customer service agent said.

  Rachel must have done it after she moved out. Like how she canceled their shared credit cards. Or how she took their dog Manny to get his teeth cleaned on the same morning she kicked him out of the house, knowing full well Shane wouldn’t have the cash to pick the dog back up.

  God, he loved that dog. Probably more than he loved Rachel. No probably. Actually. If he got out of this fucked-up situation, he was going to buy another dog that looked like Manny and name him Manny too.

  “How much is it to re-up?” Shane asked.

  “It’s sixty-eight dollars, which gets you seven miles of towing service.”

  “What if I need to go farther?” Shane asked, thinking, What the hell, maybe I’ll have AAA tow me to Arizona, give me someone to talk to. Or maybe he’d just steal the tow truck. He could do that. He was capable of anything now.

  “You’d need the premier membership for that,” the customer service agent said, and then began to tell Shane the particulars of how amazing the premier membership was. He had $274 in cash in his pocket—Gold Mike, the fucker who shot him in the foot, that’s what he gave Shane as a parting gift after he’d asked him to stop by their storage unit over by the Forum; Shane thinking it was to plan the night’s job, Gold Mike with other ideas.

  “It’s not working out,” Gold Mike told him. The storage unit was half-empty already, Gold Mike’s van filled with their deejay and karaoke equipment, all their locksmith materials, plus their three industrial-sized lockboxes filled with pills. They’d been coming up light lately, but for a while it was a good living. Black-tie weddings in the Palisades, bar mitzvahs in Calabasas, retirement parties in Bel-Air. How it worked, one of them would be inside at the wedding, singing or dee-jaying, the other guy parking cars and collecting addresses. Three-hour wedding meant they could get as many keys made as they wanted. Spend the next couple days casing a house, go in and steal all the pills, which wasn’t a crime any cop gave a shit about, particularly when there was no evidence of breaking and entering. Plus, it was a victimless crime, Shane not feeling too bad about taking a cancer patient’s Klonopin, knowing full well CVS would hook them back up in thirty minutes, maybe less. They didn’t steal jewelry or TVs or cars or any of that shit. Just pills.

  Then this whole opiate crisis started getting on the news right when weed got legalized, so people in California started loading up on edibles and vape pens instead of Percocet and benzos.

  “It’s just an ebb,” Shane said.

  “I’m moving my operating base,” Gold Mike said. “Got a friend in Reno. Says everyone’s hooked on something. He can get me into the hotels. That’s next-level.”

  “Cool,” Shane said. “I’m down to relocate.” His only steady, legal gigs were running karaoke at Forrest’s Bar in Culver City and a honky-tonk in Thousand Oaks called Denim & Diamonds.

  “You’re not hearing me,” Gold Mike said. “You can’t hit the high notes anymore. If you can’t sing, this whole operation is moot.” Moot. Where the fuck had he learned that word? “Jessie’s Girl”? “Don’t make it weird, all right? Ten years is a good run.”

  “Who needs a high note? You think Mick can hit a high note?”

  “Bro,” Gold Mike said, “I don’t even like music.”

  “So that’s it? No severance?”

  “You think you’re getting COBRA up in this bitch? Come on, man.”

  “Manny’s chemo put me back ten grand,” Shane said. Manny had a tumor on his ear that turned out to be a treatable cancer, in the sense that the dog could get treatment and still die, but he hadn’t yet, as far as Shane knew. “I’ve been upside down ever since.”

  “That was like eighteen months ago.” Gold Mike took out his wallet, thumbed out a few fifties, put them on an empty shelf next to a broken turntable.

  “Couple hundred bucks?” Shane said. “How about you give me 50 percent of everything or I walk into a police station. How about that?” And then Shane pulled out his gun, which had actually been a gift from Gold Mike. A little .22. He’d given it to Shane after a robbery went sideways, a Vietnam War vet came home and found Shane in his bathroom, beat the fucking shit out of him with a golf club, Gold Mike coming in at the last minute and knocking the fucker out with a Taser.

  You pull out your gun, mentally, you gotta be ready to kill a guy right then, no talking shit, no cool catch phrase, no freeze, no hands up, nothing, just pop pop pop. That’s what cops are always saying, it’s what Gold Mike had taught Shane too. Which is how he also had all of Gold Mike’s credit cards and his driver’s license, in addition to $274.

  “Seven miles is fine,” Shane said to the customer service agent, and gave him his location on the 10. “I need a place with a karaoke bar, if possible.” He had a hustle he liked to do where he’d bet people that he could make them cry and then he’d bust out “Brick” by Ben Folds Five and every girl who ever had an abortion would be in a puddle. It didn’t make him proud, but he had bills to pay.

  “Let’s see what we have here.” The agent made a whistling sound. “Well, the Royal Californian is 6.7 miles from where you are. They have a sports bar with karaoke. If that works, shall I charge it to your existing credit card and get the truck to you?”

  “How about I give the driver cash,” Shane said. He needed as little paper trail as possible.

  “I’ll need to check with my manager,” the agent said, and put Shane on hold.

  He was parked beneath a billboard that advertised The Wonder of Waterfront Living in the Desert! and showed a happy couple of indeterminate race walking into what appeared to be an Italian lakeside villa surrounded by palm trees. He looked to the west and could make out the obvious signs of civilization: the billboard for a Starbucks, an RV park called the Long Run, a billboard touting an upcoming concert by Rick Springfield at the Fantasy Springs Casino. That fucking guy. Twice in the same day. Had to be a harbinger.

  “Cash is just fine. We’ll have a tow truck to you in about twenty minutes,” the agent said.

  It was nearly four o’clock. He was supposed to be singing “Come On Eileen” in a couple hours, always his first song over at Forrest’s, everyone always losing their shit when he did that “Toora loora toora loo rye aye” bit, like it was 1982 and they were thirteen and it was the eighth grade dance.

  That fucking song.

  More trouble than it was worth, that was for sure.

  He couldn’t think about that now.

  He needed to get Gold Mike’s body out of the trunk.

  Or, well … choice cuts of Gold Mike’s body.

  2009 and Shane’s working the Black Angus in Northridge. They’ve got something they call the “Fun Bar,” a relic from disco years, lit up floor, big dark booths, great sound system, but no one dancing. Just frat boys over from the college drinking vodka and cranberry like they all have UTIs. At first, he’s just doing karaoke like anybody does karaoke, stand up there, let some drunk come up and sing “American Pie,” help him out when he realizes the song is eight minutes long and he doesn’t have the wind. Flirt with the bartender, maybe get a hand job in the dry storage. Woman or man. Hand job was a hand job, Shane believed in equal opportunity back then, because of all the coke and a profound lack of giving a fuck. Love is love, friction is friction.

  Maybe a little guilt now, thinking about it, thinking about how he did Rachel wrong, staring at the ceiling fan twirling in his room at the Royal Californian, eleven p.m., still a hundred degrees outside, giant flying roaches committing suicide against his window every couple minutes, Shane dying for a fucking Percocet, a million of them still in Gold Mike’s van, Shane could hit himself for being so stupid, not thinking this all through, his foot throbbing, sweat sticking his shirt to his chest.

  His own fault. Rachel, that is. A lot of lying. Fuck it had been his point of view back when he worked at the
Angus. Go home with a hundred bucks for the night and an empty load? Fuck it. Problem was, he’d kept that point of view long into his relationship with Rachel and she was not a Fuck it kind of person, so he pretended it was just how performers were, though by the time Rachel came along, he wasn’t a performer anymore, he just performed.

  “Baby,” he’d tell her, “you gotta just say Fuck it when you’re in this business, otherwise, every night would crush your spirit.”

  And Rachel, she’d say, “Then you should get another way to earn a living.”

  And so he had.

  Kind of.

  Thing was, Shane could really sing. All this other shit was ephemeral. His talent, man, that was in his genetic code. His dad played in the Catskills back in the day, singing in cover bands, even came out to California one time and brought Shane with him, doing a night at Melvyn’s in Palm Springs, which was the last time Shane had been anywhere near here. Typically, his dad would come back home the first week of September with a roll of cash, and for a month everything would be good between him and Shane’s mom. Dinners out. New clothes. Shane’s mom falling in love all over again, talking about how maybe this year they’d get married, maybe she’d go to college, then maybe law school, Shane’s mother always talking about how she was going to be a lawyer, but by the time she died, she’d spent twenty-five years as the lunch lady at Rensselaer Point Elementary down in Troy. She’d had Shane when she was fifteen. Dead by fifty-one. Got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and put a fucking noose around her neck two hours later. Shane’s dad saying, Maybe she didn’t really have the old-timers, because wouldn’t she have forgotten? His dad was still alive, that was the irony, doing what Shane thought of as the Dead Man’s Tour: Buddy Holly and Elvis tribute shows at Native American casinos in Connecticut, Shane keeping track of him on the Internet, that fucker doing pretty well.

  But the Angus.

  In comes Gold Mike. Sits at a table right by Shane’s kit, nurses a Diet Coke. Really gets into it when Shane sings. Tapping his foot. Bobbing his head. When Shane busts out “Come On Eileen” and hits his full register, Gold Mike stands up and whoops.

  When he goes on break fifteen minutes later, Gold Mike follows him outside, where Shane is having a smoke and watching the traffic on Corbin Avenue.

  “You got a nice presence,” Gold Mike says.

  “Thanks man,” Shane says.

  “Wasting it out here, if you want my opinion,” Gold Mike says.

  “Just waiting to be discovered.”

  “That’s not ever gonna happen,” Gold Mike says, like he knows. He’s maybe twenty-seven, but he’s one of those guys who talks like he’s been around the world fifty times. Gold Mike fingers a diamond-encrusted V that hangs around his neck.

  “Whatever,” Shane says. He takes one more drag from his cigarette, then puts it out on the bottom of his shoe, like it’s a thing he does all the time, which it isn’t.

  “Whatever?” Gold Mike says. “I insult you and you say, Whatever. Passivity, man, that’s an illness.”

  “You want me to hit you or something?”

  Gold Mike laughs hard. He’s one of those Armenian dudes who shaves his head just to look tough, Shane making out the outline of a full head of stubble. Shane isn’t much of a fighter. He’s the kind of person who will stab a guy, though.

  “I been watching you,” Gold Mike says.

  “How long have you been watching me?”

  “A couple weeks,” Gold Mike says, like it’s perfectly normal. “You ever do any time?”

  “You ever do any time?”

  “A couple days here and there,” Gold Mike says.

  “That must impress some people.”

  Gold Mike laughs again but doesn’t respond.

  “What’s the V stand for?” Shane points at Gold Mike’s neck.

  “My last name is Voski.”

  “Okay.”

  “It means gold in Armenian. What’s your last name mean?”

  “Solomon? It means peace. From the Hebrew word shalom. That’s what my mother said, anyway.”

  Gold Mike leans forward, motions Shane to lean in too. “You want to make some real money, Shalom?”

  Shane finally fell asleep after one a.m., woke up again at 5:47 a.m., sunrise filling his room on the second floor of the Royal Californian with orange light, his foot like an anvil at the bottom of his leg. He unwrapped the gauze and examined the wound. His foot had swollen to twice its normal size, at least, even though the wound wasn’t that big. An inch around. The nurse told him yesterday that the bullet shattered two of his cuneiform bones, that he’d need surgery to stabilize his foot, a couple pins would be inserted, and then he’d be in a hard cast for six to eight weeks. But he was going to need to speak to the police before any of that happened.

  That wasn’t going to work.

  Not with 66 percent of Gold Mike rotting in his storage unit, the other 33 percent in the Honda’s trunk, Shane thinking 1 percent was probably drying on the floor, blood and viscera and whatnot. He’d chopped Gold Mike’s head off using the fire hose hatchet inside the storage unit, then cut the head up into smaller pieces to make it easier to shuttle around, then took off Gold Mike’s hands and feet too, because he thought that would make it harder to identify him, but with DNA, fuck, it probably didn’t matter, but Shane hadn’t been thinking too terribly straight.

  He’d taken the battery out of Gold Mike’s van and poured acid over the rest of the body, but that was really just cosmetic. For sure Shane’s DNA was in the unit and the van and on Gold Mike’s body, but then his DNA was all over everything regardless. They were business partners. That was easy enough to explain. Plus, he had no legitimate reason to kill Gold Mike. Anyone who saw them together knew they were a team. Really, the only proof that it was Shane who’d plugged him an excessive number of times was probably the hole in Shane’s fucking foot and the gun itself, which Shane had tucked under his mattress.

  Well, and Gold Mike’s head and all that, which was now in his hotel room’s safe, zipped up inside a Whole Foods freezer bag filled with ice.

  Shane stepped out onto his second-story balcony—which was just wide enough to hurl yourself over—and lit up his second-to-last cigarette. He’d given up smoking when Manny got cancer, truth be known he sort of blamed himself for that whole thing, but it was the only drug he had on his person and he needed about ten minutes of mental clarity to figure out how he was going to get himself out of this situation.

  He needed to get rid of Gold Mike’s body parts.

  He needed to get rid of the gun.

  He needed to get himself an alibi … or he needed to change his entire identity, which didn’t seem like a plausible turn of events, though he was open to whatever reality presented itself to him.

  He needed to go across the street to the Circle K and get some disposable phones.

  He also was in a fuck-ton of pain and under normal circumstances might go find a dispensary and get some edibles, but he wasn’t showing anyone his ID. He’d get some ice and soak his foot in the tub; that would bring down the swelling. He’d get some bleach from housecleaning, put a couple drops in the water, maybe that would disinfect the wound? Then he needed to get a new car.

  The Royal Californian sat on a stretch of Highway 111 in Indio that could have been Carson City or Bakersfield or Van Nuys or anywhere else where someone had the wise idea to plant a palm tree and then surround it with cement. This wasn’t the part of greater Palm Springs where people came to actually visit—it was nowhere near the leafy garden hotel he’d stayed in with his dad, the Ingleside Inn—unless they were going to court or bailing someone out, since the hotel was a block west of the county courthouse and jail. He hadn’t realized it at first, not until he was checking in and the clerk gave him a brochure of local amenities. Page one had all the dining options. Page two was local entertainment and information about how to get to the polo fields a mile south. And then page three was all bail bonds, attorneys, and AA
meetings.

  Made sense, then, when the clerk didn’t seem bothered by his bloody foot and that he didn’t have ID when he gave him Gold Mike’s Visa to check in.

  He’d given the AAA driver an extra fifteen dollars to park his car just down the block, in a neighborhood of taupe houses called the Sandpiper Estates, the word estate apparently one of those words whose meaning had been lost to insincerity, since all Shane saw were a lot of children standing by themselves on front lawns made of rock, staring into their phones. Shane left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked. If he was lucky, the car would be stripped clean in a few days, best-case scenario. Worst case, it would get towed to some county yard and there it would stay, forever.

  Now, Shane counted seven cars in the Royal Californian’s parking lot. A van with a Save Mono Lake sticker faded on the bumper. A white pickup truck missing the tailgate. Two Hondas that looked just like his dead Accord. A red Buick Regal, probably a rental, no one bought fucking Buicks. An SUV. Another SUV. He tried to imagine who owned each car, and what their favorite song might be, Shane always interested if people picked a sad song or a happy one. Gave you a sense of how people viewed their own lives. Real or imagined.

  Rachel’s favorite song was “American Girl” by Tom Petty. His mom’s favorite song was “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis. Shane? He didn’t have a favorite. Not anymore. Songs had stopped having meaning for him. He’d prefer absolute silence, forever.

  A man of about seventy walked out of his ground-floor room and into the parking lot, wearing blue boxer shorts, a white V-neck undershirt, and a pair of black sandals, keys in his hand. A Sinatra guy, Shane thought. Probably “My Way” or “Come Fly with Me.” Shane made him for the red Buick Regal. It was backed into a space, always the sign of an asshole. Instead, the old man looked up and down the block, which was stone empty, then crossed the street to a one-story office building with storefront-style signs advertising a law office—Terry Kales, Criminal Defense/DUI/Divorce/Immigration—accounting offices, a Mexican bakery, a notary, and a place where you could get your cell phone fixed.