“What about our lives?”
“What about them?” He sees a sparkle in her eye.
“Are not our lives our own?”
“How can anything be truly ours if someone else can take it away?”
“I see your point.”
“It’s all part of the big picture,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “So who’d you steal the chips from and how long do you have to hide?”
She laughs.
“Am I right?”
“Yes,” she said. “No one you know and just a few more minutes.”
She takes another fry. He sips his sugary coffee.
“When you bought that burger, who came out ahead?” she asks.
“More economic theory?”
She shrugs, glances behind him, then shifts slightly down in her chair.
“I haven’t paid for it yet,” he said.
“Are you going to steal it? Dine and dash?” Her smile feeds the light in her eyes.
“I hadn’t thought of it,” he says. “No, probably not. Not worth the hassle if I get caught.”
“Good. You know your limits.”
“You are strange,” he says. “But back to your question, I think the restaurant came out ahead. This food isn’t worth what they’re asking.”
“Maybe. But if you were hungry, you’d be ahead.”
“I could buy a better burger elsewhere for less.”
“If you were starving and bought that burger, for what ten dollars? You’d be way ahead.”
“It’s fifteen.”
“If it were a thousand, you’d be ahead. You’d be alive, they’d have some money. You’d be so far ahead in the deal you might as well have robbed them.”
“What would they benefit from my dying?”
“Good question, Michael,” she says and gets up. “All clear. There’re my people. I have to go.”
He looks into the casino in the direction she gestured and scans the crowd. He sees no one special.
“The rich steal better than the poor,” she says. “That’s why they’re rich and others are poor. That’s economics.”
“That’s greed.”
“That’s their problem. Having more than you need is just inspiration for someone to rob you.”
“How much is more than one needs?”
“Anything more than I have,” she says and walks away.
She melts into the crowd amid the jangling sounds and seductive lights of wholesale robbery. A small figure, distinct but disguised. Weaving through the banks of slot machines and crap tables, she disappears among the thieves and victims. He has little doubt as to which group Jessica belongs.
Chapter Four
Michael spends the night with a fifth of Wild Turkey and wakes up late. He’s uneasy. His dreams were dark; the liquor did not numb him the way he’d expected. He calls for more towels.
“When are you checking out?”
“I want a late check-out,” he says seeing it’s past noon.
“So you’re leaving today?”
“I said one night when I checked in.”
“You’ve been here for three days,” the manager tells him.
“What?”
“So you are checking out today? We need the room.”
“Yeah, I’m leaving today. Bring me some towels.”
He hadn’t drunk enough for this kind of black out. He looks at the bottle of whisky, still two fingers at the bottom. He looks at his phone. The battery is dead. He plugs it in and after a moment, it lights up, warning him that the battery is still hours from full recharge. He checks the date. It has been three days.
He puts the phone down and feels his neck. He feels three days of beard growth under his chin. His fingers linger on his throat.
He shakes his head, showers and packs.
An hour later, with a roll of quarters and a coffee, he pays an overdue visit to a laundromat to change his grays back to whites. The crowd is a mix of poor and traveler. Wary all. His phone rings.
“Hello Maggie,” he says.
“Where have you been?”
“Sick,” he says. “I think someone slipped me a mickey. I’ve been out for days.”
“They take anything?”
“Only the time.”
“So where are you?”
“Still in Vegas.”
“Oswald…” She says it like a disappointed mother.
“What? I told you what happened.”
“You were supposed to be in Idaho a week ago.”
“I’m looking into the Assurity bounty,” he says.
“After Idaho.”
“No. I’m down here. I’ll do it now.”
“What’s the hurry? It’s already three weeks old.”
“It’s a bounty.”
“How do you know it hasn’t already been claimed?”
“Has it?”
“No, but how do you know?”
“I have a feeling about this one. A hunch.”
“Oh god,” she says.
“The money’s really good.”
“Since when are you about money?”
“Who isn’t about money?”
“What do you need the money for? Thinking of starting your own agency?”
“Would you work for me?”
“No.”
“I have a hunch,” he says. “I’m checking it out.”
Two men enter the laundromat and scan the room. They’re looking at people, not machines. Their eyes fall on Michael. He cannot see their faces. They are backlit against the windowed wall but he knows they are looking at him.
“So what about Timberline?” asks Maggie.
“It’ll wait.”
“Go to Idaho.”
One of the strangers makes a gesture to his face, but the shadows hide what he’s doing and he doesn’t know how to react. Michael waits, expecting them to move on him, preparing to be mugged.
Maggie from far away, “Michael, are you there?”
“Yes. Is there anything new about the Assurity bounty?” he says also from far away.
“Do your own homework. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it to you until you’d done Timberline.”
“Maggie, I don’t feel good.”
She sighs. He hears the clatter of keyboard typing. “The police added an official “ongoing investigation” post. That’s all. Get to Idaho.”
The connection is cut on Maggie’s side.
Slowly, Michael lowers the phone from his ear and blinks to clear his vision. The light makes tracers around the figures, auras, and shades. He smells ashes.
“‘Sup Jay?” one of them calls.
“Nothing, Slick,” Michael calls back. The other patrons stop and watch, feeling the tension, bracing for violence.
“I’m not Slick,” he says.
“I’m not Jay,” says Michael.
“Another time.”
They leave.
There’s something familiar about all this, about the tension, the gesture, the names.
He shakes cobwebs from his head and returns to the call. Maggie is right. He doesn’t want the money, at least not like that. The days when money was an object unto itself are long gone. He needs only enough to get by. A little extra will get him by longer, but he is under no delusion that money will bring him purpose or happiness. He knows first-hand the cliché about that. Like the whiskey that blunted his senses for a few hours, wealth is a distraction from the despair of existence. It is a medicine that treats a symptom not the disease.
He still sends money to Carla. He does this not because she needs it, or even wants it any more–Warren’s law firm is doing great. No, Michael keeps paying because it is going on with going on, and at times, when the void in his chest darkens and congeals, going on is the only thing keeping him from falling in.
There might be some people who were genuinely satisfied with money. He imagines a void in everyone’s soul, a hole they are put on the earth to fill. Surely everyone has a differen
t shaped hole. One size does not fit all. One man’s poison is another’s meat. He likes to think that Carla can be content with her chase of status and possessions, but he’s doubtful.
He’d had arguments with Carla about the relationship of money to happiness. It began with the usual platitudes but evolved into the very obvious proof that money could at least stave off most of the things that brought unhappiness. That was the fear talking, and Michael had called it that. She wouldn’t be moved. Money was a legitimate goal unto itself, she said.
“Even if you have to do something you hate to get it?” he said.
“We all do things we don’t like sometimes,” she replied. “Maybe we don’t like brushing our teeth but the results are worth the sacrifice.”
It was a dig at him for forgetting to brush that day. He’d been in a hurry for an appointment.
“But brushing takes seconds. A job you hate can be a lifetime.”
“If it’s a good job, with good rewards, you should learn to love it.”
“What about doing what we want? You know, the Joseph Campbell thing about following your bliss and the money will come?”
“That’s mystical bullshit.”
After Carla left him, he sat down and tried to figure out what his bliss was, promising himself to follow it now that he was “free.” In eight years, he hadn’t been able to find it.
The GPS on Lowe’s truck had been deactivated in Las Vegas. Using his computer Michael figures out the coordinates and finds the last location of the signal. He memorizes the route and stuffs his whites into a torn suitcase before going to his car. He scans the parking lot for the men who’d come in earlier, but they’re gone.
It’s an easy drive through town, the heat keeps people inside. He arrives at a suburban gas station far from The Strip and the hotel he’d stayed the night before, or rather, the three previous nights. He still can’t wrap his mind around the lost time.
He pulls his Mercedes up to the pump and refills the tank. It’s the worst time to put gas in a vehicle, high afternoon, hottest part of the day. He knows he’s buying fumes, but he figures it’ll look better when he starts asking questions if he’s bought something.
He needn’t have bothered. The bubblegum-popping clerk behind the counter has no stake in the family-owned gas station beyond her minimum wage paycheck.
“I don’t know nothing about no missing truck,” she says and the vacancy in her eyes confirms her story.
“Is the owner here?”
“Yes.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“I dunno,” she chortles. “Can you?”
She’s pleased with her joke and Michael smirks back, a fake smile, a gesture quite the opposite to what he wants to do.
“Is he here?”
“I dunno. Is he?” She laughs like she just zinged him again. “I’m not allowed to leave my post,” she explains looking up the two digit extension on a cheat sheet beside the phone. “It’s a rule.”
“How dutiful of you,” he says.
She raises an eyebrow and he knows she’s wondering if “dutiful” is a real word or not.
“Mr. Abi,” she says. “There’s a guy here who wants to see you… No, I didn’t do anything wrong. He wants to talk to you… No. Not a salesman… Okay. Bye.” She hangs up the phone. “He’s busy,” she says.
“Where is the office?” he asks.
She points down a hallway past the toilets.
He heads that way and finds a door marked Employees Only and goes through it. The clerk doesn’t say a word.
“Mr. Abi?” he calls.
He sees a narrow hallway stacked high with boxes of soft drink syrup and beer cases. He moves through it sideways. He passes a door leading behind the refrigerated racks, then the space opens a little. Beside a coat rack and a time clock, he sees a single office door.
“Mr. Abi?” he says opening the door.
A dark-skinned man sitting at a desk wheels around to face him, wide eyed and startled. Michael notices white bodies with pink recesses on the computer screen before Mr. Abi clicks the monitor off.
“Who are you? What do you want?” He speaks with an Indian accent. His mustache is straight from a travel brochure, thick and curled at the ends. He has dark eyes and black hair and skin is the color of smooth coffee.
“Mr. Abi, I’m Michael Oswald. I’m working for Assurity Insurance. I’m investigating a missing truck.”
“You cannot barge in like this,” he says.
“Don’t look so frightened. I’m an investigator not a murderer.”
Mr. Abi’s eyes stay wide while Michael squeezes inside the little room.
“You say you’re not a murderer?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You could be lying.”
“I could be,” he says, sliding a cigarette into his mouth. “But really, I’m here about the truck.”
“I am tired of this truck,” he says, his eyes still nervous but calming down. “I told everyone. I know nothing about it.”
“Who’ve you told?” Michael lights the cigarette. As he fans the match out he catches sight of a four-armed elephant-headed statue on its own shelf in the corner. He smells sweet exotic incense and notices the ends of joss sticks planted before the icon. He takes a drag from his cigarette.
“I’ve told everyone. Police. FBI. People from the company and dozens of men like you who are looking for it.”
“Dozens like me?”
“Dozens saying they work for Assurity Insurance, but all are private hunters.”
“Yeah, it’s a bounty. A reward for turning up the truck. We are all working for the company but only one of us gets paid. Get it?”
“Yes.”
“Dozens eh?”
“Maybe fifty people, in person and by phone. Maybe fifty. Maybe more. It’s been going on for weeks.”
“And what have you been telling these people?”
“Nothing. I have nothing to tell them. The day the truck was here, I was working but I remember nothing.”
“Do you have surveillance tape?”
“Inside the store.”
“Can I see the tape?”
“No. It’s on a two day cycle. That tape was erased before anyone came looking for it.”
“Erased?”
“Overwritten. It’s all digital.”
“Dozens of people looking, huh?” he murmurs.
“Fifty,” he says. “Maybe more.”
Michael nods and ashes his cigarette in a rubber trash can.
“Who’s the elephant man?”
“Ganesha,” says Mr. Abi.
“Why so many arms?”
“Indian gods often have many arms. It’s how they give out so much bounty. Ganesh helps the merchant and the scholar.”
“Working out for you?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, okay,” Michael says. “Thanks for your time. Sorry I interrupted you.”
Mr. Abi locks the door as soon as Michael leaves.
Michael walks around the gas station and finds the likely place for the work to have been done. There’s a broad gravel drive behind the building that offers concealment from the road. There is a single spotlight over a blue paint-cracked door and a dumpster beside that. No windows. The door has no handle on this side, only a silver deadbolt-keyed lock.
Before he can reach his car his phone rings.
“Oswald.” It’s Maggie. “Are you still in Vegas?”
“I’ll get to fucking Idaho when I get to fucking Idaho,” he says.
“Are you in Vegas?”
“Yes.”
“Go to the Luxor and pick up Craig McCallister.”
“Who’s Craig McCallister?”
“Roy’s brother-in-law.”
“Tell him to call a cab.”
“Roy hired him, sent him down there to work on the Assurity thing. When he found out you were down there he thought you two should work together.”
“What?”
“He wants you to work with him. Show him the ropes. Teach him. Mentor. Whatever. Just do it.”
“Dozens,” Michael grumbles after he hangs up his phone. “Maybe fifty.”
Chapter Five
“I can’t thank you enough for picking me up, Oswald. Roy says you used to be the best. Said I could learn a lot from you.” Craig McCallister hasn’t shut up since Michael found him outside the treasure ride in the Luxor. “He said I could learn a lot from you,” he repeats.
Michael navigates the awakening Strip northward, picking an onramp. He’s had enough of Las Vegas. The neon lights in the dawn show false and the casino veneers in sunshine are poor replicas of the dreams they promise by night. He meant to stay one night here but somehow, he’s been here for days.
“You ever ride that treasure ride at the Luxor? It’s a trip. I rode it like six times for free.” Craig adjusts his seat and rolls down the window. “Man, do you have to smoke? I’m sensitive.”
Roy’s brother-in-law does not look sensitive. His biceps bulge with unnatural girth, evidence of too much time at the gym. His face is round and firm, strong-chinned with confident piercing eyes under full brows. He has no hair on top of his head. It’s shaved off. His skull a bronze tan like his arms. His most striking feature, the thing that Michael keeps focusing on when he looks at his new passenger, is the man’s enormous neck. His head doesn’t so much stand on top of his neck as it is the rounded peak of a pyramid growing out of his shoulders. His neck is thick and strong, tendons run through it like canyons. He could be a battering ram.
“Do you play football?” Michael asks.
“Used to,” says Craig. “I nearly made the roster for Arizona, but I blew a knee.”
“So how long have you been working for Roy?”
“A week. He says to watch what you do and then when you retire, I can take over.”
Michael blows smoke out his nose.
“Hey, what’d I say about smoking?” says Craig.
“My car, Bluto. You want to walk?”
“Alright,” he says. “No need to be nasty. Who’s Bluto?”
Michael floors the Mercedes up the onramp. He grunts and nods and Craig doesn’t notice he’s not paying attention to him. It’s clear that Roy intends to move him out and put this lug in his place, but he can’t be mad at his boss. He doesn’t care enough about Roy or the job to worry about it.
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