This should bother him. He thinks this should set him off, since relatively speaking, his job is a big deal. He doesn’t have much in his life. His job is really all he has; the reason he gets up in the morning, when he gets up in the morning. But he doesn’t care. It’s not like he learned some kind of Zen that moves him across stressful moments of looming unemployment. He has nothing. Does that mean he is nothing?
He feels it inside him—a void growing by the hour, an emptying of who he was. Hollow and vacuous, it is absence only. It is hunger with no idea what to eat; desire for purpose without inclination or motivation. He feels adrift, a ship without cargo or course. Purposeless and lost.
He wonders if he ever had purpose. He’s had goals. Hasn’t he? He’s had positions at least, and they carried with them a purpose. When he was a kid, his purpose was to grow up. Easy enough under the circumstances. When he was a student, his purpose was to learn. As a husband, his purpose became Carla. As a father, his kids. As a salesman, the sale and now, as an investigator, his purpose is to get another sleazy insurance company out from under its obligations. He’s never been under the assumption that his job was to uncover the truth. It isn’t. He works for corporations who need boots on the ground to find cracks to exploit in expensive cases. It’s not much of a purpose, but it’s all he has right now and he feels it melting away, like this, his second-to-last cigarette. He flicks the butt out the window.
“Hey, don’t do that,” says Craig. “That’s littering.”
“And don’t forget the fire hazard,” Michael adds.
“Hey get off here. Just down and to the left is the Double-A Gas where the GPS was turned off in the Ross truck.”
“Already been there,” Michael says.
“What’d you find?”
“Nothing.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“Just before I picked your sorry ass up from the Luxor.”
“Yeah? Roy said you might be surly. Are you drinking?”
He fishes out his last cigarette but thinks better of it. It’s his last and he has hours to go. He’s not in the mood to stop.
“So where are we going?”
“Ely.”
“It’s getting dark. Why not stay in Vegas?”
“Sick of Vegas. Ely.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
They drive in silence for a couple hours which suits Michael fine. The yellow sun sinks to his left and turns orange then crimson. The sky darkens and Michael likes that too. He likes the dark and the desert in the dark. It’s welcoming to him. Uncomplicated. The world becomes what he can see and what he can’t. He wishes he could turn off the headlights and drive by starlight—a limited palette of colors, minimal inputs, blues and muddy grays, wind and cold, slither and silence. Honesty in simplicity, ragged and raw.
Uninterested in the stranger beside him, he falls into quiet reverie. He’s close to some understanding he thinks. Something important. The pieces are falling into place, like the chords of a half-forgotten song. Time, and he’ll figure it out.
“Mind if I turn on the radio?” says Craig. He’s rolled up his window. The desert cools quickly when the sun is down.
“If you want.”
Craig toys with the knob for a while and finds a Christian channel.
“You’re religious?” asks Michael.
“Aren’t we all?”
“I’m not.”
“Sure you are. You just don’t know it. God knows you are. You’re in His service. He has a plan for you. When you’re ready, He’ll tell you all about it.”
“Bully for me,” says Michael. “Keep the radio down. I’m trying to think.”
“About what?”
“About the Assurity bounty,” he lies.
“You mean the missing truck?”
“Yeah.”
“I have all the info here on my laptop. What do you want to know?”
Craig reaches into the backseat, fetches a computer from his bag and opens it. Instantly he is bathed in a sickly pale light. He squints against it.
“I didn’t get a chance to fix all the GPS signals,” said Michael. “I got Ely and North Vegas but not how he got there.”
“I got a map right here with his whole route marked on it,” says Craig. He turns the computer screen to show Michael. The glare wrecks his night vision but after a blink or two he sees a neat red line down 93 between Ely and Vegas. Also a blue line between Ely and Reno and a green one between Ely and Wendover.
“All roads lead to Ely,” he says. “What are those other colors about?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll look it up.”
“Where did you get that? Program it yourself?”
“No. Maggie gave it to me when I came down. It’s from the insurance company.”
“I didn’t get that map. I just got the GPS coordinates. Longitude and latitude numbers.”
“You like it old school,” Craig teased.
“I’m thirty-eight,” he says.
“You look fifty.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean you look wise.”
“What do the colors mean?”
While Craig looks through his notes, Michael traces the missing information back to Roy. Maybe it was an oversight, but he senses Roy trying to sabotage him, his reason clear with this twenty-something brother-in-law replacement. It’s a common horror in America to know the sack is coming and have to train your replacement.
“It means what he drove on Sunday. That’s the green. Tuesday and Wednesday is the blue, and the red is Thursday. He drove at night a lot. I wonder why.”
“Some truckers like driving at night. Less traffic.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“Glad I could teach you something.”
“Maybe I can teach you something.”
“Like what?”
“Like Jesus.”
“You can teach Jesus?”
“Open your heart.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Hey, up here is Crystal Springs. That’s where he bunked down the night before he went AWOL.”
“You mean he stayed there?”
“Yeah. He took nine hours from driving and parked there.” He reads from his computer screen. “He arrived around ten fifteen on Wednesday and left seven thirty Thursday morning. The GPS cut out a couple hours later.
“What did his logs say?”
“Logs?”
“Was he required to stop? Those are prime driving hours. Did he have to take a rest or could he have pressed on?”
Craig searches the files while Michael slows down to take the exit to the rest stop. He cruises up the pot-holed road and parks the car.
It is a dark and deserted crossroads. A single buzzing moth-bothered light illuminates a corridor between two restroom doors. A locked iron gate keeps a bank of vending machines safe from theft but not graffiti. In his headlights, under the canopy of struggling shade trees, are a scattering of concrete picnic tables, each with its own little blackened barbecue grill on a cement post. He switches off the lights and shuts off the car. He gets out leaving Craig to the false light of his computer screen.
The asphalt radiates heat like a hot plate, but a step off the road onto the verdant watered earth and the atmosphere becomes soothing and cool. Michael walks between the tables, drawing his fingers lightly over their surfaces as he passes.
He stops to listen. Silence descends like a shroud. The wind hesitates, the crickets pause. His breathing slows and stops. When he exhales he does not hear it, the silence is too thick. But he sees.
He looks south across the highway, to a grove of trees and thinks he sees movement there. Still as a stone, he watches the undulating dance of wind in the branches and imagines the black woman he’d seen before, twirling and dancing in those shadows. She high-steps and twirls, her necklace a garland of ivory, her waistband a flutter of fingers. He imagines steel and blood, rope and bone. The wind brings to him the smell of ashes
and he finds the perfume fitting and right.
Like a rolling earthquake, a pair of semis barrel past behind him heading north to Ely and break his reverie. He blinks and sees only the treetops in the headlights of night traffic. He goes back to the rest stop craving candy.
He’s surprised when he runs into Craig coming out of a bathroom.
“Sorry I took so long,” says Craig. “Mexican food you know. I’m not used to it so hot.”
Michael looks at the car where he’d left Craig a moment before and half expects to see his doppelgänger still sitting in the front seat staring into the computer screen. How long did he lose this time?
There’s no candy. Only soda. Craig buys an energy drink and three bottles of water. Michael buys a thick citrus soda and drinks it all in one pull. He buys another and drinks it too.
“You really should lay off the sugary drinks,” says Craig back in the car. “Have a water. It’s much better for you.”
“Old habit,” he says. “I’ve been craving sweets a lot lately.”
“Like newborn babies crave pure spiritual milk,” says Craig, “so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”
“What?”
“It’s from the Bible. It means seek salvation.”
“I’m talking about a sweet-tooth, not salvation. I used to have a problem with candy. I got fat as a kid I ate so much. It’s just weird I’m craving it now.”
“You need to replace your candy craving with God craving.”
“What are you talking about?”
Craig blushes. “Sorry,” he says. “Did you find any clues?”
“Are you going to interject gospel at every turn?”
“No,” he says. “I’m not sure why I did just then. Free-association, I guess. You said craving and I recalled that quote. I do that sometimes. Especially when I’m nervous.”
“You’re nervous of me?”
“No,” he says. “This place is a little creepy and you standing out there staring into the trees for so long, that might have put a spook in me.”
Michael wants to ask him how long he was out there, but doesn’t. “No, I didn’t find anything,” he says. “Too dark.”
“At least you tried.”
“What did you find out about the log?” Michael points the car back to the highway and rejoins traffic.
“I guess you didn’t hear me,” he says.
“No. I guess not.”
“I don’t know how you didn’t. I was right there.”
“Will you just tell me again?”
“Well of course we don’t have the driver’s own logs, but according to Ross, the truck had maybe four hours on it before the stop here. He’d overnighted at a rest stop the night before.”
“That’s strange.”
“Maybe not,” said Craig. “Did you see the stuff about him being told to take his time? His company was peeved about a bounced check and so told him to go slow. He’d been throttled since he left Boise.”
“It’s less than two hours from Crystal Springs to Vegas. Who’d want to park in the middle of nowhere? He could have gone on to Vegas.”
“You didn’t want to stay in Vegas,” Craig says.
Michael doesn’t say anything.
“Besides,” says Craig. “He was headed to Phoenix, not Las Vegas.” He twiddles with the radio dial. “Still, I see what you mean. This is a terrible place. Vegas is much better.”
“God requires sacrifice,” comes the voice from the radio. “Romans 12:1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is true worship.” That is what God wants, children. He wants us. Our living bodies. It is that we must sacrifice to the Ever-living God.”
Chapter Six
Ely Stereo Exchange could only survive with the internet where location didn’t matter. God knows there weren’t enough customers in the little dust-blown whistle-stop town to justify any level of specialty technology like they offered. The concern was kept alive by cheap shipping on trucks passing though on their way to other places.
“Can we talk to you for a minute?” says Michael seeing the answer in the man’s eyes.
“About the truck? Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Old news. We’re busy. Get out of here.”
“What time did—”
“I said get outta here.” The foreman rises from his desk and flexes his chest in some primitive display of manhood and aggression that is comical in the surroundings. “We’ve told this story a hundred times already. You’re wasting my time.”
“What if we bought you lunch?” says Craig. “We could talk over a pizza.”
The foreman shifts his eyes behind Michael. “For the whole crew?”
“Sure,” says Craig, winking at Michael.
Michael lets Craig pay for the food—eight large pizzas and drinks, one for every man on the shift, with wings and breadsticks—as a way to educate his young apprentice. The lesson is wasted however, when he produces a Becker Investigation credit card, the kind of thing Michael has been asking Roy about for years and has never got. He has to submit expense reports which often go missing or are outright refused.
“It was a pissing contest,” the foreman says though a mouthful of buffalo wings. “First the transport company says they’re not coming and then they get here and we tell the driver to wait, the shipment’s not ready.”
“Ross Shipping says that your boss bounced a check,” Craig says.
“It was a check,” he explains. “It’s not supposed to be cashed the instant you get it. The funds were a couple of hours behind and Ross got its panties all balled up and benched the driver. You know what kind of a pickle that put us in?”
“Not much, if when he gets here you can send him off for a couple of days,” says Michael.
“Well, he finally shows up on Sunday. Sunday night. Ain’t nobody here then. We’re a God-fearing community. We don’t work on the Sabbath. He had to just cool his heels.”
The foreman isn’t trying to hide anything, he is just sick of retelling the same story. Like Mr. Abi, in the three weeks since Isaac Lowe went missing he’s talked to countless police, company officials, insurance agents and finally greedy bounty hunters like he and Craig. His patience is exhausted. Michael feels like a beggar looking for grain on a picked-over field.
For the first ten minutes of their thirty-minute timed interview, the foremen recount the legion of others who’d gone before them looking for the missing truck. “Damn,” he says. “If I ever go missing, I hope to God I have a million-dollar laser so people will actually come looking for me.”
Craig works from a form, asking the foreman’s name and occupation, address and phone number. While he fills in the blanks, Michael chews on the foreman’s words. He’s right. They were not looking for the missing man, but the missing treasure. The laser is what the insurance company is after. They are out seven figures for a thing. The man who’d gone missing with it isn’t even mentioned on the bounty. Ross Shipping wants their truck back, and Ely Stereo Exchange would like to know what happened to their amps, but as for Isaac Lowe, his welfare doesn’t come up beyond a mention that his family hasn’t seen or heard from him in weeks and are worried about him. Wait. No, there had been something about a reward for his whereabouts. Five-hundred dollars for the life of a man offered by his family in Texas. The same amount he saw bestowed on a lucky MGM casino visitor by a screaming slot machine.
“So what happened Monday?” asks Craig, aiming his ballpoint at the bottom of the form.
“He shows up and says he’s here to pick up the amps, but we tell him they ain’t ready yet. The amps he was supposed to take down south, we already moved. We’d have another batch ready straight away, but not yet. See?”
“Did his company know this?” asks Craig acting like a TV detective.
“He phoned and told them. What could he do? It was their fault.”
“How
did he seem to you?” asks Michael. ”Isaac Lowe, the driver. How did he seem?”
Michael watches one of the workers slide to a far corner of the warehouse. There are lockers there, hanging coats. There’s something about him that draws Michael’s attention. His posture perhaps. A feeling.
“You mean was he put out with having to wait on us?”
“Sure.”
The man in the corner glances furtively and bends to tie a tied shoe.
“Nah, he’s a working stiff like us,” says the foreman. “I’m sure he got paid either way. He was fine with it. He left us a cell number and took off. No problem. Probably went to a movie or got drunk or something. Easy money when the boss is paying for it.”
“Was he nervous? Ask what everything was worth?”
With everyone concentrating on the pizza and the little interview, Michael watches the man slip a hand into the pocket of a hanging jacket and remove a brown wallet.
“You think he jacked his own load?” asks the foreman.
“It’s one theory,” says Michael.
“He seemed fine. On Wednesday too, he seemed fine. Didn’t ask any questions he shouldn’t have. Didn’t seem nervous. Normal.”
“Normal? You knew him from before?” says Craig as if he’s discovered a flaw in his story.
“No, but he seemed alright.” He tears a breadstick in his teeth. “You guys are pulling at straws, trying to drag me in it.”
The man in the corner hunches a moment, his back to Michael, his attention on his hands. A moment later, another pass and the wallet—short a few bills no doubt—is returned to the coat.
“Did you see the medical laser in the truck?” asks Michael glancing to see if anyone else has noticed the thief among them.
“Yeah, it was in there. Of course we didn’t know what it was, but one fellow described the crate, and that is what was in there.”
“Can you describe the crate you saw?” asks Craig. His cadence makes Michael smirk.
“Big box. Spring board on the bottom. Marked Handle with Care. It was in the trailer.”
“Cinched down?” Craig asks.
“Sure.”
“Did it appear to have been opened?”
“Come on, Buddy, get real. We piled amps in front of it. We were working, not sight-seeing.”
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