by Johnny Shaw
Bobby and I took my truck because—despite Bobby’s disappointment—it had no truck gun. I drove. Bobby studied a map and marked off the streets with a lavender crayon he found between the seats. We went up and down the north/south streets of La Quinta, back and forth, like tilling a field. It was all Calles and Avenidas with identical stucco and terra cotta tile houses. We kept our eyes open for a camouflage Hummer.
The first hour was boring, but we had enthusiasm on our side. The second hour was worse. Our dipping buzz and the lack of variety in the residential neighborhoods combined to test our stamina. We were losing faith in the stratagem. But the thought of being back in the soul-suck of a hotel room kept us going.
Before we switched to the east/west streets, we made a run through the looping lanes of the Palisades Golf Resort. There were at least a dozen golf courses in La Quinta. It was that kind of town. The country club houses were larger and tackier, the kind of new money monstrosities that the owner of a camo Hummer would consider classy. At least the nouveau riche, Disney-fake-European castles gave us visual variety.
“Look at these fucking houses,” Bobby said. “That one’s got those castle things.”
“Turrets.”
“I don’t know if that’s awesome or idiotic. I’m going to go with idiotic. Because if it’s something I would build, it’s probably stupid. I don’t even think those rocks in front are real. Are rocks expensive? Why would you use fake rocks? Are they easier to clean? All these houses look like an eight-year-old drew them on the back of his Pee Chee folder. Like Wayne Manor or Barbie’s fucking Dream House. With all the accessories. That one probably has a half-car, half-boat, half-airplane parked in the back.”
“Something can’t have three halves.”
“Exactly. The kind of person that builds that house wouldn’t know that.”
I forgot about the desert wealthy. Not exactly upper class. Different than rich farmers, who still worked. A whole different subspecies in these resort towns that’s all flashy and gross and big. Money can buy fake rocks, but it can’t buy class.
“Turn down this street. Calle Tlaxcala. We haven’t been down it.”
“I’m pretty sure you pronounced that wrong.”
“I’ll do you one better. I’m positive I said it wrong, but how else does tl sound?” Bobby said. “Where’d all the desert bros come from? Look at those douchebags and baguettes.”
As we turned the corner onto Calle Tlaxcala, Bobby pointed to a crowd of people spilling onto the driveway and lawn from a big, boxy structure, part Bauhaus/part World War II bunker. Loud hip-hop and bright lights emanated from the house. It had a big circular driveway with a trampoline inside the horseshoe. The trampoline: the white trash swimming pool. Couples and groups of men huddled outside, smoking, beers in their hands. I would say that someone’s parents went to Aruba for the week, leaving their kid at home to make sure nothing happened to their crystal egg, but most of the men were in their twenties or thirties.
They wore the uniform of the desert bro. Think frat boy who never went to college. Jersey Shore without the water. Farmer’s tans made by the sun instead of a cancer machine. Ed Hardy shirts and backward baseball caps. Oakley sunglasses, even at night. Goatees or shaped three-day growth. Essentially they all looked like middle relief pitchers on vacation. The kind of guys that thought they looked like MMA fighters, but really looked like assholes. Ending their night by picking a fight because none of the women got drunk enough to believe their bullshit or the roofies they bought were actually Pepcid. Whenever one of them laughed, it sounded cruel.
The desert bro was not defined by race. There were as many brown people at the party as white. Definitely not a race thing. It’s a desert thing.
I know that I sound judgmental and mean and that I’m generalizing. But I grew up here and know the desert. Believe whatever you want, but when you come out to the desert and one of these date rapes starts yelling “faggot” in the strip joint parking lot and kidney punches you as you try to walk away, you’ll remember what I said. I will, of course, graciously accept your apology.
The ladies were the female equivalent of the men, dressed to match. A lot of skin. A little wobbly on stripper heels. Navel piercings, tramp stamps, hair spray, and a few chola eyebrows. Dee Snider makeup over George Hamilton tans. And if you looked closely at their legs and arms, they always seemed to have bruises. Many of them might have been attractive under all that pancake, but it would take some serious excavating to find out.
We cruised by the partygoers. A smog of cologne, perfume, and body spray assaulted us through the open window. My eyes watered from the musky, desperate fumes.
“Holy shit,” Bobby said, waving his hand in front of his face. “How bad do those fuckers smell, they got to make themselves stink like that? It’s like getting pepper sprayed with eau de whorehouse.”
“Dead end. Story of our night.”
Calle Tlaxcala was two blocks long and ended in a cul-de-sac. Tlaxcala is the smallest state in Mexico, so it figures that the smallest street in La Quinta would be named after it. Sadly, my knowledge of Mexican geography gave me no added sense of triumph. Triumph came as I made the three-point turn and the headlights revealed camouflage.
“Well, I’ll be hornswoggled,” Bobby said.
We took a long look at the Hummer, the headlights blowing out the tans and browns. I’d been thinking green camouflage, but desert camo made more sense. There was no street parking, so I pulled my truck into the driveway of a house with a FOR SALE sign out front.
“What now?” I said. “You think the Hummer’s owner is at the party? Or maybe that’s his party? He could live on this street in one of the other houses. Do we wait for him to come out? Hang here?”
“Slow down, Mister Questions,” Bobby said. “From the looks of that crowd, those assholes are the kind of assholes to drive this asshole of a car.”
“Fair point. But how do we figure out which asshole among the gaggle?”
“I’m going to shake the car, make the alarm go off. Whoever turns it off, that’s our asshole.”
A simple, yet effective plan. Usually our plans were much more violent and caveman-esque in their execution. The fact that Bobby’s plan didn’t involve “fucking some motherfucker up” was a pleasant surprise. Though of course that part should always be implied in any of Bobby’s plans.
Bobby hopped out, looking both ways in an overexaggerated manner. He couldn’t have looked more conspicuously suspicious if he was twiddling his thumbs and whistling. I should have been watching him through eyeholes cut out of a newspaper. He pushed against the front fender. The body of the truck rocked back and forth. No alarm.
Bobby gave me a look. I shrugged and got out. The two of us violently shook the Hummer. Nothing.
“What the hell?” Bobby said. “What kind of asshole drives a monstrosity that most people would key on principle and doesn’t alarm it?”
“You got a Plan B?”
“I wish I had my Plan Bs, I’d just . . .” Bobby drifted off, looking at the front yard of the house. He found a good-sized, real rock and threw it through the driver’s side window of the Hummer. Pebbles of glass rained onto the ground, making surprisingly little sound. Still no alarm.
“Yeah, I guess we could do that,” I said, looking toward the party to see if anyone saw or heard. I could feel the music from the house thumping in my chest, so I doubted it.
Bobby popped the lock and jumped in the driver’s seat. I stayed on lookout duty, meaning that I stood where I was and did nothing. It was my first day as a lookout. You couldn’t expect much.
“Remember this name,” Bobby said. “Craig Driskell. That’s the name on the registration.”
“Craig Driskell. Got it.”
“Nothing else in the glove box. Some pens. Papers. Under the seats? Whoa-ho!”
Shirking my lookout duties, I glanced into the Hummer. Bobby held up a snubnose pistol.
“Craig ain’t playing,” Bobby said.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
“You’re going to steal a gun?”
“You say that like I’m a criminal. This fuck might have something to do with Julie’s gone missing. He doesn’t get to have a gun. Anyways, it’d be irresponsible to leave a handgun in a car with a busted window. You don’t want a kindergartner to accidentally get his little hands on it, do you?”
“I don’t think a kindergartner is going to look under the seat of a Hummer at two in the morning.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“What kind of person feels the need to keep a gun in his car?”
“Driving this jerkoff-mobile is like picking a fight with civilization.” Bobby smiled, and then looked at me. “Oh, I see what you did. I’m that kind of person is what you’re saying. Very hilarious.”
Bobby turned on the Hummer’s headlights and hopped out. He put the pistol in his pants at the small of his back, covered it with his shirt, and walked toward the party. “Come on. We have to find the driver of this car. His lights are on. As good citizens, we can’t let his battery die, can we?”
“The window’s broke. Couldn’t we reach in and turn the lights off? And I don’t think anybody’d notice if we just crashed the party.”
Bobby shook his head, mumbled to himself, and walked away.
Bobby and I walked through the gauntlet in the driveway and let ourselves in the front door. We entered the giant living room, the far wall made entirely of windows looking out onto the swimming pool and the darkness of the golf course beyond it.
I would be the first to admit that I knew nothing about interior decoration. I was a mattress on the floor, milk cartons and one-by-sixes bookshelf kind of guy. But even in my ignorance, I knew that living room was a marvel of bad decisions and unfortunate combinations. A display that I could only describe as Powerball chic. The product of someone that all of sudden had money and then spent that money in one Jaeger-soaked Internet shopping binge.
In the center of the room sat a matching fuchsia cheetah-print sofa, love seat, and lounge chair. The coffee table looked like an antique, beautiful and complex woodwork adorning the edges. In a different house, it would have been the room’s centerpiece. Currently it was covered in beer bottles and chipped at the edges. Those were the functional elements.
The rest was an insane mishmash. A life-size sculpture of a nude woman that might have been Venus—if Venus had gotten a tit job and ass implants based on a Boris Vallejo painting of Ice-T’s wife. Something that looked like a hamster maze, but I’m pretty sure was an elaborate stand-up bong. An old school, coin-op Robotron: 2084 arcade game. A narwhal horn. An oil-on-leather painting of an Indian chief and a grizzly bear standing on a mesa looking at a distant sunrise. That “art” hung over a giant flat-screen playing a montage of gonzo porn, Russian dashcams, and street fights. There was an aquarium that only had jellyfish in it. And a Raiders flag was unevenly tacked to the wall.
Thirty more Tapout T-shirts and halter tops hovered throughout the room. Everyone was dressed so similarly, it felt like some kind of ironic costume party. Imagine a room full of off-the-clock general contractors and the girls that check your ID at the gym. The fug of aftershave and perfume was thicker indoors.
“You got any quarters?” I asked.
“You’re not playing Robotron. We’re investigating,” Bobby said. “Quit making me the voice of reason. It feels all wrong.”
“I was kidding.” I wasn’t.
Bobby tapped the shoulder of the guy nearest him.
The guy turned and gave Bobby a double take. “That your real hair? You look like Halle Berry in X-Men. Or Mex-men, I guess.”
From the look on Bobby’s face, he was doing everything in his power to not turn this guy’s face inside out with his fists. “I’m looking for Craig. You know him?”
“I’m at his house, ain’t I?”
“He around?”
The guy sized up Bobby and decided that he wasn’t worth bothering with anymore. “Somewhere in the back.”
Bobby and I squeezed through the makeshift dance floor that had formed in what was probably designed to be the dining room. The music’s epicenter, it thumped through unseen speakers. The men fist-pumped and air-fucked by themselves while the ladies danced with each other, ignoring the attempts of the men to join their circle. When one of the bros flung his head as we passed, his heavily chemicalled hair juice landed on my arm and stung like acid.
In the kitchen, an inch of liquid pooled on the floor. Bottles and Solo cups and limes and ice covered the counter. A cat with “Pussy” drawn on its side in lipstick drank water out of the clogged sink. Bobby opened the fridge, grabbed four beers, and handed me two. We each cracked one and tapped the necks in a silent toast.
“Nice restraint not killing the Mex-men dude back there,” I said.
“The things we do for our kids.”
The back room—probably referred to as the rumpus room—was bigger than the living room. It had the same giant windows looking onto the golf course. I wondered how many times an errant golf ball slammed into one of the big panes.
Bobby stopped at the top of the three steps that led into the sunken room. “What the fuck is he doing here?” Bobby said.
“Who?”
I followed Bobby’s eyes through the sparser crowd.
“That can’t be good,” I said when I saw Tomás Morales.
I had known Tomás most of my life. He was Mr. Morales’s grandson and grew up across the street from me. A few years younger than me, but with no other neighbor kids to play with, we spent much of our youth together. He wasn’t that kid anymore. He operated a number of criminal enterprises in Mexicali that I knew about. His presence on this side of the border was not only rare but disconcerting. The rumors about his efforts to expand and get a foothold on the US side must have been true. The question was how Driskell fit into all of it.
The bottom line was that if it was profitable, Tomás was interested. He wielded his pragmatism like a weapon, never letting a nuisance like morality get in his way.
I had once asked him what business he was in. His reply had been, “Business, period. Don’t matter to me what it is. Like a good salesman can sell anything, I’m interested in profit. Right now, one of the best businesses is the business of knowing things, knowing more than other people. Information is a simple thing, but once you own a fact, it’s a matter of how and when you use it. Someone said knowledge is power. And so much more.”
So basically, he didn’t answer my question.
While personally, Tomás had always been a loyal friend—he had helped me whenever I needed it, including the business that resulted in me securing my son—he scared the holy living shit out of me. He was brutal, amoral, and worthy of fear. There was no way that his presence in that house represented a good thing.
Tomás sat on an oversized purple couch, deep in conversation. Across from him on a matching couch sat the king of Doucheville, a guy sporting a crown of spiky hair with frosted tips and a velvet bathrobe. From the amount of leg and chest hair showing, I would’ve put money on him going commando underneath. He snorted a line of coke off a small mirror and passed it to one of the two underfed, bikini-clad desert princesses bookending him.
Tomás had his two favorite henchmen, Big Piwi and Little Piwi, henching behind him. The gigantic Mexicans were both over six four and three hundred pounds. Their presence carried weight, literally. Behind Bathrobe two steroid freaks tried to give the Piwis their best death stares. Big Piwi yawned, making Little Piwi yawn. I don’t know what they were talking about, but if Tomás was there, they weren’t trading carrot cake recipes.
Mid-sentence, Tomás’s eyes found us where we’d frozen on the top step. He tilted his head slightly, not giving anything away or losing a beat in the conversation.
“My stomach just got tight,” Bobby said. “If that’s Driskell, the motherfucker that Julie worked for, and
Tomás knows him, that’s sixteen flavors of bad. Tomás don’t waste no time talking to no one but bad guys or people he owns.”
Bobby took a step down into the room, his eyes on Tomás. I put a hand on his shoulder when I saw the Piwis spot him. They lifted their chins in acknowledgment or possibly threat. Bobby shrugged my hand away, but stopped.
“There ain’t no reason for this to get out of hand,” I said. “If that’s Driskell, we know where he lives. It don’t look like he’s running anywhere. Not without pants. And Tomás won’t leave without talking to us. He hates not knowing what’s going on. Let’s finish these beers and wait. Better to know what the deal is, instead of jumping in blind.”
“You might be scared of Tomás, but I ain’t.”
“I know, Bobby. You have no fear. Fear is afraid of you. You wouldn’t be scared of the ground if you jumped from a plane and your parachute didn’t open. ‘Fuck you, ground,’ that’s what you’d say.”
“Fuck the ground is right. I’d roll with it. People survive that shit all the time. I’m tired of your pussyfooting, with emphasis on the pussy. It’s my daughter. It’s my plan of attack, with emphasis on the attack.”
“You go over there, get in his face, he won’t tell us shit. If you’re going to talk to him, be nice. We get one chance at him, and there’s a lot at stake. We got to do what works, not what you want to do. On top of that, there’s about a thousand pounds of hench over there.”
“Yeah, but this ain’t your show. This isn’t about you. Not everything is about what you want.”
“You’re right. It’s not about me. It’s about Julie.”
Bobby stared at me, his thinking face in full concentration mode. “You’re as shitty a wartime consigliere as you are a sidekick. It’s clobberin’ time.”
Bobby hopped down the steps and stomped over to the small group. And to think, I could have been playing Robotron.