At the top end of the mess were the deep markings of something being dragged away. Mickey focused for the first time in several minutes on the sound of the birds beyond the bushes and dreaded more than ever what he would find there. Just then he heard a noise and looked up to see Paul Kramer, chest deep in the gully, calling out as if he’d found the holy grail.
“Chief! … Chief!” He waved his arms above his head like he was calling in the Enola Gay for a landing.
Mickey stood up and saw Paul raise a mid-size hiking backpack up so he could see it. Then he called out, “It looks brand new, Chief! Like it’s only a week or two old.”
Mickey motioned with his arm for Paul to keep walking and come around from the back. “Keep on going and loop around. Meet me back behind here,” he called out, feeling a certain resolve come over him. Now was the time to see what there was to see. Mickey studied the dirt once more, as though it might offer up an explanation for man’s cruelty. But there was only silence punctuated by an occasional screech and the sound of flapping wings.
Mickey pushed through a thin wall of brush, following the drag marks, and stood solemnly. It was like piercing a veil into another world. The smell was overwhelming and thirty feet beyond the Joshua tree lay what remained of a man after a violent death and two days alone with the desert beasts. A hideous black bird perched on the dead man’s head, flapping its wings for balance and picking at a gaping hole in the abdomen. It paused briefly to stare at Mickey, and then resumed its feast, unconcerned with what it saw.
Mickey could see from where he stood that a leg was missing, as was the opposite arm. Entrails were strewn about, spiraling dusty cords and gobs of flesh spread like Pollock’s twisting blobs of splattered paint. Was this what the artist had in mind? Mickey took his eyes away, looking up. The birds circled so slowly that Mickey imagined they would plummet through the hot void, into the earth, like brimstone made of flesh.
Then a screaming cut the air and Mickey looked to see Paul running, horrified and angry and afraid all at once. The bird hardly saw him and had barely taken to the air when Paul hurdled the body, swiping the backpack in a high arc and catching the bottom of the buzzard. There was a dull slamming sound as the bird spun twice in the air and hit the ground in a flurry of beating wings. Screeching and flopping.
Paul had flung the backpack and was over the massive bird, coming down with a knee along its back. The buzzard split open at the stomach with a moist, muffled pop. Mickey heard the bird burst and he watched Paul stand up quickly and back away, his momentary rage quickly giving way to repugnance. The bird wobbled upright and staggered backward in circles around its own spilling guts, picking at them even as it backed away from them, two basic urges competing with each other. Then it fell sideways, dying even as it tried to eat itself, unaware or unconcerned that the entrails were its own.
Mickey walked toward Paul and the body, talking quickly, trying to distract him. “Well, let’s see what we can see and get the hell out of here.” Mickey didn’t even acknowledge the bird, or its dying noises in the background, and Paul’s eyes seemed to appreciate it. He shifted his attention to the matter at hand, nodding strangely, as if to thank the sheriff somehow for not mentioning his own disturbing actions.
Paul crouched over the body, feeling woozy from the smell, and swatted at the swarming bugs. Much of the surface flesh on the head had been torn or eaten off and, though difficult to look at, it made his job much easier. Within seconds he had located several massive fractures in the skull. He could do closer work back in town, under appropriate conditions, but the cause of death was obvious.
“This guy was beat to death with something heavy and hard.” Paul looked back over his shoulder and squinted up at Mickey. Behind the sheriff’s head, the black birds swirled against the clear blue sky.
Mickey ran his fingers over his thin, graying hair, and said, “I figured as much. Looks like it happened back on the other side of the brush in the dirt and the coyotes dragged him over here to tear at him.” He looked down at the body and the carrion dotting the landscape and shook his head. Thirty-two years of police work and there still had to be a first time for everything. “Goddamn,” he mumbled, and shook his head again.
“What’s that, Chief?” Paul asked, facing the body again, and thinking about the sound of the bird when its guts popped open.
“Let’s get the bag and get the rest of him out of here.” Mickey turned and walked back toward the road, stepping on the evidence as though it didn’t mean a goddamned thing.
X
The Geiger counter clicked mindlessly, communicating information neither of them understood.
“Is it working?” Tom Crossly turned the long tube over in his hand and then peeked down at the box on the floor. “It says it’s working.” He held one side of the headphones away from his ear and listened. “Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That kind of clicking noise every few seconds.” Tom’s eyes darted back and forth. “There it was again. Every few seconds there’s another one. I guess it’s just in the headphones.”
“Shit, Ted said that’s all it does.” Victor leaned over his desk to look at the box too. “The more it clicks the more radiation you’ve got.”
Tom put the earpiece back over his ear and waved the thick, wand-like tube around in the air over Victor’s desk, and Victor too. “Doesn’t seem to be picking anything up.” Tom looked at Victor and smiled. “I guess you’re safe.”
“Safe from that, anyway.” Victor gave Tom a morose look and then he plopped himself back in his chair. Groaning. Defeated.
“What’s wrong with you?” Tom asked, not really caring about the answer because he already knew. He ran the Geiger counter along the walls, listening in the headphones to the minor variances in the clicking. A silence hung in the room for a few long seconds before Victor said:
“You ever been inside a prison, Tom?”
“What?” Tom turned to look at him. This was a new approach to the existential crisis.
Victor kept talking, “You know, over the years, I put a lot of guys in them.” Victor returned Tom’s stare and raised his eyebrows. “A lot of bad guys. I mean, we put guys away that had absolutely no business being on the street. You’d be amazed what kind of people are running around out there.”
Tom just stood on the opposite side of the room, the Geiger counter clicking away in his ears, wondering why he was being subjected to this conversation again. It seemed that every few weeks he’d be sitting in Victor’s office, going over some kind of routine business, when Victor would start blabbing on about life at the FBI. How meaningful it was. How important the work was. How he slept well at night knowing he was making the country safer. And, of course, how his life had none of that now.
“The thing is,” Victor laughed, “you go into a prison, you’ll see that the cells ain’t any smaller than this office. And they’ve got a bed in them, and you don’t have to do anything but sit around and read all day, or lift weights, play basketball, or whatever.”
Tom rolled his eyes and said, “Yeah, but they don’t have bagels on Fridays and you don’t get to go home every night either.” Tom removed the headphones, leaned the wand carefully against the wall, and bent over to switch the Geiger counter off. Then he took a seat in the chair across from Victor and spoke up again.
“I don’t know why you’re always complaining. This is a good job. There’s a lot of guys would kill to have your job. Why’d you quit the FBI if you loved it so much?” Tom stared at the backs of the framed pictures on Victor’s desk. He already knew the answer to this question too. Victor’s complaint was always the same. His wife and kids—the demands of family life—had ruined his great career. He struck Tom as a guy who’d only started thinking about his own life at the age of forty. As though the wife, the kids, the two cars, and the mortgage had all happened to him in his sleep and he woke up one morning with this strange new existence. Victor acted like he was shocked to learn
that these things would affect his life in any way.
Victor puffed his cheeks and let out a long, silent breath. “Ah shit, Tom, you know how it is.” Here he went again. Tom braced himself as Victor began to ramble.
“My wife was bitching at me the second Daniel slid out the chute. I figured she was just worried because it was our first kid and all. But then she got pregnant again. And then, not long after, some asshole shot me on a stakeout that went to hell. I mean, it wasn’t even that bad, it was just a flesh wound in my shoulder. Hell, the broken arm it gave me was worse than the bullet hole. You can break your arm doing all kinds of shit. I mean, her younger brother broke his elbow skiing one time, my wife used to make jokes about that. But my arm gets broken and you’d think the world was coming to an end.”
“Still though, you were getting shot at.” Tom didn’t think Victor’s wife’s concern was completely unfounded. A bullet’s a bullet. If they’re flying around anywhere near you, that’s a dangerous job, whether they hit you or not.
But what annoyed Tom was that this conversation wasn’t about any of that at all. It was about Victor’s constant need to remind everyone that he’d once been an action hero—if only in his own mind. What made it worse was that it didn’t matter that he’d already reminded you a hundred times. All of which led Tom to suspect that Victor was really trying to remind himself—to convince himself—and that Tom was just an unfortunate bystander.
“Look,” Victor said. “I’m not saying it isn’t a dangerous job. But it ain’t like that kind of stuff happens everyday. I mean, in twenty years, I was only shot at four or five times.” Victor pushed himself back from his desk and folded his arms across his chest. “Most guys can’t hit a damned thing with a pistol anyway. If you’re more than forty feet away, you’re damned near perfectly safe.”
“Still,” Tom interrupted, “I can see where your wife’s coming from.” Why did he even have this conversation? Why didn’t he make up some excuse to leave every time it started? Tom couldn’t say, other than the fact that Victor’s manly-man routine was as fascinating as it was repugnant. Tom could almost see the self-torment on the guy’s face. But his unwillingness to acknowledge it, his need to blame the world in general—as though he’d suffered some karmic injustice—brought Tom a perverse and irresistible pleasure.
Victor went on, thrashing about in his bog of irrational self-pity. “Yeah, but you know what she doesn’t understand is that, after doing that for twenty years, everything else is just so boring. I mean, I sit in this goddamned office all day, filling out forms, drinking coffee.” Victor leaned over his desk and picked up a stack of papers and his coffee cup, grinning as he held them up. Then he laughed a little and set them back down.
Tom smiled. That was the thing about Victor. He had moments where he was funny—even charming and self-deprecating. Which made it especially disappointing when he wallowed in his angst and hubris like he was. If only he weren’t so damned needy, Victor would almost be a decent guy to be around.
“You know,” Victor said, “when I first got here, I thought: ‘Man, this is all I have to do? What a joke! And they pay me for this! This is great!’ But after three years, my God. I mean, the paperwork never stops, it’s endless.”
“They don’t have paperwork at the FBI?”
“Ah!” Victor waved off the comment like it was nothing. But he thought it over. Yeah, they had paperwork alright, shitloads of it, there were forms for everything. But somehow it didn’t seem so bad then.
“Well, shit.” Tom leaned his chair back, keeping his fidgeting hand in his lap. “If you want some excitement, why don’t we trade? I’ll sit here and fill out forms and you can stumble around with the magic wand over there listening for a nuclear blast in the headphones.”
“Hey, that ain’t bad duty. At least you get to be outside all day.”
“Shit, you got any idea how boring that is? Just walking around looking for something that isn’t there. You ever see those old guys at the beach walking around with the metal detectors? That’s what I’ll look like. Only carting that thing around people will think I can’t even afford a good metal detector, and that I don’t know where the beach is.”
Victor studied Tom. With his expensive watch and Italian shoes, it wasn’t surprising that Tom’s main concern was how he would look with the Geiger counter. To Victor’s thinking, Tom was quintessential LA: all style and no substance, as though he’d just been assembled last night on a studio back lot somewhere. The whole damned town was like that. From Long Beach to La Cañada, every last person had an aura of invention about them. Everyone obsessing about what the other guy was thinking about them—whether there were any flaws in the façade.
Victor wondered why the old men at the beach weren’t concerned about how they looked, but then, Victor never went to the beach, so he’d never seen the old men with the metal detectors. Despite the water being just over the hill outside his office, he lived ninety minutes in the other direction. Unlike Tom, who’d lived in southern California his entire life and who’d bought a condo in Manhattan Beach back when they were practically giving them away, Victor lived in a subdivision so far from the ocean he could stand in the backyard and nearly convince himself there was no ocean. Hot winds blew in from the desert and the air pollution sat over their tract home like a horrid brown cloud ready to rain shit on them at any moment.
Victor knew Tom drove fifteen minutes to get home to his three bedroom pad on the beach—probably worth a million or more now—while Victor drove an hour and a half through the worst traffic known to man to his cardboard cutout of a house in a subdivision that stretched to the horizon. It made him mad every time he thought about it. Every afternoon, by the time Tom was sitting on his deck, tanning his nuts in the sunset and staring at the water, Victor was just getting pissed enough to start screaming at the cars on the freeway. Twenty years of serving his country and that’s where it got him.
The injustice of it got to Victor and he said, “Well, I already told Marshall that if anything unusual came up, we’d handle it. So if Ted Ross and the nerd squad come up with anything, you won’t have to worry about the beach. We’ll be on our way to the desert to have some fun.”
Tom Crossly stared over Victor’s shoulder at the brown hill and the galvanized pipe running over it. He’d been to Palm Springs once. The long weekend he’d spent there constituted the entirety of his experience in the desert. As he recalled the manicured lawns, the tennis courts, and the golf courses, he wondered what the small oil towns were like. Then he thought about his Versace boots. Living at the beach, he never got to wear them much. But he bet they’d be perfect for a trip to the desert.
Perfect.
XI
Hank wasn’t sure why he had the Subaru towed to the garage at the other end of town. Maybe if they could fix it quickly he could use it to get his job done and get the hell out of there. The cost was irrelevant. Speed was everything. Hank walked the thousand feet from the motel to the garage. Although he walked almost everywhere in New York, somehow it felt completely unnatural here.
What passed for the town was a short strip of buildings spanning three blocks on either side of the main intersection where the road from the freeway came in from the south. The main drag was wide and gave the appearance of a once grand boulevard gone to seed. There were a few side streets that quickly turned to gravel, and ultimately dirt, and a small grid of residential streets surrounding Main Street, but the edge of town was almost constantly in view. There were no sidewalks, only narrow parking lots butting up against the shoulder of the road, and Hank had the distinct feeling that the town had been thrown together with no planning whatsoever. Everything was old, used, ragged, and random.
Hank had been in a million small towns—places he’d chased people to or tracked them down in over the years. Although most of them had a charm of one sort or another, each time he found himself in one, he felt claustrophobic. But this one beat them all. It seemed to be dying right before h
is eyes and threatening to take him with it. The signs of a long, slow decay were everywhere. He felt like a large animal roaming through a blighted, burned forest where only a few trees remained standing. There wasn’t much left and what there was made him homesick for the crowded anonymity of Manhattan.
At the west end of Main were the new gas station and mini-market and the Super 8 Motel. Next to the motel, heading east into town, was an appliance store that had once sold new refrigerators and washing machines. It had switched to repair work years ago, and was now abandoned—its interior piled high with rusted machines and other junk. Then there was a small hardware store. Across the street from the hardware store was a Chinese restaurant. Next to that was a low strip of commercial space—all of it boarded up except an auto parts store. Near the main intersection was an old, two-story brick building that looked like the city offices. Behind that appeared to be a small city park with a baseball diamond and a large parking lot. Altogether, the town was depressing and Hank couldn’t imagine why anyone would live there.
What was worse, at ten in the morning the sun was already heating the air well above ninety and Hank felt overwhelmed by it. And then there was the dirt. Everything—the streets, the windows, even the air itself—seemed to be coated with a grimy film. Hank imagined huge clouds of dust swirling up and down Main Street every time the wind blew—working its way into every crack and crevice, beneath every door, behind every ear, between every pair of parted lips, and down into every set of lungs in town. What a place. What a dirty little shithole of a place to be.
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