by Giles Blunt
“I don’t like it,” Max said again. “If it was you, O base Hungarian, I wouldn’t give it another thought. I would assume you were playing a high-stakes game of trivia somewhere. But Pookie? Something’s wrong.”
“You want me to go check on him?” Roscoe said.
“No, no. You get on the road to Tucson. We’ll roust the errant Pookie and meet up with you there.”
Roscoe left soon after. He was travelling separately from Pookie anyway-a security precaution Max insisted on.
Owen drove them a couple of blocks up the Strip to the Disney-style castle complete with multicoloured turrets that was the Excalibur. The castle itself was tiny compared to the vast fortifications of the hotel that surrounded it, an establishment of some four thousand rooms.
“You go in first,” Max said, “and I’ll watch your back.”
“What are you being so paranoid for?”
“Pookie is behaving out of character. When a man behaves out of character, it’s a portent. We go in separately and we come out separately. I’ll meet you on the fourth floor in five minutes.”
Five minutes later they were outside room 4418, and they were in luck because the door was propped wide open by a housekeeping cart.
“I don’t like it.”
“Max, stop saying that.” Owen rapped on the door. “Pookie?”
They stepped inside, surprising an old Chinese woman in black and white housekeeping livery, who came bustling out of the bathroom. “He not here,” she said. “Nobody here. I clean.”
“Did you already make the bed?” Max asked.
“Why make bed? Nobody sleep in it. See? Chocolate still on pillow.”
“This is bad,” Max said, his bardic turn of phrase deserting him for once.
“Please,” the maid said. “Not your room, you must leave.” She made flicking gestures at them with a damp rag, and they backed out into the hall.
“We should check his car,” Owen said.
That was easier said than done in the vast parking garage. They marched round and round the dim concrete bunker looking for Pookie’s vehicle, muttering to each other over false positives and near misses.
“At least we know it’s a Taurus,” Owen said.
“Exactly. And why do we always rent Tauruses? Because they’re the commonest car on the road. Hard to notice, hard to pick out.”
“Yeah, but we know it’s got California plates and an Enterprise label.”
After another half-hour’s plodding, they found it parked in the shadow of an elevator shaft. Close inspection revealed the doors to be unlocked.
“Pookie would never leave it like that,” Owen said.
He opened the driver’s door and peered inside. There was nothing else that looked out of place. The radio was intact, CDs were splayed on the passenger seat, the Luigi’s parking stub was still on the dash. No blood or signs of struggle.
“Car looks fine,” Owen said, closing the door.
“That doesn’t.” Max pointed to the concrete floor. With the toe of his shoe he nudged the remains of a broken hypodermic.
TEN
All the way south on 93, sunlight streamed into the Rocket so that they had to have the air conditioning up full. The dashboard showed an exterior reading of ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit; inside, it was a comfortable seventy-two.
Sabrina sat quietly in the seat behind Owen, staring out at the passing desert. Owen couldn’t stop thinking about Pookie. One reason Max used him over and over again was that he was completely reliable. If Pookie said he was going to be somewhere at a certain time, he would be there, simple as that. The crushed hypodermic may have been totally unrelated to his disappearance, but it didn’t bode well. Owen hated to think that he might be hurt somewhere. One of the drawbacks of the criminal life is that it makes it difficult to call the cops even when you need to.
Max had found an AM station that played music from the forties and fifties-Owen had never heard so many clarinets in his life-but then the announcer recounted every last detail of the Vegas Stars game and Max switched it off.
“Tell me, O Lady of the Back Seat,” he said. “What path in life do you plan to tread?”
Sabrina sat forward a little. “I can’t really afford any plans. Twenty years old and no sense of direction-pretty pathetic, huh? My fantasy is to buy a hot little Mustang and zoom around wherever I want. As for reality, school’s out of the question-for now, anyway-prison hasn’t done a lot for the family finances. What about you, Owen?”
“I’m starting at Juilliard this fall,” Owen said with a nervous glance at Max.
“Sheer folly,” Max said.
“I want to try acting.”
Sabrina smiled. “Oh, yeah? Get famous?”
Owen shrugged. “I’ve been in the drama club every year since grade school. I think I might like it.”
Max muttered something unintelligible and leaned on the horn for no reason. The sun was high now. The cactus and the tumbleweed cast no shadows, and there was nothing moving except their vast, chugging Rocket.
After many reddish mountains and ochre plains, they slowed in a convergence of holiday traffic heading through Boulder City.
“Looks like the suburb to end all suburbs,” Sabrina said.
“It was built by the government to house the people who worked on the dam,” Owen said.
As the name implied, the mountains here were like heaps of boulders, as if some super alien race had touched down on earth and left behind colossal cairns. They passed through a rocky no man’s land in a stately procession of vehicles. Then an octagonal visitors centre sprouted out of the rocks, encased in towers and wires that clung to the mountain at all angles. A weird profusion of generators and transformers followed, surrounded by metal fences and bales of razor wire. The sky was brilliant blue, but everything else, whether natural or man-made, was grey.
They rounded a bend and a vista opened up around them. On one side, Lake Mead, on the other, nothing as far as the eye could see.
“Where’s this bloody dam?” Max said.
“We’re on it,” Owen said. “We’re driving across it right this minute.”
“I don’t believe this,” Sabrina said. “We’re in the middle of the desert and there are people water-skiing.”
It was true. The lake was dotted with sailboats, motorboats and Sea-Doos. Parasails flew across the sun, sending thin shadows skimming over the water.
“Do you want to stop?” Owen said.
“Bloody tourist trap,” Max said. “I’m against it.”
“Me too,” Sabrina said. “Too much traffic.”
Several miles later, they pulled into a service centre that was itself the size of a small city-a collection of fast-food joints, video arcades, gift stores, newsagents, the entire thing overrun by obese adults with too many children. Owen and Sabrina got out to stretch their legs, while Max manoeuvred the Rocket through the gas pumps. The sun was hot, but not unpleasant; neither of them was sweating.
“Max is crazy about the Pontiff,” Owen said. “I mean your dad. He’s always saying what a great guy he is.”
“Sure. Meaning he was a laugh to be around. Generous. Funny. Full of ideas. He was all that …” She frowned a little, staring at the ground as they walked under a row of trees at the edge of the parking lot. “He was good to me, too, took me places, taught me stuff. He built me the most beautiful doll house you ever saw-all the little lights went on in every room. He was great-usually-when he was home.
“But he was hardly ever home. And depending how his work was going, we’d be in a great house with a swimming pool for three months, and then we’d get booted out and have to live in a tiny apartment. That happened so many times I lost track.”
Owen was about to say something sympathetic, but he didn’t want to interrupt. It seemed, once she got started on the subject of her father, Sabrina couldn’t stop.
“It was so hard on my mother. She totally loved the guy. She wanted him home. She wanted him around, y
ou know? But no. He always had some big plan for another score and he’d be gone for weeks at a time. She never knew when he was coming back, and when he did come back, half the time it meant we had to move again.
“Sometimes he asked us to be his alibi. I hated doing that. And I hated him being gone. When he came back, I would find ways to misbehave-I realize now it was because I was so angry with him-and he would lose his temper and the house would turn into this deep freeze.
“And of course he wasn’t just away on jobs. He got caught a bunch of times, you know-so he wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind, no matter what Max thinks. I can’t tell you how many times I was woken up in the middle of the night by cops kicking the door in and tearing the place apart. And you know what? It doesn’t feel great when you’re eight or ten or twelve years old to see your father hauled away in handcuffs. We begged him to stop, but he couldn’t leave it alone. Always had to pull one last score. Which would be one thing if he was the only one to pay the price, but, you know, others happen to be involved.”
Owen found himself getting angry at the Pontiff on Sabrina’s behalf. “Sounds like it was pretty hard on you,” he said.
“It was harder on my mother. When he got sentenced to ten years this last time, she just fell apart. She lost all interest in her job-she was a teacher for special-needs kids-and stayed home all the time watching TV. Stopped looking after herself, stopped cleaning the house. Then one day Dad’s lawyer called to let her know they’d tacked another two years onto his sentence for some scam he’d been running from prison. That was it. A week later she took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up.”
They were sitting on a picnic table out of the sun, watching Max, who was now attacking the Rocket’s tires with an air hose that was too short.
Owen touched Sabrina’s shoulder, feeling the heat of her skin through the fabric of her top. “I’m sorry you went through that,” he said. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen. Luckily, my best friend’s family really liked me. They took me in, and I finished high school living with them. That was pure luck, though. If it hadn’t have been for them, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I could have gone to live with my aunt in Dallas-but I didn’t want to leave all my friends.”
Max was approaching now, all belly and sunglasses and a jaunty hat with chinstraps that he’d picked up in the Australian outback decades ago. He was rarely able to resist the call of candy stores, and his pockets bulged with chocolate bars and licorice.
“Gas prices,” he said, “are going to put me out of business. I ask you, how’s an honest man supposed to make a living?”
“You managed to find the candy store, I see,” Owen said.
“Take two,” Max said, proffering Kit Kats. “I’m nothing if not a good provider.”
Clem piloted the Prius through the gate with tremendous care, as if he were docking a spacecraft. The Vegas lights blinked and swirled off to the south, but it was quiet out here. Not surprising, since the area had been condemned several years back, owing to its being the former site of a chemical plant. There were danger signs posted all over. Clem waited while Stu closed the chain-link gate.
Stu climbed in and said, “Car’s so quiet I thought you were switched off.”
“Gotta love hybrids,” Clem said. “Did you know blind people have actually asked Toyota to make them noisier so they don’t have to worry about getting run over with no warning?”
“Yeah, I read something about that.”
Clem killed the lights and they glided forward.
“Hear that?” Clem said. “Thing’s a stealthmobile. Plus you’re doing good for the environment.”
The terrain turned jagged and they bounced for a while over broken tarmac and potholes, bits of metal and broken glass. Acres of wasteland, lit by two high lights hundreds of yards apart. They stopped in the darkest area, halfway between them.
“Grab a shovel,” Clem said.
For the next forty-five minutes they assaulted the mixture of clay and sandy soil that lay beneath the rubble.
“Easy work, he says. Good money, he says. You can’t lose,” Stu said, his voice heaving with the rhythm of his shovel.
“You’re not complaining, are you?” Clem said. “I can’t stand whiners.”
“This the sort of job you get a lot?”
“Not that often. Once in a while.”
“Well, listen, Clem. I didn’t sign on for killing anybody. I’m not interested in a murder rap, thank you very much.”
“The people we deal with, I guarantee you, are not fine upstanding citizens.”
“I don’t care what they are. I’m just saying.”
Clem jammed his shovel into the ground and looked at him. “I’m doing you a favour bringing you along on this, cupcake. Zig don’t exactly trust you yet, but I do. I wanna be able to tell him you’re solid.”
Stu kept shovelling. “Fine, man. I’m not complaining.”
“This is deep enough.”
They opened the trunk of the Prius.
“Garbage bags,” Stu said. “Man, that’s rough.”
“What, you wanna purchase a nice casket on a layaway plan? You never even met the guy.”
“So, what’d you do to him?” Stu said, taking the feet.
“Nothing. Guy threw a heart attack.”
“Uh-huh. Good one, Clem.”
“Swear to God. Guy suddenly looks like he’s got gas pains, and boom. Dead.”
They waddled toward the hole, their glossy green burden swinging between them. On Clem’s count they slung it in. They stood at the edge, hands on hips, staring down. Stu looked like he was about to say something when a cellphone went off, its ring a digital copy of an old telephone’s.
“You gonna get that?” Stu said, pointing into the pit.
“Shit,” Clem said. “We can’t leave that on him. Someone might hear it.”
“How they going to hear it through four feet of dirt? Not that anyone’s gonna come out to this fucking dioxin fiesta in the first place. Whole place reeks of acetone or some damn thing.”
“We’re not leaving it on him, Stu. Go get it.”
Stu climbed into the pit, carefully straddling the body. He cut open the garbage bags with a pocket knife and rooted around until he found the phone. He handed it up to Clem and climbed out. Clem put it in his pocket and reached for his shovel.
“Don’t seem right to just dump him like this,” Stu said. “You think maybe we should say a few words?”
Clem made the sign of the cross and cleared his throat. “Here lies a dead guy,” he said. He looked over at Stu, then back to the green package below them. “End of story.”
ELEVEN
Sabrina sat in front while Owen drove and Max took his siesta in the back bedroom. It was unlawful to be out of the seats while the vehicle was travelling down a highway at sixty miles an hour, but it was useless to try and talk Max out of it. The afternoon nap, according to Max, was just one of many things he and the great Winston Churchill had in common.
The desert rolled by on either side. They passed the turn-off to Laughlin, and the huge letter C that marked the town of Chloride. They sailed by Kingman, and then it was miles and miles of cactus.
“They look fake,” Sabrina said. “They look just like the plastic ones, except they’re all different sizes.”
The temperature gauge said it was 104 Fahrenheit outside; the air conditioner was working overtime. Owen became acutely aware of the scent Sabrina was wearing, something incomparably fresh and clean that increased his desire to bury his face in her graceful neck.
“Those are the Hualapai Mountains,” he said, just for something to say.
“So that’s what the Hualapai Mountains look like.”
“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you.”
“Why, yes, Owen. I am.”
He tried to find a music station that wasn’t playing country, and finally gave up. Sabrina pulled out an iPod with an FM attachment, so for
the next stretch they listened to Dido.
“I like her,” Sabrina said. “She’s a bitch, but vulnerable-like me, I guess.”
“Don’t say that.” Owen pulled out to pass a spavined Buick that was belching black smoke. “You may be vulnerable, but-”
“Tell me something, Owen.” She turned her whole body round to face him. “What’s a grown boy like you doing travelling around the desert for the summer with his uncle?”
Owen smiled and pulled back into the slow lane. “Pretty weird, huh?”
“Tell me, though. Isn’t he too old to be your uncle?”
“He’s my great-uncle. But really he’s more like my stepdad.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“It’s kind of like what you went through, only I was younger. I was ten.” Owen told her the story of the car crash, and his brush with foster care.
“God,” Sabrina said. “I don’t think I would have recovered from something like that.”
“It turned out Max was the only relative I had. When he heard about my situation, he applied for guardianship and I’ve been with him ever since.”
“Pretty eccentric guy.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”
“Well, if he loves my dad, he’s got to be a crook. Made you part of the life, right?”
Owen looked at her, her green eyes bright, daring him to admit it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You’re forgetting how I grew up.” She touched his knee, warm palm through denim, quickly gone. “It’s okay. You don’t have to pretend around me. You do these, uh, road trips every year?”
“This is the last one. I mean, I like to see the country and all-it’s been a real education-but I’d like to spend at least one summer just hanging out.”
“Listen, don’t you have a girlfriend back in New York? She must hate it when you take off like this.”
“No girlfriend. Not at the moment. What about you? You said Bill was not a boyfriend.”