All night, as she cleaned, McGee’s thoughts had been returning to that conversation days before with April: what if there was nothing in this batch of files, either? Then she’d have to move on. There was no shortage of files. The main filing room was down the corridor from the photocopier, a space bigger than her whole apartment, row upon row of cabinets. In Ruth Freeman’s office, with its few drawers, McGee could copy everything. But confronted with an entire room of files, where would she even begin?
As usual, Darius announced his presence that night when her back was turned, as if hoping to catch her by surprise. “Here you are,” he said, leaning in the doorway.
As if she weren’t in the same place as always.
For a change, though, he didn’t seem especially happy to have found her. He looked tired, the jamb doing most of the work of keeping him upright.
She brushed past him, refusing to meet his eye. Out in the corridor, she began on the windows. He seemed distracted, watching without his usual enthusiasm. Next thing she knew, he was slumping down in the corner with a dramatic sigh.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Violet—” He looked up pitifully, giving McGee a meaningful look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand. She moved on to the next set of windows, wishing she could get even farther away. She’d had enough of Violet, the girl Darius liked to pretend was such a nuisance. His latest report, several nights before, was he’d finally told her to quit stopping by in her skimpy clothes. As if that were the problem, not Darius himself.
“I didn’t see her for two days,” he said now, trailing McGee with his eyes. “Two days,” he repeated, pausing, as if to allow time for applause. “I don’t know,” he said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’d started thinking maybe everything would be all right.”
McGee remembered him having said the exact same thing the night he broke it off with her, too, that maybe now his problem was solved. She hadn’t believed it any more then than she did now.
“Yesterday I got home from work,” Darius said, “and I saw something in the stairwell. One of those things you put in your hair, you know what I mean? One of those things.” He made a vague circle with his hands. “It looked like something I’d seen her wear. I thought maybe she’d dropped it. So I brought it upstairs. I wanted to leave it outside her door, but I don’t know,” he said. “I must’ve hit the knob or something.”
Right, McGee thought. Or something.
“She must’ve heard me. She opened the door, and then I had to go in, and …”
He trailed off, but McGee had no trouble filling in the details he’d left out.
It seemed to McGee as if they were hours into his sordid soap opera before Darius finally excused himself to go to the men’s room. In the sudden silence, she thought she could feel her nerves stretching out, returning to a state of calm. Each breath seemed to carry all the way to her toes.
Knowing she had only a minute or two, she moved quickly, hurrying from the lobby to Ruth Freeman’s corridor. Past the old lady’s office she went, past the photocopier room.
She let herself into the main filing room with her key. She flicked on the light.
She’d been here before. She knew what the room contained. But she needed to see it again. She needed to see it now, to measure it, to think about what it would really mean to try to find something here. A couple hundred cabinets, at least. Labeled, but the labels helped only if you knew what you were looking for. Even if she managed five hundred pages a night, it would take her decades to get through it all.
She made it back to her cart just ahead of Darius.
She let him load the heavy bags of trash into the elevator. Once they reached the basement, he picked them up again and carried them out to the loading dock. As he tossed the trash into the Dumpster, McGee stashed her papers underneath.
For a moment afterward, while Darius collected a few Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers from the pavement and tossed them into the bin, she allowed herself to watch him with a smug sort of pleasure. No matter how close he followed, he’d never catch her.
As he came toward her now, she gazed at the files just visible underneath the Dumpster, daring him to look. But was that it? A game of chicken, until hopefully, maybe, she got lucky? Found something useful?
Darius sat down beside her on the loading dock. McGee sucked on her cigarette as if it were made of pure oxygen. But no matter how deep she pulled the smoke into her lungs, calm kept eluding her.
“She came downstairs again.” Darius toed a loose bolt onto the railing at the edge of the dock. “This morning.”
McGee inhaled again, let the smoke linger even longer.
“I told her, ‘I said you shouldn’t come here anymore.’ And you know what she said?” Darius paused, shaking his head. “She said, ‘Yeah, but you came upstairs yesterday.’ ” Darius gave the bolt a solid whack with his heel.
“I said, ‘Yeah, but that was different.’ ” Darius looked again at McGee, as if waiting for her to agree. “I told her, ‘That was because I needed to return your thing, your hair thing.’ But she came in anyway, and I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to make it stop.”
McGee was glad she couldn’t speak, that she didn’t have to be the one to point out the obvious, that he didn’t actually want it to stop.
It was a strange thing, though: on behalf of his wife—on behalf of women everywhere—McGee wanted to punch him. But he was so helpless, so pathetic. A grown man undone by a girl barely out of her teens. He was a child, sitting beside her with a loaded gun.
He was still fidgeting. “See that light?” he said. He was looking at the parking garage across the alley, pointing toward a gap between the garage and the building next door. “It’s hard to see. That one right there. The red one.”
Perhaps half a mile away, a red light flashed, high in the sky, attached to a smokestack or some sort of tower.
“They used to have factories all over the city,” he said, gesturing to the building at their backs, HSI.
No kidding, McGee wanted to say.
“The stuff they sell,” he said, “they made it right here. Washing machines, laser beams, I don’t know what all. You can still see what’s left of it. The factories, I mean. Ruins.”
McGee flicked her butt off the dock, and Darius watched it go, grimacing. For a moment he seemed to be debating whether to go retrieve it.
“They found cheaper places,” he said. “Cheaper workers. That red light,” he said, pointing again, “that’s the last one. I don’t even know what they make there.”
Compressors, McGee said to herself, lighting another cigarette. They make compressors. She knew more about HSI than anybody. For all the good it had done her.
She breathed out a heavy column of smoke, and the red light briefly faded.
Darius picked up a pebble from the loading dock and tossed it into the alley. He seemed to have given up on the bolt. “They’re shutting it down, too. The last one.”
McGee lifted her eyes to his face, forgetting to hide her surprise. No, she wanted to say, you’re mistaken.
“It’s true,” he said, as if he could hear her thoughts.
She took another drag. No, it wasn’t.
Whatever else she thought of it, the company was too smart ever to leave the city completely. Even if the factory was a money pit, it was HSI’s one token gesture to the place it’d been fleecing and poisoning for generations. That factory wasn’t going anywhere.
“China,” Darius said. “They say it’s moving there by the end of the year.”
Of course, China. It was always China’s fault.
“Another ruin,” Darius said, and then he turned to face her. “Where’s the future in it?”
She was surprised by how sincere he seemed, as if he were genuinely waiting for an answer.
“My friend Michael Boni,” Darius said, “he’s got a plan. He says we should clear it out, all these ruins.”
Plans, McGee thought.
I had a plan, too. And there it lay, under a Dumpster.
“Enough’s enough. That’s what Michael Boni says.”
Off in the distance, the little flash of red was all there was to see.
Darius rose to his feet. “A clean slate, he says.”
McGee thought again of the file room the size of her apartment up on the third floor. In her head she counted all the cabinets it contained. Hopeless.
Darius was walking past her now, back to the building.
“How would you do it?” she said.
Darius stopped midstride, and he remained there, frozen.
“How would you do it?” she said again. “Clear it all out?”
When he turned to face her, Darius’s expression was perfectly blank. “Michael Boni knows.”
“This stuff about the factory,” McGee said. “Where’d you hear it?”
He blinked at her slowly. “I don’t remember.”
So much for clever plans. She got up, brushed off her pants. She might as well keep going, not stop until she reached home, leave the useless file where it lay with the rest of the trash.
“Everybody knows,” Darius said. “I heard it from everyone.” He was staring at her now, trying to process what was happening.
Well, that made two of them. After everything she’d gone through, after all the chances she’d taken, here with a stricken look on his face was what she’d been looking for all along. This guy—who treated his wife so abysmally, who spilled his guts to strangers, who cared so irrationally about the cleanliness of a stupid building—he was the one with the answers.
“Then I guess we’ve got two choices,” she said. McGee moved over to the railing, and it wobbled beneath her.
“The one I prefer,” she said, “is that I help you and you help me.”
When she got home that morning, McGee pulled off her orthopedic shoes and let them hit the floor with all their weight.
Myles shot up in bed, his eyes as big as moons.
“Have you heard anything about them closing the last factory?” she said.
Myles blinked, rubbing his eyes.
She said, “We’ve got a new plan.”
Thirteen
He was on a bench in a plaza outside Caesars Palace, near a concession stand that sold frozen, sweetened alcohol in yardstick-size glasses. This was summer, eight months ago, and the Nevada heat had been punishing. But Dobbs hadn’t gone there for pleasure. In his foreseeable future, he knew, there’d be no stage shows, no five-card draw. If anything, the odds seemed to favor him ending up on a blindfolded drive back out to the desert. He accepted those odds, and the people who’d brought him here knew it, which was why they hadn’t bothered posting anyone to watch him, to keep him from getting away.
Dobbs was waiting for Gordo to come and tell him their fate. He would wait all day, if necessary.
The fuck-up had been Gordo’s, not Dobbs’s, but these were not the sort of people who sat around splitting hairs. The problem was that Gordo, his partner on this particular job, had a little side business of his own, one that didn’t compete with the business they’d been hired to do but certainly benefited from it, allowing Gordo to take advantage of certain efficiencies in logistics management, as he later said, filling transport space in the truck that otherwise would have gone empty with cargo of his own.
Dobbs hadn’t known about any of this until it was too late, but the secret had apparently gotten out to others. The night before, somewhere east of Barstow, a mismatched pair of plus-size Fords had overtaken them, forcing them off the road, and the truck had overturned. Dobbs and Gordo were okay in the cab, but the same couldn’t be said for the people in the back. Two of them were already dead when Dobbs and Gordo extracted themselves from the wreckage. There were broken bones and agony among the rest. Even then Dobbs didn’t understand what had happened, not until he and Gordo were kneeling in a patch of gravel spotlit by the Fords’ high beams, squared-off Glock barrels pressed into the backs of their skulls, and under his breath, as if no one else could hear, Gordo admitted he would’ve told Dobbs sooner but “I thought you’d say no, Doc.”
At that moment, with the jagged rocks pulverizing his kneecaps and the diesel fumes swimming in his brain, it had pleased Dobbs to imagine Gordo was right. There were lines Dobbs had drawn. And in heroin there was no imperative, moral or practical. Gordo had been operating purely for profit.
In truth, though, when had Dobbs ever said no to anything? From the start he’d gone along with whatever jobs Sergio offered him, no questions asked, trusting in an unspoken pact. He chose to believe Sergio understood Dobbs was different. Not a criminal. A Conscientious Independent Contractor.
But Dobbs’s commitment seemed to make no difference. There was still something about him the others didn’t trust. Gordo treated Dobbs’s two years in college as the equivalent of a medical degree, and nothing Dobbs said could convince him otherwise. Why would Dobbs be doing work like this, Gordo wanted to know, when he could’ve had a house with a pool, a fleet of Cadillacs, a Rolex, a beautiful wife?
Dobbs accepted that to the others his presence was hard to understand. But for himself, it all made perfect sense. The world was changing, borders were dissolving. The rich were still rich, and everyone else was in free fall. Those jobs that Gordo imagined coming with a college degree, they didn’t exist anymore. And there was so much worse to come. Drought throughout the West. Hurricanes from the Gulf to the Atlantic. These were just teasers. But people denied what they were too scared to face. They went on dreaming of beachfront condos soon to be a mile under the sea. They stuck umbrellas in the sand and burned.
So Dobbs had aligned himself with the survivors. Bottom-feeders had always been the most adaptable of species.
Then came the accident. But not an accident, really. A transaction. One of the costs of survival. Outside Barstow, with a Glock to his head and carnage all around and the pitiable moans of the wounded, Dobbs discovered he’d gone numb. He could no longer feel anything at all.
The men who’d intercepted Dobbs and Gordo on the highway were so efficient, so confident, they didn’t bother wasting bullets. They took the drugs and left. But it would’ve been easier, in certain ways, if they’d been less merciful, sparing Gordo from having to make the phone call, to admit what had happened. “It’s like ordering your own execution,” Gordo said as it rang.
In the hour it took for help to arrive, Dobbs tended to the injured as best he could. There was so much blood it was hard to make sense of what he was seeing—what was severed and what was broken. There was screaming and praying, and Dobbs couldn’t understand a word. His Spanish was still just as bad as during his first trip to Mexico. He went from one to the next saying, “It’s going to be all right,” and he hoped the language barrier meant they couldn’t hear the tremor in his voice.
“I should’ve just called the cops,” Gordo kept saying. “Better off taking my chances with them.”
If there’d been anything for a hundred miles other than heat stroke and dehydration, Gordo would’ve taken off on foot. But Dobbs had decided to stay, no matter what.
Fifteen minutes before the three black Suburbans appeared on the horizon, a third person died, a woman maybe forty years old. Pink theme-park T-shirt, not a speck of blood. Not even a bruise. Dobbs had given her barely a glance, thinking she had no need for him. There one moment, gone the next.
They were the first people Dobbs had ever lost. All this time he’d thought he was good at what he did. Now he understood he’d just been lucky.
He and Gordo were tossed into the back of one of the Suburbans, and everything Dobbs saw on the way to Vegas, and everything since, had been a blur. It was as if his eyes had forgotten how to focus. And here on this bench outside Caesars Palace, the scorched cement radiating through the soles of his shoes, he felt not just his eyes but his entire body growing hazy, as if he were becoming absorbed in some sort of mirage. The Eiffel Tower at his back, a showgirl’s ruby thong, four stories tal
l. The palm trees along the boulevard were pert and happy, but all of it was smeared now with a film of blood. Dobbs kept watching for Gordo, for his inverted straw basket of hair bobbing among the crowds, for his big, goofy smile. Why did Gordo have to be so stupid?
Dobbs thought back to his first meeting with Sergio, to that frothy bag of beer. It was all so much farther from Minnesota than he’d ever dreamed. But even now he couldn’t imagine not having made that trip.
It wasn’t that he’d hated school or had no aptitude for it. He’d been a perfectly mediocre student. He just hadn’t understood how most of it mattered. And not in the way other people said it, the cliché about the real world being more important than books. The people who said that kind of thing just weren’t very smart. They needed to believe in simple things.
But that simplicity—if it had ever existed—was gone. Dobbs’s professors, his textbooks, his parents, they’d all been products of the old world, preparing him and everyone else for something that remained only in their memories. He’d felt this certainty since he was a kid. He’d seen what the future held. The empty mines and lumber mills surrounding his grandfather’s cabin. All those old rural towns, abandoned. It came for the cities next. He’d traveled with his family, seen what was left of Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland. He had cousins in Buffalo. Ruins.
A few months before that first trip to Mexico, before all the business with Sergio began, Dobbs had gone north to his grandfather’s cabin. He’d told no one. By then his grandfather was dead. He’d passed away the year Dobbs started high school. Even though they’d hated the place, his parents hadn’t bothered trying to sell the old lake house. Possibly they’d forgotten all about it.
On the long drive there, Dobbs had taken mental inventory of his grandfather’s possessions, the things he’d cataloged as a kid and now, as an adult, felt ready to claim: a liquor cabinet full of Canadian Club, a Remington 870 in a velvet-lined case. And hovering on a winch above his grandfather’s dock, an aluminum fishing boat with the fifty-horsepower Evinrude.
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