The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  Silence.

  “I’ve been training her. Take a good look at me. I look familiar because you saw me with Professor Rhodes today.”

  Silence.

  “What I want to tell you, Annie, is that your behavior is your choice. Professor Rhodes’s reaction to your behavior is her choice. And she has chosen to hurt you until such time as your behavior stops. If you understand this, knock once on your door.”

  Silence.

  And then . . .

  Knock.

  “Good,” Blake said. “I understand you’re worried about your job now. You should be. You should quit.” Blake unzipped his fanny pack and took out a stack of purple chips from the Spa Casino in Palm Springs, waved the stack in front of the peephole. “You should also move. This is $5,000 in chips, which is double your take-home salary for a month. This should give you some breathing room as you start your new life. You have one week. Knock if you understand what this gift entails.”

  Knock.

  “Good,” Blake said again. He set the chips down on her welcome mat. “Now, I assume you’ve dialed 911, that would be smart of you, but you have not yet hit send, so I’m going to leave. If you ever bother Professor Rhodes again, I will take that money back in blood. You don’t need to knock if you understand that, because, Annie, I hope you are the kind of person who does not understand such a thing. Now. Before I go. I want you to tell me something. What do you think of when you imagine joy?”

  “I don’t understand,” Annie said.

  “Yes, you do,” Blake said. “Think.”

  “Okay,” she said. Blake could hear the fear in her voice. That was good. “Monument Valley. The vastness of it all. I like standing in the vastness. I don’t worry about anything.”

  “Good,” Blake said. “Move there. Never come back. If this is all to your liking, knock for thirty seconds.”

  Knock. Knock. Knock . . .

  Blake was already back over the wall by the time Annie was done knocking. Still, he sat in his car and watched the place for the rest of the night, waiting for the police to show up. They never did.

  When he got home, Blake plugged his iPhone into his laptop, ran it through decryption software to extract the audio, listened to the playback. It was a little muddled, but he could fix it in GarageBand. He closed the file. Clicked over to a map of the Coachella Valley, found where Sprinkles was located.

  There was an Arby’s on one side of it, a dry cleaner on the other.

  Well.

  He’d work it out.

  THE WEEK BEFORE finals, some two months later, Blake had to spend three hours helping produce Machine Gun Kelly’s show, The Second Amen. It was the one conservative show they had on the campus radio station. It ran on Sundays at noon, timed for folks leaving church, and it was hosted by a guy named Kelly Stevens who’d gained local fame for transitioning from being the buttoned-up weatherman on the ABC news affiliate to habitually losing congressional elections. Each week he’d have on some whack job who had a story to tell about how guns had positively affected their lives, Machine Gun Kelly eventually saying, “Well, you must have said amen to God and then amen to your gun, am I right?”

  Blake’s job that day was to sit across from Machine Gun, work the board, hit a shotgun sound-effect button, and then pretend to be engaged by the topic Machine Gun was discussing with his guest, all under the auspices of learning radio production. Apparently, a big part of working in radio was feigning interest.

  “You were great today,” Machine Gun said after he’d finished interviewing a chef from the Marriott in Indian Wells who’d personally cooked for Oliver North. “I know it probably hurts your Libtard sensibilities, but you showed some real professionalism. I had that kid Down-to-Go in the other day. That did not work. But you, you’re a person who understands might makes right, I’d guess.”

  “I understand it,” Blake said, “but that doesn’t mean I adhere to it.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Everyone else around you adheres to it. No one wants to piss you off, even if you’re not aware of it. And so the world has probably been opened up wide for you most of your life.” He looked over his shoulder and then rolled back in his chair and closed the studio door. “Off the record. I’m not your teacher now. I’m just a guy in a bar. I bet you’ve gotten all the pussy, money, and power you’ve ever wanted, am I right?”

  “Were you ever my teacher?”

  “What?”

  “Are you employed by the college?”

  “Not as a teacher, no,” he said. “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “No,” Blake said.

  “It’s natural selection. But all you beta males out there, you won’t admit to it. You, you’re a beta, but you present as alpha. Me, I present beta, all one hundred and sixty-five pounds of me, but I’m all the way alpha. Right? We can agree on that?”

  “I agree with exactly nothing you’re saying,” Blake said.

  “Fair. Fair. But if we’re really two guys in a bar, and I’ve pissed you off more than I seem to have, I’ve got the equalizer.” He lifted up his shirt and showed Blake what looked to be a shitty little .22 shoved into his khakis. That was also his thing. At the end of his show, he’d say, “Follow me on Twitter @MachineGunKellyForCongress, but don’t follow too close, because I’m always packing.”

  “You’re aware they make holsters now.”

  “A good guy with a gun still needs the element of surprise.”

  “I don’t think it’s legal for you to have that on a college campus, is it?”

  “Is it?” Machine Gun Kelly asked.

  Blake’s cell phone buzzed with a new email. It was from Professor Rhodes. He’d turned in his final assignment to her. The subject said: COME SEE ME. “Are we done here?” Blake asked.

  “I’d love to have you work on the show over the summer, if you’re interested,” Machine Gun said. “I dig your energy.”

  Blake came around the board and stood in front of Machine Gun Kelly. Then, in one motion, he grabbed the .22 out of Machine Gun’s pants and shoved the rolling chair across the room, Machine Gun slamming into the soundproof wall with a thud. Blake popped the magazine out, put it in his pocket. Cleared the chamber.

  “What the fuck!” Machine Gun Kelly said.

  Blake examined the .22. It was a shitty Smith & Wesson. Two hundred bucks at Walmart. “You ever shoot this at a real person?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t ever try,” Blake said. He popped the slide off the top of the gun, yanked the spring out of it, removed the barrel, dropped it all on the floor, tucked the bottom of the gun in his fanny pack. If you couldn’t field strip a Smith & Wesson in fifteen seconds, your goon card could be revoked. “In my line of work, if someone flashes their gun at you, that means they are willing to kill you. Are you willing to kill me?”

  “What? No.”

  “See, that’s why a good guy with a gun is useless.” Blake smiled at Machine Gun Kelly. “You ever flash your gun at me again, you’ll spend the rest of your life shitting in a bag.”

  PROFESSOR RHODES’S FACULTY office was located in what Blake figured was probably the old laundry room, what with the tile floor and the exhaust vent in the ceiling. She was sitting at her desk with AirPods in her ears, her eyes down. Blake knocked on her door, even though it was open. She looked up, slid one of her AirPods out, set it down on her desk. Clicked something on her computer.

  “Blake,” she said. “Sit down.” He did as he was asked. She handed him an AirPod. “Is this you I’m listening to?”

  Blake slid the AirPod in. She clicked her mouse. Blake heard a mechanical voice say, “If you ever bother Professor Rhodes again, I will take that money back in blood.”

  “Yes,” Blake said, “I applied a filter on it, for legal reasons. I have the original if you need it, for my grade.”

  She clicked her mouse again. “This file you submitted. This is all you?”

  “Yes,” Blake said. “I completed my assignment.”
>
  “There’s audio of you burning down Sprinkles. Is that . . . real? Did you do that?”

  “No one was hurt.”

  “Half of that mini-mall burned to the ground, Blake. Did you set fire to a mini-mall?”

  “I made sure the dry cleaner was taken care of,” he said. “The Arby’s franchise was fully insured. And let’s be clear. Burning down an establishment that murders cows for human consumption is not the greatest crime in American history.” Blake smiled. Professor Rhodes was a vegetarian. He’d done some fieldwork on that when it became clear that there wasn’t a firewall between the Arby’s and Sprinkles.

  “Over the course of the last two months,” Professor Rhodes said, “I’ve received about $15,000 in poker chips. Sometimes they come in the mail. Sometimes they’re in my car. Sometimes I open my purse and there’s a stack of black chips in there. Am I to presume those are from you?”

  “Presume? No.”

  “Blake,” Professor Rhodes said, “there’s an audio recording of what sounds like the robot from Lost in Space breaking into my car and filling the glove box with poker chips. Are you telling me that wasn’t you?”

  “I’m telling you not to presume.” Blake leaned forward. “You’re undercompensated. The American educational system places its value in the wrong people. Do you know that the football coach at this school earns $125,000 per year? That should be dealt with. If you want, that can be dealt with.”

  Professor Rhodes pushed back from her desk, got up, closed her office door. Stood against it for a moment, then sat down next to Blake, but scooted the chair back a few inches. It was something Blake noticed people often did with him. “Is Annie . . . dead?” she whispered.

  “No,” Blake said.

  “Because I haven’t seen her.”

  “She’s self-relocated.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” she began. She picked up her AirPod, twirled it between her fingers. “Your average day, you wake up, have breakfast, what happens next?”

  “I’m a full-time student,” he said.

  “Last year at this time,” she said.

  “I was in Liberia.”

  “That’s a real place?”

  “Yes,” Blake said.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “We parachuted in and then crossed into Sierra Leone,” Blake said. “Took care of a problem that the United States government was reluctant to engage in.”

  “And that’s what you do.”

  “Not always,” Blake said. “I’m good at standing in the background, too. I also know which joints snap without making too much noise.”

  “And you like this job?”

  “Travel started to bother me,” he said. “I have ringing in my ears. My knees hurt. I have a problem in my neck.” He thought for a moment. “I missed my dog. That became problematic for me, too. Made me lose focus on jobs. So. Here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Professor Rhodes said. She reached over, clicked her mouse, Blake’s altered voice came back out of the AirPod. Knock for thirty seconds. “Say I was interested in a radio job in Los Angeles. Or New York. Or even, you know, here, in town. Like, a really good job. Morning drive-time. Something like that. You could . . . help me?”

  “I could,” Blake said, “if there was some . . . joy.”

  “Right,” Professor Rhodes said. “Joy is important.” She handed him the AirPod. “Did you find joy in this?” She clicked play again.

  Blake listened for a moment. He’d never get used to the sound of his own voice, even altered as it was here. He was narrating the destruction of Sprinkles. Talking about how to make a Molotov cocktail with longer-burning accelerants. It wasn’t This American Life quality, but then he wasn’t hoping to be on NPR. But the production! He’d put in music, done some artful editing, really amped up the tension, which was largely missing in the actual job. He’d simply walked up, tossed the cocktail through the window, watched it all burn to the ground from a camera he’d buried in a shrub the night before.

  Took the fire department eleven minutes to get there. It was, in total, an extremely pleasurable listening experience.

  All those years, his job was to be silent, and now he was up front, making things happen, not waiting for someone else to order him into action. He wasn’t just the guy behind the action anymore. He was the action man now.

  “I did find joy in this,” he said. He didn’t have to imagine it.

  “Then we should talk more,” Professor Rhodes said, “about how we can help each other.”

  THE LAST GOOD MAN

  They disappeared during the coldest winter on record. There was no special episode of Dateline. No jogger stumbled on a human skull. Instead, it was Scotch Thompson’s bird dog Roxanne who came running down Yeach Mountain, three days before Christmas, with a human hand in her mouth. And just like that, James Klein and his family were found.

  “Damndest thing I ever seen,” Lyle, my deputy, said. “All of them stacked up like Lincoln Logs. Like they were put down gentle. Terrible, terrible thing.” We were sitting in the front seat of my cruiser sipping coffee, both of us too old to be picking at the bones of an entire family but resigned to doing it anyway. “You think it was someone from out of town, Morris?”

  “Hard to say,” I said. “It’s been over a year, you know, it could have been anybody.”

  James Klein, his wife, Missy, and their twin sons, Andy and Tyler, fell off the earth sometime before November 12, 1998. Fred Lipton came over that day to borrow back his wrench set but all he found was an empty house and a very hungry cat.

  “You think it was some kinda drug thing, don’t you?” Lyle said, but I didn’t respond. “You always thought Klein was involved in something, I know, but I thought they were good people.”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore, Lyle,” I said. A team of forensic specialists from the capital was coming down the side of the mountain, and I spotted Miller Descent out in front, his hands filled with plastic evidence bags. I’d worked with Miller before and knew this wasn’t a good sign. Roxanne the collie had stumbled onto a shallow grave filled with four bodies, along with many of their limbs. The twins, Andy and Tyler, were missing their feet. James and Missy were without hands.

  Miller motioned me out of the cruiser. “Lotta shit up there,” he said. Miller was a tall man, his face sharp and angular, with long green eyes. He had a look about him that said he couldn’t be shocked anymore, that the world was too sour of a place. “Like some kinda damned ritual took place. Animal bones are mixed up in that grave, I think. Need to get an anthropologist up here to be sure, which is gonna be hard with the holidays, but it looks like dog bones mostly. Maybe a cat or two. Snow pack kept those bodies pretty fresh.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What’s the medical examiner say?”

  Miller screwed his face up into a knot, his nose almost even with his eyes. “Can I be honest with you, Sheriff Drew?”

  “Sure, Miller.”

  “Your ME about threw up when she saw all them bodies,” he said. “You know, I was in Desert Storm, so this doesn’t mean so much to me. You might want to have them cut up by some more patient people upstate.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. I’d been in Korea and Vietnam. I still didn’t want to see whatever was up there.

  Miller smiled and scratched at something on his neck. “Anyway,” he said. “You still playing softball in that beer league?”

  I never knew how to handle Miller Descent. He could be holding a human head in one hand and a Coors in the other and it wouldn’t faze him.

  “Not this year,” I said.

  “Too bad,” he said, and he shuffled his way back up Yeach.

  I DIDN’T GET home that night until well past ten o’clock. I brewed myself a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table looking over notes I’d written when the Kleins first disappeared, plus the new photos shot up on the mountain. Since my second wife, Margaret, died, I’d taken to staying up late at night; I’d read or
watch TV or go over old cases, anything to keep me from crawling into that lonely bed. The holidays, I barely slept. I’d sit in the kitchen, remembering the smell of pork roast, the kind with raisins and cranberries, which Margaret used to cook on Christmas Eve. Or I’d think about how we used to wake up early on Christmas morning and unwrap presents, Margaret always getting me things I didn’t know I wanted—one year, that was a kite, and every day after work for six months, I’d come home and fly it, like I was eight. Or how she cried at the Christmas cards I made for her, every year. I carved them out of birch, turning a small plank of wood into a full holiday scene, which I’d then paint. It would take me a few months to do it, but I found it relaxing and it was better than getting her a sweater or something she’d leave behind on a plane. She’d see the plank of wood and she’d just tilt her head back and start sobbing, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, always ruining her makeup. “This is so silly,” she’d say, “I’m a grown woman.” Her last Christmas, she was already dropped so low by the stroke that all I had time to carve for her was a single Christmas tree topped with a golden star against a blue sky. She’d stare at it for hours.

  But that night, my trouble was not with the memory of a woman who I loved for the last thirty years of my life, or of my first wife, Katharine, whose death at the Salton Sea still haunted me, but for a family I had barely known.

  The Kleins moved into Granite City during the fall of 1995. James Klein was a pharmacist, so when he and his wife purchased Dickey Fine’s Rexall Drug Store downtown, everyone figured it was going to be a good match. Dickey had gotten old, and going to him for a prescription was often more dangerous than just fighting whatever ailment you had with faith and good humor.

  James and Missy were in the store together most days. James wore a starched white lab coat even though it wasn’t really required. It inspired confidence in the people, I think, to get their drugs from someone who looked like a doctor. Missy always looked radiant standing behind the counter chatting up the townspeople and, when skiing season started, the tourists who’d come in for directions or cold medicine.