The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got my own LLC at this point.”

  Poremba said, “How long?” She told him her prognosis, the senior special agent never breaking eye contact with her as she put it all down. When she finished, he said, “What are you still doing working?”

  “What else am I going to do?” she said. “Play slots at the Frontier all day?”

  Poremba said, “It was me, I’d travel.”

  “I have to go to the infusion center twice a week.”

  “When that’s over.”

  “When that’s over,” she said, “if I’m lucky, it will be radiation. And when that’s over, it’ll be too late.”

  Poremba thought on that. “Stop wearing dark colors,” he said. “Your hair stands out against the fabric.”

  “I’m not going to keep it much longer,” Kristy said.

  “You have someone,” Poremba said, “to do it for you?”

  “I have friends,” she said, but that wasn’t true. Rabbi Cohen told her about a support group through Temple Beth Israel. She was going to look into that. They gave rides, took care of meals, all that. The temple paid for all of it. Maybe someone in the group had clippers. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “You don’t make it easy.” He pulled a cassette tape from his jacket pocket, set it on Kristy’s desk. Poremba said, “Reason I’m here, you showed up on a wire.”

  “What?”

  “We had ears on a house that backs up to the cemetery at Temple Beth Israel,” Poremba said. “We got you and your rabbi talking. Pinged on Bennie Savone.” He pointed at the tape. “That’s the only copy.”

  She doubted that. “What is Chicago doing running an op on a cemetery in Summerlin?”

  “We weren’t,” he said. Kristy knew how that worked. Get a subpoena to wire a house when your real target might just so happen to walk by it in public, where the assumption of privacy is much harder to prove.

  “That conversation with my rabbi is privileged,” she said, “no matter where I am.”

  “Fortunately, you’re not being investigated for anything.”

  “I’m talking about my job,” she said. “Isn’t that why we’re having this conversation?”

  “I’m not here to ruin your life,” Poremba said. “I’m here to help you keep it together, if that’s what you want.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Kristy picked up the tape, turned it over in her hand. “How much did you catch?”

  “A couple minutes,” he said. “Enough to know you were buying a plot. Had to run some background, make sure you weren’t being extorted or something, weren’t about to dirt nap yourself to get out of a problem. You came back clean, so I wanted to check on you. So here we are.”

  “So you already knew I was sick.” She ran her hand through her hair, out of habit. Loose strands came tumbling out. Shit. “What were you listening for?”

  “I was working a hunch on the disappearance of Sal Cupertine and the murder of Jeff Hopper. You familiar with that case?” She told him she was. Cupertine was a hit man known as the Rain Man who’d been piling bodies for The Family for fifteen years. He disappeared after killing three agents in Chicago in 1998. Hopper had tracked the frozen meat truck that ferried Cupertine out of Illinois all the way to Las Vegas, including to the Barer Academy, the private school on the grounds of Temple Beth Israel . . . and then Hopper disappeared. Eventually his decapitated head turned up back in Chicago. Kristy had read the file back and forth. Everyone had. Solve that one, you could pick your assignment. Finding Hoffa would be easier. “Suffice to say, didn’t pan out. And it would have been inadmissible anyway.”

  “So what was the use?”

  “Hopper was my friend,” Poremba said. “I wanted to know.”

  “Like we’re friends?” Fucking with him a little bit.

  “Hopper was an asshole,” Poremba said. “But he was good FBI. He doesn’t have any advocates left in the bureau. No family to speak of, either. So. It’s my duty. To close the case. In my mind or on paper. Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Bennie Savone’s small-game, if that’s your worry,” Kristy said.

  “Half the people who work at the funeral home and cemetery have criminal records,” Poremba said. “I’m not talking shoplifting. Legit hard knocks. And one of the rabbis across the street was found floating in Lake Mead. Missing key parts of his anatomy.”

  “Every synagogue in town has some criminal history,” Kristy said.

  “That’s the point,” Poremba said. “History. Temple Beth Israel hasn’t been around that long. Where Bugsy Siegel got circumcised is not my concern. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “I hope so,” Kristy said. “Look, Bennie Savone wouldn’t be tossed up with Chicago. His influence extends to the edge of Clark County. So he got guys with criminal records to dig holes. Big deal. Harvard MBAs don’t typically end up gravediggers.”

  “You’re probably right.” He got up, went over to Kristy’s window, looked out. The FBI office in Las Vegas was in a building on W. Lake Mead, wedged between a housing development inexplicably called The Whispering Timbers and a Dollar General store. Kristy’s office had a view of the Dollar General’s parking lot. It was clean and well lit and known by junkies as The Fed. You could score there pretty much 24/7. He tapped the window. “What’s happening here?” Poremba said.

  “See the camper-van?” Kristy asked. “Far west corner.”

  Poremba squinted. “Huh. Yeah.”

  “He’s a Metro CI,” she said. “They let him do his work. It’s just weed.” And some pills. A little coke, probably. Poremba didn’t need to know that.

  “How long?”

  “Long as I’ve had this office,” Kristy said. “It’s a pretty safe spot. Only two killings since I’ve been here.”

  “I need to retire,” Poremba said. He turned from the window, regarded Kristy with that steady gaze of his. “Listen. You encounter anything strange at that temple, give me a call, okay? Anything.”

  “The mayor of this city is a fully owned subsidiary of the Philadelphia crime family and you’re worried about a synagogue.” Kristy thought about Rabbi Cohen’s knuckles, his face, how he brought up Bennie Savone at all. There was surely something off there. But you could also smoke in the grocery store and gamble in the drugstore, and Siegfried & Roy fucked with that white tiger every night. One day, something bad was going to happen. To everyone. “Everything is strange.”

  “We’ve got ears on the mayor’s synagogue, too.”

  Kristy couldn’t tell if Poremba was joking. He probably wasn’t. She held the tape up. “I get to keep this?”

  “Take it home. Put it through your shredder.” He headed for the door but stopped before opening it. “And listen. Don’t come back to work. If you want, I’ll tell your boss you’re doing undercover for me. Whatever you need.”

  “You hardly know me.”

  Poremba shrugged. “Your rabbi,” he said. “He gave you good advice. Cling to the good. Nothing here is good, Kristy. Every part of what we do is the worst. The very worst. Disavail yourself of it.”

  “Wait,” Kristy said. He was halfway through the door. She got up from behind her desk. “Show me where the bald spot is.”

  KRISTY COULDN’T SLEEP that night. The steroids they gave her after chemo were keeping the nausea at bay, but they also had her body and mind running a constant treadmill. So, at 3 a.m., she put a leash on Bingbing, put her nine on her ankle, and walked out her front door. She lived in a condo complex called The Allegro. It was a mile down the road from Temple Beth Israel, so fifteen minutes later, she and Bingbing slid through a gap in the chained-off front gate and made their way to Kristy’s forever home. Both stood panting atop the rise where her grave would be. It was cold outside, barely 45 degrees, but Kristy was clammy with sweat and Bingbing’s tongue lolled out to one side. Six months ago, she was running marathons for fun; now she could barely walk a mile.

 
This was life. For now.

  Tomorrow would be different. She was going to do the right thing and take a medical leave. And then she was going to contact Len and tell him she needed him. That she was alone and needed someone familiar with her. She wanted to see his face to remind her of her own, because already she was changing.

  She tied Bingbing to the leg of the bench and for a few minutes they both sat there, catching their breath, staring out at the lights of the Strip. Her years living in Las Vegas, she’d never played a single hand of blackjack, hadn’t put a quarter in a slot, hadn’t looked at a roulette wheel. She prided herself on being no one’s sucker. And yet, since getting her diagnosis, she was plagued by the idea that she should empty her bank account and put it all on red, as a test of her ability to beat the odds. Though of course, she’d never do that. Because what if she won? She wouldn’t be able to handle the notion that her entire life had been a series of lucky breaks and not the result of hard work. Luck is Them not finding you in the attic. Hard work is fighting Them in the street.

  She tipped her head back and stared into the sky, hoping she’d see some stars, like back home in Washington, but even all the way out here, in the shadow of the Red Rocks, there was too much light pollution. All she could make out was the moon, which was no comfort. Stars had a much more compelling story. They were proof that dead things could still be remembered.

  A breeze blew down off the Red Rocks. It smelled like damp creosote, but this time of night—of morning—everything did, sprinklers at golf courses and gated communities and parks and cemeteries across the valley timed to go off between 3 and 4 a.m. By the time the sun came up, every blade of grass and desert shrub would glisten, another level to the sheen of surrealism that everyone took for granted here. In Washington, dew existed. In Las Vegas, it was manufactured for effect.

  It was a cynical thought, Kristy recognized. It was her pulling back from the beauty of what she loved about this life, the simple pleasure of a scent. If this life was to have meaning, it had to be that. The mundane magnificence of simplicity.

  The breeze swirled past her again. A chill ran down her neck, tickling the sweat there. She reached back reflexively and patted down her hair—Poremba had placed his thumb on her bald spot that afternoon, it was just above her occipital ridge—and came back with strands of hair stuck to her slick palm. Shit. She let the strands fall and they were picked up by the wind, whisked into the darkness. Maybe they’d become like the stars, floating out there somewhere, landing on someone, a stranger discovering months of her life in a simple strand, and they would brush her off, and she would go on, over and over again, persisting.

  How she loved the feeling of the wind in her hair. Had she ever realized that prior to this morning, in this graveyard? Would she ever feel it again?

  She reached down and unstrapped the holster from her ankle, set it and her nine on the bench, stood up, and did the only thing she could think of in that moment: she ran, first in circles, her arms out like wings, letting the wind cover her, feeling it in her hair, in her eyelashes, in her eyebrows, in the salt of the tears that slid from her eyes and into the corners of her mouth. And then she took off down the berm, into the darkness below, the wind pulling the hair from her face, strands blowing into eternity, her whole body tingling, her lungs straining, electrified by a feeling she’d always taken for granted.

  She got to the bottom of the tiny hill—it was only a ten-foot slope, but it felt like she’d run down the face of Everest—and doubled over to catch her breath, which is when she saw a pair of black work boots. She raised up and standing there, maybe five feet away, was Rabbi David Cohen. Or she thought it was him. She couldn’t see his face. He wasn’t wearing a suit. Instead, he had on jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, the hood resting lightly on his head. Behind him was a backhoe. Had she not seen that in the dark before? Or had he pulled up in it?

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She barely had any voice, her breath not quite back yet.

  In the distance, Bingbing began to bark hysterically, like he did when there were coyotes running around outside, but Rabbi Cohen didn’t even lift his head in that direction. “Are you alone?”

  “How did you know I was here?” Rabbi Cohen didn’t answer. Then she realized: the temple was covered in cameras. There must be CCTV cameras mounted in the trees or on top of the buildings. She exhaled through her mouth. Blinked once. Took in Rabbi Cohen standing there. Jesus, he was big. How had she never noticed that? Not that he was tall. No. That wasn’t it. He had a . . . presence. It was like staring at a black hole. He was both there and not there. I’m losing it. He had something in his hand. A shovel.

  “Are you alone?” he said again.

  “Alone? I have never been more alone in my life.”

  “Step toward me,” he said.

  Kristy ran her fingers through her hair. “Do you see? I’ll be gone before I’m even gone.”

  “Step toward me,” he said again, and for some reason, Kristy did. “Are you armed?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. And in that moment, Rabbi Cohen was right in front of her, the distance between them closed from five feet to five inches, and he had hold of her arms, pinning them to her side. “No. I mean. No. I left my gun on the bench. I’m not here to harm myself. I don’t think. It’s not what you think.”

  Bingbing was howling now. Could he even see her?

  Rabbi Cohen shook the hood from his head. His hair was normally combed perfectly, like he was a Republican congressman, but it was messy and loose.

  She looked down at his hands. Even in the dark she could see the scars on his knuckles.

  “You need to look at me,” he said.

  He had scars around his mouth. She hadn’t noticed that before.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  He squeezed her arms.

  Bingbing made a noise Kristy had never heard before. It sounded like he was barking inside of a blender.

  A second later, the dog came snarling down the berm. Half of his leash dragged behind him. Blood pumped from his mouth and stained his chest coat red.

  Jesus.

  Bingbing had chewed through his leash. And lost some teeth in the process.

  Rabbi Cohen stared down at the dog. “Stop making that noise,” he said.

  Bingbing did. The dog stood there. Waiting.

  “You should have been killed tonight, Agent Levine,” the rabbi said.

  And then, he pulled her into his chest, and hugged her.

  Softly.

  “It’s freezing,” Rabbi Cohen said. “You’re freezing.” He took off his sweatshirt. “Put this on.” Kristy did. “You have no immune system. Breaking into here was dangerous. You know that. Or you know that now. And so you know that you will never do it again, because Agent Levine, on the wrong night, you could die right here and no one would ever see you again. I want you to understand that. Appreciate this gift you’ve been given.” He looked at his watch. “Sun will be up in two hours. Take your dog and go home. You need rest. And then you can decide to fight or you can give in. Which is it going to be?”

  “What was it you said before,” Kristy said. “About finding Bingbing. What did you call it?”

  “Mazel,” Rabbi Cohen said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means fate,” he said. “And luck.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  He pointed up. “Above,” he said. “Around. Wherever you find God.”

  “That,” she said. “I’m going to look for more of that. For mazel.”

  Rabbi Cohen nodded, then turned around, picked up his shovel, got onto the backhoe, and drove off, leaving her there, alive among the dead, in silence, save for the fresh howling of her dog and the whispering of the wind, searching for her mazel.

  PROFESSOR RAINMAKER

  Professor William Cooperman hated teaching in the summer. The information was al
ways the same no matter the season, of course, but for Cooperman it was more about the students. If you were taking Introduction to Hydrology in the middle of July, that meant you’d spent the entire year avoiding it, or had failed it in the fall and now were spending a few weeks getting the F off your record, maybe earn yourself a D and be done with it. That was the problem with students today. Here it was 2007 and no one thought that understanding how water worked on the planet was vital, never paused to consider how something as simple as sprinklers had changed the course of human development, or that eventually the world was going to turn to shit and water would be a commodity you’d kill for. Well, maybe a few people thought about those things.

  Maybe at UCLA.

  Or Yale. Somewhere smart kids went.

  Somewhere smart people taught.

  No, he thought, sitting behind his narrow desk at the front of the lecture hall, his thirty-five students midway through the fifth pop quiz he’d proffered to them in just two weeks, these students today just didn’t want to fail water. His students couldn’t see beyond the moment, couldn’t understand that the ripples they were causing would eventually be tsunamis. Didn’t matter if it was water or gasoline or not caring about their bodies, kids today just didn’t grasp the enormity of the predicament.

  He checked his watch. It was 2:13. Cal State Fullerton required him to hold class until precisely 2:30 each day, so that the students would get the exact amount of contact hours they needed, lest some state accreditation auditor pulling undercover duty in the class was just waiting to pounce on the college for skirting the rules. And then he had another section at 7:00, which meant his whole day was lost. Cooperman thought the administrators at the college were a bunch of fucking communists, but this slavish dedication to time really didn’t jibe with his thoughts on higher education, which is perhaps why he was just a lecturer. Cooperman figured education shouldn’t keep a clock. If it took five minutes to teach something, what was the use of sitting around for another hour talking about it? Especially in the summer. And on a Thursday, everyone’s last day of class. It was useless, so the pop quizzes were his way of getting around that issue of talking. Invariably someone would finish the quiz before 2:30, but the social Darwinism at play in the lecture hall essentially forced them to stay seated until a reasonable point, which was usually about 2:15.