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  $200 AND A CADILLAC

  Fingers Murphy

  Contents

  2002

  I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI | XVII | XVIII | XIX | XX | XXI | XXII | XXIII | XXIV | XXV | XXVI | XXVII | XXVIII | XXIX | XXX | XXXI | XXXII | XXXIII | XXXIV

  Preview: FOLLOW THE MONEY | Preview: THE FLAMING MOTEL

  Copyright

  2002

  I

  He spoke into the rearview mirror.

  “Hank Norton. I’m a surveyor.”

  Eighty miles an hour down the freeway. Keeping his speed steady. Don’t get pulled over.

  “Hello. Hank Norton. Nice to meet you.” He stopped himself. Not right. Good to meet you. No. Good to know you—that’s what Hank Norton would say. He glanced out the window, eyeing the sagebrush suspiciously.

  He’d been sent to the desert to kill a man. It wasn’t the killing that bothered him, but the desert itself. The sand and dust made him uncomfortable. The vastness made him nervous—all that sky and open space. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar. He knew this place. He’d crossed the wasteland between LA and Vegas before. The man he would kill, however, remained unknown.

  He started again. Slow, casual. “I’m a surveyor, from Knoxville”—he was careful to say Knoxvull, the way a Tennessean would. “From Knoxville. Yeah, I work for the University of Tennessee. The geology department.”

  He imagined saying it to a waitress. He pictured her. A small town girl, teetering out here on the edge of the world, aching to get away but trapped by circumstance—a bad marriage, weak constitution, fear—someone to whom even Knoxvull would sound interesting. He could see her standing at the end of his table, nodding her head, buying it all. And he knew he could sell it to her too, and to the guy at the gas station, the grocery store, and to anyone else who asked, as each of them, one by one, led him to his target. Whoever it was.

  He stopped at the top of an off-ramp forty miles west of the Nevada border. To the north and south, the desert stretched out to a ring of craggy mountains, circling like a bowl fifty miles across. The sun was setting, throwing halos of orange and red up from the tips of the western peaks. He’d always marveled at these occasional overpasses in the middle of nowhere, connecting the freeway to roads that led into oblivion. He’d always wondered who used them, and now he was going to find out.

  He adjusted the mirror and looked straight into it, giving it a friendly nod. “Hey there. Hank Norton. Glad to know you.” Big smile. “Me? Oh, I’m a surveyor, from Knoxville, Tennessee. Yeah, I work for the geology department at the university there. They sent me out here to measure these rock formations out at the Egg Rock National Monument.”

  That would do just fine.

  He turned the Subaru north, down a thin strip of faded gray that parted the barren landscape, running curveless to the horizon. At the end of it lay a speck of a town called Nickelback, barely warranting the smallest dot on most maps. That’s where he would do the killing, assuming the man he’d been sent for was really there.

  He gave the car all it had and it topped out at eighty-five. The landscape blurred by, but not fast enough. The low, twisted brush, the exposed patches of rock, the Joshua trees, all of it dusky brown and purple in the fading light. Hank pressed the pedal harder, mashing it to the floor, but nothing happened. The survey equipment rattled in the bin on top of the car, but it didn’t weigh enough to slow it down. With the rpms still far from the red line, there was only one explanation: a governor.

  Hank appreciated private regulation between contracting parties—it was his own line of work, after all—but the governor irritated him. Hertz failed to tell him about it before he rented the car, which was fundamentally dishonest. As he thought about it more, it wasn’t the governor itself that annoyed him so much as its concealment. He would have rented the car regardless, but the deal would have been more fair if they had told him about it up front. At least in his line of work everything was on the table. Nothing was held back. Everyone knew where they stood. For Hank, dishonesty like Hertz’s signaled a breakdown in the moral fabric of society. It heralded a collapse of order, a world in which a reasoned approach to living would no longer be possible. Hank hoped he wouldn’t live to see it play all the way out.

  Then, at the edge of the road, there was movement. Slight, but sudden.

  The sagebrush wiggled and parted. A coyote darted out into the road, dragging something, and stood broadside, head turned, frozen in surprise at the oncoming car. Hank stood on the brake and the car began to slide, drifting to one side. He cranked the wheel the other way and the car swerved back, careening in broad swales across the pavement. But he was too close, moving too fast. He heard the dog hit the car, felt the impact, and watched it slide up across the hood and through the windshield, exploding the glass inward and all over him.

  The car went off the road at an angle, did two three-sixties through the sand along the shoulder and came to rest against a Joshua tree, which promptly collapsed and disappeared into a massive cloud of dust. The air was thick with the smell of burned rubber and steaming antifreeze. The world went abruptly still and silent.

  Moments later, when he emerged from his daze, Hank screamed a litany of obscenities, slammed his shoulder against the unmoving door, and then crawled from the car through the empty windshield hole and sat on the hood. Steam rose up around him and he ran his hands over his body, feeling for anything strange. He seemed all right. He tried to shake off the adrenaline and focus.

  But there was sand all over him—dirt, everywhere—and panic seized him. He brushed at his pants and shirt, nearly frantic, but the brushing only moved it around. He stopped himself and took a few deep breaths. There was nothing he could do. When his anxiety subsided, he surveyed the view in all directions: nothing but sagebrush and a fading sunset. All he could do was shake his head.

  This is just great, he thought. Wonderful.

  Hank turned back and looked inside the car. Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat, as if posed, were the remains of the coyote. The contorted body, caked with blood and broken glass, looked out at him like a macabre family dog waiting to go for a ride. But the real kicker, the show-stopper, was the mangled but complete human leg hanging from its mouth.

  Even better, Hank grinned. Fucking perfect.

  He shook his head and bits of glass tumbled from his hair. This was no way to start a job. He stood up on the hood and scanned the desert. Absolute desolation. No lights. No sound. Nothing.

  Where would a coyote get a leg? What were the odds of it stepping out in front of his car given all the surrounding space? What if Hertz hadn’t placed the governor on the Subaru? Then he would have driven by this very spot sooner and the accident never would have happened. Was Hertz to blame? Was the Hertz executive in an office suite somewhere who had approved the policy requiring the governors to blame? Or was this the perfect example of an accident—a truly random event that was the culmination of endless chains of cause and effect that no one could untangle? Perhaps everything that occurred at any given moment was equally random? But then, if resulting from causal relationships, nothing was really random at all—the universe, frozen at any particular moment, could be wound backward to its beginning and forward to its conclusion like a massive clock. Events were random only because the human brain was so limited. Or, perhaps causal relationships were manufactured by the brain as a way to organize the world, but in fact did not exist at all. Quantum mechanics had something to do with it. Neutrinos.

  Hank shook the thoughts from his head. What did they matter? The situation was b
affling. So overwhelmingly improbable, in fact, that he could hardly process it. But it didn’t matter if he could get his mind around it. The situation was what it was. Given that his car no longer worked, it was an improbability he would have to deal with when someone finally found him. Comprehension was irrelevant; action was everything.

  Could he drag it off into the brush and hide it? Perhaps. But then how to explain the wreck? If a state patrol or policeman came by, they might see blood in the car. Hank leaned down and into the car, studying the edge of the window, the dashboard, the fabric of the seat. There was blood everywhere, bits of hair too. The dead coyote seemed to leer at him, the gnarled head only a foot away from Hank in the dying light. He grimaced at the bloodless color of the leg, which hung down between the two front seats, its dusty toes resting cold and bloated on the gearshift.

  There would be no way to clean it up. Better to leave it. A cover-up would only make him look guilty of something. And he wasn’t guilty of anything. At least not here. Not yet.

  Hank slid down from the hood and hobbled to the side of the road. For fifty yards the pavement was marked with curving black skids. The shoulder was strewn with prism poles and range poles. A folded over measuring wheel, impaled in the dirt, turned feebly in the soft light. The road was marked by splotches of dayglo red, orange, green, and yellow paint. Leveling rods hung from the brush and survey stakes littered the landscape like the remnants of some lunatic cartographer. There was the gammon reel and the plumb bob and the laser plummet too. All of it rented, and all of it now damaged or destroyed.

  Hank kicked at a blue lumber crayon and smeared it across the pavement. Up and down the road, there wasn’t a car or light in either direction. He scratched his head and turned back toward the car, studying the transition of the skid marks on the pavement into the swaths of upturned sand that marked the spiraling path of the vehicle. Did he really see a leg hanging from the coyote’s mouth? Hank walked back to the car and peeked inside. The coyote and the leg remained, almost poignant in their absurdity. He laughed out loud. The sound muted and absorbed by the desert. A guy couldn’t even scream for help. What would be the point?

  He lingered for a moment by the side of the car, focusing again on the trail of debris. Then, just for the hell of it, he patted down his pockets until he found his cell phone. He powered it up. Why not? The LCD came on. Its glow only magnified the desolation around him. The phone beeped twice and Hank stared at the display where a tiny digital satellite dish spun round and round trying in vain to find a signal. Below the dish was a single word: “searching.”

  Hank laughed and thought, Aren’t we all?

  II

  The office job was killing him.

  Twenty years of excitement had left Victor Jones unsuited for almost everything. More and more lately, he found himself staring from his office window out at the shipyard and the water beyond, daydreaming about stakeouts, spending nights in a van, stale coffee, straining to hear whispered conversations coming in through the headphones, bursting through doors, the rush of the chase—on foot, in cars, careening through the streets, adrenaline exploding—and the look in the target’s eyes at that final moment, when he knew the game was over, the jig was up: busted.

  Three years and it seemed like ancient history now. Victor sitting at his desk, answering the phone, strolling beige hallways bathed in fluorescent light. Victor wearing a brown tie and eating a sandwich at his desk. Victor surfing the Internet. Victor staring out his window, scratching his ear on occasion. Victor going home at five-thirty, fighting traffic all the way to the subdivision and the three bedroom tract home his FBI retirement was buying. Victor with his two kids, Daniel, six, and Jennie, four. Victor kissing his wife, who’d begged him to retire and take a normal job—for her, for the family, for his own health and safety. Victor Jones, Chief Security Officer for Southwest Petroleum in Long Beach, California. Victor Jones, forty-six, making $95,000 a year; living the good life. Victor, who didn’t even carry a gun anymore, felt naked and impotent most of the time.

  “Radiation? You can do that?” Victor wasn’t really interested, but followed the conversation nonetheless. His head leaned all the way back and he stared at the ceiling, resisting the urge to spin his chair all the way around like a child.

  “Well, that’s what they told me at the lab.” Tom Crossly, sitting straight in the chair opposite Victor, picked at his cuticles as he spoke. “I mean, I’m no scientist, but those guys sure as hell are. That’s what they said.”

  Victor looked up and studied Tom for a moment—the tan skin, pressed shirt, the slight highlights in his sandy, beach-bleached hair. He’d always thought Tom was a little too well groomed to be taken seriously as a man. “I dunno,” he said. “Sounds weird to me. I’d have to get one of the heads of the lab to sign off on that. I’m not going to authorize something that’s going to taint a pipeline full of oil.” Victor smiled, amused by the idea. That would sure stir things up. Maybe he’d get fired. Maybe he’d have to go back into real law enforcement.

  “I hear you, Chief. You can call over there and talk to them about it. I’m just telling you what they told me. They said you could dump some kind of radioactive something or other into the pipeline at one end, and then all you’ve got to do is follow the flow of the radiation.” Tom looked down as he spoke, picking at the index finger on his left hand. Then he looked back up and shook his head. “I can’t understand why we’re even involved. I mean, it’s a pipeline leak for crying out loud.”

  Victor sighed and resumed his careful study of the ceiling tiles: white, textured, recessed, not very interesting to look at. “That’s just it, Tom. We’re not involved. They only let us know about what was happening in case we got reports about all the flights over the pipeline paths. You know, terrorism fears, that kind of shit.”

  “Well, like I said, I don’t really care, I’m just relaying the information.” Tom rubbed his palms together and stood, taking a moment to straighten his pants before speaking. “I mean, they’ve been flying over the pipelines off and on for two weeks and haven’t found a leak yet. I thought this idea sounded interesting.”

  “Well, I’ll think it over and maybe make a call to the lab to ask about it. But I’m not going to suggest something like that unless I’m damned sure it isn’t going to screw something up. Last thing I need is to look like an idiot, or worse.”

  “I hear you, Chief.” Tom held his hands out at his side, shrugged, and stood. “Ask for Ted Ross if you call,” he turned to go and spoke over his shoulder, “that’s who I talked to.” And then Tom was through the door and disappeared down the hallway, back into the bureaucratic void.

  Victor thought it over. It really wasn’t their area. There didn’t seem to be any kind of security issue other than the general paranoia that seemed to grip nearly everyone these days and led them to suspect that everything under the sun could somehow be related to terrorism. But Victor knew better, didn’t he? The real problem was that they put a certain amount of oil into a pipeline at one end and got slightly less out at the other end. Before the terror obsession no one would have called him because they would have called it what it was: a pipe leak. But it was a pipeline. It was an oil company. It was Southern California. There were Islamic crazies all over the place, and Los Angeles was an easy place to hide. It wouldn’t be insane to think there could be a security issue of some kind. Would it?

  Victor turned to stare out his window. The executive offices on the tenth floor had fantastic ocean views, but his view, from the second story, was partially blocked by a low hill near the back of the refinery property. He could see a distant blue at the far right and left, but straight on was an ugly rise of earth, over which ran the massive above-ground pipeline that connected the Southwest Petroleum refinery to the terminal that sat out at the edge of the Long Beach harbor. The terminal transferred the finished petroleum products through an underwater line that ran to the tankers parked off shore. But Victor couldn’t see the terminal or the tan
kers from his office, just the hill, and the galvanized pipeline running over it.

  In his rare moments of reflection, his obfuscated view struck him as symbolic: a perfect example of how his life had gone poorly. From his second floor window, Victor often felt as though he was looking out on his own mediocrity. It was a constant reminder that he’d settled, checked out, walked from a career that had been on a fast track, and for what? A shitty pension and an hour and a half commute?

  Five years before he’d been Special Agent Victor Jones, a senior field agent with an expertise in organized crime. After a three year operation that ended in a series of landmark arrests in the tri-state area, he’d been singled out by the Director of the FBI for his perseverance, his skill, his judgment, his leadership. He was on his way. But not long after, a shootout in a warehouse in Newark left him with a minor flesh wound to the shoulder and a wife who demanded that he take retirement as soon as he hit his twenty years. Eighteen months later he was having his retirement dinner at an Outback Steakhouse off the New Jersey Turnpike, wondering what the hell had happened to him.

  And so here he sat, mired in a corporate bureaucracy, a middle manager debating whether something fell inside or outside of his department, his job description. It was pathetic. He needed action. An excuse to get outside. Victor turned back to his desk, grumbling, head shaking, and picked up the phone. He dialed the lab and asked for Ted Ross.

  III

  “Swing like you’re trying to kill it.”

  Ronald Grimaldi held the Louisville Slugger right over left and swung slowly, demonstrating the rotation of the hips, the follow through. The kids watched him, some of them mimicking his movements with imaginary bats of their own. “You see, just like this.” He spoke to them over his shoulder. He demonstrated again, feeling the weight of the bat in his hand, thinking back to all the nights, the screams, the cracking sounds, the tension, and the hushed silences.