Missing Persons

58

The same night, at almost the same time, Raoul was still thinking about Diane and Canada.

He told me later that he was surprised to see how Las Vegas bleeds out into the northern desert. There is no natural demarcation, no river, no ridge, no rail at the craps table. There is no single line in the dirt and sand where a visitor would say, well, this here is Las Vegas, and that there isn’t. At some point you know you’ve left town, but even if someone offered you to-die-for odds, you couldn’t go back and find the precise spot where it happened.

Raoul looked back over his shoulder at the profile of the distant Strip that stained the near horizon with artificial vertical interruptions and radiating flashes of neon. He guessed that he and Tico were about five miles outside of town. It could have been seven, could have been three, but he was guessing five.

Tico had yanked the VW through a lot of turns to get where they were, many more than Raoul thought should be necessary to get from point A to point B across a landscape of flat, mostly barren land. But the turns had accomplished what Tico had intended: Other than being some number of miles out in the desert north of Las Vegas, Raoul didn’t know where he was.

Wide expanses of scruffy land separated the houses. In some other place, somewhere where the soil was arable, such distances between homes might make sense, but in the desert outside Vegas it seemed to Raoul that people lived as far apart as possible simply so that they could feel some separation. In Colorado’s mountains, a ridge or an outcropping of rock or a thick stand of lodgepole pine was enough to leave neighbors feeling distinct from one another. Out in this endless desert, though, the geography made no natural allowances for privacy, and separation apparently meant space.

Tico doused the headlights on the VW a few hundred yards before he pulled to a stop at an expensive wrought iron gate in an even more expensive high stucco wall. There wasn’t much of a moon and the desert was dark. Raoul couldn’t tell where Tico had taken him, but he was guessing the building was a residence. Tico waved casually toward a security camera mounted on the stucco wall, and seconds later the gates clanked loudly and started to swing inward.

The place wasn’t much to look at. It was a sprawling, low-slung ranch with long overhanging rooflines designed to protect inhabitants from the relentless Nevada sun. Raoul dated the construction from the ’60s or ’70s. Somebody had once tried to do some landscaping, but the effort had been abandoned a long time before. Tall, vaguely Greek planting urns sat forlorn and empty at intervals around the property. Adjacent to the crumbling concrete driveway a swimming pool shaped like a spade was a third filled with murky water. The front of the separate pool house was almost totally obscured by junk. The shadowed symmetry of the red tile roof on the shack was interrupted by broken and absent tiles and what looked to be an abandoned array of solar panels.

Raoul said, “That fence we went through is worth more than the house.”

“Boss isn’t picky about stuff. Everything’s temporary but people. That’s what he says, says it all the time.”

“I take it he doesn’t swim.”

“Don’t go there, man.” Tico smiled. “Don’t go there. Uh, uh. No swimming jokes, you dig?”

“Yes,” Raoul said. “Thanks. Does he live here?” He didn’t expect to get an answer and was surprised when Tico decided to give him one.

“Stays here sometimes. Other places, too. A lot. He lives where he happens to be. At some point soon enough this place will get sold. They be another, and another after that. Like that. He gets ’em. Gets rid of ’em. We move on.”

“The Airstream?”

Tico smiled. “Had that one for a while. May be gone now, too.” He killed the tiny engine on the bug. For a moment the clatter of the valves was the loudest sound in Raoul’s ears.

Raoul said, “Your boss and me have that in common. Buying and selling. I’m a bit of a speculator, too.” Initially Raoul thought Tico had been considering saying something in reply, but had thought better of it. “You have some advice for me?”

“Advice?” Tico adjusted the fabric that clung to his shaved skull, pulling it tighter toward his ears, tight enough that a phrenologist could have done a comprehensive exam without removing the cap. “Whatever you think is about to happen here, bro, you wrong. That’s my advice for you. If you think you here ’cause you want to talk to U.P., you wrong. Want to know why you here? You here ’cause U.P. want to talk to you. No other damn reason.” He opened the door and hopped out of the car. “I need to pat you down now. No offense.”

Raoul joined him on the driveway and lifted his arms. “None taken. I apologize for the smell. The shower in the Airstream wasn’t working.”