Palm Springs Noir

The Stand-In by J. D. Horn

Deepwell

“I learned about the Kennedy assassination while I was stripping for the prison guard.” Donna waited for the line to land, then sensing a tough room, stepped it up. “Tits out and squatting in front of this Mack truck with a vagina, and she just bursts into tears.”

The kid sitting across from her — couldn’t be more than thirty, corn-silk hair, weak chin, done up like a newly minted missionary in a white short-sleeve button-up — shifted in his seat but said nothing. Donna didn’t make a habit of letting just anyone into her house, but after the kid called two days earlier and asked to meet her, she got help at the senior center looking him up on the Internet. She found his résumé — a fancy school, followed by a meandering mishmash of jobs, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Puerto Vallarta, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Portland, videos of their tiny muttsy, whateveradoodle dog. The kid seemed rudderless, but harmless. He was interested, and Donna was bored, so she figured why the hell not? She’d talk to him. Besides, Sally was waiting nearby if Donna needed her help.

It was July. She turned off the AC to discourage a too-long visit. Outside it was a buck twenty, and even with the shades drawn and the ceiling fan turning, it was pushing ninety in her kitchen. The smell of fresh paint — one of her boys had talked her into letting him paint her cabinets white and the wall behind them chartreuse, because one or the other would “pop” — lingered a full week after the work, growing sharper in the mounting heat. It was starting to get to her, but the kid didn’t seem bothered.

A fat fly that had followed him in buzzed overhead, circling like it was waiting for permission to land.

“A grown damned woman,” she mumbled, her own enthusiasm waning. “Bawling.” Donna had been dining and drinking on the story of her incarceration and the events leading up to it for fifty-odd years. The kid’s dubious stare wasn’t the reaction she’d come to expect.

“I wasn’t aware,” he said, enunciating with the smarmy cool diction of an NPR correspondent, “they had prisoners squat as part of the intake process in 1963.” He folded his hands on the table next to the white robot-looking microphone recording their talk to his laptop. Across from him sat the box of chardonnay she’d demanded as compensation for speaking with him. If she knew he was going to be a pain in the ass, she would’ve demanded bourbon.

Donna raised her eyes to the faces of the Rat Pack staring down from a black-and-white photo on the wall behind him and offered up a silent prayer for strength to the city’s patron saints. “I don’t know. Don’t remember.” She scratched her temple at the edge of her lace-front wig’s nylon cap. “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.”

“Details are important to establishing the veracity of your account.”

“Veracity?” she said, rolling her eyes at the kid’s shameless sincerity. “You can’t tell a story as long as I have without embellishing a point here and there.”

“The unembellished, and with any luck verifiable, truth will go a long way in helping me help you set the record straight.”

Donna swatted at the fly. “This is Palm Springs. About the only thing left around here anymore that’s straight is the record.” She allowed herself a cackle at that one. “Not that I mind the boys. My boys. They adore me. They see me as dangerous, glamorous. Beautiful, like I used to be. Not this wheezing colostomy bag I’ve become.”

The kid tapped his fingers on the table’s Formica top. Genuine midcentury modern, a succession of her boys had cooed about her chrome dining set when first they laid eyes on the “antique” Donna had bought new. The kid stopped midstrum, as if he realized the sound was being picked up on the recording. Or maybe he misread her contemplation of herself as another midcentury modern relic as irritation. He polished a spot with his shirt cuff.

Donna felt an inexplicable flash of sympathy for him. She sighed. “Maybe it is the truth. Who the hell knows after all these years? Who the hell cares? After this long, it’s the story that matters, not the truth.”

“The truth is why I’ve come.”

“Then I’ll sow a few grains in from time to time.” She placed her cup beneath the wine box spigot and held it there till it was half full. “So, this program you’re doing...?”

“It’s a podcast. You are familiar—” he began, the obvious — given her age — question forming.

“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand like she was training a pup to sit. “The old lady knows what a podcast is. Have even listened to a couple.”

She must have flipped some switch because all at once the kid was on. “Ours examines organized crime, but from a different angle.” He leaned in, his formerly passive features animated. “It’s an anthology focusing not on made men, the gangsters themselves, but on the women who, often through circumstances not of their own choosing, find themselves caught up in the gangsters’ world.” Each word came out with a polished enthusiasm, addressed, it seemed, to an imaginary audience of thousands rather than one old woman at her kitchen table.

Donna waited till his evangelical fervor cooled. “Not my cup of tea, but you think people will listen? A lot of people?”

“We haven’t released any episodes yet. We want people to binge, the first season at least. But with stories like yours, I’m sure we’ll pick up a massive following in no time.”

“With stories like mine.” Donna laughed and saluted him with her drink. She sipped her cup, dribbling wine on her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. He watched her, patient, impassive. Maybe he hoped the wine would loosen her tongue, but the joke was on him. If her tongue got any looser, she could slip it out with her dentures.

He slid the mic a touch closer to her. “Perhaps we could start a bit earlier? What brought you to Palm Springs?”

Donna feigned surprise. “Why, you must know. I was an actress,” she said, rolling the word in deep plush drama. She read his noncommittal expression as skepticism. “I had some roles. Look it up. They were small but they were speaking. You should’ve done better research before showing up at my door.” She rose, her knees protesting. “I’ve got something I can show you.” Donna shuffled, her steps heavy, tired, to the bookshelf in her living room, and took down the thick coral-colored scrapbook — a gift for her seventy-fifth last year from her boys. A warmth filled her chest as she thought of sharing it with the kid. It was crazy. He wasn’t anything special. Not a prize by anyone’s standards. But he was here, and she wanted him to see her as she’d once been. She made her way back, pausing at the threshold. The kid sat there, futzing with his phone, kicked back in his seat and looking bored.

“Sorry for the wait,” she said, chagrined not to be returning to a rapt audience. “You’re going to like this.” She set the book before him, detesting the sight of her mottled hand as she flipped open the cover. She watched him, studying his face, waiting for his reaction to the decades-old headshot.

His eyes scanned the photo but didn’t warm at the sight. “This is you?”

Donna examined the photo. It was glossy. Black-and-white. Even so, it was clear that her eyes were crystal blue, her hair a buttery blond — natural.

The kid turned the page, flicking it over with the nail of his index finger like he was afraid to touch the book.

A couple of candid snapshots. Donna in a zebra-stripe one-piece that gave her the look of a vintage Barbie. A faded color shot of Donna lounging in an aqua-blue peignoir set. That one was a warm-up to a few private “artistic” nudes that helped her make rent when the roles didn’t come rolling in.

“I bet you would like to get together with her.” The kid’s eyes darted to her, then away. “She’s still in here, you know.” Donna’s tongue grew thick and heavy, feeling like someone had pumped it full of cement. She felt the pulse in her temple. “I don’t mean...”

The fly buzzed past.

“You were beautiful,” the kid said, then looked back at her and flashed a grin. “And you wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”

Donna didn’t feel gratitude often, but she did now. She’d stumbled into deep water, and he was offering her a chance to surface. She shifted around the table to her chair. “No, I wouldn’t have.” She nodded at the scrapbook. “Go ahead.”

He turned the page using the same odd nail flick.

A call sheet. Her two lines from the same movie, a western, cut from the script. A clipping showing the movie poster — on which she had not been featured. “So, you were performing—”

“I was putting in my dues. Just like everybody else back then.” She removed the lid from the ice bucket, and with her forefinger and thumb plucked out two fresh cubes. She dropped them into the wine. “You couldn’t pop out a sex video and become a star. You had to work for it.”

“You believe you had the talent to succeed?”

“I sure as hell did. And the backbone. That right there.” She nodded at the scrapbook. “Shows you I had the looks too. All I needed was to get noticed. That’s what brought me here... in answer to your question.”

The kid’s head jerked back; one brow raised, telegraphing his incredulity. “You’re saying you came to Palm Springs to advance your career? Can you explain what led you to believe spending time in the desert would improve your chances of stardom?”

Donna chuckled. “Sure, it sounds crazy now, maybe, but back then this town was something special. Glamorous. Everywhere you went there were producers, directors. Stars. Even here. In Deepwell.” She looked around like she was taking in the whole of the neighborhood. “Liberace. William Holden. Tippi Hedren.” She flung up her hands and mimicked Tippi’s batting away the birds from her bouffant. The kid froze and stared at her like he thought she was having a seizure. She dropped her hands. “Tippi Hedren? No?”

The kid shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Elizabeth Taylor? You have to know her.”

“Everyone knows Elizabeth Taylor. She lived in this neighborhood?”

“Yeah. For a while. Over on Manzanita, back when she was trying on Eddie Fisher.”

The kid’s eyes narrowed.

“Fisher. Eddie. Princess Leia’s dad.”

“Oh.” His eyes widened with recognition. “Yes.” He leaned back, seeming pleased with himself. “So, you came to Palm Springs to make... connections?”

“Connections. Is that what whoring yourself is called these days?” Donna laughed. “Yeah, I started coming every weekend or so. I figured it would be easier to catch a director’s eye prancing around a swimming pool than it was on one of those god-awful cattle calls they used to do. Do they still do those?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t.” She returned the lid to the ice bucket. “You don’t know Jack.” She paused for the punch line. “Webb that is. Jack Webb. He lived around here too.”

The kid shrugged. “I’m not familiar with him.”

“Shame. You two would’ve gotten on. He was all just the facts ma’am, too.”

The kid pretended — poorly — to be amused and rewarded her with a polite for-the-recording laugh. “Did coming here work for you?” Again, the NPR diction, punctuated by a precisely timed pause. “Did you get noticed?”

Donna was beginning to get a feel for this podcast business. She leaned into a well-polished contempt. “Oh, I got noticed all right.” Then allowed a beat to pass. “But not by any movie people.”

“By Joseph Fiato.”

“And others, but Joey was special.”

“Were you aware from the start that Fiato was involved in organized crime?”

Donna grunted. “I was.”

“This didn’t concern you?”

“Listen. Back then — here — it didn’t concern anyone. The Hollywood crowd, the mafiosos, even some of the police. It all blended together. A cocktail with a killer kick.” She pointed at the mic, then whispered behind her hand, “That’s pretty good. You can make like you made that up yourself if you want.”

He closed the scrapbook and studied her with his gray, unblinking eyes, his gaze lingering on her hairline. Donna straightened her wig. The kid seemed as embarrassed as she once might have been. “May I?” he said, gesturing to the shaded window.

“Sure. Just drop a token in the slot.”

“I’m sorry?” His head tilted like a dog’s at a high-pitched whistle.

Donna waved his question off. “Never mind. Go ahead.”

He rose and went to the window, tugging the chain with a smooth hand-over-hand motion. Sunlight flooded in, and in an instant Donna could feel the temperature rising. The kid stood there, in silhouette, taking in the view. “That’s a shame.”

“You stop seeing the wires,” Donna said, knowing he was speaking of the power lines garroting the mountain view. “After a while you do. But they’re always there. In the background. Humming. It isn’t so noticeable when people are around, but this time of year, the whole street is empty. It gets pretty damn quiet around here.”

“Quiet enough to hear the hum of the power lines?”

“Quiet enough to hear a mouse fart. You can hear them now if you listen hard enough. The wires. Not the mice.”

“Why don’t they bury the lines?” He began lowering the shade. “Save the view?”

“Maybe it’d cost too much. Or maybe someone’s afraid what might get turned up once they got to digging.” She leaned in toward the mic. “That’s a joke. I repeat, a joke.”

The kid returned to his seat.

“It’s Deepwell,” Donna said. “They’ve always been here.”

“Always have been doesn’t mean always have to be.”

“Aren’t you the philosopher?” She pasted on a parody of a smile and batted her eyelashes at him. “Listen,” she said, letting her voice drop an octave, “if they aren’t gonna hide the wires for Elizabeth Taylor, they sure as shit aren’t gonna hide them for me.”

“You have a point.” He glanced down at his computer. “Let me make a quick adjustment to the balance.” He fussed a bit, his focus on the monitor. “I’m curious,” he said. “The intake guard. What did you say?”

“I said she was bawling—”

“I’m sorry. I meant, what did you say to her? When she began crying in front of you?”

“What could I say? Sorry for your loss? I said, That’s terrible. Or something along those lines.”

“Were you worried that she might mistreat you later to make up for this display of weakness?”

“Damned straight I was worried,” she said, the memory of her vulnerability turning prickly. “I was terrified. I was in prison.”

“For the murder of Joseph Fiato.” He looked up from the screen, his eyes locking in on hers. “A crime you didn’t commit even though you confessed to doing so at the time.”

She snorted. This kid thought he was so flipping smart. Pretending to mess with his computer. Jumping her around in her story. Poking around for a sore spot and trying to catch her off guard. “Don’t be stupid. Why would I say I killed Joey if I didn’t?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

She sloshed the wine in her cup, then rested the cup on the table. “What makes you think I wasn’t the one who killed Joey?”

“There were rumors—”

“There’ve been rumors since Eden. You want the truth? The unembellished and verifiable truth? Here it is — the son of a bitch needed killing. I did it.”

“Why?”

“Rumor has it...” she drawled out the words, “he was cheating on me, and stealing from me too, though he called it ‘investing.’ Claimed he’d lost it. That same night I saw him out with this bimbo. My investment was hanging around her neck.” She shrugged. “I snapped. Crackled. Maybe even popped a little too. I shot Joey in the gut. Twice.” She lifted her hand and feigned a tremor. “My hand was shaking. I was aiming for his balls.” She stilled the trembling and reclaimed her wine. She lifted the cup to her lips and wet her mouth. “No regrets. No regrets at all. No, wait, that isn’t true. I do have one. The DA offered me a plea deal if I waived a jury trial. I would’ve enjoyed a chance to go on the stand before my peers. I could have given Susan Hayward a run for the money. All I got was an old gray judge flapping around in his black robe.”

“Wasn’t she executed at the end of the film?”

“Ah, so Susan Hayward you know.”

“I’ve seen the movie.”

Donna nodded. “Based on a true story, it was. Could’ve been me.” She rapped her knuckles on the table, a practiced move she often used at this point in her account. “The DA told my lawyer he’d pursue the gas chamber if I didn’t accept his largesse. I knew he meant business, so I plead down.”

“You were convicted of willful manslaughter.”

“Yes. That was the plea.”

“And you were sentenced to three years.” His words hung between them for a moment. “A light sentence—”

“Not if you’re the one serving it.”

“Your actual incarceration lasted only four months. I understand this was before mandatory sentencing, but—”

“They take time off for good behavior.” She swirled her cup, watching the diminished ice cubes spin. “Mine was... exemplary.”

“This degree of leniency implies you had influential friends pulling strings for you.”

Donna shrugged her response.

He slapped his palm on the tabletop and leaned in, turning all bad cop. It was almost cute. “Someone was protecting you. Who was it?”

The kid was trying to trigger a response. All he got was her indulgent stare. “Nobody was protecting me. Joey was a bastard. Maybe someone was grateful to me for taking him out.”

“Was that somebody Johnny Giancanna?”

“Never heard of him.”

“I’m sure you have.” The kid riffled in his beat-up messenger bag and pulled out a manila folder. “You used to date each other. I’ve come across photos of the two of you together. Here, in Palm Springs.” He took a pair of photocopied pictures from the folder and slid them to her. The images were a bit grainy, but it was certainly her own foolish young face staring back at her. To the mic, “Donna is now looking at the photos.”

“Yes, indeed, Donna is.” She raised her eyebrows. Shook her head. “I don’t know. There were so many men back then. Did I date some guy name Giancanna? Maybe. Probably even. But I don’t remember him if I did.” She placed her hand over the photos. “You should let me keep these for the scrapbook.”

“He’s dead. Giancanna.” The kid opened up the folder once more and took out a clipping from a newspaper. He passed it to her. Again, to the mic, “I’ve given Donna a copy of Johnny Giancanna’s obituary.”

The article was from some local Long Island rag, dated two months earlier. She scanned the piece and handed it back to him. “My condolences to Mrs. Giancanna.”

The corner of the kid’s mouth twitched. He returned the clipping to its folder and the folder to the messenger bag. He looked up. “I think you were alternately pressured and bribed to admit to a murder you didn’t commit.”

“Manslaughter. Court said it was manslaughter.”

“You were covering for a mob-related killing. At Giancanna’s behest.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.” She slapped her palm on the table and leaned in, mimicking his tough-guy charade. “There was never any kind of mob activity here.”

“It’s been well-documented that many mafiosos spent time in Palm Springs in the 1960s. You yourself moments ago said—”

“Yeah, sure, but they were here vacationing. That’s why there were never any dirty deeds. You got to understand. Palm Springs was the goddamned Switzerland of organized crime. The guys came, brought their nearest and dearest with them, the wives, the kids, the mistresses, sometimes all of ’em hanging out together at the El Mirador’s pool. That’s why I stayed on here. After my parole ended. I figured I’d be safer here.”

“You feared reprisal?”

Donna nodded.

“I’m sorry, could you answer aloud.”

“Yes. I was afraid of reprisal.”

“From Fiato’s associates? Or from someone else?”

She studied the liver spot on her hand. “I still spend a lot of time at the El Mirador. I go there for trysts with a handsome younger man. I am sad to say that man’s my doctor, and he’s only interested in checking my blood pressure, not raising it.” A transient wrinkle formed between her visitor’s brows. She guessed she’d lost him. “The old hotel is a medical center now.”

“All right.” He gave a slight nod that, combined with the softening of his gaze, seemed more to signal a decision to change tack than an expression of satisfaction.

“All right,” she echoed him.

“Fiato,” he said, dragging the name out, “was made in Detroit.”

“You make him sound like a sports car.”

“He was rumored to get around like one. My source says he liked going fast and taking chances.”

“There you go again with your gossip.”

“Annalisa Scarpa.”

“Another stranger,” Donna said, modulating her tone between amusement and contempt. “Is she your ‘source’?”

“Miss Scarpa was the niece of the head of one of the New York families.”

“So?”

“I’ve found reason to doubt your account of the evening, and to believe that you weren’t the one following Joseph Fiato the night of his murder. It was Annalisa Scarpa. She watched Fiato slip away from another woman’s hotel room. She followed him to the house he rented. Miss Scarpa shot him twice in the stomach, then turned to her uncle to clean up the mess.”

“Strange that I didn’t see her there.” The fly found its way to the rim of Donna’s glass. She swiped at it and almost upset the wine. She’d about had enough of both of her pesky visitors. “Check the police records if you can find the stone tablets they’re engraved on. I was there. I called the police. That’s why the DA went easy on me. ’Cause I turned myself in.”

Tiny lines formed at the corners of his eyes. He was enjoying this. “She left him,” he continued, ignoring her, “with a tricky situation. He needed to cover up the crime, but he couldn’t make it look like a hit by another family. As you have said, Palm Springs was neutral territory. An allegation against the member of another family could have triggered a war between the families. Worse, it could’ve broken the peace and ruined Palm Springs for everyone.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. Donna knew a thing or two about bluffing. He was trying to project ease and confidence.

“Someone got the idea to present the act as what it was. A crime of passion, only with a certain struggling actress in the lead role. I’ll bet you never laid eyes on Joseph Fiato before the night you called the police from his home.” The kid’s desire to push her into a confession was rubbing his NPR plating clean away, leaving him like every other too-hungry, know-it-all punk. “But you were quite familiar with Annalisa’s cousin.”

“I don’t know what you’re going on about. Where did you come up with this stuff anyway?”

The kid shook his head and sat up straight. He bit his lip. He folded his hands. “Doesn’t it bother you? Johnny Giancanna stole your life,” he said, almost as if he was determined to be outraged on her behalf, even if she couldn’t be herself. “You wanted to be famous. To be a star.” He reached for the scrapbook and flipped it open to her headshot. “But nobody remembers you. Those roles you talk about — I bet half your scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, and the other half have crumbled to dust.” Donna fought the urge to throw her wine in his smug, lineless face. “I did try to research you. You don’t even rate a mention in the IMDb, and my old roommate who shoots green screen shorts in his garage is listed.”

“You sure do know how to charm a girl.” Donna closed the scrapbook’s cover. She felt ridiculous now. Regretted she’d even thought to show it to him.

“I’m one of maybe a handful of people outside Palm Springs who even know your name, much less care about your story.”

“Why were you so hot to talk to me if no one cares?”

He nodded at the mic. “You tell me what really happened that night, and I’ll make people care. Really care. Not just a group of gay guys dragging out an elderly woman — a washed-up never-was — to tea dances. Presenting her as an amusing oddity. Laughing at you behind your back.”

His words stung. “They don’t. That’s not true.”

“Perhaps not, but you fear it is.”

Donna’s aging refrigerator hummed in agreement. She glanced back at it, wondering which of them would outlast the other.

“Annalisa Scarpa died twenty years ago. Cancer. Johnny Giancanna is gone. Why not clear your name? Get your story out there. Who knows? It might even get picked up for TV or a movie. You know that happens, don’t you? People will know who you are then.”

Donna snorted. “TV or a movie. Right. I was Joseph Fiato’s girlfriend. One of them anyway. I killed him. You’ve come up with quite the scenario, but none of it’s true.”

“All right,” the kid said, rising. “If you insist on sticking to this fabrication, I can’t help you. People would have listened to your story. They would have cared about it. They would have cared about you. You might have even become famous.” He stood and made to close his laptop. “Thank you for your time.”

The truth. It was supposed to set you free, right? She’d always envisioned lying on her deathbed, spilling her guts to a priest. Her eyes fell to the closed scrapbook. Not a goddamned thing in there worth anything to anybody. Maybe this way she could spare the padre’s ears and even gain something other than absolution for her trouble.

“Wait.” Donna reached out to him. He tilted his head and looked down at her, but remained silent. “Maybe you’re right. Who’s left to care anyway?”

“I’m listening.” He slid back into his chair. “In your own words. What happened?”

“Johnny promised me he’d take care of me. In and out of prison.” She snatched up her wine and took a deep sip. “See to it I was set up for life.”

“If you stepped in,” the kid prompted her when her silence went on too long for his liking, “and took the blame for the murder his cousin committed.” A moment passed. He raised an eyebrow and reached out to turn off the mic.

Donna caught his hand. “Yes.”

“He guaranteed you would receive a light sentence?”

“Yes.”

“How do you believe he arranged this?”

Sinatra stared bug-eyed at her from the Rat Pack photo. Never rat on a rat.

“That I will leave to your own conjecture. You know as much about it as I do.”

“But you trusted that Giancanna would deliver on his promises?”

The fly buzzed by her ear. Donna swung at it. “Yes. I trusted him. Somewhat. I also trusted things wouldn’t work out so well for me if I refused, if you get what I’m saying.”

“He threatened you.”

She shook her head. “Johnny never threatened. He made examples of the people who disappointed him. Made it clear to all that there were severe and lasting consequences for letting him down.” The heat was getting to her. She cast a glance at the thermostat. “He asked me to take the truth of what happened to my grave. I promised I would, but it’s been more than a minute.”

“Did Giancanna keep his promises?”

Johnny had kept his word, though not in the way Donna had thought he meant. She never laid eyes on him again, not after the night he pressed the pistol into her hand. “Yes. I came out of prison with a hundred and fifty thousand tax free in the bank. May not sound like much now, but it’d be like someone handing you a cool million today. I bought this house with it. Invested the rest. I did okay.”

The kid reached over and gripped her hand. “To be clear, you are saying Annalisa Scarpa murdered Joseph Fiato, and Johnny Giancanna offered you an easy sentence and what amounted to a fortune if you’d confess to the murder.”

Donna snatched her hand from his grasp. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” She glared at him. Angry with him. Ludicrous. Why should she be angry? “Yes,” she said again, concentrating on speaking in a calm voice, “for taking the rap for his precious cousin.” Donna broke out in a cold, oily sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature. She felt a sharp shock of nausea, like the time when a fall dislocated her shoulder and the ER doctor snapped it back into place.

The air around her grew thick, suffocating. She’d been lying so damn long. Until that moment she’d never realized the lie was like the boy in the old story, with his finger plugging a dike to hold back the ocean. The utterance of one truth ushered in a plague of others.

She was no goddamn actress. Never had been.

She would have never made it. Everyone had known it. Johnny had known it.

Deep down, she knew it too. That was the real reason she’d made the deal. And that was the reason she’d kept the secret. Not from fear — not this long, at least — or because of a promise made, but because without the lie, who was she? The lie made her somebody. Without it, she wasn’t dangerous, she wasn’t even interesting. She was just another goddamn never-was.

“How does it feel?” he said. “After all this time, finally speaking the truth?”

“How does it feel?” A jolt of remorse rocked her. She’d always expected to feel relief, but what she felt was nothing like truth’s promised freedom. What she felt felt a lot like loss. Like grief.

The kid watched her, seemingly unaware, or maybe just unconcerned. He got what he came for. She recognized the look in his eyes, it was the same she’d seen in Johnny’s when he realized she’d given in, that she’d agree to all he wanted. But Johnny, prick that he was, had given her something in exchange. More than a guarantee of a comfortable life, he’d offered her an identity. A mystique. All she’d ever had, all she’d ever been, was the story Johnny gave her, and in mere minutes, the kid had taken it away.

He took and only offered the flimsiest of maybes in return.

“It feels like I lost a part of myself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing.” She couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye. She focused on the sparse gold stubble on his chin. Probably not even man enough to grow a full beard. “You at least owe me one thing. Who is this ‘source’ of yours?”

A beat of silence. “I apologize for misleading you,” he said. “I was going off my intuition more than anything else. News clippings. Old photos. Of you and Giancanna. Of Scarpa and Fiato. But none of you and Fiato. Something didn’t add up. When I started to dig... well, there really were rumors—”

“I don’t think I want you to use this.” She pushed up from the table, ready to up the air-conditioning. The room reeled around her. She grasped the edge of the table and closed her eyes, waiting for the sensation to pass.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She held up her hand. “I’m fine.” She opened her eyes, and realized it was true. She once again stood on solid ground. “I want you to stop recording.”

The kid watched her but didn’t move.

“I said stop recording!” she shouted at him.

He jolted, then tapped the computer screen. He stared up at her, his lips parted, the tiny line returning to his forehead. “Are you sure I shouldn’t call someone?”

“I’m fine. I just don’t want you to use me in your...” She waved at the mic.

“All right,” he said. “It’s clear you’ve had a change of heart, and I don’t want to upset you any further.” He turned off the mic and unplugged it from his laptop. “I need to get back to the city soon anyway.” He closed his computer. “Maybe I can call you in a couple days? See how you’re feeling then? Maybe you’ll change your mind after you’ve had time to relax. To reconsider.”

Donna nodded.

“Okay.” The kid gave her a smile that landed midway between reassurance and condescension. He slid his laptop into his bag. “I want to say, though, that even if you decide not to let us use your story, I hope you’ll be happy knowing there’s at least one person who doesn’t see you as a killer. I know the truth. You’re just a nice—”

“Old lady.”

The kid’s face flushed. “I was going to say—”

“It’s fine. We’re dealing in truths here, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are.” The kid rose and shrugged the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Hold on,” Donna said, and the kid stopped, a look of hopeful expectation spreading across his face. “I know you don’t understand, but there’s one more thing I should show you. Maybe then you will.”

The kid hesitated but sat back down.

Donna crossed the kitchen and made her way to the cabinets, tugging open the drawer where she’d left Sally. She lifted the pistol from the drawer and turned it on the kid. For a moment he looked intrigued, but then his eyes popped open wide. All color drained from his face.

“What—” he began, jumping up and knocking his chair over.

Donna shot twice, catching him first in the stomach, then the shoulder. He fell back on the floor with a thud, then started kicking his heels against the linoleum, trying to push back, away from her.

Donna went to him. Looked him straight in the eye. “Truth is shit. The story’s all that matters. The story Johnny gave me was all I ever had. He didn’t steal my life. You, you little son of a bitch, you’re the one trying to do that.” She aimed at his head and pulled the trigger, then laid the gun on the table.

The fly landed on the kid’s parted lips.

Donna stood there for what seemed a very long time listening to the whir of the overhead fan, watching the fly crawl over the kid’s face. Then she began to move, her own body on automatic, her slippers making squishy, sticky sounds as she traipsed through the kid’s blood to reach the phone. She punched in three numbers.

“I need to report a murder. Yes, I’m safe. I’m the killer.”

The Ankle of Anza by Eduardo Santiago

Anza

It took awhile for the concerned neighbors to settle down. After the scraping of metal chairs on the worn linoleum, and the greetings of neighbors who rarely saw each other, an expectant silence swept the room. This was Anza, a small community as far as population, but huge in terms of land. Most of it was worthless mountaintop — high desert they called it. Sand and scrub, and too much damn gravity.

But those of us who live here wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s peaceful and quiet, save the occasional meth lab explosion. And God-fearing country for sure. I turned to face them, each of their dirt-worn faces. There’s a look to us here, beady eyes from squinting against sand and wind, white, weathered skin, thinning hair, even the women, whose long gray strands clogged sinks all over Anza Valley.

The last time they gathered, Jimbo Lure’s cousin had come to propose solar farms. There was an expectation of wealth, as if everyone had an oil well in the backyard just ripe for the picking. But the more the proposal got into crystalline vs. thin film vs. photovoltaic, and words like extrapolation, the audience began to glaze over. Even if they all pooled their money and their land together, as Gordon Lure suggested, he was talking a million-dollar investment before profits. No one here was worth a thousand, let alone a million. No one here was willing to risk the rewards. Coming up on five years ago, that was. There are solar farms here now, but none of the people present were making the money. No one knew those who were profiting, silent partners and all that. But these people whose eyes were on me now, I knew them chapter and verse.

“I want to give you people a heads-up,” I said to them. I’m not used to public speaking, in fact I don’t speak much at all, but these were all people I know. “We have a cat burglar up in here. There’s no denying it any longer.”

There were many whats and what he says and speak ups. This is what’s called an aging community, too many of us on the sliding slope to eighty. We became hard of hearing from wearing old ears and having no one to listen to anymore save for the TV, which can be turned up or down depending on mood or need.

I repeated myself with a bit more vocal power.

“What’s with the cat shit, Dave? Ain’t she just a plain ole fucking burglar?” asked Don Donner, who had never uttered a sentence without a fuck or a shit in it.

“She has the nasty habit of sneaking into your home when no one’s there, locking up when she leaves,” I said. “Opens up your vehicles, takes a few things, locks it all up when she leaves. She’s meticulous, leaves the place like you left it. You just think you’ve misplaced things, but she took ’em. Will slip into an unlocked door, take your things while you’re asleep. She has taken important things from several people that I know, including but not limited to car titles, the key to your PO Box, birth certificates and death certificates, property documents, phones, tablets, laptops, knives, flashlights, food, stuff like deodorants, prescription glasses, wallets, whatever she can carry. Never breaks nothing, not a window, not a lock She’s stealth.”

“That don’t make her no cat,” Donner said, then cleared his throat. I could practically smell his phlegm swirling down the sagging esophagus.

“Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, but she’s a wily one. She will use your electronics, try to access Google accounts, try to get a reverse mortgage just to mess with you.”

Whenever I’m in the same room with Don Donner I find myself trapped in an argument. I try so hard to avoid him, at least to avoid talking with him, but it’s like he sets a trap and I traipse right into it.

Thankfully, a hand went up that wasn’t Donner’s. It was Jasper Grosch, ninety if he’s a day. Came down with Parkinson’s twenty-plus years ago, he’s shaky as hell but he’s still here. I nodded at him to speak.

“This young lady from these parts?”

“Has no permanent address. Made some friends out behind Circle K, betrayed them, robbed them, upset them. They threw her out. She will break into your garage, sheds, storage buildings. Takes small things, doesn’t drive so it has to be stuff she can carry concealed. I’m sure she’s hoarding a lot of the things. I would love to locate her lair, see about recovering some of the loot.”

Don Donner opened his mouth to speak, but I spoke first and I spoke forcefully.

“She’s a goddamn cat burglar, Don.”

Don Donner’s eye roll was so severe that it would have been kinder if he’d told me to fuck off. “Fucking birth certificates,” he spat out.

“Is there camera footage?” came a small voice in the back. Marci Day, born again and dumb as a box of lint. “Maybe post office, bank.”

“She’s not the type to visit either one of those establishments, Marci,” I answered.

“Probably lives in a box somewhere,” Marci said, her head cast down as if to elicit the pity of the Lord.

“A litter box!” shouted Jimbo Lure.

“Seriously, Jimbo?”

Jimbo’s our one and only barber. Every man goes every couple of months and endures jokes Jimbo makes up all on his own, or so he claims. Example: Hear about the girl who wanted to have sex all the time? She had get-down syndrome. I knew Jimbo from school, class clown, disruptive, lonely. Never changed.

“This is a wild animal we’re talking about here,” I said. “We need to be on the lookout as if there was a brown bear out there, or a wolf.”

“With all due respect to wild animals.” Jimbo again.

“Has a police report been filed?” asked Marci.

“I filed one,” I said. “But you know how it goes.”

Everyone murmured agreement. As an unincorporated area of Riverside County, there are no police here, never have been. From time to time a sheriff’s cruiser will travel through. If there’s a serious crime, something to do with bodily attack, a shooting, what have you, they’ll come up and investigate. But calling the cops here is an exercise in faith and patience because it will take them at least forty-five minutes to an hour to get here, depending on where they are. We don’t have cops and we don’t want cops. We’ve learned to take care of our own up here, which is why we all have big dogs and why all these people showed up today.

“Whoever it is gonna go into the wrong house with dogs, protective ones, and get her bony ass tore up but fucking good,” said Donner, who had traded bounty hunting for herding mountain goats fifteen years ago.

“She’s too smart,” I countered. “She’ll just avoid houses with dogs.”

“What if it’s one of them quiet dogs?” Donner said.

“There’s no such thing as a quiet dog, Don. All dogs bark, particularly at strangers.”

“Not all of ’em. My dog’s not a barker. Whenever he tries it I blast him with my cane.”

“I don’t know a single person, other than you, who will hit a dog for barking,” I said, feeling like an idiot for letting Don Donner trap me into one of his arguments again. What type of man admits to hitting his dog for barking in public, just to win an argument? He knew I had him, so he launched in another direction.

“You know, if any of you dumb cocksuckers gave a shit you would post a description of this low-life piece of shit,” Donner said, his eye on me. “If she is doing what people claim she is, then she will get what’s coming to her. I guarantee this person isn’t stealing my keys.”

“And here I thought it was my neighbors, the ones with the cabin tent and the too many kids,” said Denver Abernathy, an unlit cigarette in his hand. “We have two sets of keys missing... time for new locks, I guess.”

Having said what he had to say, Abernathy sauntered outside for a smoke.

“How you all so sure she’s a she?” asked Marci Day.

“I seen her,” I said. “Loiters at Circle K, hair same color as a banana.”

“If you seen her why didn’t you catch her?” said Donner.

I took a deep breath. “Because, Don, you gotta catch her in the act. I can’t just lasso her and force her to confess. That will get me arrested.”

“Jesus can help her if only she’d ask,” said Marci.

“Come off it, Marci,” Donner said. “What the fuck has Jesus ever done for you?”

“Plenty,” countered Marci with a puff of her chest that would have made a pro wrestler weep.

Talk of Jesus always brought these meetings to a halt and Marci Day knew it. Donner would have none of it.

“The broad’s an ankle,” he said, “which is ’bout two feet lower than a cunt.”

Donner narrowed his eyes at Marci now, waiting for something sanctimonious, but got none. Unlike me, she knew better than to argue with Don Donner.

“May I suggest we do the right thing,” Marci said, her eyes fixed on Donner, “and leave the poor creature be. The level of desperation driving her to a life of crime, I hope we never know.”

“I say we find her and stomp her out,” Donner said. “But everyone just wants to chew the cud, hear theyselves talk like words matter.”

“They do matter,” I said. “It’s why we’re all together. We need some good ideas, we need ideas that are legal and aren’t going to land any of us in jail.”

“Lock your doors!” shouted Jimbo Lure, then let out a big dumb laugh. No one joined in.

I looked at Jimbo. Poor man can’t help that he’s an idiot. “Thank you, Jimbo,” I said. “In a perfect world that would be a great suggestion. But all it takes is that one day you’re in a hurry. That one day you get careless.”

Jimbo looked at me with a strange expression, not used to anyone actually talking reason to him when he flies off with one of his idiocies.

Teddy Elderberry, resplendent in tie-dye shirt, tie-dye pants, and tie-dye do-rag, made his way to where Firth was standing. Elderberry had done time before cannabis was legal. Now, he wants those years back, but he’s not going to get them. Elderberry whispered in Firth’s ear and Firth nodded his head up and down in agreement.

“Our friend Teddy Elderberry picked up a lot of useful info in the clink,” Firth said. “I suggest you all pay close attention.”

“Thank you for that introduction, bud,” Elderberry said with a wide grin. He was proud of the time he had served and survived. “What you guys need to do is send in a decoy, friend her, hang with her, find out where and with who she is affiliated. Then you set her up with some keys and an addy. Have authorities waiting to take her down. Don’t just sit around waiting to see who gets hit next. Operation Ninja Takedown’s what you need. Fight fire with fire, you dig?”

“That’s the fucking stupidest idea I’ve ever fucking heard,” said Donner, picking up his cane and ambling out the back door, his cane making a tap tap tap sound because he thought rubber tips were for dicks. “You wanna catch her,” he called from the door, “you fucking go get her. Where you say she go, that Circle K?” He pointed across the highway, the convenience store being set right across from the meeting hall.

“Yeah, right over there, Donner,” I said. “Go get her, man. Take her down.”

Donner lifted his cane and swung it through the air like a golf club meant to clobber. I had meant to be funny, but no one laughed, not even Jimbo Lure.

The cat burglar was not at Circle K that afternoon. Just as the meeting was wrapping, Kimberly Miller (her actual name) was riding shotgun in a truck, sailing down the mountain on her way to Indio, the lowest of the low desert, with every intention of getting to the night market before the sun came up. The truck wasn’t new, and she’d had to cram her shit in the space not occupied by bags of chlorine and leaf skimmers, but it took the mountain roads with ease.

Behind the wheel was Justin Alvarez, the only friend she had left from down below. Even as she got in the truck she knew he wouldn’t be her friend for long. She just needed him to stay her friend long enough to get to Indio. They’d met in Palm Springs five years ago, when she still had a house and a husband, a kid and a teenage pool boy.

Justin was no one’s idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might look like. At least he wasn’t her idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might be. Bernard had passed on the tanned and muscled blonds who applied and hired the one that mostly resembled an adolescent garden gnome. He was a fully bearded man now and taking the mountain roads with ease. They were well out of Anza in no time and traveling through the pine tree forest that links Anza to the desert floor. She wondered how much fighting and screaming Justin had witnessed in that house with the manicured cactus garden, the crystalline pool.

“You’re going back to Betty’s!” Bernard had shouted the last time she’d been in that house.

“I’m not going to Betty nothing,” she’d slurred. She didn’t want to go to rehab. Rehab is where the party ends. She was too young for that. Sure, she’d regretted that Baby Carol had seen her like that, and on Mother’s Day, no less.

“You’re disgusting.” Bernard brought it down to a defeated whisper.

“What she’s going to remember is...” She stopped to see if she could find the point to what she was saying. “... is you shouting.”

They had both looked at the baby who sat calmly playing with Legos. Go figure, a sixty-year-old man, just lost his wife of thirty years, no children, meets a desperate desert rat at the 7-Eleven on Vista Chino. He gets her pregnant, which shocks her because, well, he’s decrepit. So now there’s Baby Carol.

He wanted to name her after his dead wife and Kimberly just shrugged. If she couldn’t name her miscarriage, or abortion, what did she care what people called her? He dressed her up for Mother’s Day, all in pink, even the little shoes. No matter. Baby Carol was only three. She’d never remember any of this. There were plenty of Mother’s Days to come. Next year would be better. Stick to wine, ditch the blow.

That had been May. By August she had been to Betty Ford’s twice. Insurance covered most of the cost, but she hated it there. While sneaking a smoke out by Lake Hope, the immaculate man-made lake that is the centerpiece of the “campus,” she had looked up to the mountains bordering the valley and imagined it was more peaceful up there. Rehabs like to believe they are peaceful places, but that’s just because they paint everything beige. It’s actually exhausting — in the morning they get you up before you’re ready to get up, make you eat with other people, and participate in what they call their “wellness activities.” The mountain, as high as she could go, was the answer. Fewer people and it would be a lot cooler out. She scaled the fence and in less than four minutes was in the back of an Uber (Toyota Camry, navy blue).

“Get me as far from this place as quickly as you can.”

The Uber driver asked if she was sure she wanted to go all the way up the mountain.

“Yes, wherever it’s cooler. I can’t breathe down here.”

He’d turned to look at her and at a glance had tagged her as trash.

“How about Anza?”

He drove her up the mountain in the dark, the car winding and twisting through the hairpin curves, her stomach not reacting to it well. She could only see as far as the headlights let her. About an hour later, he stopped at a Circle K.

“Here it is, beautiful downtown Anza.”

Before he left, she blew him in the backseat. When he’d come, she asked him for a twenty and he told her to fuck off and left her in the dust. She was going to write him a lousy review but caught a glimpse of herself in the convenience store window and changed her mind. I have to start eating, she thought, I’m all skin and bones. And my hair! But a Circle K’s better than a circle jerk.

Welcome to your new life.

Except for the fluorescent lights of the Circle K, Anza had been dead dark that first night. Some bum told her there were abandoned buildings all over Anza. At first light she started looking for a place to crash. She settled into an old toolshed at the ass end of Dusty Road — that’s what it was called and that’s also what it was. That’s what Anza was like: no frills.

No thrills either.

Until she started robbing them. What else could she do? As soon as the Uber charge showed up on the statement, Bernard canceled her credit cards. She called him. He wanted to know where she was. She refused to tell him, so he canceled her phone.

“The only way to get your privileges back is to return to Betty’s and do what’s best for this family,” Bernard said before he hung up.

She hated that he called it a family, not a favorite word of hers. And she hated most of all that he called the place Betty’s, as if the former first lady would be waiting behind the counter, like at a diner.

Hi, hon, what’ll you have?

An ounce of crank and a cup of Joe, Betty.

Now, Justin Alvarez was halfway down the mountain, halfway to the desert towns she knew better than she knew herself: Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and finally Indio. She had money but no credit card. No credit card, no Uber. The sunset turned the mountains orange. She wished it was dark so she could pretend she didn’t know where she was or where she was going or who that guy was beside her. Justin was holding onto the steering wheel hard.

“You okay?” she asked him.

He took forever to respond. “Yeah, twilight driving makes me sad.”

“It will be dark soon,” she said.

In the last light she’d seen the change in the terrain, from pine trees to mesquite to striped rocks to stretches of sand littered with what her mother called malicious plants — creosote, ocotillo, barrel cactus. Justin had to drive the last stretch of switchback curves in the dark, and as they twisted their descent, she could feel the heat rising up to greet her. You thought you could get away?

By the time Justin dropped her off outside Indio’s night market, she had four hundred and sixty dollars in her pocket. She’d asked for five hundred, but Justin needed some of it for gas.

He had convinced her to let him keep the loot and sell it on his own a lot farther away. “For your own good, Kim. Sell this shit near here, they’ll pop you before you start.”

He got off cheap. Hell, he could get five hundred just for the birth certificate down in Mexicali. He worked a blow job and tittie grope into the deal and she went along. The pool boy had been waiting all this time. Kimberly no longer looked as she had when he was cleaning her pool, but she was still Kimberly to him.

“You’re all the same,” she said before lowering herself on his rod. Soon as the transaction was over, she said she needed a beer.

“I don’t think so.” He didn’t sound like Justin anymore, he sounded like a total asshole.

“Get the hell out of here,” Kimberly growled, then hopped down from the truck and slammed the door.

It was August and Indio’s swap meet could only function at night when the temperature dropped from 117 degrees to a tolerable ninety-five. The night market was all too well lit, too nicely organized. The blacktop parking lot too clean. Was this Indio? You’d think it was Rancho Mirage or some other pretentious desert community. It irritated her to walk past dozens of vendors waiting for someone, anyone, to buy a trinket, some silver jewelry, purses, shoes, mattresses, blenders from 1995, Aztec suns made of pounded tin, and about a mile of Mexican food and drinks. Kimberly wanted beer but they had none, so she bought horchata in a cup with ice and it was the most delicious thing she’d ever had. She could have drunk down the whole dispenser.

As if drawn by invisible strings, she made her way to the back, beyond the light cast by the stalls, to where the blacktop ended and the sand and the weeds began. She smelled them before she saw them. They smelled just like the men who loitered around the Circle K in Anza. What was that smell? If she could bottle it, she could sell it as a pesticide. They were standing in a circle, talking in low voices. They were all colors; no one was exempt from the strings, the hooks. Take her for example, a white and, until recently, middle-class woman, until recently a pretty girl, naturally blonder than blond. Banana blond, some people called it.

“You’re wasting your life away serving tacos to tourists,” her mother had said. “You’re certainly pretty enough to be a stripper.”

She’d said so more than once, but stripping wasn’t for Kimberly. Too complicated. Too many routines. Too much competition from women who wanted to show off, who swung from those aluminum poles like glittering tether balls. These men, at the edge of the night market, were all shirtless and no one was tipping them for it. They looked up when she approached: the prey.

It’s amazing how quickly a pack of men can size up a woman walking alone, in the heat, in the desert, in the night. But just as quickly they looked away. Had she become that hideous? Just a bit ago Justin hadn’t thought so. But Justin lived on memories; the moment he’d started with remember this and remember that, she knew where they were headed, and it wasn’t Indio.

“Remember that time when I came over and you were pregnant and wearing an orange bikini?”

Hell yeah, she remembered. That week there’d been no way to get comfortable other than floating in the pool all but naked. And Justin had come stomping in with his leaf skimmer and his jugs of chlorine and just about scared the baby out of her. And her wishing he had. But it would be two more long, hot weeks before Baby Carol popped out. Baby Carol just a few miles from here. To hell with Baby Carol.

“Go away, esqueleto,” one of the brown men said.

She looked up at the mountain behind them. Atop that mountain were Anza’s high desert, homes without alarms, and men who weren’t so rude. Those men took your money, made the transaction quick, and the stuff was all good, always.

“I got money,” she threw back at him.

“Shit’s still missing,” Don Donner said.

I had to look to make sure he was talking to me. Unfortunately, he was. “It’s history, Don, let it go,” I said, and I meant it.

“She was holed up in Dusty Road.”

“Yeah, I heard that.” I’d heard it but I didn’t believe it. So they found some things that might have belonged to a homeless person. What does that prove?

“You let her slip through your fingers. You ever think about that?”

“What would you have done with her, Don, if you’d caught her?”

We were at the post office. Anza doesn’t have mail delivery. We all go to the post office to get our mail and parcels and to run into the neighbors we mostly don’t want to see. The post office is next to the town hall, which is across from Circle K. Farther down the road is our Dairy Queen and farther down the road is the rest of California.

“I’d bring her to justice,” he said, and he said it so casually that for a moment I took him for a reasonable man.

“She’s hardly worth the trouble, considering all she took.”

“That ain’t the point, Dave. Nobody appreciates a person walking through their house, going through their things.”

I shrugged and sifted through my envelopes — Senior Fitness, Senior Dating, Reverse Mortgage Lender, Assisted Living, Retirement Community, Burial Insurance, and without fail, the American Association of Retired People. I’m not even sixty yet! I wanted to scream every time. But I knew the envelopes couldn’t hear me. They had started arriving just as I turned fifty. As if turning fifty wasn’t depressing enough.

I looked up — Donner was still there, his little blue eyes glowing, his eyebrows sprouting white tentacles that reached out to ensnare me. “Then there is no point,” I said. “If some one is taking stuff you don’t really want or stuff you can easily replace, then where’s the crime?”

“There were valuable documents.”

I nodded in agreement. Sure, there had been a couple of birth certificates. That was about the most valuable thing.

Donner spoke like he was reading my mind: “Them birth certificates are more than just paper.”

“You ever hear of the Internet? Those things can be replaced, all you got to do is contact the hospital where you were born.”

“What about the fucking Mexicans?”

“What about them?”

“They can make themselves legal with them. You want some Mexican walking around with your name on ’em?”

He wanted to argue but I didn’t, so I made for the door. He tap-tapped behind me. “They can make themselves legal with them,” he said louder, as if I hadn’t heard him.

I was at my car and he was right there behind me. He was looking at me like he expected an answer, so I gave it to him. “All right, Don, I hear you. So two Mexicans are now legal because they got ahold of some birth certificates. Two.”

“Yeah, two today,” he just about shouted, tapping his cane hard on the gravel, “but the way those people fuck, there’ll be twenty by Sunday.”

I drove off but I was sure he was still talking to me. People come up to Anza for all sorts of reasons. Mostly good ones. When I called that meeting a couple of weeks ago, I felt I was doing my civic duty. All I wanted to do was alert the neighbors that there was something going on that might affect them. I did not count on reactivating Don Donner. I did not anticipate that lynch mobs would be formed, like it was up here in the 1860s when this was all Cahuilla land. All because a woman got desperate enough to go klepto. I’d heard talk at the barbershop that Donner and some old guys had decided to waste their time dragging the mountain for her, had found some stuff in a shed on Dusty Road. Stuff that could have belonged to her.

“Empty beer cans,” said Jimbo, while snipping away at what was left of my hair.

“Could be anybody’s,” I shrugged.

“Oh yeah, get this — rag, used.”

“You mean like for the period?”

Jimbo nodded, a big grin across his stupid face. “Could be anybody’s,” he repeated. “Donner’s sure it was hers.”

“Oh yeah, did it taste like her?” I said, appealing to Jimbo’s subtle sense of humor. It worked. He about took an ear off, he was laughing so hard.

I couldn’t help thinking about her, at least whenever I drove past the Circle K, which was all the time. She hadn’t slipped through my fingers. I saw her, that’s all. Plenty of people had. She was always there, sipping a beer or a cherry Froster, smoking, minding her own, watching the traffic go by. I wondered if she had plans, dreams, a past. I guess everybody has a past. It was her present that sucked. Not much of a life. Who can blame a woman like that for sneaking into houses? Seeing how we lived gave her something to do. I blame myself for what happened because I’m the one that made a big deal out of it. I’m the one who tagged her as a cat burglar. I’m the one who brought Don Donner into it.

Kimberly Miller was lying on human skin, warm, moist, a chest moving up and down beneath her own. How long had she been here? No matter, it was nice. She kept her eyes closed. Better not look at him too close, there was no telling what she was cuddled up to. She used the same technique she had used when at Bernard’s — she had developed the ability to see without seeing. She could, for example, put on makeup without really looking at her face. She could walk by mirrors, shop windows, anything with a reflection, without seeing herself. It was better that way. She did remember things, though. She remembered handing money over in the dark, she remembered the small packet in her hand. She remembered an arm around her shoulder.

Suddenly she had a boyfriend! Who’s a ratface now? Ha ha. She liked having an arm around her, she liked being led this way and that, to a car, to a park, to blankets. There were stars and cicadas and she felt so good it was as if her whole body had become a young, lovely vagina. This is what God must be like, this arm around me. What is the matter with people? She had giggled at the thought last night, and the night before, and the night before that, when no one needed to sleep or to eat. If everyone got some of this there would be no wars, no murders, no sadness. Everyone would be a vagina and live free. She felt the sun on her face. The desert sun she knew too well, the thing that reveals everything that should be kept hidden. She could feel it burning her through the leaves, each ray a laser beam. She had to move, go find some real shade.

She opened her eyes a little bit, just enough to see through her eyelashes. Not too old, and in his sleep he appeared beautiful. Thank God he was beautiful. There he was again, God.

She managed to extract her arm from under him. He grumbled but continued sleeping. Standing up was difficult, but she clawed at a tree and it was as if the tree wanted her to get up, it stood strong for her. She felt her body — parts ached but she didn’t have to pee. Okay to get up, okay to walk. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d peed, she couldn’t remember how many days had gone by — could be two, could be twenty. She walked in the scorching sun. There was nothing anywhere. She thought of her homes, with her mom, with Bernard, her room at Betty’s.

None of them had been her home. A person without a home was always disoriented.

She looked up to the mountain that had always centered her, but the mountain was gone. Where the hell’d the mountain go? The sand was gritty and packed with boulders and the kind of trees nobody loves.

Her thoughts furiously arranged themselves into coherence, switches flipped, lights went on. Vision came into sharp focus and she regretfully knew where she was: back in Anza. Fuck me.

How did this happen? There was a vague memory of the back of a car and curves and a sense of nausea, stopping to barf. Just as well, she could always get money here without tending beejays. Her knees cracking and her guts wrenching, she pulled herself upright and headed for the comfort of the Circle K’s parking lot. She’d figure it out there. It was a good place to make a plan. Her brain hissed and sputtered with every step. Someone was walking behind her so she strengthened her resolve. The scent of goats and a tapping sound followed her, tap tap tap. Closer. Closer. And then she felt it, the pain, the back of her head, her body pitched forward, dropping fast, hard, and for good.

“Ah, but you’re a sad fuck of a creature,” Don Donner said with an uncharacteristic touch of sorrow as the cat burglar of Anza writhed in pain on the desert floor. The hair was still banana yellow but the rest of her looked like someone had taken a hooker, buried her alive until she died, then dug her up and brought her back to some sort of life. He’d hardly touched her with the cane and down she went.

Kimberly’s thoughts sliced through like ice shards: Go back to Betty’s, be a good mom to Carol, change Carol’s name to Destiny so you don’t hate her every time you look at her, divorce Bernard and take no money, talk to Eric about a job at Chica’s in Coachella, stay straight. Get a home of your own.

Forget Anza by never talking about it.

Everything Drains and Disappears by Rob Bowman

Bermuda Dunes

“Do you have a better plan?”

I didn’t.

“Then this is the plan,” Monique said.

We were broke, sitting at the counter in our apartment, a tilting slab that the ad had said was a breakfast nook but was really shellacked and cracked plywood that managed the gloomy trick of always being damp, always, 115 degrees outside, AC broken, water shut off for not paying the bill. But everything in that place still clammy and sticky, damp without cooling or quenching, like a board made of swamp.

Meanwhile, you drive up and down through the desert and every gated community here sucks down electricity, whirls their AC turbines as the windmills churn just next to the mountains, the wind slamming down the slopes and crushing along the fans, chopping down the birds. Not that I care. I wonder about coyotes running along there, eating the obliterated birds.

Fly through this valley and get knocked down and eaten.

Ever seen the entrances to those neighborhoods? Waterfalls of the clearest water you’ve ever seen, crashing and slamming down or tripping down little stone steps or shooting straight up, and burbling down. Endless gallons of it in the desert in front of the homes of men who haven’t gotten it up without prescriptions in decades.

Those entrances.

Those gates.

Guard booths and cameras, spiked walls, sign-in sheets, parking passes.

I didn’t have a better plan.

We went to the library where you can get on the Internet for free and we were a hundred bucks and a half-hour drive away from a used massage table. I call Monique “Mo” and she says she doesn’t like it, but she never tells me not to say it. I thought it was cute but maybe not. We talked the old lady down to seventy-five because it was all we had, and she could tell we meant it. She looked Mo up and down, rubbed her craggy face with her gnarled knuckles, nodded but it made her whole body move up and down because of how her back was bent and humped. She looked at Mo and asked if we needed lotion and oil bottles. They looked disgusting. We took them.

“Get what you need, honey,” the old lady said.

We didn’t know what she meant but we knew what we needed. And we intended to get it.

Between us, Mo is the smart one. And the driven one. And the tougher one. So, what do I bring to the table, or to the cracked bar top? I exist. I show up. It’s more than most guys, Mo would say. It didn’t feel like much of a compliment.

We met not quite three years ago, when she came through the burger place where I worked as little as possible while selling weed to the other people who worked there. I was sitting at a Formica table on my break when I saw her come in with a friend. I liked her right away and I offered her a joint.

“How much?”

“It’s a present.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I want to.”

Later she would tell me that was why she took it and why she gave me her number. Because I said I wanted to. She thought it sounded cool. What the hell did we know? You know what happened then or can figure it out.

It was good. It was really good. The furniture was old and lumpy, but we never noticed, curled up, smoking up, watching the TV and people living bigger than us, but it never seemed better than what we had. I’d cook her dinner; she’d do the dishes. We were happy. She would push me onto my back and lean over me, her long, dark hair falling over the edges of her face, like a curtain closing us in, our own little escape. Her hair would tickle my face and my chest, then fall more heavily onto me as she leaned closer, until she’d kiss me or blow a cloud of smoke into my mouth or both. It was really good.

And then six months goes by, a year. And we are doing okay. It’s not like when we first hooked up but it’s okay. Then I get fired but so what, the pot floats us by and her job answering phones for the extermination shop runs out when the owner goes to jail for poisoning some guy whose wife he was fucking or something, I don’t know, just that a hell of a lot of bug spray ended up in some guy’s body and he died something horrible, leaking from his goddamn eyes. So that job ends but we are okay.

Then the legal pot shops open and all the weed dealers are investment bankers and guys with MBAs and a clean criminal record to stand behind a counter, and I don’t know anybody with that where I come from.

And I’m not dealing in anything heavy. That’s how you find your way to the wrong side of the Loco Burros or the Bang Bang Boys, and last time I checked I don’t have an army.

And that’s how we started to get thin.

And that’s when Mo came up with her plan.

“Don’t you need like a license or some shit?”

“Who’s going to ask?” she said. “We’re not opening a shop somewhere, some fucking store. It’s just a drive and that’s it. Knock knock, motherfucker. Give a back rub and get out.”

“Is it safe?”

“How do you mean?”

“You are just going into some guy’s house,” I said, “and it’s just you and him? A stranger? I don’t like that. Seems way too fucking dangerous.”

“What are they going to do? Chain me up? You will be right outside. If I don’t come out, you call the cops. Or just charge right in, tough guy.”

She kissed me on the cheek and I felt a little better but not much.

We get the table and then it’s another trip to the library to post an ad online after we both sell plasma at the clinic for a little extra cash. Between us we got fifty bucks, a few stale cookies, and two miniature cups of apple juice. At the library we read a bunch of ads before we posted ours.

Sensual In-Home Massage. Satisfaction Guaranteed. We found a picture of someone who kind of looked like Mo, close enough to avoid someone flat out saying it wasn’t her even though it wasn’t actually her. Posted it with the phone number of a little burner phone we bought with the absolute last of our cash on our way to the library, after having bought a bottle of generic baby oil and a couple washcloths from the dollar store.

The fucking dollar store has everything you need to begin your own disgusting little start-up. Aisle after aisle of toxic plastic and stale food and discount Bibles. You ever seen someone buy one of those Bibles from the dollar store? Me neither.

Then we just waited for the phone to ring.

I drove.

Those first houses, those first guys, are all a beige, lumpy blur in my mind. I’d stop, help her get the table out of the back as she slung her bag over her shoulder, then get back in the car, lean the car seat back while she went and rang the doorbell or knocked or whatever. I would peek up, curious about these men. They were always men. They answered their doors in sweat suits, robes, khakis, football jerseys, without shirts. One guy in a full suit and tie. One guy with what looked, I swear to God, like a cape. Then I’d lie back in the car with the motor and the AC running, listen to music or sleep. Daydream. Worry.

I didn’t ask until after the third one. Because I already knew and I didn’t want to know.

“What happened in there?”

“What do you think?” Mo was double-checking the money. One hundred per hour and a forty-dollar tip. “Rubbed him down. Listened to him talk about a lot of nonsense. I’m pretty sure he was lying about all of it. Trying to sound cool or something.”

“Then what?”

Mo turned to look at me. “What are you asking?”

“Are you doing anything else? Who pays that much for a fucking massage?”

“Did you read the ad? It said sensual massage. What do you think happens?”

“You tell me.”

“Don’t boss me. You don’t own me. Who’s paying for your fucking lunch?”

“I drove. I did something.”

“Fuck you, you did something. You didn’t have to jerk off some guy, folding his gut up with one hand while you jerk him off with the other. Listen to his bullshit while wiping off your arm. Fuck you. What did you think was happening in there? Or did you just need to hear me say it? Is that what you want?”

I didn’t know what I wanted. I just drove on. We had another lined up for after lunch. And I still drove her there.

At night I would massage her hands and her forearms and her shoulders. She was sore all the time. I thought about her washing those hands, what she was washing off, I thought about the hunched-over old woman and her hands like tree roots. She told Mo to get what she wanted. I wondered what Mo wanted and if she was getting it.

I understood how it was and how it was reversed at night, me rubbing down Mo after a day of pulling and pressing flesh. Her sex drive pretty much disappeared. And so did mine. Then some days she would be all charged up, needing to fuck, to grind down against me until she came. She’d turn my face away, tell me to stop breathing, to not exist until she was done. Or she would hold my face with both hands and stare into my eyes and we’d feel fully in love. Then she would finish and curl up against me. Or she’d finish and leave for the couch. Or she wouldn’t finish and she would stomp out of the room and stand naked in front of the open refrigerator, the cool air chilling the sweat on her.

One time, as she stood naked in front of the fridge, I told her that having the door open would cool her off but the rest of the room would get hotter, that that’s how it works — it seems better but just gets worse all of the time.

“Shut up,” she said. “Go to bed.”

Then one day she said she had a new plan.

“You need to start pulling your weight,” she told me. “And we need to pull in more money.”

We were in a nicer place. New cell phones. No more going to the library to post ads. Bought a fancy new camera to get shots of her that would bring in more money, went out to eat, bought our pot from the places that had put me out of business. She’d chew down a gummy before going into the houses of the repeat guys she thought were disgusting. I hated those days. She’d lose track of time on the job, anything could happen. I had stopped asking questions, but I hadn’t stopped wondering.

“I hate these guys. Every one of them. I hate their stink. I hate when they touch me. It needs to be worth it. And that means we need to go bigger.”

“What does that mean?” I said. “Raise your rates? We could but we’d lose a lot of people. Probably just come out even in the end.”

“No. We need to make sure they tip more. Lots more. We need to get you better with that camera. And we need to get you some dark clothes.”

It wasn’t a sophisticated plan. I’d drop her off, unload the table, lie down, and wait, like always. Then, halfway through the massage, when she went to get the hot towels to wipe them down, she would open up the curtains, just enough for me, now hiding in the backyard, to get a shot with the long lens, a shot of them getting jerked off while rubbing her ass, make sure to get their faces, make sure to get their cocks, make sure to get wide shots and make sure to get close-ups, make sure it is obvious what is happening, make sure who it is happening to.

Then I’d text her the pictures.

She’d finish the job, collect, and ask for more. Then show them the pictures. Say she noticed the tan line from the wedding ring that was now sitting next to the bathroom sink. Say their wives might want to see these pictures. Say their bosses might want to see these pictures. Say that their HOA would probably be interested in these pictures. The HOA thing scares the shit out of rich people. It’s crazy. Then she collects more. She’ll take a personal check, sure. Write it out to cash. If it bounces or if it’s canceled, she still has those pictures.

And it worked.

Who were they going to tell? What would they say? They’d pay out.

And for some reason, there was still repeat business. They seemed to think it established something, made her safer in some way, made it certain she wasn’t a cop. They’d tip big and call again. Some guys seemed to love it, the danger of it, the torture of it. They wanted to see the pictures, asked her to be even meaner to them. That was mostly in Indian Wells, where the richest of the rich live. Something demented going on over there. She was asked to work a party there once. Turned out to be an orgy. They set up a room for her with her table in the middle and audience seating all around. She told me all about it. A crystal bowl for tips, larger bills for taking suggestions. I never saw the insides of these places, just slices through the curtains, backgrounds to all of that skin and hair.

She got calls from all over the valley, to the fancier parts of Indio, to Palm Desert, to Palm Springs, Indian Wells, Desert Hot Springs, off in the hills. We never went to Cathedral City. We lived there and didn’t want her to work where we went grocery shopping but pretty much never got calls from there anyway. We went to La Quinta, by the golf resorts, PGA West, called to the hotels but rarely went with no way to photograph the men, and too many cameras that didn’t belong to us that could photograph her, photograph me. Gated communities with their waterfalls and lighted xeriscapes, their tumbling plants and shooting fountains. She never gave her real name. The name she gave them would be sent to the guard house or she would be given a gate code and we would roll right in, without question. Sure, they had cameras, but so what? No one was complaining. They knew complaints would mean photos getting sent around.

I kept them all on a computer we had, every photo dropped in a folder with an address for a name. We never really knew names, not real names. No one knows anyone else if that’s the agreement, even now, even these days. Every day starts to feel that way, that you never really know anyone, even someone you live with.

It’s a cash business in a world of plastic people.

But we never went to Bermuda Dunes.

There’s something wrong with that place. It’s not a real town, it’s not a real anything. It’s an unincorporated island in the middle of the valley without any roads that go through. They pretend they are a town but it’s more like a fiefdom with its own security force instead of police. Some rich guy wanted to build the golf course of his dreams and named it after his favorite island getaway and the sand all around. Which, fine, whatever, there’s plenty of delusional assholes.

But he kept it completely private, completely isolated while surrounded by the other towns. Different electric company, different water company. They don’t even share sewage with the valley, every pipe leading straight down to septic tanks, seeping down through rock until they hit sand and then more sand, all of that water gurgling out while the shit builds. Centuries of drought and they throw their water away while everyone else struggles to clean it, filter it, pipe it back out, and Bermuda Dunes pisses it all away. But the golf course is green and the lawns are thick and the fountains at the gates gush twenty-four hours a day. The lords and ladies sit in their pools and suck on ice cubes while they flush all of their shit straight down and sit on it, float above it. When there is too much of it, some poor bastard with the worst job in the world sucks it all out, hauls it away.

The septic thing is terrible, sure, but is it really that different from the other communities? Yes. There are levels to the HOA there and the higher up you are, the more freedom you have. There are neighborhoods inside the neighborhood, low-income apartments and low-slung mansions, gates inside of gates. For some houses you need three separate codes and cards to get through. And all of it with private security that doesn’t give a shit about police because there aren’t any. The county sheriffs have jurisdiction in theory, but I’ve never seen one in there. Bermuda Dunes may as well be a private island, a banana republic, off the fucking map. And there’s only one way in and out for nonresidents. The traffic backs up for blocks with work trucks, nannies, deliveries, visitors, on and on. I didn’t ever want to go in there.

We had a year and a half of this built up. Then she gives me the address for the last stop of the day. I don’t know it, new client, and I don’t even know the street, so she tells me it’s in Bermuda Dunes.

“Fuck. Fuck that place. You should cancel.”

“The hell I should,” Mo said. “I looked up the street. It’s one of the big classic places. Sinatra shit. Deep-pocket money.”

“That’s even worse. Old money is drained down and low tips. They have no sense of what a dollar even is anymore. How old did they sound on the phone?”

“Not old.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Fifty, maybe. Hard to tell. Gravelly voice. You know. Hard to tell. When did you get so precious? When did you go back to giving a shit?”

It had gotten strange between us. Once it becomes routine to watch your girlfriend jerk off a guy while he sucks on her tit, something has gone really wrong. And I was certain she saw clients without me. I’d come home from a night out and she’d look far away from me while she was right next to me on the couch. Her silhouette looking blurry while we watched television. I didn’t say anything. I knew which variable could be dropped in our equation: I was the disposable one.

So I drove.

The entrance to Bermuda Dunes isn’t much different from all the others except how abrupt it feels, a sharp right turn into the gates. Some obscure provision about the point where Bermuda Dunes met La Quinta and Indio meant no one wanted to pay for a stoplight, so the four-way stop turns into a disaster about thirty times a day as everything backs up, waiting for the gate to let through guests and repair trucks and the endless chains of pool cleaners and landscapers.

Here’s a fun game: drive through the valley and count the beat-up white pickup trucks with a plug-in pool pump hanging off the bed, bungee strapped to a hand cart. And the wheels of the hand cart will be wrapped in duct tape. They clean the pools and sweat through the days, scrubbing down the walls with fifteen-foot extension poles because they aren’t allowed in the waters.

We were in line, the four-way stop lurching us in, when Mo leaned her seat all the way back, turned her back to me.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have a headache. All this stop and start.”

“Want to go home? You can cancel.” I was going to push on this point if she let me. Anything to not go in there.

“No. We are already here. I just need to rest my head.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

We continued to slowly roll into Bermuda Dunes, in pieces, as though the gates were taking bites from a long chain, chewing, swallowing, biting again.

“Different name today.”

“What?” She had a new standard fake name for gates. They never check it at these things, just look for the name on the list and wave you through, maybe print up a ticket for the dashboard. Veronica Hayworth. She said it was an inside joke, but I never got it.

“Yeah, they check IDs here,” Mo said. “So it’s under your name.”

“Fuck. We should get out of here. This whole thing feels like shit.”

“Come on, baby. Let’s get paid.” She looked at me and said it, something she had stopped saying to me a long time ago: “Please.”

She said please but it didn’t feel right. Please always feels like a pulling, like they are in front of you, leading you. But this time felt like a shove from behind, a hand between the shoulder blades. I stumbled forward.

And the cars kept worming up, chunk by chunk.

When we finally came to the booth, the guy looked straight at the list, barely glanced up at me at all. I thought he was just slacking off but then realized he was watching me the whole time, on a computer monitor linked to a camera above the door, pointed straight at me.

“Name.” Not a question.

I told him.

He handed me a printed-out card with a bar code, my name, and the address we were heading to. “Put that on the dashboard.”

I thanked him, pulled forward, listened to my phone tell me what turns to take. Mo sat up, suddenly feeling much better.

“He didn’t ask for my ID.”

“What?”

“You said they check IDs here. He didn’t ask for mine.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Mo said.

“Maybe.”

“It’s busy. Probably trying to get people through faster.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s wrong?” Mo looked at me.

I could feel her eyes on me, my cheeks grew hot. “You know what’s wrong. I don’t like it. I don’t like this. I don’t like this place.”

“Pull over.”

I did.

“Baby.” Mo hadn’t called me by anything other than my name in a long time. Then at the gate. Then this. I felt it in my chest but also between my shoulder blades. “It’s the last one of the day, baby. We are already here, already checked in.”

“So?”

“I hear you, baby. I do. Listen, just this one and then we go home. We can put on a movie. Make you feel good. Then I will take off all of tomorrow. Turn off the phone. Hell, if tonight pays out like it should, I’ll take the week off. We can drive out to someplace nice. Maybe the beach. Come on.”

A week on the beach. Calling me baby. Cocktails and bikinis. It sounded pretty good. I felt like I could become myself again.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

I finished the drive to the house. It was a nightmare for me. I glanced at the address on the card. It wasn’t the same one that Mo had told me. Blocks away. And a different street. Everything felt wrong. And that’s before I saw the house.

Most places out here are how you think of a house: front yard, house, fenced-in backyard. Most of Mo’s clients had pools out back, covered patios, which are good for me, they cut down on window glare, make it easier for me to get the shots. I can lie back on a pool lounger until the blinds open, get set up, take the pictures, and shoot them over to Mo.

The Bermuda Dunes house was a nightmare. A walledoff place where most of the house is the wall itself, a home built like a fort, a residential Alamo. Each house sits in a hollow square, a sharp-edged circle with the pool in the middle and no backyard. Probably some midsixties idea about how to party, shutting out the world from seeing what a swinging shindig is all about, steel gates and decorative spikes on the walls. They feel like prisons, these places. And Bermuda Dunes is full of them.

“Fuck. I can’t even get a shot here.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no backyard. It’s a courtyard place. This is a bust.”

“Bust? There’s no cops here,” Mo said. “It’s the Dunes.”

“I mean busted. Like broken. It’s shot.”

Mo thought for a second and then spoke again. “I will leave the gate not quite closed when they let me in. You can get a shot from in the courtyard, right?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Depending how the rooms are laid out.”

“I’ll put him right where you want. In a good spot. Just be on the far side of the pool so he doesn’t see you.”

That’s exactly where I set up and waited for the blinds to open.

I didn’t need to hear anything while waiting and usually had on headphones, listened to music, waited. The music kept me awake — I worried I would fall asleep otherwise. I sat in a chair and waited. The pool was nice but old, cement with dinner plate — sized chunks of slate around the edges, a different color above and below the surface, decades of residue and grit above the surface, while the water, constantly stirred by the filters and pumps, kept the sides more or less clean. Maybe some algae here and there.

There’s algae growing in the desert. That’s how much money there is here, rich people with their oases.

The furniture was all old and sun-bleached, the fabric strained and stretching on the loungers, so eaten by the heat that the cloth was crumbling, turning to dust. Sit on those things and take half the chair with you in your clothes, and that’s if it doesn’t collapse under you. I sat at an old café set — metal table, metal chairs, painted aluminum.

The vertical blinds moved but didn’t open, swayed a little, like something had brushed by them. It seemed early to be picture time, but I hadn’t looked at what time we set up. Maybe this guy wasn’t pretending to even want a massage. My eyes caught something scattered and dark in a jangled line. They looked like paw prints. Maybe the guy had a dog. I hadn’t seen any other sign of one, no dog tried to escape out of the front door, didn’t hear barking when Mo rang the doorbell. Could have been a coyote running through. But how did they get in and out of there? Over those walls? I wondered how they knew not to drink the pool water, how to resist something so blue and sparkling, how they knew it would make them sick, dry them out the more they drank.

Who ever thought to name them blinds? Why not hides? Why not screens?

The blinds moved again but not gently, not in a careful breath; there was a hard crashing and it seemed like something was pressing up against them, they shook and then parted, and I saw what it was.

It was Mo.

Her face was pushed up against the glass, her dark hair spilled all around her and strings of it between the blades of the blinds.

I stood still for a second, shocked, paralyzed.

Replayed that sliver of time in my mind. Oh no. Oh no. I jumped up from the chair, knocked over the table and the camera flew into the air, dropped down into the pool. I heard it splash as I ran past, went to the sliding door but it wouldn’t open, tried the next one over, locked. I kicked at a brick planter against the wall with my heel and a loose brick came free. I grabbed the brick and threw it against the glass, which wobbled and shook but didn’t break. The blinds jangled again.

Picked the brick back up and threw it with everything I had into the glass, aiming for where the first throw had scuffed and scraped it. The brick sailed through the glass and continued into the house where I heard it clang into something and thunk onto the floor. The glass held its shape for a second and then fell down like water in a fountain, splashing down onto the floor.

I ran into the room, a kind of family den, pictures of a couple all over the walls, hiking in the mountains, in front of a small plane at the tiny private airport. No massage table. I looked down and saw Mo, lying facedown on the floor halfway into the room. Her dark hair swirled out around her. I couldn’t figure out for a second what was wrong with her outfit and then realized she wasn’t wearing the same clothes as when I’d dropped her off. Her shape seemed wrong. She was arched up and bent, a tiny broken bridge. But I was moving fast and couldn’t stop. I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her over.

There was a knife sticking out of her chest, the lone pillar arching the bridge. Every alarm in my head was screaming but nothing was making sense. I shouted her name and heard her voice, a kind of involuntary yelp, but it wasn’t coming from her. It was down the hall. I looked at her face.

It wasn’t Mo.

Some other woman, in different clothes and with a different shape, just dark hair and a knife in her chest. I peered around the room and realized it was the same woman from the pictures on the walls, smiling in front of some Vegas fountain, pretending to hold up the Eiffel Tower, standing so as to trick the viewer into seeing something that wasn’t there, wasn’t true. I looked at the knife again. It was mine — how many times had I cooked with that knife? I had just the night before. Mo said she’d clean up.

The Bermuda Dunes security has sirens exactly like cop cars and they are always roaming around, looking for problems and excuses to flex as though they are real cops, like white blood cells, like vultures: clean up and tear apart. How were they already here? I hadn’t called, it had just happened. And then I knew. They were called before Mo’s face hit the glass and before I smashed it in.

I looked around and there was no place for me to go. Only one way out, straight through the front door, where security was already heading. I swept the room one more time, hoping a new door would magically appear, and there was Mo, standing and looking at me. She seemed a little sad but not very. Resolved.

“Sorry,” she said.

Then she was gone. I heard someone’s voice, a man’s. He was telling her to get in the car while she still could, get in the back, lie down. Then I heard him running out the front door. The sirens louder and louder.

I ran out of the broken window, leaped up and grabbed the edges of the wall, slicing my hands, pulled myself over and felt the terra-cotta spikes cut and scrape and pierce me as I went over, landed hard on the xeriscape rocks.

Those security guards got to me before I could stand back up, with HOA-issued Tasers and privately owned pistols. They dragged me across the stones and into the street and I was thinking as they did so that I needed the real cops to get there, that they would follow some kind of rules. And then I was on the pavement and it was hot as hell and there was so much shouting and my body shaking from the fish-hook barbs of the Taser in my skin. Then I saw a boot and it took forever to come down and it went past my eyes and past my face and into my throat. And I knew I wasn’t leaving.

Because nothing gets piped back or returned in Bermuda Dunes. It all just sinks down underneath. That’s when I felt everything in me do what happens to everything here: drain down and disappear forever.

A Career Spent Disappointing People by Tod Goldberg

Indio

Three hours out of the hospital, his left foot too swollen for a shoe, Shane’s car breaks down. It’s July, a trillion degrees outside, Interstate 10 a gray ribbon of shit unspooling east out of Palm Springs toward Arizona. Not exactly where he wanted to go, but who the fuck wants to go to Arizona? It’s what was on the other side of Arizona that mattered to Shane, the chance that there might be another life in that direction. He never liked being on the coast. The one time he ever even tried to swim in the Pacific — back when he came out on vacation with his dad, so, over twenty years ago, half his lifetime now — he was gripped with the ungodly realization that unlike a pool, there were no sides. You were always in the deep end out there.

It was a feeling that stuck with him, even when he was in one of those towns in the San Fernando Valley that sounded like an escape route from an old western: North Hills... West Hills... Hidden Hills...

The Honda was the one damn thing Shane thought he could depend on. But as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the check engine light flashed on. A hundred thousand miles he put on that fucking car and not a single problem, and the one time he really needed it, it was telling him it couldn’t comply. He didn’t have the time — or the money — to swing by the mechanic, considering he’d left the hospital before the nurse had filled out the paperwork for the cops, which was a problem. Not as big a problem as staying would have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have the cops trawling the city for him, especially since the wound did look self-inflected, since it was. Someone else holding his fucking hand while he shot himself with his own damn gun.

Shane couldn’t remember if he still had AAA, but he called anyway.

“Looks like you canceled your account six months ago,” the customer service agent said.

Rachel must have done it after she moved out. Like how she canceled their shared credit cards. Or how she took their dog Manny to get his teeth cleaned on the same morning she kicked him out of the house, knowing full well Shane wouldn’t have the cash to pick the dog back up.

God, he loved that dog. Probably more than he loved Rachel. No probably. Actually. If he got out of this fucked-up situation, he was going to buy another dog that looked like Manny and name him Manny too.

“How much is it to re-up?” Shane asked.

“It’s sixty-eight dollars, which gets you seven miles of towing service.”

“What if I need to go farther?” Shane asked, thinking, What the hell, maybe I’ll have AAA tow me to Arizona, give me someone to talk to. Or maybe he’d just steal the tow truck. He could do that. He was capable of anything now.

“You’d need the premier membership for that,” the customer service agent said, and then began to tell Shane the particulars of how amazing the premier membership was. He had $274 in cash in his pocket — Gold Mike, the fucker who shot him in the foot, that’s what he gave Shane as a parting gift after he’d asked him to stop by their storage unit over by the Forum; Shane thinking it was to plan the night’s job, Gold Mike with other ideas.

“It’s not working out,” Gold Mike told him. The storage unit was half-empty already, Gold Mike’s van filled with their deejay and karaoke equipment, all their locksmith materials, plus their three industrial-sized lockboxes filled with pills. They’d been coming up light lately, but for a while it was a good living. Black-tie weddings in the Palisades, bar mitzvahs in Calabasas, retirement parties in Bel-Air. How it worked, one of them would be inside at the wedding, singing or dee-jaying, the other guy parking cars and collecting addresses. Three-hour wedding meant they could get as many keys made as they wanted. Spend the next couple days casing a house, go in and steal all the pills, which wasn’t a crime any cop gave a shit about, particularly when there was no evidence of breaking and entering. Plus, it was a victimless crime, Shane not feeling too bad about taking a cancer patient’s Klonopin, knowing full well CVS would hook them back up in thirty minutes, maybe less. They didn’t steal jewelry or TVs or cars or any of that shit. Just pills.

Then this whole opiate crisis started getting on the news right when weed got legalized, so people in California started loading up on edibles and vape pens instead of Percocet and benzos.

“It’s just an ebb,” Shane said.

“I’m moving my operating base,” Gold Mike said. “Got a friend in Reno. Says everyone’s hooked on something. He can get me into the hotels. That’s next-level.”

“Cool,” Shane said. “I’m down to relocate.” His only steady, legal gigs were running karaoke at Forrest’s Bar in Culver City and a honky-tonk in Thousand Oaks called Denim & Diamonds.

“You’re not hearing me,” Gold Mike said. “You can’t hit the high notes anymore. If you can’t sing, this whole operation is moot.” Moot. Where the fuck had he learned that word? “Jessie’s Girl”? “Don’t make it weird, all right? Ten years is a good run.”

“Who needs a high note? You think Mick can hit a high note?”

“Bro,” Gold Mike said, “I don’t even like music.”

“So that’s it? No severance?”

“You think you’re getting COBRA up in this bitch? Come on, man.”

“Manny’s chemo put me back ten grand,” Shane said. Manny had a tumor on his ear that turned out to be a treatable cancer, in the sense that the dog could get treatment and still die, but he hadn’t yet, as far as Shane knew. “I’ve been upside down ever since.”

“That was like eighteen months ago.” Gold Mike took out his wallet, thumbed out a few fifties, put them on an empty shelf next to a broken turntable.

“Couple hundred bucks?” Shane said. “How about you give me 50 percent of everything or I walk into a police station. How about that?” And then Shane pulled out his gun, which had actually been a gift from Gold Mike. A little .22. He’d given it to Shane after a robbery went sideways, a Vietnam War vet came home and found Shane in his bathroom, beat the fucking shit out of him with a golf club, Gold Mike coming in at the last minute and knocking the fucker out with a Taser.

You pull out your gun, mentally, you gotta be ready to kill a guy right then, no talking shit, no cool catch phrase, no freeze, no hands up, nothing, just pop pop pop. That’s what cops are always saying, it’s what Gold Mike had taught Shane too. Which is how he also had all of Gold Mike’s credit cards and his driver’s license, in addition to $274.

“Seven miles is fine,” Shane said to the customer service agent, and gave him his location on the 10. “I need a place with a karaoke bar, if possible.” He had a hustle he liked to do where he’d bet people that he could make them cry and then he’d bust out “Brick” by Ben Folds Five and every girl who ever had an abortion would be in a puddle. It didn’t make him proud, but he had bills to pay.

“Let’s see what we have here.” The agent made a whistling sound. “Well, the Royal Californian is 6.7 miles from where you are. They have a sports bar with karaoke. If that works, shall I charge it to your existing credit card and get the truck to you?”

“How about I give the driver cash,” Shane said. He needed as little paper trail as possible.

“I’ll need to check with my manager,” the agent said, and put Shane on hold.

He was parked beneath a billboard that advertised The Wonder of Waterfront Living in the Desert! and showed a happy couple of indeterminate race walking into what appeared to be an Italian lakeside villa surrounded by palm trees. He looked to the west and could make out the obvious signs of civilization: the billboard for a Starbucks, an RV park called the Long Run, a billboard touting an upcoming concert by Rick Springfield at the Fantasy Springs Casino. That fucking guy. Twice in the same day. Had to be a harbinger.

“Cash is just fine. We’ll have a tow truck to you in about twenty minutes,” the agent said.

It was nearly four o’clock. He was supposed to be singing “Come On Eileen” in a couple hours, always his first song over at Forrest’s, everyone always losing their shit when he did that “Toora loora toora loo rye aye” bit, like it was 1982 and they were thirteen and it was the eighth grade dance.

That fucking song.

More trouble than it was worth, that was for sure.

He couldn’t think about that now.

He needed to get Gold Mike’s body out of the trunk.

Or, well... choice cuts of Gold Mike’s body.

2009 and Shane’s working the Black Angus in Northridge. They’ve got something they call the “Fun Bar,” a relic from disco years, lit up floor, big dark booths, great sound system, but no one dancing. Just frat boys over from the college drinking vodka and cranberry like they all have UTIs. At first, he’s just doing karaoke like anybody does karaoke, stand up there, let some drunk come up and sing “American Pie,” help him out when he realizes the song is eight minutes long and he doesn’t have the wind. Flirt with the bartender, maybe get a hand job in the dry storage. Woman or man. Hand job was a hand job, Shane believed in equal opportunity back then, because of all the coke and a profound lack of giving a fuck. Love is love, friction is friction.

Maybe a little guilt now, thinking about it, thinking about how he did Rachel wrong, staring at the ceiling fan twirling in his room at the Royal Californian, eleven p.m., still a hundred degrees outside, giant flying roaches committing suicide against his window every couple minutes, Shane dying for a fucking Percocet, a million of them still in Gold Mike’s van, Shane could hit himself for being so stupid, not thinking this all through, his foot throbbing, sweat sticking his shirt to his chest.

His own fault. Rachel, that is. A lot of lying. Fuck it had been his point of view back when he worked at the Angus. Go home with a hundred bucks for the night and an empty load? Fuck it. Problem was, he’d kept that point of view long into his relationship with Rachel and she was not a Fuck it kind of person, so he pretended it was just how performers were, though by the time Rachel came along, he wasn’t a performer anymore, he just performed.

“Baby,” he’d tell her, “you gotta just say Fuck it when you’re in this business, otherwise, every night would crush your spirit.”

And Rachel, she’d say, “Then you should get another way to earn a living.”

And so he had.

Kind of.

Thing was, Shane could really sing. All this other shit was ephemeral. His talent, man, that was in his genetic code. His dad played in the Catskills back in the day, singing in cover bands, even came out to California one time and brought Shane with him, doing a night at Melvyn’s in Palm Springs, which was the last time Shane had been anywhere near here. Typically, his dad would come back home the first week of September with a roll of cash, and for a month everything would be good between him and Shane’s mom. Dinners out. New clothes. Shane’s mom falling in love all over again, talking about how maybe this year they’d get married, maybe she’d go to college, then maybe law school, Shane’s mother always talking about how she was going to be a lawyer, but by the time she died, she’d spent twenty-five years as the lunch lady at Rensselaer Point Elementary down in Troy. She’d had Shane when she was fifteen. Dead by fifty-one. Got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and put a fucking noose around her neck two hours later. Shane’s dad saying, Maybe she didn’t really have the old-timers, because wouldn’t she have forgotten? His dad was still alive, that was the irony, doing what Shane thought of as the Dead Man’s Tour: Buddy Holly and Elvis tribute shows at Native American casinos in Connecticut, Shane keeping track of him on the Internet, that fucker doing pretty well.

But the Angus.

In comes Gold Mike. Sits at a table right by Shane’s kit, nurses a Diet Coke. Really gets into it when Shane sings. Tapping his foot. Bobbing his head. When Shane busts out “Come On Eileen” and hits his full register, Gold Mike stands up and whoops.

When he goes on break fifteen minutes later, Gold Mike follows him outside, where Shane is having a smoke and watching the traffic on Corbin Avenue.

“You got a nice presence,” Gold Mike says.

“Thanks man,” Shane says.

“Wasting it out here, if you want my opinion,” Gold Mike says.

“Just waiting to be discovered.”

“That’s not ever gonna happen,” Gold Mike says, like he knows. He’s maybe twenty-seven, but he’s one of those guys who talks like he’s been around the world fifty times. Gold Mike fingers a diamond-encrusted V that hangs around his neck.

“Whatever,” Shane says. He takes one more drag from his cigarette, then puts it out on the bottom of his shoe, like it’s a thing he does all the time, which it isn’t.

“Whatever?” Gold Mike says. “I insult you and you say, Whatever. Passivity, man, that’s an illness.”

“You want me to hit you or something?”

Gold Mike laughs hard. He’s one of those Armenian dudes who shaves his head just to look tough, Shane making out the outline of a full head of stubble. Shane isn’t much of a fighter. He’s the kind of person who will stab a guy, though.

“I been watching you,” Gold Mike says.

“How long have you been watching me?”

“A couple weeks,” Gold Mike says, like it’s perfectly normal. “You ever do any time?”

“You ever do any time?”

“A couple days here and there,” Gold Mike says.

“That must impress some people.”

Gold Mike laughs again but doesn’t respond.

“What’s the V stand for?” Shane points at Gold Mike’s neck.

“My last name is Voski.”

“Okay.”

“It means gold in Armenian. What’s your last name mean?”

“Solomon? It means peace. From the Hebrew word shalom. That’s what my mother said, anyway.”

Gold Mike leans forward, motions Shane to lean in too. “You want to make some real money, Shalom?”

Shane finally fell asleep after one a.m., woke up again at 5:47 a.m., sunrise filling his room on the second floor of the Royal Californian with orange light, his foot like an anvil at the bottom of his leg. He unwrapped the gauze and examined the wound. His foot had swollen to twice its normal size, at least, even though the wound wasn’t that big. An inch around. The nurse told him yesterday that the bullet shattered two of his cuneiform bones, that he’d need surgery to stabilize his foot, a couple pins would be inserted, and then he’d be in a hard cast for six to eight weeks. But he was going to need to speak to the police before any of that happened.

That wasn’t going to work.

Not with 66 percent of Gold Mike rotting in his storage unit, the other 33 percent in the Honda’s trunk, Shane thinking 1 percent was probably drying on the floor, blood and viscera and whatnot. He’d chopped Gold Mike’s head off using the fire hose hatchet inside the storage unit, then cut the head up into smaller pieces to make it easier to shuttle around, then took off Gold Mike’s hands and feet too, because he thought that would make it harder to identify him, but with DNA, fuck, it probably didn’t matter, but Shane hadn’t been thinking too terribly straight.

He’d taken the battery out of Gold Mike’s van and poured acid over the rest of the body, but that was really just cosmetic. For sure Shane’s DNA was in the unit and the van and on Gold Mike’s body, but then his DNA was all over everything regardless. They were business partners. That was easy enough to explain. Plus, he had no legitimate reason to kill Gold Mike. Anyone who saw them together knew they were a team. Really, the only proof that it was Shane who’d plugged him an excessive number of times was probably the hole in Shane’s fucking foot and the gun itself, which Shane had tucked under his mattress.

Well, and Gold Mike’s head and all that, which was now in his hotel room’s safe, zipped up inside a Whole Foods freezer bag filled with ice.

Shane stepped out onto his second-story balcony — which was just wide enough to hurl yourself over — and lit up his second-to-last cigarette. He’d given up smoking when Manny got cancer, truth be known he sort of blamed himself for that whole thing, but it was the only drug he had on his person and he needed about ten minutes of mental clarity to figure out how he was going to get himself out of this situation.

He needed to get rid of Gold Mike’s body parts.

He needed to get rid of the gun.

He needed to get himself an alibi... or he needed to change his entire identity, which didn’t seem like a plausible turn of events, though he was open to whatever reality presented itself to him.

He needed to go across the street to the Circle K and get some disposable phones.

He also was in a fuck-ton of pain and under normal circumstances might go find a dispensary and get some edibles, but he wasn’t showing anyone his ID. He’d get some ice and soak his foot in the tub; that would bring down the swelling. He’d get some bleach from housecleaning, put a couple drops in the water, maybe that would disinfect the wound? Then he needed to get a new car.

The Royal Californian sat on a stretch of Highway 111 in Indio that could have been Carson City or Bakersfield or Van Nuys or anywhere else where someone had the wise idea to plant a palm tree and then surround it with cement. This wasn’t the part of greater Palm Springs where people came to actually visit — it was nowhere near the leafy garden hotel he’d stayed in with his dad, the Ingleside Inn — unless they were going to court or bailing someone out, since the hotel was a block west of the county courthouse and jail. He hadn’t realized it at first, not until he was checking in and the clerk gave him a brochure of local amenities. Page one had all the dining options. Page two was local entertainment and information about how to get to the polo fields a mile south. And then page three was all bail bonds, attorneys, and AA meetings.

Made sense, then, when the clerk didn’t seem bothered by his bloody foot and that he didn’t have ID when he gave him Gold Mike’s Visa to check in.

He’d given the AAA driver an extra fifteen dollars to park his car just down the block, in a neighborhood of taupe houses called the Sandpiper Estates, the word estate apparently one of those words whose meaning had been lost to insincerity, since all Shane saw were a lot of children standing by themselves on front lawns made of rock, staring into their phones. Shane left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked. If he was lucky, the car would be stripped clean in a few days, best-case scenario. Worst case, it would get towed to some county yard and there it would stay, forever.

Now, Shane counted seven cars in the Royal Californian’s parking lot. A van with a Save Mono Lake sticker faded on the bumper. A white pickup truck missing the tailgate. Two Hondas that looked just like his dead Accord. A red Buick Regal, probably a rental, no one bought fucking Buicks. An SUV. Another SUV. He tried to imagine who owned each car, and what their favorite song might be, Shane always interested if people picked a sad song or a happy one. Gave you a sense of how people viewed their own lives. Real or imagined.

Rachel’s favorite song was “American Girl” by Tom Petty. His mom’s favorite song was “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis. Shane? He didn’t have a favorite. Not anymore. Songs had stopped having meaning for him. He’d prefer absolute silence, forever.

A man of about seventy walked out of his ground-floor room and into the parking lot, wearing blue boxer shorts, a white V-neck undershirt, and a pair of black sandals, keys in his hand. A Sinatra guy, Shane thought. Probably “My Way” or “Come Fly with Me.” Shane made him for the red Buick Regal. It was backed into a space, always the sign of an asshole. Instead, the old man looked up and down the block, which was stone empty, then crossed the street to a one-story office building with storefront-style signs advertising a law office — Terry Kales, Criminal Defense/DUI/Divorce/Immigration — accounting offices, a Mexican bakery, a notary, and a place where you could get your cell phone fixed.

Not Sinatra.

Neil Diamond.

He went inside the law office, came back out a few minutes later holding a manila envelope, unlocked a silver Mercedes using his key fob, the lights blinking twice, disappeared inside, started it up, rolled back across the street to the parking lot. A woman came walking out of the old man’s hotel room then — she looked young, maybe sixteen — met the old guy in the parking lot, got in the passenger side of the car, pulled away. Five minutes later, the Benz was parked in the Royal Californian’s lot and the old man was headed back into the hotel, which is when he spotted Shane up on his perch.

“You always stand around at dawn watching people?”

“Just having a smoke,” Shane said, “while I contemplate which car to steal.”

“Why not just get an Uber?”

Shane pointed at the man’s Benz. “German engineering has always appealed to me, but as a Jew, it feels shameful. So you’re safe.” Shane telling him he was a Jew to put him at ease, no one ever felt scared of Jews, but also just to see how he reacted, Kales seeming like a Jewish last name. Shane flicked his cigarette butt over the balcony. It landed, still smoking, a few feet away from the man. “You mind stepping on that for me?” Shane pointed at his own foot. “I’m down a limb.”

The old man scratched his stomach absently but didn’t make a move to the cigarette. “You here for a court date?”

“No,” Shane said. “Not today.”

“You need a lawyer, I’m right across the street, as I think you know.”

“How much for a murder defense?” Shane asked, but he laughed, a big joke, two guys at dawn, bullshitting.

“Less than you’d think.” Terry walked over to the butt, stepped on it, cocked his head sideways to get a better look at Shane’s foot up above him. “Looks like self-defense to me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Shane said.

“I keep office hours at Cactus Pete’s.” He pointed at the bar attached to the Royal Californian. “Be there until at least six thirty. I’ll buy you a drink, we can talk about your case.”

“I’m innocent.”

“Yeah,” Terry said, “that’s what we’ll tell ’em.”

Shane couldn’t tell if Cactus Pete’s had a seventies kitsch design aesthetic or if it just hadn’t changed since that decade. He’d never been in a bar that had shag carpeting. The VIP area, set off from the tiny dance floor and deejay booth by an actual red-velvet rope, had high-backed booths that reminded Shane fondly of the Angus, Terry Kales sitting in the biggest one, sipping on a glass of something brown, papers spread out in front of him, a cell phone to his ear, another cell phone and his car keys keeping his papers from blowing away, the overhead fans working overtime to keep the room cool. He didn’t look up when Shane walked in, at least as far as Shane could tell, which was hard because Terry had on sunglasses, the bar’s windows flooding the room with bright light.

It was just before three. Tomorrow at this time, he’d be in the clear. That was the hoped-for result. He’d found a 99 Cents Only store two blocks away, limped his ass over there, his foot on fire, picked up a change of clothes, some sunglasses, a Padres baseball cap. Went next door to the Circle K, got his disposable phone. He was about out of cash now, but he’d figure that out. This old man? He’d probably had a good enough life.

On the dance floor, a woman was setting up for karaoke, and for reasons Shane could not fathom, there was a guy dressed as a clown sitting at the bar. Green hair. Red nose. Striped pants. Big red shoes. Stars-and-stripes shirt and vest. Back of the vest, embroidered in rhinestones, it said HERMIETHECLOWN.COM. He had a cup of coffee and a Desert Sun, the local paper, reading the sports page. Shane sat down at the bar but kept a stool between himself and Hermie.

“Get you something?” the woman setting up the karaoke asked. She was younger than Terry, older than the clown, somewhere on the plus side of fifty. She had on a tank top that showed off her shoulders — muscular, but lean — and a full sleeve of tattoos down her right arm. Shane saw two names — Charlotte and Randy — amid flowers, sunsets, and spiderwebs. She had a name tag pinned above her left breast that said Glory.

“Was wondering what time the show was,” Shane said.

“Six,” Glory said. “You sing?”

“Yeah.”

“We have a lot of regulars, so sign up early.”

“Truth is, I was wondering if I could warm up first.” When Glory didn’t respond, Shane said, “I’m staying here.”

“Room?”

“204,” he said. “On account of my foot. Gotta have surgery in the morning. Just trying to have one last good night before I get the knife.” He looked over at the clown. “Unless you’ve got first dibs.”

“He don’t speak,” Glory said, “or sing.”

The clown nodded in the affirmative.

Glory leaned over the bar and examined Shane’s foot. So did the silent clown, who blew lightly on a whistle he kept around his neck, which Shane found disconcerting. He slid his flip-flop off, wiggled his toes.

“You can’t be in here without a shoe on,” Glory said.

“Just letting it breathe,” Shane said.

Glory nodded solemnly, like they’d come to some agreement about life. “What’s your song?”

“I mix it up,” Shane said, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Terry slide his sunglasses down his nose, “but mostly Neil Diamond.”

Shane was midway through “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” when Terry came over and stood next to the clown; Terry had tears streaming down his face. Terry and the clown swayed back and forth together, Shane digging down deep for the end, telling that girl, sooooooooon you’ll need a man, giving it some real soul, some real pathos.

“Again,” Terry said, and tossed Shane a fifty, so he did it again, Terry breaking down in full sobs this time, clearly going through some shit. When he finished, Terry said, “One more, your pick,” and then went and sat back in his booth, the clown following him. Shane went with “Song Sung Blue.” When he was finished, Terry motioned him over to his table.

“You really having surgery?” Terry asked once they were all comfortable in the sweaty half-moon banquette, Terry’s shit spread out everywhere, Shane eyeing his car keys, his plan coming into full focus, Hermie busy on his phone, answering texts. Popular fucking clown. “I heard you talking to Glory.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “At the hospital up the street.” He’d seen it in the brochure. It was named for John F. Kennedy, which Shane thought was some bad presidential juju.

“Good hospital,” Terry said. “All of my best clients have died there.”

“Like the girl this morning?”

“That was my daughter.”

“Really?” Really.

“Yeah,” Terry said, “I’ve got limited visitation at the moment, so I take what I can get.”

“Okay,” Shane said, not sure if he believed him. “What about you, Hermie? Any kids?”

Hermie looked up from his phone, shook his head no.

Thank God.

“Can I give you some legal advice?” Terry said. “Jew to

Jew.”

“Mazel tov,” Shane said.

“You’ve clearly been shot in the foot. In about two hours, when the courthouse closes? This bar is gonna fill up with off-duty cops, DAs, public defenders, judges, and expert-witness types. You should be gone by then.”

“That is good advice,” Shane said. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“When it all comes down,” Terry pointed at a television above the bar, the sound off, running Fox News, “they’ll take us both.”

“Apart from that.”

“You have the natural ability to make a person feel something, you know? That’s special.” Terry adjusted his sunglasses, Shane thinking maybe he was getting a little teary-eyed again, or maybe he just liked the Jim Jones vibe he was giving off. “Sometimes a song, sung by the right person, it’ll touch you. You touched me up there just now. I don’t know. Maybe I’m drunk.”

Hermie nodded vigorously.

“You saw my daughter? Her mother,” Terry said, “won’t have me in the house, which is why I’m in this situation over here. ‘Girl,’ that was our song. Our wedding song. Seems dumb, no?”

“People pick terrible songs for their weddings,” Shane said, and then told Terry about his job working weddings, all the times he sang “Wild Horses” for newlyweds.

“No one listens anymore,” Terry said. “Words used to mean something.” He looked over at Hermie. “No offense.”

Hermie shrugged.

“Anyway,” Terry said, “you seem like a nice guy in a bad situation. So. Maybe I can help you. Do you want help?”

“I could use a friend,” Shane said.

“I could be a friend.” Terry reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, slid a business card over to Shane. One side was in English, the other in Spanish, but both were for a dentist named Marco Degolado in Los Algodones, Baja California, right over the Mexican border, according to the thumbnail map printed on the card.

“You got any warrants?” Terry asked.

“No,” Shane said.

“That’s two hours from here. Two exits before Yuma. Easy in and out of Mexico, all the snowbirds go there for dental care when they’re down here. They’re liberal with their opiates and antibiotics in Mexico.” Shane nodded. “Dr. Degolado knows his way around minor surgery as well. He’s a friend too.” Shane nodded again. His foot was killing him. “Let me make a call.”

“You’d do that?”

“You walk into JFK with that,” Terry said, “you won’t walk out.”

Shane looked over at Hermie. He gave Shane an affirmative nod. What the fuck went on in that guy’s fucking mind?

“All right,” Shane said. “Set it for tomorrow afternoon?”

“What’s your name?”

Shane thought for a moment. “My friends,” he said, “call me Gold Mike.”

“What do you want the doctor to call you?”

“Mike Voski.”

Terry picked up his cell phone. “Give me five minutes,” he said, and then headed outside, which gave Shane a chance to casually snatch up Terry’s car keys from the table. He turned and looked out the window to where Terry’s Benz was parked, around the corner from where Terry stood, hit the unlock button, watched the car’s lights blink twice, set the keys back down.

Hermie the Clown didn’t utter a word, so Shane said, “You a monk or something?”

Hermie stared at Shane for a few seconds, then said, out loud, “You ever meet a chatty clown?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“That’s part of the game.” He reached over and picked up the car keys. Hit the button. Lights flashed again. Locked.

“How about I give you fifty dollars and we call it even?” Shane said.

Hermie said, “How about everything you’ve got in your wallet?”

Shane had his gun tucked under his shirt and could have, he supposed, shot Hermie, done him like Han Solo did Greedo, but Shane wasn’t yet the unprovoked murdering type. “Not gonna be much more than fifty.” He dug out his wallet, pulled out everything, set it on the table, sixty-seven bucks.

Hermie took it all. “Not personal, you understand.”

“Just two guys doing business,” Shane said.

Hermie stood up then, gathered up all his belongings, then pulled out his own business card, everyone in this fucking place the kings of Vista Print, apparently. It said:

“I’ll be back in a few days,” Hermie said. “If you’re coming back.”

“I’m coming back.”

“You’d be good in the clown game. You’ve got a nice presence.”

“Thanks,” Shane said.

“I got my teeth capped in Los Algodones. Can’t have janky teeth and be a clown. Freaks people out. Terry hooked me up.” Hermie went silent again, like he was trying to get Shane to ask him a question.

“And then what?” Shane finally said.

“And then I have to do Terry favors, periodically. Drop things off. Take out the garbage sometimes. Clean up his room. Favors. So, if you’re not willing to do that, I’d say keep moving, hoss.”

There it was.

“He really Jewish?” Shane asked.

“His brother was a rabbi,” Hermie said.

“Was?”

“Died.”

“Natural causes?”

“I didn’t ask for an autopsy.”

“Out here?”

“Las Vegas,” Hermie said. “Everyone here is always trying to get to Las Vegas, everyone in Las Vegas is always trying to get somewhere else, no one happy to be any one place.”

“You make a lot of sense, for a clown.”

“You’d be surprised what a guy can learn by staying quiet.” He looked outside, where Terry was still on the phone. “My Uber is here.” Hermie stood there for a moment, shifting back and forth in his big red shoes. “He doesn’t have a daughter,” Hermie said, then closed a giant, exaggerated zipper across his mouth, locked it, tossed away the key, and walked silently back out into the heat of the day. Hermie bumped fists with Terry, got into a waiting Prius, and drove off.

Shane unlocked the Benz again.

Terry came back in a few minutes later. “You’re all set, Gold Mike,” he said.

“What do I owe you?” Shane asked.

“Doctor will have a couple prescriptions for you to bring back.”

“That all?”

“Well,” Terry said, “you’ll need to go back for a follow-up. In which case, I might have something for you to deliver. Could be you come to find you like Mexico.”

“I’m gonna need wheels.”

“You beam here?”

“No,” Shane said. “Car broke down. It won’t be fixed for at least a week.”

Terry tapped a pen against his lips. “Okay,” he said. “How about I have Enterprise drop off a car for you. Nothing fancy, you understand. What do you have for collateral?”

Shane pondered this for a moment, then reached under his shirt and put his gun the table.

Shane waited until Cactus Pete’s was in full swing to make his move. Terry wasn’t kidding about the clientele: a steady stream of men with brush cuts and tucked-in polo shirts were followed by men and women in business suits, mostly of the off-the-rack variety, not a lot of tailored sorts doing time in Indio’s courthouse. Terry came out a couple times to take phone calls, cops and attorneys greeting him as they passed by, Shane watching from his window as they all glad-handed each other.

Shane took Gold Mike’s head, hands, and feet out of the safe, refilled the freezer bag with some fresh ice to help with the smell, zipped the bag back up, and headed downstairs. It was about seven, the sun still up, at least 105 degrees, and Shane saw that there were now anthill mounds rising up through the cracks in the parking lot pavement. The lot was full, a dozen Ford F-150s with American flags and 1199 Foundation stickers in the window, a couple Lexuses, a few BMWs, another five nebulous American cars, a surprising number of motorcycles, a couple Benzes. There was a Mexican kid, maybe six or seven, sitting on the tailgate of an F-150 parked next to Terry’s Benz, eating a Popsicle, playing on his phone. Shane’s rental, a white Ford Fiesta, was parked next to Terry’s Benz.

“You staying here?” Shane asked the kid.

“On the other side of the fairgrounds.” The kid pointed beyond the courthouse and jail.

Shane looked down the block. There was, in fact, a giant county fairground right next to the jail and courts. Across the street was an A-frame Wienerschnitzel cut-and-pasted from the 1970s, a fire station, an Applebee’s, a used car lot. He tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up here. Figured it was like anywhere else. Either you lived in a happy home or you lived in a shitty one.

“You should go home,” Shane said. “It’s late.”

“My dad works at the jail,” the kid said.

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s inside having a drink.”

“What’s he do there,” Shane said, “at the jail?”

“Something with computers.”

So probably not a cop. That’s good. “You see anything weird here?”

The kid looked at Shane for a few seconds, like he couldn’t be sure of his answer, then said, “I saw a clown. Like in that movie.”

“What movie?”

“I didn’t see it,” the kid said. “But my cousin? He saw it and said it was fucked up.”

Shane looked around but didn’t see Hermie. “Recently? The clown I mean.”

“Couple minutes, I guess.”

Odd.

“You do me a favor?” Shane asked.

“I’m not supposed to talk to anyone,” the kid said, “cuz my dad says the East Valley is filled with criminals and pedos and losers and that’s just who he works with.”

“Yeah, that’s smart.” Shane pointed at his foot. He’d wrapped it in a towel and then taped his flip-flop to it, so he could walk around a bit better. It looked absurd. “Could you just run over and get me a bucket of ice from the front desk?”

The kid looked at Shane’s foot. “What happened?”

“Stepped on a nail.”

“Must have been pretty big.”

“You do this for me or not?”

The kid slid off the back of the truck and headed to the hotel’s lobby, which gave Shane the chance to pop open the unlocked trunk of Terry’s Benz, drop the freezer bag in, and then close it.

Shane got in the Fiesta — it smelled weird inside, like vinegar and shoe leather and wet newspapers — started it up, turned left on Highway 111 out of the hotel, so he wouldn’t pass Cactus Pete’s, since he’d told Terry he wasn’t leaving until the morning, then kept going, driving west into the setting sun, his left foot inside a bucket of ice. He rolled past the presidents — Monroe, Madison, Jefferson — then was in La Quinta — Adams, Washington — and into Indian Wells, then Palm Desert, just another snowbird in a rental car, could be anyone, so he opened the Fiesta’s moon roof, let some air in, get that weird smell out. Then he was in Rancho Mirage, passing Bob Hope Drive, then rolling by Frank Sinatra Drive, Shane starting to feel like he’d gotten away with it, so he took out his burner, called the anonymous Crime Stoppers hotline, was patched through.

“This is going to sound crazy,” Shane said, now in Cathedral City, passing Monty Hall Drive, a street named for a guy who’d spent his entire career disappointing people by giving them donkeys instead of cars, “but I swear I saw a man at the Royal Californian in Indio chopping up a human head. He put it all into a bag in the trunk of his Mercedes.”

By the time he finished his story, Shane was in downtown Palm Springs, rolling north down Indian Avenue. His left foot was numb, but the rest of his body felt alive, sweat pouring down his face, his shirt and pants damp, even though the AC was cranked at full blast, the moon roof just cracked. He’d go back to LA tonight, get all the pills from the storage unit, then torch it, now that he was thinking straight. Then he’d turn around and head to Mexico, get his foot operated on, since he had an appointment already, and Terry was going to be in a jail cell for a good long time, maybe forever. And then he’d just keep rolling east, until he got back to Upstate New York. Find his father at some Indian casino, see if he wanted to start a duo, figure out how to have a life together, Shane thinking, Whoa, what? Am I high? Shane thinking his foot was probably infected, that what he was feeling was something bad in his blood, sepsis most likely, and then he was passing the road to the Palm Springs Ariel Tramway, burning it out of town, the fields of windmills coming into view, Shane finally taking a moment to look in the rearview mirror, to make sure there weren’t a hundred cop cars lined up behind him, and thinking, for just a moment, that he was really fucked up, that he was really hallucinating some shit, that he needed to get some real meds, because sitting right there in the backseat, a gun in his hand, was a fucking clown.