by Paul Bishop
A large block engine thundered into life, smashing the desert’s calm. I ducked, my left knee in the dirt, my right hand on the gun at my waist. The car’s tires raking the earth for traction, dirt and rocks clattering. I dashed across the hill’s spine in time to see a black Dodge Challenger reversing away from the abandoned motel. The car’s windows dark, large chrome wheels spinning. It skidded to a halt, the driver grinding its gears before the car wrenched forward with a thud of transmission. The rear end fish-tailed and the car disappeared around the hill’s fold.
I stared at the dusty track, the license plate was too blurry to read, but the rear windscreen was decorated with a U.S. Marine Corps emblem. An eagle sitting atop a globe, an anchor angling downward from right to left. A recognizable car if it stayed in rural western Utah. However, if its destination was Salt Lake City, I’d never see it again.
I turned to the broken down litter of Black Mountain. Its buildings were faded and crumbling, desert grasses and shrubs crawling from the cracked concrete drives. An old Chevy van was parked next to the diesel shop. Tires flat and windshield shattered. The L-shaped motel was arid and quiet.
After catching my breath, I scrambled down the hill and into the abandoned town. I moved behind the motel and under the faded sign painted on its back wall.
Motel Café–Vacancy
I counted seven windows and guessed the Challenger had been parked at the fourth. I stepped through broken glass, around a rusted truck axle, between two cast iron bathtubs and a toilet. Its seat was down and the lid closed, awaiting its next customer.
I crouched by the window and listened. I stood on my toes to get a sight angle into the bathroom. The main room was visible through the open interior door, the light dim.
A shadow flickered.
“God!” A terrified voice from inside.
A fist smacked wood. “Shit! Shit, man. He’s dead.”
The voices were disembodied, the men invisible. I shifted my feet to get a better angle, the crunch of shoe leather and sand loud in my ears.
I stopped.
The men sounded desperate.
After a moment, I moved away from the window and crept to the motel’s corner.
My ears buzzing with anticipation.
The .38 slid into my hand. I eased around the motel’s corner, eyes darting across the abandoned landscape. I held the Colt in both hands, away from my body. A few feet from the room’s door, I took a knee and listened as the men argued in hushed tones.
I shifted to the door and peered into the room’s murky interior. I let my eyes adjust, and the men appeared. One was standing at the room’s center, skinny and long, his shoulders stooped and head down. The other was sitting on a bucket in the corner.
On the torn carpet lay a motionless body. A halo of brownish-red blood blossoming on the floor.
I advanced into the room, keeping low. The .38 aimed at the man standing beside the corpse.
“Hands up!” My voice was calm and deliberate, the way the Quantico instructors had taught me in the long ago—before I burned my life and stranded myself in this desolation, working for a slug-shaped hood with Bugsy Siegel’s self-image.
The guy standing, skinny and emaciated, gasped and squealed. His tiny pupils said he was high.
The one on the bucket wobbled, his hands high in the air. “We didn’t do it!”
I crossed to where the skinny guy gaped—eyes wide and arms dangling at his sides. I clapped his temple with an open palm. He flinched, stumbled backward. He tripped on a chair and crashed to the floor, his eyes vague with confusion and rocking from side to side. A pathetic whimpering hum escaped cracked lips. The fear and drugs had him in another place.
“What’s your name?” I said to the kid on the bucket.
He opened his mouth like a drowning fish.
“I’m not here to hurt you, but if you don’t talk, I will.”
The kid gulped and said in a whisper, “Brandon.”
I pointed to Skinny. “Ryan Story?”
“How?”
“Lucky guess.” I held a finger up and advanced on the dead man lying on his back. His sightless eyes staring at the water-stained ceiling, his hair was matted and sticky. A dent on the left side of his head. The blood splattered high across a shattered mirror told me two things. The dead man had been standing when the blow came, and whoever struck him was right-handed.
The corpse was Tyler Watts, former Jenkins’ employee, junkie and casino robber.
The .38 back in its leather, I said to Wallace, “Who are you working with?”
“What?”
I grimaced. “Don’t play dumb. The blackmail. Jenkins. The chip heist.”
“How?”
I leaned close with my right hand up, the palm open.
Wallace brought his arms up defensively, almost fell off his bucket. “No—nobody. Please, don’t hit me.”
“Who was in the Challenger?”
Panic in his eyes. “They killed Tyler.” He pointed at Watts on the floor. “They killed him. He gave them the chips, but they killed him anyway.”
I crouched. My eyes were level with Wallace’s. “Who are they? I’m looking for names here.”
“I don’t know, dude.”
I shook my head, a parental scowl on my face. “Not good enough, Brandon.”
“Look, all I know is those dudes came here for the chips. They knew everything about last night. Everything.”
I sat back on my heels. “You tell anybody about your plan?”
“No, I swear it.”
“Except Zachery? Maybe Jess?”
Wallace’s eyes widened. He nodded and shook his head in a single motion.
“You confused, Brandon?”
“No. I mean…” Brandon wiggled on the can like he needed to piss. “We didn’t tell nobody except Zach and Jess and they wouldn’t tell no one.”
“They told me.”
The kid cried, a quiet trembling. “You a cop, man?”
I shook my head. “Today, I’m your best friend.”
Sitting on the bucket, Brandon Wallace looked like a six-year-old with a skinned knee. “I don’t know how those guys knew. I never seen them before. I swear it.”
I believed him. “You plan the robbery?”
Wallace looked dazed. He shook his head.
“Who did?”
Brandon glanced at Tyler’s dead body, pointed with his chin. “Him, man.”
“I heard it was you, Brandon.”
His Adam’s apple skipped in his neck. “It was Tyler’s idea from the start.”
“He get the idea after he started working at The Diamond?”
Brandon shook his head. “He got the job so he could rob the casino.”
His answer made me nervous. I stood, thinking. The room’s clutter was impressive—an empty bed frame against one wall, a splintered chest on another. The floor was littered with empty cans and bottles and used condoms. The ceiling and walls were filthy with graffiti.
“You spend much time here, Brandon?”
“Hell, no.”
“Where do you stay?”
The kid looked at the floor. His stringy hair tumbled down onto his face. “Around—the airbase.”
I knew the old air base. It was built at the start of World War Two as a training base, and while many of the old buildings were standing, it had been empty for decades.
I looked at Watts, the blood pool darkening around him and his face pinched with fear. I said, “The guys who killed Tyler...Do you think he knew them? He use their names?”
Wallace looked up, his face was as greasy as his hair. “Yeah.” He was excited. “They wore ski masks, but Tyler called the big guy Sammy.”
“You sure it was Sammy?”
“I think so, dude.”
“And the other guy, what did he look like?”
“Short.”
I said, “Could Sammy have been ‘Sonny?’”
The kid smiled. His teeth were broken and brown, loose i
n his mouth. “That’s it...Sonny!”
I knew Sonny and his height-challenged friend. We weren’t buddies, but all three of us shared an employer.
“They say anything else?”
Wallace shook his head. “They wanted the chips is all. Tyler wanted to give them a share, but the short one whacked him with a bat and they took everything.”
I walked past Story, who was still curled into a ball and moaning. At the door, I turned back to the junkies. “I told your buddy Zach to get lost. You should do the same.”
Brandon said, “Yeah. It’s time, dude.” Ryan Story stared with bland disquiet.
As I walked to the Impala, anger buzzed in my ears, the day’s heat unnoticed as I considered why everything pointed to Jenkins and his two goons.
Back in Wendover, I parked on Aspen in front of an aging blue mobile home. The yard was dirt. A string of colorful Christmas lights drooped from the eaves. A skinny cat was sleeping on the weathered porch steps. The trailer park was quiet and resigned, decaying bitterly in the casino’s glitzy glare.
The ancient flip phone in my hand, I dialed Jenkins.
He answered on the fourth ring, breathless. A woman giggling. “What do you want, Ford?”
“I found your nephew.”
His voice went soft. “He ain’t my nephew, Ford.”
“You want to know where he is...maybe how he is?”
Indignant now. “Okay, where is he?”
“Dead.” I let it hang.
So did Jenkins, but he won.
“You’re not very inquisitive today, Jenkins. Don’t you want to know where the kid is? How about the chips? Any interest there?”
Jenkins said, “Where?”
“The kid, Watts. He’s in room four at the Black Mountain motel. Someone used his head for batting practice.”
“So where are the chips, Jimmy?”
He only used my first name when he knew something I didn’t.
I ended the call and turned off the phone and stepped from my car into the airless afternoon. Sweat popped on my forehead as I crossed the slender road to a battered mobile home. Its skirting was gone, and the cinder blocks holding it off the baked ground were ugly with graffiti. An abandoned mattress and a kid’s bicycle hiding underneath. The steel security door at odds with the trailer’s decrepit exterior.
A black Dodge Challenger was shading itself under a carport, a Marine Corps decal visible in the rear window.
I shook my head at the stupidity and stepped to the front door.
From inside, voices argued. The television. I figured it was Dr. Phil or maybe The View.
I knocked, rang the bell.
A dog barked. Someone inside shouted. The dog whimpered and went quiet.
I stepped back and to the right. I hid the .38 behind my hip and spread my feet.
The trailer’s floor creaked as someone approached the door and looked out the peephole. A few seconds passed while they tried to figure out who knocked. Then, “Yeah?”
I said, “Sonny?”
“Who’s it?”
“Jimmy Ford. We need to talk. Jenkins sent me.”
“Shit.” A muted conversation on the other side before the door opened a few inches. Sonny’s crooked nose and his livered lips appeared in the opening. “What do you want?”
“That Challenger yours?”
His lips twitched into a grotesque smile.
I tried to show interest. “It’s the V8 Hemi?”
The door opened wider. Sonny’s broad face florid. His belly drooping over his belt.
“Hell, no, it ain’t no Hemi.” The words were filled with scorn. He looked over his shoulder. “You believe this guy, Eric? He can’t tell the difference between a Hemi and a Hellcat?”
A wet laugh from inside. “Dumbass. How many times I told you he’s a dipshit?”
I whistled. “Hellcat? I’ve never seen a Hellcat before.” Playing the fool. “What’s it got, five hundred horsepower?”
Sonny shook his head and frowned theatrically. He opened the door wider. “Try 707.”
“That much? My dad’s airplane had fewer horses.”
Sonny folded his arms across his chest and laughed. His teeth yellow, tongue stained blue.
I took a short step and extended a finger at his face. “You got something there.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Your tongue’s blue.”
The big man looked over his shoulder again.
From inside, “Tell him to fuck off, Sonny.”
As Sonny turned back to me, I smashed the .38 into the side of his head and raked the gunsight across the soft flesh under his jaw. Blood blossomed and splattered wetly on the door frame.
Sonny grunted. He clutched the wound with his hands and stumbled backward, crashing against a wall. He took a step and fell on his face. The impact shaking the mobile home.
The other man shouted, his words lost in panic. The dog barked.
I stepped into the trailer, the gun ready. The television was loud, its colors flashing in the small room.
“Hands up.” My voice was even and hushed.
Eric Vaughn’s eyes were wide and he had a baseball bat in his right hand.
I said, “Where’s the dog?”
The little man raised a hand. “Back there, in the bedroom.”
I leveled the .38 on Vaughn’s chest and watched the baseball bat in his hand and said, “Is that the bat you killed Tyler Watts with?”
The short man smiled and gripped the bat in both hands. He took half a step forward. “I’m going to kill you with it, too, fancy FBI man.”
Ice clawed the back of my head, the world slowed.
I said, “Jenkins sent me for his share.”
Vaughn’s eyes flickered with uncertainty. He looked at his partner lying face down on the floor.
“I owed him one. It has nothing to do with this.” The .38 steady on Vaughn’s chest.
He looked back at me, squinting this time. “What chips?”
I laughed. The sound harsh in my ears. “The chips you killed that junkie, Tyler Watts, for.” Then, “You do that on Jenkins’ orders?”
“Shit. You don’t know nothing.” He eased a few inches away from the wall.
“Nobody gets hurt if you tell me where the chips are.”
With a devil’s smile, Vaughn said, “What about Sonny?”
“A scratch. He’s high-strung, so he panicked and fainted.”
His laugh was fingernails on a blackboard. “You’re funny, Ford. A funny G-Man.”
“Yeah, that’s me. Funny.”
Vaughn adjusted his grip and pulled the baseball bat closer to his right hip. “Sure, Jimmy. No problem. The chips are in the closet behind you.” He nodded to my right, expecting me to follow his gaze, and started his swing.
The .38’s muzzle flashed. Its roar crashed in the room.
My ears ringing.
Eric Vaughn’s eyes were puzzled, disbelieving. He dropped the bat and put a hand on his chest where blood blossomed in a neat circle.
The little man slumped against the wall. “You shot me.”
I moved forward and kicked the baseball bat away.
I said, “Jenkins part of this, Eric?”
Vaughn held out his hand, staring at the blood-stained palm. He smiled, an ugly, feral expression. “You dummy.” His eyes closed. The smile stuck to his face.
I switched off the television, the silence sharp in my ringing ears. I checked Sonny’s pulse. Weak, but regular.
He would bleed out in an hour, but that gave me plenty of time to finish the job.
I found the chips in the black duffel in the closet where the little man, Eric Vaughn, had pointed. I carried the bag across the street to my car and tossed the duffel under the spare tire in the trunk. When I was done, I strolled back to the goons’ house. Inside, the killers were lying in converging pools of blood. The stench was a mixture of cordite, copper, and shit.
I went to the front porch and sat on the t
op step and pulled the cell phone from my pocket. I turned it on and dialed 9-1-1. Before the operator answered, a West Wendover police cruiser lit up like Christmas skidded around the corner and jumped the curb. Its front bumper a few feet from the house.
The officer, young and nervous, opened his door and scurried out. An automatic in his hands. He told me to raise mine.
I did.
I spent the rest of the day and most of the night explaining things. First to a couple uniforms and then to a handful of detectives. They didn’t like any of it, but an anonymous caller—a couple minutes after I’d told Jenkins where to find Watts—fingered Sonny and Vaughn as part of a ring that robbed The Desert Diamond’s VIP Room the night before. After Jenkins explained why he’d kept the rip-off quiet, as a favor to his sister and her beloved nephew, they released me.
But they told me to stay in town.
I said, “Where else I got to go?”
The detective, a guy named DeSpain, who was on our payroll for the odd favor here and there, knew me better than I liked. He gave me a knowing smirk. He followed it with, “You’ll be interested to know, we found the stolen chips.”
Trying to keep the surprise from my face, I said, “Where?”
DeSpain shook his head, the lopsided pornstache ugly on his face. “That jerk’s locker at the casino.”
“Right there, in Eric Vaughn’s locker?” I knew it was Jenkins’ work, placing chips worth sixty-grand in Vaughn’s locker to keep the investigation pointed away from him and the casino. It made it look like a simple case of stupid criminals falling out.
“In a black duffel, right on the top shelf.”
“And I’m the dummy.”
DeSpain winked. “I’ve heard that.” We shook hands, and I went home to my crummy casino hotel room behind The Diamond. I slept in my suit on the bedspread. Five hours later, I got up, showered, changed into a fresh suit, and went to Jenkins’ suite. His rooms were in the new wing of the casino’s hotel and not crummy at all. They had ten-foot ceilings and gold-foil-covered walls. High-priced oil paintings—nudes, classy and vulgar alike—hung as if they belonged. The fat man sat behind his big desk.
When he saw me, he said, “Where’s my chips?”
I shrugged, shook my head.
