The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  He jumped.

  Fifty-two floors.

  Took him almost six seconds to hit bottom.

  Six seconds and thirty-five years.

  Two years old, there were pictures of him dressed in a baby jumper that made him look like a prisoner, five years old with one of his father’s unlit cigars in the corner of his mouth, ten years old he was already running errands, standing outside when the boys came over, listening to the conversations. People started calling him Dark Billy by the time he was fifteen, not because of his skin tone, but because he was a thinker and he’d get a serious look on his face, so there was Light Billy when he was just running around doing kid stuff, and Dark Billy when he was working through shit in his mind, brow furrowed. Seventeen years old he’d already killed five guys. Twenty-five he was married and brokering multimillion-dollar heroin deals, ten bodies on his sheet. Thirty and he was second in line to an empire that he’d never get and didn’t want. Thirty-five and he was gonna disappear and leave his kid to wonder why his father left him. Sal would look at the IBM building every day for the rest of his life trying to figure out how his father wasn’t able to walk back out, how he went in and disappeared and no one knew anything. Arlene would know. Which meant maybe Arlene would be put out too, car accident or an OD or a staged robbery, shit turns around, Arlene takes a bullet. She wouldn’t go quietly, no matter the situation. But he couldn’t let her think he just walked out on her.

  So Billy Cupertine screamed the entire way down, made sure she paid attention to the situation.

  Not because he was afraid.

  No, because as he fell, Dark Billy Cupertine realized he was wrong about one thing in his life. Fear hadn’t kept him sharp. It had inoculated him. And so as he tumbled through the air and his past, his wife and child staring up at him, their faces coming into view now, Sal’s opened mouth about to make his own scream, his last thought was that he’d fucked this all up, from beginning to end. Except for that boy. That boy who’d grow up and would never make the same mistakes. He’d know who not to trust.

  GOON NUMBER FOUR

  Goon Number Four hasn’t been able to take a shit since landing in Dubai—which was, when? Yesterday morning? Jet lag has him all fucked-up. He’d flown commercial, which was a bad sign. If you can afford a goon, get a private jet. Twenty-some hours with layovers and delays, and then Goon Number Seven picked him up at the airport, drove him to the Monaco Hotel, told him he’d be back in ninety minutes, so get showered, look fucking presentable, he was on the clock now. So Goon Number Four checked in, went up to his room, got out of his Adidas sweat suit, scrubbed himself raw in the shower—before he did a job, he always shaved all the hair off of his body, which made him look more menacing, but also he wasn’t about leaving his DNA all over the fucking place, a trick he learned from doing some work with The Family in Chicago—changed into the black Armani suit he got at the outlet stores in Cabazon, about thirty minutes from his condo in Palm Springs.

  He picked at a plate of fruit. Drank a bottle of water. Checked his email on his encrypted phone. His sister Jackie sent him a proof-of-life photo of his cocker spaniel Thor, Jackie holding up a newspaper next to Thor’s head, except Jackie had photoshopped it to say Ruff You Were Here. Jackie was a good sister. The only family he had left. “Don’t you know yet,” she said when she dropped him off at the airport, five a.m., not a soul around, “if you have enough money now?”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever.”

  Now, sitting in the passenger seat of a blacked-out Suburban, a locked briefcase on his lap, two other blacked-out Suburbans riding behind him in the arrow formation, the Arabian Desert streaming by, Goon Number Four found himself contemplating what “whatever” might be, while also scanning the horizon for . . . a Starbucks, if he was being honest, or a bush. Somewhere discreet. Because it turned out, he did have enough. This could be his last real job.

  “How much longer?” Number Four asked.

  “Twenty klicks,” Number Seven said.

  Klicks. Four seriously doubted Seven had ever been military. Four did two tours in Iraq, another as contract black ops, and he wasn’t saying klicks. “I didn’t ask how far,” Four said. “I asked how long.”

  “What’s the difference?” Seven said. Definitely not military.

  “The difference is the difference between time and distance,” Four said.

  “Speedometer is in miles,” Seven said. “Now you want me to do math?”

  Four looked into the rearview mirror, met eyes with Goon Number Three. This wasn’t their first job together. Last time was in Peru. A fucking bloodbath on the streets of Lima. Time before that was a private-security thing. Walking around Coachella in shorts. Easy job. Making sure no one put hands on someone’s daughter and her friends, ten sorority girls up from USC, each with a Tri-Delt tattoo on the small of their backs, angel wings strapped over their shoulders, all of them rolling on Molly. Not exactly storming Fallujah.

  “Stay frosty,” Seven said. “Two o’clock.”

  Four looked at two o’clock. Nothing but desert. At eleven o’clock, however, there was a trail of dust being kicked up from three Hummers moving at an intercept angle. This dumb fuck. He was going to get them all killed.

  “Any idea what’s so valuable in the case?” Three asked.

  “Nope,” Four said. It wasn’t heavy, so it probably wasn’t cash or gold bricks. These days, if something was being handed over like this, it was usually technology. Four’s specialty, in situations like this, was to be the guy who walked up with the briefcase, set it down, took a step back, and mad-dogged everyone else until the case was popped. It wasn’t hard work. Most of the time, everything went fine. The other 35 percent of the time, yeah, maybe he shot a guy, slit a couple throats, broke arms and legs, gouged out eyes, set fire to a mound of corpses, but that was growing rarer these days. You wanted to kill someone and had the cash to hire a bunch of goons, you also had the cash to get a decent drone.

  Which made Four wonder about something. He opened up the moonroof, scanned the sky. Triton drones coasted at sixty-five thousand feet, which was basically outer space. If he was getting blown up from outer space, that’s just how it was going to be.

  “Close that,” Seven said. “Sand makes my asthma go nuts.” He took a Kleenex from the center console, blew his nose. “Intercept in four klicks.”

  “Easy on that klick shit,” Three said. He was checking the clip on his AK. “We get out of this situation,” Three said to Four, “I’m going to buy a boat, park it off the Oregon coast, and become a private detective. Find missing cats for little old ladies. What about you?”

  “I’m going back to school,” Goon Number Four said.

  “To study what?” Goon Number Three asked.

  “Whatever.”

  “Just don’t study history,” Three said. “It’s just war, war, war, genocide, war. In that order.” He leaned into the front seat to get a better look at the Hummers coming their way, since the windows in the back were blacked out. “This is not good. Must be a tracker in here.” He tapped his earpiece. “Comms are dead.”

  “I scanned the case,” Goon Number Four said. “It was clean.” He paused. “What about art?”

  “That could be cool,” Three said. “Tracker is somewhere in this ride or else they would have come up behind us. No sense coming from where we can see them.” He glanced at Goon Number Seven, then back at Four, motioned to the floor, so Four put the briefcase on the ground. “How far until intercept, boss?”

  “Two klicks,” Seven said, which is when Three put a bullet in his temple.

  Goon Number Four grabbed the steering wheel. Three reached around and opened the driver’s side door, shoved Seven out, the Suburban caught his body under the back tires, slowing the truck down enough for Four to slide into the driver’s seat. He looked in the rearview, saw one of the trail cars thump over the body, too. Three got up next to Four, put the briefcase on his lap. “Do you draw?” Goon Number T
hree asked.

  “Isn’t art mostly on computers now?”

  Three held up a finger, tapped his earpiece again. “Copy that.” He turned to Four. “Hard right . . . now!” Four yanked the wheel to the right, just as a missile impacted with the Hummers, blowing them to oblivion.

  IT TOOK GOON Number Four two weeks to get home, his sister picking him up at the Palm Springs airport at noon on a Tuesday. “You look like shit, Blake,” Jackie said when Goon Number Four got into her car. It had been a good long time since he’d heard his name. Long enough that it sort of jarred him. “What happened to your left ear?”

  He ran his fingers over the ragged stitch job he received to reattach a chunk of cartilage. “A fight.”

  “With what? A dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get a rabies shot?”

  “I’m clear,” he said. “How’s Thor, incidentally?”

  “He missed you,” she said. “He’s at PetSmart getting pretty for you.”

  “Did you do that thing I asked?”

  “It’s in the glove box.”

  Blake popped open the glove box. It was filled with black and purple chips from the Indian casinos in town. He kept a great deal of his cash in casino chips these days, stashed in safe-deposit boxes. It was just easier. And portable. He needed to move a quarter of a million dollars, he didn’t need to bother with a wire transfer. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. “What about the other thing?” he said.

  “It’s in there, too, in the envelope.” Blake found what he was looking for, a slim manila envelope, opened it up, dumped the information on his lap. “You’ll need to get a student ID in person, but that’s all of your registration materials. I couldn’t get you all the classes you wanted at the times you preferred. I guess there’s priority registration for returning students.”

  “No worries,” Blake said. His sister had signed him up for classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at the College of the Desert, the local community college. He’d driven by the campus a thousand times, marveled at the slick glass structures they’d erected for students who couldn’t get into a four-year college, never thinking he’d end up there himself. He’d taken the GED and gone right into the armed forces for twelve years, which had then dovetailed into the work he’d been doing for the last decade. The upside was that he got to travel all over the world, made a lot of money. But of late his back and knees had begun to trouble him, doctors telling him he was about five years from needing a knee replacement, needing corrective glasses to see at night. He’d had a persistent prostate infection for a month in fucking Colombia, standing in a jungle like an asshole, needing to piss every nine minutes. This goon shit had an expiration date, turned out, and there was no health or retirement plan. Fortunately, he’d invested and saved, Jackie told him to buy Facebook in 2012, since she was dating someone in the company at the time, and then he had chips around the world. Lots of chips. “What do I need to know?” he asked.

  “I got you whatever was still open. Mostly general-education classes.” Made sense. She’d signed him up under his name, which he supposed was fine. He had passports and birth certificates for about a dozen others. But he only had high school records as Blake Webster, since no Afghani warlord was going to check to see if one of his fake names had passed Algebra II.

  He had four classes: English Composition, Western Civilizations, Math, and then something he didn’t recognize.

  “What’s JOUR 121?”

  “Oh,” Jackie said, “yeah, I thought that might be fun for you. It’s working at the college radio station.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I guess learning how to be a DJ? Or maybe a talk-radio host? You could be like that asshole with all the conspiracy theories.”

  “Which one?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said. “Him.”

  They came to a stoplight. On the corner was MillionAir, the private airstrip Blake often flew out of. How many times had he walked off of some sheik’s Gulfstream G650 with someone else’s blood still under his fingernails?

  “Are you really doing this, Blake?” his sister asked. “Do I get to stop worrying about you dying?”

  “I’m still going to die,” Blake said, “but I’m probably not going to have to kill anyone for a while. Does that make you feel better?”

  The light turned green. “A little.”

  THAT NEXT MONDAY, the start of spring semester, Blake showed up for his 10 a.m. class promptly at 9:30 a.m., because when you’re a goon, you recon. The class was held in a classroom inside the radio station offices, located across the street from the main campus, next door to a sprawling Mormon church and a gated community called Rancho Del Sol. It looked to Blake like maybe the college had bought a house, did a light remodel, and then built a radio tower in the backyard. He’d seen a similar setup at a Sinaloa stronghold in Mexico, where the bosses ran their own private radio, TV, and Internet network, though the College of the Desert’s setup wasn’t nearly as nice.

  There was a classroom filled with Macs on his left—Blake thought it probably used to be the garage—and then a couple studios for the DJ down the hall in what used to be the living room, dining room, and family room, the house from the seventies, back when people had family rooms. Other side of the house were faculty offices, a lounge, two bathrooms. There were emergency exits in every room. Whole place was maybe twenty-five hundred square feet and could be attacked from about twenty-nine different angles. A totally unsafe spot to conduct an op . . . but Blake guessed it was probably fine for learning.

  The classroom tables were set up in a U, so Blake took a seat against the southern wall, giving him a view of all the entrances and exits. Took out his Smith & Wesson tactical pen—it was a ballpoint, but it was made of aircraft steel, the cap was sharp enough to pierce a sternum, with enough force, and/or pop out a car window, and it weighed over a pound, so if he held it in his hand and punched someone in the face, he’d collapse their skull—and a pad of paper.

  And then waited.

  A woman in black jeans, black boots, a black scoop-necked T-shirt, and huge black sunglasses came into the classroom in a flustered rush, dropped a book bag and a laptop on the podium at the front of the room, then spilled her Starbucks on the ground, coffee splashing all over her, the podium, the whiteboard, and, Blake was surprised to see, even the low cottage-cheese ceiling. “Shit fuck motherfuck cocksucker motherfucker,” she said, and then hurried back out, returning a few moments later with a roll of paper towels, only then noticing Blake. “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Twenty-three minutes.”

  “So you saw that whole production?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t laugh?”

  “It didn’t seem funny.”

  “It’s always funny when your professor spills coffee all over herself,” she said. “It’s what makes going to school worthwhile.” She stood on one of the chairs. “Help me here so I don’t break my neck while I clean off the ceiling.” All six feet five inches and 245 pounds of Blake stood up, and the professor seemed visibly surprised. “Check that. You get up here. I’ll make sure you don’t break your neck.”

  Blake had some experience cleaning spatters of fluids off of hard-to-reach places, so it was no big deal. Back when he was starting out, he did a month working for a Latvian oil scion/two-bit gangster named Vitaly Ozoles who was constantly losing his shit and shooting someone in the face. Since Blake was the lowest goon, he’d have to drag the body out, bury it, then come back and clean the room, so he had a whole checklist, literally, that he kept in a utility closet in the warehouse that contained Vitaly’s fleet of a dozen cars. This was a significantly easier job. He climbed up on the chair, took his KA-BAR knife out of his cargo pants pocket, scraped the latte-stained cottage cheese pellets off into his hand, then got down, dumped it all into the garbage.

  “Thank you,” she said. She extended her hand and Blake shook it. “I’m Professor Rhodes, but y
ou can call me Dusty. That’s what everyone calls me, as you probably know.”

  “How would I know that?”

  “From the . . . radio? Dusty Roads? The Morning Zoo on KRIP?”

  “I don’t listen to the radio.”

  “Well, we’ll fix that,” Dusty said. “And what’s your name?”

  “Blake,” he said.

  “No last name?”

  Blake wasn’t used to giving a stranger all of his details, but he guessed she probably had a roster, anyway. “Webster. Blake Webster.”

  “You’ll need a different name for radio,” she said. “Your name makes you sound like that guy you went to high school with who still lives in the same town and is now assistant manager at Del Taco.”

  “I did grow up here,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “What do you do for a job?”

  “Goon,” he said. “Assassin. Private security. Depends on the assignment.”

  This made Professor Rhodes laugh. “Can you imagine? What a life that would be.” She gazed at Blake for a moment. “I hereby christen thee Blake Danger. How about that?”

  “It’s not my favorite.”

  “Well, Blake Danger, do me a favor, that giant knife you have there? Could you go ahead and put that away? Zip it in your book bag?”

  “No problem,” Blake said. He dropped the knife into his bulletproof backpack. It was made from tactical-grade Kevlar, not the crap they sold students. His pack could stop a bullet from an AK, whereas the packs they sold at Target were only good for stopping 9mm shells.

  “And if you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “why on earth did you bring that to class?”

  “In case someone tried to kill me,” he said. The classroom was beginning to fill with students.

  Professor Rhodes smiled. “Okay then, Blake Danger,” she said. “Take your seat.”

  “Bro, you’re swole as shit.” Blake looked to his left. There was a kid, maybe nineteen, sliding into the chair beside him. He had on a Warriors jersey, a non-bulletproof backpack, shorts that hung off his ass, and flip-flops and was chewing on a straw. “You do keto?”