The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “You miss him?”

  “Sometimes,” Jacob says. The Review-Journal referred to his father either as “the alleged wiseguy” Boris Dmitrov or “reputed Russian organized-crime figure” Boris Dmitrov, depending on who was writing the story. “My mom’s in one of those memory homes, that’s what they call them now. The one up over by the temple in Summerlin? Half the time I go to see her, she thinks I’m him. That brings it back.” Svetlana drops off a bowl of cashews, Jacob’s favorite. She keeps them behind the bar just for him. It gets the taste of vodka out of his mouth. “But then there’s all the other shit.”

  “That’s tough,” Kiraly says. “I tell you about my parents?”

  “No.” Back in school, his dad had worked Metro, too. His mom was just his mom.

  “You know my pops retired?”

  “Yeah. Few years ago?”

  “Right before the election in 2016. Since then, he was doing private security. You know, put on a suit, walk around with some rich fucker while he plays pai gow. Finally got tired of it, moved down to Sarasota. Stroked out dead on a lawn chair two weeks later. Mom drops a bottle of Ambien down her throat the next day. Both of them sixty-nine years old. Could have been a lot of life yet for both of them.”

  “Jesus, Cecil. When was this?”

  “Six, nine months ago,” he says. Had it been that long since he’d seen Cecil? Must have been. “Grief makes shit run together, you know? Maybe that was better. Get it all out of the way at once.” But then tears start streaming down his face. Jacob waves Svetlana over, gets a couple napkins. “Sorry, Jacob. It’s not your problem. Just sneaks up on me.” Cecil shakes his head, dabs at his eyes. “Listen, I need to tell you some bad news.” He wipes his face with the napkin, examines it, like he thinks he’ll find blood. “Tried to get through to this without losing it.” He smiles, sadly. “Detective Peng died this morning.”

  “I just talked to her,” Jacob says. He’s surprised by his own shock. And by the immediate sense of grief that has descended onto him. Just like them, Tiffany Peng grew up in Las Vegas. Father dealt blackjack at the Rio, her mom was a stenographer at the courthouse. She was two years ahead of Jacob at Bishop Gorman. Did gymnastics, debate team. They hadn’t known each other well back then, but she and Kiraly got close working Metro all these years. And sometimes, when she’d call Jacob, they’d talk about old times, too. How it was. How it could be. But by the end, it was always the same: one day, Jacob, you’re going to wake up in a cell. “The fuck happened? I thought she was getting better. I sent over a bunch of cookies. Shit. I just talked to her. Like, days ago.”

  “Infection. Turns out, fucking hospitals are the worst place to be if you’ve been shot half a dozen times.” Kiraly clears his throat and Jacob can tell that the bad news isn’t that Peng is dead. Or not the worst news. “Last couple days,” he says, quietly, “Harvey B. Curran’s been sitting with her.”

  The one constant thing in the Review-Journal was Harvey B. Curran. His beat was organized crime. He wrote gossip columns about the comings and goings of local wiseguys like they were fucking Kardashians. Put out glossy conspiracy-theory books about who really killed 2Pac or Ted Binion. Every couple of years, someone would try to kill him. And then he’d write another book, about who really tried to kill him.

  “He can write whatever he wants about my dad,” Jacob says. Fact was, it was good for business. If the article mentioned the food, even better.

  “I don’t think she was talking to him about your pops, ” Kiraly says, leaning in close. “Tiffany only worked missing persons. Her entire career. My guess, he’s gonna write some hero shit about her in the paper, not that she doesn’t deserve it. Then something on the one case she never cracked. You know how he does. He came down and asked to look at the file.”

  “And they just let him?”

  “Jacob,” Kiraly said, “you know how it works.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “So take a vacation for a couple weeks. Come back in March. By the time you’re back, all anyone will care about is college basketball.”

  “This scenario,” Jacob says, “where is it I go that doesn’t make me look suspicious?”

  Cecil Kiraly finished off his shot. Turned his phone back on. Gathered his jacket up. Set a twenty on the bar. “How old are you now?”

  “Same as you, Cecil. Forty-eight. Why?”

  “I’ve got twenty-five years on the job,” he says. “I can walk at any time now. Got the full retirement. It was me? I’d be in San Diego. Great restaurants. Pretty girls. None of this bullshit.”

  “Is it gonna be you?”

  “After what happened to my dad? No. Never. Or maybe tomorrow.” Cecil laughed, but it didn’t sound to Jacob like he meant it. “Las Vegas isn’t for you anymore, Jacob. Maybe it never was. Once I’m gone, you got no one here watching your back. Consider that.”

  Jacob picked up the twenty, tried to hand it back to Kiraly. “It’s on me.”

  “Keep it,” he said. He looked around the restaurant, like he’d never been in it before. Nearly one thirty in the morning on a weeknight and every table was full. Cops, crooks, strippers, prostitutes, Asian tourists who didn’t know where the fuck they were eating, party kids glazed from rolling all night, a couple dealers over from the Hard Rock, a couple dealers over from Naked City, too. And yet the place was mostly quiet, everyone in their phones. “I ask you something, you won’t take offense?”

  “I can’t guarantee it.”

  “Was it better when the mob ran the city? Because it doesn’t seem like it could get any worse.”

  JACOB WAITS TWO days, gets everything at the restaurant in order, and then tells everyone he’s going down to Cabo to fish for marlin. Even books the trip. It’s a trip he’s taken before. No one will think any different, and even if they do, fuck them. Puts Svetlana in charge. Next morning, he packs up his car and heads south on Highway 95 until it meets up with the I-40, west of Needles, and then he slides down into winding back roads for another fifty miles, through what used to be known as the Buckeye Mining District.

  A hundred and forty years ago, they found gold and copper here. Little towns popped up with familiar names: Cadiz. Bagdad. Siberia. Klondike. And then all the towns disappeared, along with every ounce of ore, leaving nothing but the haunted shells of industry along rutted-out roads. A twenty-foot-tall headframe. The foundation of the old mercantile. A rotted post office. A car with no tires. Tires with no car. The desert covers everything in these parts in a fine dust the color of dried marrow.

  Jacob hasn’t been out here in eighteen years, but as time has gone by, he’s kept an eye on the region, in case someone decides to develop it, which doesn’t seem likely out on the rim of the Mojave National Preserve. The only action happens when someone upstate wants to tap the aquifer that runs beneath Cadiz or when a train running on the old Southern Transcon derails and pictures come floating onto the local news of what looks like the surface of Mars.

  Still, once every few weeks, Jacob taps into a VPN on his computer and looks at the Google Earth pictures of a tiny spot called Ragtown. Google shows it as a dotted line off of Bagdad Chase Road, hard against an outcrop of volcanic rock called Swede Hill. It’s all sand and creosote broken up periodically with what looks like finger scratches where primitive roads used to be, the only proof that anyone ever inhabited this place. Other than the fact that this rut of desert has a name at all.

  Jacob turns his Lincoln down one of the old roads—it’s demarked on either side by haphazard boulders, one of them spray-painted pink at some point, the only way Jacob remembers it at all—but thirty yards in, he comes to the grim realization that if he goes much farther, he might blow out all of his tires. There are shards of broken rock in the road, tipped-over saguaro, odd bits of ancient rusted iron strewn about.

  Jacob wonders if all the junk on the road is intentional. If this is where they still take people. And then he thinks about the boulder. Would it still be pink after all this time? Is ther
e someone who comes out here every few months with a spray can and touches it up? Makes sure none of the graves have been disturbed?

  Who alive even remembers the things done to this place?

  He backs up, parks the Lincoln behind the thickest row of creosote he can find. Not that it matters. He hasn’t seen another car in an hour and none since getting off of I-40. If you were out here, you weren’t the kind of person looking to make a new friend. Still, he takes his Glock from the glove box. Stuffs it in his waistband. It’s been a long time since he’s used it. Keeps it in the glove box in case someone from his past rolls up on him. So now he’s always strapped. Gets out, pops the trunk, grabs the shovel he packed, and starts toward Swede Hill.

  WHAT JACOB REMEMBERS, what plays in his mind about that day, looping, evermore: Driving his lowered Honda Civic, Jacob’s got a bag of cash in the trunk, didn’t count it, but it felt like $100K. Jacob’s pretty familiar with how much money weighs. Jacob, he’s thirty. Been running his father’s errands now for over a decade. Run money here. Pick up guns there. Take a guy to an airstrip outside Elko. Drive a body to the funeral home in Summerlin. Watch to make sure that dumb motherfucker Big Leon actually kills that guy you bound up and tossed in the trunk. If Big Leon lets him go, kill both of them. Not that it ever came to that, because Big Leon, he was into violence. This is also that period of time when Jacob was abusing steroids. Shooting a cocktail in his ass. Gobbling ephedrine like Altoids so he can double-up workouts, getting swollen as shit. Takes to wearing tank tops to show off his tribal tattoos, or sweat suits because his skin always feels like it’s on fire, side-effect of the steroids, and sweat-suit material doesn’t rub at him. He’s got these giant cysts on his back, too. Size of his fists. Boys call him OG Adidas. It’s dumb, but he likes it. Makes him feel like he’s on The Sopranos. It’s 2001.

  Fool.

  Beside him sits his lady. Speaks about a hundred and fifty words of English. She grew up in Russia, got herself adopted by a cocktail waitress about five years ago, moved to Las Vegas. Never really took to the language. She’s been working at Odessa as a hostess. Lucky for Jacob he speaks Russian, too. His mom made sure he learned the language, so he could speak to his Nana and Poppy, who were so Old Country they wanted to go back once Russia ditched that commie shit, but now they were too old, or dead, in the case of Poppy.

  Baby, Jacob says in Russian, let’s go get married.

  Out here?

  No. Later, I mean.

  Don’t be crazy, she says.

  What? You don’t love me?

  This was their bit. They did it a thousand times.

  Natalya stares out the window, bites on her pinky nail, a cute thing she did. Jacob loved her hands. He’s got a thing about fingernails. He can’t stand long nails. Or fake nails. He’s got a thing about germs. Natalya kept hers super short.

  My mom would freak. I don’t want to hurt my mother.

  You’re the most expensive thing she ever bought. Piss her off, she might return you for store credit.

  Natalya slaps the back of his head. She did this whenever he gave her shit about costing her mom fifty large. That’s what she paid the orphanage in Tula. Natalya told Jacob all about that place. About how every dream she has still takes place there. About how she wakes up in her mother’s condo at the Adagio and it takes her a few minutes to realize she’s not in that orphanage, that she’s replaced her dead parents with this living one, this woman who bought her, this woman who loved her before she ever knew her, and isn’t that how parenting works? You don’t get the chance to fall in love with a baby, either. You just love it. She did that for me, Natalya always says. I love that she did that for me. And you know, I did not deserve it at first. I was terrible to her.

  You were just young, Jacob tells her.

  So was my mother.

  So. He’ll do the right thing.

  SWEDE HILL IS steeper and more difficult to climb than he remembers, so Jacob has to stop and catch his breath. Makes sure he can still see his Lincoln. What he doesn’t want to do is get turned around out here. End up walking in circles, until one day a coyote takes what’s left of him, piece by piece, to feed its pups. He looks for the old water tower. But it’s gone. It wasn’t on Google Earth, either, but Jacob thought there’d be a heap of scrap somewhere. Where would it have gone? Who would have hauled it off?

  I AM NOT trying to hurt my mother, Natalya says again, in his memory.

  They’re in the car. Making that turn at the pink boulder.

  She’s a good person, she says. My grandparents. They are good, too. You will meet them one day. After you grow your hair out. And get that tattoo removed from your neck.

  Up ahead, parked twenty yards off the road, beside a rust-colored ruin of a water tower, was a black Ford Explorer. There were two men standing beside it.

  Who are they? Natalya asks.

  My dad’s friends.

  If they’re his friends, she says, why are we meeting them out here? There was a McDonald’s in Needles, wasn’t there?

  More like business associates, Jacob says.

  So not friends?

  I know these guys. They’re cool.

  Why are we meeting them all the way out here? This is stupid, Jacob.

  Chill.

  Don’t tell me ‘chill,’ she says. This is stupid, Jacob. Is that guy wearing a holster?

  Hey, he says, we’re just handing them a bag. I told you that.

  And what?

  And then maybe we go to Palm Springs. You wanna go to Palm Springs? Get some sushi or something? We’re halfway there. We’ll have a nice dinner downtown. You know they got stars on the sidewalk downtown? Like in Hollywood. But different. They got one for a chimp. It’s crazy. We’ll do that, all right?

  In his pocket is a ring. That’s why Natalya is with him this time. He’s rented the house Elvis and Priscilla stayed in on their honeymoon. Had a florist fill it with red roses. A dozen in every room. Petals up the walk. Everything. He’s going to do it right.

  Why doesn’t your father send a check?

  Baby, Jacob says, that isn’t how things work. Like how my dad gives you cash, not a paycheck? So you don’t have to pay taxes? Same deal.

  You could die out here. Look at this place.

  “Baby,” Jacob says in English, “chill.”

  He pulls up beside the Explorer, rolls down the window. One of the guys—Big Leon—comes up, sticks his head in, rests his arms on the windowsill. “What up, G?” he says.

  “Chilling,” Jacob says.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “My lady.”

  “No shit? She looks a little young, G.”

  “She’s from Russia,” Jacob says. “They make them different there.”

  Big Leon says, “What’s your name, Shorty?” Natalya looks at Big Leon. She knows what he’s saying. Even if she spoke no words of English, she’d know what he was saying.

  “She don’t speak much English,” Jacob says.

  “Convenient,” Big Leon says. “Pop your trunk.” Jacob does, and the other guy—goes by Pool Boy, because his name is Marco—goes around back, comes out with the bag, sets it on the front seat of the Explorer, starts unpacking it.

  “You can keep the bag,” Jacob says.

  “You can wait a second, G.”

  “Come on, man,” Jacob says, “it’s Friday night.”

  “Somewhere you need to be?”

  “Yeah,” Jacob says. “Not out the fuck here.”

  Big Leon says, “Last time, it was short.”

  “Talk to my pops.”

  “I did. He says he counted it himself.” Big Leon reaches into his pocket, comes out with a yellow Post-it Note. “Should be $103,261 in the bag. Is that what we’re gonna find?”

  Fuck me, Jacob thinks. Fuck me to hell. Jacob’s been skimming. Not much. A couple hundred here, a couple thousand there. Counting errors. None of these guys exactly math majors, Jacob trying to get a nest egg for himself, not wanting to have to
depend on his father. So if Natalya does marry him, maybe they have some cash to buy a house, down payment at least. For the last six months, he’s been pinching. Dad gives him a bag, he parks over by the Krispy Kreme on Spring Mountain, counts out a few grand for himself, buys himself a coffee, a chocolate-iced cream-filled, and then stashes the rest in a safe-deposit box at the Wells Fargo next door. A couple grand meant nothing to these guys. They were all on the same team, everyone working for his father. It was his money, eventually. It would be his fucking money.

  “Bro,” Jacob says, “I don’t have a chain-of-custody form on this shit.”

  Big Leon says, “What about you, Shorty? How much you think is in the bag?”

  “All of it,” Natalya says, Jacob surprised she even answered. “Now we go? This is bullshit.”

  “Oh, she talks?”

  “You speak bullshit,” Natalya says.

  “Easy, baby,” Jacob says. “We’re all friends here.”

  “We’re not friends,” Big Leon says. He reaches into Jacob’s car, yanks the keys from the ignition, pockets them.

  “The fuck, Leon?” Jacob says.

  “Just while we’re counting,” he says. “All of it is here, nothing to worry about.”

  Big Leon steps away, lights a cigarette, even though it’s nearly 100 degrees outside. Natalya glares at Jacob.

  Who is this fucking asshole to talk to you like that?

  I told you.

  What is happening?

  Nothing, baby. Let me think.

  He opens the glove box, to get his Glock. But it’s not there. He reaches under the passenger seat. In the side pockets. Nothing. Where the fuck is his gun? It’s always in his car. He’s a fucking registered gun owner. It’s Nevada. He’s not even riding dirty.

  Which means, someone took it. Only other person who has keys to his ride is his dad. Because technically, it’s his dad’s car.

  Pool Boy has a battery-powered cash counter he’s feeding bills into. Jacob has three minutes to figure this out and then the rest of his life to regret it. He just doesn’t know it yet.