In truth, though, when had Dobbs ever said no to anything? From the start he’d gone along with whatever jobs Sergio offered him, no questions asked, trusting in an unspoken pact. He chose to believe Sergio understood Dobbs was different. Not a criminal. A Conscientious Independent Contractor.
But Dobbs’s commitment seemed to make no difference. There was still something about him the others didn’t trust. Gordo treated Dobbs’s two years in college as the equivalent of a medical degree, and nothing Dobbs said could convince him otherwise. Why would Dobbs be doing work like this, Gordo wanted to know, when he could’ve had a house with a pool, a fleet of Cadillacs, a Rolex, a beautiful wife?
Dobbs accepted that to the others his presence was hard to understand. But for himself, it all made perfect sense. The world was changing, borders were dissolving. The rich were still rich, and everyone else was in free fall. Those jobs that Gordo imagined coming with a college degree, they didn’t exist anymore. And there was so much worse to come. Drought throughout the West. Hurricanes from the Gulf to the Atlantic. These were just teasers. But people denied what they were too scared to face. They went on dreaming of beachfront condos soon to be a mile under the sea. They stuck umbrellas in the sand and burned.
So Dobbs had aligned himself with the survivors. Bottom-feeders had always been the most adaptable of species.
Then came the accident. But not an accident, really. A transaction. One of the costs of survival. Outside Barstow, with a Glock to his head and carnage all around and the pitiable moans of the wounded, Dobbs discovered he’d gone numb. He could no longer feel anything at all.
The men who’d intercepted Dobbs and Gordo on the highway were so efficient, so confident, they didn’t bother wasting bullets. They took the drugs and left. But it would’ve been easier, in certain ways, if they’d been less merciful, sparing Gordo from having to make the phone call, to admit what had happened. “It’s like ordering your own execution,” Gordo said as it rang.
In the hour it took for help to arrive, Dobbs tended to the injured as best he could. There was so much blood it was hard to make sense of what he was seeing — what was severed and what was broken. There was screaming and praying, and Dobbs couldn’t understand a word. His Spanish was still just as bad as during his first trip to Mexico. He went from one to the next saying, “It’s going to be all right,” and he hoped the language barrier meant they couldn’t hear the tremor in his voice.
“I should’ve just called the cops,” Gordo kept saying. “Better off taking my chances with them.”
If there’d been anything for a hundred miles other than heat stroke and dehydration, Gordo would’ve taken off on foot. But Dobbs had decided to stay, no matter what.
Fifteen minutes before the three black Suburbans appeared on the horizon, a third person died, a woman maybe forty years old. Pink theme-park T-shirt, not a speck of blood. Not even a bruise. Dobbs had given her barely a glance, thinking she had no need for him. There one moment, gone the next.
They were the first people Dobbs had ever lost. All this time he’d thought he was good at what he did. Now he understood he’d just been lucky.
He and Gordo were tossed into the back of one of the Suburbans, and everything Dobbs saw on the way to Vegas, and everything since, had been a blur. It was as if his eyes had forgotten how to focus. And here on this bench outside Caesars Palace, the scorched cement radiating through the soles of his shoes, he felt not just his eyes but his entire body growing hazy, as if he were becoming absorbed in some sort of mirage. The Eiffel Tower at his back, a showgirl’s ruby thong, four stories tall. The palm trees along the boulevard were pert and happy, but all of it was smeared now with a film of blood. Dobbs kept watching for Gordo, for his inverted straw basket of hair bobbing among the crowds, for his big, goofy smile. Why did Gordo have to be so stupid?
Dobbs thought back to his first meeting with Sergio, to that frothy bag of beer. It was all so much farther from Minnesota than he’d ever dreamed. But even now he couldn’t imagine not having made that trip.
It wasn’t that he’d hated school or had no aptitude for it. He’d been a perfectly mediocre student. He just hadn’t understood how most of it mattered. And not in the way other people said it, the cliché about the real world being more important than books. The people who said that kind of thing just weren’t very smart. They needed to believe in simple things.
But that simplicity — if it had ever existed — was gone. Dobbs’s professors, his textbooks, his parents, they’d all been products of the old world, preparing him and everyone else for something that remained only in their memories. He’d felt this certainty since he was a kid. He’d seen what the future held. The empty mines and lumber mills surrounding his grandfather’s cabin. All those old rural towns, abandoned. It came for the cities next. He’d traveled with his family, seen what was left of Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland. He had cousins in Buffalo. Ruins.
A few months before that first trip to Mexico, before all the business with Sergio began, Dobbs had gone north to his grandfather’s cabin. He’d told no one. By then his grandfather was dead. He’d passed away the year Dobbs started high school. Even though they’d hated the place, his parents hadn’t bothered trying to sell the old lake house. Possibly they’d forgotten all about it.
On the long drive there, Dobbs had taken mental inventory of his grandfather’s possessions, the things he’d cataloged as a kid and now, as an adult, felt ready to claim: a liquor cabinet full of Canadian Club, a Remington 870 in a velvet-lined case. And hovering on a winch above his grandfather’s dock, an aluminum fishing boat with the fifty-horsepower Evinrude.
The first night in the cabin, bent over the porch railing, Dobbs purged himself of the Canadian Club.
The next morning, still woozy, he took the Remington and all the shells, stacking them neatly in the prow of the boat. Pulling away from the dock, he steered the outboard motor toward the far shore of the lake, half a mile away.
As soon as he was clear, he opened the throttle. The fifty-horsepower bought at best a gallop across the still green water. When he was maybe twenty yards from the steep, rocky bank, he dove starboard, surfacing just in time for the impact.
There was no explosion as the boat struck the sharp limestone, no ball of fire. No broken bones, either, that time. Dobbs kept treading, the pistons in his heart still firing, as the boat filled with water and tipped to the bottom of the lake.
Two months later he arrived in Mexico. He hadn’t been back to Minnesota since.
Dobbs had been sitting on the bench outside Caesars Palace for two hours when someone finally appeared, swimming toward him through the refracting waves of heat rising up from the concrete. Like everything else in his field of vision, the figure was a blur, but it wasn’t Gordo. The waves settled into something less distorted, something dark-haired and trim, and Dobbs allowed himself to believe he was seeing — could it be? — Sergio himself. His trouble really must be serious, Dobbs realized, if suddenly Sergio seemed like a comforting friend. Years had passed since Dobbs had seen him in person. Five, six? It seemed even longer ago. This time Sergio — or the figment of Sergio — had traded his apron for a business suit, but Dobbs would still have known him anywhere. With every stride, Sergio grew larger and more fixed, the black of his suit more saturated, but still Dobbs couldn’t be sure what he was seeing was real. Even when Sergio sat down beside him and took off his sunglasses, even when Dobbs saw the lines on Sergio’s face, he had doubts. But then a pair of girls strolled by in nearly transparent white capris, and Sergio turned to Dobbs and said, “Found yourself a girlfriend yet?”