But money didn't last long with Bob. Half of it ended up down the gullet of slot machines. Half ended up in empty gin bottles, tossed from the back of his trailer into the desert, where they glistened like a field of diamonds.
He had committed suicide a year ago, but his body hadn't figured it out yet.
The truckers talked about it. Bob looked normal enough, a year ago, for a man marooned in the desert. From that point, month by month, he got older. He never shaved, other than cutting tangles out of his long, graying beard. His hair dangled in messy strands below his shoulders. His skin was shriveled and gray, and his eyes receded into his skull. He ate little but jerky himself, getting thinner and thinner until he was barely a hundred and twenty pounds. He never washed his clothes, which usually consisted of jeans and a Las Vegas T-shirt hanging on his skinny frame. The stench got so bad that some of his trucker customers refused to come inside, and they told him that even the jerky was beginning to smell. Bob just opened a window, letting dry, dusty air blow through the trailer.
He couldn't go into the casinos anymore. They turned him away at the door. Instead, he spent time every few days at a bar a half mile up the highway from his trailer, where he played video poker until the bartender got sick of the smell. Then he'd buy another bottle of gin and go home, drink, and pass out In the morning, or whenever a trucker pounded loudly enough to wake him up, he would throw the bottle out back.
Last night had been a two-bottle night. Or maybe it had been two nights ago, or even three. He didn't know.
He didn't remember much. On the television it said Wednesday, but he couldn't remember when he had started his binge. His last visitor had arrived in the afternoon, and that night, whichever night it was, he had begun pouring glass after glass of gin. And now it was Wednesday.
Bob sighed. He had to piss.
He stood up, propping himself against the wall for balance. The trailer spun in his head for a few seconds before righting itself. He stepped down off the mattress onto the floor and watched a few bugs skitter away from him. The two gin bottles lay empty a few feet away. He crouched, picking them up and staring inside. There was a small puddle of gin in each one, clinging to the glass, enough to wet his tongue when he turned the bottles upside down over his mouth. His body was sufficiently poisoned that the taste caused his stomach to heave, and he had to swallow hard to avoid retching.
Bob held the two bottles by their necks. He looked around for his sandals, saw them under a chair, and stuck his feet into them. The sandals flapped as he padded to the center door of the trailer. The latch had long since broken. With his knee, he nudged the door open, and daylight roared in. Still naked, Bob shuffled down the rusty steps into the desert behind his trailer.
The sun was ferocious, like a yellow fire burning out of control above the hills. His eyes squinted, barely able to open, and his skin tightened, starting to cook. As he sucked in each labored breath, a furnace of air seared his lungs.
His penis twitched, ready to release. He began pissing a virtually clear stream of urine onto the ground. The liquid raised a cloud of dust, then gathered into a small pool in an indentation in the earth. He kept pissing into the center, causing droplets to splatter onto his toes. He watched the flow intently, as if it were his life's blood leaking out of him. The urine was frothy and reeked of gin. In a few seconds, the pool would be gone, baked away by the sun.
The stream dissipated to a trickle.
Underhanded, he heaved one of the gin bottles into the air, watching it glint in the sun in a shallow arc before crashing back to earth. He heard the glass shatter and saw shards burst in every direction. Carefully, he repeated the ritual with the second bottle, enjoying the noise as it whooshed in the air and then smashed on the ground.
There were dozens of bottles in pieces out there. It was his private little minefield. Most of the shards quickly gathered dust, but the recent ones shined, reflecting the sunlight like laser beams.
He squinted, staring at the desert. He had only been outside a few minutes, but it was already time to go inside, where there was no relief from the heat but where at least his body didn't shrivel from the direct sun. His wizened skin had burned so often that he had small sores that oozed and never healed. He could feel them now, stinging as the sun burned them.
Even so, Bob lingered.
He didn't know what it was, but something caught his eye. He saw the tough little windswept creosote bushes and the yuccas that looked like dwarf palm trees. They were right where they should be. And the hills in the distance were the same. And the broken bottles glinted like they always did. Like diamonds.
Except-no, that wasn't true.
Something was out of place. He saw the sun shining, glinting, but not in the minefield where he always tossed the bottles. The reflections catching his eye were farther away, and off to the side, nowhere near any of the other shards he could see. But they shimmered in the hot sun, little diamonds winking at him from under one of the creosote bushes.
What were they?
Bob frowned. He didn't know why, but he found himself shuffling across the desert, wanting to know what it was he saw. The closer he got, the faster he walked, until he was almost running. He was out of shape and out of breath, but he jogged naked across the last twenty yards until he was right over the spot where the diamonds lay hidden. Then he stopped and stared down at his feet.
The glinting diamonds were really the shine of glitter sprinkled on skin, sparkling on a woman's body in the dirt.
It lay, face up, partially obscured by the overhanging bush. The body was as naked as he was, but utterly lifeless and ageless, a shrunken corpse whose cooked skin had collapsed in on itself, whose eyes were wide open but shrunk to tiny marbles, whose blonde hair was grayed with dust, whose mouth was open in a silent scream as desert beetles led a parade to eat her flesh from inside. It was almost unrecognizable as anything that had once been human and beautiful.
Bob sank to his knees.
She was staring at him. And her lips, which had no color at all, were curled into a smile. He tentatively reached a hand out to touch her skin, as if he was afraid she would suddenly awaken and grab him. But she didn't move. Her skin felt like sandpaper under his touch.
Then he saw her face twitch. It was like a nightmare. She couldn't be alive!
Bob stared in horror as a fat roach squeezed its way out of the corpse's nose and wiggled its antennae at him. He stumbled backward, then ran. He didn't head back to his trailer, just turned and sprinted clumsily for the road. His sandals fell away. The rocky floor of the desert scratched and cut his feet until he left blood trails with each footfall. He ran anyway, not slowing down or looking behind him, as if the girl's ghost were on his heels.
34
Serena Dial of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pushed her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and stared down at the body.
"Nice."
She said it to no one in particular. In fact, the scene wasn't nice at all. She hated desert corpses. They all looked about a hundred years old, and sometimes, if you got there after the birds and animals did, they were chewed up, with missing eyeballs, flesh eaten away, the kind of thing that flashed back in a nightmare. She mostly saw dead people with knives in their backs or gunshot wounds, which, when you got past the blood, were not really so hard to stomach. At least the body still looked like a body. Not like this.