“Maybe.”
“What’s wrong?” Mo looked at me.
I could feel her eyes on me, my cheeks grew hot. “You know what’s wrong. I don’t like it. I don’t like this. I don’t like this place.”
“Pull over.”
I did.
“Baby.” Mo hadn’t called me by anything other than my name in a long time. Then at the gate. Then this. I felt it in my chest but also between my shoulder blades. “It’s the last one of the day, baby. We are already here, already checked in.”
“So?”
“I hear you, baby. I do. Listen, just this one and then we go home. We can put on a movie. Make you feel good. Then I will take off all of tomorrow. Turn off the phone. Hell, if tonight pays out like it should, I’ll take the week off. We can drive out to someplace nice. Maybe the beach. Come on.”
A week on the beach. Calling me baby. Cocktails and bikinis. It sounded pretty good. I felt like I could become myself again.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
I finished the drive to the house. It was a nightmare for me. I glanced at the address on the card. It wasn’t the same one that Mo had told me. Blocks away. And a different street. Everything felt wrong. And that’s before I saw the house.
Most places out here are how you think of a house: front yard, house, fenced-in backyard. Most of Mo’s clients had pools out back, covered patios, which are good for me, they cut down on window glare, make it easier for me to get the shots. I can lie back on a pool lounger until the blinds open, get set up, take the pictures, and shoot them over to Mo.
The Bermuda Dunes house was a nightmare. A walledoff place where most of the house is the wall itself, a home built like a fort, a residential Alamo. Each house sits in a hollow square, a sharp-edged circle with the pool in the middle and no backyard. Probably some midsixties idea about how to party, shutting out the world from seeing what a swinging shindig is all about, steel gates and decorative spikes on the walls. They feel like prisons, these places. And Bermuda Dunes is full of them.
“Fuck. I can’t even get a shot here.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no backyard. It’s a courtyard place. This is a bust.”
“Bust? There’s no cops here,” Mo said. “It’s the Dunes.”
“I mean busted. Like broken. It’s shot.”
Mo thought for a second and then spoke again. “I will leave the gate not quite closed when they let me in. You can get a shot from in the courtyard, right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Depending how the rooms are laid out.”
“I’ll put him right where you want. In a good spot. Just be on the far side of the pool so he doesn’t see you.”
That’s exactly where I set up and waited for the blinds to open.
I didn’t need to hear anything while waiting and usually had on headphones, listened to music, waited. The music kept me awake — I worried I would fall asleep otherwise. I sat in a chair and waited. The pool was nice but old, cement with dinner plate — sized chunks of slate around the edges, a different color above and below the surface, decades of residue and grit above the surface, while the water, constantly stirred by the filters and pumps, kept the sides more or less clean. Maybe some algae here and there.
There’s algae growing in the desert. That’s how much money there is here, rich people with their oases.
The furniture was all old and sun-bleached, the fabric strained and stretching on the loungers, so eaten by the heat that the cloth was crumbling, turning to dust. Sit on those things and take half the chair with you in your clothes, and that’s if it doesn’t collapse under you. I sat at an old café set — metal table, metal chairs, painted aluminum.
The vertical blinds moved but didn’t open, swayed a little, like something had brushed by them. It seemed early to be picture time, but I hadn’t looked at what time we set up. Maybe this guy wasn’t pretending to even want a massage. My eyes caught something scattered and dark in a jangled line. They looked like paw prints. Maybe the guy had a dog. I hadn’t seen any other sign of one, no dog tried to escape out of the front door, didn’t hear barking when Mo rang the doorbell. Could have been a coyote running through. But how did they get in and out of there? Over those walls? I wondered how they knew not to drink the pool water, how to resist something so blue and sparkling, how they knew it would make them sick, dry them out the more they drank.
Who ever thought to name them blinds? Why not hides? Why not screens?
The blinds moved again but not gently, not in a careful breath; there was a hard crashing and it seemed like something was pressing up against them, they shook and then parted, and I saw what it was.
It was Mo.
Her face was pushed up against the glass, her dark hair spilled all around her and strings of it between the blades of the blinds.
I stood still for a second, shocked, paralyzed.
Replayed that sliver of time in my mind. Oh no. Oh no. I jumped up from the chair, knocked over the table and the camera flew into the air, dropped down into the pool. I heard it splash as I ran past, went to the sliding door but it wouldn’t open, tried the next one over, locked. I kicked at a brick planter against the wall with my heel and a loose brick came free. I grabbed the brick and threw it against the glass, which wobbled and shook but didn’t break. The blinds jangled again.
Picked the brick back up and threw it with everything I had into the glass, aiming for where the first throw had scuffed and scraped it. The brick sailed through the glass and continued into the house where I heard it clang into something and thunk onto the floor. The glass held its shape for a second and then fell down like water in a fountain, splashing down onto the floor.
I ran into the room, a kind of family den, pictures of a couple all over the walls, hiking in the mountains, in front of a small plane at the tiny private airport. No massage table. I looked down and saw Mo, lying facedown on the floor halfway into the room. Her dark hair swirled out around her. I couldn’t figure out for a second what was wrong with her outfit and then realized she wasn’t wearing the same clothes as when I’d dropped her off. Her shape seemed wrong. She was arched up and bent, a tiny broken bridge. But I was moving fast and couldn’t stop. I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her over.
There was a knife sticking out of her chest, the lone pillar arching the bridge. Every alarm in my head was screaming but nothing was making sense. I shouted her name and heard her voice, a kind of involuntary yelp, but it wasn’t coming from her. It was down the hall. I looked at her face.
It wasn’t Mo.
Some other woman, in different clothes and with a different shape, just dark hair and a knife in her chest. I peered around the room and realized it was the same woman from the pictures on the walls, smiling in front of some Vegas fountain, pretending to hold up the Eiffel Tower, standing so as to trick the viewer into seeing something that wasn’t there, wasn’t true. I looked at the knife again. It was mine — how many times had I cooked with that knife? I had just the night before. Mo said she’d clean up.
The Bermuda Dunes security has sirens exactly like cop cars and they are always roaming around, looking for problems and excuses to flex as though they are real cops, like white blood cells, like vultures: clean up and tear apart. How were they already here? I hadn’t called, it had just happened. And then I knew. They were called before Mo’s face hit the glass and before I smashed it in.
I looked around and there was no place for me to go. Only one way out, straight through the front door, where security was already heading. I swept the room one more time, hoping a new door would magically appear, and there was Mo, standing and looking at me. She seemed a little sad but not very. Resolved.