“Sorry,” she said.
Then she was gone. I heard someone’s voice, a man’s. He was telling her to get in the car while she still could, get in the back, lie down. Then I heard him running out the front door. The sirens louder and louder.
I ran out of the broken window, leaped up and grabbed the edges of the wall, slicing my hands, pulled myself over and felt the terra-cotta spikes cut and scrape and pierce me as I went over, landed hard on the xeriscape rocks.
Those security guards got to me before I could stand back up, with HOA-issued Tasers and privately owned pistols. They dragged me across the stones and into the street and I was thinking as they did so that I needed the real cops to get there, that they would follow some kind of rules. And then I was on the pavement and it was hot as hell and there was so much shouting and my body shaking from the fish-hook barbs of the Taser in my skin. Then I saw a boot and it took forever to come down and it went past my eyes and past my face and into my throat. And I knew I wasn’t leaving.
Because nothing gets piped back or returned in Bermuda Dunes. It all just sinks down underneath. That’s when I felt everything in me do what happens to everything here: drain down and disappear forever.
A Career Spent Disappointing People
by Tod Goldberg
Indio
Three hours out of the hospital, his left foot too swollen for a shoe, Shane’s car breaks down. It’s July, a trillion degrees outside, Interstate 10 a gray ribbon of shit unspooling east out of Palm Springs toward Arizona. Not exactly where he wanted to go, but who the fuck wants to go to Arizona? It’s what was on the other side of Arizona that mattered to Shane, the chance that there might be another life in that direction. He never liked being on the coast. The one time he ever even tried to swim in the Pacific — back when he came out on vacation with his dad, so, over twenty years ago, half his lifetime now — he was gripped with the ungodly realization that unlike a pool, there were no sides. You were always in the deep end out there.
It was a feeling that stuck with him, even when he was in one of those towns in the San Fernando Valley that sounded like an escape route from an old western: North Hills... West Hills... Hidden Hills...
The Honda was the one damn thing Shane thought he could depend on. But as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the check engine light flashed on. A hundred thousand miles he put on that fucking car and not a single problem, and the one time he really needed it, it was telling him it couldn’t comply. He didn’t have the time — or the money — to swing by the mechanic, considering he’d left the hospital before the nurse had filled out the paperwork for the cops, which was a problem. Not as big a problem as staying would have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have the cops trawling the city for him, especially since the wound did look self-inflected, since it was. Someone else holding his fucking hand while he shot himself with his own damn gun.
Shane couldn’t remember if he still had AAA, but he called anyway.
“Looks like you canceled your account six months ago,” the customer service agent said.
Rachel must have done it after she moved out. Like how she canceled their shared credit cards. Or how she took their dog Manny to get his teeth cleaned on the same morning she kicked him out of the house, knowing full well Shane wouldn’t have the cash to pick the dog back up.
God, he loved that dog. Probably more than he loved Rachel. No probably. Actually. If he got out of this fucked-up situation, he was going to buy another dog that looked like Manny and name him Manny too.
“How much is it to re-up?” Shane asked.
“It’s sixty-eight dollars, which gets you seven miles of towing service.”
“What if I need to go farther?” Shane asked, thinking, What the hell, maybe I’ll have AAA tow me to Arizona, give me someone to talk to. Or maybe he’d just steal the tow truck. He could do that. He was capable of anything now.
“You’d need the premier membership for that,” the customer service agent said, and then began to tell Shane the particulars of how amazing the premier membership was. He had $274 in cash in his pocket — Gold Mike, the fucker who shot him in the foot, that’s what he gave Shane as a parting gift after he’d asked him to stop by their storage unit over by the Forum; Shane thinking it was to plan the night’s job, Gold Mike with other ideas.
“It’s not working out,” Gold Mike told him. The storage unit was half-empty already, Gold Mike’s van filled with their deejay and karaoke equipment, all their locksmith materials, plus their three industrial-sized lockboxes filled with pills. They’d been coming up light lately, but for a while it was a good living. Black-tie weddings in the Palisades, bar mitzvahs in Calabasas, retirement parties in Bel-Air. How it worked, one of them would be inside at the wedding, singing or dee-jaying, the other guy parking cars and collecting addresses. Three-hour wedding meant they could get as many keys made as they wanted. Spend the next couple days casing a house, go in and steal all the pills, which wasn’t a crime any cop gave a shit about, particularly when there was no evidence of breaking and entering. Plus, it was a victimless crime, Shane not feeling too bad about taking a cancer patient’s Klonopin, knowing full well CVS would hook them back up in thirty minutes, maybe less. They didn’t steal jewelry or TVs or cars or any of that shit. Just pills.
Then this whole opiate crisis started getting on the news right when weed got legalized, so people in California started loading up on edibles and vape pens instead of Percocet and benzos.
“It’s just an ebb,” Shane said.
“I’m moving my operating base,” Gold Mike said. “Got a friend in Reno. Says everyone’s hooked on something. He can get me into the hotels. That’s next-level.”
“Cool,” Shane said. “I’m down to relocate.” His only steady, legal gigs were running karaoke at Forrest’s Bar in Culver City and a honky-tonk in Thousand Oaks called Denim & Diamonds.
“You’re not hearing me,” Gold Mike said. “You can’t hit the high notes anymore. If you can’t sing, this whole operation is moot.” Moot. Where the fuck had he learned that word? “Jessie’s Girl”? “Don’t make it weird, all right? Ten years is a good run.”
“Who needs a high note? You think Mick can hit a high note?”
“Bro,” Gold Mike said, “I don’t even like music.”
“So that’s it? No severance?”
“You think you’re getting COBRA up in this bitch? Come on, man.”
“Manny’s chemo put me back ten grand,” Shane said. Manny had a tumor on his ear that turned out to be a treatable cancer, in the sense that the dog could get treatment and still die, but he hadn’t yet, as far as Shane knew. “I’ve been upside down ever since.”
“That was like eighteen months ago.” Gold Mike took out his wallet, thumbed out a few fifties, put them on an empty shelf next to a broken turntable.
“Couple hundred bucks?” Shane said. “How about you give me 50 percent of everything or I walk into a police station. How about that?” And then Shane pulled out his gun, which had actually been a gift from Gold Mike. A little .22. He’d given it to Shane after a robbery went sideways, a Vietnam War vet came home and found Shane in his bathroom, beat the fucking shit out of him with a golf club, Gold Mike coming in at the last minute and knocking the fucker out with a Taser.
You pull out your gun, mentally, you gotta be ready to kill a guy right then, no talking shit, no cool catch phrase, no freeze, no hands up, nothing, just pop pop pop. That’s what cops are always saying, it’s what Gold Mike had taught Shane too. Which is how he also had all of Gold Mike’s credit cards and his driver’s license, in addition to $274.