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  William Lashner

  I

  SALESMAN

  1. The Magazine Writer

  The magazine writer drove her rented car past sagebrush and cactus, heading ever deeper into the bowels of the desert and toward her interview with the outlaw.

  She wouldn’t even have known this rutted stretch of dirt was navigable if the outlaw’s lawyer hadn’t told her exactly how far to go past the Sinclair station before turning. She had reset the trip odometer on her rental car to zero as soon as she saw the dinosaur. At the 23.4-mile mark, she spotted a line of overhead electrical wires snaking to the right. Beneath the wires appeared something that might once have been a road. She reset the trip odometer as she steered off the asphalt.

  The instructions from the lawyer had been explicit: she was to tell no one of her plans; she was to come alone; she was to bring neither cell phone nor any kind of tracking device. When she noted that the instructions were a perfect recipe for disappearing without a trace, the lawyer said she could bring a gun for protection if she chose.

  “Cell phones terrify him,” said the lawyer, “but he’s not worried about you with a gun.”

  She didn’t doubt that last part for a minute. The outlaw was being hunted by both the FBI and a horde of criminal assassins out for a posted bounty, and he had successfully stayed one step ahead of his pursuers. He was handsome, she knew from the photographs all over the web, well built and cocky; he’d look smashing on the cover of one of the magazines she wrote for. This interview would be the greatest get of her journalistic career, but it wasn’t just a story she was after, and it was this other thing, this bitter and more pressing thing, that caused her to clench her jaw in determination as she drove through her fears along that ragged road.

  The shack first appeared well in the distance, a listing structure marooned by time. It was a mere ghost of what it once had been, and what it once had been was nothing much. She stopped the car, checked her odometer, looked at the building. A single black line ran from the electric wires to the shack, the splice very much jerry-rigged. Slowly she turned on to the merest indication of a drive wending between the cacti.

  After slamming the car door shut, the magazine writer clutched her bag and examined the barren landscape: not a truck, not a car, no signs of humanity but the shack and the thick black wire that connected it to the grid. The windows were caked with dust. The midday heat was ferocious. A hot wind swirled the dirt around her shoes. This couldn’t be the place; this was an abandoned piece of nothing in the land of nowhere.

  She had driven into the desert not just to find the outlaw, but to find a piece of herself hard enough to do what needed to be done. She worried that it didn’t exist, this hard place within her, and in this arid wasteland her worry was solidifying into certainty. She thought of leaving, going back to the comforts of her life, but the thing that needed doing compelled her to grip the hot iron handle of the door and give it a yank.

  The door pulled open with a squeal of its hinges. She peered into the gloom. An intermittent crackle and hiss came from somewhere inside. She stepped hesitantly forward. The door banged shut behind her.

  It took her eyes a moment to adjust. The shack was lit by a yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling and the thin light that made its way through the dusted windows. Neon beer signs affixed to the walls flittered noisily on and off, on and off. Behind a makeshift bar, a man, morose and gray, sat motionless on a stool. Behind him, on a hutch, stood a strange stuffed animal the size of a tall squirrel, flanked by two large jars filled with some foul purple liquid. In one of the jars an eyeball pressed against the glass, peering out. The bar top was dusty, the bottles on the shelves behind the barkeep were dusty, graffiti was spattered on the timbered walls. A pair of ceiling fans stirred the air but still the room was stifling, and it smelled like an armadillo had recently crawled beneath the floorboards to die.

  The barkeep stood, nodded at her like she was expected, and pointed at her bag. She handed it over and he gave it a cursory search, raising his eyebrow only as he lifted the camera—as if the gun he’d undoubtedly found was only to be expected—before handing back the bag, gun and camera included, all without saying a word. Then he tilted his head toward one of the tables scattered across the sandy floor, along with half a score of chairs.

  She sat facing the door, laid her notepad and pen on the splintery tabletop, placed the bag on the floor. The neon hissed, the stink wafted, the fans whirred. As she looked about she noted something in a darkened corner, something small, curled, and covered with sand. She was still trying to make it out when the door squawked open and the fierce light of day smashed into the shack’s interior. The magazine writer raised a hand to shield her eyes even as she reached for her handbag.

  When the door slammed shut and the glare died, it took her a long moment to link the man standing before her with the handsome outlaw she had been expecting. This man dragged his left leg behind him like it was a piece of meat, this man’s face was scarred and his hair was greasy, this man wore a black patch over his right eye. Yet as he shambled over to the bar to say a few words to the barkeep before making his way to her table, she could perceive, inside the wreckage, the man he once had been. To see the outlaw in this condition was to see her hope wither like a newborn abandoned in the desert.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet me so far off the beaten road,” said the outlaw, now sitting across the table from her. His voice was raw and hushed, a thing scarred. “Ginsberg’s bar is only one step up from an outhouse, and a short step at that, but it’s about the only place I can safely show my face anymore without getting it shot off. I find it has other advantages, too. I might not be much to look at anymore, but compared with the rest of the mutants that patronize this joint, I’m a veritable matinee idol. In the land of the blind . . . well, you know. And here I can sit and drink alone for hours without being disturbed by the bonhomie and laughter at the other tables because at Ginsberg’s place there is no bonhomie or laughter, only the strangled gurgle of despair. Ah, but at least we have his home-brewed beer to cut the edge.”

  The magazine writer looked up from her notepad to see the barkeep carrying two beers in heavy glass mugs. He slammed the steins down so that waves of beer sloshed onto the table. Without a word he turned and trudged back to the bar. The outlaw hoisted his mug.

  “Cheers,” he said, before pouring a good portion of his mugful down his throat. He let out a loud sigh, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at her expectantly.

  The magazine writer took a sip from her mug and reflexively spat out the mouthful. The outlaw didn’t flinch, not even from the splatters that landed on his chest and arms.

  “I should have warned you,” he said. “Even skunks won’t drink this piss. But at least it’s warm.”

  The outlaw took another long swallow as he squinted at her. His one-eyed stare was disconcerting. She tried asking something but he waved it off, as if he had no interest in her well-prepared interview questions.

  “I could read the disappointment on your face when you saw me scuffle through the door. I’m not what you expected. So let me guess your lede coming in. You were going to call me a crusader for justice ghosting across the land. You had heard about that gang of motorcycle marauders in New Mexico that ended up in a bound heap by the side of the road. You had heard about that tech millionaire who’s now in a Mexican jail on charges of sex slavery. You had heard about the so-called Salt Lake Killer wh
o mysteriously stopped killing. You had heard all this and for some reason you were going to attribute it all to me.

  “Oh, I’ve seen the sites about me on the dark web, I know what they say. Defend one girl from a band of thugs, fight it out on the grounds of some crappy tourist camp in West Virginia, and suddenly any mysterious piece of justice gets pinned to your ass. But you see me now and you are having doubts. We all want our champions to be strong-legged and two-eyed and as good-looking as underwear models. I used to be just that, but I am not that anymore, and you are wondering now what is true and what is myth.

  “Let me assure you of one thing before we continue. Whatever I tell you of my story from here on in is going to be raw truth. I’m through lying. Every lie I ever told was designed to hide the biggest of my secrets, but I’m beyond secrets now. Anyway, you didn’t come for the truth—reporters never do—you came for the legend. So I figure we’ll start at that tourist camp and then loop back for the dirty truth of how it all began.”

  The magazine writer reached into her bag, pushed aside the gun and the camera, and pulled out a silver digital recorder with a small LCD screen. She asked if it was okay if she recorded the interview.

  “Okay?” he said. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  The magazine writer had hoped the physical presence of the outlaw would grant her the strength to do the thing she needed to do, but this wreck of a man was not at all what she expected or required. If she would find her strength, it would come through his words. His story would determine her future course of action, and in a very real way her future itself. She pressed a button and a tiny red spot on the screen began to glow.

  “They were coming for her, all right,” said the outlaw, leaning forward as he spoke into the recorder, his scarred voice taking on a newsreader’s self-serious timbre. “What had been done to her was utterly unconscionable, and now they were coming to finish the job. Only I was in their way. We had been trying to run, the girl and I, but after a Pontiac nearly slammed us off the road, I realized running wasn’t going to work. We had been betrayed. They were trailing our every mile. The only choice was to make a stand. I turned into the mountains and found a tourist camp on a patch of gravelly dirt. I left the car in the open like a neon sign blinking on and off. Vacancy, No Vacancy. If we were going to have it out, I figured sooner was better than later. The girl was most likely going to die at that tourist camp, and so was I, but a choice had been made, and so there I was, steely eyed and rock jawed, putting my life between them and her. I knew the names of those that were coming, I knew their skills, their utter savagery. And I knew they would be led by a pure piece of killer.

  “But I was a pure piece of something, too.”

  He looked up. “Too much? I noired it up for you, gave it the staccato rhythm of gunshots so your copy would sing, but maybe I overdid it. Now it sounds so damn heroic it makes me want to vomit. Or is that the beer? But wasn’t that the angle you were looking for? I was going to be the righteous warrior, the noble protector of the innocent. And don’t doubt that the girl I was protecting, a young woman, actually, was an innocent. She was all rainbows and unicorns and stuffed bears. So the protectee you got right, it’s just the righteous warrior part that needs work.

  “Okay, so here, now, in the interest of truth, I need to make the first of my confessions. The role I was playing at that tourist camp—defender of the innocent, the hero’s role—was not my usual part. Through most of my life I had cast myself onto the other side of the equation. In fact, those henchmen coming for me with teeth bared and guns drawn, they had once been colleagues. I had been a henchman, too. We had all been part of a syndicate dubbed the Hyena Squad. And here’s the kicker: the utterly unconscionable thing that had been done to that girl had been done by me.

  “Can people change? Did I change? That’s for you to determine. How I went from one side to the other is the beating heart of this story. And don’t think you can figure out the why of it on your own. Don’t think one look into my eye will give you the answer. You’ll be looking for a spark of conscience, some glimmer of humanity, and you’ll find it because you’ll mistake reflection for fact. But all you’ll have seen is a shard of yourself staring back from the vile sack of jelly still in my skull.

  “My eyes have always been dead as pennies. It just took the right person to recognize that fact and make it worth something. Someone to see the value in the darkness, to refine it as one purifies a discarded mass of slag until what remains shines with the brightness of gold before sending it out into the world to do its damage.

  “Someone like Mr. Maambong.”

  2. Gold Dog

  I was recruited by Mr. Maambong as a henchman for the Hyena Squad out of a multitude of deserts, the most literal of which was the scorched and arid landscape of Nevada. This was the before, when I was still full of piss, good-looking as hell, and undamaged enough to be optimistic about my life and prospects.

  “Good morning, Mr. Cannizare. This is Dick Triplett, senior account executive with Gold Dog International in beautiful Carson City, Nevada, the gold capital of the world. The reason for the call is sometime back you requested information about the precious metals market. I wanted to personally introduce myself and get some fresh, free information out to you in this morning’s mail. Now, Mr. Cannizare, have you ever invested in the precious metals market before?”

  You already know that my real name is not Dick Triplett. In accord with my promise to tell you only the raw truth, I must also confess that Mr. Cannizare never requested information about the precious metals market, our boiler room was in a strip mall outside the Carson City city limits, and to be a senior account executive with Gold Dog International was an achievement on par with putting your pants on with the zipper in front. Even the old alcoholic who swept the office once a week was a senior account executive if ever forced to answer the phone. Our receptionist, Shelly Levalle, a fifty-year-old bottle blonde with hair higher than Lincoln’s hat, was the vice president of communications, meaning we senior account executives were subordinate to her, which you would understand if you ever saw her breasts.

  We were all working for Joey Mitts, an ancient, chain-smoking blob of con with yellow teeth and a nose like a tennis ball. Joey was a legend in certain desert circles; he was a former brothel proprietor, a former member of the state assembly, a former Carson City casino operator. Each of these positions had ended with an indictment, but Joey had a connected Vegas lawyer on speed dial and he had beaten each and every rap. “They can’t do nothing to an honest man,” would say Joey Mitts, “which is why I’m always in the shithouse.”

  Outside Joey’s private office were nine desks with phones in a room that smelled of coffee and flatulence, and from those desks we cheerfully sold promises to deliver gold to doomsday preppers from sea to shining sea. As Joey told us incessantly, “Selling gold is selling money, and if you can’t sell money, then you’re in the wrong business, chum.” “Chum” was one of the words Joey threw at us instead of our names, which he never seemed to remember. We were pally, buddy, amigo, brother, captain, cousin, Tom, Harry, and Dick, from which I took my nom de plume of gold dust.

  “I’m sure, Mr. Cannizare, that you know the secret to making money on any investment is proper timing. That’s especially true in the metals market and I am happy to say that your timing has never been better. Now, Mr. Cannizare—can I call you Luigi? Great! Now, Luigi, if I could show you an opportunity in the gold market, an opportunity that you just could not say no to, are you in a financial position to take advantage of my firm’s initial recommendation of ten thousand dollars?”

  Gold Dog International consisted of Joey, Shelly, a guy in India working the website, and a rotating roster of salespeople hammering the phones. We were mostly young, mostly male, mostly wearing shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops because the air conditioner was crap, all of us recruited by Joey himself. On the sound system we ran a continuous loop of the last five minutes of a frenzied day on th
e New York Stock Exchange, with desperate traders calling out prices and the crowd noise rising to the famous triple chime of the bell. And we worked the phones all hours of the day, 8:00 a.m. on the East Coast to 8:00 p.m. on the West Coast, weekends included; it didn’t matter much when we called, our customers were always home and delighted to talk because they were generally alone and lonely and so old they barely remembered their names.

  Nothing sells gold more effectively than a sense that the nation is going straight to hell, and so Joey bought his leads from a wild roster of religious and political organizations that predicted the coming apocalypse, or the coming rapture, or the coming economic collapse of America, or the coming election of another stinking Democrat president. And if you were stocking up on freeze-dried MREs or water storage kits or yellow pandemic suits, you could be assured Joey already owned your name and number. In support of these leads, Joey himself wrote the script. “Just read what I wrote, cousin, and don’t do no freestyling. This ain’t surf school. We’re selling gold and this is the way we do it.”

  “Luigi, I understand that’s a big chunk of cash, but it does take money to make money, am I right? Let me tell you something you already know: this whole damn country is going down the tubes. Our man in the White House is being thwarted every which way by the socialist rabble-rousers looking for their own box of chocolates. And if the mullahs in Iran drop the big one on Toledo, you’re going to want more than a few dollar bills in your wallet, am I right? That’s where our opportunity comes into play. History proves that when the US dollar dives, gold does what? Absolutely! We’re on the same page, Luigi.”