$200 and a Cadillac

$200 and a Cadillac - By Fingers Murphy


I



He spoke into the rearview mirror.

“Hank Norton. I’m a surveyor.”

Eighty miles an hour down the freeway. Keeping his speed steady. Don’t get pulled over.

“Hello. Hank Norton. Nice to meet you.” He stopped himself. Not right. Good to meet you. No. Good to know you—that’s what Hank Norton would say. He glanced out the window, eyeing the sagebrush suspiciously.

He’d been sent to the desert to kill a man. It wasn’t the killing that bothered him, but the desert itself. The sand and dust made him uncomfortable. The vastness made him nervous—all that sky and open space. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar. He knew this place. He’d crossed the wasteland between LA and Vegas before. The man he would kill, however, remained unknown.

He started again. Slow, casual. “I’m a surveyor, from Knoxville”—he was careful to say Knoxvull, the way a Tennessean would. “From Knoxville. Yeah, I work for the University of Tennessee. The geology department.”

He imagined saying it to a waitress. He pictured her. A small town girl, teetering out here on the edge of the world, aching to get away but trapped by circumstance—a bad marriage, weak constitution, fear—someone to whom even Knoxvull would sound interesting. He could see her standing at the end of his table, nodding her head, buying it all. And he knew he could sell it to her too, and to the guy at the gas station, the grocery store, and to anyone else who asked, as each of them, one by one, led him to his target. Whoever it was.

He stopped at the top of an off-ramp forty miles west of the Nevada border. To the north and south, the desert stretched out to a ring of craggy mountains, circling like a bowl fifty miles across. The sun was setting, throwing halos of orange and red up from the tips of the western peaks. He’d always marveled at these occasional overpasses in the middle of nowhere, connecting the freeway to roads that led into oblivion. He’d always wondered who used them, and now he was going to find out.

He adjusted the mirror and looked straight into it, giving it a friendly nod. “Hey there. Hank Norton. Glad to know you.” Big smile. “Me? Oh, I’m a surveyor, from Knoxville, Tennessee. Yeah, I work for the geology department at the university there. They sent me out here to measure these rock formations out at the Egg Rock National Monument.”

That would do just fine.

He turned the Subaru north, down a thin strip of faded gray that parted the barren landscape, running curveless to the horizon. At the end of it lay a speck of a town called Nickelback, barely warranting the smallest dot on most maps. That’s where he would do the killing, assuming the man he’d been sent for was really there.

He gave the car all it had and it topped out at eighty-five. The landscape blurred by, but not fast enough. The low, twisted brush, the exposed patches of rock, the Joshua trees, all of it dusky brown and purple in the fading light. Hank pressed the pedal harder, mashing it to the floor, but nothing happened. The survey equipment rattled in the bin on top of the car, but it didn’t weigh enough to slow it down. With the rpms still far from the red line, there was only one explanation: a governor.

Hank appreciated private regulation between contracting parties—it was his own line of work, after all—but the governor irritated him. Hertz failed to tell him about it before he rented the car, which was fundamentally dishonest. As he thought about it more, it wasn’t the governor itself that annoyed him so much as its concealment. He would have rented the car regardless, but the deal would have been more fair if they had told him about it up front. At least in his line of work everything was on the table. Nothing was held back. Everyone knew where they stood. For Hank, dishonesty like Hertz’s signaled a breakdown in the moral fabric of society. It heralded a collapse of order, a world in which a reasoned approach to living would no longer be possible. Hank hoped he wouldn’t live to see it play all the way out.

Then, at the edge of the road, there was movement. Slight, but sudden.

The sagebrush wiggled and parted. A coyote darted out into the road, dragging something, and stood broadside, head turned, frozen in surprise at the oncoming car. Hank stood on the brake and the car began to slide, drifting to one side. He cranked the wheel the other way and the car swerved back, careening in broad swales across the pavement. But he was too close, moving too fast. He heard the dog hit the car, felt the impact, and watched it slide up across the hood and through the windshield, exploding the glass inward and all over him.

The car went off the road at an angle, did two three-sixties through the sand along the shoulder and came to rest against a Joshua tree, which promptly collapsed and disappeared into a massive cloud of dust. The air was thick with the smell of burned rubber and steaming antifreeze. The world went abruptly still and silent.

Moments later, when he emerged from his daze, Hank screamed a litany of obscenities, slammed his shoulder against the unmoving door, and then crawled from the car through the empty windshield hole and sat on the hood. Steam rose up around him and he ran his hands over his body, feeling for anything strange. He seemed all right. He tried to shake off the adrenaline and focus.

But there was sand all over him—dirt, everywhere—and panic seized him. He brushed at his pants and shirt, nearly frantic, but the brushing only moved it around. He stopped himself and took a few deep breaths. There was nothing he could do. When his anxiety subsided, he surveyed the view in all directions: nothing but sagebrush and a fading sunset. All he could do was shake his head.

This is just great, he thought. Wonderful.

Hank turned back and looked inside the car. Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat, as if posed, were the remains of the coyote. The contorted body, caked with blood and broken glass, looked out at him like a macabre family dog waiting to go for a ride. But the real kicker, the show-stopper, was the mangled but complete human leg hanging from its mouth.

Even better, Hank grinned. F*cking perfect.

He shook his head and bits of glass tumbled from his hair. This was no way to start a job. He stood up on the hood and scanned the desert. Absolute desolation. No lights. No sound. Nothing.

Where would a coyote get a leg? What were the odds of it stepping out in front of his car given all the surrounding space? What if Hertz hadn’t placed the governor on the Subaru? Then he would have driven by this very spot sooner and the accident never would have happened. Was Hertz to blame? Was the Hertz executive in an office suite somewhere who had approved the policy requiring the governors to blame? Or was this the perfect example of an accident—a truly random event that was the culmination of endless chains of cause and effect that no one could untangle? Perhaps everything that occurred at any given moment was equally random? But then, if resulting from causal relationships, nothing was really random at all—the universe, frozen at any particular moment, could be wound backward to its beginning and forward to its conclusion like a massive clock. Events were random only because the human brain was so limited. Or, perhaps causal relationships were manufactured by the brain as a way to organize the world, but in fact did not exist at all. Quantum mechanics had something to do with it. Neutrinos.

Hank shook the thoughts from his head. What did they matter? The situation was baffling. So overwhelmingly improbable, in fact, that he could hardly process it. But it didn’t matter if he could get his mind around it. The situation was what it was. Given that his car no longer worked, it was an improbability he would have to deal with when someone finally found him. Comprehension was irrelevant; action was everything.

Could he drag it off into the brush and hide it? Perhaps. But then how to explain the wreck? If a state patrol or policeman came by, they might see blood in the car. Hank leaned down and into the car, studying the edge of the window, the dashboard, the fabric of the seat. There was blood everywhere, bits of hair too. The dead coyote seemed to leer at him, the gnarled head only a foot away from Hank in the dying light. He grimaced at the bloodless color of the leg, which hung down between the two front seats, its dusty toes resting cold and bloated on the gearshift.

There would be no way to clean it up. Better to leave it. A cover-up would only make him look guilty of something. And he wasn’t guilty of anything. At least not here. Not yet.

Hank slid down from the hood and hobbled to the side of the road. For fifty yards the pavement was marked with curving black skids. The shoulder was strewn with prism poles and range poles. A folded over measuring wheel, impaled in the dirt, turned feebly in the soft light. The road was marked by splotches of dayglo red, orange, green, and yellow paint. Leveling rods hung from the brush and survey stakes littered the landscape like the remnants of some lunatic cartographer. There was the gammon reel and the plumb bob and the laser plummet too. All of it rented, and all of it now damaged or destroyed.

Hank kicked at a blue lumber crayon and smeared it across the pavement. Up and down the road, there wasn’t a car or light in either direction. He scratched his head and turned back toward the car, studying the transition of the skid marks on the pavement into the swaths of upturned sand that marked the spiraling path of the vehicle. Did he really see a leg hanging from the coyote’s mouth? Hank walked back to the car and peeked inside. The coyote and the leg remained, almost poignant in their absurdity. He laughed out loud. The sound muted and absorbed by the desert. A guy couldn’t even scream for help. What would be the point?

He lingered for a moment by the side of the car, focusing again on the trail of debris. Then, just for the hell of it, he patted down his pockets until he found his cell phone. He powered it up. Why not? The LCD came on. Its glow only magnified the desolation around him. The phone beeped twice and Hank stared at the display where a tiny digital satellite dish spun round and round trying in vain to find a signal. Below the dish was a single word: “searching.”

Hank laughed and thought, Aren’t we all?