$200 and a Cadillac

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The Geiger counter clicked mindlessly, communicating information neither of them understood.

“Is it working?” Tom Crossly turned the long tube over in his hand and then peeked down at the box on the floor. “It says it’s working.” He held one side of the headphones away from his ear and listened. “Can you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That kind of clicking noise every few seconds.” Tom’s eyes darted back and forth. “There it was again. Every few seconds there’s another one. I guess it’s just in the headphones.”

“Shit, Ted said that’s all it does.” Victor leaned over his desk to look at the box too. “The more it clicks the more radiation you’ve got.”

Tom put the earpiece back over his ear and waved the thick, wand-like tube around in the air over Victor’s desk, and Victor too. “Doesn’t seem to be picking anything up.” Tom looked at Victor and smiled. “I guess you’re safe.”

“Safe from that, anyway.” Victor gave Tom a morose look and then he plopped himself back in his chair. Groaning. Defeated.

“What’s wrong with you?” Tom asked, not really caring about the answer because he already knew. He ran the Geiger counter along the walls, listening in the headphones to the minor variances in the clicking. A silence hung in the room for a few long seconds before Victor said:

“You ever been inside a prison, Tom?”

“What?” Tom turned to look at him. This was a new approach to the existential crisis.

Victor kept talking, “You know, over the years, I put a lot of guys in them.” Victor returned Tom’s stare and raised his eyebrows. “A lot of bad guys. I mean, we put guys away that had absolutely no business being on the street. You’d be amazed what kind of people are running around out there.”

Tom just stood on the opposite side of the room, the Geiger counter clicking away in his ears, wondering why he was being subjected to this conversation again. It seemed that every few weeks he’d be sitting in Victor’s office, going over some kind of routine business, when Victor would start blabbing on about life at the FBI. How meaningful it was. How important the work was. How he slept well at night knowing he was making the country safer. And, of course, how his life had none of that now.

“The thing is,” Victor laughed, “you go into a prison, you’ll see that the cells ain’t any smaller than this office. And they’ve got a bed in them, and you don’t have to do anything but sit around and read all day, or lift weights, play basketball, or whatever.”

Tom rolled his eyes and said, “Yeah, but they don’t have bagels on Fridays and you don’t get to go home every night either.” Tom removed the headphones, leaned the wand carefully against the wall, and bent over to switch the Geiger counter off. Then he took a seat in the chair across from Victor and spoke up again.

“I don’t know why you’re always complaining. This is a good job. There’s a lot of guys would kill to have your job. Why’d you quit the FBI if you loved it so much?” Tom stared at the backs of the framed pictures on Victor’s desk. He already knew the answer to this question too. Victor’s complaint was always the same. His wife and kids—the demands of family life—had ruined his great career. He struck Tom as a guy who’d only started thinking about his own life at the age of forty. As though the wife, the kids, the two cars, and the mortgage had all happened to him in his sleep and he woke up one morning with this strange new existence. Victor acted like he was shocked to learn that these things would affect his life in any way.

Victor puffed his cheeks and let out a long, silent breath. “Ah shit, Tom, you know how it is.” Here he went again. Tom braced himself as Victor began to ramble.

“My wife was bitching at me the second Daniel slid out the chute. I figured she was just worried because it was our first kid and all. But then she got pregnant again. And then, not long after, some a*shole shot me on a stakeout that went to hell. I mean, it wasn’t even that bad, it was just a flesh wound in my shoulder. Hell, the broken arm it gave me was worse than the bullet hole. You can break your arm doing all kinds of shit. I mean, her younger brother broke his elbow skiing one time, my wife used to make jokes about that. But my arm gets broken and you’d think the world was coming to an end.”

“Still though, you were getting shot at.” Tom didn’t think Victor’s wife’s concern was completely unfounded. A bullet’s a bullet. If they’re flying around anywhere near you, that’s a dangerous job, whether they hit you or not.

But what annoyed Tom was that this conversation wasn’t about any of that at all. It was about Victor’s constant need to remind everyone that he’d once been an action hero—if only in his own mind. What made it worse was that it didn’t matter that he’d already reminded you a hundred times. All of which led Tom to suspect that Victor was really trying to remind himself—to convince himself—and that Tom was just an unfortunate bystander.

“Look,” Victor said. “I’m not saying it isn’t a dangerous job. But it ain’t like that kind of stuff happens everyday. I mean, in twenty years, I was only shot at four or five times.” Victor pushed himself back from his desk and folded his arms across his chest. “Most guys can’t hit a damned thing with a pistol anyway. If you’re more than forty feet away, you’re damned near perfectly safe.”

“Still,” Tom interrupted, “I can see where your wife’s coming from.” Why did he even have this conversation? Why didn’t he make up some excuse to leave every time it started? Tom couldn’t say, other than the fact that Victor’s manly-man routine was as fascinating as it was repugnant. Tom could almost see the self-torment on the guy’s face. But his unwillingness to acknowledge it, his need to blame the world in general—as though he’d suffered some karmic injustice—brought Tom a perverse and irresistible pleasure.

Victor went on, thrashing about in his bog of irrational self-pity. “Yeah, but you know what she doesn’t understand is that, after doing that for twenty years, everything else is just so boring. I mean, I sit in this goddamned office all day, filling out forms, drinking coffee.” Victor leaned over his desk and picked up a stack of papers and his coffee cup, grinning as he held them up. Then he laughed a little and set them back down.

Tom smiled. That was the thing about Victor. He had moments where he was funny—even charming and self-deprecating. Which made it especially disappointing when he wallowed in his angst and hubris like he was. If only he weren’t so damned needy, Victor would almost be a decent guy to be around.

“You know,” Victor said, “when I first got here, I thought: ‘Man, this is all I have to do? What a joke! And they pay me for this! This is great!’ But after three years, my God. I mean, the paperwork never stops, it’s endless.”

“They don’t have paperwork at the FBI?”

“Ah!” Victor waved off the comment like it was nothing. But he thought it over. Yeah, they had paperwork alright, shitloads of it, there were forms for everything. But somehow it didn’t seem so bad then.

“Well, shit.” Tom leaned his chair back, keeping his fidgeting hand in his lap. “If you want some excitement, why don’t we trade? I’ll sit here and fill out forms and you can stumble around with the magic wand over there listening for a nuclear blast in the headphones.”

“Hey, that ain’t bad duty. At least you get to be outside all day.”

“Shit, you got any idea how boring that is? Just walking around looking for something that isn’t there. You ever see those old guys at the beach walking around with the metal detectors? That’s what I’ll look like. Only carting that thing around people will think I can’t even afford a good metal detector, and that I don’t know where the beach is.”

Victor studied Tom. With his expensive watch and Italian shoes, it wasn’t surprising that Tom’s main concern was how he would look with the Geiger counter. To Victor’s thinking, Tom was quintessential LA: all style and no substance, as though he’d just been assembled last night on a studio back lot somewhere. The whole damned town was like that. From Long Beach to La Cañada, every last person had an aura of invention about them. Everyone obsessing about what the other guy was thinking about them—whether there were any flaws in the façade.

Victor wondered why the old men at the beach weren’t concerned about how they looked, but then, Victor never went to the beach, so he’d never seen the old men with the metal detectors. Despite the water being just over the hill outside his office, he lived ninety minutes in the other direction. Unlike Tom, who’d lived in southern California his entire life and who’d bought a condo in Manhattan Beach back when they were practically giving them away, Victor lived in a subdivision so far from the ocean he could stand in the backyard and nearly convince himself there was no ocean. Hot winds blew in from the desert and the air pollution sat over their tract home like a horrid brown cloud ready to rain shit on them at any moment.

Victor knew Tom drove fifteen minutes to get home to his three bedroom pad on the beach—probably worth a million or more now—while Victor drove an hour and a half through the worst traffic known to man to his cardboard cutout of a house in a subdivision that stretched to the horizon. It made him mad every time he thought about it. Every afternoon, by the time Tom was sitting on his deck, tanning his nuts in the sunset and staring at the water, Victor was just getting pissed enough to start screaming at the cars on the freeway. Twenty years of serving his country and that’s where it got him.

The injustice of it got to Victor and he said, “Well, I already told Marshall that if anything unusual came up, we’d handle it. So if Ted Ross and the nerd squad come up with anything, you won’t have to worry about the beach. We’ll be on our way to the desert to have some fun.”

Tom Crossly stared over Victor’s shoulder at the brown hill and the galvanized pipe running over it. He’d been to Palm Springs once. The long weekend he’d spent there constituted the entirety of his experience in the desert. As he recalled the manicured lawns, the tennis courts, and the golf courses, he wondered what the small oil towns were like. Then he thought about his Versace boots. Living at the beach, he never got to wear them much. But he bet they’d be perfect for a trip to the desert.

Perfect.