$200 and a Cadillac

XXV



The whole evening, Hank kept telling himself he was f*cking up. He should be back at the Super 8, packing his stuff into the car, drinking coffee, planning out the final details. He could slip into Ron’s house about two in the morning, put six rounds in his chest, and be catching a flight out of Vegas before sunrise, perhaps a day or even a week before anyone would find the body.

But what was the rush? The job was basically done. Besides, it would be easier to break in during the day and wait for Lugano to come home from work. There was no risk of waking him up that way. Instead, Hank could just sit on the man’s couch, watch some TV, relax, and when the door opened up, step out from behind it and put one smooth round through the back of his head. Simple. He’d done it dozens of times before. This one would be easy.

“You seem distracted,” Janie said, turning her head to look at him.

They were on top of a massive egg-shaped rock looking out over a narrow valley of similar rocks, each of them crisp against the moonlit desert sky. It was an odd geographical anomaly, to be sure, but Hank was having trouble focusing on the present.

“Sorry,” he said, and took another can of beer from the cardboard twelve-pack they’d bought at the gas station. “I was just checking out the view. Pretty weird rocks,” he said, and then cracked the beer and took a long drink.

“Yeah, most people have never heard of this place.” Janie got a beer of her own. “We used to come out here all the time in high school, have fires, party all night.”

Hank hesitated for a moment, unsure of himself and not wanting to risk upsetting the evening. But he needed to distract himself, to relax. He felt the small lump in his pocket and debated bringing it up. But then, after a few seconds, he just asked her. “Hey, you wanna smoke some pot?”

She looked at him and smirked. “You got some?”

“Yeah, the kid that sold me the car gave me some. I haven’t smoked any in years.”

Janie started cracking up, holding her stomach as she laughed. “Justin is such a stoner,” she finally said. “He’s one of those guys who’s convinced that everyone he sees is high.”

“Maybe they are.” Hank smiled and reached into his pocket, pulling out the rolled up Ziplock. “Check it out.” He opened the baggie and smelled the pungent green nuggets. “Smells pretty good.”

“How are we gonna smoke it? You got a pipe or something?”

Hank tipped up his can of beer and drained it in three big swallows. He shook the empty can and stifled a belch. “Nah, but we can make do.”

He took out the small pocketknife he’d bought in Vegas—the last bit of equipment he’d acquired that wasn’t broken—and went to work on the can. Janie watched him bend a small depression in one side, near the bottom of the can, and poke a series of small holes in it. She smiled.

“I must have watched my little brother make a thousand of those.”

Hank grinned. “You’d think a guy who was making that many would buy a pipe.”

“I used to kid him about that, but he’d always say that even if he had a pipe, he’d still use a can because he always ended up places where he wouldn’t have the pipe anyway.”

Hank poked a hole in the side of the can and put his thumb over it. He held the can to his lips and inhaled through the hole in the top, testing the air flow through the tiny holes in the bowl-shaped depression by covering and uncovering the thumbhole. He turned to her and smiled. “Well, it’s good to have survival skills, I guess.”

Janie shook her head. “I don’t think it’s survival skills with Eddie. I think it’s a case of always being unprepared.”

Hank pinched a small clump of the pot from the baggie and packed it, as best he could, over the small holes in the makeshift bowl. He fished a lighter out of his pocket and handed it and the can to Janie. “Hit it.”

She giggled. “You’re a gentleman.”

Hank raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Chivalry lives.”

“That’s good to know,” she said, as she placed her lips to the can and sparked it. She inhaled and immediately coughed with such force that the glowing ball of weed leapt off the can and rolled away from them, toward the edge of the rock. Janie slapped her palm on her chest and bent over, turning away from Hank as she choked. “Jesus … f*cking … Christ,” she uttered, between gasps.

Hank tried to stifle his laughter. She turned back to him and handed the can back, trying to clear her throat. Hank pointed to the cherry red coal, glowing at the edge of the precipice. “I’m glad we have more,” he snickered. “Because I’m not crawling over there to get that.”

“Funny,” she said. “Let’s see you do it any better.”

“I guess that’s one advantage of smoking,” Hank said, as he repacked the bowl. “You can really inhale the good stuff when you need to.”

He held the can to his lips and composed himself. “Okay, watch this, slow and steady.” Hank lit it and took a small amount of smoke into his mouth. He tried to breathe in a little at a time, but his lungs rejected it. He started coughing immediately and handed the can to Janie.

“Oh I see,” she smirked, as he tried his best to hold it in. “Is that how it’s done?”

He managed to get out a “Yeah,” before he started coughing and hacking. Janie hit the pipe again. It was easier the second time. They passed it back and forth until it was cached. A tingling numbness floated over them and they sat quietly for a few minutes, staring out into the shimmering clarity of the night.

After a few minutes, Janie picked up the previous conversation, which, to Hank, seemed almost totally random now. “But I love my brother,” she said, then paused, and added, “Maybe that’s why I still stay here. So I can look out for him.”

Hank grunted a response and continued staring up at the sky. It was absolutely clear. The universe revealed itself as a million points of light poking through the blackness of space. There was never a view like that in New York City. Janie’s talk about her own brother reminded him of his, and the stars were a good distraction. Finally, Hank asked, “Why don’t both of you leave?”

“I’m hoping we can. It’s tough to save enough to escape a place like this when you’re trapped in it. You have to live on something, and the little you can make goes to that. There’s never anything extra.” She hesitated for a second, and added, “But I’m trying to get it together, so we’ll both be able to leave town.”

Hank smiled at her, wondering what she meant, and then said. “Well, at least it’s quiet and peaceful here. You wouldn’t have a view like this in San Diego.”

“Sure, but I think I can get by with the beach. Besides, I grew up here. The magic has worn off.” Then she started giggling. “Truth be told, it’s a lot better looking when you’re stoned.”

Hank started laughing too. “I’m sure it is. But think of all that space. The freedom that goes with it.”

“You’re a regular cowboy, aren’t you? The wild west? How do you survive back east?”

“I don’t know about the wild west. But really, you live out here, you can do anything you want, live by your own rules.”

“I think you’re being a bit romantic.” She smiled, giving him a long look. “It’s not a free-for-all. There may be fewer people, but the same laws apply. You’ve still got to be careful if you’re going to try anything.”

Hank shrugged. “If you’re in town, sure. But I’m talking about out in the desert, away from everyone. That’s why all the meth labs are out there. And they’re safe out there. Those guys only risk getting into trouble when they bring their shit into the city to sell it.”

“That may be, but what good is the stuff out in the desert? At some point, you have to come into town to sell it.” Janie laid on her back and stared up at the sky, a wide grin on her face.

“But what I’m talking about,” Hank went on, “is life when you’re out there—not when you come to town. I mean, imagine two guys running into each other fifty miles out into the desert, in the middle of nowhere. What obligations do they have toward one another?”

Janie laced her fingers behind her head, feeling them against her skull, feeling the cool night air on her skin. After a minute she said, “It shouldn’t matter if they run into each other in the desert or on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.”

“I agree.” Hank turned to her. “In either case, they don’t owe each other a damned thing.”

Janie spoke staring straight up at the sky. “They owe each other the same thing in both places. The law doesn’t change just because they’re out in the desert.”

“But law only applies when there are people around to enforce it. It requires something external. There is no law between two people. There’s only law if there’s a third person, society at large in most cases, there to apply it.”

She grinned at him. “You smoked too much.”

“What I’m saying is that law, the rules of our society, only exist in society. We’ve collectively agreed on them, but that doesn’t make them real in any external sense. It takes the presence of society, hence, a third party, to assess and enforce the law on the actions of the two people. So if two guys meet in the desert, all alone, then there is no law. They can do whatever they want to each other. There aren’t any rules out there.” Hank spoke out at the surrounding landscape, as if it might hear and understand him. Then he added, “That’s freedom.”

“Now,” he went on, “if the two guys agree on something between them. Let’s say they agree to share some food or water. Then if one guy takes too much, the other guy can do whatever he wants. If he kills the guy who took too much, that’s his business. They made their own rules, they get to enforce them however they want.”

“But you can’t kill a person over a glass of water.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because it’s murder. You can’t just go around killing people.”

“But what if they agree that that’s the punishment beforehand?”

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t agree to something like that.”

“Says who?”

“Society.”

“But in this case, there is no society. It’s just these two guys, out in the desert. And they’ve agreed to it.”

“So you’re saying that it’s okay to commit a crime out in the desert? I’ll have to remember that if I ever get caught.” Janie looked up at him, watching the outline of his body against the starry sky. She didn’t disagree with the proposition, but she knew no mere theory would change the way the world really worked.

“What I’m saying,” Hank said, grinning down at her, “is that it’s not even a crime. How can it be a crime without the presence of society, or some third party to enforce the rules?”

She listened to his tone, the sincerity in his voice. It sounded like a rationalization that was thoroughly believed. An odd position for a surveyor to hold so dear, she thought. Janie smirked back at him. “Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying it’s okay, as long as you don’t get caught?”

“Okay fine, say it’s not murder. Say they agree to share food and water. The first guy gives the second guy some food and the second guy takes it and keeps his water and runs away. Has the second guy done anything wrong?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “He broke his promise.”

“So what can the first guy do about it?”

“He can chase him.”

“Can he fight him?”

“I suppose.”

“But he can’t kill him?”

“No.”

Hank grinned and shook his head. “That’s so arbitrary. Where do you draw the line between what’s okay and what isn’t?”

“I don’t know, but it’s definitely somewhere before you get to killing people. I mean, look at what happened with that guy they found. The guy whose leg ended up in your front seat?”

“What about him?” Hank asked, as he thought it over. It seemed like a long time ago. He remembered the sheriff pulling over and telling him they’d found the body just earlier that day.

“Well, the radio said he’d been beaten to death with a heavy object. He was presumably alone out there with whoever did that to him. How can that be justified? Just because it’s out in the desert? I don’t buy it. The law is the law. Wrong is wrong.”

The words hung in his ears. Hank tried to put them together with his thoughts of Lugano. A man being beaten to death in the desert could easily be Lugano’s work. But what was the likelihood of that? Janie said he kept to himself and seemed like a normal, quiet guy. But Hank knew better. And why did Janie know so much about the guy?

Hank looked down at her. Then he looked around at the endless desert. Who was she? What was he doing here with her? He thought about Miami and St. Louis and how the jobs had gone to shit. What was happening here?

Hank rubbed his face with both hands and ran his fingers back through his hair. His flesh tingled along his scalp. It was the pot. It was making him paranoid. Or was it? Maybe he was just putting it together now? Hank felt a sudden urge to get back to the Super 8, to drink a cup of coffee, go to sleep, wake up and get the job done. He needed to just get the hell out of town.

Janie smiled, watching the stars and feeling the contrast between the night air above her and the warmth of the rock below. She ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth, back and forth, slowly feeling each one. She was surprised that her teeth were always there, yet she never seemed to really feel them in her head. Finally, she grinned and noticed Hank leaning over and staring down at her. “What?” she asked.

Hank started laughing. “You’re completely baked.” He leaned away from her, holding his stomach, nearly giggling.

Janie sat up, smiling at him. “What? Was it my turn to talk? I thought you were saying something.”

“I was.” Hank snorted, turning red-faced. “I was talking about two people in the desert.”

“Like us?”

“No. Two people meeting in the desert.”

“We’re two people. We’re in the desert.”

“Yes. But I was talking about ethics, morality, jurisprudence.”

Janie started cackling and slapping her hand on the rock. Laughing silently and hard. Hank started laughing too, just from watching her. Finally, through bursts of staccato giggles, she said, “You know that Beatles song?” and then she sang, in a falsetto that sent Hank doubling over: “Juuuuuuuuris Prudence, won’t you come out to play-hey-hey …”