$200 and a Cadillac

IX



Half a dozen buzzards circling slow and low against the desert sky could only mean one thing: there was something large and dead somewhere out in the sagebrush. Mickey turned the Suburban off the highway and onto the sandy road that stretched out across the desert. The rear end swam a little in the soft ground before the tires took hold and lurched them forward, out into the rough desert. The endless rolling landscape was not unlike the sea and Mickey could only guess how many miles away the birds were. At this distance they were merely black specks against a brilliant blue sky, swarming like bulbous insects, with one occasionally diving to the ground and remaining there.

“What do you think?” Mickey asked, trying to keep some conversation going. “Couple miles?”

“I’d say that at least. Maybe four or five.” Paul Kramer gripped the door to restrain himself as the Suburban bucked beneath them, throwing him forward toward the dash. Paul reached for the seatbelt and smiled at Mickey. “Guess I better put this on.”

The desert was crisscrossed by a network of poorly made and totally unmaintained roads that would knock the suspension out of anything but the most hearty four-wheel drive. This road was no exception and the Suburban bounced and jostled, tossing equipment around in the back, and sending Mickey and Paul Kramer up off their asses, hard against the seatbelts.

After several minutes of abuse, Mickey spoke again. “So how long you think the body’s been out here?”

“Couple days, I’d say. There were fibers in the flesh at the top of the thigh, which suggests the animals tore the leg loose through a pair of pants.” Paul Kramer tried to imagine such a sight, and then added, “Desert’s not a friendly place to die.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” Mickey mumbled, keeping his eyes on the distant, circling birds, and wondering where a friendly place to die might be. After several more minutes, he glanced in the mirror and saw the dirt road disappear into the desert behind them. How far had they gone? Two miles? Three? He should have set the odometer. “Christ,” he muttered, “what the hell would someone be doing way the hell out here?”

“Hell, we’re probably driving up on a dead coyote.” Paul reached forward and took hold of the dash as the front end collapsed over a short embankment. As the only physician in Nickelback, Paul Kramer doubled as the medical examiner, a title that yielded almost no work, but that occasionally got him roped into assignments like this one. When he’d graduated from medical school he decided to do a residency focusing on rural medicine and take advantage of a generous student loan subsidy. At the time, he never imagined he’d end up driving around in the Mojave Desert looking for corpses. But what the hell? It broke up the monotony of doling out antibiotics to sick school kids or certifying worker’s comp claims for the small group of malingerers who managed to hurt themselves out at Monarch. Besides, he liked Mickey.

“How many bodies have you actually ever found out in the desert?”

Mickey squinted at the sky and thought it over. “None, I guess.” Then he added, “Usually you don’t have to go looking for them, dead bodies have a way of calling attention to themselves. There was an abandoned car on the south road once, years ago, sat there for a few days. One of the deputies finally had it towed into town and old Beasly noticed a funky smell coming from the trunk when he was hooking it up to the tow. We found a woman in a gunny sack in there. It was a stolen car, Ohio plates, never even figured out who the woman was. But like I said, bodies have a way of getting found.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Ah, hell, Beasly still had all his teeth then,” Mickey laughed and glanced over at Paul. “So it’s been a while.”

For five long minutes of bouncing, they watched the birds grow larger, slowly taking shape, until they were directly overhead. The engine noise and clanging gear had no effect on them as the Suburban approached. The scavengers would hang around, regardless, hoping Mickey or Paul might die as well and add to the feast.

Mickey slowed down, paying close attention to the surroundings. The maelstrom of circling buzzards overhead meant this was the spot. But whether it was the spot they were actually looking for was anyone’s guess. Mickey saw nothing other than wild desert. But when one of the birds swooped down from above and took to the ground behind a clump of sage and Joshua trees, sixty feet back from the road, he knew that what he was looking for was hidden from view. Mickey drove around a bend in the road to get a view of the brush from the other side, but the road began curving in the opposite direction before he could see anything.

But when he stopped the vehicle and began studying the area in front of the brush, what Mickey did see stopped him cold. He felt a tingling at the back of his arms and up his neck and he shut off the engine. The air conditioner died. A brief silence was quickly filled with the squawk and clamor of birds. Mickey could tell that Paul hadn’t noticed it yet, and he let the moment stretch itself out.

Finally, sensing that something was wrong, Paul asked what it was. Mickey turned to look at him for a moment, and then turned back toward the side of the dirt road closest to the brush. “Look there.” He motioned with his chin. “See that? Tire tracks.”

Paul felt a dread come over him. Once Mickey said it, the churned ruts of sand were as plain as day. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed them right when they pulled up. Someone had parked on the road and then turned around in a single, wide circle that looped back onto the road and headed out the way they’d come. “Do you think someone else has already found whatever’s here?”

Mickey didn’t even look at Paul and barely heard him. The question was ridiculous in any event and didn’t warrant a response. Paul’s voice resonated with doubt even as he said the words. Mickey scanned the roadside, trying to ensure that no evidence would be destroyed merely by getting out and walking around. Finally, as the heat became intolerable, Mickey opened the door.

They could smell the body immediately. In the extreme heat, the flesh rotted fast, and the air was thick with it. Several of the black birds took to the air from behind the brush, rising so slowly they seemed to hang above the Joshua trees for an instant like flapping black clouds. Mickey listened and could still hear a couple of them back there, moving, scuttling around on their ragged claws.

He glanced across the hood at Paul and shook his head. He had been hoping they wouldn’t find it, that the leg would just turn out to be one of those weird things that turn up and never get explained. A few more days and the body would have been gone. Paul came around the hood and Mickey held up a hand to stop him.

Mickey walked forward on the road to where the ruts in the sand began. Dirt splayed out sideways from their outside edges, and the tracks that appeared to be the front tires were wide and deep, as though the sand had been pushed from behind. Mickey pointed at them and said, “They were driving fast when they left.” But he offered no explanation for that conclusion.

“Maybe someone didn’t like what they saw,” Paul said from behind, trying not to focus on the smell. Something about a body outside was so much worse than the smell of one in a hospital. “Goddamn it’s hot out here.” Paul rubbed the sweat on the back of his neck and looked up at the dozen dark bodies hovering in the sky above them.

Mickey took a few tentative steps toward the bushes and stopped to look around again. He waved his hand back behind him, telling Paul to stay by the truck. Then he stood with his hands on his hips and turned back to Paul, as if Paul had only just spoken, and said, “Or maybe someone didn’t like what they did.” The words were disconnected, but Mickey just stared back down at the ground.

There were a lot of markings in the sand. Mickey could now see several sets of footprints—maybe as many as four or five, maybe as few as two—the sand didn’t hold its shape well enough for fine distinctions. As he studied the ground, he remembered an article he’d once read about the Apollo astronauts. It was said that the footprints they left behind on the moon would remain there, undisturbed, for millions of years. Mickey tried to imagine what some other being, stumbling across them in some distant future, might think of those strange markings in the dirt. Would it even see them as footprints? Did you have to be human to recognize the signs of human existence? Of a human presence? To even see that which is essentially human? Was it the ability to see yourself in your surroundings—to project your own image into it—that gave the world its meaning? Whatever it was, Mickey had no doubt that what he saw there in the desert sand were the remnants of human feet, trampling the earth beneath them in a frenzy.

Two sets trailed off from the roadside, past where he stood, and on toward the brush and the clamor of the scavengers. But there would have been no scavengers at the time. The brush would have offered only a gateway to a wide, barren vista of desert. And back at the roadside there was a cluster of indentations—footprints upon footprints—signaling others that were watching, waiting. But for what? For the job to be done? For their turn? To see if the man would make it and get away? Mickey could only guess.

He studied the two sets that crossed in front of him. One had left a series of wide divots, perpendicular to the direction they were heading and irregularly spaced. The other set pointed straight ahead in a steady, measured pace. Mickey crouched down and looked them over, peering back toward the road where the vehicle had been parked. Where the others had watched and waited.

Mickey could almost see it: people getting out of the car, movement at the side of the road, people standing around doing who knows what, and then something happens; one person takes off in a confused rush, running sideways, hurrying and hesitating at the same time and looking back at someone who is coming for them, quick and determined.

Mickey stood and followed the footprints another twenty feet, dragging his own steps as he walked so he could distinguish his markings if he needed to go over anything a second time. They continued as before, angling away from where they started toward a thin spot in the brush. The man in front was making a break for it, hoping to reach some cover and whatever fate the desert might hold for him there, anything to escape the moment that was bearing down on him. And the man behind? What would his motive have been?

Mickey followed the tracks a few more feet to where they went sideways in a flurry, as if something had been caught in a brief struggle, the man in front fending off an attack before his tracks lurched away again in the same direction as before. Mickey looked it over, the twisted spirals in the dirt impermanently marking a brief instant of struggle and desperate fear. Then further off to the side was a larger disturbance in the sand and a light trail of wispy marks leading off beyond a cluster of sage and a shallow gully fifty feet back down the road in the direction from which they’d come. Mickey called out for Paul, as though he was very far away.

Paul jumped at hearing his name. “Yeah, Chief?”

“Hey, walk on back down the road there to that little dip and then walk out to where that brush is. Have a look around and see if anything’s there. Looks like something might have been dragged off that way.”

Paul set out without saying anything. Mickey watched him go and could see that he was eager to get this whole thing over with, anxious to just get behind the bushes and get at whatever they were going to find and then get the hell out of there. But investigations take time, and given the slim state of the evidence, Mickey had to see what he could see on his way to the bushes, or else it might be lost forever.

Another twenty feet. The footsteps pacing off a journey toward the desiccated ruin of every man. Mickey felt a twinge of empathetic desperation as he traced the final seconds of a life. He could almost see the man turning back one final time, recognizing that there was no hope. The moment of realization was marked by a fine mist on the ground, dry and black now from the sun. There had been a hard impact that opened the flesh, scattering blood into the hot, dry air. It had dried in a gentle arc that mirrored the very path of the object as it swung through the air to strike him—the physics of the deathblow writ large, frozen onto the surface of the sand.

Mickey thought about the footprints on the moon again. Had the Apollo astronauts left anything like this behind up there? He imagined his alien being stumbling across this scene one day. Would it comprehend what it saw? Or did this too require a human being to understand it? Mickey wondered what inherently human quality was reflected in the black flecks on the soil. What about them indicated that mankind had been there at all? With his eyes, he traced the curvature of the pattern to its far end, where it trailed off into a single ethereal point, like an arrow aimed at the epicenter of nothingness itself.

Mickey felt the heat on the back of his neck and looked up, staring out across the empty desert for a moment. Then he took a few more steps to where the end had come. He saw the churned soil that marked the stagger and the struggle. The footsteps of the weak man turning back, standing his final ground, only to be met by something heavy and uncaring. No doubt a second blow, dropping him to his knees this time. Followed closely by a third, which left him sprawled in the sand, writhing like a snow angel in the white-hot fire of hell.

More blood, thicker this time, pooled in dark, heavy clumps. Below it, where the body would have been, were claw marks in the earth from spastic fingers clinging to the granules of desert, groping for anything at all as the convulsive fits slowly trailed off into stillness. The entropy of the dying man.

Mickey crouched low, studying the stains in the earth. He knew they were blood, but wanted to get closer, to see the insects crawling over the droplets’ scabby surface. The footprints ended abruptly, marking the final moves in an endgame of inexplicable terror. Mickey looked back over the trail of markings, leading backward in time to the road and the remnants of normalcy that preceded such a horrid end. What could have gone wrong? What rage unraveled to lead from the roadside to destruction in what Mickey guessed was no more than ten or fifteen seconds? What had it been like being left for dead, waiting in the sun as the birds gathered above like the harbingers of doom that they were? Had the man been fortunate enough to die before they descended on him?

At the top end of the mess were the deep markings of something being dragged away. Mickey focused for the first time in several minutes on the sound of the birds beyond the bushes and dreaded more than ever what he would find there. Just then he heard a noise and looked up to see Paul Kramer, chest deep in the gully, calling out as if he’d found the holy grail.

“Chief! … Chief!” He waved his arms above his head like he was calling in the Enola Gay for a landing.

Mickey stood up and saw Paul raise a mid-size hiking backpack up so he could see it. Then he called out, “It looks brand new, Chief! Like it’s only a week or two old.”

Mickey motioned with his arm for Paul to keep walking and come around from the back. “Keep on going and loop around. Meet me back behind here,” he called out, feeling a certain resolve come over him. Now was the time to see what there was to see. Mickey studied the dirt once more, as though it might offer up an explanation for man’s cruelty. But there was only silence punctuated by an occasional screech and the sound of flapping wings.

Mickey pushed through a thin wall of brush, following the drag marks, and stood solemnly. It was like piercing a veil into another world. The smell was overwhelming and thirty feet beyond the Joshua tree lay what remained of a man after a violent death and two days alone with the desert beasts. A hideous black bird perched on the dead man’s head, flapping its wings for balance and picking at a gaping hole in the abdomen. It paused briefly to stare at Mickey, and then resumed its feast, unconcerned with what it saw.

Mickey could see from where he stood that a leg was missing, as was the opposite arm. Entrails were strewn about, spiraling dusty cords and gobs of flesh spread like Pollock’s twisting blobs of splattered paint. Was this what the artist had in mind? Mickey took his eyes away, looking up. The birds circled so slowly that Mickey imagined they would plummet through the hot void, into the earth, like brimstone made of flesh.

Then a screaming cut the air and Mickey looked to see Paul running, horrified and angry and afraid all at once. The bird hardly saw him and had barely taken to the air when Paul hurdled the body, swiping the backpack in a high arc and catching the bottom of the buzzard. There was a dull slamming sound as the bird spun twice in the air and hit the ground in a flurry of beating wings. Screeching and flopping.

Paul had flung the backpack and was over the massive bird, coming down with a knee along its back. The buzzard split open at the stomach with a moist, muffled pop. Mickey heard the bird burst and he watched Paul stand up quickly and back away, his momentary rage quickly giving way to repugnance. The bird wobbled upright and staggered backward in circles around its own spilling guts, picking at them even as it backed away from them, two basic urges competing with each other. Then it fell sideways, dying even as it tried to eat itself, unaware or unconcerned that the entrails were its own.

Mickey walked toward Paul and the body, talking quickly, trying to distract him. “Well, let’s see what we can see and get the hell out of here.” Mickey didn’t even acknowledge the bird, or its dying noises in the background, and Paul’s eyes seemed to appreciate it. He shifted his attention to the matter at hand, nodding strangely, as if to thank the sheriff somehow for not mentioning his own disturbing actions.

Paul crouched over the body, feeling woozy from the smell, and swatted at the swarming bugs. Much of the surface flesh on the head had been torn or eaten off and, though difficult to look at, it made his job much easier. Within seconds he had located several massive fractures in the skull. He could do closer work back in town, under appropriate conditions, but the cause of death was obvious.

“This guy was beat to death with something heavy and hard.” Paul looked back over his shoulder and squinted up at Mickey. Behind the sheriff’s head, the black birds swirled against the clear blue sky.

Mickey ran his fingers over his thin, graying hair, and said, “I figured as much. Looks like it happened back on the other side of the brush in the dirt and the coyotes dragged him over here to tear at him.” He looked down at the body and the carrion dotting the landscape and shook his head. Thirty-two years of police work and there still had to be a first time for everything. “Goddamn,” he mumbled, and shook his head again.

“What’s that, Chief?” Paul asked, facing the body again, and thinking about the sound of the bird when its guts popped open.

“Let’s get the bag and get the rest of him out of here.” Mickey turned and walked back toward the road, stepping on the evidence as though it didn’t mean a goddamned thing.