the loud talking son of a bitch.
What a guy like Lugano didn’t understand was that there was law and justice everywhere. Just because a guy lived a life of crime didn’t mean he wasn’t still subject to certain rules. The cops had one rulebook and guys like Fazioli had another. A careful look at both revealed that the principles behind them were largely the same—it was only the enforcement methods that differed.
Hank studied the pictures again, briefly, and then carefully closed the dossier, ensuring the photos were clipped precisely in the center of the folder. Then he placed it at the bottom of his duffel bag, beneath his copy of Ecce Homo and stood silently in the center of the room. The hotel furniture looked new, and Hank wondered how many people had actually stayed in his room and why they had been there. He imagined strangers sitting on the bed, standing by the closet, or slumped in a chair at the table, drinking a beer and waiting for God knows what. It was the fate of them all, and to Hank it somehow made them seem no different from the other objects in the room: the phone, the lamps, the little stand to set a suitcase on, the pile of broken survey equipment—they were all just things to be used or not used, retained or destroyed or discarded, but most of all, controlled. And that was what he did, it was how he got the job done.
Just as he began focusing again on the irregular placement of the lamp on the night stand, he heard a large truck pull into the parking lot. At his second story window, Hank saw a tow truck pulling in, dragging the smashed Subaru behind it. He went outside and down to the parking lot to flag down the driver.
The man leaned out the window and smiled down at Hank. He was grizzled, missing a tooth, and could have been any age between forty and sixty. “This your car?”
“Yeah.”
“Sheriff wanted it off the side of the road, said you were staying here.”
Hank scratched his head and looked off down the street. A few low strips of buildings and not much else. “Is there a repair shop in town?”
The driver glanced back at the wrecked car and then flashed Hank the toothless grin again, almost laughing. “Oh yeah, we gotta garage alright.”
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