Immoral (33 page)

His repeat customers didn’t come back for the wind chimes or the poetry, though. They came for the dried meats: beef jerky, chicken jerky, and turkey jerky, sold in flavors like teriyaki and Cajun from shoe boxes inside an old refrigerator. Most of the people who stopped were truckers. It only took a couple of them, stopping out of curiosity, to start a buzz that made its way through the trucker network of the Southwest Word got passed.
Going to Vegas? Stop at Jerky Bob
. They came twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which were his regular hours. If they came while he was sleeping, they simply woke him up, and he sold them jerky. He made enough money each month that, if it had stayed in his pocket, he could have moved back to the city and opened a real shop, complying with health codes and paying taxes instead of flying under the government radar.

But money didn’t last long with Bob. Half of it ended up down the gullet of slot machines. Half ended up in empty gin bottles, tossed from the back of his trailer into the desert, where they glistened like a field of diamonds.

He had committed suicide a year ago, but his body hadn’t figured it out yet.

The truckers talked about it. Bob looked normal enough, a year ago, for a man marooned in the desert. From that point, month by month, he got older. He never shaved, other than cutting tangles out of his long, graying beard. His hair dangled in messy strands below his shoulders. His skin was shriveled and gray, and his eyes receded into his skull. He ate little but jerky himself, getting thinner and thinner until he was barely a hundred and twenty pounds. He never washed his clothes, which usually consisted of jeans and a Las Vegas T-shirt hanging on his skinny frame. The stench got so bad that some of his trucker customers refused to come inside, and they told him that even the jerky was beginning to smell. Bob just opened a window, letting dry, dusty air blow through the trailer.

He couldn’t go into the casinos anymore. They turned him away at the door. Instead, he spent time every few days at a bar a half mile up the highway from his trailer, where he played video poker until the bartender got sick of the smell. Then he’d buy another bottle of gin and go home, drink, and pass out In the morning, or whenever a trucker pounded loudly enough to wake him up, he would throw the bottle out back.

Last night had been a two-bottle night. Or maybe it had been two nights ago, or even three. He didn’t know.

He didn’t remember much. On the television it said Wednesday, but he couldn’t remember when he had started his binge. His last visitor had arrived in the afternoon, and that night, whichever night it was, he had begun pouring glass after glass of gin. And now it was Wednesday.

Bob sighed. He had to piss.

He stood up, propping himself against the wall for balance. The trailer spun in his head for a few seconds before righting itself. He stepped down off the mattress onto the floor and watched a few bugs skitter away from him. The two gin bottles lay empty a few feet away. He crouched, picking them up and staring inside. There was a small puddle of gin in each one, clinging to the glass, enough to wet his tongue when he turned the bottles upside down over his mouth. His body was sufficiently poisoned that the taste caused his stomach to heave, and he had to swallow hard to avoid retching.

Bob held the two bottles by their necks. He looked around for his sandals, saw them under a chair, and stuck his feet into them. The sandals flapped as he padded to the center door of the trailer. The latch had long since broken. With his knee, he nudged the door open, and daylight roared in. Still naked, Bob shuffled down the rusty steps into the desert behind his trailer.

The sun was ferocious, like a yellow fire burning out of control above the hills. His eyes squinted, barely able to open, and his skin tightened, starting to cook. As he sucked in each labored breath, a furnace of air seared his lungs.

His penis twitched, ready to release. He began pissing a virtually clear stream of urine onto the ground. The liquid raised a cloud of dust, then gathered into a small pool in an indentation in the earth. He kept pissing into the center, causing droplets to splatter onto his toes. He watched the flow intently, as if it were his life’s blood leaking out of him. The urine was frothy and reeked of gin. In a few seconds, the pool would be gone, baked away by the sun.

The stream dissipated to a trickle.

Underhanded, he heaved one of the gin bottles into the air, watching it glint in the sun in a shallow arc before crashing back to earth. He heard the glass shatter and saw shards burst in every direction. Carefully, he repeated the ritual with the second bottle, enjoying the noise as it whooshed in the air and then smashed on the ground.

There were dozens of bottles in pieces out there. It was his private little minefield. Most of the shards quickly gathered dust, but the recent ones shined, reflecting the sunlight like laser beams.

He squinted, staring at the desert. He had only been outside a few minutes, but it was already time to go inside, where there was no relief from the heat but where at least his body didn’t shrivel from the direct sun. His wizened skin had burned so often that he had small sores that oozed and never healed. He could feel them now, stinging as the sun burned them.

Even so, Bob lingered.

He didn’t know what it was, but something caught his eye. He saw the tough little windswept creosote bushes and the yuccas that looked like dwarf palm trees. They were right where they should be. And the hills in the distance were the same. And the broken bottles glinted like they always did. Like diamonds.

Except—no, that wasn’t true.

Something was out of place. He saw the sun shining, glinting, but not in the minefield where he always tossed the bottles. The reflections catching his eye were farther away, and off to the side, nowhere near any of the other shards he could see. But they shimmered in the hot sun, little diamonds winking at him from under one of the creosote bushes.

What were they?

Bob frowned. He didn’t know why, but he found himself shuffling across the desert, wanting to know what it was he saw. The closer he got, the faster he walked, until he was almost running. He was out of shape and out of breath, but he jogged naked across the last twenty yards until he was right over the spot where the diamonds lay hidden. Then he stopped and stared down at his feet.

The glinting diamonds were really the shine of glitter sprinkled on skin, sparkling on a woman’s body in the dirt.

It lay, face up, partially obscured by the overhanging bush. The body was as naked as he was, but utterly lifeless and ageless, a shrunken corpse whose cooked skin had collapsed in on itself, whose eyes were wide open but shrunk to tiny marbles, whose blonde hair was grayed with dust, whose mouth was open in a silent scream as desert beetles led a parade to eat her flesh from inside. It was almost unrecognizable as anything that had once been human and beautiful.

Bob sank to his knees.

She was staring at him. And her lips, which had no color at all, were curled into a smile. He tentatively reached a hand out to touch her skin, as if he was afraid she would suddenly awaken and grab him. But she didn’t move. Her skin felt like sandpaper under his touch.

Then he saw her face twitch. It was like a nightmare. She couldn’t be alive!

Bob stared in horror as a fat roach squeezed its way out of the corpse’s nose and wiggled its antennae at him. He stumbled backward, then ran. He didn’t head back to his trailer, just turned and sprinted clumsily for the road. His sandals fell away. The rocky floor of the desert scratched and cut his feet until he left blood trails with each footfall. He ran anyway, not slowing down or looking behind him, as if the girl’s ghost were on his heels.

Serena Dial of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pushed her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and stared down at the body.

“Nice.”

She said it to no one in particular. In fact, the scene wasn’t nice at all. She hated desert corpses. They all looked about a hundred years old, and sometimes, if you got there after the birds and animals did, they were chewed up, with missing eyeballs, flesh eaten away, the kind of thing that flashed back in a nightmare. She mostly saw dead people with knives in their backs or gunshot wounds, which, when you got past the blood, were not really so hard to stomach. At least the body still looked like a body. Not like this.

Definitely a woman. That was easy enough to determine. The sun did terrible things to people who had the bad fortune to lie deceased in a desert, but it wasn’t known to make cocks disappear. Breasts, on the other hand, flattened out into nothing. Except, she realized, this corpse still had a pretty good set. That was interesting. The body also seemed to glint in the sun, twinkling at her. That was interesting, too.

Serena got on her hands and knees, getting close to the body, staring at it from an inch or two away without touching it. She started at the girl’s feet, moved up her legs, spent more time than she wanted to at her crotch, then her stomach, her breasts, and finally her face and lips, which looked ready to give her a macabre kiss.

Serena stood up, slid a digital tape recorder from her pocket, and dictated a few notes.

The wind tousled her hair, which was lush and black, shoulder length. She was as statuesque as a showgirl, which was what most strangers in Las Vegas mistook her for when they met her. She had taken to wearing her shield on the outside, which tended to cut down on the unwelcome advances from drunk convention rats. Serena was nearly six feet tall, lithe and well proportioned. She wore a sleeveless white tank top, tucked into snug, faded jeans. She was muscled and strong, from an intense workout routine. Her skin was tanned golden brown from days spent mostly in the sun.

Serena was in her midthirties. Her eyes, normally hidden behind the apricot lenses of her sunglasses, were emerald green. Her mouth was small, with pale lips and a soft curve forming her chin. She didn’t look young, not girlish young, and she never had. She had looked the way she looked now, adult and beautiful, since she was a teenager. It was only recently that her age had begun to catch up to the image she had sported all her life. At idle moments, she wondered what she would look like as the years began to get ahead of her.

Probably the girl at her feet had wondered the same thing, but she wasn’t going to find out. And it was just as well that this girl couldn’t see herself now.

“Age,” Serena said into her tape recorder. “Have to wait for the ME on that, but I’m thinking early twenties at most. Cause of death looks like blunt trauma to the head. There’s matted blood in the hair toward the back of the skull, and without moving the body, it looks like the skull may be caved in back there. Hair originally black, dyed blonde.”

Serena studied the desert floor where the body lay.

“She wasn’t murdered here. Not enough blood on the ground. Whoever did it hauled the body and dumped her here. The body is nude, but no immediate sign of sexual assault, no bruising in the pelvic area, no broken fingernails, scratches, or other wounds. We’ll run the rape kit. Time of death, no way to tell? I wonder if the ME will even be able to peg this one. At least a couple days, I guess. Rigor is long gone. We’re just lucky the vultures didn’t get her.”

A thought occurred to her. She gingerly poked the dead girl’s wrinkled breast with one finger. “Naturally,” she said to herself, standing up again.

Serena continued taking notes. “Pierced ears, but no earrings in them. No watch. No rings. Fingernails and toenails are painted red. Evidence of heavy makeup on the face. Glitter on most of the skin.”

She heard footsteps approaching and then a voice calling to her. “
Hola
.”

“Watch where you walk, Cordy,” Serena said without turning around. Not that it mattered. She had run searches in the desert before, and it rarely offered up any clues. Little wonder the gangsters of old Vegas liked to leave their targets to rot in the Mojave.

Cordy feigned offense. “And what am I? A rookie?”

Cordero Elias Angel was her partner of the last six months. Serena, who had earned a reputation with her lieutenant for being difficult to work with, went through partners quickly, but Cordy seemed to have staying power. He gave as good as he got, he did what he was told, and he hadn’t once made a pass at her. Cordy preferred girls small, blonde, and young, and Serena was none of the three. He was also six inches shorter than Serena and six years younger. There was nothing romantic between them.

Looking like she did, Serena got plenty of offers, but when she lowered her guard and succumbed to a date, it usually ended early. Her blunt style scared them away. She hadn’t had sex in years. She told herself she didn’t miss it.

Cordy, in contrast, had an active social life. In the short time they had been together, she had seen him with six different women, ranging from twenty to twenty-three years old. None of them lasted beyond the first calisthenics in bed. For at least two of them, it really was their first time in bed, or so Cordy claimed. Serena found it disgusting and told him so. Cordy just grinned, and she dropped it, rather than digging up old ghosts.

He was an attractive, if compact, package. He always dressed impeccably. Today, he wore a floral Tommy Bahama shirt and black silk pants. Cordy had jet black hair, greased straight back over his head. His skin had a dark cast, the color of virgin olive oil. His teeth looked noticeably white against it, and he had predatory brown eyes.

Serena jerked a thumb at the trailer. “So what’s his story?”

“Ah, he’s a pathetic old man. Not so old, but going downhill fast, you know? Spends each night drowning in a gin bottle. You see all the broken glass out here? He just tosses them out back when he’s done.”

Serena took note of the broad swath of glass shards behind the trailer. “Make sure the forensics team studies the glass pieces carefully. If our delivery man cut himself hauling the body in, maybe we’ll get some blood.”