Iceman
A short story by Eric Williams
Editor’s Note: “Iceman” was originally published, in June 2020, in the first issue of King Ludd’s Rag, our long-form fiction zine. The minimum word count for KLR stories is 4,000, but “Iceman” clocked in at 8,094 words.
I looked up from my beer to see Eddy Roche in the spotted mirror behind the bar. He stood in the doorway, big wrencher’s hands clenching and unclenching as he looked around the place. His eyes were wide, adjusting from the glare of the Nevada sun to the dim light of The Point’s interior. He spotted me and ambled over.
“Hear about the Old Man?” Roche asked, sliding onto the stool next to mine. He clipped his words, a sure sign he was trying too hard to sound casual. He wanted to talk. I waited for Eddy to get his beer and for the bartender to wander off before answering him.
“What about the Old Man?”
“He’s dead.” Eddy sipped his beer. He faced forward, watching my face in the mirror, waiting while I thought it over.
The Old Man had been the king of White Pine County, pretty much running all of the central Nevada scene out of his little compound on the edge of Ely. He’d started as a distributer out of El Paso, where he’d weathered the troubles and kept circulation going through the 90s and the hard times in the ’aughts. He’d shipped for cookers in the Central Valley, sold product for the Cartels, even worked with the Russians in Vegas. Until now, he’d outlasted them all.
“What’s he dead from?” I asked. Eddy ran his thumbnail along the edge of his bottle’s label, peeling it carefully away from the glass while he answered.
“Feds wanted to talk to him. Guess he didn’t feel much like talking though, ’cause he came out guns-a-blazin’. They just opened up on him.”
“No open casket, huh?”
“Hauled him out in a bucket is what I heard.”
“Hard to believe he’d slip up that bad. Thought he’d have everybody who was anybody bought up by now.”
“Here’s the funny part,” laughed Eddy. “They weren’t even there about the ‘business’ at all. They showed up to take the Old Man in for trying to buy a fucking moon rock. Turns out that’s illegal, and the Feds wanted to bust him for that.”
“The hell he want a moon rock for?”
“Who knows?” said Eddy, shaking his head. “You know he’d been buying shit like that for a while now. ‘Curiosities’ and all, right? Maybe he was gonna put it in that goddamn casino of his!”
The casino had been the Old Man’s most recent pet project. I’d only been inside a couple of times, but the Old Man had talked about it incessantly. He’d bought into a little operation outside of Reno, slots and a few tables, nothing fancy, but enough cash flowing through it to make for good laundering. He’d folded local prostitution into the operation, running it out of an attached hotel he’d bought up, and between the gambling, the sex, and the drugs, he was making money like never before, all out of that casino. He’d fixed the place up pretty good. From what I’d heard he’d taken a shine to the casino business, and had sunk some serious cash into renovations and expansion.
It’s always the stupid shit that gets you in the end.
“Damn,” I said, and took a drink. I supposed that’s all I thought it warranted.
Eddy sipped his beer and leaned in a little closer. “Look, here’s the thing Fuhrmann. They might’ve wanted him for a moon rock, but he tried to perforate some Federales. Now they’re gonna start looking into the Old Man for real, right? Shit, the gunroom alone will be enough to tip em off that things weren’t exactly kosher! They’ll be digging deep, and that might cause some problems.”
“What’s your worry, Eddy? You’re a legitimate business man, ain’t ya?”
“Shit. Listen. He had one of his cars up at the shop, for business and all. We had us a good deal, but I’m feeling leery letting that thing sit there. I don’t know what the Old Man had in the ways of records, you understand? I’d like someone to do something about it, quick, before things start happening. I’m asking you,” he said after a moment’s pause, “’cause you drove for him.”
“It’s been a while, Eddy.”
“Yeah, sure, but you’d know what to do.” He shifted on his stool, hunkered down over his beer. “Look, I can’t let this thing sink me, Fuhrmann. I need that car gone. I can pay to get that car gone, okay?”
The magic words.
“Was it coming in or going out?” I asked.
“In, I think,” said Eddy, voice low. “That shitheel Dalton brings it in a couple of weeks ago. Maybe you knew him?”
“He and I drove together a couple of times,” I said. Roche nodded, and went on.
“Well, when I heard the news about the Old Man, I took a peek. Didn’t see nothing, anyways.”
“That’s the point of a smuggling car, Eddy,” I said. “I’ll swing by this evening and we’ll see what we can do.”
“You’re all right, Fuhrmann!” said Roche, slapping me on the back. He plunked down a twenty on the bar and smiled. “Beers are on me, pal. Just come ready to drive tonight, okay?”
In the mirror, I watched him walk out. I pushed the twenty toward the edge of the bar, and ordered another.
Evening’s long light painted the Point Bar’s vinyl a deep, electric orange. It was still hot, but at least it wasn’t bright. I walked up El Cajon and over to Main Street, passing through the optimistically named “business district” on my way to Roche’s garage. Downtown Crowley, NV, wasn’t much to look at. A grocery store died a slow death on the south end of the street, while bars, payday-loan pawnshops, an American Legion, and a single Mexican restaurant filled out the rest. A faded blue coffee kiosk sat alone in the empty parking lot of a dark store, nameless, all broken glass and particle board. Lariat-lettering on all four sides of the stand announced “Cowboy Coffee!” in bright yellow. The kiosk was boarded up. What little money had been in the town left with the last cow twenty years ago, when the bottom fell out of ranching in the Basin.
I imagine that was part of what made the Old Man such a success. Desperate folks’ll do just about anything for the right price, and desperation was Central Nevada’s greatest natural resource. Cash starts getting tight, calls start coming in at all hours from collectors; makes a man think. More than a few of us made the ride down to Ely, sat down on that back porch that looked out over a scrubby arroyo and the salt-crusted playas beyond. And you listened, sharp and nodding and eager, to what the Old Man was telling you, and then you thanked him for it on the way out. You’d get a haircut, you’d buy yourself a nice button-up shirt and some slacks, and you’d be off on your new job.
It was a pretty good system. I don’t know if the Old Man had come up with it himself or what, but it worked. Aside from using drivers that didn’t fit police profiles, the real trick was the way the cars were organized. The Old Man must’ve had a hundred of them scattered around the west, parked behind houses and businesses in dozens of little towns, registration and insurance all under a local’s name. The cars were kept gassed-up and tuned, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Driver shows up, pays off the local “owner” and collects the key, and is on their way. I’d made the run down to New Mexico or Texas lots of times. Hauled drugs mostly, guns occasionally, and once a small, pale feller with the dullest, emptiest eyes I’d ever seen, folded up like a contortionist into a tiny space under the false bottom of the back seat. He’d ridden the whole drive to Vegas that way, tucked in there.
I left the parking lot moonscape and walked over to Roche’s Garage. His neon sign flashed “Big Eddy’s” in a twilight that seeped up from the ground and into the sky.
We smoked while I looked over the car. It was, like all the Old Man’s fleet, a fairly nondescript piece of hardware. Mauve coupe, nothing fancy, a few dents, a spot of rust. A peek under the hood might surprise you a bit, though. The engine was remarkably clean and surprisingly big, an expensive custom job to give the little car and its changing roster of drivers a little reserve power in the back pocket. I walked around it a few times, and then we wheeled it into the garage. Eddy shut off his neon light and flipped the sign around in the door, and I got to work.
First I pulled the false bumpers, then the hubcaps. Both were empty. There was nothing behind the side walls in the trunk or in any of the narrow compartments in the doors. Nothing strapped to the underside of the wheel wells, over the axles, inside the oil pan, or under the hood. The hollow seats and headrests were empty. I ran a screwdriver along the interior roof, popping the latches to expose an inch-deep space hidden there. Eddy smoked cigarette after cigarette, watching me go over the car.
I spent an hour searching, and was almost ready to call it quits when I pulled the glove box out of the dash and found something. Taped to the firewall was a key, a simple silver one with a big blocky crown. There was a piece of string and a bit of cardboard attached, labeled “331.” I pocketed it before Eddy could see what I’d found, replaced the glove box, and stood up.
“Well, Eddy,” I said, stretching and yawning, “the car looks clean to me.”
“You sure?”
“I looked everywhere I could think of,” I answered. “Besides, you said yourself you thought it was coming in off of a run. Probably cleaned it before dropping it off.”
“Okay,” said Eddy, looking relieved. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Get me the title, we’ll backdate a sale for it from you to me. I know a guy runs a junkyard that’ll do the same before dropping it in an auction somewhere.” Eddy signed the title over and handed me the car keys. “Anybody asks,” I said to him, “just tell him you sold it six months back, and that should take care of it.” Eddy pressed some bills into my hand and shook it vigorously.
“You’re a good man, Fuhrmann,” he said, “thanks for this. Every time the phone rings I’ve been jumping a mile, afraid it was the cops. Be a relief to see it drive away, lemme tell ya.”
I watched him in the rear-view mirror as I drove off, a figure silhouetted against the light of the open bay, the small red glow of a cigarette in one dark hand.
I drove the car up to Fallon the next morning, and ended up spending the whole day haggling with the owner of the junkyard. He’d heard the news about the Old Man too, and figured he had me over a barrel. He made me go through the whole act of checking out the machine’s hidey-holes all over again. I think he was disappointed there were no drugs. We eventually settled on $500 for the coupe, basically robbery. Even so, his hand lingered on the cash as he handed it over. I snatched it and got out of there before he could change his mind.
Waiting at the bus stop in Fallon, I thought I’d give Eddy a call and let him know everything was copacetic. You hate to see a nervous guy like him get all worked up over nothing. I called the garage but nobody answered, so I took a walk while I waited for the bus. I tried again half an hour later, and again there was no answer.
I remember thinking, as I climbed into the bus, that the unanswered phone was kind of odd, but I didn’t let it bother me unduly. The heat and the rhythm of the bus rocked me to sleep pretty quick, and I dozed most of the ride back to Crowley, a light, prickly sleep that scudded along the edge of waking.
I had to walk past Eddy’s garage to get home from the bus station, and that was how I found out something bad had gone down. Police tape everywhere, front door smashed in, everything quiet and dark. I tried not to look too interested as I strolled by. It put a chill down in my guts though; no simple robbery, not with the place shuttered like that.
I went up Main and bought a six-pack and a copy of “The Miner,” our local paper, and walked to the scrubby little park in the middle of town. I sat under a straggly cottonwood by a runoff culvert and drank beer while I read. Front page, tucked in the corner, was the headline “No Leads in Mechanic’s Murder.”
The article was brief, a couple of empty paragraphs, but the gist was this: Eddy Roche had been murdered two nights ago, some time between nine and midnight, just after I’d taken the car off his hands. No signs of robbery. Citizens with information should contact the Crowley Police.
I distrust coincidence.
The key I’d found in the car was in my pocket, with my own keys. I pulled out my keychain and looked it over. It felt heavier than it should have. I couldn’t imagine that Eddy had been killed for anything less than that key. If he’d just hung onto that car for a while longer, whoever had come looking might have left Eddy alive.
I had to decide whether I should chance a visit to my little rented house or not. Time had passed since Eddy had been murdered. The killer could’ve followed me north, maybe was bopping around Fallon right now, looking for me.
Or they could have stuck around town, waiting.
In the end, it was the bus ride I’d just taken that decided it. The smart thing to do would have been to have hoofed it back to the station and caught one for Pocatello or Bozeman or Cheyenne or wherever, let things cool down, and come back to Crowley in a couple of months. But that drowsy bus crawling through the desert was too fresh in my mind, so I decided I’d pack up some things and take my truck instead.
I approached it carefully, of course. Walked around the block a couple times, peeked into the back yard through a neighbor’s fence. Everything seemed quiet enough, so I hurried under the carport and got my biggest wrench from the toolbox in the back of my truck. My little house was empty and still, and the wrench was reassuringly heavy in my hand as I packed.
I loaded up a duffel bag and tossed it in the passenger seat, then put the more perishable stuff from the fridge in a cooler and put that in the back of the truck. All in all, I was loaded and ready to go in around twenty minutes. I locked up the house and stepped out under the carport.
“Howdy Fuhrmann,” said a voice, and I jumped. There, just out of the sun, was Dalton. I reached for the wrench in my back pocket, but he laughed and held his hands up, palms toward me. “Easy hombre,” he said, blue eyes bright. “I ain’t here for trouble.”
Dalton had worked for the Old Man for a while. Real slick, and so blond you could practically see through him. He’d come out of Seattle originally, cut his teeth running heroin for the Canadians. The Old Man brought him to Nevada a few years back and put him to work as a general errand boy. Word was that, in addition to being an efficient courier, he was handy with a shovel and could read a topographic map, and that he’d taken more than a few long drives out in the desert late at night. He was smiling at me.
“What’re you doing in town, Dalton?” I asked. I lowered the wrench, but kept it ready.
He shrugged. “I came here to talk to Eddy Roche, but someone got to him before I did.” He kept smiling. “Heading out on a trip, Fuhrmann? I’d a thought you’d be sticking around for the funeral. You and Eddy were buddies, weren’t ya?” He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “I mean, that’s what they say down at the Point Bar. They said you and Eddy had been drinking together a few nights back, pair of knuckleheads shooting the shit, maybe talking a little business?” He exhaled a long stream of smoke and watched me. “Maybe things got a little heated? Maybe you got a little mad at Eddy?”
“Shit,” I laughed, “you think I killed him?”
“Well,” said Dalton with a shrug, “anything’s possible, ain’t it?”
“Not that,” I said, shaking my head. “What did you want to talk to Eddy for?”
“Ah,” he stretched, shifted his weight to the other foot, and leaned against the back of my truck, smiling around the cigarette in his mouth. “Same general thing you two talked about, I’d wager. That little coupe I dropped off at Eddy’s a couple weeks ago.”
“Yeah, alright,” I said. “Eddy was worried about the car and wanted it gone, so I got rid of it for him. And he was alive when I left town. Christ, I was in Fallon when the paper says he was killed. What did you want with that car, Dalton?” He blew a couple of smoke rings and watched them coalesce under the carport before answering.
“I reckon Eddy and you checked the car, before you took it out? Either of you find anything?” The blue flashed from half-lidded eyes, watchful, waiting.
“We looked it over,” I said. “It was clean when I saw it, except for a spot behind the glove box. I found a key.”
“That it?” he asked. “Just the key?”
“Just the key. Eddy didn’t see it. Nothing to say where the lock it belongs to is, either.” Dalton nodded, thinking it over. “You knew about the key,” I stated.
“Lemme tell you a little story, Fuhrmann,” he said. “A few weeks back, the Old Man got real excited about something. Him and that big goon of his, Tomas, they take that little coupe out on a trip somewhere, nobody knows where. But he comes back, and he’s happier than a pig in shit. Said he’d got his hands on a big deal, something real special that was gonna make him bigtime, that’s what he said, Fuhrmann, it was gonna make him bigtime. Wound real tight, see? But he needed some time to line it up. He hands me the keys to the coupe, tells me to bring it up here to Crowley and leave it with poor ol’ Eddy. Doesn’t say what I’m hauling, just wants it done.”
“And you looked?”
“Of course I looked, Fuhrmann. Jesus, would you drive a car not knowing what was in it? I pulled over a few miles out of Ely and gave it the ol’ once over and, like you, didn’t find nothing interesting, except that key. I do my job, of course, but then the Old Man goes batshit on a couple of feds over a goddamn moon rock and now, like you, I’m looking for alternative employment opportunities.”
“And you want the key?”
“The Old Man must’ve locked up something good with that key, right? How much did he move in a year? Millions? All that, and this other thing was bigger still, big enough to get the old cynic worked up real good.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked, and Dalton shrugged.
“Pallet of uncut coke, serious precursors, loose cash, who knows? Point is, with him dead, it’s up for grabs.”
“But someone else is already grabbing for it,” I said. “Eddy Roche got killed on account of someone hunting that car and the key.” Dalton didn’t answer, but his smile turned sour. “Who else would be looking for it?”
“The only other guy in on the deal was Tomas,” said Dalton, scratching the back of his head. “I went to talk to him, too, trying to get a line on what and where the stuff is, but I got there too late.”
“Dead?” Christ, someone was serious about this, I thought.
“Sliced up pretty bad,” said Dalton. “Had to check his wallet to make sure it was him.”
“Jesus,” I said. “So you don’t know what this stuff is, where it is, and who else is after it?”
“Bit of a gamble, sure,” admitted Dalton.
“Jesus,” I repeated. “Whoever’s after it, they’ve killed two people looking for it.”
“But look,” said Dalton, “we’ve got an advantage! You’ve got the key, and whoever is looking for you is probably making trouble up in Fallon.”
“What’s this ‘we’ shit?”
“Look here, Fuhrmann,” he said. “Like you said, whoever this person is, they’re dangerous, right? A real killer. Two pair of eyes do a better job of spotting trouble than one, yeah? We’re gentlemen of the world, we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement, huh?” His smile seemed to have more than the usual number of teeth.
“Sure,” I said, “but we’ve got no clue where the Old Man stashed his jackpot, do we?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Dalton. “Eddy searched the car before you got there, right? You and me, we’re not used to things being hidden in plain sight.” He narrowed his eyes and leaned in toward me. “I know there were papers and things in that car. I bet you Eddy cleaned the car out on his first pass before handing it over to you, and if so, there might be some clues left for us.”
“The cops must’ve cleaned out the garbage in the garage.”
“Yeah, in the garage,” said Dalton. “But when I left it I parked the car outside, with the junkers he used for parts. He had a big old burn barrel, didn’t he?” He kept smiling, and I kept thinking.
For a second time, I let money sway my reason. I should’ve just handed the key over to Dalton then and there, but I didn’t. I guess I’m a slow learner.
We waited until dark to slip behind Eddy’s garage, before the moon had risen. We picked our way through the tetanus mine-field of long-dead car parts and over to the spot where the car had sat. Sure enough, there was the burn barrel. Heaped piles of dirt on one side showed where Eddy had dragged it over.
Dalton looked around. We were pretty sheltered by the cars, and you barely saw the glow of the bars along Main Street, so we figured we’d chance the flashlight. We switched it on and peered into the barrel. Dalton sighed.
“Thank God,” he whispered. “I was afraid we’d find nothing but ashes.” In fact, the barrel was barely half full. We tipped it over, spilling greasy burger wrappers, soda bottles, and wads of paper.
“What’re we looking for?” I asked, picking a sheet of newspaper out of the pile.
“I don’t know,” Dalton answered. “I remember there was a folder and some loose papers, receipts, that sort of thing. Anything that could give us an idea of where the Old Man and Tomas went . . .”
Coyotes yawped over the hill, a big group of them getting worked up for a night rummaging through Crowley’s garbage. I was feeling a distinct sense of kinship when, under a smear of cheese and pickle residue, I found a small cardstock folder. I held it up to the light and flipped through the papers inside. The header on one read “E-Z Self Storage, Mariposa Drive, Las Vegas”, and beneath the contractese was a messy signature. Stapled to the back was a credit card receipt, with the name “Tomas Diaz” printed under a duplicate scrawl. I handed it to Dalton, who let out a whoop.
“Hot damn, Fuhrmann,” he said, his voice rising. “That’s Tomas! Never sign your own name when you can have someone else sign theirs, that’s what the Old Man always said! A storage unit, that’s gotta be it! Hot damn, Fuhrmann!” He leaned over to slap me on the back, and that saved his life.
The shot boomed out of the night, a large-caliber round that thudded into the car behind us with a deep echoing crash. I fell backward, ears ringing, and Dalton dove to the ground and rolled over, a long-nosed 9-mm gleaming in his hand. He snapped off two shots, vaguely in the direction the attack had come from, before rising to crouch. He tossed the flashlight away, the beam casting weird tumbling shadows against the ruined cars as it turned and twisted in the air. One shadow was more solid than the rest and as the beam briefly illuminated its shape, fire erupted from its raised hand. Another round slammed into the earth next to me. I scrambled to my feet and dove behind a car.
Dalton’s 9-mm spat three more times, the shots better aimed but wasted since the target had moved, and they were quickly answered from somewhere to the left. Whoever was firing was moving around the junkyard to flank us.
“We gotta go,” shouted Dalton. I could just hear him over the ringing in my ears. I slammed into a couple of cars running fast but low, the expected shot a terrible itching along my back as I went. Whoever was up on the hill fired off two more shots, and I heard glass shatter.
Somehow, we got down off the hill and around the edge of the garage without getting killed. I was ready to keep running, but Dalton pulled me up short and put his finger to his lips. Gun out, he peeked around the side of the building, watching. The gun on the hill barked once more. Dalton grabbed me by the neck and pulled close.
“They’re at the barrel,” he hissed, his voice dim in the temporary buzzing in my ear. I nodded, and he looked back around the building, taking careful aim with his gun. I saw him tense and heard him spit a curse, and then he emptied his gun up the hill, each shot in quick succession. On the last click of the trigger, he pushed me ahead of him and we ran to my truck.
Sirens flashed down the road as we piled in. I took a sharp left onto a side street and we were well away from the scene and the cops in a few minutes. I looked over at Dalton. His pale face was more bloodless than usual, and he had a glazed look in his shallow blue eyes.
“You get shot?” I asked, head ringing, the fear pumping through my veins turning the question into a shout. He shook his head. “Who was on the hill?” I saw his throat bob as he swallowed before answering.
“They turned a light on at the barrel,” he said. His words sounded far away as he spoke, but they grounded me as easily as if he’d screamed them in my ear. “Rosa Calavera’s after the key too.” I swerved the car at the sound of the name. The rest of the drive was silent.
We found a trucker bar about thirty miles out of town, Red Jack’s. We pulled in and got a couple of drinks to steady our nerves. Other than ordering, we didn’t speak until we’d thrown back the first shots and gotten ourselves into a corner booth. Dalton put himself against the back wall so he could watch the door. He tapped the gun in his shoulder holster absentmindedly. Finally, he spoke.
“Alright,” he said, still staring hard at the door. “Alright, look, had us a scare, but it’s nothing to worry about, right? We knew someone else was after it, so this doesn’t change anything, does it?”
“It changes things a little bit,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “In fact, she changes things a whole goddamned lot.” He gave me a sick grin.
“You can say her name, Fuhrmann,” he said. “She ain’t gonna appear in a puff of smoke.”
“Not so sure of that,” I said. He laughed, but kept his eyes on the door.
Rosa Calavera was bad news, and that was all there was to it. We’d all heard the stories. Contract killer, the best; she’d worked with the big boys on both sides of the border. She was supposed to have come out of a Mexico City slum, where she’d gutted some street dealer because she wanted his gun. She’d gotten pretty good with it too, and killing people turned into easy money for her. She worked her way up into Juarez and then over the border and north into the Basin.
The stories about her were wrapped up in the usual narco-cult exoticism that went with Mexican hired killers in those days: she was covered in tattoos, each commemorating a kill; she was a high priestess of Santa Muerte, and she left her victims’ hearts on an alter as offerings to Holy Death. All sorts of spooky nonsense.
“The Old Man must’ve sent her on a job,” mused Dalton. “She wants payment that ain’t coming, so she slices up Tomas to find out what the Old Man had hidden away. That’s the sort of scruple those types cultivate, you know. Real mythic shit, the killer that gets the money coming to her no matter what. Good PR.” He was chattering.
“So Tomas told her where the stuff is, but she needs the key?” I asked, waving to the bar for a couple more drinks.
“No,” said Dalton, sipping his third shot. “If she knew where the stuff was she’d have just bought some bolt cutters and gone after it. Maybe she figured like us, that the key was with the directions? Besides, the key’s got a number, yeah, three hundred something? Need it just to find the right unit, probably.”
“So long as she doesn’t know about Vegas, I guess we’re safe,” I said. Dalton reached into his pocket and pulled out the small folder with the rental agreement in it.
“That’s right,” he said, his voice cheerful. “Yeah, with us gone, the trail is cold. There’s no way for her to find us.” He saluted with his drink. I flipped through the paperwork while I drank, but something stopped the shot glass halfway to my mouth. My throat went dry.
“The receipt isn’t here, Dalton,” I said.
“What?”
“The receipt that was stapled to the contract from the storage company, it’s come off.”
Dalton scrambled to check his pockets, but didn’t come up with anything. We checked the floor around the booth and didn’t find it there. We paid for the drinks, and tripped over each other searching the truck, then around the truck. Ten minutes in, we looked at each other across the cab.
“Let’s go,” he said, quietly. “We’ve got the key, we’ll spot her before she spots us.” His blue eyes were bloodshot and more than a little crazy. “And then we’ll be rich,” he concluded, simply. I turned the key. The truck rumbled to life on the third try, and we drove into the night, heading south toward Las Vegas.
We took turns behind the wheel and drove all night. We only had a few moments of panic, mostly related to a couple of cars screaming up and around us doing ninety. The first time it happened, I felt my heart rate climb and my vision blurred, but the car just whipped by and sped on ahead. Other than that, it was an uneventful drive.
We got into Vegas around six in the morning. We bought a map, and over gas-station donuts and coffee we searched out Mariposa Drive. It was on the south side of the strip, near one of the warehouse wastelands surrounding the casinos. We found it easy enough. There was an office, dark and empty, but it was a 24-hour access deal. We circled a few times, but eventually ran out of excuses. The key undid the lock on the main gate, and we drove in.
It was a big place with lines of long, low buildings. Thousands of units, each identical on the outside except for the numbers next to each door, stretching on and on, all encircled by a high barbwire fence. We snaked around and eventually found the 300-block. I parked, and we got out.
“Okay,” said Dalton, hand in his jacket as he looked up and down our row. “All clear. Open her up.”
331’s padlock was a heavy hunk of steel with a half-inch thick shackle. I snapped it open and put it in my pocket, and we rolled up the door, flipped the light on, and looked inside.
It was full of junk. Shelved, heaped, stacked, but all junk. Old beer signs, bicycles parts, wagon wheels, all that kitschy shit. Western stuff too, lot of horse tack, branding irons, and a big neon green foam cactus in one corner. I tapped a fiberglass cowboy hat as tall as me, and looked at Dalton.
“The hell is this stuff?” I asked. I wrestled the cowboy hat out of the way while Dalton examined a box of bullet-riddled highway signs. Behind the giant hat I found a curved arc of wood, three feet wide and six feet long. I flipped it around and saw the other side had been painted with an evening scene of the desert skyline, deep reds and stark yellows with the black silhouette of mountains and cacti lining the lower border. Superimposed over the scene were words. “‘Silver Nugget Casino,’” I read aloud. “That’s the Old Man’s place in Reno, yeah?” Dalton nodded. “All this stuff, it’s for his casino?”
“Looks like,” he answered after a pause.
“This was the Old Man’s big score? Decorations?”
“Well,” he barked, “you didn’t expect it to be stacked to the ceiling with cocaine, did you? This shit’s a front, just like the casino. The old man wasn’t an idiot. There’s gotta be more here. Let’s shift this stuff and look around.” I sighed, but rolled up my sleeves.
It wasn’t as big a mess as it looked. A lot of stuff had been piled up at the front, but after moving some of the larger, bulkier items, we exposed a couple of narrow, meandering paths that had been left clear, like game trails winding through the woods. A lot of it had clearly sat there a while, covered in dust and cobwebs. Dead wasps crunched under our feet, their desiccated nest hanging off of an enormous plastic boot that stood in our way. Beyond it, we heard a hum.
“I hope that’s not more wasps,” I said. We lifted the boot up over our heads, jamming it into a shelf and wedging its oversized heel against the opposite heap in order to pass under it.
We fought our way through the last bit of junk and saw that an open space had been left in the back. There we found the source of the hum, a huge white freezer, bright and brand new, its compressors running full blast in the hot, stuffy confines of the unit. A thick cord ran from the freezer to the wall, and an envelope was taped to its side.
“See?” said Dalton, gesturing grandly.
“The hell is it?” I asked.
“Whatever it is, that’s it, I’m sure of it,” hissed Dalton, stepping forward.
“Took you long enough.” The woman’s voice was flat, the bored, calm tone of a professional. Dalton whipped around, his hand darting under his jacket before freezing in place. I turned too, much more slowly.
“C’mon now,” she said, swinging the heavy black nothingness of a .45 into view. She was unremarkable enough, a person you wouldn’t look at twice, unless you happened to catch her eyes, black and hard as anthracite. Surgeon’s eyes, or the eyes of an engineer; they mapped you out in a minute, measured you up, and then fitted a solution to the particular problem of your existence. Barely clearing five feet, she still towered over us. She stepped a little closer, out of the shadow of the Old Man’s garbage. In the better light I saw color on her arm, the red and blue tangle of a tattoo that ran up her wrist and under her sleeve.
“Cops didn’t get you, huh Rosa?” His voice cracked on her name, and I saw sweat bead on his neck, but he managed a passable sneer. Calavera smiled blandly, but didn’t answer.
“Look,” I squeaked, “can’t we split it? Whatever it is, there should be plenty for all three of us, right?” The black light of her eyes glittered down on the gun, and then flashed back to Dalton.
“Not particularly compelling,” she said. She nodded toward the freezer. “What’s in it?”
“We haven’t looked,” I said, my throat tight. I felt myself shaking as I stared down what looked to be six feet of gun barrel. She shrugged and brought the .45 up, pointing it straight at Dalton. I saw the tendons of her wrist flex as she started to pull the trigger.
The sudden crash made us all jump, and I’m pretty sure one of us, either Dalton or myself, yelped. At the sound, Rosa had snarled, twisting sideways, keeping the gun in her left hand trained on Dalton.
Behind her, the huge boot that we had jammed into place had fallen and was rocking to rest against the floor. Other smaller bits of ephemera cascaded down around it.
The gun was on Dalton but her back was to me. Dalton shot me a look and dove to the left, just as Rosa turned back toward him. She squeezed the trigger, and the roar of the gun and the sizzle of the ricochet filled my universe. I hugged the ground, just wanting to get out of the way of the gun as it swept toward me, but as I moved my foot tangled in the freezer’s cord and I went flying.
I collided with her, felt her arm tensing against my chest and the cold weight of the .45 against my face as we spun back and into a shelf full of hubcabs that toppled around us. I felt her twisting to free her gun. I desperately held onto her wrist, trying to point the weapon up, and she pummelled me hard with her free hand, slamming her fist into the side of my head repeatedly. Somehow in the struggle her feet found some purchase and she heaved hard, shifting my bulk off of her and pulling the gun down again. I grabbed for it, trying to wrestle her down and get away at the same time, when the muffled explosion of the .45 between us sent me tumbling. The front of my shirt was red with blood, and I scrambled back with a sob, certain I had been shot.
The eternity of a few seconds passed, and a whistling, gasping cough made me realize that I wasn’t dying, that the gun had gone off and caught Calavera. The little blood on my shirt was hers. She was drenched in it. The gun was a few feet to her side, the recoil having tossed it out of her reach.
“Goddammit,” she rasped. “Killed by a nobody, with my own gun.” Eyes full of starless black bored into my own. I sucked in a couple of breaths and found my voice.
“You shouldn’t have killed Eddy Roche,” I shouted at her. “You could’ve bought him for a song. He’d have talked!”
She wrenched herself upright against the heap of junk, our eyes still locked.
“Who the fuck is Eddy Roche?” she growled, and toppled backward out of sight.
“Holy shit,” someone said, and after hearing it repeated a few times, I realized it was me.
“Nice work Fuhrmann,” said Dalton. He held his 9 mm causally. I was dazed enough that it took me a moment to realize it was pointed directly at me. “Appreciate it, but I’m afraid you’ve only delayed the end by a bit.” I swallowed, and he smiled.
“You killed Eddy.” I finally got it out, and he kept smiling.
“I was sure he had the key,” he shrugged. “But poor Eddy didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Finally got around to mentioning you but by then, well, it was too late for Mr. Roche. Ah well. Say goodnight, Fuhrmann.” He raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
And pulled it again. Both times, the click echoed in my skull. He’d never reloaded his gun after the firefight on the hill.
Simultaneously, we both looked at Calavera’s .45. It was closer to me, but I was still prone against the wall. Dalton dove but I kicked at it and sent it skidding under one of the shelves. I stood as he wheeled around, swinging his gun at my face. It was a glancing blow, but it was enough to put me on my knees. He kicked me, and I went down. He dropped his whole weight on my chest and put his fist into my face a couple of times.
“I’m going to kill you, Fuhrmann,” he laughed, reaching behind my head and grabbing the freezer’s loose power cord. He swatted me again, then wrapped the cord around my throat and tightened it. I choked, felt the pressure building in my temples, behind my eyes, the strained throbbing of blocked blood along the side of my neck. My arms flailed, I kicked, but I couldn’t get him off me.
As I struggled, I rolled onto a metallic heaviness in my pocket, the lock from the door. I grabbed it with my free hand, just as my vision started to tunnel. Dalton leaned close, breath hissing through his teeth with the exertion of killing me. I swung hard and brought the lock up against his skull. He groaned and slumped over. I sputtered and coughed as the cord went slack and I tore it from my throat. Dalton, stunned, tried to get up, and I brought the lock down hard against his head again, and then a third time. He went still, his blue eyes open and shallow and dead.
I passed out then. I remember coming to in the hot, still air of the storage unit. I checked my watch and realized it was close to five in the afternoon. I leaned against the freezer, just listening to the quiet. The cord had been unplugged since the fight and there was no hum to disturb the stillness of the unit as I got up and looked around. I couldn’t find Calavera, although there was a blood trail that led out a good ways before vanishing.
I went back in. My head throbbed and my throat hurt, but it beat the alternative. I slid Dalton to one side and put a tarp over him; I didn’t like the way he stared. Then I opened the freezer. I looked at it for some time, but didn’t come up with much.
It had been a big block of ice, although it was rapidly melting into a tub of water. I’d say half the ice was gone, deep wells forming on the top. Through the glacial murk, distorted and twisted, was the shape of a man or something like a man. It had a bullet head, its arms were too long, and it was covered in hair. I found Dalton’s gun and used it as a hammer to bust up the ice. When it was exposed I thrust my hand into the freezing water and grabbed the thing’s head. It startled me by popping off easily. After I recovered from that, I pulled it out and looked it over.
It could only be confused for something real through a thick sheet of ice. In my hand was a cheap rubber gorilla mask. It had been stapled against a wire frame, roughly the size of a cantaloupe. Hair, or maybe the fur of a deer or a rabbit, had been stapled in strips around the globe of the head. Glass eyes, hazel ones, had been stuck into the sockets of the mask.
I broke up the rest of the ice, and found that it was mostly all monkey costume with a few large patches of shaggy animal hide, stuffed with straw and reinforced with fiberglass. I ended up piling the bits and pieces in a heap on the floor, water pooling beneath it and around my feet.
I yanked the envelope off of the side of the freezer and, after drying my hands on my pants, examined the contents.
One of the papers was a bill of sale; some bastard in South Dakota had taken the Old Man for $30,000, selling him a gorilla costume in an ice cube. There was a newspaper clipping, yellowed and fragile, showing a heavily sideburned man in a fur coat standing next to what must have been the thing in the freezer, except this block of ice was upright and in a big glass case. The man was standing in a tent, and a sign next to the ice block asked “WHAT IS IT!?” in huge, excited letters. The headline read “Minnesota Iceman Baffles Smithsonian Scientists,” a statement that didn’t even seem to convince whoever had written the article, according to which some guy in the 70s had made a living traveling to state fairs, circuses, and carnivals in the Midwest, letting yokels gawk at his mysterious “Iceman” for fifty cents a pop. He claimed it was the remains of a missing link some soldiers had shot in Vietnam and shipped back over to the States. He’d even had some primatologists from the Smithsonian come out to look it over, although the article was a little coy about actually reporting their conclusions.
The third thing in the envelope was a handful of paper-clipped snapshots of the interior of the Old Man’s casino, either in the entryway or around the dining room/bar area. He’d taken a green marker and sketched rectangles in various empty spots around the pictures.
That was the Old Man’s big find, the centerpiece attraction for the tourists and gamblers up in Reno, the thing that left a trail of dead across Nevada—a rubber sideshow gaff some slick conman had whipped up to baffle the crowd between corndogs and funnel-cake.
And now it was all mine.
I sat down again, between the damp bits of a vintage gorilla costume and the earthly remains of Dalton, still covered in the tarp. Gonna have to do something about that, I said to myself, and as I said it, I knew what.
It took some doing, since Dalton was a little too big for the costume, but I figured under all the ice it wouldn’t have to look too perfect. I left a pile of the unused stuffing, as well as some of its internal armature, in a corner of the storage unit. Sinking him was tricky; its natural inclination was to float, of course, but the old boy who worked the gaff up had already thought of that. There were clear plastic bars that slid into place over the chest and legs, and a kind of a wire harness that went up and attached around the neck and waist, anchoring it about halfway between the bottom and top of the freezer. I looked him over, checking to see that he was locked in place. A few streaks of thin crimson leaked out from behind Dalton’s masked head and left sluggish trails in the cold water.
“Even more authentic,” I said to myself.
I plugged the freezer into the wall and the compressor rattled to life. My hands were numb, so I was glad to step out and feel the warmth radiating off the Vegas concrete. I pulled the storage unit’s door closed, snapped the lock on, and walked, stiff and bruised, to my truck.
I wondered: How much would a refrigerated van set me back?
I wondered: When did carnival season start?
Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. He is the author of Toadstones, a collection of Weird stories.