Don Winslow - While Drowning in the Desert

None of that happened. None of that happened because a) I am not especially courageous; and b) while it is true that there are no Nobel Prize committees waiting outside my door, neither am I a complete moron, popular opinion notwithstanding.

And while it is true that the hand is quicker than the eye, a bullet is quicker than either of them. So when someone shoves a gun into your tummy, you do several things: tremble, have an instant religious revelation, and sweat profusely. I guess that my whole life would also have passed before my eyes, but I was depressed enough already.

There’s something else you do when someone shoves a gun into your tummy: You do what he says, which in this case was, “Get into the car, okay?”

As we were walking back to the car Nathan whispered to me, “I was trying to tell you.”

“I know that now.”

“You are the dumbest Irishman I have ever met.”

“Shut up,” the little guy hissed.

He put Nathan in the passenger seat then climbed into the back while he held the gun on Nathan and told me to drive.

I slid behind the wheel.

“Okay, drive,” said the little guy.

“This is a standard shift,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how to drive a standard shift.”

“I shoot you.”

“It’s true.”

“I shoot you,” he said. “Drive.”

“Believe him,” Nathan said. “He really is that stupid.”

“I really am.”

You could hear the little guy thinking about what to do. It seemed like he thought for a long time.

Then he said, “Drive or I shoot you.”

I turned the key in the ignition. There was a horrible, metallic screeching noise. It was either the engine or the little guy’s voice as he screamed, “This is a 1965 Mustang! It’s very valuable!”

“Not for long,” I said.

I cranked the engine again and stepped on a pedal or something.

“Nooooo!!!!” he screamed. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I drive.”

It took awhile for Nathan to climb into the backseat and me to slide into the passenger seat and Sami-as I later learned and you already know was his preferred alias-to climb into the driver’s seat. Especially as Sami was trying to hold the gun on both of us while we were all doing what I would later come to refer to as the Lebanese Fire Drill.

But I began to feel a little better as I realized that Sami was not exactly Clyde Barrow when it came to being a gunslinger.

When we were all settled in, Sami said, “No funny business, okay?”

I think career criminals should be banned from watching old movies, don’t you?

“No funny business,” I said. “No monkey business either.”

Then Sami seemed to be having difficulty figuring out how to shift, steer, and hold the gun in order to pull out of the rest stop. He simply didn’t have enough hands.

“I’ll hold the gun,” I offered. “And if I try any funny business I promise I’ll shoot myself.”

But Sami apparently decided that the better option would be to stick the gun between his legs and expose himself to both the chance of emasculation and comments of a Freudian nature. So this is what he did, and pretty soon we were roaring west on Interstate 15.

For about a minute. Then he turned south onto a two-lane blacktop. The sign read, Cima-East Mojave National Scenic Area.

And even I had figured out by that point that Nathan had a definite reason for running away from Palm Desert and not wanting to go back, and that this reason was connected to the small but well-armed man now driving us somewhere for some reason I did not know.

Nathan turned in his seat to face me and said, “So Arthur says to the Irish kid, ‘This isn’t pastrami and…’”

I leaned over to Sami and said, “Shoot me.”

Sami didn’t shoot me.

As we headed further south into the bleakest terrain I have ever seen (and I have been to Bayonne, New Jersey), he just kept trying to interrupt Nathan’s latest stream-of-semiconsciousness soliloquy with a persistent line of questioning.

“Do you recognize me?” Sami asked.

“So Arthur was laughing and-Sure I recognize you.”

“Who am I?”

“Who are you?” Nathan asked. “You’re the for-shit, fekokteh, no-goodnik who is kidnapping me, that’s who you are. So Arthur-”

“I mean before that, okay?”

“Before what?”

“Before I kidnapped you, okay?” Sami asked. “Do you recognize me?”

“No,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry, but I do not recognize you. I’m eighty-six years old, sometimes I don’t recognize me. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this old man?’ So, excuse me, I don’t recognize me sometimes, I’m supposed to recognize you?”

Sami got an especially crafty look in his eye.

“Okay,” he said. “So you don’t recognize me as your… neighbor, for example?”

“And Arthur Minsky, who was a gentleman-What?”

“So you don’t recognize me as your neighbor, for example?”

“Excuse me,” Nathan said. “I live in a development that didn’t get developed. What neighbors? I got no neighbors. What I got is a burned-up smelly mess next door. So, are you my neighbor?”

“No, no, no, no, no, okay?” Sami said. “That was just an example.”

“Example of what?” Nathan shook a cigarette out of his pack and started to light it.

“Of how you might recognize me,” Sami said. “Please don’t smoke.”

Nathan took a drag of the cigarette and went into his usual coughing spasm. When he was finished he said, “I don’t recognize you.”

“And,” Sami said happily, “I don’t recognize you.”

“Must have been two other guys,” I said.

Nobody laughed, so I said, “Having established that nobody recognizes anybody, why don’t we just turn around, you can drop us back at the rest stop, and we’ll all forget about the whole silly thing?”

This sounded like a very good idea to me. Especially because Sami now turned off the blacktop onto a dirt road. I have learned from long experience watching movies, that when a guy kidnaps you and takes you for a ride on a dirt road in a vast desert, you can cue the vultures.

And the smoke in the car was going to kill us all anyway.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to think, okay? ” Sami said. “I have to make a phone call.”

“To tell you what to think?” I asked.

“Yes, okay?”

Sami punched some numbers on his portable phone. Being the ace private eye that I am, I memorized the number so that if I lived, I could get the name of the guy he was talking to.

“Hello, Heinz?” he said. There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll stop using your name on the phone, Heinz, okay?… Yes, I still have him. Someone else, too… You don’t have to yell, Heinz… Sorry, I forget… Who else? Some younger guy, I don’t know. Says he is working for the old man… What?…Okay.”

Sami turned to me.“Are you an insurance investigator?”

“No.”

“He says he isn’t, Heinz, okay?… Okay, I’ll ask.”

Sami turned to me again. “Do you know Craig Schaeffer?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t know him,” Sami told Heinz.

“He says you’re lying,” Sami said to me.

“Who does?” I asked.

“He-” Sami said. “The person I’m talking with.”

“I’m not lying.”

Sami got back on the phone. “He says he’s not lying, Heinz… He’s lying when he says that?… Okay, I’ll ask.”

“Are you a Jew?” Sami asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

It was a truthful response, seeing as how I was, to quote Smollett, “a love-begotten babe” and could only answer to half my lineage.

Nathan interrupted his soliloquy long enough to observe, “He’s too stupid to be a Jew.”