Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“Then I guess we’ve got two choices,” she said. McGee moved over to the railing, and it wobbled beneath her.

“The one I prefer,” she said, “is that I help you and you help me.”

When she got home that morning, McGee pulled off her orthopedic shoes and let them hit the floor with all their weight.

Myles shot up in bed, his eyes as big as moons.

“Have you heard anything about them closing the last factory?” she said.

Myles blinked, rubbing his eyes.

She said, “We’ve got a new plan.”

He was on a bench in a plaza outside Caesars Palace, near a concession stand that sold frozen, sweetened alcohol in yardstick-size glasses. This was summer, eight months ago, and the Nevada heat had been punishing. But Dobbs hadn’t gone there for pleasure. In his foreseeable future, he knew, there’d be no stage shows, no five-card draw. If anything, the odds seemed to favor him ending up on a blindfolded drive back out to the desert. He accepted those odds, and the people who’d brought him here knew it, which was why they hadn’t bothered posting anyone to watch him, to keep him from getting away.

Dobbs was waiting for Gordo to come and tell him their fate. He would wait all day, if necessary.

The fuck-up had been Gordo’s, not Dobbs’s, but these were not the sort of people who sat around splitting hairs. The problem was that Gordo, his partner on this particular job, had a little side business of his own, one that didn’t compete with the business they’d been hired to do but certainly benefited from it, allowing Gordo to take advantage of certain efficiencies in logistics management, as he later said, filling transport space in the truck that otherwise would have gone empty with cargo of his own.

Dobbs hadn’t known about any of this until it was too late, but the secret had apparently gotten out to others. The night before, somewhere east of Barstow, a mismatched pair of plus-size Fords had overtaken them, forcing them off the road, and the truck had overturned. Dobbs and Gordo were okay in the cab, but the same couldn’t be said for the people in the back. Two of them were already dead when Dobbs and Gordo extracted themselves from the wreckage. There were broken bones and agony among the rest. Even then Dobbs didn’t understand what had happened, not until he and Gordo were kneeling in a patch of gravel spotlit by the Fords’ high beams, squared-off Glock barrels pressed into the backs of their skulls, and under his breath, as if no one else could hear, Gordo admitted he would’ve told Dobbs sooner but “I thought you’d say no, Doc.”

At that moment, with the jagged rocks pulverizing his kneecaps and the diesel fumes swimming in his brain, it had pleased Dobbs to imagine Gordo was right. There were lines Dobbs had drawn. And in heroin there was no imperative, moral or practical. Gordo had been operating purely for profit.

In truth, though, when had Dobbs ever said no to anything? From the start he’d gone along with whatever jobs Sergio offered him, no questions asked, trusting in an unspoken pact. He chose to believe Sergio understood Dobbs was different. Not a criminal. A Conscientious Independent Contractor.

But Dobbs’s commitment seemed to make no difference. There was still something about him the others didn’t trust. Gordo treated Dobbs’s two years in college as the equivalent of a medical degree, and nothing Dobbs said could convince him otherwise. Why would Dobbs be doing work like this, Gordo wanted to know, when he could’ve had a house with a pool, a fleet of Cadillacs, a Rolex, a beautiful wife?

Dobbs accepted that to the others his presence was hard to understand. But for himself, it all made perfect sense. The world was changing, borders were dissolving. The rich were still rich, and everyone else was in free fall. Those jobs that Gordo imagined coming with a college degree, they didn’t exist anymore. And there was so much worse to come. Drought throughout the West. Hurricanes from the Gulf to the Atlantic. These were just teasers. But people denied what they were too scared to face. They went on dreaming of beachfront condos soon to be a mile under the sea. They stuck umbrellas in the sand and burned.

So Dobbs had aligned himself with the survivors. Bottom-feeders had always been the most adaptable of species.

Then came the accident. But not an accident, really. A transaction. One of the costs of survival. Outside Barstow, with a Glock to his head and carnage all around and the pitiable moans of the wounded, Dobbs discovered he’d gone numb. He could no longer feel anything at all.

The men who’d intercepted Dobbs and Gordo on the highway were so efficient, so confident, they didn’t bother wasting bullets. They took the drugs and left. But it would’ve been easier, in certain ways, if they’d been less merciful, sparing Gordo from having to make the phone call, to admit what had happened. “It’s like ordering your own execution,” Gordo said as it rang.

In the hour it took for help to arrive, Dobbs tended to the injured as best he could. There was so much blood it was hard to make sense of what he was seeing — what was severed and what was broken. There was screaming and praying, and Dobbs couldn’t understand a word. His Spanish was still just as bad as during his first trip to Mexico. He went from one to the next saying, “It’s going to be all right,” and he hoped the language barrier meant they couldn’t hear the tremor in his voice.

“I should’ve just called the cops,” Gordo kept saying. “Better off taking my chances with them.”

If there’d been anything for a hundred miles other than heat stroke and dehydration, Gordo would’ve taken off on foot. But Dobbs had decided to stay, no matter what.

Fifteen minutes before the three black Suburbans appeared on the horizon, a third person died, a woman maybe forty years old. Pink theme-park T-shirt, not a speck of blood. Not even a bruise. Dobbs had given her barely a glance, thinking she had no need for him. There one moment, gone the next.

They were the first people Dobbs had ever lost. All this time he’d thought he was good at what he did. Now he understood he’d just been lucky.

He and Gordo were tossed into the back of one of the Suburbans, and everything Dobbs saw on the way to Vegas, and everything since, had been a blur. It was as if his eyes had forgotten how to focus. And here on this bench outside Caesars Palace, the scorched cement radiating through the soles of his shoes, he felt not just his eyes but his entire body growing hazy, as if he were becoming absorbed in some sort of mirage. The Eiffel Tower at his back, a showgirl’s ruby thong, four stories tall. The palm trees along the boulevard were pert and happy, but all of it was smeared now with a film of blood. Dobbs kept watching for Gordo, for his inverted straw basket of hair bobbing among the crowds, for his big, goofy smile. Why did Gordo have to be so stupid?

Dobbs thought back to his first meeting with Sergio, to that frothy bag of beer. It was all so much farther from Minnesota than he’d ever dreamed. But even now he couldn’t imagine not having made that trip.

It wasn’t that he’d hated school or had no aptitude for it. He’d been a perfectly mediocre student. He just hadn’t understood how most of it mattered. And not in the way other people said it, the cliché about the real world being more important than books. The people who said that kind of thing just weren’t very smart. They needed to believe in simple things.

But that simplicity — if it had ever existed — was gone. Dobbs’s professors, his textbooks, his parents, they’d all been products of the old world, preparing him and everyone else for something that remained only in their memories. He’d felt this certainty since he was a kid. He’d seen what the future held. The empty mines and lumber mills surrounding his grandfather’s cabin. All those old rural towns, abandoned. It came for the cities next. He’d traveled with his family, seen what was left of Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland. He had cousins in Buffalo. Ruins.