Sneak hung an elbow out of the car, the desert winds rustling her curls. She was not a desert person. Two bright-pink blotches had emerged on her cheeks at the northern edge of Lancaster city, and there they remained, slick and round, as we drove through the brown, sandy nothingness. The Chrysler had no working air conditioning. I wiped the condensation from a bottle of water we’d bought from a Native American kid running a roadside stall in Mojave across my forehead.
‘It’ll be a body,’ Sneak said. I didn’t need to ask her what she meant.
‘If it’s a body, we play it nice, nod and smile, and get the hell out of there,’ I said. ‘We say, “Thanks very much for dealing with our little problem, Ada. Have a great day.” Then we step on the gas and get to the nearest police station.’
Sneak didn’t answer. That wasn’t her plan. I knew that if Ada Maverick had killed Dayly’s boyfriend I’d turn around and find Sneak gone, and I’d be stuck trying to explain to the police that she and I had only wanted to question Dimitri Lincoln when we made the mistake of sharing our predicament with a psychopath. We were headed for a pin marked on a map, well away from any paved roads or structures. I glanced at the phone as we rolled through California City, a lonely row of shopfronts in the middle of a vast, flat void three hours from Downtown LA.
Like the planned and failed utopian community partly built and now rotting by the Salton Sea, California City was marked out on Google Maps as much bigger, grander and wider than it was in real life. We drove past ghost streets, working our way north through a dream that never materialised. I turned off the main road onto a strip of dirt cutting a path through low, sparse desert scrub, heading towards the flat, hazy horizon. Wind-scattered piles of trash rolled past the car. A rusted oven resting on its side. A clump of children’s toys and clothes half buried in sand. Sheets of corrugated iron making shelters for snake families in the boiling sun.
I saw Ada’s car two miles before we arrived at it. A candy-pink Porsche Panamera gleaming so brightly I couldn’t look directly at the paintwork. Ada was standing ten yards ahead of it with her foot resting on an upturned blue plastic bucket. Her black leather pants and boots were dusty, and she’d stripped down to a black singlet top. There was a leather jacket on the hood of the car, which told me she’d been out here since the chill of morning. The shovel on the ground beside the car nailed it. The guy was dead and buried. I stopped but didn’t put the car into park.
‘Should we just go now?’ I asked Sneak.
Sneak got out of the car. I parked and joined her. That voice was whispering at me again, the one that told me I had got myself into this mess, that I was getting deeper and deeper with every second I hung around these women.
Ada flicked her cigarette into the wind and jutted her chin at me.
‘You’re late.’
‘We left when you called.’ I shrugged.
‘What’s the matter with you? You got a vat of soup in the car?’ she said.
‘That’s just how I drive.’
‘Is he dead?’ Sneak broke in. I looked and saw that her fists were clenched. ‘Did you at least get something out of him before he died?’
Ada stepped off the bucket, kicked it so that it flipped off of a human head sitting on the desert floor.
I reeled away, pressing my fingers into my eye sockets.
‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, god!’ I cried.
‘Help!’ A man’s voice cut through my blindness. ‘Help me, please. Please! This bitch is crazy!’
The human head was talking. The man from the video was buried up to his neck in desert sand. It was Dimitri Lincoln. His tightly cropped crown of tight black curls was covered in dust, and his mouth was crusted with sand and blood. Sweat was running in stark lines through the dust on his face, rivers cutting paths towards the ground. The absurd, decapitated head turned and looked around him, took in the sight of Sneak and me standing casting shadows over his situation.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘My name is Dimitri Lincoln. I’ve been kidnapped. I—’
‘We know who you are,’ Sneak said.
‘Dimitri has been trying to figure out what all this is about for six hours now,’ Ada said. She sat on the bucket and put a boot up against Dimitri’s temple, pushed his head at a painful angle. ‘He’s got some very interesting guesses. He owes a lot of money to some pretty heavy gangs. He’s fucked a lot of connected women, the wives of some important people. Cops. Drug dealers. This isn’t a very surprising scenario for you, is it, Dimitri? You’ve been expecting something like this for a while.’
‘Fuck you,’ Dimitri snapped, wiggling his head and neck madly in the sand. ‘You bitches are looking at twenty to life for this. This is kidnapping. Conspiracy. Assault.’
‘Cut the lawyer bullshit,’ Sneak said. She yanked her phone out of her pocket and showed him the page for the video of him and Dayly. ‘See her?’
Dimitri squinted in the sun. ‘I see her.’
‘That’s my daughter.’
‘Sounds about right.’ Dimitri looked Sneak up and down, which was an interesting move from his position. ‘She said her momma was a junkie whore.’
‘She’s missing,’ Sneak said. The veins in her neck were standing out. She was edging closer to Dimitri’s head, and I could see her thighs tensing as though she might deliver a fatal kick. I grabbed her arm to hold her in place. ‘Tell me where she is or I’ll back that big fucking car over your fat, stupid head.’
‘I haven’t seen her in weeks.’
‘This video was posted’—Sneak checked the screen—‘eleven days ago.’
‘Yeah, I posted it. Dayly cheated on me, and I had the video. I needed cash. So what, huh? She took off, and the video was just one thing she left behind. Too bad. I made good money from it on the site.’
‘I don’t like that,’ Ada said, her lips twisted in distaste. ‘Revenge porn, they call it. I don’t like it.’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you like, bitch,’ Dimitri scoffed.
‘Well, you better start, baby.’ Ada’s voice was soft, terrifying. ‘You better start real quick.’
‘Did Dayly know you took the video of her?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Bullshit,’ Ada said.
‘She did.’ Dimitri turned with difficulty and looked at Ada. ‘Maybe she would have been into selling it, too, if I’d asked her. She liked getting freaky. She was playing with fire, that girl. When I met her she was uptight. Wouldn’t say “dick” if you paid her. Then suddenly she wants to know about drugs, wants to go out and party. She was a fairy princess. Wanted to come over to the dark side. I was happy to show her. I introduced that bitch to a bunch of things. She had one of the tightest asses I ever—’
Ada shot out her foot and kicked Dimitri in the mouth. His head snapped sideways.
‘Fuck!’ Some of Dimitri’s bravado drained away. I saw the sand around him expanding as he drew long breaths. ‘I’m gonna kill you, woman. You hear me? I’m going to come back from this and kill you slow. I’ll film that, too.’
‘Do you know what happened to her?’ I asked. ‘Tell us what else you know so we can end this, for god’s sake.’
‘Fuck you.’ Dimitri spat blood on the sand.
‘Dimitri, come on,’ I said.
‘Nah. Fuck all y’all,’ he sneered. ‘You want to kill me, go ahead and kill me. I’d love to be the reason you didn’t find her. I hope she’s dead out here somewhere with her bones baking in the sun like fucking breadsticks.’
Ada stood and I cried out for her not to strike or kick Dimitri again, but instead she went to her Porsche and brought out a small black backpack. From it she extracted a bottle then walked back to Dimitri’s head. I watched in quiet horror as she squeezed a syrupy liquid all over him. I smelled honey on the wind.
‘Stop! Stop! What the fuck is wrong with you!’ Dimitri tried to tilt his head out of the stream. The honey gathered in folds and slopped over his ears, making thick brown beads on the sand.
‘You know what kind of ants they got out in the desert?’ Ada said to me. She scooped the excess honey off the side of the squeeze bottle and licked it off her finger. ‘You’re the smart one. You might be interested. I was googling them while I was sitting in the car waiting for you slowpokes to arrive. They got about fifty different types of ant around here. There’s the harvester ant. The carpenter ant. I guess those are the working ants. The guys who get shit done. But then there’s the fire ants. They just fuck shit up. There’s the regular fire ant and the red imported fire ant. They’re the ones that inject venom into you. By the time anyone finds this guy, his head will be the size of a beach ball.’
‘Ada,’ I sighed.
‘You know what eats ants?’ She bent and looked Dimitri in the face. ‘Tarantulas. You know what eats Tarantulas? Rattlesnakes.’
‘She was seeing some cop,’ Dimitri said. ‘That’s all I know.’
Sneak and I glanced at each other.
‘She was having an affair?’ I asked.
‘I caught her with a second phone. She tried to deny it. Say it was a friend’s.’
‘This cop,’ I said. ‘Was his name Al Tasik?’
‘I don’t fucking know, man,’ Dimitri whined. ‘I never knew his name. I saw him with her once. He had a stupid-ass military cut, like a flat-top.’
‘Blond hair? Fifties?’
‘No, brown hair. Young. Like twenties.’
‘How’d you know he was a cop?’ Ada leaned on the bonnet of her car.
‘I’m from the hood – I know a goddamn cop when I see one. He walked like he had a stick up his ass. And one time I caught her on my laptop looking up a police station. San Chinto. I figured that’s where he worked.’
I beckoned Ada and Sneak to our car. Ada slid into the driver’s seat, which didn’t surprise me. The air was stifling inside the vehicle. I wound down my window and tried to suck air in from outside.
‘Who the fuck is Al Tasik?’ Ada asked, watching me in the rear-view mirror.
‘A cop in West LA. He’s been very interested in me since I came in asking about Dayly. I don’t know why.’
‘You got another cop on the inside who can tell you why?’ Ada asked. ‘A cop might be useful in all this. Track the guy with the flat-top. Tell you where the investigation lies, if there is one.’
I said nothing. My stomach was stirring.
‘You said Dimitri is gang-affiliated.’ Sneak turned to Ada. ‘He might have found out about the affair and had some of his friends come after Dayly. We should question him about that next.’
‘I don’t think we should question him about another goddamn thing,’ I said. ‘We need him out of that hole before he gets heat stroke, or a collapsed lung from the pressure of the sand on his ribcage.’
‘Your tone sounds a little like you think I’ve done the wrong thing this morning.’ Ada’s eyes in the mirror were like fireballs. ‘I came out here and laboured in the sun for hours to help you.’
‘You dug that hole yourself? I thought it must have been your goons.’ Sneak glanced out into the desert, looking for them.
‘Girl, you think I can’t dig my own fucking hole?’ Ada shifted in her seat to take Sneak in. ‘What the hell you think I was doing before I was rich enough to have goons do that for me? This is my bread and butter. I love this shit. I don’t need Mike and Fred coming out here kicking heads for me, ruining my fun. Why the hell do you think I’m here? Because of you shitbirds? I’ll take any excuse to make a fool scream for his life.’
‘That aside,’ I said, ‘your tactics, while much appreciated, are a bit aggressive for our taste.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Sneak said. ‘I say we rev the engine a little. Make him shit his pants.’
‘He’s not wearing pants.’ Ada smiled.
‘We need to check out the San Chinto lead,’ I said. ‘Find the guy with the flat-top. See what he knows. San Chinto is the same place on the front of the parachuting pamphlet. It’s not a coincidence.’
‘Where the fuck is San Chinto?’ Sneak asked.
I was scrolling on my phone, looking at maps. ‘East. Miles from anywhere. Another day. Right now we pull Dimitri out of that hole,’ I said.
‘You two idiots get out of here,’ Ada said. She was leaning forwards, smiling at him through the windscreen. ‘I’ll get him out in a few minutes. I think I can see a big ol’ ant headed his way.’