While Drowning in the Desert by Don Winslow Read Free Book Online

color? It’s red, you know. No hang-ups there? No unfortunate associations with the Bolsheviks?”
    “Are we going to go, or what?”
    “We’re going to go,” I said, and hustled into the driver’s seat before he could change his mind. I turned the ignition and shifted into reverse.
    “Go ahead,” Nate said. “And back up.”

Chapter 7
    I love the desert.
    The desert is not boring, as some would have you believe. Although I am, as are most private eyes, a connosieur of boredom. Boredom is our business, as we spend most of our time waiting for other people to do interesting things (boring), or poring over paperwork (boring), or writing post-investigation reports (very boring). But I basically like boredom, because in this business if something boring isn’t happening it usually means that something scary is. So boring is good.
    So is the desert, even though it’s not boring.
    Normally a long desert drive is a thing of joy and beauty to me. I love the colors—the muted, subtle shades of tans, browns, and lavenders. I revel in the enormous expanse of open blue sky. I worship the sheer, vast emptiness, the solitude, the quiet.
    But after one hour on this particular drive on Interstate 15 through the Nevada desert I was ready to reach down my throat with a pair of pliers and pull my own lungs out. If I’d had a gun I would have shot myself so I wouldn’t have to live with the memory of an hour trapped in a car with Nathan Silverstein, aka Natty Silver.
    It started about five minutes into the drive when he said, “Ask me who’s on first.”
    “No thanks.”
    “Ask me who’s on first!”
    “No.”
    He started to pout.
    Now, I know about pouting. Not for nothing has Karen been known to refer to me as The Incredible Sulk. I am a marathon pouter, a deep Celtic brooder of the darkest sort. But I was a piker compared to Natty Silver. Natty Silver’s unhappiness hung in the confined air of the car like a thick gray cloud. No—not a cloud, something more solid. It filled the car like some sort of toxic Jell-O that hardened around my feet then jiggled up to my neck until I was choking in misery.
    Natty could pout.
    I broke.
    “Who’s on first?” I asked, hating myself for the craven, belly-up dog that I was.
    “Right,” he answered happily. “Right’s on first?”
    “No, who’s on first,” he said triumphantly.
    I chuckled appreciatively and stopped.
    He said, “So what’s the matter?”
    “Nothing’s the matter.”
    “So?”
    “So nothing.”
    “What, you don’t know the bit?”
    “I know the bit,” I said. “It’s an old Abbott and Costello routine.”
    “Abbott and Costello didn’t invent that sketch,” Nathan said contemptuously. “Phil Gold and I were doing ‘Who’s on First’ when Lou Costello was shitting his diapers!”
    “Okay.”
    “I taught Lou Costello ‘Who’s on First’!”
    “When he was in diapers?” I asked.
    “When he was so wet behind the ears he needed a towel,” Natty said. “It was at Minsky’s. Minsky’s, now there was a burlesque house. Those Minskys knew burlesque. They knew naughty from dirty. Until the Decency League shut them down Minsky’s was the cleanest burlesque house in the world. A classy place, and the girls were not hookers. But speaking of hookers, you heard the one about the hooker who says to eighty-six-year-old Mr. Birnbaum, ‘I’m here to give you super sex.’ Birnbaum says, ‘I’ll take the soup.’”
    I was doing about seventy. If I opened my door and rolled out now, how badly could it hurt?
    “Now, Arthur Minsky loved good pastrami,” Nathan said, “and he knew deli. You could not put inferior delicatessen in front of Arthur Minsky, who by the way, was a gentleman. A refined man. Arthur Minsky would not allow filth in his theaters and he knew the difference between naughty and dirty. I remember one time Eileen the Irish Dream wanted to respond to an unkind review which intimated that she was not a natural redhead, with a