by Don Winslow
“Wouldn’t miss it!” Neal yelled. Which is goddamn true.
He hopped in the back of Cal’s truck just as Cal hit the gas and sped out.
“I wouldn’t have believed that of Bob Hansen,” Peggy said after Steve related the story of his visit.
“He told me himself,” Steve said. “I was so damn mad I could have punched his lights out right there. But I figured I’d done about enough of that.”
Peggy set a plate of chicken-fried steak down on the table and said, “Barb never would have stood for this nonsense.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’d have ever gotten involved if he still had Barb. Grief does strange things.”
She sat down at the table with her own plate and started to cut a piece of meat. “It shouldn’t turn a man into a bigot, though. It’s going to be awfully hard being neighbors, though, and …oh, shit!”
“What?”
“Shelly’s in town with Jory.”
Steve set down his fork and headed out the door.
The kids were finishing dessert at Wong’s when Cal and the boys came through the door.
Neal lingered in the background, trying to fool himself that he could stay close enough to keep things under control but not be seen.
“Hey, Jory!” Cal yelled. “Your daddy sent us to fetch you!”
Cal took a second to grin at Shelly and let his eyes wander over her body.
“Is he all right?” Shelly asked.
“Oh, he’s okay, just a little excited at the moment,” Cal answered. “Hey, Jory, guess what—”
Neal stepped up to the booth and said, “Jory, your father wants you to come home now.”
“Neal?” Shelly asked. Her scared, bewildered look cut into him.
“Yeah, he’s got news for you!” Cal said, elbowing his way past Neal. “Seems like your girliefriend here is a Jew.”
“Come on, Jory,” Neal said quietly.
Jory looked at Shelly. “Is that true?”
She shrugged her shoulders and looked around. The gang had formed a semicircle around the booth, trapping her in. Evelyn had come out of the kitchen and was standing in the background.
“Yeah, I guess … I think Daddy’s …”
“Think nothing,” said Cal. “Daddy’s a Jew. Boy, Jory, I hope we got to you in time. I hope you haven’t screwed this little—”
Shelly stood up in the booth and slapped him.
Evelyn hurried out the door.
Neal stood in paralyzed horror. He was watching a young girl being tortured and trying to stack that up against the potential life of another child.
Cal rubbed his face and grinned, then said, “I don’t suppose screwing a Jew is much different than screwing a nigger.”
“Let me out of here,” Shelly demanded.
Nobody moved. Jory sat frozen in his seat with his face in his hands.
“Jory?” Shelly asked. “Jory? Jory, for God’s sake, say something! Jory?”
He slowly lifted his head and looked at her.
She smiled at him, a don’t-we-live-in-a-world-of-fools smile. An it-doesn’t-matter-because-we-love-each-other smile. She slid her hand across the table to take his.
“Jew bitch,” he hissed. “Goddamn Jew bitch.”
The boys hollered and whooped and slapped his back.
“Goddamn Jew bitch tried to get me to screw her last night! Jory shouted.
There was more whooping and hollering and Shelly just fell apart right there, curled up into a ball and sobbed.
Every human instinct Neal Carey had screamed at him to go hold her and take her out of the restaurant. But he kept his cover and just stood there.
“Let me out,” Shelly moaned. “Let me out.”
“Come on, Jew,” Cal said. “You wanna screw us all?”
“Yeah, you want to screw us all?” Randy Carlisle echoed. “Do you, Jew?”
“Neal, help me!” Shelly cried.
All eyes were on him.
“Neal, please!”
He looked at her and shook his head.
“You know, Shelly,” Cal said, “you really oughta let folks know that you’re a Jew, maybe wear one of them Stars of David on your sleeve—”
“You let that child up or I’ll shoot your damn head off!” Evelyn was standing five feet in back of them, the shotgun at her shoulder pointed straight at Cal.
They all turned to look at her.
“Evelyn, you wouldn’t use that thing,” Cal said.
“Cal Strekker, I’m an old lady and my hands shake and this is a hair trigger. Now you let that child pass.”
Cal and Randy parted to make space for Shelly to get up.
“Come on, honey,” Evelyn said. She held the shotgun in one arm and stretched out the other hand to Shelly. Shelly got up slowly and Evelyn cradled her in her free arm. “Now all you scum get out. And don’t be coming into my store, neither. I don’t want your business.”
“If we was Jews or niggers you’d have to serve us,” Randy said. “It’s because we’re white men we have no rights in our own country.”
“I’ll serve any human being that comes into my place, but you’re just garbage.” She held the sobbing girl as she turned away. “Come on, honey, I’ll take you home.”
Cal yelled after her, “You think you can survive without the business of the Hansen Cattle Company?”
She turned back to him. “Stack all of you up against a man like Steve Mills and you don’t come to a thimbleful of piss. And everyone in this town feels the way I do. You tell your boss that. Tell him I don’t want to see him or his ever again.”
She turned to Neal, “And you, Neal Carey. The Mills took you in when you was down and out and this is how you repay them. You’re worse than any of these vermin.” She spat on her floor and walked outside.
Cal went out into the street after them and the rest followed.
“Jew lover! Jew bitch!”
Neal stood on the sidewalk and watched as the old lady helped Shelly up the street toward her house. Shelly was doubled over, holding her stomach and crying.
Which was the first thing Steve Mills saw as he raced the truck into town. He took one look at his daughter and the jeering gang of Hansen’s cowboys, heard the cries of “Jew bitch,” grabbed his rifle off the rack in back of him, and jumped out of the cab.
“Look out!” Randy yelled.
The cowboys ran for their trucks as Steve came pacing up the street. Cal grabbed his own rifle and got behind his truck. Vetter did the same. Randy pulled a cheap pistol from under his coat. Dave ducked down behind Vetter’s truck and Jory sprawled flat on the ground under Cal’s.
Neal Carey stood on the sidewalk.
Steve ignored them, walked straight up the street, and gently took his daughter from Evelyn.
“Did they touch you, darlin’?” he asked.
Shelly shook her head.
He put his arms around his daughter and walked her slowly past the cowboys’ trucks toward his own. He opened the passenger door and lifted her inside. Then he started to walk back up the street toward the gang. Cal and Vetter shouldered their rifles and took aim, steadying the barrels on the trucks’ hoods. Seemingly oblivious of the three guns pointed at him, Steve walked back up the street toward Neal.
Neal stepped out into the center of the street, trying to put himself between Steve and the guns without making it obvious. Steve stopped a few paces from him.
“You coming with us?” he asked Neal.
Neal felt every eye and ear in the whole damn world on him. He even felt Karen’s, and she wasn’t even there. He felt Levine’s and Graham’s and The Man’s and Anne Kelley’s and Cody McCall’s.
“No,” he said.
“You with them now?” Steve made a contemptuous gesture toward the men hiding behind the trucks.
“Yeah.”
“You were on my side last night.”
So the tracks have come together, Neal thought. Not somewhere over the horizon, but right here, right now. And now they’ll go in dif
ferent directions. And you can’t have one foot on both anymore.
“Last night,” Neal said, forcing himself to look his former friend in the eyes, “I didn’t know you were a kike.”
Steve looked back at him for a second as if he were going to say something. Then he turned around and walked back to his truck to take his daughter home.
And it isn’t over yet, Neal thought.
He was in the cabin packing his stuff when she came.
He was pretty sure it was Karen when he saw the headlights coming toward the creek, because the lamps were set narrow like a Jeep’s and he figured she was going to come. But he picked up his rifle anyway before he stepped out on the porch. He watched the car stop on the far side of the creek and saw the flashlight coming toward the cabin.
The light was just a few feet away when he saw for sure that it was Karen. He lowered the rifle and stepped back inside. He was putting his books into his pack when she walked in without knocking.
She started right in. “I had to come tell you myself what a bastard I think you are.”
“Thanks for taking the trouble,” he said. He kept his back to her and went on working. He couldn’t tell her the truth and she probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.
“Is that all you have to say?”
There’s a lot more I could say, Karen. I could tell you about the lesson I never seem to learn: never get personally involved on the job. Especially not when you’re undercover. You only end up hurting people.
And whatever you do, never fall in love.
He shrugged and laid a pair of jeans out on the bed, then carefully rolled them up and put them inside his pack.
“Steve and Peggy want you out of here by morning,” Karen said.
“Tell them not to worry. I want out of here.”
“Are you going to move in with those racist pigs?”
“Oink.”
Having brought her too close, the job now was to drive her far off. Out of harm’s way.
“Do you even want to know how Shelly is?” she asked. “Do you care?”
“Not especially.
He’d known for a long time that he couldn’t have this job and a life. Where he’d made his mistake was in thinking he could leave the job for a life.
“You lied to me,” she said, the anger and hurt almost palpable in the closed cabin air.
Undercover is a he, Karen. You start by hiding who you are, and you hide it and you hide it while you become other people, and then when you want your own identity again, you can’t find it. It’s like that little treasure you store someplace to keep it safe, and a long time later you forget where you put it.
Karen, how would I tell you if I could? It’s just that you play so many characters that after awhile you don’t have one of your own. Or maybe that’s backward. Maybe I never had any character to begin with.
Anyway, he didn’t answer her, so she asked, “How long have you been with them? Just recently, or the whole time?”
“Since before I came here,” he answered, because this was a chance to push her farther away. “I’ve been convinced for a longtime now that we have to do something to preserve our white race.”
“You disgust me.”
Get this over with, Neal thought. Because if you don’t you might break down and tell her the truth. Shit, if it were an adult involved, a responsible grownup who had screwed up, I’d tell her right now. But it’s a kid. It’s a little boy who might still be alive and who has only a slim chance, and that has to be more important. If my stupid, messed-up excuse for a life means anything at all, a child has to be more important.
He turned around and said, “And you disgust me, Jew lover.”
He saw the tears come to her eyes and saw her face twist in hurt.
“I was ready to love you!” she yelled. “I was ready to love you and now I hate you! Do you understand me? I hate you!”
I understand you, Karen. “So leave,” he said.
Those blue eyes sparkled with rage. “Go to hell, Neal,” she said. Then she left.
On my way, Karen. I’m on my way.
He finished packing and started the long, cold walk to the Hansen place.
Part Three
Gunslingers
9
Neal shivered in the bitter cold. As the wind bit through his denim jacket he tucked his chin a little deeper under his sheepskin collar and pulled his black cowboy hat tighter down on his head.
The sun was a pale circle in a sharp blue winter sky. Sitting on Midnight on the top of the hill, Neal felt as if he could see forever. He was sitting in a stand of piñon pine on the west slope of the Shoshones, looking down about five miles where the little mining town of Ione sat at the edge of a vast desert. He watched until he saw a flash of silver start moving up the slope toward him. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the flash.
“Here she comes,” he said to Jory.
Jory shifted nervously on his horse. He checked the big saddlebags again to make sure they were tied on tight.
Neal moved his glasses just down the slope from him, off the left side of the road on the bottom end of a switchback, where Cal and Randy waited in a camouflaged pickup with pine boughs thrown across it. Just a little above Neal, Dave, and one of the new guys were sitting in another truck, waiting for his signal.
Neal focused on the armored car again. He checked it out and then glassed the road behind it.
Nothing.
“They don’t have a follow car,” he said.
“That’s good,” Jory said. Neal could hear the tension in his voice. He hoped the boy would be all right. Then again, all he really had to do was ride his horse. Jory had been picked for that job because he was by far the best rider, about the only legitimate cowboy there except for Craig Vetter and Bill McCurdy, who sat on another horse just by.
“Arrogance,” Neal responded. “Laziness and arrogance.”
It’s going okay, Neal thought. They’d picked the spot well. The armored car would be in low gear as it chugged up the heavy grade. The switchback would keep them hidden and give them the privacy they needed. There was a big boulder on the other side of the road.
“I sure hope they don’t spot that pickup,” Jory said.
“They won’t,” Neal answered. “Remember, they’re not looking for anything. This is just the usual milk run to the little towns to pick up the checks and drop off the money. They’ll only get half-alert when they bring the stuff out of the truck. Now shut up, I need to concentrate.”
The timing on the thing was delicate, even though they’d practiced on a similar switchback a couple of dozen times. But there was no way to simulate the armored car’s exact speed or what its driver might do, and that’s what had Neal concerned. If things started to go wrong, people might use guns in place of the plan.
He was particularly worried that Cal and Randy might get hinky, believe they’d been spotted, and just start shooting. But there was nothing he could do about that, so he put it out of his head and watched the truck work its way up the slope.
He felt his chest tighten. There’d be only one shot at this thing and he had a feeling it would be his last shot at finding Cody. If the robbery went off well, Neal would be sworn in as a full-fledged Son of Seth, and as such he would be privy to all of their secrets.
So concentrate, he told himself. Do something right for a change.
The truck was getting closer. Eight minutes, maybe ten.
“Get back some,” Neal said. He maneuvered his own horse a few feet back into the pines. It wasn’t easy. He still felt about as comfortable riding a horse as he would flying an airplane. Billy and Jory eased their horses into the pines.
“How much longer?” Jory asked.
“Shut up,” Neal answered. He didn’t dare lift the binoculars again for fear the flash might spook the driver. But he could catch the glare of the armored car’s roof as it came around the switchbacks.
More like six minutes now.
“Check yo
ur loads,” he ordered.
“But we’ve already checked about—” Jory started to say.
“Do it!”
Neal pulled his Colt from its holster and flipped the cylinder open. He had five rounds loaded, leaving the chamber empty. He didn’t want anyone’s pistol going off accidentally. He slipped the revolver back into the holster.
“You think they got two men or three?” Jory asked, his voice cracking with tension.
“Will you be quiet?” asked Neal, although it was a good question. If the car was carrying a two-man crew—a driver and a guard—the job should be a breeze. If it was carrying a third man—another guard—things could get tricky. They’d gone through the options many times, but it clearly was weighing on Jory’s mind. A third man almost certainly would mean there’d be shooting. From both sides.
Three minutes, give or take, before the truck would pass Cal’s position.
“Cover up,” Neal ordered.
He pulled up the red bandanna tied around his neck and fitted it high over his nose. He pulled the brim of his hat down so it shaded his eyes, then turned to look at Jory and Billy to see if a stranger could identify them in some nightmare lineup down the road. With the bandannas on, the hats down, and the collars up, their eyes were about all that was visible. Good enough.
Neal looked down to see the car roof shine in the sun. It was just one switchback below Cal now. One more straightaway and one more curve and they’d be in the trap.
He turned to Billy and pointed up the hill. Billy kicked his horse and started to ride up to where Dave was waiting. Jory had to hold his horse back from following.
Great, Neal thought. Even the goddamn horses are nervous.
He watched the metallic flash get closer. It was almost up to Cal now.
He raised his right arm and brought it down sharply. Jory did the same thing and Billy relayed the message. Neal heard Dave’s truck start down the hill.
It’s going to go quickly now, he told himself. Keep your head. He looked across the road to the top of the boulder and whistled sharply. An answering whistle came back right away. Neal knew it would. Craig Vetter was a solid hand and the right man in that spot.