Way Down on the High Lonely

by Don Winslow

  It was cold satisfaction for Ed that he had been right, that these thugs were shooters but had never been shot at. The feeling of bullets coming at them—the incredible noise—had rattled them, made them hesitate for those few fatal seconds.

  He looked over to where Steve Mills was trying to stanch Hansen’s bleeding, but he could tell by the sounds of Hansen’s gasps that the effort would be futile.

  Ed stood as the cold daylight paled the glare of the fire beside him. The acrid smell of gunpowder and the smoke streaming from the blazing barn burned Ed’s eyes until tears ran down through the soot on his face like tiny rivers through a scorched land.

  Joe Graham knelt against the corral’s metal piping and watched the figure of Neal Carey get smaller as it trotted away across the flat sagebrush.

  Graham turned his eyes for a moment to look at the scene of death and destruction behind him, then turned back to watch Neal running.

  Run, son, Graham thought. Run long and hard and far away.

  Neal found Strekker about an hour later. He was a hundred yards away, headed for the creek. He was dragging one foot behind him and clutching one hand in the other.

  A wounded animal going for water.

  Neal thought about Harley and Cody, about Anne Kelley, about Doreen. He thought about Shelly Mills and Steve. He thought about that horse.

  Neal brought the rifle stock to his cheek and centered the V on Strekker’s back. He started to squeeze the trigger when he remembered Joe Graham’s face and heard his words: What, have they turned you into one of them? He lowered the rifle and watched as Strekker limped away.

  Neal raised the rifle again and pulled the trigger.

  He looked through his sights as the bullet took Strekker square in the back. Blood burst out the front of his chest and blossomed onto the ground like a rose in the snow.

  Neal didn’t go to check if Strekker were still alive or to give him a burial. He didn’t walk back to the ranch. He just wiped his fingerprints off the rifle, threw it down, and started walking across the empty miles of The High Lonely.

  Epilogue

  Brogan poured another glass of whiskey as the stranger listened in rapt attention. Brogan had sold a lot of booze telling the story of the battle of Reese River valley.

  The stranger, a salesman from Bishop, laid another five down and looked around the grungy, colorful saloon. A mammoth dog lay sleeping behind the bar. The only other customer was a bearded, long-haired man who sat at the last bar stool drinking coffee and reading a dog-eared paperback book.

  “So then what happened?” the salesman asked Brogan.

  Brogan went on to tell him how Milkowski had found the money somewhere to buy the Hansen place and so now owned the whole valley, and how the daughter had gone off to college at Brown, which he thought was in Rhode Island or one of them little East Coast states. The boy got back to his momma, who sent a postcard a few weeks ago saying he was coming along well, was going to be just fine. The one-armed man and the big bear of a guy just disappeared, and for a while the feds were all over town, asking a lot of questions. Then there was a whole herd of types from the state museum who went poking around the cave measuring shit and stuff, and they were just puzzled as hell about that Indian’s body, because he came from a tribe that was supposed to have been extinct for about a hundred years. And Karen Hawley … well, she found herself a new man.

  Brogan leaned over the bar, smiled, shook his head at the wonder of his own story, and waited for the question that always came so he could give the kicker.

  Sure enough, the stranger asked, “And what happened to Neal Carey?”

  Brogan shrugged dramatically, leaned over a little more, and said, “Nobody knows. Some say he froze to death out there. Others say he’s still alive somewhere up in them caves. But no one ever saw him again.”

  Brogan left the man shaking his head and sidled down the bar. He poured more coffee into the bearded man’s cup and smiled at him.

  Neal finished the cup, climbed off the stool, nodded to the salesman, and headed out. Brezhnev lifted his head, and if Neal hadn’t known better he’d have sworn the dog winked.

  Neal would like to have had another cup, read a few more pages of Roderick Random, and maybe chewed the shit with Brogan for a while, but there wasn’t time.

  He pushed open the door, stepped out into the cool air, and walked up the hill to meet Karen for dinner. It was chili night at Wong’s.

  A Biography of Don Winslow

  Don Winslow is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen crime and mystery novels as well as a number of short stories and screenplays. His first novel, A Cool Breeze on the Underground (1991), was nominated for an Edgar Award, and California Fire and Life (1999) received the Shamus Award, which honors the year’s best detective novel.

  Winslow was born in 1953 in New York City, and he grew up in Perryville, Rhode Island, a small coastal town. His mother was a librarian and his father a Navy officer. Both parents instilled in Winslow a love of storytelling, and the bookshelves at home were well stocked with literary classics, which Winslow was encouraged to explore. When his father stayed up late swapping sailor stories with his buddies, Winslow would hide under the dining room table to eavesdrop.

  Winslow had an unusually varied career before becoming a fulltime writer, beginning with a series of jobs as a child actor. After high school, he attended the University of Nebraska and majored in African history. He then moved back to New York City where he managed movie theaters and became a private investigator. Winslow moonlighted as a PI while pursuing a master’s degree in military history. He also lived for a time in Africa, where he worked as a safari guide, and in China, where he led hiking tours. Winslow completed A Cool Breeze on the Underground while in China.

  A Cool Breeze draws from Winslow’s experiences tracking missing persons while in New York. Protagonist Neal Carey is a graduate student studying English literature who is drawn by past underworld connections into a career as a private investigator. Winslow went on to write four other novels with Neal Carey as the main character, often set in locales where the author had resided at some point. The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror (1992) has Carey chasing a scientist through China. Way Down on the High Lonely (1993) and While Drowning in the Desert (1996) are set on the west coast of the United States, where Winslow moved after marrying his wife, Jean, and publishing his first novel.

  Winslow’s recent fiction is often set in Southern California, where he currently lives. The cross-border drug war, California organized crime, and surf culture are common themes in his later work. His style bears the spirit of his settings, and his prose is notable for its spare dialogue and deadpan narration, as well as the technical accuracy that comes from his many years working as a private investigator.

  A number of Winslow’s novels have been adapted for film. A 2007 movie based on The Death and Life of Bobby Z (1997) starred Laurence Fishburne, and The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) is under production and set to star Robert DeNiro. Winslow’s latest novel, Savages (2010), has received stellar reviews, and the author is currently adapting the novel for film with Oliver Stone.

  A Winslow family photo taken in Rhode Island in the 1960s. Winslow (front left) is seen here with his father, mother, both sets of grandparents, sister (Kristine Rolofson, also a novelist), and dog.

  Winslow in his 1972 high school yearbook photo.

  Winslow juggling at his nephew Ben’s birthday party in Beyond Hope, Idaho, where he lived off and on in the mid-1970s. He ran cattle but also “had a very macho job driving a salad-dressing truck. There would have been no Thousand Island dressing in Libby, Montana, without men like me.” It was in a cabin in Beyond Hope that Winslow started writing Cool Breeze on the Underground.

  Winslow fishing on Sandy Brook, near his old home in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. He says he was “lousy at it, but was an enthusiastic trout fisherman back in the day.” Winslow also claims that he “set a record of failing to catch a si
ngle fish on four continents in a single calendar year.”

  Winslow with his two dogs, Bud and Lou, on the deck of his house in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. Riverton, a small, postcard New England town, has one general store—the Riverton General Store—that, Winslow says, “made the best sandwiches in the world.”

  Winslow with his late friend Quentin Keynes and his son at Christmas around 2003. Keynes was a safari guide, filmmaker, rare-book collector, and the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The London flat in Cool Breeze on the Underground was based on Keynes’s, where Winslow lived for several summers in the 1970s while Keynes was away in Africa. One of the characters in the book—Simon Keyes—was also based on Keynes.

  Winslow at a book signing for The Winter of Frankie Machine in 2006.

  Winslow and his son playing roller hockey.

  Once a safari guide in Africa, Winslow, seen here in Kenya in about 2007, poses with his son, wife, Jean, and two Samburu trackers, both of whom he has known since they were young. He once gave the trackers two camels to start a herd and says that now “there are apparently dozens of camels in North Kenya with the name Winslow.” Winslow’s connection to Kenya runs deep. He proposed to Jean on an island off the coast of Kenya, and when their son was born, he received spears and shields.

  Winslow on a rainy day in Berlin in September 2010.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to quote from “North Dakota” (Lyle Lovett and Willis Alan Ramsey). Copyright © 1992 by Wishbone Music and Lyle Lovett/Michael Goldsen (Wishbone Music Worldwide Administration Don Williams Music Group, Inc.). All rights reserved.

  copyright © 1993 by Don Winslow

  cover design by Milan Bozic

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0630-0

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com