by Don Winslow
The highway lights are golden in the night.
Jimmy Peaches steps out onto the porch.
Got himself a freshly opened can of Doles, and a spoon, and there’s a pretty sliver of a silver moon out and it’s a good time to think.
Maybe this is what Callan had in mind the whole time, the scheming Irish fuck. Or maybe he and the chick were planning it together, all them times he was bringing her cups of tea. Just like Callan, always the lone wolf.
Sal ain’t gonna be happy. Called with his instructions—I’m coming for a meeting, I want to make sure everyone is there. Well, Scachi will hunt Callan down and teach him a lesson about fucking his friends. He digs the spoon into the can.
A slice of peach somersaults into the air.
Juice splatters on Peaches’ chest.
He looks down, surprised that it’s golden red, the color of a fiery sunset. He didn’t know they made those kind of peaches. His chest feels all sticky and warm, and he wonders why the sun is setting twice tonight.
The next round smacks him squarely in his broad forehead.
O-Bop sees this as he looks out the window, through the little octagonal wire screen. His mouth gapes into a perfect O as he sees Peaches’ brains jet out the back of his head and hit the cabin wall, and that’s all he sees as a bullet zips into his open mouth and explodes in his cerebral cortex.
Mickey sees him melt like spring snow and puts the kettle on. The water is just starting to roil at the bottom of the kettle when Scachi and two shooters come in the door, their rifles leveled at him.
“Sal.”
“Mickey.”
“I was just having tea,” Mickey says.
Sal nods.
The kettle whistles.
Mickey pours the water into the chipped mug and dips the tea bag a few times. The bowl rattles as he spoons in some sugar and a little milk, and then the spoon knocks against the side of the mug as his shaking hand stirs the tea.
He lifts the mug to his mouth and takes a sip.
Then he smiles—it’s good and it’s hot—and nods to Sal.
Scachi takes him out quick and clean, then steps over his body to go into the bedroom.
She’s not there.
And where’s Callan?
His Harley’s gone.
Fuck.
Callan’s taken the woman and is doing a solo, Scachi thinks. And now I’m going to have to track him down.
But first there’s cleanup to be done.
Within a couple of hours his men have set up a meth lab in the cabin. They drag Peaches’ body back in and pour hydriodic acid around inside, then walk back to the facing hillside and shoot an incendiary round through the window.
The firefighters are lucky that night—there’s little wind and the fire from the meth-lab explosion burns only about twelve acres of some old grass and chapparal up the hill. That’s not so bad; in fact, it’s good to have a fire like that every once in a while.
Burns off the old grass.
So the new grass can grow in its place.
Chapter Fourteen
Pastoral
Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.
—Euripides, Orestes
San Diego County, 1998
They get up early and ride.
“There’ll be people looking for us,” Callan tells her.
No kidding, Nora thinks. When they finally stopped driving last night and pulled over, she’d demanded to know just what the hell was going on.
“They were going to kill you,” Callan answered.
He found them a cheap motel a little ways off the highway and grabbed a few hours’ sleep.
He shakes her awake at four and tells her they need to get going. But the bed is so nice and warm she pulls the blanket up over her mouth and settles in for just a few more minutes. Anyway, he’s taking a shower—through the cheap, paneled walls she can hear the water running.
“I’ll get up,” she thinks, “when I hear the water stop.”
Next thing she knows, his hand is on her shoulder, nudging her awake again.
“We gotta get going.”
She gets up, finds her sweater and jeans where she tossed them over the room’s one chair, and puts them on. “I’m going to need some new clothes.”
“We’ll get you some.”
He looks at her sitting on the bed and can’t believe she’s really with him. Can’t believe what he did, doesn’t know what the consequences will be, doesn’t care. She’s so beautiful, even looking tired and rumpled in clothes that do smell. But they smell like her.
She finishes tying a shoe, looks up and catches him looking.
It’s always cold at four in the morning.
Can be the middle of summer in the middle of the Amazon jungle—if you just got out of bed at four in the morning, it’s still cold. He sees her shivering and gives her his leather jacket.
“What about you?” she asks.
“I’m okay.”
She takes the jacket. It’s too big but she wraps the sleeves around her and the old jacket is soft and warm and it feels as if his arms are holding her like they held her last night. Men have given her diamond necklaces, Versace dresses, furs. None of them ever felt as good as that jacket. She climbs on the back of the bike, and then has to push the sleeves up so she can hold on to him.
They head east on Interstate 8.
There are mostly just truck drivers on the road, and a few old pickups full of mojado fieldworkers headed for the farms out by Brawley. Callan drives until he sees a turn-off for something called Sunrise Highway. Sounds about right, he thinks, and turns north onto that. The road climbs in sharp switchbacks up the steep southern slope of Mount Laguna, past the little town of Descanso, then runs along the top of the mountain ridge, with deep pine forest to their left side and, hundreds of feet below the ridge to their right, a desert.
And the sunrise is spectacular.
They stop at a pull-off and watch the sun come up over the desert floor, lighting it in tones changing from red to orange and then into the subtle panoply of desert browns—tan, beige, dun and, of course, sand. Then they get back on the bike and ride some more, along the mountaintop, as the forest gives way to chaparral and then to long stretches of grasslands, and then they come to the edge of a lake near the junction with Highway 79.
Callan turns south on 79 and they drive around the edge of the lake until they come to a little restaurant sitting right by the water.
He pulls up in front.
They go inside.
The place is pretty quiet—a few fishermen, a couple of men who look like ranchers and who glance up from their plates as Callan and Nora come in. They pick a table by the window with a view of the small lake. Callan orders two fried eggs, bacon and hash browns. Nora orders tea and dry toast.
“Eat some real food,” Callan says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Suit yourself.”
She doesn’t touch the tea or the toast. When Callan’s done wolfing down his eggs they go outside and take a walk along the lakeshore.
“So what are we doing?” Nora asks.
“Taking a walk beside a lake.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I,” he says.
There are pine trees on the other side of the lake. Their needles shimmer in the breeze, which kicks up little whitecaps on the water.
“They’re going to be looking for me.”
“You want them to find you?” Callan asks.
“No,” she says. “Not for a while, anyway.”
“The way I feel,” he says, “I just want to live for a while, you know? I don’t know how all this is going to turn out, but I just want to live for a while. Are you good with that?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “Yeah, I’m real good with that.”
He does want to take some precautions, though. “We’ll have to get rid of the bike,” he says. “They’ll be looking for it, and it sticks out too much.”
They find a new vehicle a few miles south on 79. An old farmhouse sits down in a bowl off to the east of the highway. One of those classic white-trash front yards, with old cars and old car parts scattered around outside an old barn and a few dilapidated shacks that might have once been chicken coops. Callan steers down the dirt road and stops the bike outside the barn, inside of which a guy in the inevitable ball cap is working on a ’68 Mustang. He’s tall, skinny, maybe fifty years old, although it’s hard to tell under the cap.
Callan looks at the Mustang. “What do you want for it?”
“Nothin',” the guy says. “Ain’t sellin’ this one.”
“Sellin’ any of them?”
The guy points to a lime-green ’85 Grand Am sitting outside. “The passenger-side door don’t open from the outside. You gotta open it from the inside.”
They walk over to the car.
“But does the engine run?” Callan asks.
“Oh, yeah, the engine runs real good.”
Callan gets in and turns the key.
The engine comes to life like Snow White after the kiss.
“How much?” Callan asks.
“I dunno. Eleven hundred?”
“Pink slip?”
“Pink slip, registration, plates. All that.”
Callan walks back to the bike, takes twenty hundred-dollar bills out of the sidesaddle and hands them to the guy. “A thousand for the car. The rest for forgetting you ever saw us.”
The guy takes the money. “Hey, anytime you don’t want me to see you, come back.”
Callan gives Nora the keys. “Follow me.”
She follows him north on 79 to Julian, where they turn east on 78, down the long, curving grade to the desert, across a long flat stretch, until he finally pulls off on a dirt road and stops about a half-mile from where the road stops, at the mouth of a canyon.
“This should do,” he says when she gets out of the car, meaning that the fire won’t spread here in the sand and there probably won’t be anyone around to notice the smoke. He siphons some gas from his spare tank, then pours it over the Harley.
“You want to say good-bye?” he asks her.
“Good-bye.”
He tosses the match.
They watch the bike burn.
“A Viking funeral,” she says.
“Except we’re not in it.” He walks back to the Grand Am, gets in the driver’s seat and slides over to open the door for her. “Where do you want to go?”
“Somewhere nice, somewhere quiet.”
He thinks about it. If anyone does discover the bike’s skeleton and connects it to us, they’ll probably think we headed east, across the desert, to catch a flight somewhere from Tucson or Phoenix or maybe Las Vegas. So when they get back to the highway he backtracks west.
“Where are we going?” Nora asks. She doesn’t really care; she’s just curious.
Which is a good thing, because he answers, “I don’t know.”
He doesn’t, either. He doesn’t have anything in mind except to drive. Enjoy the scenery, enjoy being with her. They climb back up the same road they came down, into the mountains, to the little town of Julian.
They drive right through—they don’t want to be around other people—and then the road starts heading down again as the terrain slopes toward the coastal plain to the west, and the land flattens into broad fields and apple orchards and horse ranches and then they go down a long hill, from which they can see a beautiful valley below.
In the middle of the valley there’s a crossroads with one highway going north and another going west. There are a few buildings scattered around the junction—a post office, a market, a diner, a bakery, an (unlikely) art gallery on the north side, an old general store and a few white cottages on the south side, and beyond that there’s nothing on any side. Just the road cutting through the broad grassland with cattle grazing on it, and she says, “This is beautiful.”
He pulls off on the gravel driveway beside the cabins. Goes into the old general store, which now sells books and gardening stuff, and comes out a few minutes later with a key. “We got one for a month,” he says. “Unless you hate it. Then we can get our money back and go someplace else.”
It has a small front room with an old sofa and a couple of chairs and a table, and a small kitchen with a gas stove and an old refrigerator and a sink with wooden cupboards above it. A single door leads to the tiny bedroom, which has an even tinier bathroom—shower, no bath—in back.
We’re not going to lose each other in this place, she thinks.
He’s still standing tentatively in the front doorway.
“It’s fine with me,” she says. “How about you?”
“It’s good, it’s fine.” He lets the door shut behind him. “We’re the Kellys, by the way. I’m Tom, you’re Jean.”
“I’m Jean Kelly?”
“I didn’t think of that.”
After she showers and gets dressed they drive the four miles back up the hill to Julian to shop for clothes. The one main street is flanked mostly by little restaurants selling the apple pie that is the local specialty, but there are a few boutiques, where she buys a couple of casual dresses and a sweater. But they buy most of their clothes at the hardware store, which sells denim shirts, jeans, socks and underwear.
Down the street Nora finds a bookstore that sells used paperbacks, and she buys copies of Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, The Eustace Diamonds and a couple of Nora Roberts romances—guilty pleasures.
Then they drive back down to the market across the highway from their cottage and buy groceries—bread, milk, coffee, tea, Raisin Bran (his favorite), Grape-Nuts (hers), bacon, eggs, sourdough bread, a couple of steaks, some chicken, potatoes, rice, asparagus, green beans, tomatoes, grapefruit, brown rice, an apple pie, some red wine and some beer—and sundries—paper towels, dish detergent, toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, a razor and blades, shaving cream, a hair-color kit and a pair of scissors.
They’ve agreed to take some precautions—not to run, but not to be needlessly foolhardy, either. So the Harley had to go, and so does her shoulder-length hair, because while Callan’s looks are pretty ordinary, hers aren’t, and the first thing their pursuers will ask people is if they’ve noticed a strikingly beautiful blond woman.
“I’m not so beautiful anymore,” she tells him.
“Yeah you are.”
So back at the cottage she cuts her hair.
Short.
Looks in the mirror when she’s finished and says, “Joan of Arc.”
“I like it.”
“Liar.”
But when she looks in the mirror she kind of likes it, too. Even more so after she dyes it red. Well, she thinks, it’ll be easier to take care of anyway. So here I am, short, short red hair, a denim shirt and jeans. Who’d have thought it?
“Your turn,” she says, snapping the scissors.
“Get outta here.”
“It needs cutting anyway,” she says. “You got that ’70s look going on. Come on, just let me trim it.”
“No.”
“Chicken.”
“That’s me.”
“Guys have paid a lot of money to have me do this.”
“Cut their hair? You’re kiddin'.”
“Hey, it’s a big world out there, Tommy.”