by Don Winslow
“I figured it would be the one where you’d be wearing the most clothes.”
She stared into his eyes. “You’re a real bastard.”
That about sums it up, Neal thought. “I’ll take the shower, though,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind if you drown.” She got up from the bed and stalked out.
Neal showered, then headed out the door. He was about halfway back down the gravel pathway when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and the bouncer from the corral stuck a big revolver under his nose and cocked the hammer. He still had his shades on.
“Turn back around,” he said.
“Absolutely.”
The cowboy smashed the pistol right behind Neal’s ear and Neal dropped to the ground. He was conscious just long enough to hear the cowboy say, “Help me get him in his car.”
The cowboy grabbed him under his arms and Doreen took his feet. They shoved him into the passenger seat of the Nova and drove him about five miles east along the highway. Doreen relieved his wallet of the rest of his expense money, about twelve hundred dollars, during the ride. The cowboy pulled the Nova off onto a little washout, dragged Neal out of the car, and laid him alongside some rabbit brush.
Neal started to wake up when he heard shots. He cracked an eye open enough to see the cowboy put a slug into each of the Nova’s tires and another in the gas tank.
“Let’s get out of here,” said the cowboy.
“Not quite yet,” said Doreen.
She hauled back and planted a nice sharp schoolmarm shoe into Neal’s groin and then into his ribs.
“That’ll teach the uppity son of a bitch,” she said.
Neal passed out again.
He woke up to the sound of tires crackling on the dry gravel.
I wonder if Matt and Miss Kitty are coming back to polish me off, Neal thought. Maybe I should try to crawl out of here.
He was lying on his stomach. He touched the right side of his head and felt blood caked in his hair. He traced the blood where it had run down his neck, then he tried to lift his head up out of the dirt. But even that small effort sent a bolt of pain searing across his ribs and started his head throbbing all over again.
He laid his head back down and settled for just raising his eyes to the battered car that sat between him and the road. He smelled gasoline and knew he should get up, but it just felt like too much work.
A car door shut. Footsteps came closer. Neal saw cowboy boots.
“What in the name of Sam Hill…?” a man’s voice asked. “Are you all right?”
Neal raised an eye to see a middle-aged man in a green gimme cap leaning over him.
“I’ve been better,” Neal mumbled.
“I’ll bet you have.”
The man gently turned him over on his back.
“That’s quite a knock you have on your head.”
Not to mention my balls, Neal thought. Ouch.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I’m not sure I know.”
The man chuckled. “You didn’t by chance enter the bareback event at the Filly Ranch, did you?”
“I guess I got thrown.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be the first. Come on.”
The man gently held him under the arms and lifted him to his feet. Neal’s feet didn’t really want the responsibility.
The man picked Neal’s wallet up from the ground and looked inside. “You won’t have to worry about managing your money anymore.”
“Shit.”
“Although, judging by your vehicle, it doesn’t look like it was ever a very big concern for you.”
Neal steadied himself on the old Nova and looked around. He could have been on the moon except the moon wasn’t this flat. There was nothing but desert around.
What the hell am I doing out here? he asked himself. Oh yeah, Cody McCall.
“I think I can drive,” he said to the man, who was just sort of standing there staring at him.
The man laughed. “Where do you want to go?”
“Nowhere, really.”
“Well, that’s about where you’ll get in this car. I’ve never seen a car that’s been shot before. Somebody must’ve taken a real dislike to you.”
“I can have that effect on people,” Neal said.
“I hadn’t noticed,” said the man. He stuck his hand out. “I’m Steve Mills. I have a ranch out by Austin. Or it has me.”
A ranch out by Austin, Neal thought. It has a ring to it. “My name’s Neal Carey.”
“Come on over to the truck. I have a first-aid kit.”
Mills led Neal over to an old Chevy pickup, opened the passenger door, and sat Neal down. Then he got his kit, expertly cleaned the wound on Neal’s head, swabbed some antiseptic on it, and applied a bandage.
“I’m a regular Sue Barton, student nurse,” he said. “Out where we live, you have to be a little bit of everything-medic, mechanic, cook, farmer, cowboy, and sometime psychiatrist. You’re from back East, aren’t you?”
Neal focused his eyes and took a good look at the man for the first time. He was in the tall range, real thin, with that slight stoop at the shoulders that tall men get from having to duck under things. He wore a blue checkered shirt rolled up at the sleeves, with a pack of cigarettes peeking out of the breast pocket. He had on jeans over his cowboy boots, which were old, tan, and worn.
He had a handsome face that had weathered more than its share of cold, harsh winds, and baking sun. It was deeply tanned up to the telltale line on the forehead that betrayed a habitual ball cap. His brown hair was still thick at about forty-five years of age, and his dark brown eyes shone with life. It was a face you liked right away, a face with nothing to hide.
“I’m from New York,” Neal said.
“City or state?”
“City.”
Steve Mills scratched his cheek. “I’d have thought you could have gotten yourself mugged there. What brings you out this way?”
I’m looking for a man who works on a ranch out by Austin. “I like to travel,” Neal said.
“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Steve said.
Good.
“Well, Neal Carey, mystery man, why don’t I throw what’s left of your personal possessions in the back of the truck and take you to Austin with me? If your destination is nowhere, Austin is at least close. There’s a bus that comes through every couple of days.”
Neal reflected on his options and quickly arrived at the conclusion that he didn’t have any.
“This is very generous of you,” he said.
Steve was already tossing Neal’s duffel bag into the truck.
“I’m going there anyway. Wouldn’t mind some company for the ride.”
“Hold on a second,” Neal said. He straightened himself up, tottered over to the Nova, and opened up the trunk. He tore the fabric off the inside of the trunk hood, reached in, and pulled out a stack of bills, the last five hundred dollars of his expense money.
“You may not be as dumb as I thought,” Steve observed.
“Don’t get carried away,” Neal answered. He felt pretty dumb. He’d come on too fast with Doreen. And much too rough. He could have gotten the answers he needed without insulting her, just as he probably could have gotten the truth out of Paul Wallace without slapping him. He had substituted tough for smarts, and that was stupid. And flashing all that cash around had been just plain idiotic. He didn’t blame Doreen and her gun-wielding cowboy friend as much as he blamed himself. He’d been trained better.
He hauled himself back into the truck and the resulting pain felt almost like satisfaction.
Steve climbed into the cab and pulled the truck back onto the road. The old truck rattled, rumbled, and roared down the highway.
Neal settled back in the seat and tried to figure out his next move.
I’m headed toward Austin, he thought, the last known location of Harley McCall. I know McCall has hooked up with a rancher, someone he k
new from his California days. That’s the plus side.
The down side is that I don’t have a car or much money, and that Levine and Graham are expecting me to show up in New York any day now. And they’re going to be pissed off that I didn’t follow orders. But at least I dumped the car.
He was pondering the wisdom of calling the office when he fell asleep. He woke up over an hour later.
“You don’t look crazier than a pet coon!” Steve shouted.
“What?” Neal Carey shouted over the noise of the old pickup truck as it rattled over Highway 50.
“I said you don’t look crazier than a pet coon.” answered Steve Mills. His face crinkled into a wry smile. “I was thinking that you’d have to be crazier than a pet coon to be wandering around this country all by yourself with no particular purpose.”
“Maybe I am.” Neal answered. “How crazy is a pet coon?”
“Pretty damn crazy. Course, anybody who tries ranching Nevada has no damn business calling anyone else crazy. So even if you are crazier than a pet coon, I figure I still got about twenty years of crazy on you! Hold the wheel, will you?”
Neal reached over and steadied the steering wheel as Steve Mills took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, then lit it up.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Steve said, exhaling a deep drag of smoke, “but since my heart attack the wife raises unholy hell if she sees me with a butt. They had to whirlybird me into Fallon, so I finally got a little of my insurance money back! Kind of scared the wife, though. She says if it happens again, and she finds any cigs on me, she’s just going to leave me to die in the barn. I told her she might as well bury me there, too, seeing as how I’ve been ass deep in cow shit most of my life anyway. You don’t say a lot, do you?”
“I like to listen.”
“Well, this relationship might work out, because I like to talk and the wife and daughter have already heard all my stories-twice. I got a herd of cows rooting for my next heart attack just so they won’t have to listen to me anymore. My cattle don’t go ‘moo,’ they go ‘Shut up!’”
The truck reached the top of a long, steep grade. Neal could see a broad valley below them. A mountain range formed a backdrop beyond. The valley seemed to stretch endlessly to the south and north.
You can see forever, Neal thought.
“Welcome to The High Lonely,” Steve said.
“The what?”
“The High Lonely-that’s what we call it around here. You’re at about six thousand feet elevation, and it’s mostly empty space, as you can observe. Very few people, some more cattle, lots of jackrabbits and coyotes. Back there in the mountains you have cougars, bighorn sheep, and eagles.”
Steve pulled the truck off onto an overlook.
It’s like being perched at the edge of the world, Neal thought. A great brown vastness under a canopy of startling blue.
“We’re sitting on Mount Airy Summit,” Steve explained. “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine feet high. Down there is the Reese River valley, although it isn’t much of a river as rivers go. That’s the Toiyabe Range across the valley. The big peak there is called Bunker Hill. My place sets at the base of it. Believe it or not, I actually climbed that damn thing once or twice with my daughter Shelly.”
Steve pulled the truck back onto the road and started the descent into the valley.
“It’s mostly cattle country,” Steve said, “but it takes a tremendous amount of land for the cattle to graze, it being mostly sagebrush. We grow the best alfalfa in the country up here but it costs an arm and a leg to irrigate and we don’t have the water to do more than we’re doing. Used to be a lot of gold mining around, but that’s about finished.”
“So what do people do?” asked Neal.
“Leave, mostly.”
Steve pointed to a dirt road off to the right. “Our place is about twenty miles down that way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the winters up here. That’s called a non sequitur, isn’t it?”
“Right.”
“I got a B.A. in English, although that doesn’t impress the cows.”
“From where?”
“Berkeley. Back before the whole free speech stuff, of course. Which is sort of too bad, seeing as how I’m all for free speech,” Steve said. The road took a sudden steep rise, curling through several switchbacks flanked by thick stands of pinon pine. “Now, we’re coming up to Austin, which ain’t got much except it does have a bar and I thought I should give you the whole tour.”
“The wife doesn’t approve of drinking either?” Neal asked.
“Well, not since my heart attacked me. Damn doctor… nice enough guy, but Jesus, he tells me to give up smoking, drinking, and red meat. I’m a rancher. I raise beef. I smoke and drink and eat my own beefsteak and I might be the happiest man in America. Well, here’s Austin, such as it is.”
It sure isn’t much, Neal thought. The town seemed to cling to one of the gentler slopes on the west side of the mountain range. Route 50 narrowed to make the town’s main street, along which there was a raised wooden sidewalk. Old buildings that looked like a run-down movie set of a bad western flanked the street. The buildings were mostly wooden, with a couple of red brick edifices thrown in, and featured classic western facades and wood canopies held up by long poles. There were a couple of cheap motels, a gas station, one restaurant, maybe three saloons, and a grocery store. A few houses dotted the hill that led up from the north side of the road. The hill was sparse except for a few pinon pine.
“Let’s go see and be seen at Brogan’s,” Steve said as he pulled the car over on the side of the road.
He brushed the dust off his pants and old leather boots and ambled toward Brogan’s. Neal watched his slightly bowlegged gait and the little hitch in his left leg. Then he gently lowered himself out of the truck and he followed him into the bar.
It wasn’t really a bar, though. It was a saloon, as dark and cool as an old cellar. The two small windows were grimy from forty years of collected grease and smoke and let in unsteady streams of filtered sunlight to highlight the specks of dust that floated in the stale air. The low ceiling sheltered cobwebs in each corner and the three small, round tables showed only a nodding acquaintance with anything resembling a rag.
A few stools, a couple with torn red upholstery, were pushed up against the bar, behind which sat an old man, fat and wrinkled as a bullfrog, with jowls to match. His butt sank deep into the cushion of an ancient wing-back chair and he was sipping what looked like whiskey from a jelly jar that was as greasy as the hand that held it. An enormous dog of dubious ancestry and ineffable color lay beside him and raised its gigantic head to see who was coming through the door.
A younger man, tall and wiry, was perched on a stool at the far end of the bar. His sandy hair peeked out under a red gimme cap advertising Wildcat. A spindly mustache outlined the narrow mouth that was bent into a frown. A long red beard hung straight down from his mouth. He was staring into a glass of beer.
“Whoohoo,” the fat man wheezed. “I guess Mrs. Mills didn’t come into town.”
“Hello, Brogan,” said Steve. “This is Neal Carey.”
The man at the end of the bar looked up.
“Steve,” he said, nodding his head.
“Cal,” Steve nodded back. “What are you drinking, Neal?”
“A beer?” Neal asked.
“I guess Brogan’s got one or two. A beer for my friend and I’ll have a beer and shot.”
“You know where it is,” Brogan answered. Neal got the feeling that Brogan didn’t spend a lot of time out of that chair. “Leave the money on the bar first.”
“You don’t trust me, Brogan.”
“I trust myself and my dog and I don’t turn my back on the dog.”
Steve climbed over the bar and reached into an old-fashioned Coca-Cola cooler and pulled out two sweating bottles of beer. Then he took a bottle of Canadian Club out from under the bar, grabbed a shot glass from
a rack, and filled it up.
“I wouldn’t either if I had that dog,” Steve said. “It would probably try to screw you in the ass, and it’s big enough to do it.”
Neal saw Cal flinch ever so slightly, then bury his head deeper in his beer. The dog lifted its muzzle with somewhat less interest. Steve Mills knocked the shot back, shook his head, turned red, coughed, and set the glass down.
“I love this country,” he said. He popped the caps off the beer and handed one to Neal.
Neal sat down on a stool and took a tentative sip of the beer. It tasted bitter and cold. It tasted great. He took another sip, then a swallow, and then tipped the bottle back and guzzled the stuff, savoring the feel of it pouring cool and wet down his throat.
Steve pulled a couple of crumbled bills out of his pocket and laid them on the bar.
“Mrs. Mills letting you have a little of your money?” Brogan teased. His voice sounded like a slow leak from a steam pipe.
Steve turned to Neal. “The missus handles the money, which is kinda funny, seeing as I’m the one who’s supposed to have the head for it.”
Cal looked up from his beer again and glanced quickly but sharply at Steve Mills. Nobody seemed to notice but Neal, who took an instant dislike to the guy. That felt almost as invigorating as the beer. Neal hadn’t allowed himself to feel very much in the way of emotion for a while. He swigged down the rest of the bottle and saw Steve Mills watching him.
Steve lit up a cigarette and took a drag. “Why don’t you come out to the place with me? We can feed you and give you a place to sleep and you can sort things out from there.”
“I couldn’t impose on you like that.”
“We are starved for company out there, and I have a teenage daughter who would just love to interrogate you about life in the big city.
He does have a point, Neal thought. I’m hungry and tired, and if I call Friends just now they might send the old van out to haul me back in. And I’m not ready for that just yet.
And after all, I am looking for a ranch near Austin.
“Well, thank you. It’s very kind of you,” Neal said, feeling like a lying hypocrite.
But that’s what undercover work is all about, he thought.