Way Down on the High Lonely

3

Neal parked alongside the raised wooden sidewalk of the main street of Virginia City, Nevada. He had bought the car, a 1967 Chevrolet Nova, for three hundred dollars in a used car lot in Santa Monica and probably had paid too much for it. It had at one time in its hard life been silver; now it was a dull gray spotted with rust. The driver’s side inside door handle had fallen off in his hands, and he now closed it by sticking two fingers into the panel holes and pulling as hard as he could. The upholstery was torn, you could keep track of the road through the little holes in the floorboard, and the air-conditioning was more like a faint memory of a fall day. The car idled uncontrollably at thirty-five miles per hour and bucked, wheezed, and snorted for a good eight seconds after the ignition was turned off. But the radio worked, the big engine would take a hill, and the old car would settle into an eighty-mile-an-hour gallop and hold it all day. It was a car meant for covering miles.

Which was exactly what Neal did right after pulling out of the used car lot. He had arranged to meet Graham and Levine in Virginia City. They had flown to Reno and were driving from there. But Neal had to drive the whole way because he was the point man, undercover at that, and it wouldn’t do for any of Harley’s buddies to see him coming off an airplane in Reno. Reno was a small town and Virginia City was even smaller. Harley was working in a bar called the Lucky Dollar. He’d apparently gotten cocky and given his employer his social security number, which is a real mistake if people are looking for you. Especially if one of those people is Ed Levine, who tends not to miss that kind of thing.

It was to be a simple bag job. Neal would find McCall, talk a little Identity talk with him, become friends, get invited to his home, then lure him into the waiting arms-so to speak-of Joe Graham and Ed Levine.

They’d follow the old routine: two vehicles with tinted windows would be standing by. At the right moment Ed and the thugs in one car would grab Harley, force him inside, and take him for a nice long drive in the country while Graham and Neal would take Cody into the other car and head for California.

It was illegal as hell, involving as it did assault, kidnapping-of Harley, that is-and a host of other potential felonies and misdemeanors. But everyone except Neal would be masked, the vans were untraceable, and as for Neal, well, he had a new identity, a phony car registration, and would be back in New York City within forty-eight hours of the operation.

And Anne Kelley would have her child back.

To his great surprise, Neal discovered he liked to drive. He liked the feel of the wheel, the surge of the car beneath him as he pushed it through the desert east of LA, then north alongside the Sierras, then over the mountains and across into Nevada. He liked the isolation of driving at night, with “Darkness at the Edge of Town” wailing in his ears. He liked pulling the Nova under the soft lights above the gas pumps, filling it up, then buying a dinner of beef jerkey, corn chips, and a fruit pie and eating it back on the road.

He liked rolling down the road, watching the sun come up in the gray terrain of northwestern Nevada, getting a cheap breakfast of greasy eggs, stale toast, and bitter coffee in a roadside diner, and hitting the highway again, making that push across the flatlands to the mountains west of Reno. He liked the driving and was a little disappointed when he turned off the highway onto the small road that climbed up to the old mining town of Virginia City.

It was a small town. One broad, main street ran along the spine of a ridge that overlooked the lower hills and the broad plain to the east.

Neal made Virginia City by midafternoon and then posted himself on a convenient bar stool where he could see the street. He nursed some beers until a van with tinted windows and tourist stickers all over it pulled up and parked. A few minutes later a small rental moving truck cruised slowly by and parked. Two very large men got out and went into a coffee shop.

Nice touch, Neal thought. He found a restaurant on a side street and had himself a rare steak with some fried potatoes and a piece of cherry pie. He lingered over coffee until it got good and dark out, then walked down to the Lucky Dollar Saloon and Casino. The street was about deserted on a Monday night and he listened to his own footsteps on the wooden sidewalk. The widely spaced streetlamps cut harsh silver wedges in the darkness, and it was cold for a summer night.

The Lucky Dollar was mostly a tourist trap. It had swinging saloon doors and old wooden tables. Slot machines lined three walls and an enormous wooden bar occupied the other. An old lady, thin as a weed, stood holding a plastic container of quarters in one hand and feeding the slot machine with the other. An old guy who might have been her husband sat at a video blackjack machine, staring at the electronic cards as if they might break down and show him what the dealer had down. Neither of them looked up when Neal walked in.

The guy behind the bar was about fifty. His red hair was going to orange and his cheeks were headed south. He had a drinker’s nose and deep-set blue eyes. His shoulders were wide, his forearms were thick, and he didn’t look like he needed a bouncer to work the place with him.

“We don’t get many out-of-towners on a Monday,” he said as Neal took a stool at the bar. “Most people go to Reno nights, anyway. Too quiet.”

“I like it quiet.”

“What can 1 get you?”

“Scotch.”

“House brand?”

“Fine.”

Neal took his drink, got ten bucks in quarters, and lost at video poker for a while. Then he went up to the bar, ordered another scotch, and asked, “Hey, you know, I thought I’d see Harley McCall in here.”

Neal realized that he was nervous. Making the approach was always the dicey part of one of these jobs, because you didn’t know who it was you were approaching. If the bartender here knew Harley’s situation, or worse, if he was a member of the Identity movement, Neal could just as easily get a baseball bat across the face as any information.

“It’s his night off,” the bartender said. “How do you know Harley?”

Neal could feel sweat dripping down the back of his neck. I haven’t done this shit in a long time, he thought. This is screwed. Maybe my backup is too far away. Maybe Ed should have put someone in here with me. Maybe this guy can see I’m scared.

Come on, now. Don’t start doubting yourself. That’s when you get hurt.

Neal gave the bartender a crooked smile and one of those I-don’t-know-if-I-should-say-this shrugs.

“You knew him in jail, right?” the bartender chuckled. “Where?”

“LA.”

“LA is a jail.”

“You got that right.”

“He owe you money or something?”

Neal laughed. “Nah. Harley said if I was ever in the area to look him up, so I was in the area and thought I’d look him up.”

Should I say anything about Cody? Neal wondered. No, it’s too quick, I might spook him.

“He lives in a little motel at the north edge of town,” the bartender said. “The Comfort Rest. Shitty name for a motel. Shitty motel. Cabin 5, last one down.”

“Hey, thanks a lot. I think I’ll finish my drink and wander down there.”

Neal forced himself to sit back, sip his whiskey, and let his heart rate go back down. It was tougher than he thought, getting back into the business.

Over at the slot machine the old woman cackled as coins poured out into her plastic cup. The old man looked up from the blackjack machine and cursed her good luck.

Neal finished his drink, waved so long to the bartender, and started a slow walk down the street toward the Comfort Rest. He didn’t look behind him to see if the truck and van were trailing him, he didn’t even try to pick out sounds. He knew that Friends would have the best drivers and the best muscle. He knew that Graham was rubbing his artificial knuckles into his real palm. He knew that Levine was whispering instructions a mile a minute.

This is too good to be true, Neal thought as he reached the motel. The place was a bag job dream. It sat recessed off the street by a good sixty feet of gravel parking space. The motel itself was actually a group of run-down cabins set in a half-moon pattern around the badly lit parking lot. Cabin 5 was the farthest down from the office and cabins 1 through 4 looked empty. There were no lights on in the office. An old Ford pickup was parked outside Cabin 5. A light inside the cabin shone through the closed curtain.

Neal felt the old adrenaline rush. Do it now or wait? he asked himself. If I wait Harley might talk to his boss, get suspicious, and bolt. We might never have a better chance than right now. At this time of night Cody’s probably in bed. If I can just talk my way in the door we can do this quickly and quietly.

Do it now.

He turned around and found the tourist van in the darkness, angled out of sight of the motel. The moving truck was on the opposite side of the street, about fifty yards back. Neal crossed the street, walked back up the sidewalk, and tapped on the driver’s window. The window slid down electrically.

Neal recognized the driver from a couple of old jobs in New York: Vinnie Pond was the best get-away driver in the business. He had the reflexes of a cat burglar and the low blink rate of an Indy driver. Neal nodded hello and then looked at Graham.

“Let’s do it now,” Neal said.

“Is Cody in there?” a female voice whispered.

Neal leaned in and looked in the back of the van. Anne Kelley was there, shivering with nerves, a cup of coffee clutched in her hand.

Neal looked back at Graham.

“She insisted on coming along,” Graham explained.

“I know this sounds nuts, Ms. Kelley,” Neal said, “but we’re committing a crime in getting your son back this way. You weren’t supposed to have any knowledge of this, for your own protection.”

“Cody would be terrified if I wasn’t here, strangers grabbing him. This is going to be hard enough on him. I’m staying.”

One look at her eyes convinced Neal that they weren’t going to get rid of her and that there was no sense getting shirty about it. So he said, “Maybe it is good you’re here. Maybe you can keep Cody quiet when we put him in the van.”

“I guarantee it.”

“You want to do it now, Neal?” Graham asked. “Are you sure?”

“I had to give up too much at the bar. This is as good a time as any. I love the setup.”

Graham nodded. “It’s pretty,” he said.

“You’re not going to hurt Harley, are you?” Anne asked. “I don’t want him hurt.”

Neal turned away and the window slid back up.

We don’t want him hurt, either, Neal thought, but if that’s what it takes…

He took three deep breaths and walked back toward Cabin S. He could hear the van pull forward, within range. The truck wouldn’t be far behind.

Neal knocked on the door.

A man’s voice answered, “Who is it?”

Is that aggravation or anxiety I’m hearing in the voice? Neal asked himself.

“My name is Kellow,” Neal said. “Reverend Carter asked me to pay you a visit, see how you were doing.”

“Who the hell is Reverend Carter?”

The voice came from right behind the door.

Shit, shit, shit, Neal thought. He’s hinky already. I don’t think this is going to be a finesse job. This is going to be size and speed.

There was no peephole, so Harley couldn’t see out. Neal stuck out his right arm and made a fast circular motion forward with his hand.

Hurry, hurry, he thought. He didn’t look back to see if they were coming. He knew they were.

“Reverend Carter was getting a little worried. Seems there were some people coming around asking about you,” Neal said into the door.

There was a long silence. Neal could almost hear him thinking.

“Worried about me?”

Just open the door, Harley. Just open the door and all our worries will be over. “Yeah. I guess you have some sort of situation? With your wife? Reverend Carter thought maybe we could be of help.”

Graham was crouched at his feet now. Two of the muscle guys were flat on the ground under the window and by the door. Levine was squatting a few feet behind Neal.

“How could he help me?” the voice asked.

The tone was a little belligerent. Is he stalling for time? Neal wondered. Getting Cody up, getting him dressed, getting ready to go out the back window?

“Ohhh…” Neal answered, “a little money, maybe.”

The door opened a crack. Joe Graham stuck his artificial arm in the gap as the man tried to slam the door shut again. Neal jumped out of the way as Levine slammed into the door, ripping the security chain from the wall.

The two hitters burst in. One tackled the man around the waist as the other slipped a black hood over his head. The first hitter clasped him around the neck, put one huge hand over his mouth, and lifted him up onto his toes in a lock that would break his neck if he tried to fight. The second hitter closed the door as the van pulled up alongside. This all took about three seconds.

Levine went over to the bed to pick up Cody.

Cody wasn’t in the bed.

Graham came out of the bathroom shaking his head.

“Where’s the boy?” Levine hissed.

“What boy?” asked the voice muffled under the hood. The voice was shaking.

Levine grabbed the hood just under the chin and pulled hard. “You can tell me now or tell me later, but you’ll be feeling a hell of a lot worse later, so tell me now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It wasn’t a voice of defiance. It was a voice of terror.

“It isn’t him,” Graham said.

“What?” Levine asked.

“It isn’t him.” Graham lifted the man’s left arm and pointed to a spot beneath his white T-shirt. “No tattoo.”

“What’s your name?” Levine asked him.

“Harley McCall!”

There couldn’t be two of them, Levine thought.

“What’s your real name?”

“Paul Wallace.” He was crying.

“Why are you using Harley McCall’s social security number, Paul?”

“I found his wallet. I needed a new name. Are you going to kill me?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Where did you ‘find’ it?”

“In Las Vegas.”

“When?”

“Month or so.”

Ed signaled for Graham, Neal, and the other hitter to get out, then said, “Paul, I have to leave now. There’ll be someone watching from across the street. You stay in here for ten minutes with this hood on. If you don’t-”

“I will.”

Graham cracked the door open, looked outside, and then moved quickly into the van. Neal followed him in. The hitter strode to the phone booth outside and ripped the receiver cord from the phone. Then he headed for the truck.

Levine came out the door, lifted his hands, and made a gesture like a stick breaking. The hitter got into the van just as it slid off down the street. Then Levine climbed into the van.

Anne Kelley was crying. She was beating her fists on the seat cushion, crying and saying, “Cody, Cody, Cody.”

Levine said to Neal, “Get in that car and drive like hell. Don’t go to Reno airport. Just get across the state line, dump the car, and meet us back in New York. We’ll start all over again.”

“I’m sorry,” Neal said to Anne.

She nodded but kept crying.

“Move!” Ed yelled to him. “The bartender can ID you!”

Neal was looking at Anne Kelley. She was a study in misery, a study in loss.

“Get going, son,” Graham said quietly.

Neal opened the van door and got out. Vinnie threw the van in reverse and rolled out of town in the opposite direction from the truck.

Neal stood in the parking lot for a few long moments. He tried to shake the image of Anne Kelley’s tortured face from his mind, but it wouldn’t go. He opened Paul Wallace’s door and stepped in.

Wallace looked small and skinny in his underwear, a white T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was an older guy, now that Neal took a closer look at him. He was in his late forties, with a lot of hard miles behind him. He had a full head of black hair, streaked with silver, greased straight back. He had heavy bags under his eyes and deep lines on his face. His skin was pale. He was trying to pour some Old Crow from a pint bottle into a motel glass, but his hand was shaking so badly that he spilled the booze on the floor.

Neal took the bottle from his hand, poured three fingers of whiskey into the glass, and handed it to him. Then he sat down on Wallace’s bed.

“We have a problem, Paul,” Neal said quietly.

“We!” Paul asked sarcastically. He took a heavy gulp of the cheap whiskey.

Neal nodded. “Well, you. You do.”

“You were the guy outside my door. I recognize your voice.”

“See, they’re thinking about whacking you.”

Paul tried to sound tough but his voice cracked as he asked, “What do they have against me?”

“They think you’re lying. So do I.”

“I-”

“Shut up. See, I have to wonder why you opened the door if you don’t know who Reverend Carter is. So that makes me wonder if maybe you also know Harley McCall. Now you can talk.”

“All right. I didn’t find the wallet. I took it. Okay? Now leave me alone.”

Neal shook his head. “You’re not a pickpocket, Paul. You’re a loser. A dues-paying member of the fraternity of losers.”

“I’m going to walk out there and call the police!”

“You’ll never hear the sirens, Paul.”

“You said you’d help me! Give me money! I didn’t know who this Carter was, but if he was going to give me money… well, look around you. I could use a little money.”

Neal pointed his index finger at Wallace’s face and pulled his thumb back like the hammer of a revolver.

“Maybe Harley and I were drinking together once,” Wallace said quickly. “Maybe he gave me the wallet.”

“Why would he do that?”

Paul stuck out his empty glass. Neal poured him another belt.

“I been having some problems. Alimony. They hound, they hound me. 1 just wanted a fresh start. McCall said maybe we could help each other out. Said maybe his ID was more useful to him in my hands than his. Said just to travel with it… use it. Throw people off his trail for a bit.”

Which it sure did.

“Were you friends? Did you work together?”

“He worked at a place where I used to do a little business. We maybe had a few drinking nights together.”

“Did he have a little boy with him?”

Paul was eager to answer by now. He sensed that salvation lay on the other side of the right answers. “Yeah, yeah. A cute little kid. And a woman. A real looker named Doreen.”

“How old was the boy?”

“Three, maybe four?”

Neal got up and made a show of pulling the curtain aside and looking out the window. He turned back to Wallace.

“Now, Paul, I have a two-part question to ask you and you really need-really need, Paul-to give me a true and accurate answer. Tell me you understand that.”

“I understand that.”

“Where and when did you have this remarkable conversation with Harley McCall?”

Paul’s eyes starting flipping around. He looked like one of those little dogs you win at the carnival. He was thinking up a lie.

Neal thought about Anne Kelley, crossed the room, and slapped the glass out of Wallace’s hand. The whiskey splashed against the wall.

Paul looked mournfully at the booze dripping down the cheap paneling.

“Next time it’s your brains,” Neal said. He was furious at Wallace and himself. He’d never done anything like that before.

“He told me to say I found it! Not to say where he was!” Paul said indignantly.

Neal took Wallace by the shoulders and spoke softly into his ear. “He’s not here, is he, Paul? I am, and the guys outside are, and you are. Now, I’m losing my patience with you.”

“He said he had friends who would find me and…” Wallace said in a hoarse whisper. He started to cry again.

“But we found you, Paul,” Neal said just as quietly. “And we’ll put that hood back over your head, and put you down on your knees, and it will be blackness for ever and ever.”

“It was about a month ago, that part was true.”

“Good…”

“At the Filly Ranch.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just off Highway 50, between Sparks and Fallon.”

Neal let him go and walked toward the door. He took two hundred-dollar bills-expense money-out of his wallet and let them drop to the floor.

“Sorry for all the trouble, Paul. Now, do you believe we could find you again if we wanted to?”

“Yessir.”

“Is there anyplace you can go now, out of state?”

“I have a sister in Arizona.”

“Go there. First thing in the morning.”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t even think about trying to warn Harley.”

“To hell with him.”

Not yet, Paul. Not until I find him.

Neal left the cabin, walked as fast as he could to the old Nova, and headed for the Filly Ranch.

It being the middle of the morning, the neon sign over the purple prefabricated building was turned off, but Neal could make out the design: a caricature cowboy with a lascivious smile and his tongue hanging out of his mouth about to “mount” a buxom lady with long hair, long legs, and a bit between her teeth.

Four trailers were parked around the place, some junker cars sat on blocks, a big butane tank shone silver in the sun behind the low, flat building. Neal Carey had never been on a ranch, but this sure as hell didn’t look like one, not even one he had seen in the movies.

He followed the path marked with white-painted stones up to the front door and rang the bell.

A short woman with curly red hair answered the door. She was wearing a high-collared western shirt, a studded denim jacket, and jeans. She had a matching turquoise necklace and bracelet on, pointy lizard cowboy boots, and the smile of a professional greeter.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Bobby. What’s your name?”

“Is this the Filly Ranch?” Neal asked her.

She caught the tone of puzzlement in his voice.

“What were you expecting, honey? Horses?”

“Sort of.”

She gave him an all-men-are-stupid-but-some-more-than-others look and said, “Listen carefully: horse, whores, horses. A female horse is a filly. We have female whores here. Get it?”

“I think so.”

“Well, do you want it?”

“How much?”

“Another romantic. Fifty dollars a ride. You want them to do tricks, it’s extra. We got a menu inside. Also air-conditioning. Also showers, which I would highly recommend to you.”

“I’ve been on the road awhile,” he explained.

“Ain’t we all.”

He followed her into a room called the corral and sat down on the orange vinyl cushion of a cheap, low sofa. The room was dark, low ceilinged, and close. A small bar ran across one side. Two nickel slot machines were shoved against the opposite wall. Various posters of horses were glued to the plaster. Lava lamps bubbled on glass coffee tables alongside an assortment of porn magazines. A potbellied cowboy with long black hair, a black hat, and sunglasses sat in a chair with his feet on a stool and a revolver in his lap. Neal made him for the bouncer.

“I’ll call the roundup,” Bobby said. She pushed a button on an intercom by the door.

“The what?” asked Neal.

“The roundup,” she repeated, sounding every bit as bored as she was, “is when we bring all the fillies into the corral so you can pick one out.”

Neal tried a hunch. “Do you have a girl named Doreen?”

“If you want one. I mean, honey, they’ll answer to any name you like, except that they do get a little spooked at ‘Mommy.’”

“I’m looking for a real Doreen.”

“A real Doreen. Well, we do have us a real Doreen. Now, how would you like her dressed? Real Doreen does your basic pink teddy and garter thing, or a kind of Annie Oakley with just the gunbelt and boots, or she does a real prim schoolmarm and makes you talk to the tune of the hickory switch, but that’s another twenty.”

Neal pulled out his wallet and handed her three twenties and a ten.

“My, my,” Bobby said.

Neal shrugged.

Bobby shook her head and spoke into the intercom. “Doreen, we have us a bad little cowboy out here who needs to stay after school with the teacher.”

She turned back to Neal.

“She won’t be but a minute,” she said. “Would you like a drink while you wait? First one’s on the house.”

“Scotch?”

“You got it.”

She poured him a drink, then reached under the bar and handed him a key, a towel, and a bar of soap.

“Trailer 3. Do yourself a favor, cowboy, shower before, this time. The schoolmarm don’t like dirty little boys.”

An unshowered Neal was sitting on the purple bedspread when Doreen opened the door and strode in. True to her billing she was carrying a switch, wore a long print dress, and had her light brown hair put up in a severe bun. She looked to be in her late twenties. She was tall and thin. She flashed her blue eyes at him in a determined, if unconvincing, display of feigned anger.

“Stand up when I come in the room!” she ordered.

“You can save the act, Doreen. I just want to talk.”

She sat down on the bed beside him. “I’m not going to tell you the story of my life, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

At closer inspection, she was older than Neal had thought. Now he put her in her middle thirties and figured that she was developing this little specialty act to stretch out her working life by a couple of years.

“No,” Neal said. “I was hoping you could tell me something about my buddy Harley McCall.”

She leaned back and laughed.

“There is very little I couldn’t tell you about that son of a bitch,” she said. Her voice had turned hard and bitter. “But why should I?”

Neal knew right then that McCall had skipped out again.

“Why shouldn’t you, if he’s a son of a bitch?” he asked.

She looked him over.

“You’re no friend of Harley’s,” she said.

“Neither are you.”

“But that don’t make us friends.”

Neal got up from the bed and took his wallet from his pants pocket. He laid five hundred-dollar bills on the bed. “Maybe this does.”

Doreen looked at the money and gave a little snort. “After all,” she said, “I’m a whore. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, you’re pretty much right.”

She scooped the bills up and stuffed them into the dress pocket.

“Harley stayed here awhile with the little boy,” she said. “That’s probably why you’re looking for him, right?”

Neal didn’t answer.

“Right,” she said. “He got a job as a bouncer on the night shift. Bobby put him and the boy up in one of the trailers in back as part of the deal. Harley and me hooked up about the second day he was here, I guess. He’s a good-looking son of a buck. I even switched over to day hours so I could baby-sit Cody nights. Fixed his meals, watched TV with him, tucked him in. It was kind of nice. I guess I had thoughts about becoming a real-life family, but it didn’t last.”

“What happened?”

“We had a black guy come in from one of the bases out around Fallon. He picked me out of the roundup. Harley got wind of it and went nuts. Got mean drunk and said things.”

“What things?”

“You want a lot for your money.”

“It’s a lot of money,” Neal answered.

“Said he just couldn’t even think about putting his thing where a nigger had put his, called me a no-good whore. I imagine he’s right. This is no kind of work for a white woman. Anyway, he packed up his stuff, put Cody in the pickup, and took off.”

She put a pillow behind her head and leaned back against the wall.

“Do you know where he went?” Neal asked.

“Maybe. We had talked about it a lot, because we had been going to go together. There’s a ranch near Austin that was looking for hands. Harley knew the owner from California and had some buddies working the place. We was just working here to put some money away to eventually buy our own place. I’m sure he headed there without me. I’ve even thought about trying to look him up myself, see if… so you think you got your five hundred’s worth yet?”

“Do you remember the name of the ranch?” Neal asked, not believing he was going to be that lucky.

She shook her head. “The son of a bitch never said. Maybe he was always figuring on dumping me.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“It’s been about a month now, I guess.”

Well, at least we’re whittling it down, Neal thought. “Okay, thanks.”

She sat up and gave him a nasty, knowing smile.

“You still got seventy bucks’ worth coming to you,” she said. She flicked the switch against her hand. “I mean, you chose the school-marm for some reason, huh?”

“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 knew 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.

Three more beers met their maker before Steve and Neal got back in the truck and headed out of town. They drove west for a mile or so and then turned south down the dirt road Steve had pointed out earlier. The road ran roughly parallel between the Toiyabe Range to the east and the Shoshones to the west, through pretty flat sagebrush plain broken by deep gullies. It took an occasional dip down into one of the wider gullies but then rose right back up onto the plain.

The terrain was mostly the blue-gray of sagebrush above the yellow-gray of the alkaloid soil, punctuated here and there by a few deep green fields of alfalfa. The mountains in the background, rising as high as twelve thousand feet, were a blend of the darkest-almost black-green, and purple, with patches of gray stone and bright yellow spreads of wildflowers.

Cattle dotted the landscape. Most grazed in small herds far from the road, but a more adventurous few explored the grass along the roadside, stopping to stare indignantly at the truck as it passed by. Steve had to stop once or twice for cows and calves that were standing in the middle of the road.

“Most of what we’re on now is Hansen Cattle Company land,” Steve explained. “Hansen owns most of this part of the valley. In fact, my spread is about the only piece he hasn’t bought up the past few years.”

“Does he want to buy you out?” Neal asked.

“Oh, I suppose he would if I ever left, but he doesn’t seem to mind my puny presence. Bob Hansen’s a good guy, which is a good thing, seeing as how we’re each other’s only neighbors. His son Jory and my daughter Shelly are the hot item at the high school right now.”

The truck lurched down into a particularly bumpy old wash. A jackrabbit, its big ears twitching with anxiety, broke out of the sagebrush and sprang away with long jumps at amazing speed. A skinny coyote appeared at the edge of the road, gave the truck a thanks-a-heap glare, and trotted back into the brush.

They drove for another forty minutes or so before coming to the Mills place. It was a big, two-story log house that sat about two hundred yards east of the road, on the left side of the dirt driveway. An enormous hay bam just to the west almost dwarfed the house. On the side of the barn was an open shed, with two tractors and some other agricultural equipment that Neal didn’t recognize. About fifty yards north of the house was a corral made of metal piping. Three horses pricked up their ears at the sound of the truck, saw the vehicle, and trotted to the edge of the fence. There were two other, smaller livestock pens and then another barn beyond that.

“It’s beautiful,” Neal said as he got out of the truck.

He meant it. The Mills place seemed to stand alone in the sagebrush, the only building within sight in the beautiful valley, framed by the mountains. The stillness was at once soothing and alarming.

“Yeah, well, it has its moments,” Steve said. “Of course, it’s under about two feet of snow from October to April, then you’re knee-deep in mud until sometime in June, then you got your dust until September, and autumn lasts about an hour and a half until it snows again. But goddamn if I don’t love it. Speaking of which, here’s the missus.”

The “missus” was maybe five feet three on tiptoes. Her black hair, cut short just below her ears, framed her strong cheekbones, strong nose, strong jaw, and wide eyebrows. Her face wasn’t pretty. It was handsome, and its beauty wasn’t diminished by the laugh lines and worry lines etched by twenty years of crazy on an isolated ranch twenty miles from nowhere.

She was wearing a red shirt tucked into trim blue jeans over white sneakers. Her sleeves were rolled up and the whole effect was one of energy, efficiency, and strength.

She kissed her husband on the cheek and offered Neal her hand.

“I brought home a stray,” Steve said to her. “This is Neal Carey.

“I’m Peggy Mills. Welcome.”

If she was surprised or annoyed at having a strange guest sprung on her, she didn’t show it. Neal had the feeling that he wasn’t the first stray that Steve had ever brought home.

“Thank you.”

“Has Steve been showing you the sights?”

“Some of them.”

“I’ll bet. Come on in.”

She led them into the kitchen and sat Neal down at a wooden drop-leaf table. The kitchen was small but uncluttered. Pots, pans, and spoons hung from a metal ring above the sink. Checkered contact paper covered the counter.

“Where’s Shelly?” Steve asked her.

“Riding around with Jory Hansen. She should be back soon.”

Steve chuckled. “Jory’s old man won’t like him wasting a Saturday afternoon.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot on the counter and sat down.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Peggy said. “I think Eleanor’s sick.”

“Oh?”

“She’s been bawling all afternoon.”

Steve sipped his coffee, set his cup down, and headed for the door.

“There is no rest for the weary,” he said. “See you in a bit, Neal.”

“I’ll be right back,” Peggy said. “Grab yourself a cup.” She followed her husband out onto the small enclosed mud porch where he was putting on a pair of rubber boots.

Neal figured that Steve was filling her in on their visitor. Neal took the moment to look around the house.

It was basically a square. The walls were made of big, dark logs with white mortar in between. The kitchen occupied a narrow rectangle on the north side of the house. The table was set by a big window that looked out to the mountains on the east. Three other windows gave a view to the north, to the horse corral and the barns. Closets and a stairwell made up the south wall of the kitchen. On the other side was a large living room that made up the rest of the first floor.

The living room was terrific. A stone fireplace took up most of its north wall. A big sofa stretched along the south wall, and two big easy chairs on either side, by the fireplace, created a conversation area. There was a big, dark blue Indian rug on the floor and a large glass coffee table in the center.

The east wall was a beauty, being mostly a huge picture window that afforded a wonderful view of the Mills ranch. Beyond the porch that wrapped around the east and south sides of the house was a small lawn that had been laboriously nurtured and carved out of the surrounding sagebrush. Beyond the lawn the land sloped gently for hundreds of yards down to what appeared to be a creek bed, judging by the thin scattering of pines along its side. The land rose again on the other side of the creek, particularly on a big spur that ran down from one of the bigger Toiyabe peaks.

The mountains were a revelation from this perspective. What had looked from a distance like a solid mass was actually a series of separate peaks joined by saddles along the top. Each peak had a spur that ran down onto the flat, forming a wedge where the mountain met the sagebrush plain. Parts of the mountain were thickly wooded, other sections looked barren and rocky, still others were abloom in enormous fields of wildflowers. Clouds were beginning to wrap around the mountain peaks, obscuring the summits and softening the sharp lines of cliffs and ravines carved in the western face of the mountain.

It was a view, Neal thought, that seemed to build in evocative layers-the homey porch, the struggling lawn, cattle grazing out on the plain, and the dramatic mountains in the background.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” Peggy said as she came back in.

“Pretty doesn’t begin to say it.”

She stood beside him and looked out the window. “Sometimes,” she said, “I just pull up a chair and sit. How’s your head?”

Better than it’s been in a long time, lady, just looking out this window, being here. “It’s okay.”

“Sounds like you ran into some bad luck.”

“I feel like it ran into me.”

She gazed out the window for a few more seconds, as if she were thinking about saying something and wondering whether she should.

“What would you like to know, Mrs. Mills?” Neal asked.

“I’m not much for small talk, Neal. I’m the mother of an impressionable teenage girl and I need to know who’s in my house. So, is there anything about you I should know?”

Where to begin, where to begin… “I’ve had some troubles.”

“Drug troubles?”

“No.” Well, not my drug troubles, anyway.

“Troubles with the law?” Peggy asked.

“No.”

Neal felt her eyes like laser beams, looking right through him.

“So you’re just trying to find yourself?”

No. I’m just trying to find Cody McCall. “Something like that,” Neal answered.

She looked at him for another moment and said, “Well, there are worse places to find yourself.”

Steve came back in the door.

“How’s Eleanor?” Peggy asked.

“Even nastier than usual. She’s got too much milk for that calf and her udders are real swollen. You’d bawl, too.”

“So are you going to Hansen’s?”

“I guess so,” Steve sighed. “Actually, it’s okay. I wouldn’t mind getting another calf.”

“I’ll get some boots on,” Peggy said.

“No,” Steve said. He turned to Neal. “You want to play cowboy with me?”

The turnoff to Hansen’s place was about two miles farther south down the road. The big white clapboard house was set about a half mile east of the road. It had a two-story central section with two one-floor wings coming at forty-five-degree angles on either side.

The ranch had none of the casual, loose charm of the American West but an almost obsessive air of efficiency and order. White fences bordered the long driveway. The clapboard house gleamed with a recent coat of white paint and shiny red shutters. Two large barns were painted orthodox red, as were several equipment sheds, a garage, and a big bunkhouse that was set several hundred yards east of the house. A large lawn, green from fertilizers and neatly trimmed, was protected from the road by a perimeter of crushed limestone. A heard of holstein cattle, uniformly black and white, grazed in a rectangular pasture. A smaller herd of light brown Swiss Charolais patrolled the next enclosure.

“Bob Hansen is a model rancher,” Steve explained to Neal as the old pickup rumbled up Hansen’s drive, “and I mean that sincerely. He scratched this place out of the rabbit bush and he gets the most out of every inch. Now, Bob doesn’t have what you’d call a scintillating sense of humor, and he isn’t the kind of guy you’d sit and have a beer with, but he’s a hell of a cattle man and a fine neighbor. When I got my leg broke, Bob or Jory or one of the hands was over my place every day feeding the cattle and chopping the ice out of the creek.”

Steve gave the horn a beep before pulling into the crushed rock parking circle outside the garage where two green tractors were parked side by side, as shiny and bright as if they had just come out of the John Deere showroom. A minute later a short, middle-aged man dressed in a light khaki shirt over khaki slacks and a big gray Stetson hat came out of the barn. He had the gait of a bantam rooster. His short blond hair was carefully combed and his blue eyes highlighted a handsome face. He looked like the second lead in a forties movie, the guy who gets the money but loses the girl.

“Hello, Steve,” he said.

“Bob. This is Neal Carey.” Steve said.

Bob took off the canvas glove and offered his hand. “Nice to meet you. What can I do you for, Steve?”

“Got a calf you can sell me? I got a cow giving too much milk.”

“Well… I don’t have anything really good I can spare.”

“Don’t need anything really good.”

“Well… then I got a mixed-breed Angus and Charolais heifer I could let you have, might be good for some table beef down the road.

“She’ll do.”

“Come take a look at her.”

He led them to a corral behind the barn where a few cows and calves were lazily swatting at flies with their tails. Hansen pointed at a long-legged calf the color of mud.

“That’s the one,” said Hansen.

“How’d she happen?” Steve asked.

“Ohhh, back up in the mountains during spring pasture, I suppose,” Hansen said with an edge of irritation. “The two hands I had up there weren’t too careful about keeping the herds separated. You know cowboys these days, they know it’s a cow and that’s about all they know or want to know. Half of them move on after the first payday.”

Say, Mr. Hansen, Neal thought, you wouldn’t have a cowboy named Harley McCall working for you, would you?

“How much will you take for her?” Steve asked.

“Hardly worth me feeding her-she’ll never do much. A hundred?”

“Sounds fair.”

Steve opened his wallet and handed Hansen two fifties.

“Thank you,” Hansen said. “I do appreciate it.”

“How’s the bull business these days?”

“Terrible. Federal government’s going to put me out of business. They make all these regulations that mean I have to buy new equipment, but then the bank won’t give me the loan to buy it.”

Steve Mills took his cap off, shook his head, and then put the cap back on. “That’s ridiculous, Bob. Bill Bradshaw knows that you’re one of the best ranchers in Nevada.”

“Bill don’t own the bank anymore. It got bought by some California outfit.”

Steve shook his head again. “Things change, don’t they?”

“Too much. Had some government inspector from Reno out here snooping around my dairy, saying it’s a health hazard. Saying my milk’s ‘unsafe.’

Neal heard the indignation in the man’s voice.

“Shit,” said Steve.

“Of course,” Hansen continued, his voice starting to rise, “with the price you get for milk these days-and I mean the price I get, not the middlemen-I might as well go out of business, maybe just sit around and drink whiskey.”

“Hey,” Steve asked, “would you mind giving Neal here a tour of your place? He’s from New York City. It’d be an education for him. While you’re doing that, I’ll wrestle this calf here into my truck.”

“Oh, a man from New York wouldn’t be interested in my operation.”

Actually, Mr. Hansen, this man from New York would be very interested in looking around your operation. Neal said, “I’d like to see it if you feel like showing it to me.”

Hansen shook his head a little but looked pleased nevertheless. “Well, come on.”

When he stepped into the livestock barn Neal wished that Joe Graham were there with him. Graham would have loved it-the long narrow building was immaculate. The floors had been scrubbed and disinfected, the stanchions shone from metal polish, the equipment glistened.

“This is really something,” Neal said. And he meant it-anyone could see the dedication and hard work that went into Hansen’s operation.

“Thank you. Care to see the rest?”

“Yes, please.”

Hansen gave him the tour. He showed Neal the neatly laid out barns, the tool shop, the equipment shed. He took him along the different pastures that separated the breeds of cattle and explained how he rotated the grazing schedules to let the land refresh itself. He pointed out the wooded slopes above the pasture that he had left pristine so he could hunt deer for the meat locker and take firewood from the deadfall.

He took him around to the large garden-almost a farm in itself-behind the house where he grew all of the vegetables for their table.

“How many people work here?” Neal asked.

“Oh… that depends on the season and the economy. Right now only about twelve. That’s not including my boy Jory and the cook. My wife used to do the cooking, but since the cancer took her…” His voice trailed off. “We ought to get back to Steve.”

“Thanks for the tour.”

“My pleasure, young man,” Hansen answered. Then he added shyly, “Thank you for your interest.”

Steve was leaning against the truck. The calf stood trembling in the truck bed.

“Sorry you had to load her yourself,” Hansen said. “The hands are up bringing a herd in for inoculations and I think Jory’s out running around with your Shelly.”

He chuckled a little and Steve joined in, a shared joke between fathers of teenagers.

Steve said, “Youth will be served.”

“I suppose.”

“Aw, Bob, it’s just one of those homecoming king and queen things. They ain’t gonna run off and get married or nothing.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Well, you take care, Bob.”

“Yup. Nice to meet you, Neal.”

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

Bob’s head came up a little on the “sir” and he gave Neal an evaluating look before he turned around and headed back to the barn.

“Climb in the back and hold on to that calf, will you, Neal? Steve asked.

“Do you have a rope?”

“Yep. At home where I forgot it. Just get a headlock on the calf and keep it from jumping out or tumbling around.”

Neal found that the only way he could get a headlock on the calf was by kneeling on the metal bed of the truck. This wasn’t too bad until the truck got bumping down the road, bouncing Neal’s knees off the steel studs with every rut, rock, and jolt, of which there were about two thousand. Neal winced, groaned, whimpered, and finally cursed every time his kneecaps slammed into the steel, but he held on to the calf.

The calf wasn’t all that thrilled either. Bawling and trembling, she let loose a stream of urine all over both of Neal’s pant legs. Neal could feel it soaking through and sticking to his legs, but he held on to the calf until the truck took a particularly daredevil bounce and the calf squirmed out of Neal’s hold and attempted to jump over the back end. Neal sprawled on his stomach and managed to get a hold of her left rear leg.

This was a tactical error, because it left her right rear leg free. Not a calf to miss an opportunity, she hauled off and gave him a Bruce Lee to the diaphragm. Neal got a grip on the hoof implanted in his chest and managed to flip the calf over onto his lap, discovering that a baby cow weighs a lot more than the baby person he’d probably never be able to have, judging by the sudden pain in his crotch. But he held on to the calf.

He could hear Steve happily singing along to some tune on the radio about a mother not letting her babies grow up to be cowboys or something, which Neal didn’t think was very funny. But the calf must have liked it, because she let out a big sigh and relaxed in his lap. She felt so relaxed she let loose the contents of her bowels on those parts of his pant legs that she’d missed soaking with urine. Neal kind of wished that Steve had remembered that rope, but he held on to the calf, stroked her neck, and cooed soothing endearments. He hurt like crazy from the earlier beating, but he held on to the calf.

Steve stopped the truck by the back of the Mills’ house, got out, and took a look at Neal and the calf.

“She piss and shit on you?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, they’ll do that. Do you two want to snuggle some more or shall we introduce her to her new mama?”

He dropped the back gate and the calf scrambled out the back end. Steve opened a rickety wood and wire gate and shooed her into the small corral behind the barn.

Neal stepped in behind him. The sun was getting low and the sky was turning a soft salmon pink. The air was crisp and cool. Neal could see how you could fall in love with all of this and never want to leave.

“Now the fun begins,” Steve said.

“I don’t know if I can stand any more fun.”

“See, Eleanor has a calf of her own and she’s too dumb to figure out we’re trying to help her by bringing in this young interloper. So even though she needs another calf to suck on those udders, she’s going to resist. She’ll try to kick that calf, and if I know Eleanor like I do know Eleanor, she’ll try to kick it square in the head.”

No, Neal thought. She’s not going to kill that calf. I have two broken knees, a purple chest, I’m covered with shit and soaked with piss, and I’ve become kind of possessive of that calf.

“So what do we do?” Neal asked.

“Well, we do a number of things. See, these are range cattle. They’re about half-wild anyway, and long about dusk they hide their calves in the brush on the lower slope. So first we have to find Eleanor’s calf before the lions or the coyotes do-”

“Lions?”

“Mountain lions-and then drive the little thing back to the barn. Eleanor’ll follow even though she already suspects an ambush. Then we finagle Eleanor into a stanchion, sneak around her backside, and tie a rope around her hips so it pinches a nerve and hurts if she tries to kick. Then we introduce the new calf to its new lunch counter, which won’t be difficult because a calf will just naturally go for it, if you know what I mean. After the new calf sucks for a while, Eleanor’ll forget it ain’t really hers and then she’ll take care of it.”

“Lions?”

“They’re scared of people.”

Oh, good.

“However,” Steve said, “I’m going to bring the rifle along, just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case we run across a psychotic one or some goofball survivalist who figures that taking my calves is cheaper and easier than raising his own. I could use your help. Two is a lot better than one when you’re trying to drive cows on foot, and it would save me the trouble of saddling up a horse. Besides which, the doctor told me I should take a daily constitutional.”

“Sure.” I would never pass up a chance for a sundown confrontation with a lion and/or goofball survivalist rustler, Neal thought.

They walked back to the house and Steve took a 30.06 lever-action rifle off a rack in the kitchen. Then they hiked for about ten minutes down through the sagebrush toward the base of the mountain. They came to the tree line Neal had seen from the window, and sure enough, it screened a shallow creek that ran at the bottom of a deep gully. Sandbars flanked the creek on both sides and it was easy to cross the stream by stepping on rocks and then jumping onto the sand.

They walked a couple more minutes and reached the bottom of the big spur of the mountain.

“The mountains themselves are government land,” Steve said. “The spur here is the southern boundary of my land and Hansen’s.”

At the base of the spur, almost dug into the north slope, was a small log cabin.

“Whose is that?” Neal asked.

“It’s ours,” Steve answered. “It was here before I was. Probably an old miner’s place. You’ll find abandoned shafts all over these hills. Or it was a station for the cowboys to sleep in when they came to get the cattle down from the hills for the winter. We’ve had a couple of hired hands stay in it from time to time.”

They didn ’t run across any mountain lions or beef-crazed survivalists. They did find Eleanor, an enormous black-and-white cow, who promptly led them in the wrong direction.

Or tried to, anyway.

“Eleanor’s getting predictable in her middle years,” Steve said. “If she heads east you can be damn sure that junior’s lying under a bush somewhere to the west.”

He was. A cute, big-eyed little squirt who looked a little grateful to have the game of hide-and-go-seek end so quickly. He got up on shaky legs as Eleanor trotted over protectively. Steve gave her a poke on the flanks with the rifle butt.

“To the barn, dumb ol’ Eleanor.”

It took about forty minutes to drive the cows back and another twenty to lure Eleanor’s head into the stanchion by putting a big handful of aromatic alfalfa into the trough. Eleanor took the bait and Steve slammed the stanchion shut, just getting his hand out of the way before Eleanor swung her head in a violent effort to crush his fingers.

“We’re both getting a little slower, old girl,” Steve said without any bitterness Neal could detect. Then Steve snuck around her backside, dodged her kick, tossed a rope over her hips, grabbed it behind her udder, and pulled it tight. He tied it off on a post and stood back. She started to give a kick, suddenly changed her mind, and gave an aggravated bellow instead. Then she settled down and started chewing on the hay. Her calf instantly slid in and started to suck.

“Go get the new one, will you?” Steve asked. He took a quick look around, reached behind another stanchion, and pulled out a pack of Luckys.

Neal walked out into the corral, found his calf huddled up against the fence, and shooed it into the barn. It took one look at Eleanor’s swollen udder and nuzzled up. She tried another feeble kick, gave up, and apparently decided that she was the mother of twins as the calves happily nudged, pushed, and nuzzled against her.

Steve took a contented drag on his cigarette as he watched the scene.

“I love this country,” he said.

He had loved it from the moment he saw it, he told Neal over dinner, twenty-odd years ago when he and Peggy had given up the ghost trying to grow lettuce in California. They had packed what little they owned into their “Fix or Repair Daily” and headed east to Reno, where Steve drew a ten to a king down. This started a streak that Peggy capped off with a hot hand and three straight dice rolls that each added up to seven.

They thought they might treat themselves to a little vacation and headed east out of Reno, finally ending up in the Reese River valley. She loved it too, so they ended their vacation early, bought this chunk of land, got a good deal on an old trailer, and settled in.

Steve got a job driving a mining truck over on Round Mountain and Peggy waited tables at the one diner in town. They used their spare hours to clear enough land for a corral and a barn.

Peggy started the garden, lost most of it to bugs and rabbits, and then started it again behind a wire fence that represented about a month of tip money. Steve joined a few of their new friends on some jack-lighting expeditions and put a winter’s worth of venison in the freezer he’d bought fourth-hand from Brogan’s place in town.

They lived in the trailer for two years before they saved enough money for a house. Two years of his wrestling trucks around treacherous switchbacks. Two years of her pouring coffee, flipping burgers, and putting down whispered remarks about her “neat little rear” with a withering glance, and once twisting the arm half off a trucker who gave her neat little rear a pat. Two years of saving every penny except for their twice-a-month expedition into town-twenty miles away-to drink a few beers and dance a few dances at Phil and Margie’s Country Cabaret to the country tunes of New Red and the Mountain Men. (Old Red having been caught with half an acre of marijuana behind his house and the Mountain Men being composed of two men and two women.)

Steve and Peggy built the house themselves after Kermit Wolff had put in the foundation. They started in May and had the roof party in mid-September, about half of north central Nevada showing up to help them raise the damn thing and polish off the beers chilling in ice in the horse trough. They had one hell of a party, and Peggy shed a few tears when the young Shoshone from down by lone hauled off the old trailer. Steve got real busy finishing the house when Peggy came home from Fallon with the news that she’d done in a rabbit with something other than her pellet gun.

Shelly was born in the middle of winter. There were problems with the birth and weren’t going to be any more babies. Peggy was pretty down about that, but Steve didn’t care because he loved that little girl positively to distraction.

Neal could see why just as soon as Shelly came bursting in the door a good minute before dinner hit the table.

She had her father’s eyes and smile and her mother’s strong features. Her chestnut hair was shoulder length and thick-Peggy swore that she had broken scissors trying to trim it once. She dug into her steak and baked potato with the voracious appetite of the young, guileless, and guiltless.

She was a junior in high school. Biology and chemistry were her best subjects, English and history her worst, meaning that she had to work for her A’s in them. She wanted to go to the University of Nevada and then on to either med school or vet school, because she couldn’t decide which she wanted to help more, people or animals. She had succumbed to classmates’ pressure and become a cheerleader, although she thought it was pretty boring and a little silly. She’d rather have spent the time with one of the horses, or helping out on the place, or taking long rides with Jory up on the trails in the mountains.

She was a secure kid from a secure home. She knew her parents loved her and each other, and she loved them back.

She also loved Jory Hansen. They planned to go to Reno together and get married after they established their careers, she a medico of some type, he a crusading district attorney. Her parents didn’t disabuse her of her plans by telling her all of the things that usually happened to a relationship on the long trek through college. She was a level-headed kid and she’d take it all in stride.

She had clearly been told by her mother to suppress her natural curiosity about their house guest, and for the first twenty minutes avoided asking Neal the three thousand questions she had about the world outside of Austin.

“How was your afternoon with Jory?” Peggy asked her between bites of cherry pie, by way of rescuing Neal.

“Fine,” she answered.

Peggy picked up on it. For her exuberant daughter, “fine” was a barely positive description.

“Why? What’s wrong?” Peggy asked.

“I don’t know. He’s been a little quiet lately.”

“Jory Hansen’s never been exactly a chatterbox,” Peggy said.

Shelly hesitated. “He seems angry,” she said.

“Honey, I think he’s been a little angry since his mother died,” Peggy answered.

Peggy knew how he felt. She was angry too. Barb Hansen had been one of her closest friends. They had raised their babies together, helped each other through all of the childhood illnesses and injuries, sipped on a little wine together when the men were up in the hills cutting timber or hunting. They had spent long summer afternoons down at the creek, watching their kids splash around in the water and trading notes on marriage, business, cooking, ranching, and just plain stuff. She missed Barb Hansen too.

And Jory-short for Jordan-was such a sensitive kid. Much more like his mom than his dad. It was a hard loss for him.

“That’s three years, Mom.”

“I know.”

“He talks strange lately.”

“Strangely,” Peggy corrected, “and what do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Politics. How the country’s changing. He talks like a right-wing Republican or something.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked that boy,” Steve observed.

“He just seems angry,” Shelly repeated. “It scares me a little.”

“Maybe you ought to go out with other boys,” Steve suggested, ducking his head closer to his pie to avoid his daughter’s sharp eye.

“What other boys? Jory’s the only one around here who thinks that there might be more to life than roping cows,” Shelly answered. “Besides, I love him.”

“There’s always that,” Steve answered and the conversation turned to the local economy, politics, and the usual topics that people discuss when they’re getting to know one another.

And then the conversation turned to Neal.

He pretty much made the cover story up as he went along, letting it out little by little, playing at being shy and embarrassed but always observing the number-one rule of a good cover: stay as close to the truth as you can.

So he told them he’d been in graduate school in New York, that he’d fallen in love with a woman who broke his heart, and how all of a sudden life didn’t make any sense anymore and he just needed to get away to think.

So by the time he was into the second piece of pie and the third cup of coffee he was telling them how he’d flown to the West Coast, hadn’t found what he was looking for there, and decided to buy a cheap car and work his way back east.

All of which was technically true in its parts and a complete lie in its whole. The essence of a good cover story.

After dinner they repaired into the living room. Shelly went upstairs to take a shower and go to bed early.

Neal sank into the sofa and took the glass of scotch that Steve handed him. It smelled a little like the smoke from the charcoal fires in the monastery kitchen. He took a sip and let it linger in his mouth a moment before he swallowed it. It felt like a blanket wrapping around him.

“You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” Steve said to him.

Neal had no idea what he meant but nodded anyway. He took another swallow of the whiskey and drew the blanket a little tighter around himself.

Peggy came in from the kitchen. She had a drink in her hand and a serious look on her face. She sat down next to Neal on the sofa.

“Steve and I were thinking,” she said. “Steve could use a little help around the place. Winter will be here before we know it and we have a lot of hay to put up, that sort of thing. We’d probably need to hire someone anyway, and as long as you’re here…”

“We couldn’t pay much,” Steve said. “But you can have the spare bedroom here, and the food is great.”

And so is the location, Neal thought.

“How about if I lived in that cabin up on the spur?” he asked.

The Mills laughed.

“You don’t want to live out there,” Peggy said. “It’s filthy, for one thing. It’s cold, it’s isolated…”

Well, I’m not going to be here long enough for it to get cold, Mrs. Mills, and isolation is just what I need to conduct my little search for Harley and Cody McCall.

“Neal might want some privacy, Peggy,” said Steve.

“There’s not even any electricity. Just that old wood stove.”

“I’ll be fine,” Neal said. “And I’ll work for the rent on the place and a few supplies to get me started. I have a little money in the bank at home I can have sent out.”

“Are you sure?” Peggy asked.

“I think this is what I’ve been looking for,” Neal said.

Or it’s damn close, anyway.