The Cat, The Devil, And Lee Fontana. The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

1. THE CAT, THE DEVIL, AND LEE FONTANA

1

McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Washington State

The devil arrived at McNeil Island Federal Prison March 8, 1947, bleating like a goat and looking like a goat. He had taken the form of a big buck goat with coarse brown fur, a rank smell, spectacular accessories, and a drool-stained beard. He was looking for Lee Fontana. Fontana, who was considered not immediately dangerous to the other felons, had been made a trusty and put to work on the prison farm growing potatoes and mutton for the inmates. Satan looked for him there. When he didn’t find Fontana among the pens and dairy barns and gardens, he turned his attention to a flock of nubile young sheep and for an hour had his way with them, perplexing and then delighting the young ewes. Afterward the goat stood in the muddy pasture where it met the shore of Puget Sound, pawing atthe salty water that lapped around his hooves and staring back toward the prison, watching through the thick concrete walls as Fontana left the mess hall wiping the last trace of supper from his grizzled chin. How old he’d grown since Satan had last looked in on him, his tall, thin body ropy and leathered, the lines etched deep into his lean face printing out a sour disappointment with life that greatly pleased the devil.

Galloping along to the prison and melting in through the high concrete walls, the goat materialized suddenly in the exercise yard, big, rough-coated, smelly, and causing considerable interest. He allowed a crowd of amused inmates to touch his thick heavy horns but when they started to touch other, more private parts, perhaps with envy, he butted and struck at them with his sharp hooves. They scattered. The goat disappeared, poof, into nothing, abandoning the form he had taken as he’d moved up through time and space from the flames of earth’s fiery and turbulent core.

He was invisible when he entered the cell block, an errant swirl of sour wind pacing unseen beside the debilitated old train robber as Lee hurried along toward his cell, toward the ease of his iron bunk. Though Fontana couldn’t see him, an icy aura made the hard-bitten old man clutch his arms around himself in a sudden and puzzling shiver, made him hope he wasn’t getting the flu that was going around the cell blocks. That, with his sick lungs, wouldn’t be good news. Whatever was the matter, he was aching with cold by the time he reached his barred door; he stood impatiently watching the uniformed guard leave his desk farther up the corridor, watched his rolling walk that accommodated his big belly as he came to lock Lee in for the night. “You look beat, Fontana. You okay?”

“Cold, is all. Be warm in a minute,” Lee said, looking hopefully down at his thin blanket.

The guard shrugged, but he shivered, too.“Does seem colder back here.” He looked up above the three tiers of cells to the clerestory windows high beneath the ceiling as if to see one of them open or broken but all were shut tight, the wire-impregnated glass smoky with dirt where it caught light from the hanging bulbs. He looked at Leepuzzled, shivered again, locked the cell door and headed back to his desk, his gait rolling like a pregnant woman heavy with her burden. Beside Lee, the devil, too, felt the cold despite the fact that he had generated that unearthly chill, so very different from the normal cold of the cell block—he didn’t like the damp cold of the cells any more than Lee did, he despised the chill of the upper world just as he hated its too-bright days and the vast eternity of space that swept endlessly beyond the spinning planet. All that emptiness left him uneasy, though hell knew he’d spent enough time up here on the naked surface enjoying his centuries of tangled and debilitating games. Watching Fontana now, he thought about the many times he’d returned to observe and torment the old cowboy—for all the good it did. Tempt and prod the old man as he might, and though he was always able to manipulate a few uncertain places in Fontana’s nature, the end result was the same. Fontana would give in for a while to his prodding, would be drawn to the cruel and sadistic aspects of whatever robbery he was planning—but for only a short time. Then he would go his own way again, ignoring a moreinteresting treatment of his victims, as hardheaded and stubborn as the billy goat Satan had so recently sent butting through the prison wall.

But the devil wasn’t through with the old man. He had infinite time. He meant to change Fontana, he meant to own Lee’s soul for his own. Time was nothing to Satan, he moved through the centuriesas he chose andwherever he chose, tending to the vast ranks of souls that teetered uncertainly on the cusp between eviland a bland life of virtue—but so many of them begging to be lost, beseeching him to take them with him on that last and fiery descent.

Lee Fontana was a harder quarry, but one he didn’t mean to lose.

The guard sitting down at the desk crammed into his chair would have been an easier mark, but there’d be no fun in that game, with such a simple target. Satan had watched the round-bellied officer with distaste as he locked Lee into his cell, and when he’d touched the man with an icy hand the fat boy had shivered, hastily bolted the door and hurried away. Now, smiling, Satan slipped in through the bars of Lee’s cell as invisible as a breath and stood waiting for Fontana to pull off his clothes, stretch out on his bunk in his skivvies and pull the blanket up, waiting for Fontana to ease toward sleep where his mind would be most malleable.

But as Lucifer watched Lee, he in turn was watched. The prison cat sat observing that dark and hungry shadow, peering out from beneath the guard’s desk just as, earlier in the evening, he had watched the rutting goat play hell with the sheep out at the prison farm. The cat had known Satan even in goat form and knew why he was there. His silent hiss was fierce, his claws kneading, every angle of his lean body tense and protective. He didn’t like the devil sniffing around Lee again, poking and prodding as he’d done ever since Fontana was a boy, showing up always with the same vendetta, willfully tormenting Lee, wanting what he thought was his due, wanting to get back at Lee for an effrontery that Lee had had nothing to do with. Leehad been only a child when his grandpappy faced off and bested the devil, but Lucifer wouldn’t let up, he wouldn’t back off, not until Lee gave in to his dark desires or, in death, went free at last, still unbound to the slave maker.

The yellow tomcat had lived at the prison most of his life, he’d arrived there as a tiny kitten in the pocket of a prison guard, had been bottle-fed by the guard and two inmates and, when he was old enough to be let outside, had learned to hunt from the resident prison cat. He had taken over from that aging beast when she passed on to enjoy another life. Indeed, Misto himself had died there at the prison, at a ripe and venerable age. That body, only one relic from his rich and varied incarnations, was buried just outside the prison wall with a fine view of Puget Sound, of its roiling storms, and its quiet days cloaked in coastal fog. The very night that a guard buried Misto, as fog lay heavy over the still water, the cat had risen again appearing as only a tangle of vapor mixed with the mist, and he wandered back into the cell blocks.

He wasn’t ready to leave McNeil. The prison was home, the ugly cells, the exercise yard, the mess hall with its ample suppertime handouts, the kitchen with more scraps than a dozen cats could devour, the overflowing garbage cans, the dense woods and grassy fields, with its band of wild and amorous female cats and, out at the prison farm among the dairy barns and chicken houses, a fine supply of rats and fat mice to hunt and tease, and what more could any cat want?

During Misto’s lifetime most of the prisoners had been friendly to him. Those who were not had been kept in line by the others. Now, returning as ghost, he had gotten his own back with those men in a hurry, driving a fear into them that would prevent them from ever again tormenting a cat or any other small creature. When, after his death, he’d materialized in the prison yard and let the inmates see him, some claimed another cat had moved in, likely one of Misto’s kittens that was a ringer for him. But some prisoners said Misto himself had come back from the grave into another of his nine lives;theyknew he wasn’t yet done with the pleasures of McNeil, and he soon became a cellblock myth, appearing and disappearing in a way that offered an exciting and chilling new interest for the bored inmates: a ghost cat to tickle their thoughts, to marvel over and to argue about. Lee Fontana observed the ghost, and smiled, and kept his opinions to himself. As for Misto, it wasn’t the comfort and pleasure of the island alone that detained his spirit there. He remained because of Lee Fontana.

The cat had lived an earlier life in Lee’s company, when Lee was only a boy. A willful kid and hotheaded, but there was about him a presence that had interested the cat, a deep steadiness, even when the boy was quite young, a solid core within that had clashed with the boy’s fiery nature. Drawn to Lee, Misto had, in the ghostly spaces between his nine lives, often returned to Fontana as he grew up and grew older. He had ridden unseen with Lee during a number of train robberies, greatly entertained by the bloody shootings, the excitement and the terror of the victims—though he never saw Lee torment, or seen him kill with malice. Lee had killed his share of armed men, but those shootings were in self-defense, meant to save his own life.

It might be argued that if Lee hadn’t robbed the trains he wouldn’t have been in a position to defend himself, would have had no reason to kill any man. Maybe so. But however one judged Fontana, the cat saw in him a strain of decency that the devil hadn’t so far been able to touch, something in the hard-bitten cowboy that had kept the dark one defeated. If Misto had his way, that wouldn’t change. He had watched as Fontana grew older and more stubborn in his ways and as he grew more sour on life, too. He had watched Lee’s fear of old age and death settle down upon him, the fear that haunted most aging humans, and he didn’t mean to leave the old man now, he would not abandon Lee so close to the end and to his last parole; he meant to stay with the old man to the final breath of his earthly journey, meant to follow Lee in his decline as the dark spirit made a last attempt at Lee’s final and eternal destiny.

As a ghost, the tomcat had chosen perversely to retain the exact color and form in which he’d lived all his earthly lives: rough yellow coat, battle-ragged ears, big bony body moving with an ungainly clumsiness that belied his speed and power. When he made himself visible he seemed no more than a rangy prison cat lying on the warm concrete of the exercise yard soaking up the last of the day’s meager heat or slipping into the mess hall under the tables bumming the inmates’ scraps that were passed down to him by one rough hand and then another; the prison cat that lay now unseen on the cold iron shelf in Lee’s cell, watching Lee’s dark and shadowed visitor that stood at thefoot of Lee’s bed—waiting for Lee to be discharged in the morning, waiting to make one more try at bringing Fontana into his fold, waiting to play some final and unexpected card in his hungry game.

Out beyond the cell block the prison yard lay deserted, and a thin breeze scudded in off Puget Sound across the green and quiet island, touching the lighted windows of the guards’ and staff houses and the small, darkened schoolhouse, touching the peaceful and forested hills—while there within the cell block the devil waited. And Misto waited, ready for whatever would occur tomorrow as Lee left the certainty of his prison home, as he moved out into a free and precariousworld followed and hazed by that hungry spirit who meant, so intently, to steal the will and the soul of the lonely old man.

2

Easing onto his bunk, Lee pulled the rough prison blanket close around him, though it did little to drive the cold from his bones. Maybe hewas coming down with whatever was sending men off to the infirmary, their faces white as paste, doubled over hacking up yellow phlegm. In the old days when he was young, death from the flu was common enough, it would take a whole family, half a town, in one violent outbreak and there was nothing much a doctor could do about it. At least now the docs had what they called wonder drugs, for whatever they were worth.

Well, hell, so what if he did come down with the flu on his last day in prison, so he died from the flu rather than be strangled to death from the emphysema. Dead and buried at McNeil in a convict’s grave. As good as anywhere else, he guessed, because who would know or care? Reaching for his prison shirt and pants, that he’d left folded at the end of the small iron shelf, he spread them out over the blanket for extra warmth. They didn’t help much. Damn screws didn’t have the decencyto run the furnaces, let a man sleep in comfort, the cheap bastards. The cell felt like a South Dakota winter, and he’d seen more than enough of those in his lifetime.

He guessed he should consider himself lucky to have a cell to himself, not shoved in with a bunch of young studs to hassle him, that he’d have to fight and then have to keep watching all the time because the bastards never would back off. Lucky to be on the ground floor, too, thanks to the prison doc. That climb to the upper tiers would take his breath, would make it impossible, on one of his bad days, toget a breath.

His cell was like any other, and he’d seen enough of those, too, stained toilet, stained sink, the narrow iron shelf to hold all his worldly belongings. His black prison shoes lined up side by side, just beneath. Smeared concrete walls where graffiti had been repeatedly scrubbed away. But it was better than some of the places he’d ended up, on the outside. Narrow sagging bed in some cheap boardinghouse, or the rotting floor of an empty miner’s shack, his blanket spread out among the mouse and rat droppings. He thought with longing of a bedroll on the prairie when he was running cattle, the smell of the cook fire and boiled coffee, a steer lowing now and then, the faint song of a herder to soothe them and to keep himself awake, the occasional rattle of a bit or a horse snorting to clear dust from his nose.

Strange, tonight the whole cell block seemed not only colder but unnaturally dark, too. Though there was never any real night under the hanging bulbs, never the night’s soothing blackness to rest your eyes and ease a person into sleep. New inmates, first-timers, found it hard to get used to, hard to sleep at all beneath the invasive lights running the length of the cell block ceiling like a row of bright, severed heads—though tonight even the overhead conesseemed blurred and dim, as if viewed through a layer of greasy smoke; and when he looked out through his bars, along the corridor, the four tiers of sleeping men were so shadowed and indistinct he wondered if his eyesight was failing. Shivering, he pulled the blanket tighter. So damn cold. A deep cold that had cut through his bones at intervals all day. He’d be warm for a while as he worked moving bales of hay, and then suddenly would be freezing again for no reason. He was so cold now that, staring up past the lights through the high, barred windows, he expected to see snow salting the night sky.

None of the other men seemed bothered. Nearby, where hecould make out guys sleeping, their covers were thrown back, a bare leg or bare arm trailing over the side of a bunk, the sleeper snoring away happily, warm and content—as content as a man could be, caged in here like a captive beast.

Well, hell, he’d be out of here tomorrow. Leave the cold behind. Would be heading south to the hot desert, where he could bake in the hundred-twenty-degree sun, soak up all the heat he wanted.

His idea was to work a while down in Blythe, in the Southern California desert, the way his parole plan said, but to stay just a little while and then jump parole, pull one more job, and head for Mexico with a good stash tucked away. He wanted money for his last, declining years, he didn’t mean to end up a pauper, with no money for his needs, that dread was always with him; hard as it might be, he meant to do something about that. A few hundred thousand was what he had in mind, enough to live comfortably for the remainder of his life, for however long that was.

Who knew, once he got out of this damp cold, got down into the hot desert and got himself some cash, once he was settled in a place of his own, maybe the emphysema would get better as it sometimes did when he was comfortable and not stressed. Hell, maybe he’d forget about dying, maybe he’d live forever.

His written parole instructions were to get off the train at San Bernardino before heading on down to Blythe, check in there with his parole officer. Maybe he’d do that, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe just stay on the rattler until he hit Blythe, go right on down to the job, such as it was, tell the parole officer, when he showed up in a few weeks, that he’d forgotten about stopping off, or maybe that he’d lost the paper giving him any such orders.

The job in Blythe was supposed to be permanent, but even if his old running partner had arranged it for him, they both knew Lee wasn’t about to work the vegetable fields for the rest of his parole time. That was migrant work, they had to like the hot, heavy labor just fine or they wouldn’t keep slipping across the border, hiding in the trunks of rickety old cars half smothered to death, heading up to the States, men wantingbetter pay and better treatment than they got at home.

He meant to work at the ranch a few weeks so he looked good to the parole board, get his bearings, lay out a plan to put his hands on some cash. Pull that off, and he’d be out of there, rich again and not a care to worry him. One big job, one nice haul, then on down across the border where he’d pick up a little adobe house and some land for a few bucks, enough to pasture a couple of horses. Find a little se?orita to cook for him and take care of his needs,live on tortillas, good hot Mexican dishes. Maybe a last crack at good, hot Mexican love. If he could still handle that much excitement. He didn’t like thinking how the years lay on him. Even his spirit felt flat, worn out, not fiery, as when he was young. He was giving out, his body giving out, aches and stiffness, and the emphysema made it so hard to breathe that when he thought of pulling another job, he wondered if he could handle it, if he could still bring off a job with the decisiveness and fast moves it would take and still get away clean.

But he had no choice. One more big job, or just wither away to nothing like an old horse turned out on barren, grassless land and left to starve to death.

He wondered, too, if he’d be up to the modern ways. He was coming out of prison into a world he didn’t know anymore, a world of sleeker, faster cars than he was used to. Fast diesel trains that no man on horseback could take down the way you could halt a steam train, the way he used to do, and his grandpappy before him, neither of them ever expecting the steam trains to die out and a new kind of train to take over the rails. In the old days, in L.A., the vaqueros used to race their horses against the steam trains, their ponies faster in the sprint, but the locomotive taking over for the distance, leaving the riders behind. With these new trains, a horseman didn’t have a chance. This was the 1940s, everything fast and slick as he’d never imagined, the world turned into a place he didn’t know, and, in truth, didn’t want to know. The slick Chicago gangs all duded up in their fancy suits and greased hair, their high-powered machine guns and big fancy cars, their steel-fisted control of a whole city. Big crime, taking down millions of dollars, not the simple one-on-one robberies that Lee was used to.

The whole world had grown too big; it was overwhelming. The Great War, World War I, a war fought from the sky, from planes that, some said, would soon replace the trains, take you anywhere in the U.S. you wanted to go, in just a few hours. This was not his world. There was even talk of some new kind of camera invented, which one day soon would watch you enter a bank, watch your every move in there. A world of spying, more sophisticated fingerprinting, all kinds of technology the cops could use to trap you. It was hard to get his mind around the changes that had happened while he worked the prison farm, herded and cared for a bunch of sheep and milk cows. His own kind of life was fast vanishing, running cattle on thousands of miles of open range that were now mostly fenced, broken into puny little spreads, cut up and ruined. His kind of life had been sucked away into history like water sucked down a drain.

Tomorrow he’d step out into that world, a used-up old man. No new skills to cope with the changes, a dried-up old gunman with maybe nothing hecould do but the field work where he was headed, hard labor that would leave him falling into bed at night aching in every bone and trying to get his breath. With allthese fancy new ways, what kind of robbery was out there that he could even handle, anymore? When he hit Blythe, maybe hecouldn’t do anything else but fall into the same life as the Mexican pickers, work among them, eat, and sleep, and work the fields until one day they found him dead among the cabbages, and no one to give a damn.

The cat, as Lee deliberated on his fate, dropped invisibly down from the shelf to the concrete and rolled over on the hard cell floor, watching Lee, knowing Lee’s thoughts and not liking them much.

A mortal cat would know distress at the nervous unease of the humans he cared about. But the spirit cat saw more, he understood more and, too often, he felt drawn to do celestial battle on Lee’s behalf. Now, flipping to his feet, restlessly pacing, he at last drifted up onto the iron shelf once more, above Lee’s empty shoes, lay down across the iron grid, invisible ears back, invisible tail twitching as he waited for what was about to occur, as he waited for the dark visitor to makehimself known to Lee, as was the devil’s way.

Lee’s battered watch said twelve-thirty, but he couldn’t sleep. Still shivering, he dug the paperback western out from under his pillow and tried to read. He got through barely two pages before the print on the page began to blur, his eyes watering not from want of sleep but from the unnatural cold that shivered him, and from the harsh overhead lights that, even through the murky air, glared straight down into his face. He was idly turning the pages, trying to stay interested in the cheap pulp western and wishing he had another Hershey’s bar—he’d eaten the last three—when a whisper from the corridor brought him up startled, a voice as faint as a shifting breeze.

“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”

Easing up on one elbow, he looked out through the bars. He scanned the cells across the way, tier upon tier, but saw no one looking out at him, no one awake. Not a soul stirred, the prone bodies seemed as still as the products of a waxworks, or as if they floated in a chill suspension of time.

“Lee … Lee Fontana.” A whisper closer than those far cells, and as insidious as a rattler’s buzz. He couldn’t tell the direction, it seemed to come from all around him, from the ceiling, from inside the cell itself, and through the concrete walls on either side of him. Whatever thoughts slid into Lee’s mind at that instant, he pushed away, whatever images arose he didn’t want to consider. But then suddenly the prisoners’ snores began again, the coughs, the twang of flat metal bedsprings as some sleeper relieved his tensions or rolled over. Maybe he’d imagined the whisper he’dthought he heard, had imagined that seeming pause in time, as well. Reaching for his book again, he stretched out flat, pulled the blanket up, shivering, trying to get warm and to read and not look around him, to pay attention to nothing beyond the cheap novel. He was turning the page when the shadows in his cell shifted so violently that he jerked upright, staring around him.

“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”

No one was there beyond the bars. But a shadow lay across his blanket, the stark shadow of a tall man cutting across the dark stripes that were cast by the iron bars. He squinted, but still the corridor was empty, unbroken by any figure. No one stood peering in at him, no one to account for the dark shape cast boldly across his blanketed legs. But a heavy malaise pressed at him, weakening him so he had to ease back, to lie supine, watching the dark imprint, watching the empty space beyond the bars, the empty corridor. He remained as still as if he faced a coiled rattler, as if the faintest shift of his body would trigger a flash of attack.

Frozen, slowly he made himself look up through the bars at the harsh lights, hoping that when he looked back, the man-shadow would be gone. The acid glow of the overheads blinded him, he stared until his eyes watered and then looked down again, mopping tears with a corner of his blanket, hoping the specter would have vanished. His vision swam with red afterimages, and only after some moments could he make out the shadow still cast solidly across his bed.

But now, as well, he could see a faint darkness suspended beyond the bars, a gray smear as ephemeral as smoke drifting and moving in the corridor, hovering with a life of its own, some terrifying form of life that was watching him—but how could that thin and shifting smear cast the harsh black man-shadow that cut so starkly across his bed?

Silently he slid his hand under the pillow reaching for the sharpened metal rod he kept there. Whatever threw the shadow, whether he could see it clearly or not, maybe it could feel the thrust of a blade. His fingers touched the cold steel, but when he tried to grip the homemade knife his hand wouldn’t move, it was frozen in place. He tried to swing off the bunk but he couldn’t shift his legs, his body was immobilized, he could no more move than could a slab of stone dropped onto the sagging bunk. When he tried to shout for the guard, his voice was locked to silence within his constricted lungs.

And what would he have told the guard? That he saw a phantom, that he heard a voice out of nowhere? That he couldn’t move, that he was as silenced and locked in place as a sparrow he’d seen once, in dead winter, frozen upright to a telegraph wire. Phlegm began to build in his throat, phlegm from the emphysema, triggered by fear, mucus that would soon cause a spasm of choking that must bring him up off the bunk spitting, or would drown him. He began to sweat. He’d soon have to move or he would strangle. What the hell was this, what was going on? He wasn’t going to die here frozen like that sparrow, die on a prison bunk drowning in his own spit, unable even to turn his head and clear his mouth. Fear filled him and rage until, angry and straining, he was at last able to turn enough to cough onto his sheet. But still he couldn’t rise.

Hell, this wasn’t happening, he was Lee Fontana, he could still hit a pigeon at fifty yards with a forty-five, could still see a train scuttling across the horizon small as a black ant, see it way to hell before the rails started to hum at its approach, could still jump a steam train and stop it cold—if there’d been any more steam trains. He had, in his prime, stricken men with his own brand of terror, there’d been a time when he had only to stare at a train engineer and because he was Lee Fontana the man would lay down his rifle and pull the engine to a halt. He had sent strong men cowering from him,left them rigid with fear. He didn’t like it when that kind of terror hit him instead.

Sweating and straining, he was at last able to slip off the bunk, down to the cold concrete floor. Clutching the prison-made knife, he rose up, stood in the center of the empty cell facing the shadow—a naked, ludicrous figure wielding the knife as he glowered at the empty bars. A tall, flat-bellied old man, his tender white flesh tanned to leather only from his neck up and from his elbows down, where he rolled his shirtsleeves. Leathery brown hands marked by sixty years of rope burns and wire cuts, his face hard, wind-beaten, most of the rest of him pale and vulnerable.

When he approached the shadow, it thinned the way smoke thins when one walks into it but the chill deepened, and the instant he touched the cold metal bars, he faced not the corridor and the tiers of caged men, he faced a vast and empty space reeling away and soft laughter echoed inside his head, a sound that seemed to fill the world.“You think you’re something, old man. You’re no more than a speck of dust, you’re already a moldering corpse or nearly so. Dead soon enough, and no one to give a damn. You’re a worn-out has-been without the cojones anymore to pull another job.” And the creature’s laugh echoed coldly, deep into Lee’s bones.

“Get out!” Lee spat at the emptiness. “Whatever you are, get out! Get the hell out of my space.” Turning his back on whatever this was—and he knew too well what it was—he went back to bed, pulled the blanket up. He didn’t look again at the shadow but he felt it watching him, felt the ongoing intensity of its interest.

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the shadow and felt its chill. The first time was long ago when he was only a boy. He was thinking back to that time when suddenly the prison cat appeared, lying on the shelf inside his cell, its yellow eyes on him, its yellow tail twitching as it looked him over. Leaning up, he reached to stroke it but the yellow tom leaped past his hand to the bunk, heavy and solid. It rubbed against him, its fur felt rough under his stroking, its purring loud as the tomcat settled down beside him, warm and yawning—and when Lee looked back at the bars, the figure had vanished. Across his blanket the spaces between the straight black lines were empty.

He heard the guard coming, making his regular round, his black shoes tapping on the concrete. The man glanced in at him, his fat face not changing expression as he took in every detail, looked at the sleeping cat, and shrugged. The cat roamed everywhere. How he got into the locked cell block was anyone’s guess but he seemed to have no problem. When the guard had passed, Lee lay stroking the cat and looking around at his cell, the stained toilet, the dented steel sink with his toothbrush balanced on the edge, the graffiti-smeared walls, the familiar stain on the concrete floor where a previous inmate had lost blood in some self-inflicted injury. His book lay facedown across the stain beside the three empty Hershey’s wrappers. Nothing was different, yet everything was different. The cell seemed without substance now, as if at any instant it might fade, and he with it. The intrusion of the specter had rammed his mortality home to him like a knife stuck in his belly. He lay the rest of the night thinking of that haunting, seeing his life vanish before its unearthly power like fragments of burned paper tattered on the wind. He lay there desolate and frightened, and with only the yellow cat to warm him, to somehow reassure and to comfort him.

The devil, in human form, left the cell block pleased with his night’s work. Moving unseen through the concrete walls, slipping through iron bunks and through the bodies of sleeping men so their dreams clutched suddenly at them and left them sweating, he drifted through the infirmary, the mess hall, the administrative offices, and down across the lawn that was kept neatly mowed by prison trusties, down to the edge of Puget Sound. There he stood, a wraith come out of eternity, staring out at the roiling waters that covered this small scrap of earth at this moment and at the distant smokestacks of Tacoma rising beyond—at the great bulk of Mount Rainier towering white and majestic over all that lay below, daunting even the devil in its rocky, snow-crowned dominance. Beside his left foot a rabbit crouched, so frozen with fear of him it was unable to run, riven with such terror that when he reached down and took it in his hands the little beast didn’t twitch. It died slowly and in great pain, emitting one high, terrified scream before Lucifer at last broke its neck and tossed it into the bushes.

He had subtler plans for Lee Fontana. Unlike the rabbit, he meant that Fontana would provide his own pain.

3

Lee left his cell for the last time dressed in a prison-made pinstripe suit a size too big for him, the sleeves hanging down to his knuckles, a red-and-yellow tie so gaudy that a dog wouldn’t pee on it, and prison-made wingtip shoes that raised blisters before he ever reached the first door of the sally port, their squeaking soles providing his only fanfare as he headed out for the free world. Moving down the corridor of McNeil for the last time, toward the double-doored cubicle where he would receive his belongings and sign out, his nerves were strung tight. He’d be on his own in less than an hour. His previous five releases from the federal pens didn’t make getting out, this time, any easier. No one to tell him when to eat, tell him when and where to sleep, tell him where exactly to work each day and how to do his work. A man got out of practice making his own decisions.

At Admissions, a soft-faced officer with jowls like a bulldog produced the usual brown paper bag with Lee’s name scrawled on it, shoved it across the desk with a patronizing smirk. “Here’s your worldly goods, Fontana.” He looked Lee over, amused at the baggy pinstripe suit and fresh prison haircut, and at the one pitiful item he saw Lee take from his pocket and drop in the bag, the little framed picture of his sister, Mae, when she was ten. “Here’s your train ticket,” he said, handing Lee a plain brown envelope, “and your prison earnings. Don’t lose them, old man. And be careful, it’s a great big world out there.”

Lee moved away from the counter wanting to smash the guy. As to his prison earnings, there wasn’t much; they didn’t get paid for working the farm, only for splitting cedar shingles that the prison shop made from the trees that grew along the shore—most of that pittance, he’d spent on razor blades and soap, on cheap dime novels the guards would pick up on the mainland, and on candy bars. He wondered if the money was still stuffed into the toe of his boot, from all those years ago when he was brought into McNeil and stripped of his civilian clothes, when all his belongings but Mae’s picture were locked away as he changed into prison uniform. He hoped to hell the guards hadn’tfound it. He needed cash for a gun, for any number of essentials to start life anew.

Now, as Lee headed for the sally port, the ghost cat followed him unseen, his attention on the child’s photograph that Lee had taken from his pocket, that he always kept close to him, the picture of Lee’s little sister, Mae, from those long-ago days in South Dakota. The child who looked exactly like Misto’s own Sammie, who lived now, in this time, in this moment, across the continent in Georgia. Sammie, with whom Misto had lived a short but recent life, and with whom, as ghost, he still spent many nights, unseen, purring close to her as she slept.

The exact likeness of the two little girls continued to puzzle the ghost cat, for even now in his free and far-roving state between his earthly lives, the tomcat did not have all the answers. He knew only that there was a powerful connection between Mae and Sammie, an urgent and meaningful adjunct to their lives of which Lee was the center, a connection that, the cat thought, might ultimately help to save Lee in his conflict with the dark power.

Lee, clutching his brown paper sack and brown envelope, stepped into the sally port glancing at the officer behind the glass barrier. Receiving a nod, he moved on out through the second door. He knew he should be happy at the sound of the metal gate locking behind him. But he felt only unsteady at his sudden freedom, at being turned loose with no barriers, no limits or rules, adrift and on his own after years of confinement, lost and rudderless in a vast and unfamiliar world.

The sky was gray, the morning’s heavy mist chilling him clear through. The small prison bus was waiting. He shoved the brown envelope with his ticket into his coat pocket, tucked the paper bag under his arm, climbed the three steps up into the stuffy vehicle, took a seat halfway back, nodding at the trusty who was driving and at the guard who sat angled where he could see the seats behind him. Lee was the only passenger. Earlier in the morning, and again in the afternoon, the bus would be full of schoolkids, children of the guards and prison personnel who lived on the island.

The bus rattled down the winding gravel road, past green pastures on both sides, past the reservoir and on down to the ferry landing where the SSBennett, McNeil’s forty-foot mahogany powerboat, was tied. The churning waters of Puget Sound looked as cold and gray as death, the hills of the distant shore vague beneath the overcast, grim and depressing, the smear of crowded mainland houses, with taller buildings rising among them, all generated the prisoner’s fear of the vast and sprawling outside world. He knew the feeling would pass, it always did, but every time he was released he felt as off balance as if the cinch on his saddle had broken and he was scrambling to swing away from a bad tumble.

At the dock he left the bus, moved on down to the rocking launch where a uniformed guard and a trusty were coiling lines on the aft deck. The gray waters shifted and heaved as if forces deep down were restless. There was one other passenger, a prisoner chained to a bench on the foredeck sitting between two guards, a two-time felon who had made his third kill at McNeil and was being shipped off to Alcatraz. Lee crossed the wooden catwalk and stepped aboard, staying to the aft deck avoiding his prison mate. The hollowness in his belly was sharp with excitement but sharper with dread, leaving for the first time in ten years his secure cell, the farm where he’d felt comfortable, the animals he’d liked better than his fellow inmates—leaving the old prison tomcat, he thought, surprised he’d think of that. Leaving the old cat he’d come to care about more than he’d imagined. The yellow tomcat that had spent last night on Lee’s bed, easing Lee’s night-fears, somehow coming between him and the phantom that he hadn’t wanted to see or to hear. Now he was leaving the old tomcat that was, it seemed to Lee, the only real friend he’d had at McNeil, the only presence he could really trust. The old cat that had, some said, died and returned again. Sometimes Lee thought he’d been there all along, that what the guard and prisoners had buried had been one of his offspring. Other times, he wondered. Whatever the truth, Lee had a pang of regret and knew he’d miss the old fellow.

He stood at the rail as the tall, lean guard cast off and began to coil line. One of the guards would have a shopping list in his pocket, they’d pick up needed supplies in Steilacoom before they headed back to the island, maybe food stores that had been trucked down from Tacoma, though most of their staples came by boat from there or from Seattle. Easing free of the dock, they were under way, the twin diesels churning the water in a long white tail boiling out behind them. Moving up to the bow, Lee stood chilled by the heavy mist and salt spray, riding the choppy waves liking the speed, and soon he began to feel easier.

Off to his left the overcast had lifted a little above the hills of Tacoma, the sun trying to burn through the murky cover. But it wouldn’t burn away much, sun wouldn’t blaze down on the land like the pure, hot desert where he was headed. As they approached land, the smokestacks from the iron smelters rose black and ugly, smelters that dumped their hot slag into the sound, souring the waters so nothing would grow along that shore. He could picture the streets and sidewalks of the city slick and wet from the mist and busier than he’d known: too many people, too many cars, not the quiet he’d grown used to on the island—the prison had been quiet most of the time, until a rumble erupted to stir things up, a dose of trouble breaking the monotony until armed guards stepped in and broke up the fight. Looking away toward the vast horizon of the mainland, he felt uneasy at so much freedom ahead, so much emptiness, so many choices, no one telling him what to do, no direction to his life except that he made for himself.

The prison counselor said that was what a parole officer was for, to guide him, help him over the rough spots until he’d settled in again. Well, to hell with that. He didn’t need some wet-behind-the-ears social worker hardly out of diapers telling him how to live his life.

What the hell, the whole world lay open to him. What was he afraid of? He’d have free run at whatever he wanted. All kinds of robberies and scams were open to him, a chance at whatever he chose to take down, so what was he bellyaching about? Hell, yes, he’d get used to freedom again and to the new ways, even if life was more sophisticated, and people maybe harder tomanipulate. The old habits hadn’t all died. The old-fashioned, trusting ways would still prevail among the smaller towns and farms, among the honest people with their straightforward talk, their unlocked doors and innocent views, so many folks just waiting and ripe for the taking.

He tolerated the loud suit and noisy shoes for the half-hour boat ride to Steilacoom, was eager to get rid of them as they pulled up to the scrappy little community, coming in close to the tall pier that jutted high above them, the small prison boat rocking against the tall pilings. Couple of buildings up there along the pier, and he could smell coffee over the smell of dead fish. The boat nosed into the short catwalk that led to the shore. The train station was just on the other side of the tracks, dumpy wooden building, the town rising up the hill behind it, shabby little houses half hidden by the Douglas fir trees, the homes of lumber workers and maybe smelter workers from up around Tacoma. Ten years back, he hadn’t seen much of Steilacoom, he’d been dumped off here from a marshal’s car, handcuffed and in leg chains, after a silent ride down from the Tacoma jail through dense fir forests and past a couple of lakes. The marshal had handed him over to a McNeil guard. The guard had hustled him across thetracks, out along this same ramp he was descending now, and into the prison boat, had locked his leg chain to a wooden bench, and they’d been on their way over the rough, choppy water, McNeil Island looming ahead, dark green forests, pale green clearings, hard-faced concrete buildings—heading for his new and extended island vacation, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Now, stepping down off the ramp clutching his paper bag, he stood a moment watching the guards unload their prisoner—chained like a walking ghost of himself from ten years back. As they moved away into the train station he double-timed up a set of wooden steps and onto the wooden pier, separating himself as far as he could from the group. Heading out along the pier past a storage shed, he followed the smell offresh coffee toward the lighted windows of a little caf?.

The room was dim inside, the shellacked walls made of beveled pine boards. Four wooden booths, two tables with Formica tops and stainless steel chairs, and a wooden bar. The woman behind it nodded to him, trying not to smile as she took in his pinstripe, pimp getup. Two men at the bar, plaid flannel shirts, heavy pants and boots, maybe lumberjacks. They turned to look and nodded briefly. Lee took a stool halfway down the bar, between the men and an old woman. He watched one of the men pour half his freshly opened beer into a frosted mug, and then tip in a glass of tomato juice and a big squirt of Tabasco; red beer was popular in this area. Lee didn’t want to think how it would taste. The pudgy old woman down at the end, on the last bar stool, leaning against the wall, was dressed in several layers of clothes, none of them too clean. In his day you hadn’t seen many woman hobos, but that was what she had to be. She smelled of sour urine, sour clothes, and a body that hadn’t seen soap for a while. He ordered coffee and a slice of lemon pie from the glass case, then, hauling his paper bag, he headed for the men’s room, holding his breath as he passed her.

Beside the door to the bathroom hung four wanted posters. Lee knew two of the men, they had left McNeil in the dark of night in one of the local residents’ small boats. The boat had later been found adrift against the shore; the escapees were still at large. Lee took a good look at the other two pictures, at the men he didn’t know. He was always interested in who was on the outside, maybe desperate and volatile, that might pose a threat if he ran up against them. And maybe part of his interest in the posters stemmed from when he was a boy, on those rare trips to town when he could enjoy the handsome photograph of his famous grandpappy.

Stepping on inside the little cubicle, he changed into his soft old Levi’s and one of three shirts from the paper bag, removed Mae’s picture and put it safely in his Levi’s pocket. Feeling down into his right boot, he found the bit of paper with the folded bills inside, just as he’d left them. Seven hundred dollars, and he was mighty glad to find it all there. He left it taped in his boot, didn’t shove it in his pocket along with the train ticket, his seventy-five dollars of prison earnings, and the prison-made knife. A bit of dried manure still clung to the sole of the run-over boot. He removed his rolled-up old jacket, shook the wrinkles out as best he could, then stuffed the prison clothes down in the paper bag. When he left, he’d drop them in the refuse bin out near the door of the train station—they wouldn’t be there long, that old woman would fish them out again, sell the clothes for food or wine.

Coming out, he drew amused looks from the barkeep and the three customers, all of whom had likely seen, over the years, dozens of prisoners shed their cheap prison garb in just the same way. The barkeep set his pie and coffee before him and gave him a friendly smile, as if she knew exactly how good it felt to be back in the comfort of his own clothes. She was nearly his age, white hair smoothed back showing glimpses of pink scalp, lively brown eyes. How many departing inmates before him had she served, along with the locals, with the lumber and smelter men, and with the civilian residents of McNeil come ashore on one errand or another. He watched the lumberjacks down their red beer, still fascinated with how that would taste. He was just finishing his pie and coffee when he heard the train whistle.

Pushing some change across the bar, he rose, headed back along the pier for the station. He was just stepping across the tracks when the slow-moving engine gave a big blast and came into view ambling along close to the water, barely clearing the fir branches where they had been trimmed away, train huffing and clanging up to the station, squeal of brakes, shouts of the conductor. Lee dropped the clothes in the trash can, but kept the paper bag. He boarded quickly, with his ticket in hand, moved on in looking for a quiet space to himself.

He chose a half-empty car, took a seat away from the other passengers, laid his Levi’s jacket and his paper bag on the seat next to him, to discourage anyone from sitting there. The car smelled of stale sandwiches and ancient dust. As he settled into the dirty mohair, a fit of coughing took him. He coughed up phlegm, spat it into his prison handkerchief. He could see through thedirty window half a dozen people hurrying down from the scattered houses above. The train waited in the station maybe fifteen minutes. Only four more passengers had entered his car when the train began to back and jerk, moving with a lot of hustle, and they were on their way. If this train made every little stop, it would be a slow, halting trip down across Washington and Oregon and into California—but then soon the train stretched out, moving fast, its iron wheels hitting a steady gallop that calmed and steadied Lee, the way speed had always calmed him.

When the vendor came by he bought dry sandwiches and coffee, the same sandwiches he’d live on for the next two days. He tried to clean the grimy window with his dirty handkerchief so he could see out, but he only smeared it worse. Irritated, he went out to stand in the windy vestibule between the cars, looking out at the waters of Puget Sound enjoying the sea while he could, the cool damp air, the green marsh along the inlets, before he got on down to the dry desert. He’d been up in this country a long time, away from that hot, parched land. He craved the dry heat, but he knew the muddy, sluggish Colorado River wouldn’t be the same as the living sea, not like this surging water eating away at the lush and ragged edge of the continent. The overcast had followed them, but had thinned near the ground, enough to let him see an eagle soaring low overhead looking for dead fish. He stood clinging to the iron bar watching the dark waters and green marsh, and then looking out the other side, taking pleasure in the little farms, their cattle and fat horses knee deep in grass. When he was a boy on the dry prairie they’d never had grass like that, a man could only dream of feed like that for his stock.

Settling in for the long pull down to L.A., he gravitated between the dusty car, the narrow windy vestibule, and the men’s room where he shaved and washed himself as best he could using their dinky little bars of soap, and paper towels. He slept in his seat, ate the dry sandwiches, read other people’s discarded newspapers, and he thought too much.

The hitch at McNeil was the longest he’d ever served, he shouldn’t have had a ten-year sentence. The only reason he got caught was sloppy work, and that had worried him. For the first time he knew he was getting old, afraid he’d lost his touch, maybe lost all talent for making a living in the only way he knew, the only way he liked. He’d give all he’d ever stolen or earned to be young and vigorous again, to be back in the early part of the century, back when the prairie was free and open, a good horse under him, nothing to think about but when the next steam train was due and what it carried, how much gold and cash—but then came the diesel trains, during the war, and you couldn’t stop those babies by riding across the track waving a gun at the engineer. And those trains carried dozens of guards, soon there wasn’t just one detective named Pinkerton to investigate a train job but a whole organization called Pinkerton, nosy, high-powered bastards, and his own times, his own ways were gone into the dust of the past.

After the steam trains were finished he’d worked cattle for a while, doing his first paid work in years. Then, long before America got into the war—but when many folks knew that day would come—he had taken a job in Montana, in Billings, breaking horses for the remount. Later, during the war, he’d heard that even the coast guard was using horses, patrolling the coastal beaches at night watching for German submarines.

For two years he had worked for the government breaking horses, he’d been straight then, no robberies, and he had, strangely, felt almost good about that. But then the itch for a thrill got him. When he left Billings he took on the Midnight Limited out of Denver, a diesel carrying military payroll. He’d planned every detail carefully, had even worn gloves to avoid fingerprints, accepting the annoying traps of modern technology. He had brought off the job alone without a hitch, had left the conductor and four guards tied up in the express car, had stashed the strongbox in the truck he’d hidden in an arroyo south of Grand Junction. But then, one second of bad judgment and he blew it. Blew it all, real bad. One second, standing beside that old Ford truck thinking how the money in the strongbox was meant for the new recruits at Camp Pendleton, thinking how those marines wouldn’t get any pay, and he had turned away from the strongbox. Had left it in the truck and just walked away, knowing the sheriff or the feds would be on it within an hour. One weak minute, thinking how the leathernecks deserved their money more than he did, and he’d lost it all. Walked away, half of him feeling good, the other half shocked at the stupid waste.

And then, soon afterward, still pissed off at his own stupidity and with a lot of hustle and not the faintest plan, he’d stormed into that Vegas bank, leaned into the teller’s cage and jammed the six-inch barrel of his forty-five into the girl’s face, and before he could get a word out that feisty little bitch had slammed the brass window gate so hard it broke two fingers on his right hand. From that point on it was all downhill, the bank guard had him cold. The feds picked up a few prints on the train job, and on the Ford truck and the strongbox, where he’d been careless. They had him for both jobs though he never got a penny from the damned bank teller, and he knew he’d be doing time. He’d toldhimself bank robbery wasn’t his line of work, but the truth was, he’d blown it bad. Suddenly, he knew he was old. An old man who’d lost his skill, and he’d envisioned the slow, confused end to his life, imprisoned by his own weakness, imprisoned by a fear far greater than he had ever known or ever wanted to know. Trapped by a mortality that seemed, every day, to draw in closer around him—and trapped by a heavier darkness, by a convergence of shadows pressing at him in a way far more lethal than simple fear of death, by a dark and terrifying aura that seemed to reach down from cold infinity, reaching to embrace and to own him, to painfully and endlessly devour him.

4

On the short run down to Olympia beneath the snowy shoulder of Mount Rainier, they were soon skirting the vast and marshy shore of Nisqually Reach, where dairy cows grazed fat and content in their lush pastures. Among the tall green marsh grass at the water’s edge, two bald eagles fought over a flopping fish, beating with angry wings at each other, tearing the silver body apart between them. But as Lee watched their hungry and brutal battle, the air inside the train, even through the closed windows, soon stank of the area’s paper mills, a sour odor harsher than rotted wood, its thick effluence soon turning the land, the sea, and sky a dull, heavy gray, featureless and depressing.

But maybe, Lee thought, he’d better enjoy, while he could, even these pollution-bound inlets where the mills had soured the land, before he reached the dry desert, the pale dunes where the only water he’d see would be dark and sluggish, where he’d miss looking out every morning at the lapping waters of the sound washing against the ragged and wooded shore.

Now, suddenly, the world turned black as they pounded through a tunnel. When they emerged, the passengers around him strained to see the Cascade Mountains towering in the east, snowcapped, bright even against the graying sky. Only when, farther on, the manmade fog thinned near the ground, could he see the dense city buildings of Olympia, and the Olympic Range rising to the west. In the green surrounding fields, half a dozen eagles soared low over a pasture, homing in on something dead, then one lifted and left the group; he watched it rise on powerful wings to disappear into the overcast above, the great bird soaring free wherever he chose to go, his unfettered flight making Lee want to do the same.

Made him wonder, when he got to L.A. to change trains, if he should fly free, too. End the journey there, take off wherever he chose, never complete his parole plan. Buy a bedroll, put together a kit, hop a freight out of the city, never show up in Blythe, forget the job waiting for him, stop knuckling under to the feds.

Right. And end up back in the joint. Christ, that would be dumb. Besides, he wouldn’t do that to a friend. Jake Ellson had gone to a lot of trouble to get him this job. Without it he might not have made parole, would have finished out his sentence right there at McNeil.

It didn’t seem like twenty-five years since he and Jake had pulled their last train robbery, and now Ellson was married, to the woman they’d both wanted, was settled in a responsible job and had two grown girls—married to Lucita because Lee had turned away from her, because he was too wild to want to settle down. Yet even now when he thought about her dark Latin beauty the heat would start to build and he’d wonder if heshould have stayed.

Well, hell, that had been decided when they were young, Jake was the one who’d got himself tamed, and that was what Jake wanted. Lee hadn’t cared to settle down, had no desire to be saddled with a family. Now he wondered what that would have been like, that life, children to love and to love him, Lucita in his bed, a warm, vibrant part of his life.

Leaving Olympia, the train was crowded. He tried to occupy both seats by spreading out newspapers but it wasn’t five minutes, passengers pushing into the car, that a round little man entered carrying a briefcase, headed straight for the seat next to Lee, a nattily dressed little fellow in a baby-blue three-piece suit. Lee glared at him, willing him to move on, but brazenly he pushed the papers aside andsat down, his round blue eyes smiling behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Guess it’s the only seat left.” Still smiling, he made a short attempt at small talk, leaning forward to look myopically at Lee, his blue eyes too earnest, and the first thing Lee knew he had launched into a land-selling scam,intently pushing his worthless, five-acre desert plots. Lee tuned out the man’s sales pitch, staring out through the smeared window at a red-tailed hawk lifting on the rising wind. The little man went right on, garrulous, so annoying Lee wanted to punch him. “You married, sir? You have children? Mister … I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t give it,” Lee said shortly.

“Well, sir, if you have children, this land would give you a nice estate to pass on to them. Grandchildren? Think what you could leave to your grandchildren, why, this one piece of land …” But then as his blue eyes took in Lee’s increasing irritation, his tapping foot and restless hands, hechanged his tack. “What line of work are you in, sir? You look like maybe a retired banker.”

Lee’s temper flared. He rose, shoved past the man, and left the car, went to stand in the open vestibule trying to shake his anger. When he heard the door open behind him he turned, meaning to chase the little scum away.

Light glanced off the man’s glasses revealing, now, eyes very different from the smarmy smile: cold, predatory eyes, a look that forced Lee to step back. Even his voice was different, grainy and hushed.

“You’re getting old, Lee Fontana. You’re old, and you’re all alone. You have nothing,” he said with satisfaction, “you have no one. No money to speak of, no possessions, no one who cares about you. Only the little cash you earned in prison, and the seven hundred dollars wrapped in brownpaper in your left boot. How far do you think that will get you?”

Lee waited, chilled. As far as he knew, no one was aware of the seven hundred dollars. If the prison authorities had checked his belongings that long time ago when he first arrived at McNeil, they’d left the money alone—or maybe they’d missed it, tucked deep in the toe of his boot. But this little man had no way to know such a thing, and no way to know his name, either. The wind tugged at the salesman’s seersucker suit and at his thin, pale hair. He watched Lee intently, his eyes ashard and penetrating as the steely stare of a hunting hawk, and an icy dread filled Lee. This was the shadow he had seen last night in his cell, the specter that had appeared to him now and again over the years, whispering, urging him, bringing out the rage and cruelty that seemed to dwell somewhereinside him, that usually he managed to put aside, to ignore. This was the shadow he had seen as a child, so long ago on the prairie, the chill presence that had frightened even his strong and powerful grandpappy.

“What do you want?” Lee managed, swallowing back a cough.

The little man smiled, his face and eyes cold as stone.“I want to see you prosper, Lee Fontana. I want to see you make it big, this time. I want to see you make a nice haul, enough money to take care of your retirement, just as you plan. I want to help you.”

Rage filled Lee, the man was in his space, pushing him hard. He turned away, fists clenched, his anger nearly out of control, looked out at the calm green fields sweeping past, trying to calm himself, but still his temper boiled. He spun around to face the man, tensed to swing.

The vestibule was empty.

Neither door had opened, but Lee was alone. He stood for a long time, numb, not wanting to think about what he’d faced, wishing he had something steady to cling to.

When at last he returned down the aisle to his seat, he walked slowly, studying the faces of the other passengers. No one remotely resembled the stranger, no one looked up at him. On his empty seat the newspapers were strewn as he had left them, his sandwich wrappers crumpled on the floor where he’d dropped them. Still, he stood watching the rows of passengers, then at last slid into his seat. He sat with his eyes closed, but there was no way he could forget that icy stare; the man had driven a shaft of cold through him that left him sick with rage. He fidgeted, engulfed in a heavy silence, in a vast and growing solitude that was soon the silence of the empty prairie.

He was twelve years old, standing at the corral fence beside his grandpappy, the two of them staring out at the flat rangeland where there should be nothing to scare anyone, staring out at a moving shadow where there could be no shadow, at a shifting presence that turned his grandpappy pale. Lee had never seen Russell Dobbs scared, had never imagined his grandpappy could be afraid, but now Dobbs was afraid, something was out there, something beyond even Russell Dobbs’s ken, something that the famous train robber couldn’t have destroyed, even with a well-placed bullet.

Lee’s grandpappy was his hero. When Lee was a boy, he hadn’t spent much time with Dobbs, a few days once or twice a year when Dobbs would show up for an unexpected visit, yet the old man had dominated Lee’s childhood. Lee’s dreams of his grandpappy’s adventures had shaped his hunger for fasttrains and fast guns, for gold bullion, for the feel of gold coins running through his fingers. Russell Dobbs was known throughout the West for having taken down more train money than any man alive, and in far more reckless confrontations than any man. Young Lee had dreamed of even more dramatic robberies, had dreamed of far more wealth even than his grandpappy had stolen and had so recklessly spent.

From the time Lee could handle a horse well enough to be of help, he had worked the ranch beside his daddy. His older brother was no good around cattle, and his two older sisters, Nora and Jenny, helped in the kitchen and in the vegetable garden—their parents didn’t believe in girls working with the cattle. Lee worked the ranch, but every waking moment he dreamed of a more exciting life. Even that day leaning on the fence beside Dobbs, staring out at the prairie at what looked like a twist of smoke moving and approaching, the boy was even more alarmed by the old man’s fear than by that half-seen specter, by the shadow of a man where there was no living figure. Dobbs had watched the figure so intently it seemed almost like it was speaking to him. Dobbs’s cheeks were pale beneath the leathered tan and when, after a long while,the haunt vanished, his grandpappy had started as if waking from a dream. And had looked down at Lee, trying to know for sure if Lee had seen it, too.

Well, the five pastured horses and that old steer had sure seen it, they were spooked as hell; but for some reason, none of them had spun and taken off away from it, none of them ran, they just stood staring, twitching and dumb in their fear. That summer, more than sixty years ago, something had visited his grandpappy there at the home ranch. Lee never doubted that Russell Dobbs knew what it was, and that he had seen it before.

Lee had heard talk, back then, that Dobbs drew the devil to him like fire drawn to tinder, some said that Dobbs had made a bargain with Satan, but others claimed that Dobbs, having beat the devil in a wager, would never be shut of him. Whatever the truth, in the pasture that morning, Lee’s grandpappy had been not only afraid, but angry.

After the steer and the horses had settled down, had stopped fidgeting and staring and gone to grazing again, and after his grandpappy had turned away, that was when Lee, still shaken, had turned and seen the yellow cat standing in the door of the barn watching him—and watching the empty prairie beyond, the cat’s back humped, its yellow fur standing up stiff, its golden eyes blazing.

That yellow cat had been afraid of nothing. Lee had liked that tomcat that would kill a rat as big as itself and, fast as lightning, could kill a rattlesnake—the yellow tomcat that was a dead ringer for the McNeil prison cat, for the cat that had slept on Lee’s bunk last night keeping him company after his visitor had vanished, the ragged and battered creature he wished was here now, beside him, to ease his fear of that little blue-eyed man, to calm the chill that, like a finger of ice, seemed lodged in Lee’s very soul.

5

But the big yellow catwas near. He lay curled up on the dusty mohair seat, as invisible as the air around him, unseen but impressing the faintest telltale indentation in the rough gray cloth of the seat cushion. Knowing Lee’s fear and rage, the tomcat purred for Lee, a subliminal song too faint for Fontana to consciously hear, but a sound the cat knew Lee would hear deep inside himself, a purr that matched the rhythm of the rocking train, a rough-throated mutter of comfort meant to ease Lee’s soul, a rumble generated not only by love but by the joy of life itself that, even in his ethereal form, the ghost cat carried with him.

But now Misto purred out of discomfort, too, out of concern for the old convict. A cat will purr not only when he’s happy, he purrs when he’s frightened or distressed. A mortal cat will deliberately purr to himself when he’s hurt or sick, a muttering song to hold on to, perhaps to calm himself, to make himself feel less alone. Now Misto purred for Lee, wanting to hold him steady, wanting to drive away the old cowboy’s sense of that little man’s glinting, blue-eyed presence, to rid Lee of the evil that kept returning seeking to terrify or to win him, grasping hungrily for Lee’s soul.

The blue-eyed man was gone now, the incubus was gone, his black leather briefcase gone, too, the satchel he’d left behind on the seat when he followed Lee out to the vestibule. The moment he’d vanished from the train, the briefcase had dissolved, poof, as completely as a mouse might disappear into the tomcat’s sharp-toothed gulp. But though the man and his briefcase were no more, an aura of evil still drifted within the passenger car, a miasma as caustic as smoke, touching the other passengers, too. A sleeping man woke and stared up the aisle and twisted to look behind him, studying his companions, scowling at the tightly closed doors at either end of the car. Up at the front, a woman laid down her book and half rose up, looking around nervously. Two women stood up from their seats staring all around, seeking the source of whatever had made them shiver. Two seats behind Lee, a toddler climbed into his mother’s lap howling out his own sense of fear. And beside Misto, Lee Fontana sat unmoving, still pale from the encounter in the vestibule, still edgy with the sense of the dark spirit that he knew wouldn’t leave him alone, with the devil’s curse that would continue to follow Dobbs’s descendants.

Lee knew only rough details of the plan Satan had laid out for Dobbs’s heirs those many years ago. He knew only what he’d heard rumored among his neighbors, back on the ranch. Gossip that, when Lee entered the room, would make folks go silent. Stories that the devil had set Dobbs up to destroy a certain gang of brothers, but that during the train robbery as thedevil planned it, Dobbs had turned the tables on Satan. That Dobbs’s deception had so enraged the devil, he had sworn to destroy every Dobbs heir, to force or entice each Dobbs descendant to drive their own souls into the flames, into the pit of hell itself. To destroy the soul of each, but particularly that of Lee Fontana who had so idolized the old train robber. As far as Lee knew, he might be Dobbs’s last heir, all Satan’s vindication against Dobbs’s supposed double cross could be focused, now, on Lee.

As the train slowed for the station ahead, Misto increased his purr, singing to Lee to soothe him; and as they pulled out again with barely time to take on one lone passenger, the cat purred until Lee settled back and dozed again; and beside him the ghost cat closed his eyes, lulled by the train’s rocking rumble.

The ghost cat did not need to sleep, sleep was a healing gift left over from life, a skill comforting and warm but not needed in the spirit world—a talent the newly released ghost must reconstruct from memory, must willfully summon back until he established the habit once more, if he chose to do so, if he wanted that earthly comfort. The yellow ghost cat had so chosen and, drifting now toward sleep, he purred to comfort himself as well asto comfort Lee.

The tomcat didn’t know what woke him. He rose suddenly, startled, half asleep. He shook himself and quickly left Lee’s side, drifting out through the wall of the passenger car, leaving a warm dent in the seat behind him. For a moment he rode the wind giddily, lashing his tail as he peered back in through the dirty window watching Lee, the cat gliding with pleasure alongside the speeding train, and then he somersaulted up to the roof, banking on the wind as agile as a soaring gull.

Landing lightly atop the speeding train, he settled down, still invisible, looking about at the world speeding by him, at the green fields beneath the snowcapped mountains and, off to his right, miles of green pasture and the dull and gentle cows; and they had left the dark, cold waters of Puget Sound behind them. But now, in the cat’s thoughts, he saw not the land that swept past the train, he saw back into a time long past, before ever that vast inland sea had formed, when all the land was dry, he saw into eons past, as it had been, saw a higher and mountainous shore, densely wooded, skirting the Pacific, a raised land with no hint of the deep bowl that would later be carved there to hold the deep waters of Puget Sound. He saw the great glacier to the north, easing slowly down over vast reaches of time, slowly scooping the land away, a gigantic beast of ice slithering and creeping down from the great northern ranges.

He saw a million years of time slip by as the glacier slowly toppled the ancient conifers and crushed them and dug away the land, as it dug the vast trench that would slowly fill with the waters of the sea and of the coastal rivers. He saw millions of years pass by, dwarfing all life into a speck smaller than the tiniest sneeze.

He shivered at the vastness of time, at the vastness of the earth itself, and at the short and tenuous span of life upon it. He perceived, as well as anyone could, that richly varied panorama of life forming and changing, that short span of the arrival of human life, of human evil and human good. He sensed as much of the grand design as his eager cat soul could embrace; but even so, he saw only a small portion of the grandeur which swept away to infinity, the vastness which no creature could truly comprehend.

Atop the train, the cat sensed when Lee woke. He knew when Lee sat up and looked around him, as the train pulled into the next small station. He knew Lee had been dreaming and that he was shaken, that he had experienced again an incident at McNeil that had greatly angered the old man. At once the cat returned to the passenger car, a whirl of air sweeping in through the dirty glass and onto the dusty seat: he was at once caught in Lee’s rage, in the aftermath of the prison rape in which Lee had faced off young Brad Falon.

Falon, a surly man less than half Lee’s age, had been Lee’s enemy ever since that encounter.

He had been Misto’s enemy far longer, yet for very different reasons. The tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern between the two conflicts, but he knew that in some way they were linked together.

When Misto left McNeil for that short time after he died and was buried in the prison yard, he had fallen into a new life almost at once, he was born in a small Southern town, a squirming and energetic kitten who was soon picked from the big, healthy litter to be given as a birthday present to little Sammie Blake. He had grown up loved by the little girl and loving her, had grown into a strong, defiant big tomcat when he found himself protecting Sammie against Brad Falon and was murdered by Falon’s hand.

Falon had been the cat’s adversary in Misto’s last life, and he was bonded in some indecipherable way to Lee himself and to what would happen to Lee. There was a pattern building, a tangle the cat could as yet barely see, a relationship between Lee, and Brad Falon, and Misto’s little girl—the tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern, but he didn’t like it much.

Sammie was five when her daddy brought the tiny yellow kitten home to her, just before he was sent overseas in the Second World War. Sammie’s mama worked as a bookkeeper in their little town of Rome, Georgia, and their small rented house seemed very empty, once Morgan had gone. Empty, and then soon vulnerable. The minute Morgan Blake left for the navy, Becky’s and Morgan’s old schoolmate began to come around, uninvited. Brad Falon was a well-muscled, pushy young man. In high school he had run with Morgan, but Becky had never liked him. Now he began to annoy Becky, coming to the door, frightening Sammie with his cold eyes and slippery talk. Becky never let him in, but he kept coming. The late night he came there drunk, pounding on the locked door, not beseeching anymore but demanding to be let in, and then breaking in, it was Misto who drove him off.

As Brad broke a window, reached in and unlocked it, Becky ran to the phone. Falon knocked out most of the glass, and swung through. He grabbed the phone from Becky, threw it against the wall. When little Sammie flew at him, he hit her hard against the table. He shoved Becky to the floor and knelt over her, hitting her and pulling up her skirt. As Becky yelled at Sammie to run, the big yellow cat exploded from the bedroom, landing in Falon’s face raking and biting him. Brad tried to pull him off then flicked open his pocketknife.

The cat fought him, dodging the knife. Becky grabbed a shard of broken glass and flew at Falon. He hit her, had her down again, cutting her. The cat was on him again when a neighbor heard their screams and came running; the wiry old fellow saw the broken window and climbed through, but already Falon had fled, banging out through the front door.

Behind him, Misto lay dying from a long, gaping wound that bled too fast, that bled away his life before anyone could help him. But even as Falon fled, Misto’s ghost rose and followed. He followed as Falon dodged the police, gained his car and took off fast heading out of Rome, heading for Atlanta. The Rome cops didn’t like Falon, they wouldn’t be gentle if they caught him, nor would the county D.A. Some of the younger officers, having gone through school with Falon, observing the trouble he had caused all those years, might indeed have turned to law enforcement careers in an effort to right the wrongs of the world.

At the airport south of Atlanta Falon bought a plane ticket and an hour later, nervously drinking coffee from a paper cup, he boarded a flight for the West Coast, where he had connections who could be useful in whatever venture he chose to pursue. As Falon settled into the dusty seat in the DC-4, Misto drifted into the plane and settled unseen beside him, not too close, but unwilling to lose sight of him.

Falon had friends in a number of West Coast cities. Why, the cat wondered, had he headed for Seattle? Had that urge been formed simply at Falon’s random choice? Or, by Satan’s wishes? Why Seattle, not twenty miles from where Lee was doing federal time at McNeil? The ghost cat couldn’t pretend to understand the forces at work here, but Falon’s destination distressed him. Lee had no connection to Falon, and no connection to Georgia where Falon had grown up. Lee might have no family left anywhere, as far as he knew. He had lived his life on the run, had left the home ranch as a hot-tempered sixteen-year-old, and had not kept in touch with his relatives.

Misto, even in his ghostly state, couldn’t know everything. There was, however, the one puzzling link: the mirrorlike resemblance between Lee’s little sister, Mae, and little Sammie Blake. Mae Fontana, born a lifetime ago, before Sammie, whose old tintype picture, taken at their South Dakota ranch, Lee had carried with him all these years, in and out of prison, the picture he still carried among his meager belongings. Two little girls more alike than twins, the exact same wide brown eyes, same little heart-shaped faces, same dimples cleaving deep, the same crooked smiles, the same long pale hair so painful to comb free of tangles. Two little girls from two different centuries, more alike than twins could be. Misto had known of no connection between Lee and Mae, and Sammie. Until now, when in some inexplicable manner Brad Falon formed the connection.

When Falon killed Misto, when Misto rose as ghost to follow Falon out to the West Coast, Falon soon committed a bank robbery in which he shot a guard in the leg. He was tried, summarily convicted in federal court, and was sent from Seattle to the nearest federal prison, at McNeil Island. Though his sentence was shorter than the U.S. attorney would have liked, there was no question in the ghost cat’s mind that forces beyond his ken had brought Falon and Lee together.

Did the dark spirit, with his persistent hatred of Lee’s ancestor, mean to use Falon against Russell Dobbs’s grandson, against the failing old man? But how was little Sammie a part of his plan, this child so like Lee’s sister? If she were in some unknown way also a descendant of Russell Dobbs, then she, too, would be in danger.

When, at McNeil, Lee’s emphysema grew worse on cold, damp days, but then he felt good again when sunshine warmed the island, he grew increasingly desperate about his old age, grew more determined to pull off one more job when he got out; he did not mean to face his failing years with nothing to support himself.

With sympathy the cat remained near him. Misto was witness when, not a week after Falon arrived at McNeil, the prison rape occurred that so enraged Lee, the conflict between Lee and Falon playing, clearly, into the dark web Lee’s adversary was weaving. As Lee confronted younger, stronger Falon, did the dark spirit expect Falon to kill Lee? More in keeping with the devil’s plans, the cat thought, would be that Lee kill Falon in a passion of unbridled rage that would destroy Lee’s own salvation.

Or was the confrontation between Falon and Lee intended to lay some pattern for the future, for a plan that would prove even more satisfying to the dark one? Though Misto could move back and forth within short periods of time, when it came to the complicated shape of the distant and tangled future, he was as lost as if trying to swim the heaving depths of Puget Sound.

But whatever the devil’s purpose in bringing Lee and Falon together, it was surely no accident, and the yellow tom grew increasingly wary for Lee—just as he worried for Sammie herself, who was somehow entangled with Lee’s own destiny.

6

After Lee’s encounter with Brad Falon he’d found himself watching the shadows more carefully, and he didn’t like this kind of fear. He had been headed for the laundry that afternoon, had started to cut through the exercise room when he saw half a dozen jocks in there pumping iron. One of them, a new arrival, had eyes as cold as a hunting vulture. Brad Falon had already gathered a cluster of followers around him, and Lee didn’t want to mess with him. His good sense told him to turn back and go a different way, to avoid trouble, but he stubbornly pushed on in. Afterward, hours later, he wonderedwhy he’d done that. The men watched him expressionlessly from where they worked the weights, the press, their rhythm never ceasing but their eyes never leaving him, their stripped bodies sleek with sweat. Lee moved on past, knowing this wasn’t smart, feeling Falon’s stare and not liking it. When, behind him, the rhythm of the weight machine stopped, he tightened his grip on the knife in his pocket, didn’t falter or let his glance flicker.

He entered the auto shop skirting a battered touring car set up on blocks waiting for a rebirth. No one entered behind him, and he could still hear the steady rhythm of the exercise equipment. Passing the touring car—a badly dented relic, one fender twisted, paint peeling over heavy rust, cloth top in tatters—he heard a faint moan.

Beyond the car against the wall lay a power sprayer beside half a dozen cans of paint. A motor block hung suspended from chains over a greasy tarp. He heard the moan again, a wrenching cry from among a stack of cardboard cartons. He glanced back toward the exercise room, then moved fast.

Behind the boxes lay a young inmate curled into the fetal position, his face covered by his pulled-up shirt, his naked ribs sucking in quick, shallow breaths. Bloody scratches covered his back. Lee had seen him around the prison yard. Randy Sanderford, a clean-faced boy doing three for an identity scam. His pants and shorts had been pulled down around his ankles, his blue shirt jerked over his face and mouth, likely muffling his yells. Bright red blood and semen spread from his rectum down his inner thighs.

Lee lifted and half carried him to the shower between the shop and the exercise room. Now he could sense a stirring among the jocks. The machines were silent. Listening warily, he stripped Randy down and turned the warm water on him, shoved the lye soap at him, told him to scrub, and where to scrub. The youngster hadn’t spoken. He gripped the soap, shivering, began to wash, wincing at the pain. Above the shower Lee could hear the men moving around again, heard the outer door pop air as it closed. Randy whimpered once, then was quiet. Lee stood watching him, filled with rage at the useless jocks but with rage at the kid, too, for being so stupid, for letting this happen to him. The water stopped at last. Randy came out shivering. Blood still flowed, thinned by the water on his body. The boy stared at Lee, frightened and ashamed.

“What did you do, go in there to work out with that bunch? No one has to tell me this is your first time in the joint.”

The boy began to cry.

“I’m going to tell you something, Sanderford. When you come into a place like this you’d better have one of two things with you, an ice pick or a jar of Vaseline. You’re going to need one or the other.”

Randy dried himself off with his shirt, staining it with blood.“I just came down to work out, I didn’t … I was working the bench press when they grabbed me …” His face flushed.

“What the hell did you think would happen? You thought they were just a bunch of nice guys in there working out, that you’d waltz in, introduce yourself, and you’d all be friends?”

Randy looked so shamefaced that Lee wanted to smash him. Didn’t the kid have any sense? Where the hell had he been all his life? What had he learned in his twenty-some years? “Hell, Sanderford. These prison turks aren’t little kids playing dirty games in the barn.” The baby-faced kid looked like he’d never been anywhere, like he’d had his nose wiped all his life by his rich mama. Sanderford wiped his mouth and smoothed back his hair.

“These men don’t just rape, Sanderford. They’d think nothing more of killing you than of crushing a cockroach.” Lee stared down at his own clenched fists, stifling an alarming desire to work Sanderford over, to beat the hell out of the kid, beat some sense into him. Shocked by his own rage,he stared hard at Sanderford, and turned away.

He had no reason to feel this boiling rage, this wasn’t his normal response to a dumb kid, this kind of anger. He stood puzzled, watching Sanderford pull on his clothes. “You’d better do some thinking, kid, better decide how you’re going to stay out of trouble in here, how you’re going to defend yourself if you mean to survive in this joint.” Trying to get his anger under control, Lee saw again Brad Falon’s stare, felt again the cold threat, was so enraged that heavy coughing rose up in his sick lungs, choking him.

He walked Sanderford back to his cell, got him there in time for the afternoon count. He traded a pack of cigarettes to a reliable inmate for a small bottle of iodine, and paid a second pack to get the iodine smuggled in to Sanderford. Lee didn’t smoke, the coffin nails were for trading. Tired and irritable, he went on to his own cell and lay on his bunk coughing and spitting up phlegm. The day hadn’t started out good, and the next days didn’t get any better. He was sick enough, the doc pulled him off farmwork for a week. Sanderford followed Lee like a lost puppy, after he was raped. The kid was grateful, but mostly he wanted protection. And, whether Randy was following him or not, Lee would catch Falon watching him from across the yard, a calculating coldness that made him want to waste Falon. He felt a threat from the man that wasn’t just prison fear and wariness. Something more, as if the very shadows where Falon sometimes stood, watched him, too. And Falon’s derision was magnified when Sanderford was hanging around. Lee sent Randy packing twice, but the kid kept coming back. He had lost patience when Sanderford,in desperation, began laying out scams to him.

Some of the moves were new to Lee, they were good ones and he found himself listening. The kid seemed to know his way around businesses and banks, though his easy life hadn’t taught him much else. A dropout from UC Berkeley, whose pronounced heart murmur had kept him out of the service, the kid had disowned his family, hating their values, hating everything he called the establishment. He had blown the money his father gave him on women and on three expensive cars that he demolished one after the other while drunk. For kicks, he began ripping off the colleges his father forced him to enter. When he got into big trouble at Cal, his father at last threw him out and cut off his allowance. Within a week Randy had gotten a job as salesman at a small jewelry store.Within six months he had taken the owner for ninety thousand dollars and disappeared. Then, while living on the interest from the ninety thousand, he began ripping off banks. The boy had talent, Lee gave him that. He was clever and inventive, and Lee tucked away the scams for future use. If things were real changed on the outside, if he couldn’t pull the kind of job he had in mind, maybe he’d have a go at the traveler’s check operation.

“All you have,” Randy said, “is the little transaction slip you get from the first bank, with the numbers of the traveler’s checks on it, to show the second bank.

“Two things are important at the second bank, the way you give your sob story, and the bank’s willingness to please without checking out your story. You have to be subtle. Honest and quiet, and not too quick with the charm.” Lee thought Sanderford, with that innocent face and big blue eyes, would have little trouble conning some young teller.

“I always pick large, busy banks in big cities,” Randy said. “They want your business, they’ll bend over backward to please the customer. If you need a few hundred bucks, that’s the way to do it.” The boy gave Lee an innocent smile. “Good idea, though, to have false ID. The second bank always wants to see something.” He shrugged. “I’ve never been questioned. Every time, I just walked out of there cool as you please with the cash in my hand.”

But Sanderford had been arrested and imprisoned for a different kind of forgery that, Randy said himself, was amateurish and stupid. He had been so intent on the convertible he had stolen that he had let his attempt to cash a simple forged check trap him, he said he never would have stolen the car in the first place if he hadn’t been drunk. Lee thought maybe if Sanderford left the booze alone he’d make a first-rate con man. But Lee didn’t like the kid. Sanderford was intelligent, very bright. But if he hated the world so much, why didn’t he give up the booze, knuckle down, andreally milk the humanity he despised? Watching the baby-faced boy, Lee felt only disgust for him.

7

The rocking rhythm of the train and the stuffy heat of the car put Lee to sleep again in a luxury of malaise. He had no need to wake and hustle around, no prison job to go to, no lockdown time to think about, not even a set mealtime. He woke and ate his sandwich, and when the vendor came around, he bought another for later. He slept and woke as he chose, enjoying his freedom, looking out the window at the green pastures and at the long orchard rows fanning by so fast they dizzied him if he looked too long. Or looking down at the streets and into the windows of the small towns where the train crept through, or out at the boxcars crowded into the freight yards, and then as they gained speed once more he’d ease back, soothed by the green hills, or by the climb into the dark and wooded mountains, the train rocking and tilting, taking the narrow curves. He liked traveling, liked moving on, he liked the speed that made him feel suspended in time, with nothing to stop him or fret him.

Nothing except that sometimes when he woke he had dreamed dark dreams, would come awake planning crimes that were not his kind of brutality, actions against others that disgusted him, would wake to ugly suggestions and to the hoary presence that wouldn’t leave him alone, that was more real than any dream. But then sometimes he’d wake feeling easier and was aware of the prison cat beside him, lying warm and invisible on the seat next to him—nothing to see, the seat empty except for his sandwich wrapper and his spread-out newspapers. But thecat was there, curled next to him. Reaching into the empty space, Lee could feel his warmth, and when he could feel the rough, thick texture of the tomcat’s fur, and when he stroked the ghost cat, a gentle paw pulled his hand down closer, the big invisible tom enjoying the stroking just as much ashe had in real life.

Lee told himself he imagined the cat, and that he’d imagined the dark presence in his dreams and in his cell that last night, told himself he had only imagined the evil in that puny little blue-eyed salesman. But he knew he had imagined none of it. He knew what he’d seen, that both the ghost cat and that chill shadow were more than real as they followed him onto the train.

He was happy to have the cat, he was good company, a friendly and comforting spirit to steady and embolden him. But he didn’t need his darker traveling companion. Spirit, haunt, whatever you’d name him, Lee knew it was the same unworldly presence that had tormented his grandpappy when Lee was a boy. He didn’t need this chill spirit that had made a bargain with old Russell Dobbs and for which Lee himself was now being prodded—being pushed toward the devil’s due, as some might call it, that the dark spirit seemed to think he deserved.

It was May of 1882 when Russell Dobbs, in the line of his work, relieved the Indiana Flyer of ten thousand dollars’ worth of gold bullion just north of Camrose, South Dakota. Stopping the train where it slowed at a curve, Russell boarded with his partner, Samil Hook. Samil was a little man, wiry, and a crack shot. Dobbs towered over him, muscular and rough shaven. Between them they took down the conductor and the four crew members, left them tied in the express car while they loaded eight canvas bags of gold bullion into a small spring wagon.

Leaving the train, the two men separated. Samil drove the wagon, keeping to the deep woods along a narrow timber trail to a cabin hidden in a stand of pine trees ten miles north of Agar. Russell didn’t worry that Samil would double-cross him, Samil feared Russell with a passion far more powerful than greed. Samil knew Russell wouldn’t kill a train man if he could avoid it, but that he would kill a friend who deceived him as casually as shooting a rabbit for his breakfast.

Leaving Samil and the wagon, Russell rode alone to Cliffordsville where he holed up in the Miner’s Hotel. The proprietress always took a keen pleasure in sheltering him. She would swear he had been there for better than a week. It was the next morning, early, one of the bartenders came to Mattie Lou’s door to tell Russell a gentleman, a stranger, was asking for him.

As far as Russell knew, no one but Mattie Lou had seen him slip in through the back entry, and Mattie Lou had told no one. He finished dressing, strapped on his gun belt, and went down the back stairs so as to come on the visitor from behind.

Halfway down, a man stood in the shadows of the landing. City clothes, fancy dark suit, embroidered cravat, soft black pigskin gloves—and the gleam of metal as his hand slipped inside his coat. Russell drew, fired twice point-blank, close enough to blow out the side of a barn.

The man didn’t fall.

Russell saw no wound, no blood. The stranger eased up the stairs never taking his eyes from Russell, his Colt .36 revolver fixed on Russell as steadily as his smile. Russell fired three more rounds, again hitting the man square in the belly. Again, he didn’t fall, didn’t jerk, didn’t seem to feel the impact.

“Perhaps by now, Russell, you have guessed who I am?”

Russell had seen his bullets enter a man and disappear into nowhere. Hadn’t seen them strike anything behind the man. He fired again knowing the impact should put the man down, knowing it wouldn’t. He looked toward the hotel lobby expecting that people would have heard the shots.

“No one can hear us, Russell.”

“What the hell are you?”

“I think you know what I am.”

Russell wasn’t a religious man. If the way he lived sent him to hell, so be it. But he sure hadn’t expected hell to come seeking him. “What do you want?”

“I want your help. In exchange, of course, I offer you a gift.”

Russell waited.

“I can give you freedom from death and injury, I can make you impervious to any wound including those caused by a knife or bullet.”

Russell had heard that old saw around a dozen campfires. But the man smiled.“Maybe you have heard it, Russell. This time, it’s no tall story. Freedom from sickness, too. From pain. From death by any weapon. Freedom to live in health until you are an old, old man.”

“An old man? How old?”

“Past eighty.”

In those days, fifty was a respectable age. Russell waited. The man straightened his cravat, leaned comfortably against the hotel wall, and laid out his proposition.

“There are two families, brothers. The Vickerses and the Loves. Bad blood between them. With every coast-to-coast train worth taking down, it’s a standoff who gets in position first to rob it.”

“I know all that.”

“Last week, the Loves robbed the mail train out of Topeka. The law was on their tail, and they had half a dozen lookouts when they buried the gold. Meant to return for it that night. The Vickerses found it, dug it up, then turned Lem and Cleve Love in to Pinkerton.” The man smiled. “They did it to cut down the competition. You can imagine how that inflamed the feud.”

“So?” Russell watched him warily.

“Cage Vickers is the only one in his family who doesn’t steal. Some kind of throwback, maybe. Whatever his problem, he’s pure as a newborn. And,” he said, smiling, “he’s fallen for Tessa Love, he means to marry her.”

Russell turned away. This was of no interest to him.“I have a friend waiting.”

He was stopped cold, couldn’t move, he couldn’t touch his gun in the holster.

The stranger continued.“Neither family would allow him to marry Tessa. He’s decided to get rid of them all, to kill them all, including his own brothers. He tells himself they’re all without virtue, that he’d be doing the world a favor.”

Again Russell tried to move, but he was locked in a grip as tight as if he’d been turned to stone.

“When the next big gold shipment comes through out of California, heading east, Cage plans to set up both families to be caught red-handed when they try to stop the freight. Once they’re locked up and convicted—he’s hoping safe behind bars, on long sentences—he means to marry Tessa, leavethis part of the country, and vanish.”

“Fine. Then the trains will all be mine.”

“I don’t want that, I’ve taken a lot of trouble manipulating the Midwestern railroads. Through the right people in Washington I’ve been able to infuriate every settler who thought he was going to buy railroad land for a dollar an acre, I’ve worked to increase the land prices, to foment a strike against the railroad that has escalated into a small civil war. It’s already cost the railroads a nice sum, and the public, enraged by the government railway, has turned to protecting the train robbers. No,” he said, smiling, “I like things just as I have them, I want no change, I don’t want the gangs stopped, I want Cage Vickers stopped. I don’t like his plan. I want Vickers brought down.”

“So do it, you’re the one with the power.” Trying again vainly to move his feet or to reach the butt of his gun though he doubted a bullet would faze the apparition.

“I can’t stop him, the stupid boy is totally pure, he can’t see me, can’t hear me, he’s beyond my influence.”

Russell scowled.“I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

“I can’t change events. I can only influence the players—some of them. There has to be a respectable amount of evil in a man before I can reach him.”

“Hell, I’m not killing Cage Vickers, if that’s what you want. And I’d be a fool to try to warn his brothers or the Loves. Any one of them would fill me full of holes.”

The visitor waited.

“I gather this bargain wouldn’t take effect until after I’d done the deed. That your protection of my life wouldn’t begin until I’d already risked my neck for you.”

“That is so. However, if you don’t stop Cage Vickers, I’ll take great pleasure, when the time of your death arrives, in seeing you suffer, eternally, in ways you can’t yet imagine.”

Russell said nothing.

“With the bargain I offer, you will have a long, pain-free, and profitable life, any kind of life you choose—youth and wealth and beautiful women, enviable power and superb health.

“You have only to stop Cage Vickers, see that none of the brothers are apprehended, and not go to the law yourself.

“If you refuse my bargain, I have within my power many creative ways to annoy and harass you for the remainder of your miserable life, runaway horses, train conductors who are fast and accurate and lust for blood, women who, once you have made love to them, feel an overwhelming desire to maim youas you lie sleeping beside them. Little things, Russell, accomplished through the minds of others, but oh, so effective.”

Russell remembered stories of multiple calamities that beset some men over an entire lifetime, innocent men saddled with strings of disasters that defied all laws of probability.

“If you work with me,” the dark spirit said, “you will know no sickness, no wound or pain, no bullet will ever touch you, you will not die of any cause until you are an old, old man and still healthy and vigorous. Even then, your death will be peaceful, no pain and no fear.”

“And in exchange,” Russell said, “I stop Cage Vickers from getting the Loves and the Vickerses arrested, so they can go on robbing trains. That seems simple enough.”

“That is the bargain.”

Russell was a born gambler, that’s what robbing the trains was all about. But he’d never played for stakes like these. “Under what circumstances,” he said softly, “would you consider that I had bested you?”

“Under no circumstances. If you do as I say, that won’t happen.”

“If Cage’s plan fails, if neither family takes the train down successfully and no one of either family is arrested, I would be free of you?”

“You would.”

“And you would uphold your bargain.”

He nodded.

“Would you throw in that Cage and Tessa marry anyway, and live long and happy lives together, without the ire or retribution of either family?”

“Why would I do that? I told you that my powers are limited. I can only influence, I can’t twist fate.”

Russell looked back at him and kept his thoughts locked tight inside himself. He received so penetrating a look in return that he had to fight to keep from glancing away. He stared at the stranger until suddenly the figure vanished. The stair and alley lay empty.

Russell stood in the alley shivering. And slowly considering his options.

His question had not been answered. He had no real promise from the stranger. He thought about that a long time, then at last he turned and made his way back up the stairs, to his lady friend.

8

The train bucked and slowed, waking Lee as the conductor hurried through calling out,“Centralia. Five minutes.” Straightening up, he watched out the window as the mailbags were heaved off. Two passengers descended from the car ahead, hurrying inside the long, red-roofed brick building, then almost at once they were pulling out again, the white peak of Mount Saint Helens towering bright, to his left, against the heavy gray sky, bringing half a dozen passengers rushing to Lee’s side of the train to look. But soon Lee slept again, only vaguely aware of the frequent hollow rumbles as the train crossed the railroad bridges that spanned Washington’s swift rivers. When the sour smell of caged chickens filled the train, passing through Winlock, he looked out at the long, ugly rows of wooden chicken houses and, beyond them, a tractor and trailer spreading chicken manure on the vegetable fields. Not a job he’d want, not mired in that smell all day.

Soon, dozing, he woke again when they skirted the Columbia, the river’s giant rafts of logs moving below him, down toward Lake Vancouver headed for the sawmills. How would it be to settle down here along the shore somewhere in a little shack, get some sort of job, maybe taking care of someone’s horses, forget his grand plans for a hefty robbery and for that life-sustaining nest egg? Forget his urge to take on the feds one last time, to outsmart them once and for good? Along the green of the marsh, the train’s approach sent restless flocks of shorebirds exploding up into the sour mist, sweeping away beneath low, heavy clouds. There’d be a twenty-minute stop at Portland, where Lee thought to get off and stretch his aching legs. Sitting too long stove him up like a stall-bound cowpony that was never let out to run.

It was stormy coming into Portland, the afternoon sky darkening, the streets slick with rain. Ignoring the drizzle, he moved out into the train’s vestibule where he could get a good look. The streets were busy with fast, slick cars, so many of them, kicking up water along the gutters, streets lined with impressive new buildings sandwiched in between the comfortable old brick-and-stone structures from an earlier time. The train slowed approaching the three-story station, its peaked roof and the tall, handsome clock tower stark against the gray sky. But far ahead beyond the city, light streaked the sky where the storm looked to be clearing, to be moving on north passing over the train. The station lights glowed, the neon signs announcing, UNION STATION. GO BY TRAIN. Stepping back to his seat, he made sure his wrapped sandwiches were in plain sight on his two seats atop his neatly arranged newspapers, hoping to mark his occupancy.

Moving down the metal steps and into the station, he stood staring around the vast terminal, looking up at the high, domed ceiling towering above him, at its soaring structure of curved and interlaced crossbeams. The sound of other trains departing and arriving was only background to the loudspeaker’s harsh and metallic commands. People hurried past him talking quickly, hauling luggage, shouting to others ahead of them. When he didn’t move out of the way, they shouldered past him, scowling, busy travelers louder and more intense than a crowd of inmates, and way less disciplined. Women laughing, folks in little clusters talking frantically, kids running in and out between them not caring if they stepped on your feet. He wandered, pushing through, battered and pummeled. Maybe he should have stayed in his seat, quiet and away from people. Feeling in his pocket to be sure he had his ticket, he at last retreated into a small tobacco shop, a crowded little cubicle.

The smell of the rich tobacco was homey and welcoming though he’d never smoked or chewed, a heady scent that stirred something from the past he couldn’t place. A woman stood behind the little counter, one hand on the cash register. Young, skinny, red hair to her shoulders, freckles heavy across her nose and cheeks. A baby in a carriage behind the counter, tucked up in its blue blanket and, when he glanced down over the counter, a little girl sitting on the floor playing with a set of jacks. He felt embarrassed coming in here when he didn’t mean to buy anything.

“To get out of the crowd,” he said shyly, looking at the young woman. “Too many people out there.”

At the sound of his voice the child behind the counter looked up at him. Her gaze never wavering, she stood up clutching the edge of the counter, staring up at him with a steady, bold look that shocked him. Her look was so like his little sister Mae’s, that he took a step back. Well, she didn’t look like Mae, she had carroty red hair like her mother, a pale, freckled face that would have burned easily in that long-ago South Dakota sun. But beneath the child’s black lashes, her brown eyes proffered the same challenging gaze as Mae’s bold assessment: curious about him, unafraid but with a look deeper down that said if anyone reached to hurt her she’d kick and bite as desperately as a roped mustang. A look that put him in mind of the first time he put Mae on the back of a horse, a small old cowpony, back behind the hay barn wheretheir mother wouldn’t see. He’d started to lead her along, walking beside her, holding her firmly in the saddle—with disdain she had taken the reins from his hand, pushed him away, kneed the cowpony as if she’d done that all her life, and moved on out at a nice fast walk, legs and heels where they should be though her feet didn’t reach the stirrups, a nice easy seat that told him she’d been watching the cowmen since she was big enough to look out the window, that she had absorbed what she wanted from them and didn’t want his interference. Though later, learning to rein a cowpony,spinning him, hopping over logs, opening gates and then learning to rope, she’d listened and followed what he showed her.

This child wasn’t anything like Mae but the same strong spirit was there in her eyes and a belated grieving hit him, a terrible longing for his small sister that nearly undid him. He bought two candy bars from the young mother, where she kept a little shelf of treats and a few magazines among the cigars and cigarettes and cans of tobacco and bags of Dull Durham. He left the shop quickly. When, once, he looked back, the child was still staring. He hurried on to the train, hoping his seat wasn’t taken.

Lee dozed out of Portland, dreaming of his childhood and of those early days when he left home at sixteen, horse and saddle and a few coins in his pocket, going out on his own. Leaving his little sister behind, and that was the last he ever saw or heard of her. He didn’t know why he hadn’t kept in touch, written to her once in a while. He was young and hotheaded and too busy making his own life, trying to survive among grown men, some of them cruel as a hungry buzzard. He knew Mae was all right, there at home, and he knew she could take care of herself.

He woke to darkened windows, night drawing down. He ate another ham sandwich and the two candy bars. The few farm lights he could see far off were dim and scattered. The passengers around him snoozed, lulled by the train’s hypnotic rhythm. The crowding of strangers together into a protected metal womb that raced free across the dark land seemed strange and unreal, as if they were all caught in the same inexplicable dream. The passengers around him had pulled on sweaters, opened their traveling bags to strew jackets and personal belongings out across the few empty seats. The little toddler up front seemed the most alive, whining and squirming. When the boy made a bad smell, his mother grabbed him up, snatched up her carryall, and hurried him off to the restroom. That stink, mixed with the stale-sandwich smell and the gathering odor of stale sweat, grew so heavy that at last Lee returned to the vestibule, where he could breathe, stood looking out at the night, sucking in the good cold wind.

He remained there alone, wary that the invasive shadow would return, but more caught up in the long-ago nights of the past when he rode balanced on a galloping train, waiting for the moment when he would enter the engineer’s car, force the frightened man to stop the train, when he and his partner would tie up the engineer and the one or two guards, would relieve them of the mail and money bags, would step down again into the night and be gone before their victims could free themselves.

He remained in the vestibule until he was freezing, then headed back to his seat. Buttoning his jacket tight, he settled down, pulling the newspapers over him. When sleep took him, no dark spirit bothered him; waking sometimes, he saw only his reflection in the glass, against black emptiness—but then he woke suddenly to see the moon had risen, and he sat up startled, staring out.

A foreign land lay beyond the glass, a nightmare vision as twisted and unnatural as the face of the moon or of some distant and virulent planet: moonstruck lava ridges rising up twisted into phantasmic shapes casting unearthly shadows around them, towering, twisted specters sprung from bare earth where no tree, no bush, or blade could survive, only those monstrous twists of rising stone formed eons ago, by the ancient volcanoes that still marched across this land and north into Canada. The stark remnant of times long past held him, too fascinated to look away. How long he watched he wasn’t sure before he felt suddenly the weight of the ghost cat pressing against him, warm against his jacket, and could hear him purring. When he looked down, Misto was there looking up at him; the ghost cat twitched a whisker, making Lee smile.

Did Misto mean to travel with him clear to his destination, clear to Blythe? Lee hoped that was his intention, though he didn’t know why the big yellow tom would want to head for that parched desert, he didn’t know why Misto was so determined to stay with him. Whatever the reason, the security of the big tomcat eased him—a bold guardian against the dark thoughts that too often pushed and prodded at him. Lee was learning to depend on that steadying sense of rightness that the burly beast lent him, that sense of stubborn protection that Lee found so comforting.

Misto dozed warm and close against Lee, purring as the cat idly dipped into his own memories, into thoughts of his own past lives. He thought about Lee and Mae as children, and then remembered lives lived long before that one, recalling dark medieval times when cats were thought to be witches’ familiars, when he had barely escaped murder as one of these, and he remembered another time when he hadn’t escaped, when he had been hanged with the so-called witch beside him, a lovely, dark-haired young woman whose spirit, too, had moved on into a happier realm.

How variable the fate of cats, and of their consorts, over the centuries, from those times of bloody cruelty, to the luxuriant idolatry a pampered cat knew in ancient Egypt. How indecipherable the vicissitudes of time, how mysterious the meaning of life for all living creatures. Drifting off into sleep, Misto wondered at how unfathomable life was, and of the far more vast spirit, wondered at the mysteries in all their eternal truths that not even the far-seeing ghost cat could decipher.

When Lee woke, the cat was gone. Only the sense of him remained and a lingering warmth against his jacket. The sun was up, the Oregon smog vanished, and the smell of the sea came strong. He looked out at the rolling waves brightening the Pacific, and at the green hills and tall forests north of San Francisco; and on a whim, knowing he shouldn’t spend the money, he thought of having breakfast in the fancy dining car. Rising, he went to wash himself in the restroom. He shaved, cleaned up as best he could, and then headed up through the passenger cars and the sleeping cars with their little, closed cubicles.

In the dining car, he expected to have to stand in line but it was early, the waiters were just getting set up, laying out heavy silverware, fine glasses, and white napkins on bright white tablecloths. He was seated alone at a small table. The East Bay hills swept by on his left, a glimpse of the sea and dark redwoods across to his right. Sipping the best coffee he’d tasted in ten years, he ordered three fried eggs, hash browns, bacon, and a biscuit with gravy. He hadn’t dined like this since well before McNeil, and he didn’t expect to do so again, not in the foreseeable future.

He returned to his seat heavy with too much food, and as they made their way down the coast he tried not to sleep, he sat enjoying the bright green of the hilly pastures and the fat livestock. There were new calves everywhere, and a bull mounting a cow not a hundred feet from the train brought embarrassed giggles down the length of the car.

It was dusk as they approached the outskirts of L.A., too overcast to see the great letters marking the Hollywood Hills, but the nearer lights of the small towns swept by clear enough, picking out homelier neighborhoods, small businesses, and little wooden cottages tucked among tall Victorian homes. He tried to read the cheap dime novel he’d brought, but now he kept envisioning, at every scene he read, a crueler way to handle the action, a colder and more sadistic turn that the writer should have thought of himself.

Approaching the L.A. station, the train edged slowly through what seemed miles of lighted freight yard. As soon as they came to a halt and the conductor stepped aside, Lee swung out of his seat and down the steps, carrying his few belongings. Inside the station he ignored the crowds that pushed around him as he walked the length of the big building trying to ease his aching legs, trying to come fully awake, after sitting too long on the train.

He had a long layover here. He asked questions, found the gate where he’d board, found a wooden bench to himself, and at last he spread out his papers, and settled in. He’d be glad when he hit Blythe. Right now, he never wanted to see another train. Not as a passenger, shut in with a bunch of strangers, and not with evenone whining kid. He lay down on the bench trying to sleep, trying to ignore the noise of people hurrying around him, but he had slept too much on the train. Restless, he read for a while, in the poor light, and then rose and paced the station again, trying to make the hours go faster. And then at last, tired out, he found another bench, lay down again covered with his papers and coat, lay waiting for morning, waiting for his train to Blythe.

9

Lee jerked awake as the train’s couplings shifted, he could feel the engine straining as it began the heavy pull up Banning Pass, the passenger car rocking in the sharp wind that swept down between the mountains. He was glad to have left L.A. behind him and San Bernardino, too—he had stayed on the train during that two-hour layover there, hadn’t swung off to report to his parole officer as his printed instructions told him to do, he hadn’t felt like it. If the PO wanted to see him he could find him in Blythe, at work as his release plan told him to do. He had boarded the train to Blythe bleary-eyed and stiff after sleeping on that hard wooden bench most of the night; even a sprung prison cot would have been luxury. Breakfast had been a dry sandwich in the train station, at a little booth where the giggling shopkeeper must have had those dried-up ham-and-cheese treats stashed for a week or more.

As the train strained rising up the pass he looked out below him, down at the vast apple orchards, miles of green trees marching in straight formation across the high desert. Rising from his seat, he moved stiffly out to the vestibule, stood in the fresh wind smelling the heady scent of apple blossoms, the sweetness making him think again of Lucita, of old passions never fulfilled. One time, they’d been rodeoing, he and Jake and Lucita, not riding but just as spectators, just for the hell of it, sitting on a fenceat Salinas watching the bull riding, but ready to swing off the rail fast if the Brahma turned in their direction. When the bull did head for them Lucita swung off but she caught her heel and nearly fell. They both grabbed her, pulled her up, but it was Lee she clung to. He’d felt her excitement, clinging close, both of them rising to the same urge—until she looked up, saw Jake’s expression, and she pulled away from Lee straightening her vest and hat. She was so beautiful. Long, dark hair down over her shoulders, so slim in her leather vest, her pale silk shirtand well-fitting jeans, the silver jewelry at her throat and wrists exotic and cool against her deep tan. When Jake turned away, her dark Latin eyes were hot on Lee once more.

That look still made him wonder, sometimes. What if they had pursued what they felt, what if she had married him instead of Jake? What would life have been like? He thought for a while about that, Lucita in bed with him, his hands on her, the two of them in a little cabin just big enough to turn around in, cozy and isolated.

But how would he have made a living for her? Not farming, like Jake. Maybe breaking colts, or general ranch work—but that would have gotten them nowhere. Lucita slaving away in a primitive ranch kitchen, her long beautiful hands roughened, her dark eyes filling with disappointment when he didn’t ever make more than the meager subsistence of a ranch hand. Her disappointment and anger when he began to yearn for the open road again, when he began to hanker for real money, when his thieving ways took hold again: the discouragement in her eyes, her bitter disappointment as she saw her own dreams wither.

But was her life any better with Jake? What had Jake given her, that Lee couldn’t have if he’d settled down, if he’d abandoned his footloose drifting, as Jake had? Jake was ranch foreman, he made a good living, they had a nice house, saddle horses, he drove a new truck, and he’d written to Lee that Lucita had help in the kitchen, help with the housework when she wanted it.

Lee could have given her that, if he’d settled down and changed his ways. If he hadn’t been so hotheaded, sohardheaded in what he thought he wanted. The train strained harder hauling up toward the summit, the apple orchards behind and below him now, down on the flats, but he could still smell their sweet scent on the fitful breeze that twisted up the mountain. Just at the top, the engine paused, the train hung there a moment and then heaved itself over, gathering speed until its tail of cars thundered down again, fast. All the green was left behind now. Ahead, down the mountain, the vast desert stretched away, a flat table of pale dry sand and raw rock, parched and faded where no water could reach it.

But then far ahead a line appeared sharply dividing the land: on the near side, the flat pale desert. Far beyond, a vast green garden of lush farm crops, brilliant green, melons, vegetables, the feathery green of date groves, hundreds of acres divided by the concrete aqueducts that carried water from the Colorado, water as precious as gold to bring alive the fields that fed half the state and more, some folks said—water the farmers fought over, their battles growing ever more violent. Water rights meant money, big money, inviting every legal and political grab, every scam a man could imagine.

When gusts of hot wind began to swirl up from the desert, spewing sand in Lee’s face, he returned to his seat. Already the car was growing hot; it grew hotter still as they approached Indio. Off against the mountains he could see what must be Palm Springs, a little resort town patched onto the desert, its tall hedges and high rock walls hiding large vacation homes, he could see just their sprawling rooftops, and flashes of blue that would be swimming pools, oases for the rich. Beyond Palm Springs rose the dry mountains, their peaks incongruously capped with white, with snow that would remain all year, aloof and cold, high above the burning desert.

It was well past noon when the train pounded into Indio, the altered rhythm woke him, the train’s slowing pace, the clang of metal on metal as they bucked over the crisscross tracks, then row after row of dusty freight cars. The temperature, by the big thermometer above the station platform, was a hundred and ten. Facing an hour layover, tired of stale sandwiches and of the stale smell of old food and sweaty passengers, Lee rose. Hanging on to the overhead rail, he followed the conductor, heading for the door. When they pulled up in the center of town he swung off the train, stood waiting to cross the fast highway that served as Indio’s main street. Farm trucks loaded with baled hay and crated produce roared past him farting the smell of diesel. Across the highway an irrigation ditch seethed with fast-running water from the Colorado. Beyond this was a line of shops, a few restaurants, a couple of pawnshops. A reefer truck was pulled over to the side idling, the driver hammer-thumping its tires checking the air pressure that built up in the hot desert. In the bed of a rusted pickup, four migrant workers sat eating bread from torn wrappers. A stalled station wagon sat blowing steam from its radiator, two mattresses tied to its roof, its interior crowded with smear-faced little kids. Diesel fumes from the trucks started him coughing, and when he tried to cross the highway between them he misjudged his distance and had to leap back.

It took him three false starts before he got across, running. He followed the winking neon of taverns and hamburger joints, and soon enough could smell the garlic and hot sauces of a Mexican caf?. He followed the aroma down a side street until he saw ahead a splash of red and green neon announcing the Colima Caf?; the smell drew him like a kiss. Hurrying toward the small white house, he pushed inside.

Red checkered oilcloth covered the tables. The fly-specked walls were decorated with sombreros, faded pi?atas, and beer posters. The hot, meaty, spicy smell made him think he’d stepped into heaven. He chose a small table, sat with his back to the wall, fingering the sauce-spotted menu, though he knew what he wanted. He sat holding the menu before him, surveying the room.

A man and woman sat two tables down: tourists, all dressed up. Three Mexican men in denim overalls occupied the table in the middle of the room, drinking beer and wolfing tacos from a heaped plate. At a table near the window were two young husky Mexican men dressed in flared jeans, tight T-shirts, and expensive boots, a dozen empty beer bottles on the table between them. Each had several self-inflicted tattoos on his arms, crosses and initials, the kind the peacock punks in the joint gave themselves with the help of a sharp instrument and blue ink. Lee tucked the scene away as he watched the waiter approach wiping his hands on his dirty apron. He ordered chorizo, two eggs over easy, tortillas, refried beans, and a bottle of beer.

The waiter grinned.“You miss breakfast, se?or?”

Lee smiled back at him.“I missed this kind of breakfast.”

“?Qu? clase cerveza, se?or?”

“Carta Blanca. Pronto, yo tengo sed.”

The waiter scurried for the kitchen, he was back at once with the beer. Lee tilted the bottle and let the icy brew slide down, then ordered another. The ferment they made in prison, from prunes and apricots pilfered from the kitchen, faded into welcome oblivion. When his meal came he covered it with salsa and savored it, too, trying to eat slowly and get the most from every bite, but too soon it was gone. He wrapped the remains of his beans and chorizo in the last fresh, hot tortilla. When finally he pushed back his chair and fished in his watch pocket for money, the two twenties and the five came out together. Annoyed, he peeled off the five and pushed the twenties back, but one of the Mexican boys tapped the other on the shoulder, watching him. Lee paid the bill and left quickly, knowing too well what was coming.

He was barely out the door when he heard it close a second time, and one of the young men shouted,“Hey,hombre viejo. Wait up.”

Lee turned to face them on the empty side street. The two approached him side by side, walking with a belligerent swing through the green river of neon, the taller one casually tossing a small object hand to hand, and Lee caught the gleam of a switchblade. The young man’s voice was soft, casual, and sure of himself. And they were on him, moving in close. “We want the money in that little pocket of yours, se?or.”

Lee smiled.

“If you do not give it to us, old man, I’ll show you what this can do.” Again he tossed the knife, watching Lee.

Lee judged his timing and distance. When the knife was in midair he stepped forward on his left foot, did a snap-kick that brought the toe of his right boot crashing into the guy’s testicles. As the young man doubled over, grabbing himself, Lee dropped to a crouch and scooped up the fallen knife. He hit the button releasing the six-inch blade, swung it up in an arc at the man on his left. The blade traveled horizontally, hitting him just below the belt buckle to deliver a gut gash. Bright red blood splashed up across his white T-shirt and down the tight flared pants. The young Mexican looked down, gasped at what he saw, clutched his gut, and fled.

Lee knelt beside the fallen youth. He was curled up groaning, holding his crotch. Lee rolled the boy over, wiped the blood from the knife onto the boy’s nose. “Old man, am I? If I ever see you again, you little pussy-ball scumbag, I’ll cut your nuts off and cram them down your throat.” He closed the switchblade, stuck it in his back pocket, stood up and headed for the train station.

Back on the train, as they got moving, Indio’s industrial buildings edged past and then its small old houses, and then outside of town began the dizzying corridors of towering date palms fanning swiftly past, making him giddy if he watched for too long. Closing his eyes, he wondered if those two youngbraceros had signaled a new pattern in his life, one where he, an old worn-out gringo, stood at the mercy of the young and belligerent field hands with whom he would be working—but then suddenly the cat was with him again, easing Lee, curling up against his thigh, invisible but warm and purring, and Lee felt steadier. Ghost cat, spiritcat, perhaps from a brighter dimension, Lee was grateful to have Misto near him.

He guessed when he got to the ranch the big yellow tom would have no trouble hiding himself, moving about invisibly; or perhaps he would make himself boldly known among the barn cats and the other ranch animals. He just hoped Misto would stay with him; the tom had been with him at McNeil both as mortal cat and as ghost, the little spirit proving to Lee beyond doubt that a vast and intriguing universe awaited somewhere beyond, a realm far more intricate, and perhaps far kinder, than this present world seemed to offer. Lee thought the ghost cat might know almost everything Lee himself had experienced in his life. He wasn’t sure what that added up to, but the thought was more comforting than annoying, that the friend from his childhood cared enough to know about him and to stay with him.

As the train picked up speed, the fanning of the palm groves so dizzied Lee that he turned again from the window. Dozing, it seemed he was a boy again, back with Russell Dobbs reliving, almost as if it were his own life, the tale of Dobbs’s bargain with the dark spirit, with the haunt that visited Lee himself too often, cold and tenacious. All the long-ago gossip that Lee had heard as a child seemed to come together now, as the cat lay with his paws on Lee’s arm, looking up at him, looking wise and all-knowing. As Lee dreamed, was it Misto himself who filled in the small, sharp details of the confrontation between the devil and Russell Dobbs? When Lee woke, he seemed to know the story more clearly, small details had been fitted into place. Could he still hear Misto’s whisper—or was it Lee’s own silent thoughts whispering, over the rattle of the train?

10

Having agreed to certain terms, Russell Dobbs spread the word quickly that the Northern& Dakota out of Chicago would be carrying a heavy payroll and that he meant to take it down. He put out that information in ways that would not be traced back to him, he let it be known that he would slip aboard at Pierre and work the job from inside the train, alone and that he meant to leave the train with half a million in cash.

His plan worked out very well. The five Love boys, and the three Vickers brothers lay in wait for the Northern& Dakota, stopping and boarding the train at different points, both sets of brothers unduly heated and aggressive with the promise that Russell Dobbs would already be aboard. Dobbs waited in the woods, quieting his horse as, inside the train when the brothers discovered each other, a small war fought itself to a bloody finish. When it was all over he rode away hoping he’d seen the last of the Loves and the Vickerses and of his phantom visitor.

Not until two weeks later, when Cage Vickers and Tessa Love were married, did Russell wake at dawn in his cabin to see the finely dressed figure standing before him, fancy black suit, embroidered vest, black string tie. He could not see the man’s eyes. The elegantly groomed haunt put him at a distinct disadvantage. Lying naked in bed, Dobbs rose on one elbow, pulling the blanket around him.

“You have destroyed both gangs,” the devil said coldly. “You knew I wanted them unharmed. You have, of course, lost the wager.”

“I didn’t lose anything. I agreed only to prevent Cage from getting them caught and arrested. Nor did I harm them. They harmed each other.”

“The three who lived were arrested, you knew I did not want them arrested, you failed at your task.”

“That wasn’t part of the agreement. I said I would preventCage from getting them caught—Cage didn’t cause that, they trapped themselves. That was the bargain,” Russell said. “I didn’t allow Cage to give up either gang, I kept that part of the agreement and you are bound to it. You promised me a long, healthy life, unwounded, unharmed.” Though Dobbs had no idea whether thehaunt would keep his end of the bargain. What made him think hell’s messenger was bound by any code?

“Perhaps,” said the dark one, “perhaps I will honor what you call a bargain. And perhaps not. Whatever I do, Russell, you have only one lifetime to enjoy the fruits of such an agreement—while I have all eternity to retaliate for your deception by twisting and manipulating the lives of your heirs, and never think, Russell Dobbs, that those who come after you will not suffer. Your heirs will be bound to me through your deceit, they will know me, Russell, I’ll wield my hold over them in ways you have never dreamed.”

“You don’t have that much power. If you did, I would not have beaten you.”

“You will see what power I have when you view the lives of your descendants, when you see them from the other side, when you witness the suffering and agony of your own kin that you have deliberately destroyed.” But even as Russell rose, pulling the blanket around him, the devil vanished, was gone from the room, no faintest shadow remaining, the cabin dim and empty. Russell stared around at the log walls, the iron stove, his pants hanging over a chair. He got up, pulled on his pants and shirt, his boots, took up his rifle, and went to shoot some breakfast.

When Lee woke, the passenger car was hotter than a bake oven, the midafternoon sun burning in through the train’s smeared windows as they sped across the high desert. Far ahead, the land dropped down steeply onto the wide and ancient riverbed, dry now, forever waterless. And there lay Blythe, a jumble of faded rooftops, the end of the world, some said, the asshole of creation. He doubted the town had changed much, these twenty years. A small, ugly cluster of forlorn wooden buildings set along wandering dirt tracks.

But the dusty roads led, out beyond Blythe, to another vast spread of brilliant bright green fields just as in Indio, another welcome oasis, and that was where he was headed, out among the farm crops, the miles of melons, summer vegetables, and alfalfa, huge fields that, even as far as they stretched away, were dwarfed by the endless desert that spread on beyond, parched and ungiving. He remembered too well, when he’d run with Jake, the sour salty smell along the dry washes where the tamarisk trees thrived, remembered the beery smell of the little town when you passed a bar, the high sidewalks above the one paved street, the cross streets of powder dust so fine it would splash up over your boot tops. Remembered the dirty faces of the little Mexican kids and the patient-eyed women with that deep, lazy Mexican beauty. Mexicans, blacks, whites, and Indians all working their tails off making money for the farmers, and what little money they put in their own pockets lasted only one trip to town, where theylost it to backroom gambling and to booze and prostitutes, and what they didn’t spend someone waited to take forcibly from them.

But still the migrants kept coming, smugglers with overload springs on their Cadillacs rolling in from the border at night with trunks full of illegals who paid them two hundred dollars a head, innocents who blew their life savings trying to get a chunk of the American dollar, migrants who might end up treated like shit with the wrong farm boss, lucky if they got enough to eat for their stoop labor. And some of them weren’t that lucky. Those who suffocated in the Cadillacs’ locked trunks were stripped of what little they had and tossed out on the desert for the coyotes to finish.

Didn’t seem like twenty years since he and Jake rode into California over the dry mountains to lay up after that Tucson train job, Jake nearly dead from loss of blood. And then a week later outside Blythe, when Lee was alone, the feds had grabbed and arrested him. Jake was holed up by then, Lucita taking care of him. And with Lee arrested and in jail, Lucita was all Jake had.

Thinking about all that had happened since, about the mistakes he had made, thinking how he’d promised himself not to get trapped in any more screwups, now Lee cursed himself for not getting off the train in San Bernardino. That could mean trouble, too. What the hell was he thinking? He’d better come up with a good excuse for his parole officer, he could have blown his release right there.

As the train slowed for Blythe, Lee stepped out to the vestibule. Peering around the side of the cars, he could see the town up ahead, a dry wart on the face of the ungiving plain. Stepping back to his seat, he checked the watch pocket of his jeans, fingering the tightly folded bills. Unlike the seven hundred more in his boot, this was clean money, money he’d earned in prison industries. But all together, enough—if the parole board got snotty with him—to get him a good distance away, in a hurry. When the train bucked to a halt, a heavy black cloud rattled against the windows turning the passenger car nearly as dark as night. What the hell was that? Not Satan’s shadow, this was different. And not blowing leaves, there weren’t that many trees in Blythe; and the black cloud made a clicking noise, hitting the glass, so loud he thought for a minute it was pebbles blowing—but this was clouds of something small squirming as they hit the glass, and some of them were clinging and crawling, were crawling up the glass …

Crickets. Swarms of crickets, thousands of flying bodies beating against the glass. And at a break in the swarm, when he could see the train yard, it too was black with them, they had turned the afternoon as dark as night. The station lights had come on, crickets surged in their glow, swarming, and where they swept against Lee’s window they left trails of silver mucus. Peering down, where lights lit the track, he could see them fall and die there, glistening brighter than the slick metal.

Well, hell, he knew Blythe had these swarms now and then, over the years, like the grasshoppers in South Dakota. But did he have to arrive right in the middle of this mess? He rose when the car stilled; and as the rest of the passengers stood up, gathering their belongings, he felt a brush of fur against his hand. Sometimes, he couldn’t understand why the little cat stayed with him. A ghost cat must have the whole universe at its disposal, must have all of time to travel through and to choose from, so what was he doing here? Had they bonded so well that the yellow tom simply wanted to be with him, wanted to remain where Lee was, or was there some other reason, some mystery yet to unfold? Moving on out of the train, stepping down onto the platform, his boots crunched dead and squirming crickets, the steps and sidewalk were alive with them, masses of dark, brittle insects swarming around his boots, swarmingup his boots, creeping and flying up the walls of the station and inside whenever the door opened, swarming over the newspaper rack and shoeshine stand, dark stinking bugs crawling through the white powder that had been sprinkled along the street and sidewalk and across the thresholds of the shops to kill them.

It hadn’t seemed to kill many, they were still thick on the varnished oak benches before the station, dark bodies crawling in and out the slots of the cigarette and candy machines, the sound of their beating wings against metal and glass like some dark prediction he didn’t want to know about. The streets and gutters were dark with glistening bodies, crickets clinging to fenders and windshields, to tires, to license plates and chrome grills. Heaps of dead crickets had been swept up along the curb, the piles dusted with the killing white powder; crickets flew in his face or flew past him to beat their hard little bodies against the hot overhead lights—he wondered if the ghost cat was invisibly diving at them, swatting and gobbling up crickets. A shout made him spin around.

“Fontana! Lee Fontana!”

Lee stepped back out of the light, watching the approaching figure. Only when he saw the horseman’s stride, the Stetson and boots and then the familiar face and crippled hand did he step forward, grinning.

11

Jake was still lean, but he’d grown a bit of a paunch over his belt. Same grin, big wide mouth ringed with laugh creases. His thin face was wrinkled some from the sun, his dark hair was turning gray in streaks, and white along the temples.

“Didn’t expect you to meet me,” Lee said. “Damn glad you did. Crickets are about to crawl up my leg, swarm in places I don’t want ’em.”

“You look bushed, Lee. Suitcase?”

“Travelin’ light,” Lee said.

Ellson turned away quickly, maybe uncomfortable that Lee had done the jail time, and Jake hadn’t, because the cops hadn’t had enough to hold him when he had been suspected of robbery later. He led Lee through the crickets along the line of parked cars. On the curb a woman huddled cuddling a baby, ignoring the swarming insects as she held the child to nurse. Ellson headed for a red pickup that looked brand-new, its doors professionally lettered with the signature of Delgado Farms. Lee slid in onto the soft leather seat, shut the door quickly but even so half a dozen crickets slipped in. Lee caught them in his hand, threw them out the window and rolled it up again fast. The truck smelled new, the red leather thick and soft—a lot fancier than the old, rusted-out trucks they’d used to drive. Jake had been with Delgado Farms almost twelve years now, a big switch for him, staying in one place. Lee guessed he’d changed some after their messed-up train job. Jake and Lucita were married long before that robbery, he knew Lucita had come down hard on Jake about that. Jake looked more respectable now, calmer, more settled and sure of himself. He had to be doing well, head foreman of the whole Blythe outfit, which was only one of several farms Delgado owned. Jake did the hiring and firing. He’d said in his letter that Lee would be ramroding a crew ofbraceros and locals.

The Delgado family lived up in Hemet where they raised Steel Dust horses. They owned four big farms in the Coachella Valley, growing hay and dates and vegetables, land totaling over six thousand acres and stretching from the Chocolate Mountains to the Colorado River. Land that, before water was piped from the Colorado, had been dry rangeland, the grass so sparse it must have taken twenty square miles to feed one steer. Now, with water brought in, every acre was as valuable as gold.

Just a little speck of that wealth would set a fellow up real nice, Lee thought. Sitting in the new truck beside Jake, Lee wondered if Jake handled the Blythe payroll—then he turned away, angered at himself. What the hell kind of thought was that? Jake was his friend, just about his only friend.

As they headed through town, Lee began to see other changes in Jake, the calmer way he drove, the lowered timbre of his voice. As Ellson turned down a dusty side street, Lee could smell wet, burned rags from the town dump, and he grinned, remembering the night they had sat in there under a wrecked truck, passing the jug. Jake remembered, too. A little smile touched the corner of his mouth. Lee said,“What was that we were drinking?”

Jake laughed.“Homemade tequila, fermented cactus juice.” They passed a line of feathery tamarisk trees crowded against weathered shacks and pulled up in front of a graying house, its window frames painted turquoise, its door bright pink. A neon Budweiser sign hung from the eaves. The smell of chiles and garlic mixed with the blaring jukebox rhythm of castanets and brassy trumpet stirred a lot of old memories. They got out, crunching crickets, moved past a young Mexican boy who stood outside the door with a broom, brushing crickets away. They stepped inside fast, but a few insects leaped in past them and under a table. Lee hoped to hell they weren’t in the kitchen, but he didn’t know how they could keep all of them out. He didn’t let himself think too long about that.

The walls of the caf? were built of rough, dark wood. Down at the end, at one of three windows, a swamp cooler chugged away, keeping time to the Mexican brass, belching out cool, damp air. The tables were crowded withbraceros and with a few dark-eyed women. They slid in at the only empty table, the oilcloth still damp from the waiter’s towel. When Jake reached for the chips and salsa, Lee tried not to look at the stump of his right hand where three fingers were missing, an accident Lee felt guilty for.

They’d taken down one of the last steam trains, a short run from San Francisco up the San Joaquin Valley. They got the only money bag they could find, had swung off the train when one glancing shot by a train guard hit Jake. Lee ran, in plain sight meaning to lead the cops away, hoping Jake would vanish around the far side of the train. He knew Jake had made it when he heard a horse pounding away. Lee made a lot of noise to draw them off, then slipped away on his own mount, moving silently in the dark.

He had ridden for maybe an hour, could still hear them behind him, but then their sound faded as they took a wrong turn. When at last Lee holed up, hid his horse in dense woods, and opened the canvas bag expecting a big haul, the bag contained a measly four thousand bucks.

Days later, when Lee thought the cops had eased off their searching, he’d gotten half of the money to Lucita. She kept it, but she was mad as hell. She wouldn’t tell him where Jake was, she said his hand, what was left of it, was healing just fine. She told Lee, snapping out the words, her black eyes flashing, that this was the last jobthey’d ever pull, that Jake was done with that life, done for good, or she’d send him packing and divorce him.

Lee didn’t hear from Jake for a long time after that, long after the marine payroll job and the bank fiasco when that damned teller nearly cut off his own fingers. Then, somehow, Jake heard where he was, maybe from someone they had worked with at one time, and Lee started getting a letter now and then, up at McNeil. A thin thread to keep in touch, but it had meant a lot to him.

Now, beneath the table, something brushed his leg, but when he lifted the red checkered oilcloth and glanced down, nothing was there. Only the faintest purr reached him, and in the shadows he saw a scrap of tortilla disappear into thin air. He dropped the edge of the oilcloth wondering, not for the first time, how a ghost could eat solid food.

But at McNeil when the cat had made himself visible in the prison mess hall, he’d gobbled up every handout he could beg. Well, hell, Lee thought, what didhe know about the talents of a ghost? When the purring became louder, he scuffed his feet hoping to hide the sound; and then when the waitress approached, the cat silenced.

Not only was the beer ice-cold, the chiles rellenos when they arrived were light and fresh, the corn tortillas homemade. It was all so good Lee thought maybe he’d died and gone to heaven. If he could just make it from one small Mexican caf? to the next, without having to deal with the rest of the world, he could get along just fine. Jake, rolling beans and salsa into a tortilla, said, “Parole, rather than conditional release?”

Lee nodded.“Parole board didn’t much like my record. I’m beholden for this job at the ranch, Jake.”

Ellson shook his head.“Except for you, I’d have bought it when that guard shot at me, if you hadn’t led them off they’d have grabbed me. I worried a long time, hoping you got away. The two thousand dollars you got to me, I did a lot of thinking, after that.”

“And you took a lot of flack from Lucita.”

Jake grinned.“That was a long time ago.”

“More years than I like to count,” Lee said. “I’m sorry about Ramon, about losing your boy in the war. I’d like to have known him.” He wondered how that must feel, to raise a fine son, and then see him die so young, so brutally. When he thought about how that must have been for Lucita, pain twisted his belly and he felt a warm longing to comfort her. Though he had never made a play for Lucita, once she and Jake were engaged and then married, he’d never been near her without being tempted, without the heat rising.

“She’s up in Redlands,” Jake said. “Her sister just had gall bladder surgery, Lucita’s taking care of her. She’ll be home next week. She’s sure looking forward to seeing you, planning on cooking up a big dinner.” Jake motioned to the waiter for another bowl of salsa. “Both our girls are married. Carmella’s in San Francisco, her husband’s a fireman. Susanne’s in Reno.” He grinned. “Married to a sheep rancher.”

“Sheep?” Lee said.

Jake smiled.“He’s a good man. Basque. Good people.”

Lee watched Jake quietly. Jake’s family had lived a whole lifetime, the girls grown up into their own lives, Ramon shot down by a German sniper, buried and mourned, while Lee had gone on year after year pulling a few jobs, getting older, getting slower, and then back in the pen scrubbing prison latrines, sanding prison-made furniture, eating prison slop, and then finally out working on the McNeil farm. He’d had no ties at all on the outside except Jake and Lucita, no one else who cared, no family of his own that he’d ever kept track of. Only the thought of his little sister, as if Mae were still out there somewhere,as if she were still alive. But if Maewas still alive, and grown old, where was she? What kind of life was she living? And why had she never tried to get in touch? But how could she have done that when he was always on the move, leaving as few tracks as he could, ever traveling on, aimless as a tumbleweed? And why hadn’the tried to get in touch?

Well, hell, he’d stayed in touch for a while. He’d write or make a phone call to the rancher, Sam Gerrard, who owned the land adjoining them, because Lee’s family had no phone. Years ago he’d called Gerrard when he read in the newspaper that his grandpappy was killed. He couldn’t believe it, shot to death during a train robbery, though Russell had taken three Pinkerton men with him. His grandpappy’s death had set Lee back some, he’d been a long time getting over the demise of Russell Dobbs—as if a whole stretch of history had collapsed, as if the whole shape of the world he knew had shiftedand changed.

He’d given Gerrard a number where he might be reached now and then, a hotel in Billings where he had a lady friend. That was how he found out when his daddy died, had a stroke, they thought. Died out on the range alone. Must have been a bad one, to make him tumble off his horse. Horse came back to the ranch, and they’d gone looking. They found his daddy two days later lying among the boulders at the edge of a stony draw. After that, Gerrard said, Lee’s ma had left the ranch, sold it for what she could get, took Mae and their two older sisters back to North Carolina, to live withher sister. That was when he lost touch, didn’t try to contact them. He knew Mae would be all right if she was with family. But he thought about her a lot, he hoped she had horses as she’d always wanted, and he’d carried her picture and would look at it, at that bold little girl who wanted to learn everything herself, wanted to do everything her way.

Mae and her older sisters were allowed to ride but only decorously, at a walk or slow trot, and they were kept as far as possible from the cattle and the cowhands. When Lee and Mae could sneak off alone, when he saddled a real horse for her and not the poky pony, she wanted to do everything, she wanted to learn to rope, she wanted to work cattle, she wasn’t afraid and in a short time she handled a horse real well. Their mother didn’t know half of what went on, working in the kitchen or around back in the garden, trusting Lee to take care of his little sister, thinking he was carefully chaperoning Mae on the pony when, in fact, they were off beyond the nearby hills, Mae learning to rein and work a good cowpony, to spin and back him, to chase a calf and learning to handle a rope.

What he didn’t understand was, why did he still dream of her? Dreams so real, as if she were still alive, as if she were still a little child as he’d last seen her. In his recent dreams, she was in a house he’d never seen, or in a flower garden unlike any place where they’d grown up, and she was dressed in a way she wouldn’t have been, back on the ranch, back in their own time. He was still wondering about those dreams as they moved out into the shabby street, both men full of the good Mexican dinner, the street darkening around them as evening fell. Along the row of little shacks, faint lightsglowed behind curtained windows. They slipped into the truck fast, dodging crickets, tossing crickets out the windows. Moving on through the small town, they headed out a dirt road, its pale surface caught in the light of a rising half-moon, the long straight rows of bean plants polished by the faint glow. Now when they were moving fast and no crickets swarming in, Lee cracked open his window, letting in the musky wet smell of the river, of the tamarisk and willows silvered along the steep, silt banks.

Twelve miles out of town they turned onto a dirt lane, cutting through a cantaloupe field, the smell of the fruit sweet and cloying. Half a mile up, they turned into the ranch yard under bright security lights, their dust rising white against a row of packing sheds, long bunkhouses, and small frame bungalows. Jake drove on past the big mess hall with its long screened windows and deep porch, past rows of assorted tractors and field trucks. He parked in front of a cement-block house with a white picket fence. A statue of the Blessed Virgin stood in the sandy yard, the little, two-foot-high figure carefully outlined by a circle of miniature cactus. Near the house was a paddock and a small stable, and he could see a couple of horses. Beyond were more packing sheds, then more ranch trucks and some old cars. They got out beside the picket fence, but Jake didn’t head into the house. No lights burned there, with Lucita gone. They moved across the dusty yard toward the cabins, where Jake turned up the steps of the first one, the porch creaking under their weight.

The cabin door complained as Jake pushed it open, reached in and flipped a switch so a sudden light flared from an overhead bulb. The cabin held an iron bed, a brown metal nightstand, a small battered desk, a small wooden chest of drawers, and a straight-backed chair, painted purple. An ornate wooden crucifix hung above the bed, hand carved and gilded. There was a bathroom with a little precast shower, and spotless white tile around the sink. A new bar of soap still in its wrapper, two clean towels and a washcloth, clean white shower curtain, all touches that spoke of Lucita, as did the little pitcher of wildflowers she had placed on the old, shabby dresser.

“Not elegant,” Jake said. “You’ll find a new razor and shaving cream in the cabinet.”

Lee sat down on the bed to pull off his boots.“It’s elegant to me. Clean. Private. Even flowers,” he said, grinning. “No prison bars, and a real door I can shut. No screw coming to lock me in.” He dropped a boot. “Bathroom all to myself, private shower without some jock elbowing me or reaching to feel me up, a razor I don’t have to account for every day.” He grinned up at Jake, as he dropped the other boot.

Jake looked back at him unsmiling. Too late Lee realized he’d hurt Jake, that he had rubbed it in that he’d been in prison all the time Jake had been free and making a life for himself. Lee didn’t mean to do that. Jake turned toward the door, his white-streaked hair catching the light. “See you in the morning,” he said shortly. “Breakfast in the mess hall, five-thirty,” and he was gone, shutting the door softly behind him.

Feeling bad, Lee fished into the paper bag. He took out his few clothes, laid them on the dresser, and set the picture of Mae beside the flowers. He undressed, removed the seven hundred dollars from his boot, shoved that and his prison-made knife under his pillow. He turned out the overhead light and slid into bed, pushed down under the lightweight blanket, and stretched out to ease his tired body. It had been a long day, too many hours on the train, his muscles were all stove up—but not a moment later he felt the cat leap on the bed, landing heavily beside him, and this time he could see it clearly silhouetted against the shaft of moonlight that struck through the cabin window. How the hell did the cat do that, invisible one minute, and then there it was as solid and heavy as bricks, kneading the blanket and pushing him with its hind paws to gain more room, its rumbling purr rising as it settled in for the night. And now, for the first time, the cat spoke to Lee, its yellow eyes glowing in the thin moonlight, its yellow tail twitching.

“You’resorry you hurt Jake’s feelings? You’resorry?”

Startled, Lee sat up in bed, staring at him. The cat had never spoken to him, not during all the years at McNeil, neither as a living cat nor later when Misto returned there as a ghost cat. Yet always Lee had had the sense that Misto could have spoken if he chose, that he understood the conversations of the inmates around him. By his glances, by the set of his ears, by the attention he paid to certain discussions, Lee had always felt that even the living cat was wiser and more clever than ever he let on.

“You’resorry?” Misto repeated with a hiss. “Sorry?Why are you sorry when, all through dinner with Jake you were thinking about ripping him off, and you were lusting after Jake’s wife, you sat there laughing and joking with him while you lusted after the Delgado payroll, too, while you planned to double-cross Jake in two ways. And now, you’re sorry? Sorry you hurt his feelings? What the hell isthat about? Whatkind of friend is that?”

“I didn’t think about it for long,” Lee said crankily. The shock of hearing the cat speak was nothing to the realization that the ghost cat could read his thoughts—even if the beast did exaggerate, even if he did take an overblown view of Lee’s short-lived temptation. When Lee moved uncomfortably away from the cat, to the edge of the bed, the tomcat remained relaxed and easy, glancing at him unconcerned as he casually licked dust from his paws.

“It’s one thing,” Lee said, “to travel with a ghost following me, with a damned haunt hanging on my trail. It’s another thing when you start criticizing, telling me what to do, acting as if you know what I’m thinking, like some damned prison shrink.”

It was unsettling as hell that the cat knew things that were none of its business, thoughts Lee wasn’t proud of and that, facing the cat’s righteous stare, shamed Lee all the more. The yellow tom stopped washing and looked back at him steadily, his wide yellow eyes stern and unblinking. Then he closed his eyes, twitched a whisker as if amused, curled himself deeper into the blanket, and drifted off to sleep as if he hadn’t a care.

Misto was well aware that Fontana’s defensive retorts, his anger and surly responses, had grown harsher as the cowboy grew older. But this was only a part of Lee’s nature, a defensive shell to protect a normal human weakness. Lee’s very temper was part of why the cat loved him. Lee’s sometimes frail, sometimes volatile nature was why Misto guarded Lee so fiercely in wary defense against Satan, against the inroads the devil plied so adroitly in attempting to own Fontana.

12

Misto’s dreams that night, as he slept at the foot of Lee’s bed, were visions he knew were a part of Lee’s future. And though he felt fiercely protective of Lee, staying close to him since his parole, his thoughts tonight were on Sammie, too, so far away in Georgia.

Brad Falon had returned to Rome after his prison time, escaping a dirty piece of business out in L.A., running from the law before the land scam he’d been involved in was uncovered. Now, he was too near again to Sammie, in that small town, was too interested in Sammie and in her mother and was a threat to them both.

Except that now, in Georgia, Morgan Blake was home again, he was out of the navy and back with his little family. Becky and the child need no longer face Falon alone, and that satisfied and eased Misto.

But Lee was alone, and just now he needed Misto. The ghost cat did not mean to leave Fontana as the dark spirit sought to own him. And in Misto’s dreams, the connection between Lee and Falon and Sammie was building closer, their lives slowly drawing together, incident by twisted incident, toward a final and life-changing event that would shape the future of all three.

Only just before dawn did the cat stir from his dreams, and leave Lee, slipping out into the fading night to wander the dim ranch yard and then to stroll in through the bunkhouses observing the sleeping workers, their clothes and possessions strewn everywhere among the jumble of cots, a far less organized scene than a cell full of regimented prisoners. The breath of the sleeping men smelled strongly of chiles and garlic. He wandered and looked, amusing himself and then moved outside again where he chased half a dozen chickens, sending them flapping and squawking in panic; then he headed for the back door of the ranch house where, if he were lucky, Jake Ellson might have set out a bowlful of milk for the half dozen farm cats. The rancher had seemed pleased when he glimpsed a new mouser on the property, maybe a wanderer, maybe a drop-off, as often occurred in the open country. Misto, during his stay, meant to catch and leave a few fat mice on the porch, just to prove his prowess.

Yes, this morning there was milk. He lapped the bowl clean before the other cats got to it, and then looked up at the kitchen window, catching glimpses of Jake as he prepared his breakfast; the boss seemed to prefer quiet in the morning to that of a crowd of noisybraceros.

It was Friday, the end of Lee’s third day on the job, that Ramon Delgado came roaring into the ranch yard in his big white Cadillac, kicking up dust, and Lee got a look at the two canvas cash bags that contained the ranch’s weekly payroll, and then soon at the money itself. At enough cash to set him up real nice. And this payroll, to be doled out to more than a hundred men, was only one of four among the Delgado holdings.

The day was still hot as hell though the sun had already dropped behind the hills as they headed in from the fields. Lee had pulled into the ranch yard, the last in the long line of trucks, hot and sweaty after twelve hours of driving. He felt beat down to nothing, it took the last of his energy to get out of the truck, turn in his tally to Jake, walk across the dusty yard to his cabin and ease himself down on the top step, trying to get a full breath. The job itself wasn’t hard physical work, driving the truck back and forth. Even the heat was to his liking—until it gottoo damned hot. But it was the stress of dealing with a few quarrellingbracerosthat would tighten up his lungs. He sat sucking air, slowly calming himself, watching the five other foremen strideacross to their cabins, three gringos and two Mexican men, all brown from the sun and seeming comfortable in the heat, all of them at least a generation younger than Lee.

Well, he wasn’t letting on how beat he was, he needed the job, and he liked it here. He had plans here, he didn’t mean to move on until he was loaded with cash, and ready. But right now his shirt and pants stuck to him wringing wet, and his feet were swollen inside his boots. His eyes burned from the glare of the fields, from rows of broad melon leaves reflecting back the beating sun, and from sun bouncing off the hood of the truck. He was parched, dog tired, and his temper boiling from a run-in with the boy he’d picked for straw boss.

From the first morning, Lee had to work at establishing his authority. These men had different ways than the men he’d worked with at McNeil, and he was even rusty with the farm equipment. On that first morning, heading out of the ranch yard before daylight, driving a truck for the first time in years, following the line of trucks, he’d jerked the clutch so bad that the men, jammed into the truck bed, laughed and hooted and shouted good-natured Spanish obscenities at him. They’d eased along a dirt lane and sharply up the side of a levee to a thin track at the top, the old truck straining, then moving on fast through the darkness to keep up with the others. The thin ridge dropped steeply on both sides. The truck rocked and heaved as the field hands horsed around laughing and cuffing each other, thinking nothing of the drop, not giving a damn if they went over. Lee crouched over the wheel gripping hard with both hands, hoping to keep it on the narrow track. As the sky began to turn red, sunrise soon staining the fields, he could see an occasional turnoff angling down the bank on his left. On his right, almost directly under him, a concrete ditch surged with fast black water from the Colorado. He was mighty glad when he saw his own flag marker, ahead in the field below.

As he angled down off the levee, the rising dust from the trucks ahead filled his mouth and nose, dust crept into his lungs so thick that soon he was retching and gagging, coughing up specks of blood. Well, hell, maybe the emphysema would finish him right there in the stinking truck, and who would even care?

He slowed along the edge of the melon field and the men began piling out, lurching the truck harder, landing at a run to keep their balance beside the slow-moving vehicle, men peeling off into the melon rows. They got to work fast when they were picking on their own time, were paid by how much they could harvest. They didn’t look up from their work as the sun lifted, as the sky slowly bleached to white and the rising heat slicked sweat across their bare backs. They stopped only to drink from the six water coolers that were wired to the back of the truck, then got to work again. Lee, driving along feeling the truckjolt as they loaded the melons, couldn’t escape the sun’s reflection from the fields and from the truck’s hood and dashboard. The temperature inside the cab, even with the windows open, must be a hundred and thirty. He wished this were a horse operation instead of a farm, wished he were doingajob he cared about, something he could put his mind to.

By midmorning he’d pulled off his shirt. He felt cooked through. He grew bored with keeping tally on the pickers, marking down their loads as they dumped them into the truck bed. By noon the water coolers were empty and the truck riding low on its axles, its bed piled high with its first load of cantaloupes. Going back in for the noon meal, the men rode on the outside, clinging to the slats, their voices irritable now with heat and hunger, exploding in fast Spanish arguments, and the heavy, sweet smell of the cantaloupes sickened Lee. If he were twenty years younger, maybe he wouldn’t mind this routine. At his age, with the emphysema flaring up, working all day in this damnable heat wasn’t going to cut it for long. Where the hell had he gotten the notion that the hot desert was just what he longed for? It was early that afternoon when, observing the men at work, he picked out a straw boss to run interference for him.

Tony Valdez was a squarely built kid in his early twenties, with an easy way about him. Maybe too easy, but he looked like he could handle the men, and that was what Lee wanted. Valdez worked stripped to the waist, the silver cross hanging around his neck swinging as he bent to cut the fruit from the vines. Lee saw no prison tattoos on his sun-browned skin, and no sullenness in his face.“I’ll pay you two dollars a day extra,” he’d told Tony. “You’ll keep the arguments down, and help me with the tally.”

The boy’s shoulders had straightened. “I can do that.”

“Can you drive truck?”

“I can drive that truck.”

Lee had nodded, thinking Tony would do. But it wasn’t long before the kid was strutting like a Spanish rooster, goading the men. “Estoy el segundo jefe, you guys. Don’t give me any shit,” and the next thing Lee knew a fistfight erupted between Tony and a dark-skinned older man. Lee, jumping over a row of cantaloupes, grabbed the two of themand jerked Tony around to face him, his temper flaring hot.

“What the hell did I hire you for! To stop fights, not start them.”

Tony looked at him innocently.“I was only keeping order, se?or …”

The men snickered.

Lee shoved Tony toward the rows and whirled around, staring at the idle crew.“The bunch of you get back to work or I’ll run your sorry asses clear to hell off the place.” He’d burned with rage, almost out of control. The other men looked at him, and quieted and turned away.

Lee didn’t think he had the authority to fire anyone, but they seemed to think he did. He looked Tony over, trying to quiet the fire in his belly. “If you can’t straw boss like a man, Valdez, I’ll pick someone who will.”

Tony quieted, too, looking at him first with anger, and then sheepishly. For the next three days Tony behaved himself, he didn’t goad the men, and he stopped two serious arguments capably enough. But then on Friday evening, when Lee moved to the right seat and let Tony drive, heading up the levee, the kid double-clutched it, jammed it into second and floorboarded it, shooting up the slope so fast the front wheels left the ground and the rear end skidded toward the drop-off. Lee grabbed the dashboard, and the pickers laughed and cheered.

“What the hell are you doing, Valdez! Slow down! This ain’t no cayuse you’re breaking!”

“Just getting the truck up the hill, se?or.”

“Yeah, and have the damn thing in the canal, on top of the pickers.” He wanted to smash the kid’s face. “If you can’t do better than that, hombre, you’ll ride in the back from now on.” Lee had been mad and rightly so, but in the ranch yard as he swung out of the truck, he wondered if that much anger was called for, wondered at the explosion of blazing rage that had filled him.

Dusk was gathering as Delgado’s Cadillac pulled into the yard. Lee turned over his day’s tally to Jake and moved away to his cabin to sit down on the steps catching his breath. Maybe he’d get used to this gig, and maybe he wouldn’t. On the hot evening breeze, the smell of beans and chili from the cookhouse drew him. Rising, he moved inside the cabin to douse himself with water, to gulp water, then he headed on out and down the steps, anticipating an isolated supper at the long tables, among the Spanish-speaking men.

Jake was just crossing from the house to the big white Cadillac parked beside the mess hall. There was no mistaking Ramon Delgado, as the boss stepped out. Looked like the fancy new car had been clean and shining when he left the home ranch this morning, before it picked up the day’s collection of road dust. Lee could see the gleam of red upholstery inside. Along the back shelf beneath the rear window lay a handsome serape carefully folded, and on the hood, where other cars had radiator ornaments, Delgado had mounted a set of polished, brass-tipped longhorns that reached out just to the edge of the fenders.

Ramon Delgado was a big man, half a head taller than Jake and maybe twenty pounds heavier. He looked to be all muscle under his Levi’s jacket and pearl-buttoned shirt. His boots were three colors of fine soft leather, heavily stitched in flower patterns. His black Stetson sported a silver hatband. Lee imagined a nice home place up in Hemet, maybe an adobe house low and rambling, green lawns irrigated by the Colorado and shaded by rows of date palms. Everything about Delgado looked rich and successful; and beneath the wide black brim, his face, hard-angled and square, had the look of a man to be wary of.

Beside him, Jake looked thin and dry, the leathery look of a cowman, faded frontier shirt, faded jeans and cracked boots. Lee watched the two men head inside the mess hall, eyeing the four bulging money bags they carried, bags marked with a bank logo that Lee couldn’t read, and each sealed at the top with a green drawstring and a metal clasp. Watching Delgado with speculation, he headed on in, to collect his pay.

The pickers, the minute they saw Delgado’s car, had piled out of the trucks laughing and talking and crowding fast into the mess hall for their wages. They were lined up inside, shoving and jostling, eager to pocket the week’s take, twenty to twenty-five dollars apiece, depending on how fast a fellow worked, more money than they’d ever see in Mexico. And the bags held, as well, the wages for Lee himself and for Jake and the other five foremen.

He knew from Jake that Delgado made the rounds to all four ranches every Friday, heading out from Hemet, knew that Blythe was his last stop, that he’d stay with Jake overnight, head back home in the morning. The same drill, week after week. Leave Hemet at dawn carrying all four payrolls, carrying enough cash to set a fellow up real nice.

Maybe not as much as Lee would like to have on him before heading for Mexico, but a nice start. And how could Delgado miss a week’s wages? The thought quickened Lee’s pulse, wondering where Delgado kept the money until he headed out. In the local Hemet bank, maybe picked it up the night before? Or in a home safe?

If the safe was one of those big walk-in jobs, that would be a poser. He wished he’d paid closer attention to the half-dozen master safe crackers he’d known over the years in one prison or another. Though he had learned some, all right.

But if there was a safe, what other kind of security did Delgado have? Dogs? Guards? Some kind of electronic device?

No, it would be better to hit him just as he started out in the morning from Hemet, wait until he was on the road alone, then force him over. He’d need firearms; and he needed to know what weapons Delgado carried, and where, what weapons he had stashed in that big Cadillac, and what weapons he carried on him.

But, picturing himself forcing Delgado’s car off the road, a tremor of fear touched Lee. Was he up to this? Up to handling Delgado alone, as he had always handled his victims in the past, except for those years he ran with Jake? After parting from Jake, he’d blown a couple of jobs, and when he took a good look at what he was now, an honest look at how he’d aged, at how weak he’d grown compared to the man he had been, he didn’t much like what he saw.

But then a dark sense of power kicked in, a sudden surge of certainty. He could do this. What was the matter with him? A dark vitality stirred his blood, strength burned in him, and a hard envy of Ramon Delgado, jealousy for all Delgado had that Lee had never had. A heady resentment boiled in him making him scoff at the idea he was too old to take down Delgado, that he was biting off more than he could handle.

He’d bring this off, he thought, smiling, he could take what he wanted and maybe—maybe he could set Jake up for the fall.

He thought about that, about laying the groundwork for Jake’s arrest, setting up the clues, maybe lift one of Jake’s guns from the house, with Jake’s fingerprints on it, maybe something else of Jake’s left “forgotten” under the seat of the Cadillac. He’d stash the money where no one would find it, return to the ranch innocent as a babe. And when the cops came nosing around he’d be there to sympathize with Lucita, to comfort her, to be enraged at Jake’s betrayal of all they’d had together.

If Lee could hear the cat’s whisper that Lucita would never believe such a story, that thought didn’t last long. The dark presence told him more forcefully that he could do this, he could lay out a foolproof scenario that left Jake guilty beyond doubt, a plan that even Lucita would have to believe.

It would take time to work it out, to put every detail in place. But, thinking about the plan as he moved through the mess hall to the pay table, his certainty, his self-satisfaction, was a dark itch within him.

Taking his turn at the table, where Jake and Delgado were dealing out the week’s cash, he collected his three days’ wages, pocketed the meager change and left the mess hall. He could see the cooks working back in the kitchen, could see that supper wouldn’t be set out on the long serving counter until the payroll had all been dealt with. Winding out between the lines ofcrowding men, he returned to his cabin smiling, liking his plan. He sat on the steps feeling bold and right, watching through the screens the crowd at the long table until a sudden sneeze behind him made him swing up off the steps turning, his fists clenched.

13

But it was only the cat sitting on the rail big as life, lashing its tail, its ears back, glaring at Lee, a gleam in its eye that didn’t bode for good. The big tom’s yellow gaze burned into Lee as if seeing every detail of the plan Lee had embraced. When Lee looked deep, he imagined he saw in Misto’s eyes every image of the robbery that he had envisioned, and none of that knowledge was the cat’s business.

“Make no mistake,” Misto said, “if you follow the passions that were fed to you tonight, you’re lost for eternity, your soul will crumble to dust, there will be nothing left of you to move on and to know the joy of what yet awaits.” The cat sneezed again. “He tells you lies you’re toosmart to believe. You’re too smart, Lee, to suck up to the wraith’s passions, when you know they will destroy you.”

“Go to hell,” Lee said. The cat was too nosy, too opinionated, too bossy. Turning his back, he sat down again on the step.

“You know, of course,” Misto said softly, “that young picker’s been watching you, that young Latino man standing in the shadows between the sheds, that young Tony Valdez, watching you with great interest, asyou watched Jake and Delgado.”

Lee lifted his eyes to scan the yard, watched Tony move away deeper between the cabins and disappear among the sheds.

“Valdez has a quick mind,” the cat said, “he wonders what you found so interesting. The boy is full of questions.”

Lee thought reluctantly that in the future maybe he ought to listen to the cat, after all, ought to swallow back his defiance and pay attention. And as Valdez disappeared into the night, Lee decided he’d better pay more attention, too, to who was observing him. Had better play it closer to the chest before Valdez had that whole crew of young hotheads nosing into his business.

“Maybe,” the cat said, “you should take a better look at where those dark plans are coming from, before they take you down, Lee Fontana.” The cat’s challenge pulled Lee in one direction, while his thieving desire drew him in the other. Seated on the cabin steps, he watched Jake and Ramon Delgado leave the mess hall, striding away toward the ranch house. On the porch, they paused. Delgado moved on inside but Jake turned back, heading across the dry yard toward Lee’s cabin. Jake paused at the bottom step, his boots coated with pale sand, the band of his tan Stetson dark with sweat. “Come on, Lee, join us for dinner. Just a quick bite before Ramon and I start on the books, he’d like to meet you.”

“Why? I can’t be the first parolee he’s hired.”

Jake looked surprised.“You’re my friend, he said he’d like to meet you.”

“Sorry,” Lee said, rising. “Just tired. I’ll stop by in a few minutes, let me scrape off some of the dust.”

Jake looked him over, nodded, and turned away.

Lee didn’t want to meet Delgado. Besides a prickly conscience, he’d had a long, hard day, his legs ached, sand and dust made his eyes sting, couldn’t Jake see he was beat? Jake took a couple of steps up, reaching to stroke the yellow cat. “Don’t know where this one came from. Dozen cats around the place, new one shows up now and then, keep rats out of the seed and food stores. Most of them are half wild. This one’s friendly enough, he makes right up to a person.”

“Never been much for cats,” Lee said noncommittally, wondering what that was about. He was right, the damned ghost cat was too nosy. He moved on into the cabin, glancing back as Jake crossed the yard and disappeared inside the house. He could see through the lighted windows beyond Lucita’s lace curtains where Delgado sat at the dining table, the lamp lit and a thick ledger before him as if he had already started on the payroll and expenses. On the wall behind him where the lamplight shone, a painting of white roses made Lee think sharply of Lucita.

While he was cleaning up he thought about her, about being in her house surrounded by her little touches, her books, her flowers, her scent. He showered, put on a clean shirt, guessed he’d better wash the other one in the sink tonight. Feeling strangely nervous, he went on over.

The house was just as much Jake’s house as Lucita’s, Navajo rugs, leather chairs, agricultural and cowman’s magazines, but with Lucita’s touches everywhere, brightly jacketed books, potted violets, the lace curtains, the dining room furnished with an intricately carved Spanish table long enough to accommodate a dozen chairs, creamy walls, and above the dark, carved buffet the white roses as showy as Lucita herself. She loved roses, though he hadn’t seen any out in that pitiful, dry yard where roses were never meant to grow. The painting made Lee uncomfortably aware of her, the petals as soft as her cheek, as creamy as the pale silks she liked to wear, Lucita in tight Levi’s, a creamy satin shirt, fancy boots, her black hair sleek and shining, her dark eyes laughing.

Jake had folded back the lace table runner, out of the way, one end covered with a heavy mat, with bowls of beans, rice, and good Texas chili that a Mexican woman brought in from the kitchen. Lee took the empty place Jake indicated, accepted the cold beer Jake passed to him. As they dished their plates liberally, Delgado looked across at Lee.

“McNeil wasn’treal hard time?” he asked casually. “More freedom than, say, Leavenworth or Atlanta?” The big man leaned back in his chair, sipping his beer from the bottle.

Lee nodded, taking in Delgado’s bold, square features. Ramon Delgado might be a hard worker, but he was a man who lived well, treated himself well. What did he know about McNeil? What did he know about solitary, if you came in with a bad attitude, how you were stripped naked and locked into a pitch-black cell, five feet by five, cold as hell, no toilet, no sink, no bed to lie on, and what sleep you got was on the cold, damp concrete. They gave you one thin blanket, took that away in the morning, brought you a dinky little bowl of gruel, and you had to pick the cockroaches out of that. Lee had been in there only once. After that five-day stretch he was real careful, he stayed out of trouble, didn’t make a move or say a word to draw the attention of the guards or, as much as possible, of the other inmates. If he had a beef with someone, he took care of it in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him. After thatstretch in solitary, he’d been a model inmate despite the hazing that was laid on him, and pretty soon he got what he wanted. “I worked the farm,” he said shortly. “That part was easy time.”

Though he hadn’t lived in the farm complex like most of those who worked there, he’d gone back to the cell block at night. Even with Lee’s attention to good behavior, he guessed he’d still made the warden nervous. But Delgado didn’t need to know the whole story, the fancy bastard. What did he know about prison, anyway? Delgado’s interest made Lee’s temper flare but he did his best to swallow back his anger.

“What were you in for?” Delgado continued. “Jake mentioned bank robbery.”

Lee nodded, drew his thumbnail down his beer bottle, crumpling the label away from the glass.“A job I messed up on.” He had to try harder not to show his anger. He was, after all, working for the man, he guessed Delgado had a right to ask questions. “It was the first bank robbery I ever tried,” Lee said, keeping his voice mild, trying to act like they were having a normal conversation. “And it was sure as hell the last.”

“You liked the trains better,” Delgado said, smiling.

Lee nodded.“The old steam trains. Those days are gone.”

“Not many big shipments of gold, either,” Delgado said. “All bank drafts or paper money, marked money, not like it used to be. And the diesels too fast for a man on horseback.” His blue eyes burned into Lee. “You’re thinking to stay straight, now? Thinking not to cross the law anymore?”

“That’s my plan,” Lee lied. “I’m getting too old for that life. My lungs are too sick, I can’t take the abuse anymore.”But not quite the last job, he thought, looking steadily at Delgado. As he watched this man, with his riches, with his great spreads of land and hundreds of men working for him, men under his complete control, Lee’s dark urge pressed in at him, wanting part of what Delgado had, no matter who he hurt. If the other three operations, plus the date groves at Hemet, were as large as this ranch, that could total over six hundred workers. Say each man averaged aroundtwenty-five dollars a week, depending on how much he picked, that would add up to some fifteen thousand dollars. Add in the salaries of Jake and the other ranch managers, and their foremen, and that still wouldn’t be enough to retire on, even in Mexico, for whatever time he had left.

But then when he thought about betraying Lucita and Jake, he felt his face heat with shame. The cat was right, if he stole from Delgado he’d put a knife in the hearts of his friends. Shaken, not knowing what he wanted, he soon left the two men to their account books, the dirty dishes and empty beer bottles piled at one end of the table. Crossing Lucita’s comfortable living room to let himself out. Looking at the deep leather sofawith its tumble of soft pillows, he had a sudden vision of lying there with her, holding her close, a thought that brought heat again.

But which dominated? The heat born of lust? Or of shame? He’d never known himself to be so uncertain. Was this a part of getting old? Old, and too weak to know what he wanted? Too old and uncertain to resist whatever notion might, at any given moment, pass through his aging brain?

Dark of mood, he pushed out into the night, the day’s searing heat vanished but the evening air still warm. A thin moon was rising over the melon fields, silvering the tamarisk trees beyond, along the riverbank. He could hear coyotes singing off in the distance, somewhere this side of the mountains. Looking out across the desert toward the wide Colorado River that fed the vast rows of crops, he had a sudden sense of what Jake had told him about Ramon Delgado, about how Delgado had built up this land by backbreaking hard work, and a sudden sense hit Lee of what Delgado might, in fact, feel for the land; and Lee felt a hint, deep inside, thatwhat he had chosen to see in Delgado might be warped, twisted by the way he wanted to see it.

His cabin windows were black, but moonlight touched the porch. A tall shape stood waiting in the shadows beside the door, sending goose bumps up Lee’s arms, a fear flashing through him that made him grip the switchblade in his pocket. The same fear he’d known back at McNeil when the dark wraith moved in through the bars to stand at the foot of his bed. He told himself itwas only a shadow, that it had no power over him except that which he allowed it to have. He moved on up the steps and past it, stepped on in through his unlocked door, closed the door, and switched on the overhead bulb.

Nothing in the room seemed disturbed, everything looked as it should, his folded clothes and towels, Mae’s picture on the white-painted dresser, the straight-backed purple chair standing where he’d left it, the quilted coverlet rumpled on the iron bedstead where he had sat to pull on his boots, the coverlet made by Lucita’s hand. The yellow tomcat lay curled in the middle of the bed, blinking up sleepily at him. Again he was surprised at how glad he was to see Misto there, so pleased that Lee almost spoke to him, then thought better of that idea. He didn’t feel like a lecture. Stripping off his boots and socks, his pants and shirt, he turned the quilt back as best he could without disturbing the beast, turned out the light and slid under the covers leaving most of the space to the cat. If, tonight, the dark spirit slipped into the room to torment him, so be it, he was too tired to care; he was too conflicted by the devil’s hassling to deal with it tonight, he wanted only to be left alone, except for the ghost cat. He badly wanted Misto to stay. Though the big feline, who had taken solid shape tonight in all his shaggy glory, was damnably heavy as he stretched out across Lee’s feet. Amused, but eased by Misto’s boldness and warmth, reassured by the cat’s presence, Leedrifted off into sleep, into dreams that made the dark spirit seem less threatening. That made Satan seem less powerful, tonight, than the spirit of the wily yellow ghost who lay wakeful, watching over Lee, though much of Misto’s attention turned now, as well, to Georgia, to the dark spirit’s keen interest in the family of little Sammie Blake.

14

It was hot in Georgia, too, but more humid. Earlier that same day, as a little breeze stirred the oak leaves, high among the branches Sammie sat straddling a gnarled limb, her bare feet swinging, her long pale hair tangled in the twigs and leaves. Life was good, her daddy was home now, at work at his auto shop just a few blocks away. Later in the afternoon she and Becky would walk down to join him and they’d head over to Grandma’s for dinner. Below her at the picnic table her mother had laid out the monthly figures for Thrasher’s Drugstore, her papers weighted with rocks, her ledger shaded by the sprawling tree.

Looking up, Becky watched Sammie with interest, the child completely absorbed in moving a little metal car along in the air above a leafy branch—she had attached a pair of paper wings to the car, stuck on with tape so it was now an airplane, and she had filled the hollow metal plane with white flour. Becky didn’t know where Sammie’s interest in flight came from, there weren’t many planes around Rome, just a couple of small ones that enthusiastic young men were learning to fly. She watched Sammie pass the little plane over a branch, shaking it so the flour would drift down and cover the leaves. “Dusting the crops,” Sammie said. Becky could swear Sammie had never seen a crop duster. Somehow, the child’s use of the word, her knowledge of the word, made her uneasy.

She was probably reacting to nothing, maybe to some chance remark by a neighbor that Sammie had overheard, but still she wondered. With Sammie, any unusual reference, like so many of her dreams, might have far more meaning than seemed obvious. Sammie’s dreams could affect their lives in ways that were far more real than the ephemeral world of nighttime fantasies.

Though many of Sammie’s visions were small, unimportant events, a neighbor’s truck breaking down late at night; the neighborhood cat who birthed five kittens, two black, three striped, just as Sammie foretold. Becky was used to those dreams, Sammie would tell them to her, then later would smile at her knowingly when the kittens were born just as Sammie said, or the truck broke an axle just before midnight and the neighbor called Morgan for help.

But some of Sammie’s night visions were ugly. When she was barely four years old she dreamed that the courthouse was on fire and she woke crying that the tower was falling all in flame. A week later the courthouse burned, the tower fell blazing, its flying parts breaking ladders, smashing the hood of the town firetruck, severing a six-inch hose, and injuring four volunteer firefighters.

Becky and Morgan had told no one about their child’s predictions, and they swore Sammie to secrecy. The same year she dreamed that her little dog was dead, the small spotted pup Becky had gotten for her from the animal shelter and for which she’d had a fence built to keep him from running in the street, the pup who slept with Sammie and spent every waking hour with her. Sammie dreamed that he followed their car to Main Street where a truck hit him, she dreamed his death in detail far too vivid for any child to have imagined, for any child to have to witness. Three days later the pup dug under the fence and followed their car when Sammie and her mother went shopping. He was killed on Main Street under the wheels of a delivery truck. The child’s grief had already reached its peak before his death; now, her response to the fatal accident was numbness, a cold silence that deepened day by day, badly frightening Becky.

But not all Sammie’s dreams were shattering, some were happy predictions, a new teacher she would grow to love; her grandmother Caroline’s new sewing machine on which Caroline, a tall, handsome woman, would fashion bright new clothes for Sammie. She dreamed the tale in a brand-new storybook, knew it nearly word for word before it was read to her. She dreamed of a school party with papier-m?ch? elephants and giraffes and a cake with a zebra on top, her school “circus party” about which she knew nothing at the time.

But now, this past week, a stranger vision had begun: Sammie had started dreaming of an old man, someone neither Becky nor Morgan had ever met. Sammie called him the cowboy, she would wake worried becausehe was worried, because he was frightened.“Scared because he’s growing old and weak,” she told Becky. It seemed that only by sharing her dreams could the child deal with her fears; and this old man seemed as close and familiar to Sammie as if she had known him all her life. Becky tried to say something reassuring about people gettingold, how natural that was; she would hold Sammie and rock her until the child’s sadness seemed to ease, until Sammie’s pain and fear for the old cowboy drew back, the distress in the little girl’s dark gaze to soften, though she would remain pale and unnaturally quiet.

But now Sammie, flying her crop duster over the leaves saying the cowboy would be happy about the plane and that it would make everything all right, that the airplane would bring him what he wanted, the connection of Sammie’s play with those night visions indeed disturbed Becky. The powerful juxtaposition of dream and waking play left Becky warily on edge, left her waiting nervously for whatever would happen next, for whatever was destined to happen, for the inevitable conclusion to her little girl’s strange and unnatural predictions.