Read Online Way Down on the High Lonely by Don Winslow - Free Book Online Page B

carried away,” Neal answered. He felt pretty dumb. He’d come on too fast with Doreen. And much too rough. He could have gotten the answers he needed without insulting her, just as he probably could have gotten the truth out of Paul Wallace without slapping him. He had substituted tough for smarts, and that was stupid. And flashing all that cash around had been just plain idiotic. He didn’t blame Doreen and her gun-wielding cowboy friend as much as he blamed himself. He’d been trained better.
    He hauled himself back into the truck and the resulting pain felt almost like satisfaction.
    Steve climbed into the cab and pulled the truck back onto the road. The old truck rattled, rumbled, and roared down the highway.
    Neal settled back in the seat and tried to figure out his next move.
    I’m headed toward Austin, he thought, the last known location of Harley McCall. I know McCall has hooked up with a rancher, someone he knew from his California days. That’s the plus side.
    The down side is that I don’t have a car or much money, and that Levine and Graham are expecting me to show up in New York any day now. And they’re going to be pissed off that I didn’t follow orders. But at least I dumped the car.
    He was pondering the wisdom of calling the office when he fell asleep. He woke up over an hour later.
    “You don’t look crazier than a pet coon!” Steve shouted.
    “What?” Neal Carey shouted over the noise of the old pickup truck as it rattled over Highway 50.
    “I said you don’t look crazier than a pet coon.” answered Steve Mills. His face crinkled into a wry smile. “I was thinking that you’d have to be crazier than a pet coon to be wandering around this country all by yourself with no particular purpose.”
    “Maybe I am.” Neal answered. “How crazy is a pet coon?”
    “Pretty damn crazy. Course, anybody who tries ranching Nevada has no damn business calling anyone else crazy. So even if you are crazier than a pet coon, I figure I still got about twenty years of crazy on you! Hold the wheel, will you?”
    Neal reached over and steadied the steering wheel as Steve Mills took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, then lit it up.
    “Hope you don’t mind,” Steve said, exhaling a deep drag of smoke, “but since my heart attack the wife raises unholy hell if she sees me with a butt. They had to whirlybird me into Fallon, so I finally got a little of my insurance money back! Kind of scared the wife, though. She says if it happens again, and she finds any cigs on me, she’s just going to leave me to die in the barn. I told her she might as well bury me there, too, seeing as how I’ve been ass deep in cow shit most of my life anyway. You don’t say a lot, do you?”
    “I like to listen.”
    “Well, this relationship might work out, because I like to talk and the wife and daughter have already heard all my stories—twice. I got a herd of cows rooting for my next heart attack just so they won’t have to listen to me anymore. My cattle don’t go ‘moo,’ they go ‘Shut up!’”
    The truck reached the top of a long, steep grade. Neal could see a broad valley below them. A mountain range formed a backdrop beyond. The valley seemed to stretch endlessly to the south and north.
    You can see forever, Neal thought.
    “Welcome to The High Lonely,” Steve said.
    “The what?”
    “The High Lonely—that’s what we call it around here. You’re at about six thousand feet elevation, and it’s mostly empty space, as you can observe. Very few people, some more cattle, lots of jackrabbits and coyotes. Back there in the mountains you have cougars, bighorn sheep, and eagles.”
    Steve pulled the truck off onto an overlook.
    It’s like being perched at the edge of the world, Neal thought. A great brown vastness under a canopy of startling blue.
    “We’re sitting on Mount Airy Summit,” Steve explained. “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine feet