Way Down on the High Lonely nc-3

by Don Winslow

  “Who the hell is Reverend Carter?”

  The voice came from right behind the door.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Worried about me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Levine went over to the bed to pick up Cody.

  Cody wasn’t in the bed.

  Graham came out of the bathroom shaking his head.

  “Where’s the boy?” Levine hissed.

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

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

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

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

  “It isn’t him,” Graham said.

  “What?” Levine asked.

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

  “What’s your name?” Levine asked him.

  “Harley McCall!”

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

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Paul Wallace.” He was crying.

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

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

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

  “In Las Vegas.”

  “When?”

  “Month or so.”

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

  “I will.”

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

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry,” Neal said to Anne.

  She nodded but kept crying.

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

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

  “Get going, son,” Graham said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Neal nodded. “Well, you. You do.”

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

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

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

  “They think you’re lying. So do I.”

  “I-”

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

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

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

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

  “You’ll never hear the sirens, Paul.”

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

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

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

  “Why would he do that?”

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

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

  Which it sure did.

  “Were you friends? Did you work together?”

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

  “Did he have a little boy with him?”

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

  “How old was the boy?”

  “Three, maybe four?”

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

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

  “I understand that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Good…”

  “At the Filly Ranch.”

  “Where’s that?”

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

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

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

  “Yessir.”

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

  “I have a sister in Arizona.”

  “Go there. First thing in the morning.”

  “Yessir.”

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

  “To hell with him.”

  Not yet, Paul. Not until I find him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She caught the tone of puzzlement in his voice.

  “What were you expecting, honey? Horses?”

  “Sort of.”

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

  “I think so.”

  “Well, do you want it?”

  “How much?”

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

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

  “Ain’t we all.”

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

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

  “The what?” asked Neal.

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

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

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

  “I’m looking for a real Doreen.”

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

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

  “My, my,” Bobby said.

  Neal shrugged.

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

  She turned back to Neal.

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

  “Scotch?”

  “You got it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She leaned back and laughed.

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

  Neal knew right then that McCall had skipped out again.

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

  She looked him over.

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

  “Neither are you.”

  “But that don’t make us friends.”

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

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

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well, you’re pretty much right.�
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  She scooped the bills up and stuffed them into the dress pocket.

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

  Neal didn’t answer.

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

  “What happened?”

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

  “What things?”

  “You want a lot for your money.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” Neal answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How long ago did he leave?”

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

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

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

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