While Drowning in the Desert

by Don Winslow

  “Actually, I’m starting to feel better.”

  “And you need your rest.”

  “In moderation,” he said. “With exercise.”

  “But you can’t get out of bed.”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope.”

  “So any exercise you’re going to get …”

  “… would have to be in bed.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Hmmm.”

  I shut and locked the door, then got out of my clothes.

  “I’m really feeling considerable improvement,” Neal said.

  What can I tell you? The guy makes me laugh.

  “It must be the tender, loving care,” I said.

  “Is that it?”

  “It’s about to be.”

  Then I eased into the bed.

  Epilogue

  Karen was just getting out of the shower when I asked her to get me a Diet Pepsi.

  “Excuse me?” she murmured.

  “I’m in postcoital bliss,” I said. “And when I’m in postcoital bliss I need a Diet Pepsi.”

  “Why don’t you get one?”

  I shook my head.

  “When a man’s in postcoital bliss it’s the woman’s job to get the Diet Pepsi,” I smiled. “Besides, I’m not supposed to get out of bed.”

  “I’m in postcoital bliss, too.”

  “Too bad.”

  I looked at her with what I liked to think was a lascivious expression.

  “Besides,” I said, “it’s your fault.”

  She got dressed and went out to the little refrigerator in the hall to get me a Diet Pepsi.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello, son.”

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “What’s this I got in the mail today?” he asked.

  “From me?”

  “No, from Elvis,” he said. “Yes, from you.”

  “It’s a Father’s Day card,” I answered.

  “It isn’t Father’s Day,” Graham said.

  “It should be,” I said.

  There was a long silence over the phone. Then I said, “Dad, thanks for finding me.”

  “Forget it,” Graham said. “So how’s Palm Springs?”

  I laughed, then he nagged me about my various terrible injuries and I told him I was okay.

  “Well, you take care of yourself,” he said.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  We would have gone on in that vein but it would have been absolutely bathetic.

  Karen came back in, sat down on the bed and handed me the Diet Pepsi.

  “Did we attempt to make a baby?” I asked.

  I was willing. I thought I could handle it.

  Talk about your long silences.

  Then she shook her head.

  “I still want to, though,” she said.

  “I think I do, too.”

  “But you don’t know,” she said.

  “No.”

  She sighed, lay down next to me in the bed, and snuggled her face into my neck.

  “Not knowing’s not good enough,” she said. I’m sorry.

  “Don’t be sorry. Wherever you go, there you are.”

  We held each other as tightly as two people with various broken bones could.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “I think I have a lot of stuff to work out.”

  “I hate saying it,” she said. “But I think so, too. I just want you to know. I’ve been thinking about it, too. A kid deserves that, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I guess you do.”

  I swallowed hard and said, “So I think I’ll go see somebody.”

  “You mean like a shrink?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked.”

  “No, I think it’s a good idea,” she said. “I’m just surprised that you do.”

  “I don’t. I just don’t know how else to go about it.”

  We shared some more silence.

  “I think we should postpone the wedding,” she said.

  “Is that a gentle way of saying we’re not getting married?”

  “No, it’s a gentle way of saying that we shouldn’t get married until we know what we want,” she said. “And I guess we need to be alone for a while.”

  That scared the shit out of me. “You’ll be there when I come back?” “If it works out that way,” she said. “And I hope it works out that way. I love you.” “I love you, too.”

  I left the hospital two days later. I was still sore and still hurting and had a heroic limp, but it was time to go. I said good-bye to Nathan and Hope. Karen had already left.

  Saying goodbye to Nathan was harder than I thought it would be. It’s funny—first I couldn’t wait to get rid of him, and when I finally did I felt kind of sad. I just had this feeling that I had seen the last of Natty Silver and that there weren’t any more coming down the road.

  I don’t want to talk about saying good-bye to Karen.

  I didn’t really know where I was going so I finally got on that flight to Palm Springs. I hated to leave a trip unfinished, I wanted to find a shrink, and I figured that they probably had a few of them in California.

  So I never should have got out of the hot tub, right? Sometimes you get out of the hot water just to jump right back into it.

  But maybe you have to almost drown before you really learn to swim. And sometimes you find out that you’re somewhat broken and you can’t swim at all.

  But you do anyway.

  Drowning in the desert, you just tread water.

  A Biography of Don Winslow

  Don Winslow is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen crime and mystery novels as well as a number of short stories and screenplays. His first novel, A Cool Breeze on the Underground (1991), was nominated for an Edgar Award, and California Fire and Life (1999) received the Shamus Award, which honors the year’s best detective novel.

  Winslow was born in 1953 in New York City, and he grew up in Perryville, Rhode Island, a small coastal town. His mother was a librarian and his father a Navy officer. Both parents instilled in Winslow a love of storytelling, and the bookshelves at home were well stocked with literary classics, which Winslow was encouraged to explore. When his father stayed up late swapping sailor stories with his buddies, Winslow would hide under the dining room table to eavesdrop.

  Winslow had an unusually varied career before becoming a fulltime writer, beginning with a series of jobs as a child actor. After high school, he attended the University of Nebraska and majored in African history. He then moved back to New York City where he managed movie theaters and became a private investigator. Winslow moonlighted as a PI while pursuing a master’s degree in military history. He also lived for a time in Africa, where he worked as a safari guide, and in China, where he led hiking tours. Winslow completed A Cool Breeze on the Underground while in China.

  A Cool Breeze draws from Winslow’s experiences tracking missing persons while in New York. Protagonist Neal Carey is a graduate student studying English literature who is drawn by past underworld connections into a career as a private investigator. Winslow went on to write four other novels with Neal Carey as the main character, often set in locales where the author had resided at some point. The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror (1992) has Carey chasing a scientist through China. Way Down on the High Lonely (1993) and While Drowning in the Desert (1996) are set on the west coast of the United States, where Winslow moved after marrying his wife, Jean, and publishing his first novel.

  Winslow’s recent fiction is often set in Southern California, where he currently lives. The cross-border drug war, California organized crime, and surf culture are common themes in his later work. His style bears the spirit of his settings, and his prose is notable for its spare dialogue and deadpan narration, as well as the technical accuracy that comes from his many years working as a private investigator.

  A number of Winslow’s novels have been adapted for film. A 2007 movie based on The Death and Life of Bobby Z (1997) starred Laurenc
e Fishburne, and The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) is under production and set to star Robert DeNiro. Winslow’s latest novel, Savages (2010), has received stellar reviews, and the author is currently adapting the novel for film with Oliver Stone.

  A Winslow family photo taken in Rhode Island in the 1960s. Winslow (front left) is seen here with his father, mother, both sets of grandparents, sister (Kristine Rolofson, also a novelist), and dog.

  Winslow in his 1972 high school yearbook photo.

  Winslow juggling at his nephew Ben’s birthday party in Beyond Hope, Idaho, where he lived off and on in the mid-1970s. He ran cattle but also “had a very macho job driving a salad-dressing truck. There would have been no Thousand Island dressing in Libby, Montana, without men like me.” It was in a cabin in Beyond Hope that Winslow started writing Cool Breeze on the Underground.

  Winslow fishing on Sandy Brook, near his old home in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. He says he was “lousy at it, but was an enthusiastic trout fisherman back in the day.” Winslow also claims that he “set a record of failing to catch a single fish on four continents in a single calendar year.”

  Winslow with his two dogs, Bud and Lou, on the deck of his house in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. Riverton, a small, postcard New England town, has one general store—the Riverton General Store—that, Winslow says, “made the best sandwiches in the world.”

  Winslow with his late friend Quentin Keynes and his son at Christmas around 2003. Keynes was a safari guide, filmmaker, rare-book collector, and the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The London flat in Cool Breeze on the Underground was based on Keynes’s, where Winslow lived for several summers in the 1970s while Keynes was away in Africa. One of the characters in the book—Simon Keyes—was also based on Keynes.

  Winslow at a book signing for The Winter of Frankie Machine in 2006.

  Winslow and his son playing roller hockey.

  Once a safari guide in Africa, Winslow, seen here in Kenya in about 2007, poses with his son, wife, Jean, and two Samburu trackers, both of whom he has known since they were young. He once gave the trackers two camels to start a herd and says that now “there are apparently dozens of camels in North Kenya with the name Winslow.” Winslow’s connection to Kenya runs deep. He proposed to Jean on an island off the coast of Kenya, and when their son was born, he received spears and shields.

  Winslow on a rainy day in Berlin in September 2010.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1996 by Don Winslow

  cover design by Milan Bozic

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0626-3

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com