Way Down on the High Lonely (5 page)

“Good to see you,” Neal said, realizing with some surprise that he actually meant it. Ed Levine had been his boss, his rival, his nemesis for about a dozen years.

They stood awkwardly staring at each other for a few moments—Ed in bikini swimming trunks, water dripping into a pool at his feet, Neal trying to keep his new shoes from getting wet.

“So how have you been?” Neal asked.

“Divorced.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not,” Levine said. “So how was China? Did you have a good time?”

“Terrific.”

Joe Graham asked, “Is this touching moment over? Can we get to work?”

“Is he on?” Levine asked Graham.

“He’s on,” Neal answered.

“Let’s grab a table. I’ve had lunch sent out.”

They sat down at a round, white enamel table with a crank-up umbrella. Levine put on a Hawaiian print shirt that was oversize even on him. Neal draped his jacket over the back of his chair, put his sunglasses on, and watched the beautiful people sunbathing around the pool.

“You look good,” he said to Levine. “You’ve lost some weight.”

“I’ve been working out. Running, weights, squash … the whole bit. I’m in the best shape since I was in the service.”

“That’s good.”

“How about you, Neal, are you in shape?”

Neal thought about the endless trips up the steep mountain slopes, carrying buckets of water and loads of firewood.

“I’m in shape.”

“No, I mean, are you
in shape?
Operational shape?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Ed looked over at Graham. Graham nodded.

“I don’t know,” Ed muttered.

A waiter came over. Graham ordered a beer, Ed got an iced tea, Neal an iced coffee. They sat quietly with their own thoughts until the drinks came.

“We wanted you to meet Anne Kelley, hear her story, before you committed to the job.”

“We?”

“Graham and I … and The Man.”

“What’s going on here, Ed?”

The waiter came back, and with a big tray of food.

“I hope no one minds, I ordered for us.”

The waiter set down a pastrami on rye for Graham, a rare cheeseburger and fries for Neal, and a salad for Levine.

“A salad?” Neal asked.

“So?”

“Nothing.”

Ed pointed to Neal’s plate. “It isn’t the Burger Joint,” he said, referring to the little joint that was Neal’s hangout in New York.

“But what is?” asked Neal.

“Right. But if you’d rather have some rice or something …”

Neal shook his head. He was too busy eating to speak. It
wasn’t
the Burger Joint, but it was still pretty wonderful—food you actually had to grip in your hands.

Levine dug into his salad with an almost grim determination to enjoy it. He downed it in about ten seconds flat, wiped his mouth, and tried to convince himself he was full.

“So, Neal,” he said.

“So, Ed.”

“Here’s the deal. McCall became a disciple of the True Christian Identity Church. C. Wesley Carter has some interesting ties with groups like the Posse Comitatus, the Klan, and the Nazi party,” Levine said, eyeing the cottage fries on Neal’s plate. “Our contacts in the FBI tell us that these groups are starring to get together, trying to establish a nationwide network. The idea is to maintain their aboveground public parties while creating underground terrorist groups loosely gathered under the rubric of White Aryan Resistance. What is this?”

“A radish.”

“Jesus … to coin a phrase.”

“Could you pass that vinegar over?” Neal asked Ed.

Ed handed him the bottle and Neal poured vinegar over his fries.

“Anyway,” Ed continued, “in setting up these little cells these geeks get each other jobs, help their fugitive members hide out … a whole underground network.”

“And if Harley gets into this network we could lose him for good,” Graham added.

“Which is why we need to move fast,” Ed said, “now that we know where he is.”

That’s interesting news, Neal thought. “Where is he?” he asked.

“So,” Ed asked, “you want to do it?”

Neal just wanted to make him work for it a little more. Just to protest a little against this old bit—pretending to let you decide if you want to do the job but refusing to tell you what it is until you say you’ll do it.

Ed leaned over and snatched a cottage fry from Neal’s plate.

“Do what?” Neal asked.

Ed looked to Joe Graham.

“Go undercover, son.”

Undercover. The most exciting and scariest word in the business. The flame that attracts and burns.

“Undercover where?” Neal asked.

Ed munched on one bite of the cottage fry and gestured with the other, making small, vague circles in the air.

“You know, out there.”

Out there, out there. Well, boys, why not? I’ve been out there my whole life.

Six hundred miles out there, a shriek came up from the sagebrush flats. At first it sounded like a coyote in pain, but coyotes don’t howl in the daytime. The sound was human, a scream of agony that lifted and then died in the vast stillness of The High Lonely.

3

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

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

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

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

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

And Anne Kelley would have her child back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like it quiet.”

“What can 1 get you?”

“Scotch.”

“House brand?”

“Fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LA.”

“LA
is
a jail.”

“You got that right.”

“He owe you money or something?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do it now.

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