Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

They find a new vehicle a few miles south on 79. An old farmhouse sits down in a bowl off to the east of the highway. One of those classic white-trash front yards, with old cars and old car parts scattered around outside an old barn and a few dilapidated shacks that might have once been chicken coops. Callan steers down the dirt road and stops the bike outside the barn, inside of which a guy in the inevitable ball cap is working on a ’68 Mustang. He’s tall, skinny, maybe fifty years old, although it’s hard to tell under the cap.

Callan looks at the Mustang. “What do you want for it?”

“Nothin',” the guy says. “Ain’t sellin’ this one.”

“Sellin’ any of them?”

The guy points to a lime-green ’85 Grand Am sitting outside. “The passenger-side door don’t open from the outside. You gotta open it from the inside.”

They walk over to the car.

“But does the engine run?” Callan asks.

“Oh, yeah, the engine runs real good.”

Callan gets in and turns the key.

The engine comes to life like Snow White after the kiss.

“How much?” Callan asks.

“I dunno. Eleven hundred?”

“Pink slip?”

“Pink slip, registration, plates. All that.”

Callan walks back to the bike, takes twenty hundred-dollar bills out of the sidesaddle and hands them to the guy. “A thousand for the car. The rest for forgetting you ever saw us.”

The guy takes the money. “Hey, anytime you don’t want me to see you, come back.”

Callan gives Nora the keys. “Follow me.”

She follows him north on 79 to Julian, where they turn east on 78, down the long, curving grade to the desert, across a long flat stretch, until he finally pulls off on a dirt road and stops about a half-mile from where the road stops, at the mouth of a canyon.

“This should do,” he says when she gets out of the car, meaning that the fire won’t spread here in the sand and there probably won’t be anyone around to notice the smoke. He siphons some gas from his spare tank, then pours it over the Harley.

“You want to say good-bye?” he asks her.

“Good-bye.”

He tosses the match.

They watch the bike burn.

“A Viking funeral,” she says.

“Except we’re not in it.” He walks back to the Grand Am, gets in the driver’s seat and slides over to open the door for her. “Where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere nice, somewhere quiet.”

He thinks about it. If anyone does discover the bike’s skeleton and connects it to us, they’ll probably think we headed east, across the desert, to catch a flight somewhere from Tucson or Phoenix or maybe Las Vegas. So when they get back to the highway he backtracks west.

“Where are we going?” Nora asks. She doesn’t really care; she’s just curious.

Which is a good thing, because he answers, “I don’t know.”

He doesn’t, either. He doesn’t have anything in mind except to drive. Enjoy the scenery, enjoy being with her. They climb back up the same road they came down, into the mountains, to the little town of Julian.

They drive right through-they don’t want to be around other people-and then the road starts heading down again as the terrain slopes toward the coastal plain to the west, and the land flattens into broad fields and apple orchards and horse ranches and then they go down a long hill, from which they can see a beautiful valley below.

In the middle of the valley there’s a crossroads with one highway going north and another going west. There are a few buildings scattered around the junction-a post office, a market, a diner, a bakery, an (unlikely) art gallery on the north side, an old general store and a few white cottages on the south side, and beyond that there’s nothing on any side. Just the road cutting through the broad grassland with cattle grazing on it, and she says, “This is beautiful.”

He pulls off on the gravel driveway beside the cabins. Goes into the old general store, which now sells books and gardening stuff, and comes out a few minutes later with a key. “We got one for a month,” he says. “Unless you hate it. Then we can get our money back and go someplace else.”

It has a small front room with an old sofa and a couple of chairs and a table, and a small kitchen with a gas stove and an old refrigerator and a sink with wooden cupboards above it. A single door leads to the tiny bedroom, which has an even tinier bathroom-shower, no bath-in back.

We’re not going to lose each other in this place, she thinks.

He’s still standing tentatively in the front doorway.

“It’s fine with me,” she says. “How about you?”

“It’s good, it’s fine.” He lets the door shut behind him. “We’re the Kellys, by the way. I’m Tom, you’re Jean.”

“I’m Jean Kelly?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

After she showers and gets dressed they drive the four miles back up the hill to Julian to shop for clothes. The one main street is flanked mostly by little restaurants selling the apple pie that is the local specialty, but there are a few boutiques, where she buys a couple of casual dresses and a sweater. But they buy most of their clothes at the hardware store, which sells denim shirts, jeans, socks and underwear.

Down the street Nora finds a bookstore that sells used paperbacks, and she buys copies of Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, The Eustace Diamonds and a couple of Nora Roberts romances-guilty pleasures.

Then they drive back down to the market across the highway from their cottage and buy groceries-bread, milk, coffee, tea, Raisin Bran (his favorite), Grape-Nuts (hers), bacon, eggs, sourdough bread, a couple of steaks, some chicken, potatoes, rice, asparagus, green beans, tomatoes, grapefruit, brown rice, an apple pie, some red wine and some beer-and sundries-paper towels, dish detergent, toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, a razor and blades, shaving cream, a hair-color kit and a pair of scissors.

They’ve agreed to take some precautions-not to run, but not to be needlessly foolhardy, either. So the Harley had to go, and so does her shoulder-length hair, because while Callan’s looks are pretty ordinary, hers aren’t, and the first thing their pursuers will ask people is if they’ve noticed a strikingly beautiful blond woman.

“I’m not so beautiful anymore,” she tells him.

“Yeah you are.”

So back at the cottage she cuts her hair.

Short.

Looks in the mirror when she’s finished and says, “Joan of Arc.”

“I like it.”

“Liar.”

But when she looks in the mirror she kind of likes it, too. Even more so after she dyes it red. Well, she thinks, it’ll be easier to take care of anyway. So here I am, short, short red hair, a denim shirt and jeans. Who’d have thought it?

“Your turn,” she says, snapping the scissors.

“Get outta here.”

“It needs cutting anyway,” she says. “You got that ’70s look going on. Come on, just let me trim it.”

“No.”

“Chicken.”

“That’s me.”

“Guys have paid a lot of money to have me do this.”

“Cut their hair? You’re kiddin'.”

“Hey, it’s a big world out there, Tommy.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“Then you’d better hold still.”

He lets her cut it. Sits perfectly still on the chair, looking at her image and his as she stands behind him and snips away, brown locks of his hair falling first on his shoulders and then on the floor. She finishes and they look at themselves in the mirror.

“I don’t recognize us,” she says. “Do you?”

No, he thinks, I don’t.

That evening he makes chicken broth for her and steak and potatoes for himself and they sit down at the table and eat and watch television and when the news comes on about a meth lab blowing up and bodies found he don’t say nothin’ to her about it because it’s clear she don’t know.