Don Winslow: Way Down on the High Lonely

“I don’t care,” she was saying into the phone. “I don’t care… . So let her… Fine. We’ll get somebody else.”

She hung up the phone, took a drag on the cigarette, and then snuffed it out.

“Could you be a real lifesaver and get me a Diet Pepsi?” she said to Collier. “You guys want anything?”

An oxygen tank, thought Neal.

A vacuum cleaner, thought Graham.

They shook their heads.

Jim Collier sprang up to get the soda. Anne came around from the desk and shook hands with Neal and Graham.

“I’m Anne Kelley, head of Creative.”

Nice work if you can get it, thought Neal.

Anne dropped into a chair across the coffee table from them. “You don’t mind if we don’t start until the Diet Pepsi comes, do you?”

Lady, I don’t mind if we don’t start at all, Neal thought.

“Take your time,” Graham said.

Jim came back with the soda, opened it, handed it to Anne, and took a chair in the corner. He flipped open a pad and had his pencil poised, ready to take notes.

In case Anne said something creative? Neal wondered.

Anne took a long gulp out of the can, sighed with relief, then turned her attention to Neal and Graham.

“So pitch,” she said.

Graham looked at Neal and shrugged.

“So give me the ball,” Neal said to Anne.

Jim coughed rhetorically. “Anne, these are the detectives.”

Anne Kelley blushed. “Oh, shit. Shit! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I thought you were writers, pitching a project!”

Something the cat dragged in.

“I’m Anne Kelley,” she repeated. “Cody’s mother.”

“And head of Creative,” Neal said.

“You’re the guys that Ethan Kitteredge sent,” she continued. “You’re going to find Cody.”

“We’re going to try,” Graham said.

“Ethan said that you’re very, very good.”

“Probably just very good,” Neal said as Graham gave him a dirty look, “but maybe not very, very good.”

“I’m really sorry,” Anne said. “I didn’t mean to mistake you for writers.”

“That’s all right,” Graham said charitably.

“So where do we start?” Anne asked.

Jim started to write.

“Hold on, Boswell,” Neal said. “No notes.”

“Jim memorializes all my meetings.”

Memorializes? Neal thought. “That’s nice,” he said, “but notes have a funny way of showing up in funny places, like newspapers.”

Anne stiffened. “I trust Jim implicitly.”

Neal looked over at Jim. “No offense. I’m sure you’d never deliberately betray the queen here-”

“Neal, shut up,” Graham said.

“-but unless you have a shredder, or unless you take your notes on single pages on a hard surface, it’s better not to take them. I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve made-unfortunately-going through someone’s trash, or sneaking into someone’s office to look at the impressions left on a notepad or a desk blotter-”

“Neal…” Graham warned.

“Well, you taught me all this stuff, Graham,” Neal answered. He turned back to Jim. “Besides, you don’t need notes. I need the notes, and I keep them in my head. You want anything ‘memorialized,’ give me a call and I’ll recite it to you, okay?”

Jim closed the notepad.

So much for burnout, thought Graham.

“You’re being rather hostile,” Anne Kelley said to Neal.

“Right, which is what your ex-husband will think about me when I find him. Now, do you want to throw a little tea party, or do you want your kid back?”

“I want my kid back.”

Neal sat back in the sofa.

“So pitch,” he said.

Harley McCall was a cowboy. They met on a film shoot in Nevada. He was working as a wrangler-a horse handler-on the movie she was producing, one of the last of a brief resurgence of westerns.

He was tall, lanky, and bowlegged and spoke with a slow drawl that she found charming, especially contrasted with the affected inflections of the Hollywood men she’d been seeing. His dirty blond hair had natural streaks in it, his mustache was bronze, and his tan stopped at the level of his rolled-up sleeves, a tan he got from working outdoors, not frying himself in oil on a Malibu beach or poolside at the Beverly.

He ate chicken-fried steaks, eggs and bacon, and wicked hot burritos, and never-ever-queried the waiter about where the sun-dried tomatoes were grown. He liked his beer cold and his women warm, and he touched a warm spot in her all right, a warmth as soft and fine as a summer afternoon.

They’d walked out on the desert one night, away from the horrid little motel that was their location headquarters, away from the director, and the actors, the crew, and the business types, out onto the open desert under the stars and she’d seduced him there… or maybe he’d seduced her into seducing him… but she wanted him-badly-so she took him.

The sex was fantastic-that was never their problem-and she felt that he’d changed her life, turned her into the natural woman they all seem to sing about. He brought desert flowers to her trailer, took her out on long rides, called her “ma’am” everywhere except in bed, and one afternoon they’d jumped into his pickup and rode to Vegas, went to one of those tacky chapels, and actually got married.

She got pregnant right away, maybe that very night. They wrapped the shoot, and she headed back to LA with a film in the can, a baby in her belly, and a brand-new husband in tow. Queen Anne, happy at last.

They would have named the baby Shane, after their favorite movie, but that seemed a bit much, so they settled for something almost as good. Cody was a golden child, with his dad’s rugged good looks and his mother’s soft beauty, and they were both crazy in love with him.

The movie came out a little later and was a hit, and they bought the place in Malibu.

But somehow the film came to be known as the last great western, a nostalgic farewell to a classic genre, and in that weird Hollywood way, everyone was saying it because that’s what everyone was saying. Pretty soon the only horses in the movies were the ones pulling carriages through Central Park, and Harley McCall found himself with a lot of time on his hands.

There just wasn’t a lot for a cowboy to do in Malibu.

For a while they thought he could be a big help at Wishbone, a fresh eye, an honest voice, that sort of thing. But he picked the dumbest projects-unfilmable books, remakes of old flops, stories that were pitched by writers he went out for beers with… it didn’t work out.

And she discovered, to her immense sorrow, that West Hollywood was a lot different from the West, and all the qualities that she’d found so fresh and exciting out on the desert became old and grating at the lawn parties, studio meetings, and premieres. And if “Harley doesn’t say a lot” was something she had originally said with a measure of pride, she found herself saying it as an apology more and more, especially as Harley’s reticence changed from quiet confidence to sullen despair.

There just wasn’t a lot for a cowboy to do in Malibu.

But what there was, he found. He started drinking his cold beers for breakfast. He found that a joint or two made the afternoon pass in a pleasant torpor, and that high-stake poker games gave him his balls back, win or lose. Mostly it was lose.

And he found the women. None of her friends, thank God, or her competitors, but the would-be starlets and country-western singers who found him witty and handsome and who were content with afternoons.

She heard about them, of course-Los Angeles is a small big town-and she felt surprised and a little ashamed that she was relieved. She didn’t find him witty, his handsomeness didn’t travel well, as they say, and she was too busy in the afternoons to try to think of things for him to do.