Don Winslow - Way Down on the High Lonely

Neal stepped out into the center of the street, trying to put himself between Steve and the guns without making it obvious. Steve stopped a few paces from him.

“You coming with us?” he asked Neal.

Neal felt every eye and ear in the whole damn world on him. He even felt Karen’s, and she wasn’t even there. He felt Levine’s and Graham’s and The Man’s and Anne Kelley’s and Cody McCall’s.

“No,” he said.

“You with them now?” Steve made a contemptuous gesture toward the men hiding behind the trucks.

“Yeah.”

“You were on my side last night.”

So the tracks have come together, Neal thought. Not somewhere over the horizon, but right here, right now. And now they’ll go in different directions. And you can’t have one foot on both anymore.

“Last night,” Neal said, forcing himself to look his former friend in the eyes, “I didn’t know you were a kike.”

Steve looked back at him for a second as if he were going to say something. Then he turned around and walked back to his truck to take his daughter home.

And it isn’t over yet, Neal thought.

He was in the cabin packing his stuff when she came.

He was pretty sure it was Karen when he saw the headlights coming toward the creek, because the lamps were set narrow like a Jeep’s and he figured she was going to come. But he picked up his rifle anyway before he stepped out on the porch. He watched the car stop on the far side of the creek and saw the flashlight coming toward the cabin.

The light was just a few feet away when he saw for sure that it was Karen. He lowered the rifle and stepped back inside. He was putting his books into his pack when she walked in without knocking.

She started right in. “I had to come tell you myself what a bastard I think you are.”

“Thanks for taking the trouble,” he said. He kept his back to her and went on working. He couldn’t tell her the truth and she probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

“Is that all you have to say?”

There’s a lot more I could say, Karen. I could tell you about the lesson I never seem to learn: never get personally involved on the job. Especially not when you’re undercover. You only end up hurting people.

And whatever you do, never fall in love.

He shrugged and laid a pair of jeans out on the bed, then carefully rolled them up and put them inside his pack.

“Steve and Peggy want you out of here by morning,” Karen said.

“Tell them not to worry. I want out of here.”

“Are you going to move in with those racist pigs?”

“Oink.”

Having brought her too close, the job now was to drive her far off. Out of harm’s way.

“Do you even want to know how Shelly is?” she asked. “Do you care?”

“Not especially.

He’d known for a long time that he couldn’t have this job and a life. Where he’d made his mistake was in thinking he could leave the job for a life.

“You lied to me,” she said, the anger and hurt almost palpable in the closed cabin air.

Undercover is a he, Karen. You start by hiding who you are, and you hide it and you hide it while you become other people, and then when you want your own identity again, you can’t find it. It’s like that little treasure you store someplace to keep it safe, and a long time later you forget where you put it.

Karen, how would I tell you if I could? It’s just that you play so many characters that after awhile you don’t have one of your own. Or maybe that’s backward. Maybe I never had any character to begin with.

Anyway, he didn’t answer her, so she asked, “How long have you been with them? Just recently, or the whole time?”

“Since before I came here,” he answered, because this was a chance to push her farther away. “I’ve been convinced for a longtime now that we have to do something to preserve our white race.”

“You disgust me.”

Get this over with, Neal thought. Because if you don’t you might break down and tell her the truth. Shit, if it were an adult involved, a responsible grownup who had screwed up, I’d tell her right now. But it’s a kid. It’s a little boy who might still be alive and who has only a slim chance, and that has to be more important. If my stupid, messed-up excuse for a life means anything at all, a child has to be more important.

He turned around and said, “And you disgust me, Jew lover.”

He saw the tears come to her eyes and saw her face twist in hurt.

“I was ready to love you!” she yelled. “I was ready to love you and now I hate you! Do you understand me? I hate you!”

I understand you, Karen. “So leave,” he said.

Those blue eyes sparkled with rage. “Go to hell, Neal,” she said. Then she left.

On my way, Karen. I’m on my way.

He finished packing and started the long, cold walk to the Hansen place.

Neal shivered in the bitter cold. As the wind bit through his denim jacket he tucked his chin a little deeper under his sheepskin collar and pulled his black cowboy hat tighter down on his head.

The sun was a pale circle in a sharp blue winter sky. Sitting on Midnight on the top of the hill, Neal felt as if he could see forever. He was sitting in a stand of pinon pine on the west slope of the Shoshones, looking down about five miles where the little mining town of Ione sat at the edge of a vast desert. He watched until he saw a flash of silver start moving up the slope toward him. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the flash.

“Here she comes,” he said to Jory.

Jory shifted nervously on his horse. He checked the big saddlebags again to make sure they were tied on tight.

Neal moved his glasses just down the slope from him, off the left side of the road on the bottom end of a switchback, where Cal and Randy waited in a camouflaged pickup with pine boughs thrown across it. Just a little above Neal, Dave, and one of the new guys were sitting in another truck, waiting for his signal.

Neal focused on the armored car again. He checked it out and then glassed the road behind it.

Nothing.

“They don’t have a follow car,” he said.

“That’s good,” Jory said. Neal could hear the tension in his voice. He hoped the boy would be all right. Then again, all he really had to do was ride his horse. Jory had been picked for that job because he was by far the best rider, about the only legitimate cowboy there except for Craig Vetter and Bill McCurdy, who sat on another horse just by.

“Arrogance,” Neal responded. “Laziness and arrogance.”

It’s going okay, Neal thought. They’d picked the spot well. The armored car would be in low gear as it chugged up the heavy grade. The switchback would keep them hidden and give them the privacy they needed. There was a big boulder on the other side of the road.

“I sure hope they don’t spot that pickup,” Jory said.

“They won’t,” Neal answered. “Remember, they’re not looking for anything. This is just the usual milk run to the little towns to pick up the checks and drop off the money. They’ll only get half-alert when they bring the stuff out of the truck. Now shut up, I need to concentrate.”

The timing on the thing was delicate, even though they’d practiced on a similar switchback a couple of dozen times. But there was no way to simulate the armored car’s exact speed or what its driver might do, and that’s what had Neal concerned. If things started to go wrong, people might use guns in place of the plan.

He was particularly worried that Cal and Randy might get hinky, believe they’d been spotted, and just start shooting. But there was nothing he could do about that, so he put it out of his head and watched the truck work its way up the slope.