Don Winslow: Way Down on the High Lonely

He never should have turned around.

Neal Carey was looking out over a deep canyon when he heard footsteps coming up the knoll behind him. He tried to focus on the sheer rock cliff that rose on the other side of the canyon, but the two pairs of footsteps crunching on the gravel path would not go away. They were getting closer.

He put his attention back on that most delicate and demanding movement, Obliquely Tame Tiger, and watched his left arm slowly move outward and upward, hand open in the knife position. He had been trying to master Obliquely Tame Tiger for almost three years now, and the constant training was just beginning to overcome his natural clumsiness.

Neal Carey did not want to be disturbed.

He shifted his weight to his back foot and let the canvas slipper dig into the thin dirt. He breathed in the icy morning air and felt the slight warmth of the early morning sun hit his shoulders. Then he slowly raised his front leg, pivoted on his back foot, and started the slow turn to face the footsteps that were now reaching the top of the knoll. His knoll, damn it, his one private spot tacitly reserved for him every morning during his few free moments before dawn. Did three years of practice mean nothing to these intruders?

He swung his foot over the gnarled root of the scraggly cedar that clung to the knoll in this harsh altitude among these spare mountains. The cedar had become his closest friend over the years. They had each learned to survive in the thin air and soil, getting little sustenance and needing less.

He planted his front foot and shifted his weight forward, his left hand raised in front of his face, his right hand open behind his head, ready to whip out and strike like a viper.

He looked down the stone steps to see the two men reach the top of the knoll and begin to approach him across the stone pavilion.

Then the world that he finally had come to accept shattered in a single moment.

The young monk spoke first. He gestured to the short, one-armed man who stood beside him, staring at Neal as he struggled to catch his breath.

“Ni renshr ta ma?” “Do you know him?” the monk asked Neal.

“Wode fuchin,” “My father,” Neal answered.

That’s where Neal Carey made his big mistake. He should have denied knowing the man, or just turned around, or run away into the dense bamboo. If he had done any one of these things, he never would have found himself way down on The High Lonely.

This is some weird kind of place,” Joe Graham said.

He and Neal were sitting in a small pavilion at the edge of the knoll. The tiled roofs of the monastery below glinted in the sunshine. Monkeys perched on the curved eaves, waiting to leap down onto the courtyard to pounce on any morsel of unguarded food. Brown-robed monks crossed the courtyard with one protective hand held over the tops of their bowls, steam from the hot rice gruel rising through their fingers.

“Tell me about it,” Neal answered. He’d been a prisoner in the weird kind of place for three years, long enough for the strange to have become the familiar. He filled Graham’s cup with green tea, made a small bow out of habit, then filled his own.

“You have any coffee?” Graham asked.

Neal shook his head. If three years’ confinement in a Buddhist monastery had done nothing else for him, it had cured his caffeine addiction.

“How about milk and sugar?” asked Graham.

“Sorry.”

“A clean cup?”

“It is clean.”

Right, Graham thought. He’d seen the rats scurrying around the dining hall down the hill.

“I’ve missed you, son,” Graham said.

“I’ve missed you, Dad.”

Neal had never met his real father, a guy who apparently hadn’t figured on getting a kid for his twenty buck investment, so Joe Graham had pretty much taken over the role. Neal had thought about him every day of his imprisonment. No, not imprisonment… “internment” is what the Chinese had called it. An internment that was finally over. Or was it?

“Did you come to bring me back?” he asked Graham.

“No, I’m picking up my laundry.” Little asshole, Graham thought. I’ve only been tracking you down for three years, ever since they told me you were dead.

“Let me tell you, kid,” Graham said. “It cost the Bank one hell of a lot of money to spring you. Next time get yourself popped in Rhode Island. A pizza with extra cheese and you’re out of there.” Graham tasted his tea and grimaced. “What, they mow the lawn and then dump the grass into a pot of water?”

“How much money?” Neal asked.

“I don’t want you to get a swelled head. But we’re talking about a low-interest, unsecured loan for ‘agricultural development in Sichuan Province.’”

“A bribe,” Neal said.

“Big time bribe.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re a ‘friend of the family.’”

Friends of the Family, Neal thought. The Bank’s shadow department that handled difficult problems for its larger investors. His erstwhile employer. Or was it?

“Do I still work for Friends?” Neal asked.

“Did you ever?”

Since I was twelve years old, Dad. Since you caught me picking your pocket and put my dubious skills to work for you. And now you’ve come to take me home.

“Besides,” Graham said, “we got an errand for you.”

“What?”

Graham looked at him quizzically. “Three years’ vacation isn’t enough for you?”

“Vacation! You call hauling wooden buckets of water up this frigging mountain a vacation? Lugging bundles of firewood on my back? Listening to a bunch of religious fanatics chant the same goddamn note for three years-that’s a vacation?”

“To each his own.” Graham shrugged.

“I want to go back to New York, Graham. I want to sit in the Burger Joint, with the ink from my New York Times smudging the bun of a rare Swissburger as the juices run down my wrist. I want an iced coffee sweating there right beside me… where I can just reach out and grab it. I want to walk down the west side of Broadway and then amble back up the east side. I want-”

“I, I, I,” Graham titched.

“Graham!”

“Don’t get all worked up,” Graham said. “I’m just talking about a little job I need your help with. We’ll stop off in Los Angeles, do this thing, and you’ll be back in New York slobbering your food before you know it. I worry about you, though, you know? Locked up all this time and you think about cheeseburgers.”

“What kind of job? What ‘thing’?” Neal asked. The last job had landed him in this place.

Graham peered into his teacup. “I don’t suppose they have egg creams, huh?”

Neal shook his head.

“A missing kid,” Graham said. “Daddy picked him up on Friday for their one weekend a month visitation. Didn’t bring him back on Sunday night. No big deal.”

“What’s wrong with the sheriff’s department?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the sheriff’s department,” Graham answered, “except that they don’t pay much attention to custody cases, even when the mother is famous.”

“What’s she famous for?” Neal asked. Famous was bad, famous was trouble.

“Something to do with movies. What, you need a resume? Are you working for us, or what? Because the Chinese can’t cash the check until you’re safely back in the States, so we can still tell them that you’d rather stay here. I just need you for backup. I can get anybody.”