Chapter One
Twenty Thousand Roads
Three days from LA. Almost there.
Over the high country, late afternoon sun glinting off die
rocks and shining grasslands where Colorado rose into
Wyoming. Sally fiddled around trying to pick up a radio
station (Broncos 17, Patriots driving, stupid exhibition
season football) and put up with static until she could
see the Monolith Cement Plant. Then she could indulge
herself and slip the tape in the slot. She caught sight of
some antelope loping dark shadows across the golden
meadows, with day waning into night, lights flickering on
in the Laramie valley and the tiniest August chill in the
air.
She'd had the hammer down since Longmont where the traffic
thinned out, and found the cutoff that put Fort Collins
behind her. She could never resist the urge to see what
kind of time she could make between the Denver Mousetrap,
where I-25 and I-70 snarled, and the first sight of the
lights of Laramie coming on in the dusk. Two hours and
twenty minutes, for what some people called a three-hour
drive. She sang, loudly, along with the tape, along with
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and her whole fife. Sang
her way down twenty thousand roads. Maybe, finally,
heading straight back home.
The sun painted the hills pink. The air got just a taste
chillier. Sally could really get nostalgic now, if she
weren't obliged to history, so adept at remembering the
bad with the good. How they'd all headed west, to grow up
with the country...
Shit!
Where the flaming hell did that cop car come from?
So much for the peaceful fading glow of day in the high
country. Now it was bubblegumlights in the rearview, and
Sally's perfect certainty that she'd had the Mustang doing
better than seventy passing the Holiday Inn, and despite
her most earnest efforts, over fifty as Route 287 turned
into Third Street. What was the statute of limitations in
Wyoming? She looked again in the mirror, knew she was
cooked, slowed and pulled over to the right, heart
pounding.
California plates. A '64 Mustang, restored to sleek
perfection by the Mustang King of LA, doing maybe
fiftyseven miles per hour in a thirty zone entering
Laramie, Wyoming: She was dead meat, looking at a ticket
for a hundred bucks easy She turned off the tape, composed
her face. She wondered again about. ancient outstanding
warrants, looking at the police cruiser in the rearview.
She leaned over slowly and opened the glovebox
The Laramie cop did things with his brake, his radio, ins
clipboard, his hat, got out of his cop car, walked up to
her window, peered down at her through predictably
mirrored sunglasses, and drawled genially, "Well, Sally,
guess you'd better slow that Mustang down.,,
She stopped in the middle of getting out the registration
slip. Freakin' Dickie Langham. Guess this was Road Number
20,000 after all.
He didn't give her a ticket. instead, he gave her the
biggest hug she'd had since the last time, sixteen years
ago. He hadn't gotten any shorter than the six foot four
inches he'd been back when he'd been tending bar at Dr.
Mudflaps, and he hadn't gotten any lighter. Back then,
Mudflaps had the gaff to pretend to be an upscale
restaurant and lounge but was really a place with orange
plastic booths (red leatherette? Sure.) and a brisk trade
in bad white stuff. Dickie had been carrying maybe thirty
pounds less than now, had been a completely different
color (greenish gray-white to his current reasonably tan)
and extensively more jittery. That's what living on Dr.
Langham's Miracle Diet (booze and blow) would do for you.
He'd been unerringly decent then, in his own way, and
funny as hell, but not so much so that four big guys from
Boulder had seen either the humanity or the humor of his
coming up a little short of cash one time when they were
in town.
"The Boulder guys were drinking black coffee," Dickie
explained to Sally, "and they weren't enjoying being
squeezed into one of those orange booths. I had
experienced their form of persuasion the year before," he
recalled as they looked at the plastic-covered menus in
the Wrangler Bar and Grill. "My shoulder still aches
sometimes from where they simulated ripping my arm off.
Extremely frightening guys. So, lacking the money to pay
them, I told them I was going into the back room to get
something and, well, I came back eleven years later."
By the time he returned to Laramie, Dickie said, as he
requested a double cheeseburger, an order of rings, an
order of fries, a side salad with blue cheese dressing,
and an iced tea, the Boulder guys were who knows where,
and the sensible people who ran the Wyoming Law
Enforcement Academy had use for somebody who'd personally
seen law enforcement from a variety of different points of
view, but upon whom nobody could seem to make a particular
rap stick. He had picked up some valuable skins along the
way, including familiarity with a range of firearms,
fluency in Spanish, and intimacy with the rigors, rewards,
and limitations of twelve-step programs. Now he was an
Albany County deputy sheriff with four years in, likeliest
candidate for sheriff when the incumbent moved on to the
state legislature this November. Dickie was a lucky man on
his way up in the sometimes forgiving (or at least
forgetting) state of Wyoming.