the morning he was on the interstate before seven and crossed into the Texas panhandle before eight. There were signs for Big John’s Steak House in Amarillo. A seventy-two-ounce steak. Eat it in an hour and get it free. By ten he was in Amarillo Big John was not alone. The highway was suddenly beset by motels and fast food, car dealers and steak houses and gas stations. Then he was out of Amarillo and back onto the plains. The Big John’s signs faced the other way now, luring the westbound travelers. On each side of the highway the open range reappeared, dotted occasionally with cattle grazing on the..unappetizing brown grass. Once in a while there would be a gate, usually made of iron piping, with a sign indicating a cattle baronage.
But he never saw any houses, or any cowboys, mostly just brown grassland beyond the wire fencing that lined the highway, and now and then a water cistern. The grass did not look nourishing. He had the cruise control on seventy, but the distances were so great and the sky so high and the horizon so distant that the car seemed in the ulteriority of his imagination a beetle scuttling without measurable progress beneath a limitless sky across an uncomprehcn .ding plain… They’d been married a month when they had dinner at a table in the rear at Spago with Elliott Krueger. He had been across the street from spago once, at 2:35 in the morning, on the crime-scene team, when a Chicano coke dealer named Street Duck been killed by somebody who shot him five times in at close range with a nine-millimeter pistol. No had seen the shooting. Elliott was about fifty. His thick hair was touched with gray, his short careful beard touched with more. He was medium height, medium He didn’t look like he exercised. He had on an un-constructed linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up over his He wore a Rolex watch. It had been Jesse’s ex-that people who really had a lot of money didn’t it on Rolex watches. In the bad neighborhoods, on other hand, a Rolex watch on a kid meant he was so that no one dared to take it away from him. Elliott a girlfriend with him. Her name was Taffy. She seemed sixteen, but she might have been twenty. Wearing a dress with a very short ruffled skirt, she sat si-beside Elliott like an obedient spaniel waiting for a
“It’s my business to know this sort of
thing,” Elliott to Jesse. “And your wife here has the goods.”
Jesse nodded.
“Oh, Elliott,” Jennifer said.
“‘I’ll bet you say that to all
girls.”
“My right hand to God,” Elliott said, and put his right in the air. “I see twenty girls a day. All of them are
Everybody out here is good-looking, you But none of them come alive through the lens like do, Jennifer.“
Jesse sipped the tall scotch and soda he’d ordered.
“What are you working on now, Elliott?”
Jennifer said.
“Got a thing in development at Universal,”
Elliott said.
‘Absolutely amazing story about a plastic surgeon, got an deal going with his mother. Women come to him a makeover and he does a surgical reconstruction so that they look like his mother, then he kills them. Great vehicle for Tommy Cruise.“
“I love the concept,” Jennifer said.
“Do you love it, Jesse?”
“Love it,” Jesse said. Tommy Cruise.
“Maybe I can bring you aboard, Jesse, you know, you being a cop and all, could use a little professional consult on this.
You ever dealt with psychopathic killers?”
“Not my job to decide if they’re
psychopaths,” Jesse said.
“Oh, Jesse,” Jennifer said, “you
know what he means.”
“Well, you murder somebody,” Jesse said,
“probably something wrong with you.”
“Well, I may give you a ringo, soon as I teach this idiot writer I’m working with how to write a screenplay.”
“He’s never written one?”
Jennifer said.
“No, he’s a damn novelist, you
know?”
“The worst.”
“You got that right,” Elliott said.
“Can’t tell them shit.”
He sighed thoughtfully for a moment, looking around the room, then he patted his chest over his shirt pocket, and frowned, and took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pants pocket and handed it to his girlfriend.
“Taffy,” he said, “go get me
some cigarettes.”
Taffy took the money and headed for the bar near the waiting area out front.
