sandals.
One of the men, in a black oversized polo shirt with a ball cap pulled down low over his eyes, looked up as Joe drove by, and for a moment their eyes locked.
A bolt of recognition shot through Joe, and he tapped on his brakes.
The man broke off and quickly looked down. His companions called after him as he turned abruptly and walked stiff-legged back in the bar.
“Shamazz, what the fuck?” one of the women said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
Johnny Cook and Drennen O’Melia were outside of Farson and Eden in west central Wyoming doing meth and getting their ashes hauled. They’d been there most of the week. Their plan, for a while, was to go west to California or at least as far as Las Vegas. But they hadn’t even made it to the Utah border.
It was that green sign saying they’d entered the tiny town of Eden that held them up. Who, Johnny had asked, wouldn’t want to stop and have a beer in a place called Eden?
Johnny was taking a break. He slumped in a director’s chair someone had set up outside between clumps of sagebrush about fifty yards from the trailers and smoked a cigarette and drank a can of beer. Although the sun was moving in on the top of the Wind River Mountains in the distance, it was still warm out and Johnny didn’t know where his shirt or pants were, which trailer, so he sat there in his straw cowboy hat, boxers, and boots with a pistol across his bare knees. He knew he looked awesome without a shirt, so he didn’t mind.
Occasionally, he would raise and fire a Ruger Mark III .22 pistol at gophers that raised their heads up out of a hole. He’d hit a couple. When he did he’d shout
Johnny shivered, despite the heat. The tremor ran through his entire body and raised goose bumps on his forearms. Immediately afterwards, he was flush and felt sweat prickle beneath his scalp. Damn meth, he thought, trying to remember the last time he’d eaten something. Two days ago, maybe. He had a vague recollection of eating an entire package of cold hot dogs dipped one-by-one into a warm jar of mayonnaise. But he might have dreamed that, he conceded.
He heard a whoop from behind him and he turned his head to see Drennen emerging from one of the trailers. Drennen was telling one of the girls inside something, and he heard her laugh.
“Don’t go anywhere or get too comfortable,” Drennen said to the girl. “I’ll be coming right back after I reload.”
As he shambled toward Johnny in the dust, Drennen said, “Jesus, what a wildcat. Cute, too. I can’t get enough of that one. Lisa, I think her name is. Lisa.”
Johnny nodded. “Brunette? Kinda Indian?”
“That’s her,” Drennen said. “Like to burn me down.”
Johnny thought Drennen was lucky
Drennen collapsed into the dirt next to Johnny, then propped himself up with his elbow. He reached up and plucked the pistol from Johnny’s lap and fired a wild and harmless shot at a gopher before handing it back. “Missed,” he said. “Where’d you put that pipe?”
“You weren’t even close.” Johnny gestured toward their pickup. “In there, I think. Let me know if you see my shirt or my pants anywhere.”
“I was wondering about that,” Drennen said, slowly getting up to his hands and knees. “We still got plenty of rock?”
“I think so,” Johnny said, distracted. “I can’t remember a damn thing, so don’t hold me to it.”
Drennen laughed, got to his feet, and lurched toward the pickup to reload. Drennen said, “Man, I love this Western living.”
The collection of double-wide trailers hadn’t been out there for very long. They weren’t laid out in any kind of logical pattern and looked to Johnny as if they’d been dropped into the high desert from the air. The dirt roads to get to the trailers were poor and old, and there wasn’t a single sign designating the name of the place. An ex-energy worker named Gasbag Jim was in charge of the operation, and he had a small office in one of the double-wides where he collected money, assigned girls, and passed out from time to time from drinking too much Stoli or smoking too much meth.
Drennen and Johnny had learned about the place from a natural gas wildcatter at the Eden Saloon. They’d stopped for a beer or nine at the edge of the massive Jonah gas field before continuing on to California. When they found out Gasbag Jim’s operation was less than twenty miles out of Farson and Eden in the sagebrush, they thought,
That was four days ago. Or at least Johnny thought it had been four days. He’d have to ask Drennen.
Gasbag Jim’s was an all-cash enterprise, which suited them just fine. That meant there would be no paper trail—no credit card receipts, no IDs, and no need for real names. They’d decided to call each other “Marshall” and “Mathers” because Drennen was a fan of the rapper Eminem, and Marshall Mathers was his real name, but Johnny had slipped and called Drennen “Drennen” when they were in bed with three women at once. One of the girls, Lisa Rich, the ravenhaired beauty with heavy breasts, had coaxed their real names out of them the night before. She seemed very interested in their real names, for some reason.
“Fuck,” Drennen said as he staggered back from the pickup holding the crack pipe. “We’ve been burning through cash like it was . . . money.”
“I know,” Johnny moaned, and rubbed hard at his face. He’d been noticing that his face didn’t feel like it was his, like someone had stitched it over his real face to fool him. “Does my face look normal to you?” he asked.
Drennen squinted at Johnny. “You look normal,” he said, “for an over-sexed tweaker with no pants.”
