The Long Night of Winchell Dear Read online

  More lights were coming on inside the adobe. He could see the profile of someone looking out a window. Get closer, be certain, finish. He smashed his 230 pounds through the door, saw a woman, and knew instantly she was the target. She stood there in her nightdress, pressing herself against the kitchen sink fifteen feet away, eyes wide.

  Breathing hard, the driver flicked his Beretta to automatic and began to swing it up to firing position, preparing to kill a woman who thirty-eight years earlier had given him life. Near where Sonia Dominguez stood, a rear door banged open, and a tall old man in a white shirt and blue suspenders leaned around the sill, firing two rounds from some kind of pistol, then ducking back outside. Neither bullet hit the driver…but the arrow did, slamming into the middle of his back and causing him to lunge forward a step with its impact. He turned to see a dark shape running through the night and fired a quick three-round burst, all the while wondering what was causing the strange sensation in his back.

  Now, and once more, the sound of Winchell Dear’s pistol as he leaned through the kitchen door—this time from behind the driver, who was facing outside—and this time both bullets hit, one near the arrow wound, the second higher and toward his right shoulder.

  Confused and reacting to the most immediate threat, the driver managed to turn back toward the pistol, vaguely noticing that the woman had disappeared and seeing only the open rear door swinging on its hinges in the night wind. Wheeling around once more to the darkness outside, he caught the four-inch blade of a well-sharpened skinning knife in his throat, driven hard and home by the strong right arm of Peter Long Grass. Simultaneously, the Beretta was ripped from his hand and thrown into the darkness. A knee hit his groin, and the driver went down, dying fast there in the doorway of a high-desert adobe.

  Peter Long Grass gave a quiet grunt of distaste, of hate, for everything the world had become and kicked his heavy boot full into the driver’s face.

  In the main house of the Two Pair Ranch, Winchell Dear carefully packs a suitcase, his good suits and shirts and ties, and removes twenty thousand dollars from a floor safe in his bedroom closet. The Cadillac is oiled and gassed and will be pointed toward Las Vegas the following dawn. Six miles farther south on the ranch, Peter Long Grass lies on his sleeping bag, hands behind his head, the day’s images replaying in his mind.

  Neither of them much caring for complications in their lives, he and the old man dumped a Lincoln Continental emptied of gas and oil, but containing two bodies and two Berettas, down a mine shaft five miles from the main house. On top of that potpourri were tossed brown suitcases and a knapsack. Using the front-end loader on the ranch tractor, they covered all the shoddy with ten feet of dirt and rocks.

  As for Sonia Dominguez, who knows, who cares? She disappeared into the darkness that early morning. A bank account in Clear Signal was closed five hours later, and a bus ticket to Presidio, Texas, was purchased. Since Ojinaga lies just over the border, perhaps she was heading for Mexico and a fine brick house in a coastal town.

  The last item packed in Winchell Dear’s suitcase is a copy of his will. In Vegas he intends to have it rewritten, leaving most of the ranch to Lucinda Miller, as before, but also two thousand acres and an access easement to a man named Peter Long Grass, whose address will be shown as “Southernmost Canyon (Diablo Canyon); Two Pair Ranch; Clear Signal, Texas.”

  When he told the Indian of his intentions, Peter Long Grass nodded and said, “I will care for the land and bring venison to your willow tree.”

  While Winchell Dear packs his bag, while an Indian lies in contemplation in a rugged canyon, a man named Pablo Espinosa rides comfortably in the rear seat of a border patrol Jeep Cherokee and looks out the window at a three-quarter moon on its way to full and yellow flowers beginning to open in the late dusk. He has decided this was his last run to el Norte. Never allow greed to influence your decisions, his uncle used to tell him, and Pablo Espinosa judged he had saved enough for his dream of a small hacienda in the cool wet mountains of the Sierra Madre, a place to show his grandchildren, who would hold his hand and walk with him in the forest and fish clear streams.

  So in mountains that rose volcanically centuries past and ever oblivious to the ways of humans, the night plays itself like an old Victrola song, a high-desert song: easy wind through the mesquite and scrub cedar, a coyote’s howl answered or joined seconds later by other coyotes, and the almost imperceptible scrape of loose gravel where a seven-foot diamondback rattlesnake named Luther crosses a ranch road and winds through a stand of evening primrose.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my agent, David Vigliano, for his suggestions about improving the manuscript. And I feel a faraway, nostalgic sense of gratitude to the remote high-desert ranch where I once made my home, a place that provided me with the ideas and language for this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROBERT JAMES WALLER lives in the Texas Hill Country and pursues his interests in economics, mathematics, photography, and music, as the spirit moves him. In the evenings, he wades Hill Country streams with his fly rod.

  Other Books by

  ROBERT JAMES WALLER

  Border Music

  Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

  The Bridges of Madison County

  Old Songs in a New Café: Selected Essays

  A Thousand Country Roads

  Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

  Just Beyond the Firelight

  One Good Road Is Enough:

  Essays by Robert James Waller

  High Plains Tango

  Copyright © 2006 by Robert James Waller

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Shaye Areheart Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Waller, Robert James, 1939–

  The long night of Winchell Dear : a novel / Robert James Waller.—1st ed.

  1. Ex-gamblers—Fiction. 2. Women domestics—Fiction. 3. Drug couriers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.A4347L66 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2006006003

  eISBN: 978-0-307-35159-3

  v3.0