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British parade ground, scattering the ground
fog like frightened children.
    “The governor of Arizona’s jet is
waiting at Boeing Field,” the guy said.
    Corso checked his watch. “What
time’s he supposed to kill another one?”
    “O-six-hundred.”
    “I need to change clothes. Come on
inside.”
    The guy followed Corso into the
salon. Stood there looking around while Corso navigated the three
steps down to the storage lockers and the forward berths.
    “Beautiful rig,” the guy said.
    “Thanks,” Corso said from below.
    “You live aboard full-time?”
    “Yep.”
    “I always wanted to . . . you know,
something like this . . . but you know, kids and such . . . and my
old lady . . . I mean, there’s no way in hell . . .”
    “People do it with families.”
    The guy turned his back and changed
the subject.
    “What’d you do to this Driver guy
where he wants you so bad?”
    “I wrote a book about him.”
    The guy watched as Corso traded
coveralls and long underwear for jeans and a black silk shirt. “Book
must have really pissed him off.”
    Corso came back up the stairs into
the galley. He pulled a black leather jacket from the nearest hook
and put it on. “Actually, he was quite fond of the book.”
    “Then how come he wants to kill
you?”
    Corso barked out a sinister laugh.
“Driver doesn’t want to kill me. He wants to make sure his story
gets told. That’s my end of it.”
    “You’re kiddin’ me.”
    Corso signaled “Boy Scout’s
honor” with his fingers. “Honest.” He pulled open the top
drawer and grabbed his wallet, stuffed it deep into his hip pocket.
“Listen, man . . . I don’t want to rain on your Western hero
motif or anything, but if I thought for one minute Driver was
planning to off my ass, I wouldn’t be going anywhere near that
place.”
    The guy checked Corso for traces of
irony and came up empty.
    “When you get her back home, leave
the lines loose,” Corso said. “We’ve got some big tide shifts
coming up here pretty soon.”
    “I’ll take care of it.”
    Corso looked around, then drew a deep
breath. “Let’s go,” he said.
7

    “I thought Arizona was supposed to
be hot,” Melanie groused as she walked in a circle, hugging herself
and stamping her feet to keep warm. The wind was everywhere. Seemed
like whichever way you turned it was in your face. Melanie raised the
collar of her coat and pulled her head in like a turtle. On the roof
of the satellite truck a pair of technicians engaged in the
never-ending task of tuning and fine-tuning the dishes.
    “Not this high and not this time of
year. Minute the sun goes down so does the temperature,” one of
them said. “Around here’s got some of the biggest daytime to
nightime temperature differences in the country.”
    “What’re you, the weatherman?”
his partner wanted to know. Melanie gazed out over the barren
landscape. Banks of portable lights had been brought in to light the
perimeter, but the prison itself lay dark and silent. In the
distance, the San Cristobel Mountains stood sentinel against the
night sky, their jagged peaks offering the proceedings little more
than a crooked grin. Another gust of wind swirled the desert dust,
making Melanie’s lips feel chapped and eyes feel heavy and full of
grit.
    “I’ll be in my trailer,”
Melanie announced to the deepening No Man’s Land night. Her trailer was actually a forty-seven-foot mobile satellite unit designed to
Melanie’s specifications. Her agent had made it part of the last
contract negotiation. As Melanie left the comfort of the studio less
and less these days, they’d included the motor home merely so as to
have something to jettison when negotiations got serious. Turned out,
the network had given them everything they’d asked for . . .
including the motor home. In the past five years, she’d used it
less than a dozen times. Tonight, however, she was glad to feel the
warm glow of heat on her cheeks as she climbed inside and closed the
door.