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hundred miles out there, a shriek came up from the sagebrush flats. At first it sounded like a coyote in pain, but coyotes don’t howl in the daytime. The sound was human, a scream of agony that lifted and then died in the vast stillness of The High Lonely.

3
    N eal parked alongside the raised wooden sidewalk of the main street of Virginia City, Nevada. He had bought the car, a 1967 Chevrolet Nova, for three hundred dollars in a used car lot in Santa Monica and probably had paid too much for it. It had at one time in its hard life been silver; now it was a dull gray spotted with rust. The driver’s side inside door handle had fallen off in his hands, and he now closed it by sticking two fingers into the panel holes and pulling as hard as he could. The upholstery was torn, you could keep track of the road through the little holes in the floorboard, and the air-conditioning was more like a faint memory of a fall day. The car idled uncontrollably at thirty-five miles per hour and bucked, wheezed, and snorted for a good eight seconds after the ignition was turned off. But the radio worked, the big engine would take a hill, and the old car would settle into an eighty-mile-an-hour gallop and hold it all day. It was a car meant for covering miles.
    Which was exactly what Neal did right after pulling out of the used car lot. He had arranged to meet Graham and Levine in Virginia City. They had flown to Reno and were driving from there. But Neal had to drive the whole way because he was the point man, undercover at that, and it wouldn’t do for any of Harley’s buddies to see him coming off an airplane in Reno. Reno was a small town and Virginia City was even smaller. Harley was working in a bar called the Lucky Dollar. He’d apparently gotten cocky and given his employer his social security number, which is a real mistake if people are looking for you. Especially if one of those people is Ed Levine, who tends not to miss that kind of thing.
    It was to be a simple bag job. Neal would find McCall, talk a little Identity talk with him, become friends, get invited to his home, then lure him into the waiting arms—so to speak—of Joe Graham and Ed Levine.
    They’d follow the old routine: two vehicles with tinted windows would be standing by. At the right moment Ed and the thugs in one car would grab Harley, force him inside, and take him for a nice long drive in the country while Graham and Neal would take Cody into the other car and head for California.
    It was illegal as hell, involving as it did assault, kidnapping—of Harley, that is—and a host of other potential felonies and misdemeanors. But everyone except Neal would be masked, the vans were untraceable, and as for Neal, well, he had a new identity, a phony car registration, and would be back in New York City within forty-eight hours of the operation.
    And Anne Kelley would have her child back.
    To his great surprise, Neal discovered he liked to drive. He liked the feel of the wheel, the surge of the car beneath him as he pushed it through the desert east of LA, then north alongside the Sierras, then over the mountains and across into Nevada. He liked the isolation of driving at night, with “Darkness at the Edge of Town” wailing in his ears. He liked pulling the Nova under the soft lights above the gas pumps, filling it up, then buying a dinner of beef jerkey, corn chips, and a fruit pie and eating it back on the road.
    He liked rolling down the road, watching the sun come up in the gray terrain of northwestern Nevada, getting a cheap breakfast of greasy eggs, stale toast, and bitter coffee in a roadside diner, and hitting the highway again, making that push across the flatlands to the mountains west of Reno. He liked the driving and was a little disappointed when he turned off the highway onto the small road that climbed up to the old mining town of Virginia City.
    It was a small town. One broad, main street ran along the spine of a ridge that overlooked the lower