Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

“Can’t help you there.”

“What do you want me to do, piss in the trunk?”

“It’s your car.”

I opened the back door and fished out a syringe and a vial of Ativan from the fanny pack. Another car passed us, heading toward Lincoln, and I suddenly felt anxious to get on the road again.

“Turn over, Orson.” I stuck him with the needle.

“Andy,” he said as I put my hands on the trunk to close it, “you’re very good at this.”

The coffee and sinus medication had worn off hours ago, and on the tediously straight roads of western Nebraska, I now operated solely on the determination not to fall asleep.

I’d been driving for twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes, and I existed in a limbo between sleep and consciousness. Occasionally, my forehead would touch the steering wheel, and I’d jerk back up and cherish a five-minute oasis of petrified alertness. Then my mind would drift back, and I’d lose consciousness for that split second and scare myself to death all over again.

Heading up Highway 26, fifty miles northwest of Ogallala, the prairie awoke. A peach sunrise was lifting out of the eastern horizon, and as the light strengthened, the land spread and spread and spread, farther than it seemed possible. It had changed overnight, and because I had not witnessed the gradual topographic expansion, this sudden revelation was staggering. For an easterner driving west, the stark vastness of the land and sky is always inconceivable, and I imagined a symphonic aubade to accompany the majesty of the morning.

At 6:30 a.m., I crossed the tree-lined North Platte River into the town of Bridgeport. In the southern distance, the tips of numerous sandstone buttes were catching coral sunbeams. Though several miles away, it looked like I could reach out and touch them.

Highway 26 cut through the sleeping town. On the western fringe, there was a motel called Courthouse View (named after a prominent butte five miles south), and I got a room there. Since I’d given Orson enough Ativan to maintain sedation for the better part of the day, I left him in the trunk, walked inside, and crashed.

I’d be meeting Luther in fourteen hours.

I checked out of Courthouse View in the late afternoon, and heading northwest toward Scottsbluff on Highway 92, I started mulling over what I’d gotten myself into with Luther. In all honesty, I’d done a stupid thing. It was already 5:07, and that left me a little under four hours to determine how I would kill him, dispose of him, and leave town unnoticed. Finally, I concluded that I was being hasty and reckless. Besides, I couldn’t get past the idea that I was going to get myself killed f**king with this guy. So fifteen miles outside of Scottsbluff, I decided not to go through with it. I’d been methodical up to this point, and while it was tempting to orchestrate a quick, clever way to do in Luther Kite, four hours wasn’t an adequate length of time in which to do it.

Ricki’s was a true shithole. On the southern outskirts of Scottsbluff, in the shadow of the eight-hundred-foot bluff from which the town assumed its name, I pulled into its dirt parking lot and turned off the car. Stepping outside into the dry, tingling cold, night was imminent, though the sun still illumined the prairie and the spire of Chimney Rock, tiny but distinct in the distance. The tourist brochure in the motel claimed that the five-hundred-foot inselberg had been a landmark for pioneers on the Oregon Trail—the first indication of the Rocky Mountains, which lay ahead. Walking toward the trunk with two squeeze bottles of water and three bags of potato chips, I stared at the golden sandstone buttes of the Wildcat Hills, thinking, I’d like to pick one of those hills and lie down on top and never leave. I’d just sit out there and erode, alone.

I’d bought the food at Courthouse View, but the motel parking lot had been too crowded to risk opening the trunk. Ricki’s parking lot was empty except for Orson’s Lexus and a pickup truck.

Orson was awake. Even the sallow evening light burned his eyes, so he closed them. He’d pulled his cuffed hands under his feet, so they were now in front of him.

“Here,” I said, placing a squeeze bottle in his hands. As he drank it like a baby, I dropped the bags of chips and the other bottle inside. “It won’t be much longer,” I said. “We’re just thirty-five miles from the Wyoming border.”

I had a syringe prepared and I shot another 4-mg vial of Ativan into his ass.

I located a pen in the glove compartment and tore off a piece of the Vermont state map. I’d considered just calling Luther and having Orson cancel our meeting, but I had misgivings about my brother’s current ability to mask the atrophy in his voice. So stuffing the pen, paper, and Glock into my jeans pocket and pulling on a gray wool sweater, I locked the car and walked across the dirt parking lot toward the bar.

Above the door, a neon sign displayed ricki’s in blue cursive. I walked under the humming sign and entered the deserted bar, which was smaller than my living room. Its ceiling was obtrusively low, booths lined the walls, and with only two windows, one on either side of the door, I felt as though I were stepping into a smoky closet.

The sole patron, I sat down at a bar stool on the corner. The bar was constructed of unsanded railroad ties that still smelled of tar. Names, oaths, and declarations of love and enmity had been carved into the black wood.

As I pulled out the pen and scrap of paper, a woman emerged from the kitchen.

“We ain’t serving yet,” she said. She wore tight jeans shorts and a black turtleneck with bearcats: ’94 state champs across the chest. Her black hair was wiry and stiff, and she’d have benefited from orthodontic care.

“Your door was open,” I said.

“Well shit. What do you want?”

“Whatever you have on tap is fine.”

While she grabbed a glass out of the freezer and commenced filling it with bronze ale, I started what would be Orson’s note to Luther. L—I made a

She set the glass down on the railroad tie. “Dollar fifty.”

I handed her two of Orson’s dollar bills and told her to keep the change. Foam spilled down the sides of the glass. I took a sip, tasted flecks of ice in the draft, and continued scrawling on the scrap: friend this morning—you know how that goes. In fact, she composed this letter before I …Anyhow, I though it prudent to leave town asap. Sorry we couldn’t meet tonight. Have fun in Sas. O.

I folded the torn map into a neat little square, wrote “Luther” across the town of Burlington, and set it on the bar. Then I sat there, drinking my beer, thinking, So people actually leave notes with bartenders. How many times have I written this scene? It doesn’t feel real.