It was another long day of driving over mostly flat and undistinguished and dusty landscape from Dallas to Amarillo, Texas. Driving through the town and almost to Cimarron, the convoy of two vehicles turned south onto a dirt road under a log archway with "The Big C Ranch" engraved on a plaque overhead and drove three more miles until they came upon a long, l...
Jack Cranford himself picked me up at Denver International Airport in the Hunt's Ranch Range Rover for the nearly four-hour drive up into the Rockies to the northwest to the ranch. He had said it was no trouble because he had to meet the flight of another couple that would be lodging at the ranch. When we'd exchanged e-mails, he hadn't asked me why I was com...
"Shit." "What is it? What's wrong?" Lieutenant Kahn asked sotto voce. We were walking, being carried along by far too many people, I thought, to be out and about at 9:00 am. We were trying to get to the gate for my flight to Denver, connecting through Chicago. At the moment, though, I was grateful for the crowd, even though their chatter was exploding in my...
Warren Savage only visited the Hayden saloon and required Cal's services one more time during Cal's temporary work there. He was a bit more demanding and rough on the repeat than the first time, and Cal sensed that this was something that would build in intensity until something gave—probably Cal's life. He knew that law was so raw out here on the edges of c...
Mikey, a studly 18-year old finds himself intimate for the first time with Mike, his namesake 24-year old uncle whom he's idolized all his life during a cross-country drive. Steve is the 20-year old collegiate gymnast who hitches a ride with them. "So what about this ranch?" I asked. "Well," Steve said, "I better start at the beginning. My mom's folks own...
Chapter 01: John Why had he left the photograph there, standing right there in a leather frame on the dresser top? More important, why was the photograph here at all? I had gone into his room to put his things together so they could take them down to Hayden along with the body, and there it was. To some extent the whole success of the Wolf Creek Ranch had...
"Did he do you on the saddle?" Butch asked as I hit the bottom stair to the basement when I'd left Side Slade's office and gone down the stairs as the ranch's foreman had told me to do. "Yes," I answered, but I wasn't my most attentive to the question. This was what Slade must have meant about Butch testing me on the edges before I was let loose—and they we...
I got rousted out myself not long after dawn the next morning. I was pretty sore and afraid I wouldn't be able to walk a straight line and would be wearing a sloppy grin all day, but I needed to get the lay of the place before Jason Jenks, the novelist I was supposed to keep alive, arrived. And I also needed to get my expected routine down, now that I had be...
The Ranch "I'm no cowboy," Eliot reminded his roommate. Behind the wheel of his black Hummer H1, Harlan said, "Neither am I." "But your dad—" "He's a wannabe cowboy." "Who just happens to own a 1,583-acre ranch in Texas." "Land is more like it. The former owner raised turkeys and hogs, but Dad sold the birds and hogs and had the hog barns demolished af...
"You just come in for a drink and a look see, or you want something more, Oskar?" "Just the drink today, Skinner, thanks. A shot and a chaser, please." "Been some time since you got any, hasn't it?" the bartender at the Buckhead Ranch said as he set up two shot glasses for the big Swede bellied up to the bar. "You're still in fine shape, Oskar. You should...