Download e-reader versions at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

Meg called room service for tea and oatmeal, ate, took a bath, and lay down for a nap. A knock woke her. She yelled to whoever it was to wait, rolled out of bed, and pulled on jeans and a shirt.

Another knock.

“Hang on,” she said. “Let me get my things.”

She collected her digital recorder and room key, tied her hair up, and stepped into sneakers. At last she went to the door.

It was David. “Going somewhere?” he asked. “We do have a flight tonight.”

That annoyed her. She let it show in her voice, thin and hard. “I said I’m not flying back tonight and I said why. You think ignoring what I say makes it at all likely I’ll do what you want?”

David shook his head and tried to come in. Meg stood her ground in the entryway. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “You keep running around blind, all crazy with guilt. It’s dangerous here. You’re scaring the crap out of me.”

Meg glared. He looked at the ceiling, then lowered his eyes to her and held out his left arm as if to gather her into a hug. She drew away; he took a step forward and wrapped the arm around her back. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course I should listen to you. But I also feel like I need to look after you.”

His soft chest stifled her. “Stop it,” she grunted. His arm loosened a bit. “Stop mothering me.” She backed out of his grip and retreated a few steps, past the bathroom.

He came after her partway, letting the door fall closed behind him. “I’m not. But if you’re going to meet a source you have to be smart, Maggie, and tell your editor where you’re going, even if your editor is me. You’re not looking out for yourself.”

He drew too close again, though without touching this time. She retreated even farther. Again he followed.

Someone new knocked. With David so far into the room proper she had space to dart around him to the door. A pageboyed, homely blonde a few years older than her.

“Margaret Anthony?” the woman said. “Gary sent me.”

Meg turned and gave David a salute. “Back in a few hours.”

“Wait!”  He held out both palms to her. “What if we could have a kid? We could adopt. We keep coming back together anyway, Maggie.”

Meg’s heart pounded at the notch of her sternum. Everything else was unnaturally still. “That’s not fair. You can’t offer a baby in trade for me walking away from that girl again,” she whispered, forcing breath through a knotted larynx. “You can’t offer me a baby as a deal.” She barely managed to speak the last word. The expression he’d worn when he offered to have a child with her—she could tell he didn’t want one, but believed that she did so deeply she’d give up anything else for it. If that’s what he thought of her, how much could he ever have loved her to put it off so many times?

She pushed the woman into the hall and tumbled out after her.

“My name’s Deirdre,” the woman said, offering a pocket-pack of tissues.

Meg took one and blew her nose. “Let’s go get my sidekick,” she said. “This is nothing. Forget about it.”

**********

Wyatt opened his door to Meg and some other womanwearing a lumberjack shirt. Meg had been crying.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

Meg grinned with half her mouth and neither of her red eyes. “Oh yes,” she said. “David and I are getting remarried. It’ll be miserable but what the hell, I’m not happy at all anyway. Get the gun.”

It took Wyatt a moment to understand that that last part had nothing to do with the rest of it.

He got a windbreaker with deep pockets from the closet and went to the nightstand for the gun. As he was loading it the phone rang and he answered.

“Is Meg taking you with her?” Dain demanded.

Wyatt considered lying, but decided that whatever the favor was worth to Meg, it would cost him far more when Dain found out, as inevitably he would. “Yes,” he said.

“Do you know where?”

“No.”

“Hmph. Call me when you know.”

Wyatt glanced at the door. Meg had stayed outside; he was alone. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“Goddammit!” Dain exploded. “My reporters do not hide things from their editors. You call me before midnight or fuck your job and fuck the money we owe you too.” A clatter as the receiver slammed into its cradle and the line died.

Wyatt went out to the hall and the woman led him and Meg downstairs to the casino garage, to a pickup the same make as his own, only a little newer and a lot cleaner. They all three piled in, Meg in the middle, drove onto the highway heading north, and then immediately exited again. The ramp made a 270-degree, downward-spiraling arc, at the end crossing beneath the highway itself. A traffic light hung from the bottom of the overpass—it was green but Deirdre started to brake as she approached it anyway; it had just turned yellow when she reached it and stopped completely. A man in a neatly trimmed beard and a shirt the twin of Deirdre’s sat on a guardrail to Meg’s right.

“Okay, get out,” Deirdre said, and with the motor still running opened her door and hopped down. Meg and Wyatt got out. The man on the guardrail stood, kissed Deirdre on the cheek, and handed her a set of keys, then took her place behind the wheel and drove off.

It was quiet for a moment. Traffic overhead was light. Meg could hear the buzzing rush of each individual car.

With a nod Deirdre indicated the other side of the cross street, where a bean-shaped minivan sat before one of the many concrete pillars holding up the highway. The inside, when they reached it, smelled of grease and cooked hamburger from two wads of butcher paper on the passenger-side floor mat. Meg nudged one with her toe, and Deirdre leaned in front of her and tossed them on the rear seat, next to Wyatt. Then she leaned back, making no move to start the engine.

“What are we doing?” Meg asked.

Deirdre pointed at the roof. “With the turnpike up there, the Feds can’t look down and see us. They could be following you with a satellite or something. You never know what technology they’ve reverse engineered off those spacecraft.”

“Aliens,” Meg said. “You think aliens are tracking us from the sky.”

“I know you don’t believe.” Deirdre gave Meg an indulgent smile. “Mr. Shecker told me. That’s okay, I wouldn’t believe myself except my husband—that was my husband we just met—he’s seen spacecraft three or four times since our daughter was abducted, oh, most of a year ago. Before that I was skeptical as anybody.”

“Your daughter has been missing a year?” Meg didn’t want to say it, but a girl missing for a year was probably dead, and certainly not the prisoner of space aliens. Just as Veronica might be dead—a fact Meg had mostly avoided thinking about for the last few days, because when that fact did force itself to her attention, as now, it gave her a physical jolt like a hard poke under the ribs.

“That’s why I’m here,” Deirdre said. “We’re going to bring her back, her and all the kids.” She pulled a wristwatch from her pocket and checked it. “All right. Time to go.”

They stayed on surface streets now, driving back south through the city until they reached the northern end of the Strip and the Circus Circus casino. From the front, Circus Circus was a plain white box with pink circus-font lettering and a hundred-foot clown. Around back they found that someone had stuck a dome of reflective pink glass onto the side of that white box. Fifteen big trucks were ranged beside it. Deirdre parked and they climbed a set of stairs to a fire door and entered at one end of a row of midway-game kiosks. In the middle of the dome, where the glass vault rose the highest, a pink roller-coaster track wrapped itself around a promontory of plastic rocks.

It was far hotter in here than outside, probably over 90 degrees. Without air conditioning the glass dome had become nothing but a massive greenhouse. Right away Wyatt felt his face and hands greasing with sweat. He removed his windbreaker and tied the sleeves around his waist.

They could hear a crowd somewhere deeper inside and advanced toward it, following a path around the fake rockpile. They emerged from a plaster tunnel twenty feet from a crowd of Possemen, and the smell landed on Wyatt’s face like a wet washcloth. A few hundred of them were packed together in front of a low stage, in a corner of the dome by the hotel wall. He could smell the festering rot from all those thousands of creases of skin where sweat had cooked over and over into a slimy mix of dust, bacteria, and dead cells. It smelled of hair grease gone clumpy and rancid. It smelled like foul meat, cabbage, and sex all together. It was far worse than the mineshaft camp, where at least the Posse smell had been mixed with the heavy, natural musks of the horses and hawks, with wood smoke, and even with the occasional breath of fresh air. These filthy men in this hot room smelled unnatural, wrong. Wyatt could feel it climbing up his nose and crawling down his throat like a live animal that wanted to smear shit and maggots on the clean lining of his mouth and lungs.

The ponytailed man from the casino got onstage. Meg had said he was called Shecker. He yelled a couple of names over the crowd chatter, and fifty or so Possemen filtered toward the rear of the dome and the fire exits. Ten minutes later he read three more names and another big group left. The third time he read Wyatt recognized a name and realized he was calling out counties. By the fourth time about half the crowd had gone and Meg was starting to glance around nervously.

“Where’s Cutt?” she muttered, and then seemed to decide something and made a beeline for the stage, Wyatt trailing her. “Is Cutt already gone?” she demanded of Shecker when she got there.

“He hasn’t arrived yet,” Shecker said.

Meg pinched up her face. Wyatt thought she might be trying to look threatening.

“He’s coming, but not until later,” Shecker said. “When I’m done here I’ll buy you dinner and explain.”

He went back to calling roll. Possemen kept leaving and Wyatt kept sweating. It took nearly three-quarters of an hour to clear all of them out, but in the end Meg, Wyatt, and Shecker were alone in the hothouse, now echoingly quiet.

“So when will Cutt be here?” Meg demanded again.

Shecker checked his watch. “Not for two, three hours,” he said. “There’s two stages to this thing. These men were all in the first, but Sheriff Cutt volunteered for the second. Meanwhile, I’ve got to eat and you’re invited.”

They left the dome. It was a perfect 65 degrees outdoors and cooling fast, and Wyatt had never tasted sweeter air. He waved his arms and turned his body side to side to let the breeze dry his crevices and wash away any lingering funk.

“Did you have to do that in a sauna?” he asked.

Shecker pointed at the sky. “Infrared.”

He led Meg and Wyatt up the casino driveway to the Boulevard and turned south. The sun had nearly set, which made one landmark ahead stand out: the green, gold, and red neon sign of the Peppermill 24 Hour Restaurant and Fireside Lounge. They heard the generator powering it and the rest of the place from a hundred yards away, when the only part of the restaurant itself visible was the very peak of its roof. It got steadily louder as they approached, and when they reached the parking lot (which was nearly three-quarters full) it was deafening.

Inside, though, they barely noticed it, especially once the hostess took them to their table in the sound-damped back room.

The space was plush and dim. To the left of the entryway a sunken circle of benches surrounded a six-foot reflecting pool, in the middle of which a flame burned directly from the surface of the water. Semicircular booths filled the rest of the room, each with mirrored columns at its corners with artificial rose vines wrapped around them. There were mirrors and artificial roses on all the walls too, creating the illusion of thousands of flower-wreathed booths going on forever. At the same time, though, the place felt cozy. It was the lounge from Frank Sinatra’s vision of Heaven, and the waitresses all had on floor-length black cocktail dresses.

They ordered burgers and cocktails, and ate and made small talk about every Westerner’s favorite topic, the good old days before Occupation. Shecker used to sell electronics, Wyatt used to live with his wife and daughter and teach freshman lit and comp, and Meg used to hustle for interviews with councilmembers and DAs on the local crime and politics beats.

“You wouldn’t think I was any less crazy, would you, if I told you I don’t actually believe I’ve seen a UFO?” Shecker asked at one point. “I used to go to the ridges near Area 51 years ago, before the Air Force restricted them. Folks would always claim they saw UFOs but really it was the landing lights on the commuter 737 from McCarran.”

“Only a tiny bit less,” Meg said.

Toward the end of the meal Shecker finally brought up Carson Cutt, and before he could get out two more words Wyatt excused himself to use the bathroom. On the way in he’d spotted a pay phone by the bathroom door. Dain had demanded a call, and when he called he didn’t see how he could risk hiding or lying about what he knew; it was still more likely than not that Dain would figure it out afterward. So he thought he’d better get it over with before he learned too much.

He told Dain what he’d seen and what he thought it meant: a battalion’s worth of Possemen were on their way to Area 51 for the “first part” of whatever it was; Cutt and his men were in the “second part,” but he hadn’t yet appeared.

“This Shecker wants to show us proof,” Wyatt said, “so they might make us go with them. If you call the Army on them we could be there when they get strafed or bombed or anything else.”

“Then get out!” Dain said. “Get out now!”

“You really think Meg would go along with that?” Wyatt asked.

He returned to the table. What Shecker had been about to say, apparently, was that it was time to make contact. They would meet Cutt behind the restaurant in ten minutes.

“I thought it would be hours,” Wyatt said.

Shecker shrugged and paid the check. Meg finished her second drink. They went outside.

The plate windows on the front of the diner and the sign by the road lit up the parking lot, but when they went around the side it got dark fast. Out back there was barely enough light to see. The trailer-sized portable generator sounded like half a dozen outboard motors tied together and tipped over to chop their screws against each other and the ground.

Wyatt’s eyes adjusted to it and he saw a man coming toward them. He shouted hello and Wyatt recognized Cutt’s voice. He wasn’t wearing his duster anymore. Two more men were with him.

Shecker left. Cutt waved his hand for Meg and Wyatt to follow him and they did. An empty strip mall hooked around the restaurant in an L shape; they walked across its parking lot. It was a little brighter here, enough to see that both Cutt’s men had rifles.

They kept going past the mall, to a beige Ford Bronco parked on its far side. Cutt opened the driver’s door and the dome light revealed his face clearly for the first time. He’d trimmed his beard by about half its volume and cut his hair unevenly, and he’d given up his furs, boots, Carhartts, and flannels. Instead he wore wool slacks with knife-edge creases and a checked office shirt. He could have been a supply manager or a bank teller at the end of a rough weekend, except he had this slight frown, his hands moved just a little slower than average, his hips jutted out when he stood at rest—there was something wild and Western about his whole way of carrying himself, in other words. Wyatt thought Carson Cutt could stride the boardwalk of Venice Beach in trunks and sandals and still pull that off.

The other two Possemen were as filthy as ever, and their smell was just as strong inside the truck. Wyatt remembered one of them, a fat man in a stained Denver Broncos sweatshirt. He was one of Cutt’s chief lieutenants.

Cutt paused until Meg was settled in back, and then twisted in his seat. “I saw the article you did,” he said. According to you I’m a big bad wolf shitting heroin and your Feds are a bunch of Little Red Riding Hoods. You didn’t quote one thing I said about why we do it.”

“Editors.” Meg shrugged. “Now we’ve got another chance.”

“No,” he said, “no interview. We’re going to show you things and you’re going to write about them, that’s all.” He started the engine. “You know,” he said to Wyatt, “I almost didn’t recognize you without the mustache.”

**********

Cutt turned the Bronco south onto Paradise Road, which paralleled the Strip a quarter-mile to the east, and after a few minutes turned off it again and parked behind the Flamingo Hotel. He led Meg and Wyatt through an archway to a pool deck where Possemen lay on deck chairs and sat around plastic tables. In the bottom of the empty pool itself, six men surrounded two more wearing the grimaces of real boxers and punching at each other crudely. All eight were almost certainly high; those on the deck chairs were passed out drunk or still drinking from bottles they passed hand to hand. Around one of the tables, five men played cards for small amounts of loose change. Four more around another covered a map with their arms to hide it from Meg and Wyatt.

“Where’s Veronica?” Meg blurted out.

“Your violent friend?” Cutt said. “I left her where I said. You weren’t there and she got pissed; last I saw she was trying to thumb a ride. Probably she got picked up by the soap bus I saw about twenty minutes later. I wouldn’t bet my own life on it but maybe the neighbor’s dog’s that she’s in there with the kids we’re breaking loose tonight. Or someplace like it.”

Meg scanned the crowd again, as if despite what Cutt said Veronica might be there somewhere. “I don’t buy it,” she said. “Your friend Jack said you never had a girl with you.”

“I dropped her before I saw him.” Cutt waved his hand to take in all those gathered there. “Look, I don’t really give an owl’s fart what you think, but the fact is this is everyone who rides with me, minus the phantom-limb duo who stayed to tend the horses. And you know I couldn’t have left that girl alone with just them. She tried to fight just about all of us at once, twenty on one, and near blinded one of my boys.”

Meg sat on a chair, face set, intercepted one of the bottles going around, and took a drink. Wyatt sat beside her.

“If she’s not here, she’s dead,” she whispered as soon as Cutt moved away. “She must be.”

Wyatt tried a little to argue that the Feds really might have picked her up just after Cutt put her down, but he didn’t really believe it himself and soon quit. Cutt’s story had the feel of a partial truth awkwardly joined to a lie. It was easy to believe Veronica had lashed out at his men; nearly impossible to believe he’d let her go afterwards and now simply had no idea what had become of her. Meg was probably right, she was dead.

Now they were stuck again with men they were surer than ever were killers. They waited for opportunities to run away, but none came. Too many Possemen were there to watch them. After an hour Cutt ordered his men to stop drinking and take no more drugs, saying he wanted them more or less straight before he gave them back their guns. That made them all cranky, more so the more they dried out, which only made Meg and Wyatt more scared.

A half moon rose a little after midnight. At around 2:30 a.m., Shecker returned. At 3:00 the man in the Broncos shirt eased a van up the drive and halfway through the archway and began distributing automatic rifles, some with grenade launchers slung underneath their barrels. The Possemen, who’d started the night partying and brawling, were by then either sober or simply worn out; they took their weapons silently.

A handful crossed the driveway to the garage and returned at the wheels of three Suburbans, two Broncos, and a Tahoe. The others loaded in. Meg and Wyatt were put in the backwards-facing seat of the rearmost truck.

At 3:30 the caravan rode north. Not long after they got on the road the driver, maybe as a gesture of black comedy, began to sing the old cowboy dirge “O Bury Me Not.”

 

“O bury me not on the lone prairie”

These words came low and mournfully

From the pallid lips of the youth who lay

On his dying bed at the close of day.

 

Just shy of dawn they turned west from U.S. 93 onto the Extraterrestrial Highway. An old sign at that crossroads warned that the next food and gas could be found at the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel. A newer sign partially covering it claimed that in fact they weren’t until Tonopah, 149 miles away.

 

“O bury me not on the lone prairie

Where the wild coyote will howl o’er me

Where the buffalo roams the prairie sea

O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

 

Wyatt, facing backwards, saw the sky begin to lighten, the scrubby far-off hills first appearing as black silhouettes against the sky, then transitioning gradually to purple-gray, pale gray, and finally brown.

 

“O bury me not,” but his voice failed there

And we paid no head to his dying prayer

In a narrow grave, just six by three

We buried him there on the lone prairie.

 

Eventually they slowed, took a left onto a dirt road, and stopped. The others climbed out. Meg and Wyatt did too. Neither had a plan. Wyatt, at least, merely hoped that that if they got out of the truck, maybe, maybe the Possemen wouldn’t make them get back in.

The sun had risen most of the way above the horizon. They stood on a well-graded track pointing straight as a plumb line for a modest-sized mountain range. A boxy old gray notchback sedan sat parked across it, fifteen feet beyond the lead Bronco, the one Cutt drove. Dain was beside it, hands in the air, shaking his head emphatically in refusal. He wore the same sport coat as the night before, and raising his arms like that pulled the shoulders and neck up around his chin while six inches of forearm extended from the sleeves, straining at the buttoned cuffs of his shirt. Since he had a round face and mostly bald head to begin with, the overall effect was to make him look like a doll.

He’d come to save them. Meg rushed toward him and Wyatt went after.

“Here she is, then,” Cutt was saying. “Now dig up your goddamn keys and get out of my goddamn way.”

Dain lowered his hands when Meg reached him. “My hero,” she said semi-ironically. “You’re a complete fucking idiot.” She hugged him, pressing her face into his neck. He kissed her hair and then backed away, took a few steps into the scrub past his front bumper, knelt laboriously, and scratched at the sand under a clump of saltbush. One of the Possemen came near and gave Cutt a pistol, which he held loose at his side, watching intently.

Wyatt had to admit this did border on heroic. Dain hadn’t gone to the Feds, instead he’d somehow gotten a car—probably bought since they were next to impossible to rent—come up here, and waited all night to face down what was, in his mind, a gang of pure fanatics. He’d put himself directly in their path and there was a better than decent chance that as soon as he dug up his keys, they would shoot him dead.

Meg got in the car, in the front passenger seat. Wyatt opened the rear door but remained outside, hand on his own gun in the pocket of his windbreaker.

Dain straightened, a three-step process where first he raised his torso perpendicular to the ground while remaining on both knees, then launched the right knee forward to get the foot flat on the ground, and finally, using both hands on his thigh for leverage, struggled his body erect. He came back to the car, keys in hand. Cutt did not shoot, but he didn’t put the pistol away either.

“How did you know we’d be here?” he demanded. “Did you hear it from the Feds? Do they know we’re coming?”

Most of the Possemen were a few paces behind Cutt, but the one in the Broncos shirt was edging up. He was almost even with Cutt already and his gaze was locked on Wyatt, specifically on Wyatt’s right side where his hand disappeared into his jacket. He carried an assault rifle pointed down so the barrel nearly grazed the road.

“That UFO guy,” Dain said. “The one who set up your interview with Meg.” Wyatt was impressed again: it was a good lie and he was a good liar. His breath, which was fast and heavy from fear and slight exertion, did not catch; the puffy flesh around his eyes didn’t so much as flinch. He kept moving as he said it, got his door open, dropped behind the wheel, tried to put the key in the ignition. Unfortunately “that UFO guy” had ridden with them. Wyatt saw him approaching fast and calculated that being caught in a lie was worse than confessing to one. Dain couldn’t drive away faster than several dozen men could shoot.

“Stop!” Cutt yelled.

“I told him,” Wyatt said. “I’ve known for days, since I met another Sheriff in a bar.”

“Don’t you get it yet?” the fat one in the Bronco shirt said in a dead voice. “They turned us in.” He swung the rifle up to his shoulder, aiming at Wyatt.

Wyatt fumbled with his gun, trying to free it. He was not afraid. What was happening was not real enough to be frightful. Instead he had the absurd feeling of being in a Western movie quick-draw scene. People thought of those as movie climaxes, but really, Wyatt thought, they almost never were. They could be tense, suspenseful moments, but they were nearly always too foregone and tightly constrained to be climactic. In a movie’s final battle, the one that really counted, neither the hero nor the villain fought fair.

The horizon let go its last hold on the sun. It shone on Wyatt and his villain equally, from the side. From the car, Meg was yelling at him to get in.

Someone kicked him in the chest, harder than he’d ever been hit before, a blow that felt like it went clear through him. He heard a gunshot. Someone punched him in the face, caving it in. He fell.

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