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Lucky wasn't about to share the details of what happened, no matter how bad he felt about it. If he told the yard bull about Mike's attack and the fight on the back ledge of the grainer, they would probably arrest him for murder. So he gave an abridged, reconstructed version of the story: "We jumped on the freight up by Vanishing Lake. I think he banged his throat real bad getting on. I got worried, so I cut the air and we jumped off the freight down here."

"Vanishing Lake," Roscoe said, alarmed. "They say some kinda killer bug is loose up there, people goin' nuts, attackin' each other. Somebody started a big ol' forest fire. It was on the radio."

Lucky was still trying to get a grip on his wavering consciousness. He sat up straighten "Whatta you mean?" he said. "What killer bug?"

"Don't ask me. They got the whole place quarantined. Maybe your friend got the bug!" Roscoe said, alarmed.

"Don't think so. Like I said, I think he crushed his larynx when we were getting aboard. The door handle whacked him in the throat," Lucky lied.

His mind was spinning with what the yard bull had just said. He started to replay the strange events he had witnessed at Vanishing Lake, ending with Mike, for no reason, clawing at his throat in the darkness of the tunnel, screaming obscenities while they fought desperately on the narrow ledge of the grainer.

Lucky looked down at the handcuffs holding his wrists to the wood arm of the sofa.

"Yer under arrest," Roscoe explained. "I'm holdin' ya here for the Sheriff. He ain't gonna make it for a bit, on accounta the substation at Government Camp is workin' with the military right now, lookin' for some scientist that started the fire. They got roadblocks up for two hundred miles."

"Where'd you put Mike's body?"

"Got him in the other room. My brother's gonna shit."

"Whatta you gonna do with him?"

"I ain't gonna do shit with him. I just watch parked freight cars for the SP," Roscoe said. "I ain't got nothin' t'do with this. Once the Sheriff gits here, he'll figger somethin', probably pack him off to the Medical Examiner in Government Camp, then they'll probably do him like all the other 'no names' we find dead 'round here… Just drop him in a potter's grave with a sack a' lye."

"You don't wanna do that."

"Yeah? Why's that?"

"You just don't wanna," Lucky repeated.

"Yeah? Well, it ain't gonna be none a' my doin'."

Lucky didn't want to wait around for the Sheriff. He knew he couldn't dry out cold in some cell, covered with bugs. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.

"He hoboed under the name 'Hollywood Mike,' but his real name was Michael Brazil."

"Yeah?" Roscoe said, not really caring.

"His father's a big-time movie producer."

Roscoe Moss now started to smile and shake his head in bewildered amusement. "Sure," he said. "Sure."

"Go look in his mouth."

"What's that gonna tell me?" Roscoe smiled. "He got his daddy's name engraved there?"

"Just go look in his mouth, you'll see." Lucky could still feel the Scotch, warm inside him. It had settled him, given him new courage. "Go on, take a look," he prodded.

After a long moment Roscoe got up and moved out of the back room of the store, muttering to himself. He had laid Hollywood Mike on the floor behind the counter, out of sight. He peeled back the tarp he had covered the body with, then took a pair of pliers and a screwdriver off the shelf and carefully pried Mike's mouth open. It was harder than he expected. The joints were already beginning to lock from rigor mortis, a condition that Roscoe knew from his ambulance-driving days would have the body board-stiff in an hour. After he got Mike's mouth open, he looked in. He couldn't see much in the dim light behind the counter, so he got a flashlight down off the shelf and shined it into Mike's mouth. "What'm I supposed t'be lookin' for?" he called to Lucky.

"His bridgework," Lucky called back.

Sure enough, Roscoe could now see a complicated dental repair job, complete with gold fillings. "That sure musta cost a few bucks," he shouted. Then he snapped off the light and moved back into the room where Lucky was seated. "So?"

"He told me he was in a car accident up on Mulholland Drive last summer. He trashed his dad's Porsche and broke out a buncha teeth. How many twenty-two-year-old hobos you know got ten grand in dental reconstruction?" Then Lucky stretched open his own mouth, showing his own broken tooth for emphasis. "You don't wanna be the guy who dumped Buddy Brazil's kid in a hole with a bag a' lye."

"Whatta you think I should do?"

"Take a Polaroid of him and send the picture to his father in Hollywood. He's gotta be at one of the movie studios." Lucky paused. "Who knows… maybe he gives you some kinda reward."

Roscoe Moss finally nodded. "And what's in all this fer you?"

"He was my friend. I want him to get a proper funeral." Lucky hesitated, then added, "I can't go to jail, man. I can't go through that. I helped you, you gotta help me, one Marine to another. Semper Fi, brother."

Roscoe looked troubled. He moved over and sat down next to Lucky. "I let you go, there's gonna be hell t'pay. Not that I wanna give you no grief, but that Trainmaster is gonna drive up here from Sierra Blanca. I know him. He's a tough old buzzard, an' them two brakemen gonna be yellin' 'bout how you 'bos're all the time cuttin' the air t'slow trains. He'll go on 'bout how them products on that train is worth money-The interest on that trainload a' stuff would pay my salary fer ten years!' I'm gonna have t'listen t'that shit fer hours."

The two of them held each other's gaze.

"So, y'learned that trick a' yers fightin' in the Marines?"

Lucky decided to humor him, and smiled warmly. "It's called ground fighting. The idea is that all fights end up on the ground anyway, so you take it there first. Use the other guy's force against him. There's half a dozen choke points. You should be able to kill an opponent silently in seconds."

"You was a Ranger?"

Lucky nodded. Roscoe looked at him hard and said, "See, thing is I don't really like bustin' people. It sorta ain't in me."

Finally, Roscoe Moss, Jr., got up and left the room.

Lucky looked down in wonder at his bloody wrists cuffed around the arm of the sofa. Then he looked out the back window of the Feed and Grain. The dusty Texas-Oklahoma landscape was barren and bleak, like the last four years of his life. He wondered what had happened to Hollywood Mike. He remembered the horrible way Mike had choked on his own spit. His friend's eyes had burned with insanity, then had been empty and expressionless, devoid of soul. Suddenly Lucky wanted to run, wanted to get the hell out of there. He had never felt such a compelling desire to be someplace else. He wanted a new life… a life without alcohol, without dementia tremens, and the poverty of hopelessness and homelessness.

For three and a half years he had been riding the high iron, living in main stems or hobo jungles. He would catch out on the SP rails and head west to the Burlington tracks, then north to Oregon. Once there, he would have no reason to be there, no reason to stay, and would catch out again on the UP, heading east until he got to New York. Then it was the main central line to Fort Kent and back west again on the CN, fueled by restlessness and cheap wine. Around and around he went, human lint on a big useless spin cycle, sleeping under cardboard with the Sunday paper for a mattress. Then up again, with no reason or direction, wandering aimlessly to nowhere important, from nowhere special.

Suddenly, he wanted to sleep someplace warm, where he wouldn't wake up being hammered into oblivion for his shoes.

Then all at once, with Mike's death weighing on his mind, Lucky knew the journey was over. He was through with the liquor, through being a drunk. He would go home. He would talk to his old friend Clancy Black… Clancy would help him find a way to beat it.