Slow Fade Read Online Free PDF

was raw and impatient. “When?”
    “When I get to one of them. Certainly not before.”
    “Will you?”
    “Will I what?”
    “Get to one of them?”
    “If I get around to it. I guess so.”
    “You guess so? That’s not good enough.”
    “Good enough?” Walker asked, feeling a curtain come down between them with terrifying swiftness. “What do you know about good enough?”
    There was a knock on the door followed by the assistant director’s blond head.
    “We’re ready to roll, Boss, any time you are.”
    Wesley rose, relieved to be summoned. “Hang around, or I’ll see you at the hotel tomorrow for lunch. We’re shooting all night and we’ll probably try to get a magic-hour shot. They’re after me like a pack of wolves so I won’t have much time. But we’ll talk on the ride back or something. We go to Mexico in a few days for three weeks, and the whole business should be finished in less than two months.”
    “I don’t have any plans,” Walker said.
    “That’s what I’m afraid of. Do you have money?”
    “Your lawyer gave me a few grand in L.A.”
    Wesley paused as he went out the door. “I’m married again. You might like this one. She’s from Labrador. Her grandfather knew your grandfather.”
    Walker went back to the rear of the trailer and lay down, falling immediately asleep. He woke before dawn. The trailer was empty and he stepped outside into the cool night air keeping away from the dazzling arc lights and fog machines and walking toward the area that had been staked off for the horses.
    A thin woman in tan corduroy pants and red flannel shirt was saddling a horse, one of the wranglers looking on. She moved with relaxed assurance, tightening up the cinch and swinging her long frame into the saddle. Her long black hair hung behind her in two knotted braids, and as she turned her face Walker knew that she was his father’s new wife. She had the same level look to her blue eyes as the girl in the photograph.
    “You’re Walker,” she said, gazing down on him. “I’m Evelyn. Do you want to take a ride?”
    He nodded. She looked no older than he, somewhere in her early thirties, with the broad cheekbones of the Inuit as well as the blue eyes and thin nose of the Scotch. His father had married a breed. He must have finally gone home and that’s where he must have met her.
    The wrangler brought him a saddled horse and he rode after her as she trotted down the dirt road and out along the banks of a slowly moving river. She urged her horse into a gallop as the sun broke over the horizon and it was in trying to keep up with her that Walker lost control, his horse running flat out across the desert until the collision with A.D.

AND THAT was what Walker recalled, not exactly in that narrative form, of course, but in that general sequence, until finally, toward dawn, A.D. woke again.
    “I’m here,” A.D. said. “Who’s there?”
    “Walker.”
    “Don’t fuck with me, Walker. Because of you being such an asshole, I’m pinned here with no eyes, no gig, and not too much hope.”
    “What would give you hope?”
    “A deal.”
    “You’ll get a deal.”
    “Is there some kind of watch on me?” A.D. asked, suddenly nervous that Walker was just sitting there staring at him. “Am I in worse shape than they’ve told me?”
    “You’re the same,” Walker said. “I’m just sitting here wondering if you have any pain pills.”
    “I take all they give me.”
    “How many years have you been on the road?” Walker asked.
    “Too many. I’ve been through it all on the road.”
    They were silent and once again Walker watched an obscure night give way to an equally obscure dawn.
    “Did anyone from the band ask for me?” A.D. asked.
    “The nurse told me someone came by to say they had checked out.”
    “Who are you, anyway?” A.D. asked. “Aside from being your father’s off-the-curb son.”
    A.D. was experiencing an almost overwhelming wave of fury, an emotion which, while it