No Immunity

duplex. She’d watched him reach out, hand on the edge of the door, the urge to slam illustrated in every tense muscle. But of course he couldn’t. Ezra liked to roam through both units, keeping tabs on both his people.
    Her eyes filled. Quickly she blinked back the threat of tears. She’d find Tchernak a place close by; Ezra could still see him.
    The sour coffee and airplane pretzels arrived, supplanting the prosciutto-and-Emmentaler quiche, sourdough bagels, mixed melon slices, and still-hot espresso Tchernak would have sent with her. She silently acknowl-: edged the gastronomic depth of her loss. She was hungry, but she would wait.
    When the plane landed, she sprung the overhead compartment door while the stewardess was still on the speaker warning of luggage shifting during the trip. If the terminal at McCarran offered food, it was camouflaged by the blinking colored lights, the clanging bells and whirling: winner sounds of the banks of slot machines. The very air f seemed laced with caffeine, and everything about the place 1 screamed, Hurry! Last chance! She’d wait till she picked up the rental car, cleared town, and spotted the first real food cafe along the road.
    Minutes later the Las Vegas Strip rose from the sand like a plastic mirage, and was gone again before she could believe it had been there. There were one or two more city exits and then: nothing. No exits, no access roads, no gas I or even a rest stop, much less real food. The only comfort was that her cell phone would nor be ringing with nagging calls from Tchernak. The rumpled hills lay beside the highway like dying elephants laid tail to trunk. Once she turned onto 93, her only decision was made. Next stop would be the town of Gattozzi, and Jeff Tremaine; but that wasn’t for well over a hundred miles. The blacktop shot out straight ahead, bisecting the high desert; the morning sun seemed to bleach the land colorless. To her right, jacketed power lines ran like covered bridges in the air. In the nearly treeless, waterless, uninhabited desert the meticulously protected power lines were baffling.
    An hour and a half into the drive she noticed a narrow strip of green pasture, ponds, cattle—southeastern Nevada ’s answer to the Nile Valley . Thirst had settled like blotting paper in her throat. She longed to pull the car over, run into the pasture, and shove in among the slurping cows.
    Jeff Tremaine had talked about the land here, but oddly she hadn’t pictured it like this. She’d known it would be brown and dry, but he hadn’t mentioned the subtle, seductive browns and violets in the distance, the isolated green strip of ranches and cottonwoods, the miles and hours that separated men from their deeds.
    It was after eleven when she spotted the prefab truck stop inaptly called the Doll’s House. Unless those dolls were beneath the red light in the no-frills motel behind. In the cafe she hit the Dolls’ bathroom (Guys’ was around the corner), grabbed the two tallest bottles of water in the cooler and a bar of waxy chocolate Tchernak would gag at. “Why are the power lines covered?”
    “Huh?” The boy proffered her change.
    “The power lines, they’re jacketed, all the way from Las Vegas .”
    “Oh, the shields? Birds were shitting on the power lines. Acid rotted ‘em out. But these shields saved the day. Coated with poison. You check out the ground below?” He giggled. “Chorus line of corpses.”
    She swerved to avoid a decaying crow as she pulled onto the highway and now recognized the gray and black lines that lined the road. On the horizon sun-bleached dirt darkened into red rock. Against it the piñón pines were greener, the rabbit sage bright yellow, and the gravel and stones not gray but silver. She passed through one small town and close by another that probably hadn’t changed since 1950. Pioche, the old mining town, sat too far up the knobby tan hill for close viewing, but she could still see the wires that had carried the ore buckets from the dead mine. There was an odd completeness to these tiny isolated places, as if the ensuing years and outside world were merely tales told beside the hearth.
    When Jeff Tremaine had talked of coming back here, it had sounded like life without the possibility of parole. Now, as she turned off the highway onto Gattozzi’s Victorian main street, she wondered if she had heard Tremaine’s initial description with urban ears or if dry grass and duty were all he’d been able to