Audio Book Description:
The steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and the squeak of an overhe4ad fan turing slowly are soft but insistent, counting down the night,while the high desert thrums like a halfremembered Victrola song. The sounds arebelow the consciousness of Winchell Dearan old-time gambler, a Texas pokerplayer on the southern circuit,as he waits for something... something vague that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his way. In Diablo Canyon, a distantpart of Winchell Dear`s ranch, Peter Long Grass squats by a campfire, contemplating the profilehe saw moving along the ridge ofGuapa Mountain an hour ago, thinking about the gambler`s hosuekeeper, Sonia Dominguez, about the small, quiet world he has fashioned far from civilizationand what undefined presence might now bethreatening it. He gathers his tools andbegins to run across the desert floor. And boring toward all of them is acream-colored Lincoln Continental with two men aboard. Traveling from Los Angeles on a mission they`ve been given,they are professionals, cool andimplacable at the start, but becoming steadily more confused by the strange landscape they are passing through. Forty minutes from their task, theyready themselves, while a kitchen wall clock ticks its way through the long night of Winchell Dear.
