Cold Wind - C. J. Box [80]
Drennen and Johnny had learned about the place from a natural gas wildcatter at the Eden Saloon. They’d stopped for a beer or nine at the edge of the massive Jonah gas field before continuing on to California. When they found out Gasbag Jim’s operation was less than twenty miles out of Farson and Eden in the sagebrush, they thought, What the hell.
That was four days ago. Or at least Johnny thought it had been four days. He’d have to ask Drennen.
Gasbag Jim’s was an all-cash enterprise, which suited them just fine. That meant there would be no paper trail—no credit card receipts, no IDs, and no need for real names. They’d decided to call each other “Marshall” and “Mathers” because Drennen was a fan of the rapper Eminem, and Marshall Mathers was his real name, but Johnny had slipped and called Drennen “Drennen” when they were in bed with three women at once. One of the girls, Lisa Rich, the ravenhaired beauty with heavy breasts, had coaxed their real names out of them the night before. She seemed very interested in their real names, for some reason.
“Fuck,” Drennen said as he staggered back from the pickup holding the crack pipe. “We’ve been burning through cash like it was . . . money.”
“I know,” Johnny moaned, and rubbed hard at his face. He’d been noticing that his face didn’t feel like it was his, like someone had stitched it over his real face to fool him. “Does my face look normal to you?” he asked.
Drennen squinted at Johnny. “You look normal,” he said, “for an over-sexed tweaker with no pants.”
They shared a good laugh over that one. But Johnny still distrusted his face. He probed his jawline with his fingertips, expecting to find a seam.
Then Drennen said, “I was talking to Gasbag Jim a while ago. I can see where this is headed and we’re going to be broke on our asses in no time flat. So I made him a proposal.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Drennen said, pulling the top off a cold Coors. He lowered the lid of the cooler and sat down on it so he was facing Johnny. He was so close their knees almost touched. “See, all his business except for you and me comes from Jonah field workers between here and Pinedale. You seen ’em this last weekend.”
Johnny had. Dozens of men, a parade of them, in new model four-wheel-drive pickups. Many of the customers lived in man camps put up by the energy companies. There were few women around. They talked of three things mostly: the prostitutes, hunting, and how the price of natural gas was dropping like a rock and might endanger their jobs and then they’d be out of work like everybody else. They wanted to spend their money while they had it.
“A bunch more layoffs coming,” Drennen said. “This place is going to look like a ghost town pretty soon. Those guys’ll get their pink slips and head home to wherever they came from. Gasbag Jim will have to send those girls away and sell his trailers, is what I’m thinking.”
“So what?” Johnny said, shifting his weight so he could see the prairie over Drennen’s shoulder. A gopher popped up twenty yards away and Johnny raised the pistol and fired. Missed. The pistol had gone off just a few inches from Drennen’s ear and Drennen flinched, said, “Jesus, you almost hit me, you ass hat.”
“Sorry,” Johnny said, looking past Drennen for more gophers.
“Anyway,” Drennen said, rubbing his ear and regaining his momentum. “So there’s always a need for whores somewhere. Maybe just not here in a few months. So what I was talking about to Gasbag Jim was you and me get an RV and load in a half-dozen whores and take’em to wherever there’s action. Like that big oil discovery up in North Dakota. Gasbag Jim says they found oil and gas down in southern Wyoming, too. Southern Wyoming and northern Colorado someplace. And all those fucking windmills going up everywhere. Somebody’s got to be building them.