The steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and
the squeak of an overhead fan turning slowly are soft
but insistent, counting down the night, while the high
desert thrums like a half-remembered Victrola song. The
sounds are below the consciousness of Winchell Dear, an
old-time gambler, a Texas poker player on the southern
circuit, as he waits for something . . . something vague
that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his
way. He has gassed and oiled the Cadillac and adjusts
the pistol in his right boot, then plays one of the six
fiddle tunes he knows, thinking back to his good days
with Lucinda Miller. Alone, he waits in his remote ranch
house, while, just outside, an acquaintance named Luther
hunts, unblinking and of nervous temperament and moving
through yellow primrose bending in the night wind.
In Diablo Canyon, a distant part of Winchell Dear’s
ranch, Peter Long Grass squats by a campfire,
contemplating the profile he saw moving along the ridge
of Guapa Mountain an hour ago, thinking about the
gambler’s housekeeper, Sonia Dominguez, about the small,
quiet world he has fashioned far from civilization and
what undefined presence might now be threatening it. He
gathers his tools and begins to run across the desert
floor. And boring toward all of them is a
cream-colored Lincoln Continental with two men aboard.
Traveling from Los Angeles on a mission they’ve been
given, they are professionals, cool and implacable at
the start, but becoming steadily more confused by the
strange landscape they are passing through. Forty
minutes from their task, they ready themselves, while a
kitchen wall clock ticks its way through the long night
of Winchell Dear. The Long Night of Winchell Dear
finds master storyteller Robert James Waller at his best
as he takes us through the wind and dust of the high
desert mountains, into the shadowy world of high-stakes
poker fought in the back rooms of Amarillo and Little
Rock, and headlong toward the book’s stunning finale of
chaotic terror, where an unexpected hero
emerges. From the Hardcover edition.
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