Step to the Graveyard Easy Read Online Free Page A

as hell, she said.
    Cape spent a week with her. Went diving twice more, longer freefalls and bigger highs. The third time, he stood in the open door with the wind screaming in his ears and looked down through three thousand feet of nothing at a checkerboard landscape. No fear before or after he jumped; and the high was all adrenaline. Just like that, he wasn’t afraid of heights any longer.
    Prescott.
    The Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam.
    Las Vegas.
    Heat, smog, desert sprawl, the longest downtime traffic lights in the country. The Strip didn’t impress him. Glitter and glitz and money-worshiping, sugarcoated, bleary-eyed craziness; people swarming over everything like brightly colored ants over piles of rock candy. Cape spent minutes inside New York, New York, just long enough to see what a Vegas pleasure palace was like. Then he headed for one of the downscale strip joints a few miles away.
    He lasted twenty minutes in there, paying forty dollars to find out what a nude lap dance was all about. Another taste of corruption that wasn’t for him, neither the joint nor the dance. Demeaning to the women, demeaning to him, if not to the other panting and sweating male customers.
    That night, two guys tried to break into the Corvette in the parking lot outside his motel room. They set the alarm off, and by the time Cape got out there, groggy with sleep, they were shadows disappearing into deeper shadows. Their jimmying had damaged the door so that it would no longer shut tightly, but at least he could still lock it. Scratches in the paint, too, not that they amounted to much. The ’Vette hadn’t been a virgin when he married her.
    He left Vegas at dawn.
    Vegas was a gaudily disguised trap, a sugared slice of hell, no better underneath than the Tex-Mex tenderloins. Leaving it was like an escape.
    Death Valley.
    Some people might call it a slice of hell, too, but he wasn’t one of them. Awe-inspiring. Stark vistas, vast brown and gray and saltwhiteemptiness, bare jagged mountains brooding all around. Dazzling sunlight, ink-black shadows. So still the silence hurt your ears. You stood looking out from Zabriskie Point, or one of the high spots in the Grapevines and Panamints, and it put everything into perspective. You understood that you really didn’t matter much, alive or dead. That nobody did. That this place had been here for millions of years, and would be here for millions more after you were gone. The knowledge was somehow comforting.
    Barstow.
    Palm Springs.
    Los Angeles.
    Beach scene for a day. Didn’t appeal to him much. Phony, superficial, everybody playing a role—surfer, beach bum, bikini bombshell—like extras in a bad teenage movie.
    The rest of L.A. was clogged freeways, towns that weren’t towns but teeming highway connectors, smog so thick the sky was yellow-brown and breathing hurt your throat and lungs and screwed up your sinuses.
    Two days of California Dreaming, and he was on the road again.
    Santa Barbara. Better, but still too much residual L.A.
    Big Sur on Highway 1. Much, much better. The air, the coastline, the Pacific Ocean—all clean, beautiful, unspoiled.
    Carmel. Monterey.
    Argument in a pool parlor with a local who tried to hustle him. Nothing came of it inside, but later, when Cape left, the local and one of his buddies jumped him on the street. Wasn’t much of a fight; they were both too drunk to do any real damage. But they kept trying to get his wallet away from him, and that made him furious. He smashed the hustler’s nose, stomped the other one’s hand, left them both down and moaning, and drove off before anybody else showed up. The last thing he wanted was trouble with the law.
    The fight stayed with him that night, into the next day. The depth of his anger, the capacity for violence—he didn’t like that hidden side of himself. He would have to be careful to keep itcaged. Still, there was cold comfort in knowing that if he needed it, had to depend on it in a tight spot, it was a