Free Detour to Death by Helen Nielsen

Trace recalled. “It might make a fair studio.”
    “Peace Canyon? Is that what you call it?”
    “Then you know the place?”
    Expressions chased across Douglas’s handsome face like clouds and sunlight playing tag in a troubled sky. Now he was gay, now grave. “I know the place,” he murmured. “It’s horrible!”
    “Douglas—”
    Laurent must have gauged the irritation mounting in Trace’s reddening face. His voice was like a whip, and then it became a caress. “Ramón is waiting to serve the salad,” he said. “Can’t we change your mind about lunch, Mr. Cooper?”
    “I’m afraid not,” Trace said. “It’s over a hundred miles to Junction City. If I’m going to play bloodhound, I’d better get started.”
    “A little man in a raincoat, a canvas hat, and carrying a Gladstone bag,” Laurent murmured, repeating the description Trace had given in his story. “I don’t envy you your task, Mr. Cooper, but let me know how you come out.”
    • • •
    It must be true that nothing is really appreciated until it is lost; something had to account for the resentment Trace felt at Douglas Laurent’s criticism of the ranch. But in that case, he reflected, he should be feeling awfully appreciative these days because losing things was fast becoming his only talent. And so now T. Cooper, the great loser, was setting out to find something—a man.
    “I wonder where I would be if I were Steve Malone,” he mused, as Arthur headed the jeep back toward Mountain View.
    Arthur grinned. “At a bar,” he suggested.
    “Now wait a minute, I said if I were Malone—” Trace paused and reflected a moment. “Say, you might have something there! I’ll cover every bar in Junction City.”
    “In that case I’d better come along.” Arthur sighed. “Somebody’s got to cover you.”
    Arthur’s concern was understandable, but Trace, oddly enough, didn’t feel a bit thirsty. What he did feel was more like excitement. “Life gets dull without challenge,” Laurent had said. “The mob says guilty, and so I must say innocent.” But Trace knew it was more than that. He remembered Danny, the skinny legs in the tight Levi’s, the close-cropped hair, the scared face. Danny Ross was all the people in the world who were strangers on earth, and for that reason he could be no stranger to Trace.
    “I want to stop off and see the kid before we go on to Junction City,” he said. “I want to let him know Laurent’s in his corner.”
    But they were going to stop sooner than that. They were going to stop rather abruptly about ten miles beyond the ranch turnoff when a frantic, wild-eyed Virgil Keep suddenly appeared on the road ahead waving both arms like a windmill gone crazy.
    “Where the hell have you been?” he yelled. “Why couldn’t you be around when you’re needed?”
    The sheriff was alone; no Danny, no sedan. But he did have an ugly bruise on the side of his head.
    “He tricked me!” Virgil roared. “He pulled the keys to stop the car and slugged me with my own gun. I knew that goddamed kid was a killer!”

CHAPTER 7
    A LL THE LITTLE ONE-TRACK TRAILS led somewhere, but where they led was a mystery to Danny. Away—that’s all he could think of now, just away. He was free. He had a steering wheel in his hands again and a powerful motor responding to the press of the accelerator. But he couldn’t go back to the highway—not past that Mountain View crossing where a pair of armed deputies were watching for the return of the sheriff’s sedan, and he certainly couldn’t go back to Cooperton. He took the first trail cutting up from the south, praying that it wouldn’t double back or run into the wall of a canyon. All directions had been lost on that twisting ride to the mine, but he knew that the mountains ran like twin walls, one to the east, one to the west, and the trick was to cut between them.
    It was a desperate chance he’d taken, but desperate conditions breed desperate remedies. Virgil Keep had