The Scenic Route

Kevin might be a possibility, down the road. He was cute, with curly blonde hair and wide blue eyes. He had a nice physique, firm without being muscle bound, and he had a good sense of humor and a friendly, engaging personality--and a killer smile. He was obviously attracted to Rose, too, as most men were. Nevertheless, it was still too soon. After Bruce the Brute, she needed a little time to herself. She needed a little time to heal.

And getting away, by herself, on this road trip through the northern Nevada desert had been just what she'd needed to refocus herself and clear her head. She'd traveled north on U. S. Highway 95, past a series of mountain ranges to the northeast--the Pintwater, the Spotted, and the Cactus, behind which lay the long-dry bed of Groom Lake and the notorious Area 51, wherein government military scientists might or might not be reverse-engineering alien spacecraft; took the jog west on U. S. Highway 6 at Tonopah, where Wyatt Earp had once owned a saloon; and turned left, onto U. S. Highway 95 again, passing the Excelsior Mountains to the southwest and traveling through Hawthorne and Schurz before turning right onto U. S. Highway 50. The desert was pretty much in bloom, intermittently, on both the north and the south side of the highway.

Except for a few tractor-trailer rigs, she hadn't seen more than a handful of other vehicles since she'd left Fallon behind, dwindling in her rear-view mirror, just as Kevin had predicted would be the case when he'd described the roughly clockwise route she'd planned to take out of, and back to, Sin City. The near-empty highway didn't bother her in the least; nothing could have been better for her plans, she thought.

She consulted the road atlas she'd laid, open, in the passenger's seat. According to the map, not more than ten miles ahead, on her left, a paved road, numbered 121, led north, between the Stillwater Range to the west and Clan Alpine Mountains to the east, toward Dixie Valley, a small town at the end of an unpaved dead-end road that led toward the east.