Dylan bursts out of Vegas like a shot.  Has the good sense to keep it relatively sane until he clears the city limits.  Desert sun scorches late summer afternoon and beats through the glass of the Dodge.  Warms the knees of Dylan’s faded blue jeans, in spite of full open AC.
     He eases off Highway 15.  Slides through the stop at the end of the ramp, left onto route 93 north.  Passes the gypsum plant and opens the throttle.  Watches the plant shrink in the rear view.  Watches the needle on the speedometer nose past 90.  Edge toward 100.  Fucking beautiful.  Supertramp’s on the CD.  Take the Long Way Home keeps time with the RPMs.  They’re fine.  As usual.  The souped up, ‘73 dark blue Dodge Charger SE — Dylan’s pride — hasn’t even breathed hard.  As usual.  The shiny mags flash reflection of the late day sun, and he hits a buck ten.  “So you think you’re a Romeo, playing a part in a picture show.  Take the long way home.”  Ain’t no long way when the 340 kicks in.  Ain’t no long way at all.
     A couple of hours and it’s dark.  The curves are harder to hug.  He drops it down, settles around 90.   But he loves speed.  Drives like before the State imposed limits.  It’s a rush flying up behind slower vehicles.  And they’re all slower.  Flashes his lights on approach.  Loves the magnificent whoosh of air as he passes.  Grins at the fast glimpse of their faces as he zooms around.  A freakin‘ road rocket.  A meteor’s taillights vanishing in blackness.
    Open desert flanks both sides of a road that climbs slowly as it heads north.  Dylan knows it cold.  Like his own driveway.  Driven it since his teens.  Up and down the state.  Running pot, or coke.  Sometimes something stronger.  Sometimes more dangerous. 
    Under a mere sliver of moon, he can drive this without headlights.  It’s edgy, makes his adrenaline spike, and he does it with regularity.  Not for an entire trip.  No.  That’s five hours on a good day, with his speed.  Even with his profoundly skewed confidence, he won’t try that.
    But there are long stretches, at two or three in the morning, in the summer, when nothing’s visible on the inky horizon.  He cuts his lights, then, barreling through the night.  A believer’s prayer winging to God.  Passing a motorist from the opposite direction he’s a sudden, dark shape, come from nowhere.  A great roar startling their consciousness.  Furious sound hurtling past.  A ghost from darkness, barely recognized in a quick brush of headlights.  A faceless ghoul in the shadows, gone as quickly as he came.  Diminishing thunder, melting to invisibility.
    Dylan wants a legacy of fear.  Equates it with respect, like he did with his father.  Craves immortality.  Natural Born Killers is still his favorite movie.  He hopes he terrifies travelers on desolate, back roads.  Hopes they believe they’ve narrowly escaped a lunatic.  Narrowly escaped brutalization.  He doesn’t have the balls to go that far but he imagines himself of that cloth.  A wicked legend of the road.  Notorious and fabled.  Iconic.  Living in stories told by those gullible or wishful enough, to believe the shadowy form of the speeding Dodge to be a ghost car.  And some will believe they’ve passed an alien.  Swear they encountered an extraterrestrial entity on the road near the infamous Area 51.  A manifestation of the paranormal.
    Running drugs isn’t a livelihood for Dylan but it’s a lovely augmentation to the money he makes as an occasional mechanic, or day laborer, since his parents died.  The drug runs are favors he started doing, once in a while, for friends.  Now, twenty years later, many of those friends are dead, others in prison.  Dylan’s been lucky.  He’s managed to skate around the traps set by law enforcement or, fortuitously, been rerouted or detoured by a providence clearly on his side.  He’s never spent a single day in jail.
    Occasionally, he’s driven drunk or stoned, feeling his way by instinct along the well known route, damned lucky he hasn’t been pulled over.  Damned lucky he hasn’t hit and killed anything, except an Elk, one autumn.  The creature hadn’t hurt the Dodge too badly.  Clipped the corner of Dylan’s precious car.  He’d pulled out the dent in the fender, replaced the injured radiator, and repainted.  He was right back on the road, loaded, within ten days.
    His cargo isn’t always drugs.  Sometimes it’s cigarettes, brought in by rogue truckers, from cheaper States, for under the counter sales.   There’s profit for the driver, savings for the final customer.  In the middle, it’s a nice fee for Dylan and his buddies, who arrange it.  Sometimes it’s stolen goods.  Sometimes money.  But he doesn’t always know what he carries.  Once, he transported unknown cargo in the trunk of the Dodge, placed there at night while he slept in the hotel room reserved for him in Vegas.  His instructions were to drive, in darkness, to an abandoned ranch on a long, lonely road, halfway up the middle of the state.  An SUV, sans plates, had backed up to the rear of his car.  The trunk lid of the Dodge was raised, by an unseen hand, obscuring Dylan’s view.  No one spoke to Dylan and the load had been transferred.  The SUV’d taken off, heading deeper into the unmarked desert, while Dylan found his way back to the main road.
    As any good speeder, he has a radar detector, the newest model every year.  Once he clears the major cities — Reno or Vegas — there’s rarely a sound out of the little box, mounted just below the rear view mirror, searching for signals fore and aft.  There are speed traps along the way, operated intermittently, usually during daylight hours when a deputy has nothing else to do.  Beyond an occasional shooting on one of the ranches, pulling cars out of ditches, or settling fights between neighbors.
    Manning the radar’s an important part of the job.  Speeders bring the lion’s share of revenue into the tiny towns nested in the sprawling, sparsely populated counties.  The take is the source of cash for salaries, libraries, and the tiny municipal centers.  It gives those far flung towns new vehicles every few years.  It’s that lucrative.  It lines pockets along the way, making life more comfortable for those routinely cut off from the populated centers. 
    Dylan knows the later it gets, the safer it gets, the faster he can go.  Except when one of the local boys can’t sleep, or has a fight with the wife, and decides to climb into the cruiser.  In the company of sandwiches, hot coffee and a selection of country music, they’ll hide, lights off, invisible in the night, waiting for speeders.  At these times the radar detector’s especially valuable.  Now the detector chirps.  Dylan lifts his foot from the pedal, allows the Dodge to coast down closer to the posted 70 mph speed limit.  He’s picked up the offending signal from miles away, as he crests one of the many rises in the highway.  The road dips again, the chirping stops, momentarily blocked by another small hill.  He maintains the lowered speed, knowing the signal’s only temporarily broken.  He knows it’ll find him again, across the uncluttered desert, across spaces devoid of population.  Only an occasional cattle ranch breaks the landscape’s monotony.  Or once in a while clusters of overgrown foundations that constitute the final vestige, the last and distant remains, of long gone towns. 
    Some of the old towns don’t even have that.  Lost communities with names like Strawberry, or Safford, or Joy, that now show only on ghost town maps.  Their buildings eradicated, no proof left of the proud settlements they once were.  Once prosperous towns, with their own post offices.  Now left with a single PO box in the county, if a ranch happens to remain.  The desert leaves little.  It’s eaten the skeletons of communities that rose up and thrived 100, 150 years ago.  They’d burgeoned, wildfires of towns, each for a year or two or maybe ten, until the mines were emptied, or the railroad built to pass them by.  In the face of progress, they died.  They are once towns, now cadavers in various stages of decay.  Fallen into dust and passed from memory.  Most only a level expanse of sage and mesquite.  Old signs, or preserved markers, are all that remain.  Silent witness to previous existence.
    Some were ghost towns Dylan explored as a child, with his siblings, on family outings.  Picnics packed in the back of the old ’59 Suburban wagon, his father at the wheel as they wandered back roads of a Sunday afternoon.  His mother would spread lunch on a checkerboard cloth on forgotten mining equipment, rusting in the sun, unused for decades.  Some towns were the stuff of stories his great grandfather told, with his memory of life at the turn into the 20th century.  But all of them, like Dylan’s childhood, are dead.  They belong to his past, along with great grandfather’s campfire stories of alien sightings, the ones that chilled him as a kid.  He thinks of them only when he passes their neglected signs on his way to a back road delivery.  This is now, and his focus is always on the road, on the cargo he carries.  On evading the law, in its every form. 
    Dylan closes in on the tracking radar, sporadically losing the signal, blocked temporarily and happily by the soft hills as he sails into the valleys.  He switches CDs, puts on a homemade mix and hums to Tom Petty.  Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.   He passes the offending cruiser, smack on the speed limit.  He’s a maddening, no revenue, low beamed shadow in the night.  The detector chirps steadily.  He glances in the rear view mirror at the dark shape of the cruiser.  Checks his own eerie reflection in the green glow of the dashboard.  Beyond the town the signal fades.  He presses the accelerator.  Returns to the familiar 90 mph, and more.
    He’s startled when headlights appear in his rear view mirror.  There wasn’t a car that close behind him before he’d slowed.  The chirps from the detector have died but he eases up on the gas.  The car behind him is now on his tail, dogging, pacing him.  It has to be that sheriff.  Must’ve decided if radar couldn’t nail the Dodge, he’d track it, get him that way.  In the mirror Dylan can’t identify the car.  But the headlights are familiar.  Could be one of the small, unmarked cars a few counties have put on the road in recent years.  For such purposes as this.  With identity uncertain, Dylan doesn’t dare speed up.  He levels at the posted 70 mph, and holds there.  The lights remain the same distance away, two car lengths, locked on.
    Dylan shifts in the driver’s seat, uncomfortable.  Checks and rechecks the rear view mirror, trying not to be obvious.  He’s approaching another small town, with further deceleration indicated.  Reduced Speed Ahead.  He stole one of those signs, years ago.  He’d thought they were funny.  Heralds of an amphetamine sale.  Price cut on drugs.  The sign he stole still hangs in his bedroom, a teen trophy.  But now it’s a serious warning.  The speed limit signs are progressively decreasing.  From 70 to 65, to 55, to 45, and 35.  Beside a darkened bar and gas station, 25 mph.  Dylan steps on his brakes to meet the posted limit when passive deceleration doesn’t quite do the trick.  And the car on his tail still clocks him, the same distance behind.  Like it’s fastened to the bumper of the Dodge.  He thinks about the cocaine stashed in his door panels, and sweats.
    It’s a long six minutes before the car pulls around, picks up speed and disappears into the darkness.  Dylan notices the out of state rental tags, and breathes.  It’s not an unmarked patrol car, just a cheap, blue Cavalier.  Irritation replaces relief, anger rises in place of worry.  I Won’t Back Down beats a rhythm in his head.  This car, this whoever  it was, had made him afraid.  That pisses him off.  In his mind he creates revenge.  Obsesses on the havoc he’d wreak, if he could.  The beating he’d dish out to recover his standing, his status.  His manhood.  He’d demolish that car, beat it with pipes.  Smash its windows and its driver.  He’s grinding his teeth when he hits the intersection, a “T” in the road.  Gravel to the left, pavement to the right.  He hangs a right, picks up speed. 
    He sails smoothly into another of the valleys in the road, and then headlights appear in the rear view.  There hadn’t been anything down the gravel road.  Where’d it come from?  In seconds, it matches his speed.  He speeds up, it stays with him, same as that other car.  He’s aware of the shape of the headlights — same as before.  Dylan’s bravado fades.  Fear rises in his mouth.  He tells himself it’s unreasonable.  Pushes away the panic.  Is it....  Dylan can’t believe he’s actually thinking this.  Something out of Area 51?  Are the rumors true, after all?  Dylan recalls the tales his great grandfather swore by and the back of his neck prickles.  He speeds up again.  Not enough above the limit to warrant siren and lights, if it is a cop.  Just enough to pull away from what’s behind him.  It stays on him, as before.  Locked.  He sweats, fear so strong he barely hears the music.  His stomach knots.  His hands are slippery on the steering wheel.  If the stories are real....  No.  Can’t be.  It’s not possible.  It’s lack of sleep.  “No!” he says out loud.  
    The possibility of something unearthly behind him outweighs his fear of arrest.  Even with the drugs he’s hauling.  And then he has it — riding by the moon!  He knows these roads, paved or not, that lead off the highway.  He’s napped on their shoulders, brought girlfriends here.  Couple miles up ahead is a dirt and gravel road that leads to one of many abandoned mines.  If he can make that road, he can shake the other car.  The mile markers whiz by.  He counts them off and eases down on the accelerator.  Eighty five, ninety.  The vehicle stays with him, like a tick.  Then — here it is!  Coming up fast.  He punches the gas, and pulls away.  Ninety eight mph.  Now!  Dylan slams his hand into the knob, extinguishing his lights.  At the last possible second he yanks the wheel.  The car bounces and the CD skips.  Spitting lyrics to Free Falling  fill the Dodge as he swerves onto the dirt road, onto its familiar climb.  The phantom vehicle whizzes past. 
    Thank God!  Is he suddenly religious?  He’s unsure, but doesn’t care.  Relieved, he laughs.  His muscles relax and he stretches his cramped fingers, momentarily releasing the wheel. 
    It’s only an instant but it’s the wrong instant.  Without lights he doesn’t see the rocks in the road.  In the fractional moment he loosens his grip on the wheel, he hits the miserable rocks.  The Dodge jerks violently to the left, knocked off course.  Dylan grabs at the wheel but it slides through his fingers, yanked away by tires jerking over damaged road.
    The Dodge plunges over the edge, down the sheer drop off.  It hits, head first, 90 feet below, with a sickening crunch.  The front end crumples, creasing the deep blue of the paint job.  Dylan is tossed, doll like, against roof and windshield.  His head smashes the glass as the metal of the hood rushes up to meet him.  The 340 engine gives up, stalled by the impact.  In the moonless night it’s almost invisible, among shrubs, and its own slide of rocks.  In what’s left of the Dodge, from the wrinkled door panels, a bit of white powder trickles out, dusting the interior.  Forms small peaks around Dylan’s still feet. 
    The silver Cavalier’s a full mile beyond Dylan’s turn off.
    “What’s up with that guy?” the woman says.  “Acted like we were after him.”
    “Great rabbit, while he lasted,” the man replies.  He sighs.  “Doubt we’ll find anyone else to run interference with radar like that.”
    “So we get in a little later.  Gonna nap for a while.” 
    She tips her seat back, curls up and pulls his big coat over her.  Reluctantly he drops speed, closer to the posted 70 mph.  Resets the cruise control.  He’s not sure how tight the local troopers are on the limit.  No point getting busted over something that stupid.  He pops a CD, Eric Clapton’s From the Cradle to the Grave, into the player.  Some Blues for the road.  Clapton’s throaty voice pours, aching, from the speakers.  Sinner’s Prayer.   It’s going to be a long night.