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    The Last Honest Horse Thief
    The Last Honest Horse Thief
    The Last Honest Horse Thief
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    The Last Honest Horse Thief

    By Michael Koryta

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    About this ebook

    A boy comes of age among a family of grifters in this powerful story from a New York Times–bestselling “master” (Stephen King).
     
    Never knowing a real home, Markus Novak’s only constant in life is his passion for paperback westerns. The child of a family of outlaws, he moves through the West town by town with his mother and two uncles, staying in a place just long enough to run a short con and move along.  After one job goes south and his mom gets locked up, Markus finds himself in the foster care of a rancher and his wife—with whom he’s strangely comfortable, yet torn by loyalty to the family he’s lost.
     
    To distract himself, he spends his days working the farm and his nights fixing a rusty old ’55 Chevy. Then he discovers a note from his uncles hidden in a book at a local pawnshop and learns that they are hiding out in a mountain town near Yellowstone. Restoring the car soon becomes Markus’s only hope of finding them, and maybe finally finding himself, too.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateDec 18, 2018
    ISBN9781504055642
    The Last Honest Horse Thief
    Author

    Michael Koryta

    Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has won or been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, International Thriller Writers Award and the Golden Dagger.

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      Book preview

      The Last Honest Horse Thief - Michael Koryta

      Koryta_LastHonest.jpg

      The Last Honest Horse Thief

      Michael Koryta

      By the time Markus was ten he understood the con well enough to participate in it. By the time he was thirteen, he understood it well enough to want nothing to do with it.

      That was the year they visited Medicine Wheel, and the pilfering of a few bills from tourists who were happy to offer them suddenly felt evil. That had nothing to do with the con itself, and everything to do with the place.

      Markus had seen his mother’s routine practiced all over the west—the Black Hills, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake, Sunlight Basin—by the time they drove for Medicine Wheel, a new stop.

      Special kinds of fools, Uncle Ronny said of the tourists. He drove with one arm resting out the open window the Ford Sport Custom pickup. The folks who think it’s insane that the Sioux won’t accept 600 million dollars for the Black Hills, even though they don’t have it now and never will again, still believe that any Indian might be in touch with the spirit world.

      Markus didn’t object, didn’t say much of anything, just watched the long empty highway snaking toward the Big Horn Mountains, the highest peaks obscured by low-lying clouds. The four of them were jammed in the cab: Markus and his mother in the middle, Ronny at the wheel, Larry at the opposite window. In the bed of the truck, curled up on blankets, was a dog of unknown origins named Amigo. It had been a good week—Markus’s mother had made nearly two hundred in palm readings, Ronny had made fifty in a trick-shooting demonstration, and Larry had lost only forty at poker. They were coming out ahead, which was probably what convinced them to take the shot at Medicine Wheel.

      Markus’s mother was a slim, petite woman with light brown hair and blue eyes. During the summer tourist season, though, you wouldn’t see the blue eyes or the light hair. Between tanning beds and tinted lotion her face became the color of the inside of a walnut. Her hair was dyed raven-black and lay straight down her back in a perfect, tight braid, with a few feathers interwoven. Her blue eyes were hidden by dark contacts. She looked to have exactly the heritage she claimed, and that was critical, because Snow Creek Maiden, princess of the Nez Perce, got a lot more palm-reading dollars than did Violet Novak, single white female, of Billings.

      All she got were collection notices.

      Because it had been a good week, both in revenue and in weather, with summer at its beautiful peak, the sky huge and blue and cloudless except near the peaks, the country fanned by gentle winds, they were feeling bullish about the ruse, and Markus found Medicine Wheel intriguing for reasons he wouldn’t mention to his family. Truth be told, he was fascinated with the Native American rituals, particularly the drum circles and chants, a sound that carried you right out of the present and into an unknown past. He was the only one who cared to see what the ancient, sacred site at nearly two miles in the air actually looked like; the others cared only that it sounded ripe for the taking.

      His uncles often rode his mother’s con based on their sense of energy, like a poker game, and so Markus wasn’t surprised that they endorsed the plan. Also, it had nothing to do with them. They only drove the truck. His mother didn’t have such clear motivation. She was known to give up on a good location to pursue a bad one without explanation, and Markus never voiced his guess—that, on some secret level, she had begun to believe her own act. He suspected there was at least a part of her, hidden beneath the laughter and behind the dark contacts, that thought she truly heard spirit voices better in some places than others.

      None of this weighed much on Markus as they drove into Wyoming. The biggest concern on his mind was a girl from his seventh grade class in Cody named Ruby, a rancher’s daughter with endless blue eyes and an unabashed yelp of a laugh. He couldn’t imagine any reason for her to be in the Big Horns in summer, but there was a chance, and if she saw him…God, he couldn’t deal with that.

      It was a silly concern for two reasons, really. One, Ruby wasn’t likely to be in the Big Horns, true, but the second reason was sadder than the first and so

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