Excerpt from The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I had set my four next to the two left by the DHL driver. They weren't gone until Friday morning. That meant they had been left out for two days and two nights, which wasn't just odd—it had never happened before in all my years of making deliveries to Walt.

There was really only one possible explanation for why Walt failed to bring his freight inside—he had been out of town, except to my knowledge he had no family or friends, and absolutely nowhere else to go. Given his advanced age, the logical assumption would have been that he had died of natural causes and was stretched out stiff as a board somewhere in the recesses of his diner or workshop, or lay broken in the desert after an accident on one of his motorcycles. You had to know Walt to appreciate just how far-fetched such death scenarios were.

I pounded on the door of the Quonset hut. Just once. Walt's hearing was perfect. At seventy-nine, all of him was damn near perfect, except his attitude toward people. No matter where he was on the property, or what he was doing, he had a sixth sense that told him if someone was around. If he didn't show himself, he was ignoring you. The smartest and safest action you could take was to leave—the sooner the better. The only thing pounding and yelling did was piss him off. If there was one seventy-nine-year-old man on the planet you didn't want to piss off, it was Walt Butterfield.

I was probably the only person to have seen the inside of Walt's Quonset workshop in at least twenty years. These occasional excursions into Walt's world, always by gruff invitation, never lasted longer than the time it took for me to slip freight off a hand truck.

I left the new box of parts next to the door and did the smart thing. It was a piece of good luck that Walt hadn't answered my knock. I might have done something stupid, like ask him where he'd been or what was in the six cartons.

I always hoped to catch Walt, or rather have him willing to be caught. On a handful of occasions we sat in the closed diner. Sometimes he talked, though usually not. I always listened when he wanted to talk. A few times he actually fixed and served me breakfast in the diner. He had been around the area longer than anyone, or at least longer than anyone who had a brain that worked and a reliable memory.

I returned to my truck determined not to dwell on the strange freight or Walt's absence. The really big mysteries in life never troubled me much. How the pyramids were built or whether or not Cortez was a homosexual didn't bounce my curiosity needle. On the other hand, Walt's absence and his odd freight were hard to resist. The diner and I contemplated each other. Like Walt himself, it had a long and colorful past.

US 191 is the main highway north and south out of Price, Utah. North led to Salt Lake City. Due south took you to Green River, and eventually Moab. The turnoff for State Road 117 is about twenty miles from the city limits of Price. Ten miles east, down 117, on the left, surrounded by miles of flat, rugged nothing, you came upon The Well-Known Desert Diner.

From 1955 to 1987 the diner appeared in dozens of B movies. There were the desert horror-thriller movies, the desert biker mayhem movies, and the movies where someone, usually an attractive young woman, drove across the desert alone and some bad shit happened.

Once in a while it's possible to catch one of these low-budget gems on cable. I always cheered when the diner filled the screen. My personal favorites involved atomic monsters or aliens terrorizing small-town desert locals. The locals eventually triumphed and saved the planet. Their victory was usually accomplished with little more than a car battery, a couple of Winchester rifles and a visiting college professor who had a crazy theory—and a wild, beautiful daughter.

The diner was originally built in 1929. Its pale gravel driveway, antique glass-bubble gas pumps, white adobe walls and green trim made it seem familiar, almost like a home you had known all your life but never visited. Even the most hardened, sun-struck driver slowed down and smiled.

Excerpted from The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson. Copyright © 2016 by James Anderson. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.