The year was 1988, and a 17-year-old Stan Havelka is spending his summer selling scoops of freezer-burned rocky road to neighborhood kids and their exhausted mothers in the little nothing town of Picacho, Arizona. The Picacho Ice Cream Shack is a bright aquamarine hut on the sandy outskirts of the town. To the north is the village, where fewer than 500 people live and ever fewer work. To the south is the Santa Cruz River, a 184-mile valley that's bone dry for most of the year. And to the east and west is desert: vast, dry, and lonely, where one mile is indistinguishable from the next.

One day, at the peak of the mid-afteroon heat, Stan was hunched under the soft serve machine, peering up into the dispenser, where a thick crust had started to clog. He barely even heard the door open, and the three slow strides across the linoleum before the man spoke.

"Three scoops of rum raisin."

Stan whipped around and found his eyes resting on a stranger’s broad chest. The man couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Stan, but he was a good foot taller. He wore all black, and there was something menacing about him; the only gentle thing was his hair, cropped close to his head but fluffy on top, like a puff pastry. His mouth looked like a hyphen; a small, straight line. Stan felt a cold stream of nerves drip from his throat to his gut.

"Sure, sure, rum raisin," Stan stuttered.

The Ron Guidry of ice cream, they called him

Stan began flitting about behind the counter, grabbing the scoop and throwing open the glass coffin of the freezer. Then, with a few seasoned flicks of his wrist — the Ron Guidry of ice cream, they called him — Stan had crafted a perfectly round rum raisin mountain in a paper cup. He presented it to the man on his palm, like a jeweler offering up a selection of engagement rings.

"$1.25," Stan said.

The man handed him a one hundred dollar bill. Stan paused to turn it over in his fingers. He had never seen one before in his life.

Flustered, Stan turned to put it in the register. "Hey," the man said. Stan jolted up, midway through counting change.

"What are you doing tonight? You've got fast hands, and I could use someone like you."

"Use me for what?"

"Business," the man muttered, his small black eyes squinting as if he saw a sun glare no one else could. He held out his hand. "Name's Frank. Frank Seymon."