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Show Coffee Drinkers Preferred • Page 6 of 307 hope that doesn't make me sound petty, but the place really was a dump. At the end of a four-mile dirt road, at the foot of a rock quarry, his domicile looked as'abandoned as a beef farm after an outbreak of Mad Cow. There was no lawn or anything even attempting to look like landscaping covering the hardened dirt, unless you considered several rusting barrels and three half destroyed tractors in varying degrees of decay decoration. I took a look around. Out in the middle of an adjacent alfalfa field was the tiny figure of a man standing next to a grazing horse, stroking its neck in that affectionate way that some horse owners have. He clearly saw me and waved. I waved back. He pointed in the direction of his mobile home. I took this as meaning he really did want me to go in and wait for him. It was June and the mercury was cresting into three digits, and I thought I might get out from under the sun and away from all this dust. It would be an enormous exaggeration to say that entering Steve's single wide gave one the feeling of going'into the Bat Cave, but he was obviously aiming after this effect. The shock of cold air was the first clue. The next clue came from the walls, packed with the flashing lights of computer servers. His three desktop systems hummed up a storm from the floor under a mahogany desk and four flat-screen displays were arranged in a grid pattern on another wall. I'll confess that the most impressive detail of |