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Ray Brautigan was born to the owners of a horse farm in central Kentucky, but he was never comfortable with the easy, opulent life of the gentree class. As a teenager he ran way, headed west. As the frontier, rough and tumble days died, he saw the tail end of a lifestyle he'd never fullly get back to. The war came, and he enlisted to go fight overseas. While in the trenches, he saw more pain and suffering than any human should. He doesn't like to talk about it.
When he returned, the country life was far too quiet for his addled psyche, so he found himself in Los Angeles. Good with a gun and deceptively intelligent and observant, he was taken in by an older private detective and shown the ropes. At first he was the old man's fist and legs, but eventually his knack for the mental work was clear. The old man eventually retired and Ray took over the practice. Mostly divorce work, the job kept his brain busy enough that his anxieties and memories were more or less drowned out.
But this one, a missing person case ...he'd had a few and they ranged from mundane to shady, but nothing was ever like this case. The trail had brought him to a place between places, where things stopped making sense. Not entirely sure if he was hallucinating it all, he's trying to figure the place out enough to find the girl.