The Highway (2 page)

There was a large pool of blood on the floor beneath Tokely’s chair. Cody guessed it was thirty inches across. The outside four inches of the pool was clear and the inside was dark and oval-shaped.

Next to the pool on the right side of the body was a stainless-steel revolver.

Cassie thought suicide. Cody thought homicide. Not only that, he said he was pretty sure who’d done it. Someone named B. G.

He said, “B. G. is a six-foot-five reprobate who lives right up there on the ridge.”

There was no evidence she could see pointing to anyone.

“Don’t worry,” Cody had said with an evil grin that chilled her and confirmed her worst fears about her partner, “we’ll prove it.”

IV.

C
ODY DIDN’T
TURN
on the lights and moved by feel and memory into Roger Tokely’s kitchen. The lounge chair where Tokely’s body had been found was still there in a muted pool of moonlight. The bloodstain had not yet been cleaned up but the murder weapon had been taken for evidence.

On the side of the kitchen counter was a garbage container. With gloved hands, he opened the lid. The smell of rotted food wafted out. Then he opened the small paper sack he’d brought with him and glanced inside. The contents had been taken from B. G.’s Dumpster. Inside were crumpled fast-food wrappers and a half-eaten McDonald’s cheeseburger that might yield DNA. The scraps would tie B. G. to the scene of the murder.

He’d try to act surprised when the evidence tech announced the discovery.

*   *   *

As Cody climbed into his Ford he thought he heard the distant sound of a car starting up. He stepped back into the grass and peered toward the bench on top, then scanned the dark treeline. He didn’t see a vehicle, or headlights. Still, it unsettled him.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20

There’s a killer on the road

His brain is squirming like a toad

—Jim Morrison, “The Hitchhiker”

1.

4:03
P.M.
, Tuesday, November 20

H
E CALLED
HIMSELF THE
L
IZARD
King. The prostitutes known as lot lizards feared him. More precisely, they feared his legend, the
idea of him
. None of them who’d ever seen his face up close lived to describe it.

He was parked in the back row of trucks with his diesel engine idling, his running lights muted, his hair slicked back, and a bundle of tools on the floorboard on the right side of his seat within easy reach. He was hunting but there was no need to go after his prey. The lot lizards would come to him.

The truck stop was four miles west of Billings, Montana, off I-90. A cold mist hung in the air and moisture beaded on the windows and the paint jobs of more than seventy big trucks. The black asphalt lot shined as if freshly varnished between the rows of semis, reflecting the lighted highway signs and hundreds of streams of horizontal running lights from the parked trucks themselves. The air outside hummed with rumbling engines. Tendrils of steam rose from beneath the engines and combined with the undulating waves of heated exhaust that rose from beneath the big rigs.

From his high perch in the dry and warm cab, his sight lines were clear. The truck plaza itself was filled with activity and he noted it carefully. Vehicles entered and exited the long banks of fuel pumps in front of the garish low-slung building a hundred yards away. Professional truckers filled 150-gallon aluminum tanks with diesel fuel on one side of the lot, passenger cars and vans filled up with gasoline on the other.

Inside the truck stop restaurant, waitresses served the $10.95 T-bone special advertised on the marquee near the exit. Drivers lounged in the “trucker’s only” section checking e-mail, comparing road conditions, or drinking coffee. Truck stop employees cooked up fried chicken and potato wedges for the lighted bins at the front counter and manned the cash registers selling salted snacks, energy boosters, beef jerky, and drinks.

This was the way it was on the open road; islands of lighted activity in a sea of prairie darkness. Cars and families on one side, truckers on the other, but sharing the same facility. Two vastly different worlds that met only at places like this. Inside, truck drivers and citizens barely acknowledged each other and the modern truck stop was designed so there would be little interaction. Sure, the drivers would get on their radios and laugh at the rubes they’d run into inside and mock their looks or stupid conversations, but inside they were segregated between the amateurs and the professionals, the clueless consumers—the civilians, the amateurs—and the cloistered universe of the providers.

He was on the road so much his outlook on it had changed completely over the years. It no longer seemed like he was moving, for one thing. Now he felt as if he were stationary while the road rolled under him and the scenery flowed by. The world came to
him
.

Like the captain of a large ocean vessel, a large swath of the landscape was off-limits to him, as he was confined by the shipping lanes that were interstate highways. When he parked his truck at a rest area or truck stop for the night he couldn’t venture into town because he had no way to get there unless he walked. It was like a captain who had to anchor his boat and take a dinghy to shore.

Oh, how he resented the smug people in those towns. They thought their food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and electronics simply appeared at stores or on their front doorsteps. They didn’t stop to think that every item they ate or wore or used was likely transported across the nation in the trailer of his truck or those like him, or that the hardworking blue-collar rednecks they avoided in real life and despised on the road were the conduits of their comfort and the pipeline of their wealth.

*   *   *

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so there was more traffic on the highways than usual. It would be much worse the next day as families moved across the country with a lull on Thanksgiving and another spike on Sunday as people returned home. He was used to it. The rhythms of the road were like rivers that flooded and receded in perpetuity.

The Beartooth Mountains to the south were light blue with new snow and the lack of stars indicated heavy cloud cover. It was still warm enough on the valley floor that the moisture hadn’t turned to snowflakes, but there was a snap in the air outside and he watched as travelers left their cars and zipped up coats on their way into the truck stop. He snorted at an overweight family of fools wearing T-shirts and shorts who practically ran from their passenger van to the door that led to the restrooms.
Fucking idiots
. What if they broke down wearing clothes like that? Who would they look for to rescue them?
Me,
he thought. The invisible, faceless trucker.

In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout. The truck was flat black, stripped of chrome, and as subtle as a fist. It was a trucker’s truck the way a Harley-Davidson was a biker’s bike. He’d even painted the twin stacks with black chimney paint to eliminate any hint of flash.

Without looking down, he let his right hand slip down on the side of the seat until he could find the string that held his bundle together. He pulled the cord and the bundle unrolled. His fingertips traced each item. Everything had been wiped clean and sterilized since its last use: the tire thumper, which was a short lead-filled wooden baton used to check the pressure of his eighteen wheels, the pliers and wire cutters, two pairs of handcuffs, four knives—the heavy hunting Buck, the short folding Spyderco, the long thin filet knife, and the stainless-steel hatchet. His lightweight Taurus 738 TCP semiauto in .380 ACP. In an oblong, hard, and hinged box once used for sunglasses was a syringe filled with Rohypnol. And his vintage fourteen-inch long Knapp butcher saw with the aluminum T-grip and both bone and wood teeth on opposite sides of the blade. It was designed for the rapid field butchering of big game. He ran his thumb gently along the bone teeth.

Satisfied that everything was in order, he removed the tire thumper and placed it on the dashboard next to his roll of one hundred-mile-an-hour brown Gorilla tape. Both were standard items used by every trucker and they wouldn’t draw a second glance. He bundled the rest of the tools and reached under his seat for the satchel, which contained heavy plastic bags, the wire ties, his folding shovel, the 300,000 volt Stun Master stun gun, and the three-inch-wide roll of duct tape. He put the bundle of tools back into the satchel and zipped it closed.

If things went well, he wouldn’t even need to reach for the satchel.
If things went well …

*   *   *

The Lizard King glanced around the cab to make sure he’d completed all the items on his mental checklist. The carpeted floormats had been pulled and stashed, leaving a bare metal floor. Both seats were fitted with clear plastic covers. All logbooks, maps, and other paperwork—anything that could absorb fluid—had been stashed away. He turned in his seat. The cloth drapes separating the cab from the sleeping cabin had long ago been replaced by clear shower curtains that allowed him to see clearly into the back. On his bunk was a specially adapted cover made from blue tarpaulin, and plastic sheeting lined the walls. The single small window of the sleeper was blacked out.

He’d forgotten nothing. There was no cloth or porous surface for blood, hair, or fiber to cling to inside, and the cab and cabin could be hosed clean in a few minutes by a power washer.

He was ready.

*   *   *

He waited for the segregation between the professionals and the amateurs to breach. It did when a rusted-out van cruised the trucking lanes and parked in shadow on the side of the truck stop. North Dakota plates.

Two lot lizards got out and the van drove away. That meant they had thumbed a ride or made arrangements for a pickup later. Meaning there would be no telltale vehicle left at the truck stop to raise any alarm. That was good.

What wasn’t so good was that there were two of them. It wasn’t unusual; they tended to partner up to some extent. Which meant if one of them vanished the other would know.

One lot lizard, who was short and heavy and dark—maybe an Indian from the res to the south—started off for the far corner of the lot. She’d work that side first, he guessed. He breathed a sigh of relief.

The other one put her hands on her hips and looked in his direction.

She looked thin and gaunt and had long stringy blondish hair haloed by the blue overhead lamps and the mist. He couldn’t see her face yet because of the darkness. A long sweater or shawl-like cape hid her figure, which was one of the tricks of the trade. She teetered on high heels and held her hands out to her sides as if for balance and she baby-stepped toward the parked lines of trucks.

Perfect.

He stubbed his cigarette out and squinted through the curl of smoke and the rain-smeared windshield. He could feel his insides start to knot.

*   *   *

Since that morning outside of Chicago the Lizard King had been planning the hunt. He’d awakened in his bunk thinking about it, and at breakfast he’d gone through his mental checklist. It had been several weeks, and he was due.

He pulled a fifty-three-foot trailer known as a “reefer,” meaning the inside of the box was controlled by a separate diesel refrigeration-slash-heating unit mounted on the front. Depending on the contents of his load, he could keep the box cool to freezing, and his loads were primarily pallets of fresh or frozen food. He ran coast-to-coast, picking up apples in Yakima, Washington, and delivering them to Boston, and completing the circuit with yogurt from Connecticut or potatoes from New Jersey to be delivered in the west. The loads and destinations varied from circuit to circuit, and sometimes he forgot what he was hauling. It took him four and a half days to run from one coast to the other, and he generally completed two full laps of the nation before returning home. His life was a rhythm of three weeks on the road, a week at home to recuperate and get repairs, then three more weeks of running. He was on his way home after nineteen straight days on the road; meaning no more than eleven hours of driving in any fourteen-hour period, and ten hours of rest in order to legally drive another eleven.

The Lizard King knew mileposts on every highway in America and knew which truck stops to fuel up and which ones to avoid. He timed his routes to avoid as many weigh scales—called “chicken coops”—as possible and he’d rather use his piss-jug than be forced to stop at highway rest areas frequented by homosexuals known as “pickle parks.” Like all truckers, he did his best to avoid states with overbearing troopers and stupid regulations like Minnesota, Ohio, California, Oregon, and Washington, and he gave a wide berth to other trucks from companies known for poorly trained drivers.

*   *   *

It had taken just one glimpse of a young woman the night before, red-haired and college-age, her car filled with boxes and clothes she was taking home for Thanksgiving break, who passed him on an incline and swung back into his lane so recklessly that he had to tap his brakes and lean on his horn. When he was able to catch back up with her in the passing lane she looked up and their eyes met for a brief second. Then she flipped him off with dismissive contempt. That’s all it took. Rage blasted through him and orange spangles erupted in front of his eyes.

Before he could swing his rig over into her lane and force her off the highway she stomped on her accelerator and shot ahead. Their bumpers almost kissed but she gained distance. He cursed the half-load in his trailer that held him back. It was like dragging an anchor behind him. He cursed that red-haired girl until her taillights faded away in the dark.

He’d kept an eye out for her all the way to Janesville, Wisconsin. But by the time he got to Chippewa Falls he’d lost her somewhere. She’d either continued to speed home straight ahead or she’d taken an exit off the interstate.