Un-Connected (10 page)

Chapter
8

Phone calls

Just when I was beginning to feel a little
safer, Deb got a phone call from Seth. He said he wanted to meet with us. Jim
had not met us, and we didn’t want to meet face to face. There was too much
risk for us and for Jim as well as Seth.

Fear swept over her and then me when she told
me who was on the line. I shook my head “no” and asked her to hang up. We both
turned our cell phones off. We rode in fearful silence for about an hour. Now I
realized we were getting sloppy, and somebody was still interested in me. Now
they were including Deb.

She was driving, and I looked at her and saw
fear in her eyes. For the first time she looked beat up and helpless. Her face
was flushed, and her shoulders were drooping. That made me afraid and sad.

“I am so, so sorry I have gotten you into
this. Why don’t you drop me somewhere? You could call Seth, tell him I wasn’t
in the truck, and ask him what he wanted. Then you could get on down the road
and more than likely be safe when they know I am not with you.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then
she said, “Well one thing is for sure. I’m not dropping you somewhere. We are
in this together. I don’t know what to do, but I’m not leaving you no matter
what it means.”

We rode on in silence. Her last statement was
strong and determined and opened my eyes to something I had not considered.
What a dummy I was. She wouldn’t leave me. We were in this together. Most
marriage vows weren’t stated as seriously. However, this was more serious than
most people take their vows.

She had told me she loved me before in the
hot tub. Now she reaffirmed she loved me and was with me until the end.
Hopefully it would not be soon for either of us. I asked her to pull over
because I wanted to talk to her. Tears came into her eyes. “You’re scaring me.”
She said with fear in her voice.  “What is going on?”

 “You should never be afraid of me.” I said.

Once she pulled to the shoulder, she turned
to me with dread in her eyes and a sigh. “OK, I’m listening.”

I got on my knees as best I could in the
truck floorboard and asked her to stretch her hands over toward me. I took her
hands in mine. Looking into her eyes I said, “I love you and want to be with
you the rest of my life. Will you marry me? I will love you and be with you and
protect you as best I can my whole life. I’d marry you as Ben or Sam or any
name you want to call me.  And I will never, ever cheat on you.”

She started bawling. “I love you so much, and
I’m so scared. I am so afraid you won’t live or you’ll go to jail, and one way
or another I’ll lose you.  I have been hurt so bad and I don’t want to go there
again.”

I got into the seat and pulled her over on my
lap. We just sat there for a long time without saying a word.

She finally began to breathe normally and
stopped crying. “Yes, I want to get married.  I want you so bad but I don’t
want to have sex before we get married.”

I nodded. “OK.”

Then I began to think of all the practical
difficulties. How could we get married? We couldn’t plan a wedding. We couldn’t
invite anyone we knew. Seth wanted to meet with us. Jim and Seth knew who she
was, which meant they now knew more than they had, and it scared me almost to
death. And was Seth who called her really who he said he was? Why did he want
to meet us? What were we doing? If I loved her and I really, really did, then I
would want her to be safe. Being with me would not be safe.

I told her we needed to work out a lot of
things, but right now I needed to sleep on all this, and I crawled into the
bunk. I was so excited and scared I couldn’t sleep but I needed time to think
and pray.  I needed to know what to do.  We wanted to get married but it didn’t
look possible or smart for that matter.

One thing I had noticed over at least the
last two months. Her appearance had softened a little. She was doing more with
her hair. She wore more attractive clothes to supper, and she was singing more.
So at least a part of her life had been better. She was such a good listener. 
Whenever I talked to her I knew I had her undivided attention. 

“Oh God, help us,” I cried out under my
breath.

I finally went to sleep and don’t know how
long I slept, but Deb stayed in the seat the whole time. We covered a lot of
ground. When I woke up we got a shower and supper and since I wasn’t sleepy, I
volunteered to drive until I was. We were 650 miles from our drop, and I wanted
to get it done and change directions. I also felt we needed to change some
things by running different routes.

Maybe I had been too smart cutting those
deals on fuel, getting to know the yardmen at the various stores, getting
acquainted with the mechanics. Somewhere information got away from us.

Since it was Seth, it probably was a leak,
likely in the Fairfax area. Jim was a career agent. I didn’t believe he would
be either ignorant about security or make that kind of mistake. So how could
this happen? I was afraid I had done something or someone had recognized me.  I
drove on into the night with my mind racing. With some serious sleep behind me,
I didn’t get sleepy until I was in the yard of the drop.

When I pulled in just before daylight, Deb
woke up. “Boy, you made good time.”

“You made good time the day before. Maybe we
were good together. We are lots of miles from where we had been.”

When she was driving by herself, we would
typically cover about 600 miles per day, maybe 700. If we were in the lowlands,
we could sometimes do more. Once I started driving we often covered 1100 miles
a day. We could do more if we weren’t loading or unloading on any given day. We
actually could do more miles on average when we ran coast to coast.

Occasionally we got a run from somewhere
around Seattle to somewhere around Miami. Except for the mountains, we made
really good time and could average over 1200 miles per day.

This was good and bad all at the same time.
We didn’t know if anyone but Jim knew we were in a truck. Since Seth had called
Deb on her phone, it was now at least a possibility that he knew. With us on
the road, we would be several states away from where we were the day before. It
should be much harder for anyone to stay up with us. But if they ever figured
out we were in a truck and where we were making a drop, then they could be
there waiting on us with days to plan.

I called Jim’s phone and left a message that
Seth wanted to meet with us. That scared us and we didn’t want to meet him. I
also asked if he or Seth knew what we were driving.

We had a network through Jim. We were about
to lose it and be on our own again. How did Jim get pictures of Deb off
surveillance video? Did Jim know we were in a truck? We never told him we were,
and we never told him where we were. But the pictures were from truck stops.  Maybe
from cell tower information he knew, but what did he know? Did the killers know
anything Jim didn’t know?

 “Since I don’t know what to do, I feel we
should do nothing for now.” I said to Deb. “I think we ought to get off the
road for a few days and lay low. We need to see what we can figure out.”

“I agree.” She said with a lot of feeling. 
“This is too much.”

Seth’s call was potentially very dangerous.
Since we didn’t know fully what it meant, we needed extreme caution. This
delivery was in Phoenix, so we dropped the load and deadheaded out into the
middle of nowhere to a little truck stop. We found one with a good shower and
good food. During the daytime you could see someone coming for miles in all
directions. We got there at lunchtime, and we were famished. The old man at the
fuel island was funny and engaging.

“If you weren’t so old, I would dicker with
you about the high price of your fuel,” I told him.

 He laughed and laughed and said he would
take off ten cents a gallon because I made his day. With that offer, we filled
up. Getting 325 gallons saved us more than enough for lunch. We asked him if he
was going to charge us for parking there for a few days. He snorted and
laughed. He said we could stay until we had the last parking space and then we
would need to move on. I asked him when there’d been a last parking space. He
replied they’d opened in 1928, and it hadn’t happened yet.

I told him we might have another problem.

“Oh, no! You haven’t been here even an hour,
and you’re already making problems. OK, what is it?”

“We were going to be off the road for three
to seven days as best I could tell, and we need to stay in one spot. We wanted
to shower every day. What will you charge us?”

“If that is your biggest problem, you are a
lucky man.”

“It isn’t my biggest problem, but it’s the
only one I want to bother you with.”

“Look young man, you stay as long as you
want. You shower as often as you like. Eat some of our food every now and then,
and we’ll call it even. We’re glad to have the company.”

As we started out the door, the old man
yelled at us and asked if our AC would work off 110 volts. I looked at Deb and
she nodded “yes”. The old man followed us out to the truck. He paced around a
little and then spotted the rock he was looking for.

He turned it over and underneath was a 110
VAC receptacle. “If you will back in there straddling this receptacle, I’ll
turn it on and you won’t have to run your engine.”

 The offer was too good to turn down, and we
got the truck moved in double time. Our extension cord was not heavy enough for
him. Ours was 16-gauge wire, and he said ours might be OK, but it was a little
light.

He brought one out that was 14-gauge wire. He
told us it should be fine even on really hot days, especially if we ran the
cord under our trailer and kept it out of the sun. “Heat will ruin any cord.”

I asked his name.

“Otis,” he said simply.

“Thank you so much, Otis. You have been more
than kind. This is real generous. My name is Sam Adams, not Samuel, and I don’t
make beer.”

He chuckled. “It’s good to meet you, Sam.”

I told him my partner was Deb. He shook her
hand and told her she was very pretty. She didn’t often blush, being hardened a
little by the road and life, but she reddened slightly.

He chuckled a little and headed to his store.

We climbed into a cool truck, and it was
quieter than we were used to. It was really nice.

At breakfast on the fourth day, Otis came to
our table. He reminded me I’d said I had only one problem I wanted to trouble
him with. He wanted to know more about us and our problems, and wanted to
invite us to lunch with him and his wife. We accepted, not really sure if we
wanted to share much.

Jim called. “The Seth that called you isn’t
the real Seth. Don’t take his calls and give us time to figure out who he is
and how he got the information he has.”

We went to the truck. Now we were really
scared and glad we were off the road. This place felt much safer. Each of us
found a book to read and settled in until lunch. This was so different from the
last three plus years we now had been running together. I thought of Rebecca
sometimes and felt a little guilty for moving on. But I knew in my head, but
not necessarily in my heart, I needed help to survive. I didn’t know if I had
aged or not, but those last thirty-nine months or so had been so stressful it
made lying up in this truck stop seem surreal. We went from running as fast and
furious as we could some days to a really slow pace here. For now, it felt
great, but I was sure in time we would want to be moving again. I wondered
about the best thing for us to do. We needed to be off the radar of the
killers. And the big unknown was the false Seth.

We put on some clothes that were a little
nicer. Deb wore trucker attire less. Her outfits were hard for me to describe.
They usually consisted of tight jeans or sometimes Capri pants as she called
them.  She had such great legs the Capri pants or a skirt really showed her
off.   She wore a black or red bra or teddy and a sheer blouse.   There was
often lace somewhere in there.  You could almost see her bodacious figure
through it but not quite. It was a tease for sure. It was never gaudy or
raunchy and always feminine, but it was something I wasn’t sure I had seen
anywhere else.  In the evenings she would sometimes have it unbuttoned a little
more which made a really nice view at supper. 

While we were walking to lunch, I asked her
about her attire.

She wanted to know what I meant and after a
clumsy explanation and description, she laughed and said it was her “Cherry
Hill” attire.

It didn’t matter what she called it. Deb
looked delicious in just about everything and especially that.

Lunch was pleasant. We swapped stories of
people we’d known and places far and near. Otis grew up there. But he’d made
enough over the years that he and his wife, Tilly, had enjoyed some nice
vacations. He had been in the Army and served in
Viet Nam.  They’d been married for fifty-one years. They had two kids who were
married, and their daughter had two grown kids, one of whom had just married
and the other was about to get married. They called about once a month to check
in, but that was about it.