A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 (20 page)

     Complete with a heavy Sicilian accent he uttered, “Just when I thought I was out of it… they dragged me back in.”

     But he said it with a smile.

     And it had its desired effect. Marty laughed. It helped ease a tense situation.

     “Tell me what you got.”

     “White male, early forties, maybe late thirties. Kinda hard to tell from the condition of the body. The doctor in Eden said he’d try to narrow it down a bit better. Somebody found him in the woods not far from here. He was actually far outside of the Eden city limits, but since we have no county sheriff anymore, I figured it was up to me to work the case.”

     “That could be grounds for dismissal if the case ever goes to trial.”

     “I know. But the alternative is to just look the other way and ignore it. And then the killer gets away with it.”

     “Any ID?”

     “No. And no clues, except for that tattoo. ‘Martel.’ Sounds like a name. Of course, whether it’s
his
name or not is anybody’s guess.”

     “Could be his alma mater too. I think there’s a Martel University back east somewhere. I might be mistaken.”

     “Gee, I never even thought about that.”

     “You said he was shot?”

     “Execution style. His wrists and ankles were bound behind his back. Poor guy never had a chance.”

     “Any indication of a motive?”

     “None. There were tire tracks close to the body. Wide ones. And it was muddy and too rough a terrain for a car. I think maybe the guy was there hunting, and somebody tied him up, shot him, then took his truck and guns. So I’m going with robbery as a likely motive, I guess.”

     “You said on the radio you didn’t recover a murder weapon. Any shell casings? Any bullet fragments anywhere? Any bullet holes in nearby trees or in the ground?”

     Marty paused and grimaced a bit.

     “Damn it, I didn’t even think to look for bullets in other places. I figured there would be some in the body to use as evidence.”

     “Sometimes they break into a lot of little pieces and wind up in a lot of different places.”

     “I’ll go back to the crime scene and look around, after I get this other thing rolling. If there’s any other bullets out there, I don’t reckon they’ll go anywhere in the next few days.”

     “Careful, Marty. An unsecure crime scene, or evidence that’s obtained long after the fact, are also grounds for dismissal.”

     “I reckon. I’ll get back out there as soon as I can.”

     “Any crime scene photographs?”

     “Yes.”

      Marty pulled a flash drive from his pocket and handed it to Frank. Frank spun around in his chair and plugged it into the computer behind him.

     Most of the photos were focused on the body itself, taken from several different angles. At one point the body was rolled over and more photos were taken. There were close-ups of the wounds, the tattoo, and the bound hands and feet.

     “Well, you’re as thorough as any crime scene photographer I’ve seen. Of the body, anyway. Are these all you got of the area around the body? The tire tracks? The roads in and out of the scene?”

     “That’s all. I guess I should have taken more.”

     “A good defense attorney would say that you weren’t very thorough. That you only took pics that would help your case and not ones that might exonerate the defendant.”

     “Crap. And let me guess. Further grounds for the defense to request a dismissal.”

     “Yep. Remember that defense attorneys are always looking for any little thing they can use. And all these things are biggies. Did you recover any casings?”

     “Yes. And I was careful when I picked them up. With the tip of an ink pen, just like they do in the movies.”

     “Did you put them in an evidence bag and seal it?”

     “I put them in a Glad zip-lock bag and zipped it closed.”

     “Did you lock it in a safe so nobody had access to it?”

     “No. I put it on my desk. But I’m the only one who has access to my office, except for the cleaning lady the city hired for me last week. And the guys who came in to repair a roof leak yesterday.”

     Frank pursed his lips, leading Marty to apologize once again.

     “I’m sorry. I should have put more thought into it, I guess.”

    “Did you look at the casings? Were you able to make out any fingerprints?”

     “I did, and I thought I saw some fingerprints, but only bits and pieces, and some of them looked like they were smudged. I don’t know if they’re any good or not.”

     “I’ve got an old fingerprint kit. Would you like to borrow it?”

     “I wouldn’t have a clue how to use it, Frank. I’m a trucker, not a detective.”

     “Would you like for me to see if I can get some usable prints off of it?”

     “Gee, I was hoping you’d volunteer.”

     “No problem. Let me have them and I’ll let you know what I find.”

     “I’d like to, Frank. But I went off and left them on my desk.”

     “The desk that the cleaning lady and the roof repair guys have access to?”

     “Yes,” Marty said rather sheepishly.

     “Bring them back by here when you can. I’ll take a look at them. The legal standard is pretty high. You have to match at least ten features of a print to the suspect’s print for it to be used as evidence. And, of course, you have to have a suspect to compare prints with. But even if it’s less than ten points, it might be of some use to you. They might help you exclude some of your suspects.”

     “How so?”

     Sometimes it’s possible to identify which finger the print came from by examining the print’s angle on the casing. Say, for example, if we know from the angle on the casing it was the fight forefinger, and if your suspect’s right forefinger isn’t a match, you can exclude him and look at other suspects instead.”

     “I never thought of that. Okay, I’ll bring them by in the next couple of days. Anything else?”

     “No.”

     “Should I go back to the crime scene, take some additional photos, look around for stray bullets?”

     “No, don’t waste your time. Once the crime scene becomes unsecure it’s pretty much worthless. Any defense attorney worth his salt would get the judge to disallow any evidence you found out there now anyway.”

     “I’d like to talk to Brad before I leave. Any idea where I can find him?”

     Frank and David looked at each other. Marty thought he saw something… strange… pass between them, but quickly dismissed it.

     “No idea. Why do you want to talk to Brad?”

     “Before Mark left with Hannah he told me that Brad was one of your truck drivers. Apparently the only one left since Bryan’s down at Wilford Hall with Sarah. I want to tell Brad I’ll help him train a couple more drivers if he’ll recommend them to me and send them my way.”

     “We can ask around for volunteers.”

     “Volunteers would be great. But a big rig isn’t a bicycle. There’s a lot involved, especially with trailers that have been sitting and rotting for ten plus years. You need people with mechanical skills and common sense. The best one to determine who might make a good trucker is another trucker.”

     Frank picked up his walkie talkie.

     “Brad, this is Frank.”

     “Go ahead, Frank.”

     “You got a few minutes to come by the control center?”

     “Sure. Be there in five.”

-39-

     When Marty walked off to find Glenna and gather up her children, the mood grew somber at the security control desk.

     Brad spoke first.

     “Do you think he knows anything?”

     Frank was a bit testy. He didn’t like the delicate situation he was in.

     “Does he know anything about what, Brad? About what, damn it?”

     Brad had his head down, as though deeply ashamed about something.

     “Nothing.”

     David asked, “Brad, what in
hell
went on out there?”

     Brad opened his mouth. Frank got the impression he wanted to say something. Wanted, perhaps, to confess his sins.

     Or somebody else’s.

     Instead, he rose from the easy chair he was sitting in and walked away without another word.

     Frank and David watched him walk away, hoping he’d change his mind and return. He didn’t.

     David asked Frank, “Were you intentionally trying to discourage Marty from investigating the case?”

     “You mean by pointing out his mistakes? I don’t know. I didn’t say anything to him that I wouldn’t have said to anyone else in his position. He made several rookie mistakes, any one of which could jeopardize his case. He asked me for my advice and I gave it to him.”

     “What do you plan to do with those shell casings when he brings them to you?”

     Frank’s first inclination, to intentionally smudge the prints so they couldn’t be used as evidence against his friends later on, bothered him. He honestly didn’t know if he could bring himself to do it.

     So again, he answered the question truthfully.

     “I don’t know, David. I suppose I will struggle with my conscience and morals. And in the end, I suppose I’ll do whatever I think best under the circumstances. I hope the prints are already worthless. It would make it a lot easier for me to sleep at night.”

     Frank was furious at Bryan and Brad for putting him in the position he was now in.

     Normally he’d talk it over with Eva. But Eva’s mind was already made up, and Eva’s mind was not one to be changed once she locked it tight.

     Eva told him it didn’t matter. To let it go.

     “He was a very bad man,” Eva told him the night before. “He almost certainly would have killed Sarah once she crossed him or he grew tired of her.

     “Then he would likely have gone out and found himself another woman and killed her too.

     “You’ve taught me many things about evil people over the years, Frank. You’ve brought home your cases with you every night, shared with me stories of the worst of mankind and the things they do. You’ve taught me that some men are just pure evil and there is no chance of redemption, no matter how hard one tries to rehabilitate them.

     “You’ve taught me that some men, for whatever reason, learn to love the taste of blood. That once they kill it becomes easier for them to kill again and again. And that they find they enjoy it, and look forward to it.”

     Frank had tried feebly to argue.

     “But honey, I’m a cop. I have been for a very long time.”

     “In a
different
time, Frank. Times have changed. We live in a whole new world. A vastly more dangerous world. One where people no longer fear each other. Or the laws.

     “Hell, what good are the laws now anyway? There’s no justice system anymore. If they had taken him to a jail somewhere he’d have sat there for months, maybe years, waiting for his case to be resolved. At some point a soft hearted jailer would have decided he’d served long enough and would have set him free.

     “Or, just as likely, one of his friends would have broken him out of jail. And then what would happen? He might come right back here, Frank. He might come back here for revenge. He might get himself a sniper rifle and perch himself atop Salt Mountain and just pick our people off one by one as we went outside.

     “Frank, there’s a lot of misery in the world. There are a lot of miserable people in the world. Now there’s one less. Just forget about him. He’s not worth your time. You’ve got more important things to worry about than punishing a good man for ridding the world of a very bad one.”

     This was a tough one. Frank had always gone to Eva for advice when he couldn’t resolve something on his own. And he almost always took her words to heart.

     He just didn’t know if he could this time.

-40-

     The light of the sun brought a lot of activity the next morning. Mark and Hannah and Bryan and Sarah had always been the core of every big operation, going back to the days when Saris 7 was a million miles from earth and closing.

     Now the same thing was happening again, and all four of them were away.

     Someone… several someones… would have to step up to the plate in their absence.

     Brad and Rusty were on their feet well before the crack of dawn and in the tunnel headed toward the mine. Marty had promised to train a couple of new drivers to help out. But Brad figured that Marty had his own operation to worry about. There was nothing Marty could teach Rusty that Brad couldn’t.

     Rusty had driven an eighteen foot box truck for a San Antonio dairy for several years before the big chill. It obviously wasn’t as easy as maneuvering a fifty-three foot trailer through the obstacle course that heavy traffic could be. But it was a start. At least Rusty was proficient at changing lanes and backing using only his mirrors, and knew to watch out for such things as low bridges and power lines and narrowing roadways.

     In lieu of a better plan, Brad decided to try a simple approach.

     “Bobtailing, this is no harder than driving that dairy truck. Granted, you’re rusty. No pun intended. Well, maybe a little pun intended. Anyway, driving a truck will come right back to you. The only thing you’ll have to get used to right away is the gearshift. Upper and lower, you’ll use ten gears in all. But you’ll learn in no time.”

     Then he had a thought.

     “Wait a minute, Rusty. That truck you drove wasn’t an automatic, was it?”

     “Oh, heck no.”

     “Good. You can start out in second or third gear when you bobtail, and also when your trailer is empty. You’ll shift fast and often while getting up to speed, so that’ll take a bit of adjustment.”

     “Am I going to haul back a load today?”

     “Yes. But I’ll hook it up for you. You can watch how I do it the first few times, and we’ll do all our pickups together so I’m there to help if you need me. We’ll come back slow. Do you think you can back an extended trailer?”

     “I don’t know why not. I can back a boat.”

     “Good. Believe it or not, backing a fifty three footer is easier than backing a boat. Because it’s not so touchy. The trailer doesn’t turn on a dime, so you tend not to overcorrect as bad.”

     “You said we’ll go out and come back together, each with our own loads?”

     “Yes. Until you’re comfortable and we find out what the situation is with marauders and squatters. Until then we’ll always stay together, in case one of us has mechanical problems or if we come under attack.”

     “Do you think marauders are going to be a problem?”

     “Marauders? No. But I think we may have some problems with squatters taking over sections of the highway. They may think we’re invading their territory and taking what’s rightfully theirs. And they may shoot at us to make their point.”

     “So what do we do then?”

     “Shoot, I don’t know that there’s anything we can do. We could shoot back, but killing someone over a truck, when there’s plenty of other trucks elsewhere, doesn’t make much sense. And if they’re better shots than we are, we may be the ones who get killed. It’s probably better to just back off and go elsewhere.”

     Brad had Rusty crawl into the driver’s seat of the big Kenworth and crank her up. The engine came to life with a rumble and the cab began to vibrate. Everything on the console was clearly marked, and Brad told him to familiarize himself with the panel.

     “I’m going to start my own truck. If you see something you don’t recognize, leave it the hell alone until I get back, and I’ll tell you what it is.”

     He came back a couple of minutes later and crawled into the passenger seat of the big cab. Rusty looked confident, and anxious to try out the rig.

     But Brad didn’t want to rush him. He explained to the rookie trucker how to watch his air pressure gauges and when he could release the brakes.

     “What if I release them too early?”

     “You can’t. It won’t let you.”

     “Nice to know.”

     “You got any questions about the tranny?”

     “Nope. I can handle it.”

     Rusty pressed the accelerator halfway down to help build his air faster.

     “She’s got an awful lot of power she’s just itching to let loose. She’s been cooped up in here for an awful long time.”

     “Well, let’s go then. I’ll take the lead.”

     Brad returned to his own truck. He eased it into second gear and crept forward, then changed to third when he was rolling. Slowly they passed each bay of the mine, illuminated by their headlights, until they turned a hard left into the entry tunnel.

     At the overhead door they stopped and got out again.

     “Now, here’s the tricky part,” Brad said. There are three cameras outside the mine wired into both security control centers. We don’t want to just crank open the overhead and drive out into he world without checking to see if the coast is clear. That’s because the mine is supposed to be deserted, and we don’t want to announce to the world it isn’t.”

     “So what do we do?”

      “We call into the control center and have them check to make sure there’s no one out there. The problem is, the walkies won’t reach the compound from the interior of the mine because the salt is too dense. The only way they’ll reach the control center from the mine is at the doorway, right up against the overhead door.”

     “Okay. So what do I do?”

     “Go stand up against the door and call into the SCC. Tell them we’re ready to pull out and ask them to verify that we’re all clear. Then open the door.

     “I’ll pull my rig out. Then I’ll come back for yours. You stand by the door in case they see something and you have to close it in a hurry.

     “Once I pull the second rig out, close the door button and run out as it closes.”

     “Got it. And we do the same thing when we come back?”

     “No. Coming back will be different, because the door can only be opened from the inside. When we return, we’ll call the SCC when we’re about twenty minutes out. They’ll send someone through the tunnel and have them stand by, ready to push the button when we tell them we’re here.

     “Are you ready?”

     “Yep.”

     “Let’s do this.”

-41-

     Brad and Rusty left the compound and took Highway 83 to Junction, then headed west on Interstate 10.

     In the first mile, Brad counted five trailers that had been parked on the shoulder of the road and abandoned.

     When word about Saris 7 got out to the general public, a few brazen truckers dropped their trailers and went home to be with their families.

     Others tried to complete their jobs and deliver their loads, but found it hard to find fuel. Many of the dropped trailers were diesel tankers, on their way to fill the tanks at truck stops and gas stations across the nation’s interstates.

     Once the fuel started to dry up, those remaining truckers trying to do the right thing saw the writing on the wall. They were doing a job for which they’d almost certainly never be paid, for a company which would almost certainly never survive the blackout.

     And they were doing that while their loved ones were back home, having to fend for themselves in an increasingly chaotic and riotous world.

     One by one the remaining truckers dropped their trailers. Some at truck stops, then on the shoulder of the highway once the truck stops were full.

     A tractor without a trailer could make it twenty times farther on a hundred gallons of diesel than when towing a heavy load.

     The truckers now had a new mission: make it home to their families and friends, trucking companies be damned.

     The abandoned trailers had become a popular and very valuable source of supplies for the survivors of Saris 7’s turmoil.

     The world froze within hours of the meteorite’s collision and ensuing blackness.

     Frozen goods in the trailers didn’t have time to thaw before the temperatures turned frigid outside the trailers. And the meats and produce inside the reefers thereby stayed frozen for seven long years, until the earth finally thawed out again.

     For a long time, survivors picked at the food in the trailers and used it to sustain them. But most were too timid to stray far from home even before the roads grew impassable.

     Within four months, with all precipitation coming down in the form of snow and ice, the roads became covered with more than a foot of snow. That protected all the trailers that were more than a few miles from the cities.

     After the big chill ended and everything thawed out, the trailers that were miles away from cities were protected by distance and circumstance. Circumstance because only ten percent of the population survived. There was enough food and supplies to scavenge within the cities themselves, and in those trailers within walking distance.

     Few vehicles were on the road after the thaw. After seven years, car batteries were pretty much shot. Few people thought to plan ahead and put away dry cell batteries and acid to fill them. Most vehicles were now nothing but rusting monuments to the way the world used to be.

     The first fifty or so trailers Rusty and Brad saw had been picked clean by the survivors. It was easy to tell, because of the huge piles of trash outside the door of each trailer.

     Survivors were looking mostly for food. Sometimes for additional layers of clothing or blankets or medicines.

     Most of the things on a typical trailer were neither wanted nor needed, and were thrown unceremoniously onto the highway in huge piles.

     Scavengers came after the fact, rooting through the piles and scattering them further.

     Now the highway was such a mess that the truckers frequently had to drive on the narrow inside shoulder, two full lanes from the trailer, just to get through. And along the way they had to drive over a myriad of things, from prom dresses to disposable diapers to alarm clocks.

     Brad kept listening to various things crunch beneath his tires and hoping they wouldn’t cause a flat.

     By the time they were five miles west of Junction, the scavenged trailers ended. Trailers on the side of the road still averaged six per mile. But these were intact because they were too far away to be reached by foot.

     Brad slowed to a crawl each time he passed one which looked promising.

     He was looking for padlocks and seals on the back of the trailers which would indicate whether they were full or empty. While empty trailers were usually locked to prevent the locks from being lost, and to keep vagrants from hitching rides, trailers with seals were always full.

     He also looked at the condition of the trailers. He intentionally passed by a Walmart trailer sealed with a numbered metal strip and a padlock.

    It was probably chock full of dry goods and pasta, clothing and tools, blankets and miscellaneous other items they could use.

     The problem was, two of the four tires on the driver’s side of the trailer had gone flat, leaving the remaining tires carrying twice the weight they once did. The two good tires looked like ticks, ready to burst, and the trailer was listing badly to the left.

     Brad was certain that after ten years, the tires would blow as soon as the wheels started turning.

     They were better off leaving this one for an adventurous scavenger and find another one farther up the highway.

     And find one they did, less than a mile ahead.

     The men pulled both tractors past the target and parked them, their engines still running at a roar while they stepped out to inspect the trailer.

     Brad looked at the feet, which had sunk into the pavement but not excessively so. Not enough to keep a hard knock from the tractor from breaking them loose.

     The seals on the air line connectors seemed sound, as did the lines themselves when he crawled beneath the trailer to look. One tire was flat on each side of the trailer, but Brad decided that wouldn’t be a problem at the speeds they’d be driving.

     None of the tires seemed excessively cracked or rotted.

     “Looks roadworthy to me,” he said. “You stand back and watch. I’ll hook up and we’ll see if it’ll hold air.”