The Brotherhood of the Wheel (2 page)

But as the truck bounced onto the on ramp of I-70 a Mason jar rolled across the floor. There was something floating in the cloudy fluid inside the jar. It was pale and spongy, with some dark hair, swaying like seaweed in the ocean, sloshing around. Then Marcia saw the harsh, fluorescent light above the steel table in the cab catch the gleam of the clitoral piercing and Marcia knew, she
knew
. It was the decaying remains of a woman's mutilated vagina. The fear was screaming, screaming like a fire alarm in her mind. This was no rip-off, this was one of the tricks that went past sickness; this was one of the monsters that rolled in off the highway to the lots, one of the things that gobbled you up and you were never seen again. Marcia screamed, her patchwork soul wanting to flee her body, but the duct tape held it in. She was gone. No one would ever find her, no one would ever know. No one would miss her. No one cared.

The Marquis's truck passed the I-70/I-44 interchange, headed south. On the left, the Gateway Arch rose, illuminated, out of the icy mist, a monument to America's expansion; the never-ending hunger to move farther out, the drive to move faster, and to move with unfettered freedom. The American dream was a race. The Mack truck's passage did not go unnoticed.

*   *   *

“Break 2-3, Paladin, Paladin, you got your ears on?” Jimmie's CB crackled. The voice held a distinctive New York accent. “Handle's Mr. Majestyk. I'm northbound on 70, just past the I-44 exchange, and I just had eyes on your yellow-and-white bulldog. He's headed southbound on 70, coming up on the 251C exit. You copy me?”

Jimmie stomped the accelerator pedal, a wolf grin spreading on his face. “Hot damn!” he said, and clicked the mike open on the radio. “10-4, Mr. M! I owe you big. Thank you kindly.”

“Just go get that
stronzo,
Paladin. I'll be 10-10, give me a shout-out if you need any help. The wheel turns, brother.…”

Jimmie's truck skidded as he threaded between the traffic. The ice was starting to make the highway a lot more dangerous to traverse at the speeds he was moving. “Breaker 2-3, this is Paladin. Is there anyone out there in a position to get that truck off the road, c'mon?”

Blue lights strobed in Jimmie's side mirror. A Missouri state-police cruiser had slid up behind him. “Aw, damn it!” Jimmie said. He switched the CB channel over to 19, the one used by most trucker drivers and monitored by the police. “Break 1-9 to that bubble-gum machine riding my tail, I got a real good reason I'm speeding, Officer. I…”

“Boy, you got any idea how fast you going?” The trooper's voice came in clear over the CB speakers in Jimmie's cab and over his headset. “You doing in excess of twenty-three miles per hour, now aren't you, son?”

Jimmie's eyes widened and the smile returned. “Yes, sir, I reckon I am, Officer,” he said, and switched back over to Channel 23. “Break to that county mountie back there. You one of us? C'mon?”

“Go get him,” the trooper replied. “I'll clear the road for you if you slide on into the back door here. I'll put out a BOLO on his truck right now. Once you land him, I'll get you all the backup you need. Over.” Jimmie could almost hear the grin in the trooper's voice. “Oh, and consider this a warning about that speeding, Paladin,” the trooper said. “You slow your ass down, coming through my jurisdiction, cowboy. The wheel turns.”

Jimmie laughed. Damn if the wheel didn't turn.

The state trooper's siren howled and the cruiser sped from behind Jimmie's rig to in front of it, going well over a hundred miles an hour. Cars and trucks began to clear the lane for the trooper, and Jimmie accelerated to follow his escort, yanking the cord for his air horn and letting loose with a rebel yell.

The Marquis slowed to a near-crawl. “What is this shit,” he muttered. Traffic had thickened. Ahead, there looked to be some kind of road work going on. There had been no signs or notifications on the digital message boards that dotted the highway. A crew of orange-vest- and hard-hat-wearing Missouri Department of Transportation workers with flashlights were directing traffic to move slowly through the choke point, marked with crimson road flares and a flashing yellow arrow sign. They looked thrilled to be out in the freezing rain. Cars and trucks honked as they jockeyed to merge from three lanes down to one. A portable digital road sign built into a trailer announced, A
LL MULTI-AXLE VEHICLES MUST DETOUR TO
E
XIT 209
A G
RATIOT
S
TREET.
F
OLLOW SIGNS TO DETOUR ROUTE
.

The Marquis's truck slowly merged into the single open lane and began to descend the exit ramp. One of the highway crew, a foreman, unclipped a handheld CB radio that was tuned to Channel 23 and spoke into it. “Paladin, this is Roadway Rembrandt. Your bulldog is off the highway and getting detoured right to where you said you wanted him. The wheel turns.”

Almost a thousand miles away, outside Washington, DC, in the suburbs of the nexus of federal power, FBI Special Agent Cecil Dann was asleep in his recliner for the third time this week. A stack of case files sat next to the chair, beside his dinner plate and the remains of the meal his wife, Jenna, asleep upstairs, had left in the fridge for him. The Danns' dog, a coal-black pug named Oscar, eagerly finished off Dann's dinner. The flat-screen television droned on, showing the John Wayne version of
True Grit.
Oscar didn't seem very interested as he gnawed on the steak bone. Agent Dann even less so as he snored. Dann's cell phone rang; the ringtone was the theme to
Dragnet
. He sputtered and opened his eyes, sitting up, and spilling the files he had fallen asleep reading.

“Wha…” he muttered, wiping drool from the side of his mouth. The phone rang again. “That's not even my ringtone.”

Dann's hair was salt-and-pepper, and it made him look more like a college professor than a federal agent. He had played CIAA baseball through school, had almost gone on to the major leagues before the FBI recruited him straight out of North Carolina A&T. He still had the build and the gait of a pitcher. Dann was the assistant special agent in charge of a division of the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. It was a program established by the FBI back in 2009 to track unsolved murders that occurred near interstate highways and to look for the patterns that might indicate the signature of a serial murderer. There was a map of the United States on Dann's office wall. Each red dot on the map was an unsolved murder on or near the highways. The map bled red—over five hundred cases reported, with more coming in every day. The rough estimate was that, at any given time, HSKI had about two hundred suspects committing serial murder across the roadways, a nightmarish circuit of pain, loss, and death. HSKI had cleared twenty-five cases during its first year in business, but, as the stack of files Dann brought home with him every night indicated, the FBI was bailing water with a teaspoon.

Dann blinked and looked down at the screen of his ringing smartphone. Where the number of the incoming call should be there was a line of text instead:
“Answer it Cecil.”

He answered the call with a swipe of his finger. “How the hell do you do that?” he said into the phone. “Do you have any idea what time it is you're calling? Because I don't, but it's late, I know that!”

“Listen carefully, Agent Dann. The I-70 Torturer is a long-haul truck driver named Wayne Ray Rhodes.” The voice was automated, the kind you got when you received a spam phone call. “You have just received an email with DMV and GPS information on Rhodes's truck, a mug shot of Rhodes when he was arrested for assaulting a prostitute in 2010 in Illinois, and a link to his information in your suspect database.”

Dann shook his head, “
Our
database? Really? I don't suppose you gift-wrapped him for us, too, did you?”

“Rhodes should be in the custody of the Missouri State Police shortly in St. Louis,” the stilted electronic voice continued. “Jimmie Aussapile is pursuing him as we speak.”

“Aussapile,” Dann said. “Again. Busy fella.” Dann climbed out of his recliner and knocked over his tower of files in the process. Oscar the dog, his meal disturbed, scampered away. Dann looked around for his shoes. Quietly, Jenna descended the stairs, pulling on a robe over her nightgown. She mouthed the word “Work?” to him, and Dunn nodded as he continued to look for his shoes while quickly trying to jot down notes on a pad of paper.

“Listen, I don't know who you people are,” Dann said to the voice on the phone, “where you get your information or how the hell you do what you do, but you are interfering with multiple federal, state, and local investigations, and you can't just keep doing this.…”

Dann looked down at the floor, covered with his scattered files. Black-and-white crime-scene photos looked back at him. Women, girls, torn to shreds and worse, so much worse; many still had no names, so many unavenged. He tried to gather them up so that his wife wouldn't have to see.

“But thank you,” he said, “for this one.”

“Your shoes are under the coffee table,” the automated voice said before it hung up. Dann looked at the screen of his phone. It now said,
“The wheel turns.”
Beneath the words was a stylized circle with a central hub and three equidistant spokes radiating out from it. After a moment, the symbol and the words disappeared and were replaced by Dann's FBI seal wallpaper and the military time on the East Coast: 0145. Dann quickly began to dial the phone as he retrieved his shoes from under the table.

“This is Assistant Special Agent in Charge Dann,” he said. “I need you to get me someone in the St. Louis field office right now, and scramble me a tactical team and a jet. I want wheels up in an hour or less. Thank you.”

“Cecil,” Jenna said, placing her hand on her husband's shoulder, “what was all that about?”

“Apparently,” Dann said, wresting his shoe away from Oscar's teeth, “Triple A has some kind of black-ops division.”

*   *   *

The Marquis's truck growled like a junkyard dog as it glided past the industrial wasteland of South Wharf Street. His headlights caught the frozen rain as it continued to spill from a dark and merciless sky. A single, swaying yellow caution light blinked as it was buffeted in the wind and the rain, no audience to heed its mute warning. Crumbling concrete walls on either side of the street were smeared in vibrant, tangled graffiti, the secret language of the city's soul. Above the painted walls, the gravel lots, and the chain-link fences were the silent black conveyor-belt towers of the rock quarry that covered several city blocks in every direction. The detour signs had led him here, and now the Marquis thought perhaps it was fate. This was the perfect place to pull over into a deep shadow, wait out the storm, and play with his newest toy. As he slowed to find a good spot, he didn't notice someone else already using the shadows.

Francisco Pena sat behind the wheel of his taxicab in the darkness, watching as the yellow-and-white semi rumbled by. The vibrations of the big truck made the Saint Fiacre medallion on Frank's rearview mirror sway slightly. Frank had driven a hack for fourteen years in St. Louis and owned his own cab for most of that time. When the call came in tonight about the killer on the road, he knew he had to do all he could to help stop this man, the way once, many years ago, the others had helped him, saved him. He raised his microphone to his lips and keyed the mike.

“He just passed me,” Frank said. “He's in position. The wheel turns.”

The Marquis slowed as he scanned the desolate street for the perfect spot where he could have some time with his newest acquisition. The darkness of the road ahead was pierced as high-beam headlights suddenly snapped on. Another semi straddled both lanes about a hundred yards ahead, idling in the icy rain and mist. Condensation trailed from its twin-towered exhaust pipes, like smoke from the curled lips of a crouching dragon. The Marquis lurched to a stop, his own engine idling now.

“What the fuck is this?” he snarled. As if to answer, his CB suddenly hissed with static. A voice broke the stale, evil silence of the Marquis's cab.

“Break 1-9 to that bulldog up ahead of me, you got your ears on son? C'mon?”

The Marquis picked up his mike and clicked it on, one of his eyes bugging out in anger, the other squinted up like Popeye. “10-4. You got the Marquis here.” Wayne Ray pronounced his handle as “
Mar-qiss.
” “That fancy poor-boy rig you're driving there is blocking the road, asshole.”

“Handle's Paladin,” the voice replied. “Now don't you be a-cussin' on this here channel, Hoss. That's against the law.…”

Off in the distance, the Marquis heard them—sirens. Distant, but a chorus of them, growing slowly louder, closer.

“See,” the voice on the CB said. “That's the FCC coming to get you right now. Nobody likes a potty mouth. Best pack it in, Marquis.”

A cold sweat covered the nape of the Marquis's neck, a terrible awareness of what was happening to him. He glanced back at the trash lying on his bunk. Her wet eyes held a glimmer of hope. The Marquis had to fight the urge to vomit. He revved his engine, and the whole truck shook.

“Get out of my way, Paladin,” he said.

“They know, Wayne Ray,” Jimmie said into the mike, revving his own engine now. “They know what you did to those girls, and they're coming for you.”

“Let me go, or I'll kill the whore,” the Marquis said, sweating and blinking. “Move!”

“You'll kill her anyway,” Jimmie said, “and quick is a damn sight more merciful than what you had planned for her. If you let the girl live, that will show them you can have compassion. It will help you, Wayne Ray, and right now you need all the help you can get.”