Truck Stop (5 page)

WHAP! A hand slapped down on Roger’s shoulder and spun him around.

Roger came face to face with the gaunt trucker, who was brandishing a heavy lug wrench.

“What the fuck are you doing under my rig?” the driver asked angrily.

“Get your hand off me, asshole.” Roger shoved the man’s hand off his shoulder.

The gaunt trucker lunged back at Roger, cracking him in the ribs with the wrench. Roger smashed back against the fender, clutching his aching side. He looked up and saw the trucker rearing back with the wrench for another swing.

Roger rolled out of the way just in time. The wrench clanged down onto the fender. The trucker spun around, came for Roger again. This time Roger leaped right at him, tackling him to the wet asphalt. The lug wrench clattered out of the trucker’s hand and went skittering under the engine compartment.

Roger cracked the trucker across the jaw, shoved him aside. He scrambled over and grabbed the wrench. He was coming up with it when a voice yelled from the darkness, “Freeze! Don’t move!”

Roger looked up and saw a highway patrolman standing several yards away, with his pistol trained dead on Roger.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ben Clark, an African-American highway patrolman in his mid-30s, sat at a corner booth across from Roger and Kat. He had surprised even himself at how patient he had been for the last forty minutes. First, he had managed to diffuse the conflict outside with Roger and the trucker, then he had separated them, and now he was focusing on Roger’s long, twisting story.

Ben prided himself on withholding judgment until he had all the facts in front of him. He knew that most of his buddies in law enforcement claimed that they did this, but in the end they were only human, and they usually judged people on what they looked like and how they acted; Ben had seen it happen a million times.

Roger had looked like trouble with his rocker tattoos, hair, and clothes, but Ben had soon discovered that Roger was just a frightened father who had lost his daughter. Ben couldn’t help but sympathize; he would be out of his mind if he had lost sight of his little boy for as long as Roger had been missing Lilly. So, Ben had taken things a step at a time, and now he was trying to get everything written down as accurately as possible.

For his part, Roger was doing everything he could to hold it together. He looked anxiously out the window at the old tanker truck as he relayed his side of things. “I saw him after I went to the bathroom,” he said. “He knew I left Lilly in the car. I’m telling you, that creep out there is the one you should be talking to.”

Ben looked up from his notepad. “I’ll get to him, don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere.” He gestured to the trucker’s keys on the table next to him, then looked over at Kat. “So, the entire time Roger was gone, you didn’t see anyone come near his car?”

“No one.”

“And you watched it the whole time?”

Kat took an anxious breath and nodded, but it was getting harder every time she went over it. After all, it had been her responsibility all along. No one had come out and blamed her for anything, but it didn’t matter. The guilt had been nagging at her, and now she felt it was about to overwhelm her. “I mean it was raining pretty hard. I guess it’s possible I….” She trailed off, feeling nauseated, then took a breath and forced herself to say what had probably been obvious all along. “I might have missed Lilly getting out, or even someone coming up to the car.”

Kat trailed off into silence. There. She had said it herself. She had thought that it might be better this way, but it wasn’t. She felt sick about it. Lilly had probably left the car while it was her responsibility to watch it, and now she was missing. Kat looked down, unable to look in Roger’s direction. She didn’t have to see the expression on his face to know what he was feeling.

Ben referred to his notes to find a name Roger had mentioned earlier. “Zoe. Your ex-wife,” he said to Roger.

“What about her?”

“You said you picked your daughter up from her house in Las Vegas. Why was she there if you have sole custody?”

A simple question, but Roger felt an old familiar feeling creep up on him. It was the nagging guilt that had colored his entire life. “I…I didn’t have a choice. I had a gig in L.A., and I couldn’t take her with me.”

“And you don’t think there’s any chance Zoe could have followed you here and taken your daughter?”

Roger shook his head. “Zoe? No way. She doesn’t want anything to do with my daughter. She’s in love with her pipe. That’s pretty much what you get when you meet your wife in rehab.” As soon as the bitter words were out of his mouth, Roger felt awkward. Could he sum up such an important part of his life so quickly and callously? He used to think it was so much more complex.

Roger had loved Zoe when they met. They had connected. Not just through the shared misery of dependency, but through a shared desire to get better. They had found strength together, and Roger began to believe that that strength was going to be enough to turn things around. Of course, it hadn’t been. Not for her. Not for Zoe.

Ben referred to his notes again for another question. “What about this boyfriend of hers, Jack Murphy?”

Roger felt a deeper pain stab into him this time. His whole life was being dragged out and put on an autopsy table in front of him. The God’s truth was that Jack was a motherfucker. At first, Roger had held out hope that Zoe would turn things around for herself, but then she met Jack. Jack the dealer. The crackhead who thought he was a gangster because he got his shit from some low-level mob connection in Vegas. So how much of this do I try to explain? Roger thought. He decided to downplay it. “Look, they’re both users, and they’re both seriously messed up,” he said.

Roger looked at Ben then and saw the officer looking at him a bit differently. It wasn’t the look of a cop. It was the look of a father. It hit Roger then how fucked up his entire life was. “Okay, I know. I shouldn’t have left Lilly there, but I didn’t have a choice. Anyway, she was fine when I picked her up.” He didn’t mention the fact that Lilly had been waiting for him by herself, with no sign of any adult presence save the lights and the television.

Ben considered this. It was times like this when he found it hard not to pass judgment. He managed to let it go, and he looked back down at his notes. “All right, I think I’ve got everything here. I’m going to go ahead and issue an Amber Alert on your daughter. We’ve had a lot of luck finding missing children with the system in the past.”

“A lot? This happens a lot?”

Ben flipped his notepad closed and tucked it in his jacket. “The sad truth is, it’s not that unusual for people to go missing out here. It’s a transient world on the Interstates. People come and go.” Ben stood up, saw the concern on Roger and Kat’s faces, and added, “But like I said, she hasn’t been missing long, and we’ve had a lot of luck using the Amber Alert system.”

Ben grabbed his hat and turned to leave, but then he remembered another question. “What exactly did you see under the truck out there?” he asked Roger.

The seemingly innocent question hung in the air for a moment. Roger felt Kat’s eyes on him, and he looked over at her. She had been careful in her answers to Ben’s questions. She had not mentioned the joint they had smoked together or anything about their conversation about his “gift.”

Roger considered his answer. He knew the creepy bastard out there was guilty. Very guilty. But Roger couldn’t tell Ben exactly how he knew. He couldn’t tell Ben that every time he had an encounter with the other side, it was always at the place where someone had lost his or her life. In this case, someone had been run over by that truck. Sure, maybe it was years ago and someone else was driving, but Roger doubted it. He had a feeling about that creepy asshole, and usually his feelings were right.

Roger decided he had to play it off. There was no choice. He had to keep things focused on finding Lilly. “Well, I thought I saw something that looked like…like a person’s shirt or something.”

“A shirt?” Ben asked, puzzled. This seemed like an unusual detail.

Ben’s reaction threw Roger. He was distracted and hadn’t thought it through well enough. The shirt was too strange. He had to backpedal. “Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t know. It looked like something was tangled in there, but it was nothing.”

Ben considered this for a moment, then moved away, “Stay put,” he told both of them. “I’ll be back.” He zipped up his jacket, pushed out the diner door.

Roger and Kat watched as he headed over to the tanker truck.

“Russell Fields,” said a voice.

Roger and Kat looked up and saw Bart, the cook, who had come out of the kitchen.

“The guy driving the tanker truck? You know him?” Roger asked.

Bart nodded and held out his hand to Roger. “Bart Corrigan,” he said, and Roger reciprocated, shaking the man’s hand. “Fields has been coming through here for years,” Bart said.

“I’ve only seen him a few times heading to the bathroom,” Kat said. “He never told me his name and I sure as shit wasn’t going to ask him. Dude is a fucking troll.”

“He’s a loner, that’s for sure,” Bart added. “But I never saw him cause no trouble or nothing.”

Roger looked back out at the tanker truck. His expression grew dark. “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t up to it.”

CHAPTER NINE

Ben leaned in the open door of the old tanker truck cab, looking up at Russell Fields, who sat patiently behind the wheel. In the dim yellow cab light, Russell seemed rather ordinary, but at the same time, he was strangely out of place. He wore a plaid work shirt and patched jeans. Ben’s first thought when he saw him was about the patches on his knees. Who patches their jeans anymore? It was something Ben hadn’t seen since he was a little boy. Ben had also carefully searched the truck and hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary, just a lot of empty cups and plastic wrappers. Ben had decided Russell’s gaunt face and rail-thin body were because he lived on a steady stream of beef jerky and coffee, and probably other stimulants that were less than legal.

But there was also an undeniably strange, timeless quality, about him, like he could have stepped out of the pages of
The Grapes of Wrath
. An Okie heading from the dust bowl during the Great Depression. If he had been seeing this in a black-and-white movie, Ben thought, it would all make more sense.

The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and the Utah night air was becoming bone-numbing cold. Ben’s breath came out in pale puffs of mist as he spoke. “And you hadn’t talked to him or seen him before you found him under your truck?” he asked Fields.

“No sir. I told you, I was just protecting my rig. My life depends on this thing. I don’t let no one get near it unless I’m right there with them,” Russell answered.

“I understand.” And Ben did understand. This was the part that seemed so ordinary about Russell. He made sense. He seemed earnest.

Ben took another glance around the cab, then handed Russell back his driver’s license and his keys. “All right, look,” he said to the driver. “If you’re going to be staying here for the night, keep out of his way. He’s got a missing daughter and he’s upset.”

“Of course, sir. I sure will.” Russell nodded.

And that was it. There was nothing else to be done. Ben had found nothing illegal in Russell defending his property; there was nothing suspicious in or around the truck, and no reason to suspect Russell of abducting Lilly.

Ben closed the rig door and folded his notepad. He looked around at the other nearby trucks, pulled his collar up against the biting cold, and was about to head to the next truck when he hesitated. One more thing.

He clicked on his flashlight, kneeled and looked under the truck. He moved the beam slowly across the greasy underside of the engine compartment. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Inside the diner, Roger watched intently out the window.

“What is he doing now?” Kat asked. She was seated on the other side and didn’t have the same view that Roger could.

“Just looking around underneath the truck,” Roger answered, and kept watching.

Kat gazed at Roger for a moment in silence. She wanted to say something more to him about everything she was feeling, but it wasn’t the right time. Not now. Not yet. But she would, she promised herself, when the time was right.

Back outside in the cold parking lot, a faint gasp and a low moan drifted from inside the pearly cream-colored rig. Ben was still looking under the tanker truck, and he was too far away to hear it. Too far away to hear what was going on inside the sleeper cab.

Ida Consiglio calmly took a drag off a filter-less Camel as she gazed into the sleeper side of the cab. Her son’s groans, interspersed with sharp gasps of pain, filled the cab. The windows were steamed up, and the cab was smoky and humid.

Ida exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Don’t let up on him, honey,” she growled. “Don’t you dare go easy.” She was looking at Lucinda in the bed, dominating Daniel with a strap-on from behind.

The low-rent prostitute nodded breathlessly to Ida and continued her sodomy. Lucinda had done many things in her short but extensive life as a truck stop hooker, but this had come as a surprise. At first, she thought Ida was engaging her for Daniel as a kinky gift from mother to son. It had happened before to Lucinda, but it was usually a father who bought her for his son. The fathers usually ended up taking her when she had finished with their sons, but usually they were generous with the additional fee.

But this. This was different. Ida had negotiated the deal for her son, and Lucinda had accepted. When she had climbed into the cab, she had found Daniel already naked in bed waiting. The first clue was his expression. He looked scared. At first, Lucinda thought it was one of those virgin things; Mom had hired her to pop her son’s cherry. Thinking this, Lucinda had then gone out of her way to be nice to Daniel. She smiled seductively and promised to go easy.

But it all began to turn when Ida told her that Daniel wasn’t a virgin. Lucinda couldn’t figure out why he looked so scared, until Ida took out the strap-on.

Lucinda hesitated when Ida told her what she wanted her to do to her son. But Ida didn’t back down; she even became a bit intimidating. She insisted that it was what Daniel wanted, even though Daniel remained silent the whole time. And that’s when the rationalizing began—a process familiar to Lucinda.

A year ago, Lucinda had ended up at a motel between the truck stop and Vegas after her boyfriend drove off without her. He had taken her last few dollars and the rest of their crystal meth. She was flat broke and strung out bad. She had to get right again, and a hand job for the guy at the gas station next door was the solution. Twenty bucks. He took her into the bathroom in back, dropped his pants, and she jerked him off. It was over in about six minutes and she had twenty bucks. Not so bad. Just a hand job.

But twenty dollars is just twenty dollars. She could get fifty for a blow job. Same six minutes, different deed. Fifty bucks. And so it went. Blow jobs, straight sex, 50-50. Two guys at once. A girl and a guy. And anal. Finally anal. That was three hundred. She had to use amyl-nitrate poppers to relax herself, use lots of lube, and it took longer, but still it was three hundred dollars.

Now it all seemed the same to Lucinda. Just one more thing to do. One more thing to rationalize. The sex. The money. The meth. The merry-go-round that Lucinda found herself on.

What she was doing with Daniel Consiglio now was another twist on something she had done a few times before; men liked her strap-on work. She was quite good at it, but she had never done it with the man’s mother watching.

Daniel grimaced, his eyes watering as he looked over at his mother. The hard rubber dildo burned in his rectum. Like it was on fire. Ida took another drag, flicked her ashes, and stared.

A pleading look filled Daniel’s eyes. Was this good enough? Was he doing what she wanted? Was he a good boy now? Daniel always had the same thoughts when he did this for her. He just wanted it to be over so he could go back to being her little boy again.

Lucinda’s thigh was beginning to cramp up from all the thrusting. She took a deep breath, gave a showy moan like she was enjoying herself, and glanced surreptitiously at the clock. She had agreed on half an hour. It would almost be time to renegotiate. She was about to say something when there was a knock on the cab door. Lucinda stopped cold.

Ida shot a look at the door, then got up; she placed her finger to her lips. “You make a sound, I’ll beat the both of you.” She yanked the curtains closed to the sleeping area.

Outside, Ben waited a moment, then knocked again. The door opened, and Ida looked out. “Yes, Officer?”

Ben peered carefully into the smoky, steamy cab. “Yeah, we have a missing persons report on a seven-year-old girl here, and I wanted to check….“

“Oh, I know. Still haven’t found her yet?” Ida asked, trying to sound casual.

“No. Not yet.” Ben focused on the curtains that were pulled in front of the sleeping area, “Someone in there?”

Ida glanced over at the curtains, probably a little too quickly, she thought. She looked back at Ben and shrugged it off in her best nonchalant way. “Oh, yeah. My son. He’s asleep. We’re a team. Driving keeps us on different schedules.” Then she painted on a smile, to sell it. “You know. He sleeps, I drive. I sleep he drives. So on and so on. It’s a grind.”

“Right. Got it.” Ben gave another look around the cab. “What’s your name?”

“Ida,” the woman answered without hesitation. “Ida Consiglio. My son’s Daniel. If we see anything, we’ll make sure to report it right away,” she offered helpfully.

“Good.” Ben was about to turn away when someone rippled the curtains from the other side. His eyes snapped back to the cab. Ida fought the urge to look, too.

“Is he getting up?” Ben asked.

“I, uh, no, he’s not due to get up for another few hours. He….“ Before Ida could finish, the curtains whipped open.

“It’s okay, Momma. I’m up, I’m up.”

Ben looked into the bed area. Lucinda was nowhere to be seen; the only hint to her whereabouts was the back window that was slightly ajar.

“You looking for that lost little girl, Officer?” Daniel asked. He was surprisingly good at hiding any hint of what had been going on. He didn’t even make eye contact with Ida.

Ben carefully eyed the empty bed area. “Yes, we are.”

“Well we ain’t seen nothing,” Daniel said.

He was starting to sound a bit too smug, Ida thought. Just wait until the goddamn cop was gone and she could lay into him for pulling this bullshit.

Movement out the back window got Ida’s attention. She could see Lucinda, sneaking around the side of the truck and running away as she buttoned her top. Ida looked back at Ben, expecting the worst. But he was looking at Daniel. From his angle, he couldn’t see what she had just seen.

Ben eased back out the door “All right, then. You make sure you let us know if you do.”

Ida leaned forward and grabbed the door. “Yessir, Officer,” she said in her best law-abiding voice. “We will. Definitely.”

Ben nodded and turned away.

Ida closed the door tight and looked over at Daniel. He could tell by his mother’s look that this was going to get very ugly very quickly.