I turned my head to look at Big Belly waiting for his hamburger. Then I grinned at her.
"Okay, two types. One looks like a pro wrestler gone to seed, the other like Randy Travis. The point is, there's a lot of both. Traveling salesmen are about extinct. You notice the ones that are left." She folded her arms and leaned them on the counter. There were circles under her eyes, and she was older than I liked them in general, but she had good cheekbones and a serious expression. I'd had my fill of the playful kind. "How do you work it? Do they call you, or do you check in?"
Just then the cook set the burger and a plate of slimy fries on the sill. She delivered them without comment and took up the same position at my end, arms folded on the counter.
I pushed away my plates, unrolled the pack from my sleeve, and held it up. A NO SMOKING sign hung in plain sight on the wall behind her, but she shrugged. I got out two, gave her one, and lit them both. "If I went in for that work," I said, blowing smoke, "I'd have them call that eight-hundred number on the back of my truck. You know the one."
She nodded. "'How's My Driving?' with the number to call and complain. I can't remember the last time I saw a truck that didn't have it."
"That's what's beautiful about it. I'd have it forwarded to my cell. If I cut someone off in traffic and he called, I'd tell him I'd look into it, blow him off, like I'm a dispatcher. The other kind, the paying kind, if the cops trace it I can always say it was a wrong number. If there were no complications I'd adjust my route and take care of business."
"Pretty smart."
"Smarter than my old man, anyway. Smart enough not to go in for that line of work."
She straightened up and put out her cigarette in what was left of my eggs. "I thought so. Just another pickup. The trouble with you guys is you've seen
Bonnie and Clyde
one too many times. You think every girl who slings hash is just waiting for her chance to hook up with some road-show Jesse James."
"Badlands,
actually. But you've got me pegged."
She figured my bill, slapped it on the counter, and left to bus tables. I finished my cigarette and paid, leaving fifteen percent. I wanted to leave more, but I'd done too much already to make her remember me. I went back out to my rig.
It's a nice one, a secondhand Freightliner with an orange tractor and a shiny silver trailer; when new it had set someone back the price of a house on the beach. In the sleeping quarters behind the seat I switched on the light, went over my notes one more time, and looked at the driver's license photo blowup and telephoto candids once again for luck, then fed them to the cross-shredder I'd added to the standard equipment. I looked at my watch. I had better than an hour to kill. His company had him on a tight schedule, and he couldn't afford to lose another job. The Feds had told him he had no more coming if he expected any more help from them.
Twenty to midnight. I took two more hits from the flask and went back into the diner.
Big Belly had finished his meal and left. I waited while she rang up a middle-aged tourist couple with fanny packs, then asked if she got off at midnight.
"Why? You going to buy me a cuppa and tell me you're an international spy?"
"I started off on the wrong foot. I'll make it cappuccino if it'll make up for being a jerk."
She thought that over. She frowned more attractively than most women smiled. I had an almost overpowering urge to see what her smile looked like. She was as hard to put away as the flask, which I had now in my hip pocket.
"I'm on till four," she said. "But I'm past due for a break. Coffee's fine, but I wouldn't mind a slice of pie."
She asked the cook to cover the counter and brought the coffees and a wedge of lemon meringue to a booth in the smoking section, away from the others. I produced the flask and when she nodded I trickled some from it into both cups. We tapped them together in an unspoken toast.
She made a face when she tasted it. "I suppose it's good whiskey, but you don't drink it in coffee for the taste, do you?"
"My old man only drank it this way when he had a cold."
"You're not going to talk about him again, are you?"
"That subject's closed."
We shared small talk, or what passed for it between strangers late at night. Her name was Elizabeth; she preferred Beth, but she had LIZ scripted on her uniform blouse and said I could call her that as long as she was dressed for this job. She was working two jobs to earn enough to pay a lawyer to get custody of her ten-year-old daughter. She was a recovering meth addict. Her lawyer said if she could stay clean another six months she had a better chance in court. "So much for budding romance," she said, forking pie into her mouth.
"If I go on hitting this stuff the way I've been lately, we'll both be in the same boat." I added more to my cup. She frowned again when I offered to freshen hers, then nodded. The coffee was still hot; the fumes entered my nose and speeded up the process. I had to close one eye to see only one of her.
"Conscience," she said. "I guess you have to anesthetize yourself to make a clean job of it."
I couldn't tell if she was needling me or if she was really interested. I asked her what her other job was.
"Not as glamorous as this. Tell me about some of the people you've killed."
I looked at her, closing one eye. Her mouth twitched at the corners. It was going to be one of those conversations. In the same vein I told her about Omaha and then Sioux Falls, that bitched-up job that had almost got me pinched. I'd spent a nervous day maneuvering myself back into position to make it good. I was careful to speak hypothetically, spinning a story to keep the lady's interest.
I put away the flask, but by then I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. I told her what I was working on, an open contract; a hundred and fifty grand to the man who made an example of a mouthy errand boy who'd blabbed enough in court to take down a chunk of the East Coast and put himself in the Witness Protection Program. But Anderson was a grifter who couldn't resist the temptation to turn a dishonest dollar, even if it brought attention- and he had to be relocated under yet another identity. At present he was delivering office furniture from Cincinnati to L.A. and back, with a new face courtesy of the taxpayers to keep him from being recognized in case of a chance encounter with a former acquaintance. I'd started out careful, but somewhere along the way I stopped being hypothetical and mentioned the fact that Anderson always put in at that truck stop and was due there in a little while.
"Do you use a gun?"
"I have, but it makes a lot of noise: A knife's better for close work, and you know right away if you made it good. Also it's cheaper to replace when you leave it at the scene, with the prints wiped off, and you don't get jammed up if the cops find one on you. A lot of truckers carry buck knives for quick repairs."
I heard myself then, and it sobered me in a hurry. Then she chuckled, shaking her head, and the smile turned out to have been worth waiting for.
"You sure do sling the bull." She finished her pie and slid away the plate. "I ought to dump my coffee in your lap. So why am I not doing that?"
I took out my pack and lit us both, relieved. "Maybe I'm the first guy you ever met in this place didn't think pushing a rig was the most romantic job in America. It's boring as hell is what it is. You make up stories just to keep from aiming straight at a bridge abutment."
"It's pretty clever, especially that bit about being able to move around being a big advantage. You ought to write for the movies."
"You need to know somebody," I said. "And it helps to know how to spell."
She laughed. I grinned. It was going to be all right. Then the cook made a racket behind the counter, and that meant her break was over. She thanked me for the pie and the entertainment, and I got up like a gentleman when she rose. She pressed against me brieflyâprobably an accident, but try telling that to my physical reaction. She switched her hips in the tight uniform walking away. I was going to have to stop in on my way back across country.
Back behind the wheel I stuck the flask in the glove compartment and fired up the diesel. The Anderson job was out, at least at that location. If I was to get a jump on all the others looking for a big payday I'd have to follow him when he left, run him off some lonely section of road, and do the job with a jack handle, or anything but a knife. It would help that he wasn't going by the name Anderson and that the Feds would make sure it didn't get out that a witness in their care came to a bad end. If Liz read about it, she'd think it was an accident and wouldn't connect it to me.
One thing was sure. I needed to save the whiskey from then on for after the job, as a treat instead of a stimulus to action.
Anderson pulled up half an hour late, his company rig plastered with mud from some detour down a dirt road, probably in search of a crap game. The man had no pride, in his workmanship or anything else. The cargo of Arrow shirts I was carrying may have been just a cover, but I'd deliver them on time. Apart from ridding the world of a rotten snitch, I'd be doing some dispatcher the favor of not having to can him.
He went into the diner, looking as sloppy as the way he approached his duties. I remembered what Liz had said about there being two types of trucker, the big-bellied kind and the kind that looked like Randy Travis. I adjusted the rearview for a look at the stalwart chin, the granite squint, the hair cut short at the temples and left long in front to tumble go-to-hell fashion over the forehead. She'd felt firm and warm pressing against me. I wanted another pull at the flask, but I tamped down the temptation with a smoke.
I dozed off, I think. I jumped, alert all at once and cursing, but Anderson's filthy tractor-trailer stood where he'd left it, and the clock on the dash told me only five minutes had passed. At least I'd had the presence of mind to ditch the butt in the ashtray, where it had smoked itself out. I didn't remember doing it. Blackouts are a good sign to cut back.
I turned on a late-night talk show for company: the war, the economy, yet another scandal on Capitol Hill. If I'd ever had reason to regret the path my life had taken, self-esteem was only a dial switch away. I put in Johnny Cash and tried to keep up with him on the
Rock Island Line
.
Forty minutes passed, an hour. I pictured Anderson lingering over a plate of slop, maybe chatting up Liz. I hoped to hell he wasn't trying to impress her with his career in crime.
I got restless after ninety minutes. His desks and crap were due in Milwaukee by noon. I didn't picture him highballing it to make his deadline. He was exceeding even the margin of ineptitude I'd drawn up for him. I ditched the cigarette I'd started and stepped down to investigate. He didn't know me from Donald Duck. I could sit slurping coffee on the stool next to his and he'd think I was just another gear-cruncher, feeling all superior because he was just slumming from the wise-guy life.
The place was jumping. Just in the time I'd been out of the loop the lot had filled with Macks and Peterbilts and the odd Winnebago, and Liz was too busy filling cups and plunking down bowls of chili to notice me. There were more beer guts than Travises crowding the counter, but Anderson wasn't among them, nor at any of the booths, where the knights of the road sat belching onions and air-shifting down steep mountain grades for their bored audiences. I went down the narrow tiled corridor that led to the showers and toilets.
Anderson wasn't in any of them, not even the ladies' room, where a schnook like him might wander into without stopping to read the sign on the door. The only door left was marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
He lay there on the floor among the mops and cartons of toilet paper and industrial-sized mustard dispensers, on his face in the middle of a stain that didn't look like anything but what it was. I bent to feel his neck for a pulse, but didn't get that far. The knife stuck out hilt-deep from just below his left shoulder blade, flat, with a brass heel and a printed wood grain on the steel handle. I groped for the buck knife in my left pants pocket, purely from reflex. It wasn't there.
The door flew open and the rest was shouting and shoving and my feet kicked out from under me and two hundred pounds of county law kneeling on my back and the muzzle of a big sidearm tickling the back of my neck. I heard my rights and felt my shoulders pulled almost out of their sockets and the cold, hard, heavy clamp of the cuffs on my wrists.
I kept my mouth shut, credit me that. I was as sober as a Shaker and met every pair of eyes that locked with mine during the hustle through the crowded diner and out the door toward the radio car, where some kind soul who cared whether I suffered a concussion pressed down my head with an iron palm, shoved me into the backseat, and slammed the door.
The lot was desert bright, sheriff's spotlights adding candlepower to the pole lamps, the night air throbbing with sirens grinding down and radios muttering and spectators' chatter and the monotonous drone of official voices ordering the crowd to disperse, go home to your families, nothing to see here. I sat staring at the gridded polyurethane sheet that separated me from the front seat, where a fullback in uniform sat on one haunch with a foot on the pavement, murmuring into a mike, lights twinkling on the Christmas-tree console that divided the bucket seats in front.
When I got tired of looking at that I stared at the carpeted floor at my feet. I hadn't a chance with a not-guilty plea. The cops would track me through the ICC log and place me at the scene of every hit I'd performed. A good prosecutor would find a way to bring that out in court, even if my knife in Anderson's back wasn't enough. ("Someone picked your pocket? That's your defense?") You can't argue with the record. I was pinned as tightly as my old man in his bar where customers kept going in and never came out.