Road Test

by David Wickenhauser

  “Looks like a week. If we’re lucky and don’t hit a snag with getting parts,” Jake said.

  “Are snags expected?”

  “Not usually. But you never know. Some parts are standard, in stock. We’ll have to see.”

  “And the cost?”

  “We might be looking at between ten and fifteen depending on how much damage there is to the cooling system behind the radiator. You’re lucky it looks like there’s no damage to the frame or steering.”

  "With so much time lost in the last few months, I hope it's closer to ten thousand," Hugh replied.

  He followed Jake into the service department to sign insurance papers.

  Hugh went back to sit in his truck to make some phone calls and to check to make sure he and Jenny had everything they would need from it for the time being.

  Hugh’s first call was to his dispatcher, Gloria, to let her know the potential timeline for him getting back on the road.

  “Can you transfer me to safety, please?” he asked her.

  The fleet safety officer would need a full report from him, and photos of the damage emailed to him.

  When Gordon, the safety officer, got on the line, Hugh gave him a quick rundown on what had happened. And answered some questions.

  Then, as he was about to hang up, Gordon asked, “Where are you?”

  “Right now, I’m at the Freightliner dealer in Phoenix, right off of 1-10 south of 202. But, I’m staying at the South Mountain Resort and Spa a little north of here on 10.”

  “Hold for a minute,” Gordon said.

  When Gordon came back, he said, “I want you to go immediately to a DOT drug-testing facility. It’s on West Chandler Boulevard east of 10. I’ll call and have them ready for you. You haven’t had drinks or anything before or after the accident, have you?”

  Hugh had always thought questions like that from a safety officer sounded more accusatory than questioning, but he kept that opinion to himself.

  “No. Nothing. Of course.”

  “Good. Just asking. I’ll text you the address. Get there as soon as you can. And don’t forget to email me those photos.”

  The second call was to the ranch.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said when his mom picked up.

  “Hugh, honey. Are you guys all right?” his mom asked.

  “We’re fine. How did you know?”

  Hugh hadn’t thought news of a Phoenix crash would have made it all the way up to Northern Idaho.

  “It’s all over the news here,” she said. “Someone must have seen the Phoenix story and made the connection with our local hero trucker. Apparently, they’re still interested in you.”

  “Yeah. I guess there’s no real time limit on the fifteen minutes of fame,” Hugh said.

  “What happened?”

  “You remember I’ve told you about how four-wheelers in a hurry like to swerve in and crowd into the gap I leave for my following distance?”

  “Yes, I remember. You say it happens all the time.”

  “This was one of those times when it went very, very badly. Investigators are still figuring out what happened, but it looks like two cars tried to cut in from both sides of me at the same time, and the second car didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. How’s Jenny?”

  “She got real shook up about it. We’re staying at a nice hotel near the Freightliner dealer while I’m getting my truck repaired.”

  “Good. Pamper her, Hugh. She’s such a sweet kid.”

  “Hey, Mom. Can you do me a favor?”

  “What, hon?”

  “Can somebody be free in about a week to make a run over to the Spokane airport?”

  “Sure. What for?”

  “Jenny doesn’t know it yet, but I’m sending her home when I get back on the road again.”

  “Are you sure that’s the right thing to do?”

  “Absolutely. No my choice. I just got off the phone with my fleet safety officer, and he basically made it a condition for my continued driving with them, while everything about this accident is sorted out.”

  “And right now, until I know we can get back to a safe routine I need to know Jenny will be safe and staying with you guys.”

  “No problem. She’s family, and we’ll love to have her. Good luck trying to persuade her, though,” Hugh’s mom said with a smile in her voice.

  “OK, Mom. I gotta go. Love you.”

  “Love you too, son. Bye.”

  A final call was to James to tell him he’d been in an accident, and that he and Jenny were fine.

  Hugh needed to get going. The drug test was urgent for insurance purposes. He understood.

  Jake had offered him a ride back to his hotel in the dealership’s courtesy van. He had taken a cab there, and appreciated the convenience of getting the ride back. He went into the service department to tell them he was ready to leave, and to find the courtesy van and driver.

  On the way up the freeway, Hugh asked the driver if they could make a quick stop over at the DOT testing clinic.

  “No problem,” Sharon, the driver, said.

  Hugh started to tell her the address, but she said she knew where it was.

  “We get that a lot. Guy comes in here with a broken truck, he’s always got to go pee in the cup,” she said. “Happens all the time.”

  When Hugh got to the clinic he learned he had to not only provide a urine sample, but they wanted to clip some hair off of the back of his neck as well. The hair follicle test. Nobody takes chances anymore.

  That done, Sharon took him the rest of the way to the hotel.

  Fishburn was pleased the phone call with Joe earlier that morning had finally gotten him to get his lazy ass out of bed and get to work on what he needed to do.

  The attorney was on the phone with Joe that afternoon. Joe was telling him the husband had called the highway patrol and had fed them a sad story about how his wife had left with their two children and his sister-in-law to go shopping. The husband lied that his wife had told him they might end up staying late, and she might spend the night at her sister’s house.

  That’s why the husband hadn’t suspected anything was wrong until he hadn’t heard from her in the morning either. The police were satisfied with that.

  “Did he make a positive identification?” the attorney asked Joe.

  “No. He couldn’t. Nothing was left. The husband told me he puked his guts out and couldn’t stop heaving when the morgue attendant zipped open the body bag.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Hold on,” Joe said. “The attendant said there is enough tissue among the charred remains that they could do a DNA test. They could identify the victims if they could get a sample to compare it with. The husband said he offered to get a hair sample from his wife’s hair brush.”

  “Excellent. When is it going to happen?”

  “It’s already done. So it will only take as long as it takes the lab to run the tests.”

  “What about the children?”

  “That could be a different problem,” Joe said. “Burned and melted remnants of car seats were found in the back of the car, but so far no evidence the kids were in the car.”

  “We’ll have to deal with that later. Let me know the minute the gals are ID’d, and then have the husband call my office to officially get the settlement request started.”

  The neighbor and her daughter, the ones who had taken the two children out of the mother’s car, had been watching with horror the coverage of last night’s car crash. They weren’t positive the car burned beyond recognition was the mother’s. But it wasn’t looking good. They had expected to have heard from her by now. Not a word so far.

  The mother had told her neighbor what she was doing, that she was working with a guy who was going to pay her a lot of money to stage a little fender bender accident with a truck.

  She had warned her neighbor not to breathe a word to anyone because this guy ran with a rough crowd, and it could ruin everything if he found out t
he mother had told anyone about their scheme.

  Watching the news, the neighbor and her daughter went back and forth believing, then not believing, the accident was the fender bender the mother had told them they were going to stage. They concluded what had happened last night was definitely not a little fender bender. So, they decided to hang tight, and keep the children, hoping to still hear from the mother.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hugh had phoned Jenny to let her know he was on his way back. Her voicemail picked up, so he assumed she was enjoying herself at one of the spa amenities.

  He sat in the living room waiting for her to return. It was already mid-afternoon, and he hadn’t had any particular plans for the rest of the day other than a leisurely restaurant meal, possibly a movie and then bed.

  Not too much later, he heard the door’s lock disengage and Jenny came sweeping into the room with shopping bags hanging from both hands.

  “Hey, sweetie. How was your day?” she asked. She bent over and gave Hugh a kiss.

  “It was good. I got a lot taken care of. How about you, what all did you do?”

  “Oh. It was great.” All smiles, and as beautiful as ever.

  “I went shopping.” She hoisted the bags to show him.

  Then she put the bags down and opened her spa robe to model for him the bikini she had bought.

  Hugh’s heart skipped a beat. He wondered if Jenny had any idea how beautiful she was, and what a perfect figure she had. He doubted it, because Jenny didn’t dress to accentuate her figure like a lot of women did. Charlie came to mind as that kind of woman.

  Her body was more toned and tanned than when Hugh had first met her. She had spent a lot of time at the ranch swimming and riding horses.

  “Nice. That definitely suits you,” he said. “What else?”

  “I went swimming. They’ve got a gigantic, gorgeous pool here. Then I got a massage, and had a mani-pedi. I hope that’s OK.”

  Hugh wasn’t sure what a mani-pedi was, but if it made Jenny this happy, he was all for it.

  Hugh chuckled to himself. The only interesting thing he had done today was pee in a cup.

  “Perfect,” Hugh said. “I figured we’d put on the best clothes we’ve got and go down to the resort restaurant for an early dinner.”

  She pulled something out of one of the bags and held it in front of her. “How about this?”

  It was a long evening gown, cut low in front, and even lower in the back. It was made out of material that shimmered and changed color depending on how it caught the light. She reached in the bag again and pulled out a pair of high heels. “And these?”

  “Wow! But I’m going to be standing next to you looking like a stable hand in my trucking clothes,” Hugh said.

  “Not a problem.” Jenny reached into another bag and brought out a pair of evening dress slacks, a long-sleeved dress shirt, and a stylish dinner jacket. Then she finished off the display by showing him a pair of slip-on dress shoes.

  “OK. Beats what I had in mind,” Hugh said, with a laugh.

  Hugh and Jenny walked into the resort’s world-class restaurant. In her high heels, Jenny’s height difference with Hugh was not such an obvious contrast. She walked with her arm in the crook of Hugh’s arm, and they turned heads as they approached the hostess station.

  This time they had a reservation, and they were immediately seated.

  “You look gorgeous,” Hugh told Jenny after the waiter had given them the menu.

  “Thank you, Hugh,” Jenny said. “I never get tired of hearing that.”

  Truth is it took Hugh’s breath away when he saw Jenny step out of the bathroom after showering. She had put on makeup and was wearing her new dress. She was stunning.

  “And you, my man, look positively handsome tonight. You clean up well.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Now, order anything you want. No limit. And don’t look at prices.”

  On their way back up to their villa Hugh said he had noticed the resort provided in-suite movies, and it would be fun to watch something.

  “We might as well take advantage of the large TV, snuggle on the couch and watch a movie together.”

  Jenny went into the bathroom first to change into comfortable clothes. On the way out she said she’d figure out how to order a movie while Hugh changed his clothes.

  Sitting on the couch in the living room, they looked over the selection together and agreed a movie called, “The Greatest Showman” would be a good one to watch. It featured quite a few popular actors, including Hugh Jackman as the lead character playing P.T. Barnum, and Michelle Williams playing his wife.

  When the movie got started, and Jenny was snuggling against Hugh on the couch with their feet on the coffee table, she said, “You know what? Hugh Jackman looks like you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he’d be the one I’d want to play you in a movie about a hero trucker and his adventures with a hijack ring.”

  Hugh laughed out loud at that one.

  “I always thought you reminded me of a young Meg Ryan,” Hugh said. “Perky, pretty, blonde. A dead ringer. I always had a crush on her as a kid.”

  “Did you ever think you could you do this with Meg Ryan?” Jenny said. Then she began some serious kissing action with a surprised, but unresisting, Hugh.

  They agreed they had liked the movie – as much as they had seen of it anyway – and then they took turns in the bathroom getting ready for bed, Jenny first.

  When Hugh came out of the bathroom the lights in the master bedroom had all been turned off, as they had been the night before. Jenny was under the covers on her side of the bed, as before. And the covers on Hugh’s side of the bed had been turned down, inviting him to climb in, as before.

  As soon as Hugh got into the bed and pulled the covers up, Jenny scooted over and claimed her spot snuggled in next to him. Her left leg was draped over Hugh’s left leg. Her left arm rested on his chest, and her head rested in the hollow between Hugh’s left shoulder and his chest.

  “Lord, help me,” Hugh said under his breath.

  “I heard that.”

  Attorney Fishburn was confident the mother’s DNA analysis would return a positive identification. Because of the circumstances of the horrific accident, Fishburn could see himself shooting for a fifty-million-dollar claim against WestAm Trucking, the truck driver’s trucking company.

  He was not so confident, however, he’d be successful in shaking a huge settlement like that out of the carrier.

  Usually, he could count on a carrier to pay a settlement to keep the whole thing out of the public’s eye. Attorneys could often make the case, right or wrong, that the cause of the accident had been the trucker’s fault because of lack of proper safety training by the trucking company. He’s seen huge settlements offered for just that reason.

  The problem this time was authorities were already hinting the truck driver would be exonerated for the crash. Doubling the problem was the celebrity status of the trucker as a hero, and his universally favorable reputation among law enforcement. It would be impossible to find a witness against him.

  The carrier would simply have no incentive to agree to a settlement – of any amount, much less for fifty million, which left Fishburn with only the alternative of filing a civil lawsuit.

  Fishburn had considered letting this one go. Find another victim, and try again. The problem with that idea, and why he had immediately dismissed it, was because the deed was done. It had cost several lives, and Joe and the husband would expect to be paid. Fishburn knew Joe could get ugly about it. The husband could turn snitch and cause all kinds of trouble.

  No, Fishburn decided, he’d have to file a civil lawsuit. But to win he’d need a ringer. Someone who could testify against the truck driver to tarnish his golden reputation. That’s the only way the attorney could see him getting enough of an edge to persuade a jury to call for the nuclear verdict Fishburn needed.

  He had begun to germinate an idea along those lines when
he had pulled up information from an Internet search about this truck driver, Hugh Mann. One newspaper article in particular had caught his attention. Apparently, a reporter at the Idaho Times newspaper was planning to ride with this trucker and do a series of feature articles about him.

  Obviously, it could be some time before the trucker was back on the road again. He was probably getting his truck repaired. Probably in Phoenix. Probably at the Freightliner dealership on I-10 south of the 202. Fishburn was familiar with that facility. The folks at that dealership wouldn’t know it but in a way the attorney who had staged numerous fake-crash accidents against truckers in and around the Phoenix area was responsible for a lot of their repair business.

  The attorney began thinking. What if he could get the reporter to hook up with the truck driver shortly after he leaves the repair facility? What if he could encourage the reporter to report back to him with damaging information that could be used against the trucker and his carrier in the lawsuit?

  Fishburn thumbed his phone to scroll his list of contacts, and tapped one of the numbers to dial the person he was looking for.

  “Frank, I’ve got a job for you. I need it done ASAP.” He listened to Frank’s end of the conversation.

  “I know it’s late. You’ll have to do some research overnight. Then here’s what I want you to do first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Fishburn spelled out his plan. Then hung up the phone.

  Perfect. A brilliant fifty-million-dollar idea.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Hello. Charlie Shields here.”

  Her desk phone had rung soon after Charlie had gotten to the newspaper office in the morning.

  “Hello. My name is Frank Rico. I’m with Rico Investigations.”

  “What can I do for you, Frank?”

  An investigator calling her. Could be a story lead. She typed “Frank Rico Investigations” into her browser’s search bar. Top of the first search page was a link to a Phoenix-based private investigation firm.

  Phoenix. Hmm. That’s where she knew Hugh was right now, and where he had gotten into the accident. Of course, her newspaper had published an article about it.