by C. J. Box
“I think his mother lived at home,” Pedersen said. “I hope to hell she wasn’t inside.”
They exchanged glances.
“We’ll find him,” the sheriff said, reassuring her. “You can’t hide for very long in an all-black eighteen-wheeler, for Christ sake. We know his license plate number, and his DOT registration, and the description of his truck. The word is out everywhere. Every trooper in the west is looking for him. We’ll get the son of a bitch.”
Cassie nodded dumbly, but it all came crashing in on her. She’d let him escape by not calling it in when she found the package in her car. She knew it, Pedersen knew it, Ronald Pergram knew it.
“He set up Legerski,” she said, “and he used me to pull the trigger.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. You did the right thing. You couldn’t have known,” Pedersen said.
“He thinks ahead,” she said, gesturing toward the smoldering ruins. “He plans things out. He probably has a plan of some kind to get away with this.”
She closed her eyes. “Instead of killing the monster I killed the monster’s sidekick. The monster is still out there.”
And Gracie’s voice echoed: You need to find him.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad
—Jim Morrison, “The Hitchhiker”
Afterward
3:37 A.M., Friday, December 7
TWO WEEKS AFTER RONALD PERGRAM became Dale Everett Spradley of Oakes, North Dakota, he stood alone under a television monitor at a Love’s truck stop outside Tulsa to check the load board. He’d unloaded thirteen pallets of Washington State frozen salmon at a grocery warehouse at midnight, which left ten skids in his trailer to deliver to Little Rock in the morning. He was looking for a partial load he could pick up in the area to maximize his trip to Arkansas and he found it: ten skids of frozen farm-raised catfish in Inola, Oklahoma, needed to be trucked to Hot Springs, Arkansas. The foray would take him a couple of hours out of his way, but as usual he was ahead of schedule.
He jotted down the telephone number for the dispatch broker, checked his wristwatch, and made the call. It was a nice $4,500 deal and he took it. No reason to run his new truck LTL (less than a load) when he could pick up a partial en route. It was free money.
The truck stop was empty and quiet except for two drivers huddled together drinking coffee in the twenty-hour diner. He nodded at them as he passed and they nodded back. No recognition at all. He smiled to himself. The storm had passed.
He was ready to go hunting again. He needed to go hunting again.
* * *
The first twenty-four hours after he drove out of Gardiner were the most stressful, even though he’d swapped out his Montana license plates for Oregon plates he’d stolen the year before and stored in his “Oh Shit” box for just such an emergency. It wasn’t difficult to black out the DOT numbers on his driver’s side door with black Krylon spray paint and replace them with stick-on numbers that looked good enough even though they couldn’t be traced to anyone. He’d driven straight south without stopping, using his piss-jar to urinate, and taking back roads through tiny sleeping towns to avoid interstate highways and weigh scales. He’d dyed his hair jet-black in the sink of a remote rest stop, and added a big drooping false mustache that matched his new color. He’d wear it until his own grew out. He’d added thick horned-rim glasses with clear lenses and except for the intensity of his eyes he barely recognized himself in the mirror.
Because his trailer was empty he didn’t have to refuel until he entered New Mexico, where he bought diesel for cash on an Indian reservation notoriously lax for keeping a sales log. He spotted three troopers en route to Brownsville, Texas, but they didn’t look back.
He’d seen his own face on a television tuned to Fox News behind the counter as he paid for fuel. They’d used the one from his driver’s license, and he looked ruddy, washed-out, and jowly. The attendant didn’t look over his shoulder at the screen, and Pergram didn’t look up.
* * *
At an infamous used truck outlet in Brownsville next to the Mexico border, he took a loss on his truck and trailer and traded up for a two-year-old bright yellow Peterbilt Model 389 with a Cummins ISX15 engine, an eighteen-speed Eaton-Fuller transmission, a Unibilt Ultracab with a seventy-seven-inch bed, a microwave and refrigerator, blackout curtains, and 190,000 miles on the gauge. The cost with trade-in was $105,000. He added a $70,000 reefer trailer and got the salesman to agree to lose the paperwork in exchange for an all-cash payment that took most of the stash in his “Oh Shit” box. He knew his old truck would be resold south of the border within a few days. Down there, they didn’t care about DOT numbers or plates that didn’t jibe.
While they got his new rig ready, Pergram walked to an Internet café he’d found several years ago. The owner of the place specialized in documents, and sold most of them to coyotes or illegals coming across. But for his last $25,000 in cash, the man produced a new commercial driver’s license (CDL) in the name of Dale E. Spradley as well as a social security card, medical examiner’s report, and a clean CSA scoresheet that showed Spradley was a damned good driver who kept his nose clean and played by the rules. Pergram/Spradley used one of the rental computers to purchase load insurance online, and he was back in business.
* * *
A week prior, he’d scored his first big load as an independent owner-operator. He picked up twenty-four pallets of frozen salmon in Washington to deliver among four warehouses coast-to-coast. As he dropped each partial load he used the load boards at truck stops to arrange smaller loads and keep his trailer full and making money.
Because he was working for himself, he wouldn’t ever again have to worry about satellite tracking, or overbearing dispatchers, or Qualcomm units that noted his every move. He’d negotiate his own deals from his prepaid and untraceable cell phone and keep his truck on the road, always moving forward. He’d eat on the road, sleep in his truck, keep his logs clean, and stop at every weigh station to rebuild his track record. It wouldn’t take long.
He thought about what had happened back in Montana but he didn’t dwell on it. He admitted his mistakes—involving others, primarily—and learned from them. Never again would he have a fixed address, a home base, an obsessive mother with a big mouth. There was no need.
Although he was Dale Spradley of North Dakota, he would never have to actually set foot in Oakes.
In a spiral notebook he kept in his console he’d sketched out the reason why he’d never have to rely on a home or somewhere like the Schweitzer place ever again. That’s because he’d carefully designed where he’d weld a false wall inside the nose end of his trailer, cutting the overall load capacity from fifty-three feet to forty-eight feet. Forty-eight feet was a standard load length, and he doubted anyone would ever notice the missing five feet of length inside with a naked eye. Behind that false wall would be an eight-foot-by-five-foot compartment. Big enough for a cot fastened to the floor, sturdy enough for ringbolts in the walls, wired for video and audio, and soundproofed from the outside. He would be able to carry his Schweitzer place with him.
He felt unleashed.
Like a shark, he’d always keep moving. No one could ever pin him down again. He’d pick up a load on one coast and deliver it to a warehouse on the other and never return to a house or a town. The scenery would roll by day after day and he’d keep his eyes out for opportunities.
* * *
On the way to Inola on old Route 66 for the skids of frozen catfish, dawn broke over the horizon. It was clear and cold and there were commas of snow on the Oklahoma prairie. He had to tap his brakes to prevent running into an older model Honda weaving unsteadily on the two-lane highway. As he swung around it, he could look down and see inside.
A disheveled brown-haired teenaged girl in sloppy lounge pajamas, her hair askew, was squinting hard over the wheel and barely keeping her car on the road. Hungover, he thought, and driving
home in the morning after a long hard night of beer and sex and privilege.
She looked up at him, obviously annoyed that he was staying right with her.
The Lizard King returned.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Butch and Dana Preston of Montana, two wonderful long-haul truck drivers, for offering technical assistance and answering all my questions during that cold January ride on I-90 from Billings to Chicago.
I’m also grateful to my first readers: Laurie Box, Molly Donnell, Becky Reif, and Roxanne Box. Special thanks to Ann Rittenberg—who was right as always.
Thanks also to Don Hajicek, Jennifer Fonnesbeck, and the terrific St. Martin’s Minotaur team: Sally Richardson, Andy Martin, Hector DeJean, Matt Baldacci, Matthew Shear, and my peerless editor Jennifer Enderlin.
ALSO BY C. J. BOX
THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Back of Beyond
Three Weeks to Say Goodbye
Blue Heaven
THE JOE PICKETT NOVELS
Breaking Point
Force of Nature
Cold Wind
Nowhere to Run
Below Zero
Blood Trail
Free Fire
In Plain Sight
Out of Range
Trophy Hunt
Winterkill
Savage Run
Open Season
About the Author
C. J. BOX is the bestselling author of Back of Beyond, Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, and sixteen other novels, including the award-winning Joe Pickett series. Blue Heaven won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2009, and Box has won the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award. His first novel, Open Season, was a New York Times Notable Book and an Edgar Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Box’s work has been translated into twenty-six languages. He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE HIGHWAY. Copyright © 2013 by C. J. Box. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph by Exactostock/Superstock
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Box, C. J.
The highway / C. J. Box.—First edition.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-58320-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-03192-1 (e-book)
1. Missing persons—Fiction 2. Roads—Montana—Fiction. 3. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.O87658H54 2013b
813'.54—dc23
2013009869
eISBN 9781250031921
First Edition: July 2013