“Can’t stand the man myself,” Marshal Dimmock said. He knew I was lying. He would have heard what the pursuit was all about. “Why don’t you have your partner step out here beside you,” he said.
“He’s right behind you, officer,” I said. Floyd had moved away from the cruiser and was standing silently behind the policeman.
The Marshal looked around, surprised that he hadn’t heard Floyd.
“That’s him?” the Marshal said. “You’re hauling freight with a tin-job?”
Tin-job. I owed myself a dollar.
“That’s Floyd, he’s my partner.”
“Get over there with your master,” the Marshal said, not taking his eyes off Floyd as he moved to stand beside me. “You’re legally responsible for everything he does, you know that, right?” he asked me.
“Yes, sir, I am aware of that fact.”
“He comes any closer to me than that, he’s going to get a bullet in the head, do you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“What’s wrong with you that you can’t have a proper person driving your truck for you?”
“Floyd’s cheaper to feed,” I said.
“Don’t you give me no sass, son. No one likes a smart mouth.”
If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that... I tried to look suitably contrite and must have managed it well enough.
“Now, I bet you’re wondering why I pulled you two over,” Marshal Dimmock said.
“Floyd was keeping to the speed limit,” I said. “He’s programmed to do that.”
“I don’t doubt it,” the Marshal said. “It’s not like them things do any thinking of their own – and rightly so, in my opinion. Speed is not the issue here.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s not. I am much more concerned with the general roadworthiness of this here vee-hickle.” He nodded towards the truck. “I don’t believe I have ever seen that much rust in one place before.”
“She’s a classic,” I said.
“Damn thing looks like a menace to other road users,” he said.
“Don’t judge her by her looks,” I said. “She’s properly maintained, I promise you.”
“That so? If what you say is true, that truck would have two working taillights, wouldn’t it, and not just the one?”
“I bet she just developed a short-circuit. I can fix that easily,” I said.
“And I bet this heap of junk is riddled with gremlins and isn’t safe to be out on the public highway. How about that for a bet?”
“If you check, I’m sure you’ll find there’s no major safety issues,” I said.
“Well, that’s not something I can personally determine,” he said. “I reckon I’ll have to have a qualified mechanic come out here and make sure it’s as well-maintained as you claim. He’ll probably have to take the whole darn thing apart.”
My emotions were see-sawing at this point and I was worried which would win out. On one side I was feeling helpless, unable to do anything to challenge the authority of this officious swazz-stick. And on the other, I could feel my blood beginning to boil and I wanted to punch him in the mouth. Maybe Floyd’s sensors picked this up.
“We have a certificate of roadworthiness issued by an official testing station,” Floyd said.
“Did you say something?” the Marshal asked me, ignoring Floyd.
Floyd went back to the cab and retrieved our folder of documents. He gave the certificate to me and I passed it to the Marshal.
“Where was this paperwork issued? Some hick western town where you bribed the official?” he asked.
“Cicada City,” I said. He seemed to recognise the name.
“Well, there you go. Hick town. They might let you drive this moving violation on their roads, but standards here aren’t quite so lax.”
“That certificate is valid in every county in Saphira, you know that,” I said.
“I do know that. But I’m going to have to check whether this here certificate is genuine before I can allow you to move on.”
“You could just call the man who signed it,” Floyd said. “His name’s Delbert Stewart. He’s your wife’s brother, isn’t he? You wouldn’t doubt his word, would you?”
Marshal Dimmock refused to look at Floyd. The colour rose in his face. He knew he’d been outfoxed. Floyd must have been dipping into databases all over the planet looking for something he could use against the lawman. I forced myself not to smile.
“I’m sure your wife would understand if you investigated her bother,” I said. “You have to make sure he’s doing his job properly. After all, you’re only carrying out your sworn duty to uphold the law.”
Marshal Dimmock looked at his watch and tried to get his blood pressure down out of the danger zone. He stared at the watch face for quite a while. Maybe he was calculating how long it was until lunchtime.
“I have decided that I am going to show leniency toward you,” he said finally. “I’m not going to order a formal examination of this vehicle. But I am going to issue an on-the-spot fine for the taillight. One hundred dollars.”
“A hundred?!” I said. That was double the maximum penalty.
“Pay the man,” Floyd said.
I pulled the fold of banknotes out of my pocket.
“Alliance dollars will do just fine,” the Marshal said.
I handed over the cash. “Can I get a receipt for that?” I asked. “I’d hate for anyone to think I just paid you a bribe.”
“You should just roll on out of here before I change my mind about stripping that truck down to its axels,” he said. He turned away.
“You can kiss my axels,” I muttered under my breath.
“Oh, and boys,” the Marshal said, turning back and almost catching my hand gesture. “I want you to keep your speed down to thirty miles an hour until you stop somewhere and get that light fixed.”
“We will,” I said and waved.
“I know you will. Because I’m going to be following you all the way. In case you didn’t notice, this here car has a Federal Marshal badge on the door. That means my jurisdiction doesn’t stop at the next county border. We provide service across the whole of this fine planet. You have a nice day now.”
We got underway again, the three vehicles crawling along at a snail’s pace, Floyd then me and then Marshal Rufus T. Dimmock. Floyd did tell me what the ‘T’ stood for, but I forget. Toadface or Turdwanger or something like that. It was more like being in a funeral cortege than a trucker’s convoy.
I’m an outlaw by vocation but that doesn’t mean I have no respect for law and order. But I reserve my respect for true justice, not some badly warped version that only serves the wealthy and powerful. As far as I’m concerned, the greedy deserve to be robbed and bullies should be exposed for what they are. I like to think that what I do restores the balance just a little.
Marshal Dimmock was a thief too, but he hid it behind a badge and pretended to be an upstanding citizen. But not everyone was fooled. I once heard a couple of motorists joking in a roadside diner. ‘Why is a Marshal’s car green and white? To show he accepts dollar bills.’ And, ‘Why is there a gold badge on the door? To show he accepts payment in coins too.’ It only takes a few corrupt individuals to tarnish the reputation of the whole service. Dimmock was one of those men. Hopefully, he would get his comeuppance someday. Luckily for him we were on a schedule and just wanted to get away from him, otherwise I’d have been tempted to take him on.
“What were you doing in his car back there?” I asked Floyd.
“Just making a couple of modifications,” Floyd said.
“Did you loosen his wheel nuts?”
“Something a little more subtle,” he said.
“I hope it stops him. Otherwise he’s going to keep pulling us over and I’m going to run out of cash.”
“Did it strike you as odd that he didn’t want to look inside the trailer?” Floyd asked.
“He was more interested in the dollars in my pocket.
”
“But we could be carrying anything,” Floyd said.
“Stopping crime isn’t high on his list of priorities.”
“Or perhaps he already knew what was in there.”
I thought about that. “Makes sense,” I said. “Flint probably bribed him so he’d let us pass. The Marshal just stopped us to make a little extra on top of that.”
“How long do you think he’ll keep following us?” Floyd asked.
I looked in my rear-view mirror. The Marshal’s car was about three-quarters of a mile back, smeared by the heat-haze coming up off the road.
“Until it’s time for him to eat,” I said. “He doesn’t look like the sort who’d miss a meal.”
“There’s a diner ten miles ahead,” Floyd said.
“We’d better stop there and fix that taillight. Maybe then he’ll go away.”
Floyd could give the truck a thorough going over while I ate at the diner. We needed to make sure there weren’t any other minor violations we could be pulled over for.
At thirty miles an hour, those ten miles were going to take us a full twenty minutes. And at that rate, we’d be lucky to hit New Grimsby this side of Winter.
I decided that if the Marshal followed us after the diner, I would head off at speed so he’d pursue me. Floyd could then put his foot down and make up some lost time. I was sure I could outrun the Marshal’s car. Fairly sure.
“This is Bobby-Ray Bitrot with a weather update for the desert counties. On a scale of ‘hot, really hot, and are you kidding me?’, the thermometer says it’s hotter than Satan’s scronies out there. If you’re human, your underwear will stick to your ass and your thighs will stick to your chair. So just relax, throw open all the windows and take off your clothes. Unless you’re on the bus, obviously.
“And spare a thought for your robot today – he’s basically sealed inside a metal can. If you see smoke coming from his joints, it may be time to pop the lid on that thing.”
Chapter Twelve
The road surface started to improve and we left the worst of the dust behind us. We had also started to head upwards. There were hills in front of us and the day after tomorrow we’d be on the mountain road, heading towards the peaks that formed a chain along the border of wherever we were and wherever we were headed. On the other side of the mountains, we’d hopefully start to see green fields and forests. Deserts are hot and dry and uncomfortable. Jungles are hot and wet and uncomfortable. But I reckon that forests and farmland are in the Goldilocks zone when it comes to climate.
But before all that, we had to get to the mountains. Preferably before I was too old to remember why we were making this trip. The steep winding road would have slowed us down a little anyway, but crawling along with Marshal Dimmock on our tail made it feel like we were sliding backwards. Hopefully, he’d soon find some other distraction and leave us to get on with our journey. I hoped the diner would do the trick.
Back when we started out as truckers, Floyd explained the basic rules to me. I can’t honestly say that he had my full attention, but I do remember some of what he said such as ‘Never pick a fight in a biker bar’ and ‘Never eat roadkill’, both of which sound like good advice. He had also said ‘Never pick up hitch-hikers’ and again that seemed a reasonable suggestion. My only slight concern about these rules was that they weren’t based on actual personal experience. Floyd got them from watching old trucker movies. That’s where he’d also got all that crazy radio communication stuff and the use of ridiculous on-air aliases. It is entirely possible that we lacked some of the wisdom of genuine real-life truckers. I say this, in part, to explain why we occasionally look like we don’t know what we’re doing.
Of course, sometimes a person does stupid things even when he does know better.
“Don’t even think about it,” Floyd said. He kept going and didn’t slow the truck.
The car at the side of the road up ahead was glossy, red, and sporty. It might have been a new Serpente Rosso but I can’t be sure – I didn’t look at it that closely. Standing by the open hood of the car was a long pair of legs supporting an incredible body. She had on a broad-brimmed straw hat and big dark glasses. Her white blouse was knotted above a tiny pair of pale cut-off jeans leaving her belly-button visible. As I got closer I could see that under the blouse she was wearing a sheen of perspiration and nothing else.
“We have to stop,” I said.
“No, we don’t,” Floyd said. The truck was already past her car. “Let old Smokey stop and offer her assistance.”
Marshal Rufus T. Dimmock chose that moment to pull out and motor past me. He kept going, overtaking Floyd and disappearing around the bend. I’m guessing he heard the sound of the dinner gong. Or his bladder had reached bursting point.
“No hitch-hikers, that’s the rule,” Floyd said. He’d slowed the truck as the green-and-white went by but he still wasn’t stopping.
“She’s not a hitch-hiker, she’s a damsel in distress,” I said. I pulled into the side of the road about twenty yards down the hill from the marooned red convertible.
“We’re not obliged to stop and help every half-wit who doesn’t properly maintain their vehicle,” Floyd said. He knew I’d stopped and I saw his brakes come on.
“We can’t leave her here,” I said. “What if the Dragon Riders come through after us. Do you think those creeps will behave like gentlemen?”
“Perhaps she’s hoping to meet just that kind of man,” Floyd said.
“Do you honestly think she’d stand here in hundred-degree heat trying to pick up guys?”
“No,” Floyd admitted. “She’d do that down at the truck stop.”
“I’ll just give her a lift to the diner. It will be my good deed for the day. What harm can it do?”
“She’s trouble looking for a place to happen,” Floyd insisted.
“You don’t know that.”
“Based on your extensive real-world experience, when has a woman not been trouble?” he asked. It was a fair question.
“They’re always trouble,” I said. “And so are most of the guys I meet. It’s part of what makes it fun.”
Floyd was silent for a moment considering this and a new thought must have come to him. “Maybe you should give her more than just a lift,” he said. “You need something to take your mind off she-who-shall-not-be-named. Get back into the saddle.”
“That’s offensive on so many levels,” I said. “And besides, we’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Floyd said, “it’s not like it’ll take you long to disappoint her.” I’m sure he meant that as a challenge. The taillights on the truck blinked off and it pulled away up the hill.
I put the Trekker in ‘drive’ and pulled up level with the convertible. When I rolled down my window the damsel tottered towards me on her spike-heeled mules. It brought to mind a scene from a porno movie. I half-expected her to lick her lips and tell me she was desperate for a man with the right tool for the job.
“What took you so long?” she asked. “Did you have to call your mother and ask if it was okay to stop?”
She was closer than she would ever know.
“Car trouble?” I asked.
“No, I’m standing here trying to pick up guys. Do you have air-con in that thing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I leaned over and pushed the passenger door open.
I turned up the air-conditioning while she climbed in and made herself comfortable. She took off her hat and tossed it on the back seat, shaking out long honey-blonde hair. Then she leaned close to the air vent, flapping the damp fabric of her blouse.
“If these things were fake they’d have melted out there,” she said, adjusting them and letting me see just a hint of areola. Was she deliberately teasing me? “Why don’t you put this thing in drive and show me what it can do.”
“I can only take you as far as the diner,” I said as we pulled away.
“Honey, I don’t care where it is as long as we’r
e not out in the sun.”
A man with a one-track mind might have read entirely the wrong thing into that comment. I drove sensibly, resisting the urge to try and show off. That never goes well.
“I’m Quin,” I said.
“Marcie. I’m sorry if I was a bit crabby back there. It’s the heat. And guys just kept driving past me.”
“They probably thought it was a trap,” I said.
“What?”
“Highway robbers,” I said. “A beautiful woman stands at the side of the road looking helpless. A guy stops to help. And then her accomplices ambush him. It’s one way they try to steal a trucker’s load.” At least it was in the movies.
“People do that?” Marcie asked. “Is that why your friend didn’t stop?”
“What friend?”
“In the black truck.”
“Oh, he’s not my friend,” I said. “I don’t know who he is.”
That seemed to confuse her. “Oh. Well, I just wanted you to know that I’m grateful you stopped.”
The Trekker worked its way up the hill and the only sounds came from the tyres on the road and the air from the vents.
“You’ve got an east coast accent, a car with west coast plates, and here you are stuck in the middle,” I said.
“Middle of nowhere is right,” she said. “The car’s not mine.”
“Who’s the guy?”
Marcie looked at me. “He’s nobody.”
“But he thinks he’s somebody?”
“Don’t they all? They put on a suit and a silk shirt and suddenly they’re Mister Big. And you only discover they’re not when it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late,” I said.
“Maybe not in your world.”
“Then hop over to a new world,” I said. “Be someone else. People have been doing that for centuries.”
“This is the only world I know,” she said.
“Saphira?”
“You know what I mean.”
We reached the brow of the hill and started down the other side. I could see the diner nestled in the bottom of the valley.
The radio on the dashboard bleeped and the notification light flashed. I turned it on.
Road Rage Page 7