Road Rage

by Paul Tomlinson

  “Of course,” I lied. “I knew that.”

  “While you were being distracted, Crawford planned to have his men grab the truck.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “They could either do that at the roadhouse or they could lie in wait down the highway on a blind bend somewhere,” Floyd said.

  “I’m with you so far,” I said.

  “Three miles past the roadhouse there was a sign at the side of the road, Pick Your Own Squash, did you see it?”

  I nodded. I remembered passing it. I hadn’t felt a sudden urge to don dungarees and gardening gloves.

  “Did you notice what the sign was attached to?” Floyd asked.

  I hadn’t, but I was able to make an intelligent guess despite my brain’s fuddled state. “An old shipping container on a trailer?”

  Floyd pointed his finger at me and nodded.

  Farmers weren’t supposed to put up billboards along the highway. The authorities reckoned they were dangerous – a driver might be distracted by one or run off the road into one. Or both. The real reason was that the corporations that owned the official billboard franchises didn’t want any amateur competition. Local farmers got around these objections by rolling old trailers to the roadside borders of their properties and plastering signs on the side of them.

  “I pulled off the road and made the switch,” Floyd said. “I planned to unload the whiskey into that empty container but in the end, it was quicker to just swap them over.”

  “Our trailer is hidden behind that sign?” I said. “Floyd, you’re beautiful.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” He raised his arms and began another shuffling pirouette.

  “Come on,” I said, “it won’t be long before Crawford sends his men back to find where you hid the whiskey.”

  When I explained all of this to Harmony, I let her believe that it had been my idea. Including the part about the second tractor. I justified this on the grounds that it was best she didn’t know how smart Floyd really was. As far as she was concerned, he was just an ordinary robot. If she ever found out he was an artificial sentience, she’d probably try to steal him. And I couldn’t blame her for that.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “We need a plan to rescue Skeet,” I said.

  “And then we’re going to deliver the whiskey?” Harmony asked.

  I nodded and grinned – briefly. My lip still hurt. As soon as Floyd told me Crawford didn’t have the whiskey, I felt that we still had a chance to pull this off. It wasn’t about the fifteen thousand dollars any more – I wanted to rub Crawford’s big ugly face in it. But I wasn’t going to risk Skeet’s life by doing something stupid. Though I’ll admit that I do have a very flexible definition of ‘not stupid’.

  “We’re going to offer Crawford an exchange,” I said. “They give us Skeet and we tell them where the whiskey is.”

  “He’ll never go for that,” Harmony said.

  “He will if we arrange a face-to-face trade,” I said.

  Harmony wasn’t convinced. “If you put us and the truck in the same place, Crawford will have his men kill you and me and Skeet and then he’ll drive away with the whiskey.”

  “We’re not going to be in the same place,” I said. “We just have to make Crawford think we are. We’ll hide the whiskey where he’ll never find it.”

  “We will?” Harmony said.

  “What’s the best place to hide a needle?” I asked.

  Harmony frowned. “A haystack?”

  I shook my head. “That’s the second best place. The best place to hide a needle is in a pile of needles.”

  “How would you ever recognise your own needle?” she asked.

  “Exactly!”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?” Harmony asked.

  “I have no idea what he’s talking about either,” Floyd said.

  “Misdirection,” I said.

  Harmony looked none the wiser. “Explain it in terms I’ll understand.”

  “Find the Lady.”

  A smile spread across Harmony’s face. “Misdirection!” she said. “We’re going to need three containers.”

  “And two of Doogal’s tractors,” I said.

  “Where are we going to hide the lady?” Harmony asked.

  “You’ll like that part,” I said.

  Floyd’s head was turning from Harmony to me and back again throughout this exchange. He wasn’t just testing the repair Doogal had made. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Floyd was right, the rusty tractor in Doogal’s yard looked uncannily like the one we’d driven across the country. Park them side by side and you could probably spot differences between them, but we weren’t planning on doing that.

  “Have you got another one of these?” I asked Doogal.

  He looked like he was going to ask me a question but then he remembered I was paying him extra not to. He just shrugged. “Got three or four of them, have a look around and take your pick.”

  We picked out another rusty black tractor and also found three serviceable trailers and Doogal used his crane to lift a battered shipping container onto each of them. In accordance with our agreement, he didn’t ask any questions. The containers weren’t the right colour, but nobody ever gives those things a second glance. The squash farmer would never realise that his signboard trailer had been switched. Twice.

  We paid Doogal three thousand dollars from my emergency stash. When we drove out of his yard, our convoy consisted of the Trekker – driven by me – and two (almost) identical rigs driven by Harmony and Floyd. We’d pick up the third one from the yard later – after we’d rescued Skeet. I felt the urge to start singing a trucking song. I stopped when my co-conspirators threatened to crush me between two trucks.

  We headed towards the city, reaching the suburbs a couple of hours later. This brought us closer to the finish line, but it didn’t feel like it. We now had two trucks and no cargo. It was time to plan our next move so we pulled into a truck-stop. It was the kind that is almost exclusively used by truckers. The lot was filled with big rigs. Some of them looked like ours, but most had gleaming paintwork and shining chrome as if they’d just been driven out of the showroom.

  I had to park the Trekker in a separate area reserved for ‘tourists’. Oh, the humiliation. Not daring to show my face inside, I made Harmony and Floyd fetch coffee and pastries and bring them out to me. I told them this was because I needed to do some thinking. When Harmony came out she told me three guys had given her their numbers. I was sure that if I’d been driving one of the trucks I would have fared just as well – even with my bust lip.

  Harmony and I sat in the Trekker and ate cherry Danish while Floyd didn’t.

  “We need to figure out where Clem Crawford is hiding,” I said. While the other two were inside, I’d done a quick search of local property records. They showed that Crawford owned a bizarre variety of real estate in and around New Grimsby. Including the dockside freight yard where we were supposed to deliver the whiskey by noon the following day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also had a race track. There were also a couple of references to him running an illegal poker game – I took note of these for future reference.

  “He’ll pick the place he thinks is the easiest to defend,” I said, as we scanned the list on the Trekker’s screen. “Look for something like an underground bunker.”

  There were hotels, a couple of nightclubs, a casino, and a strip-joint. From the pictures we looked at, none of them seemed heavily fortified.

  After thinking about it for some time, Harmony sat back in the passenger seat and ran her tongue over the front of her teeth. “He’s at the freight yard,” she said.

  “Possibly,” I said. “But we need to be sure.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “If he knows we still have the whiskey, he’ll have men guarding that place to stop us making the delivery.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s there with Skeet.”

  “If he’s som
ewhere else, he’d have to split his guards into two teams,” Harmony said. “Why guard two places with small armies when you can guard one place with a big army.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “I should go and check it out. I have to know where they’re holding Skeet.”

  “We should all go,” Floyd said. He was standing by the Trekker’s open window. In his new suit of armour, there wasn’t room for him inside. He only just fit behind the steering wheel in the truck.

  I shook my head. “I want you and Harmony to go and pick up the whiskey. We have to make sure it’s safe. The longer we leave it there, the greater the chance that Crawford’s men will find it.”

  Hiding things in plain sight is a good tactic but it does have inherent risks. Neither Floyd nor Harmony were enthusiastic about us splitting up, but they had to admit that we didn’t have enough time left to do everything as a team. Besides which, Floyd wasn’t going to be much use sneaking around on the dockside. He clanked when he walked and it sounded like someone kicking a trashcan down a fire escape. I didn’t tell him that. The armour was perfect for his part of the plan, which was going to involve shooting and possibly blowing things up.

  We got out of the Trekker and brushed crumbs of flaky pastry from our clothes. I offered to help Harmony get rid of a couple of stubborn flakes but she turned me down.

  Harmony didn’t need armour for her part of the plan. It involved her stealing yet another truck. When Floyd and me started this trucking thing I never expected that we’d end up with a fleet.

  “Do you think you can distract a trucker and steal his truck?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said. She looked into my eyes and one side of her mouth turned up into a smile. “I’ve missed working with you,” she said. She stepped in closer and I got a whiff of her spicy perfume. “You can improvise a plan better than any man I ever met.” This made me blush a little bit. She rested her arms on my shoulders and pulled me towards her. “Does it hurt when I do this?” She kissed me. It did hurt my bruised lip but I didn’t say so. I didn’t want her to stop. I began to feel a bit woozy and knew it was nothing to do with the blows to the head or the painkillers.

  Harmony stepped back and smiled. When she took another step back I saw that she was wearing my gun belt. She’d taken it from me while we were kissing. I think she’d got the distraction part sorted. I hoped she didn’t have to get in quite that close with the trucker.

  “Human men really do have an unfair disadvantage,” Floyd said.

  “Don’t you go spoiling things by telling them,” Harmony said.

  We parted company then. The next time we saw each other, this whole thing would be over. One way or another.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Reconnaissance is a tricky word to spell. That’s probably why the military shortens it to ‘recon’. In days of old, people in my line of work used to call it ‘casing the joint’ – checking somewhere out before you robbed it. Thieves would look at the layout of the building, they’d get a map of the surrounding streets, and they’d try and get inside information on the security systems in the place. We still do that sort of thing, though now you can do a lot of it sitting in front of a computer screen. But sometimes you just have to go and check the place out in person.

  I’d already looked at satellite images of Clem Crawford’s freight depot. It was a lot like Honest Herb’s where we’d originally picked up the consignment of whiskey. That seemed like a lifetime ago. Dishonest Clem’s was a larger scale operation and it was located next to the ocean. Some of the stuff he shipped actually went out on ships. Containers were loaded onto them and delivered up and down the coast. Ships were cheaper than aircraft and could carry bigger loads. On the downside, they were slower and they smelled of rust, rotting seaweed, and dead fish.

  I think we could have sailed the container on a boat up to the dock and lifted it with a crane into Crawford’s yard. But that would take more time than we had. And it would have been cheating. The bet was that we would deliver it by truck. We weren’t allowed to fly it in there so we probably couldn’t sail it in either. I didn’t want to give Crawford any loophole he could exploit to avoid paying up.

  Although the freight depot was a twenty-four-hour operation, things got quieter after the sun went down. Trucks still came and went, but instead of one every ten minutes, there were maybe two an hour. I could see armed guards on the gate and could tell from the reaction of the truck drivers that the men with guns were new.

  Crawford had his own fleet of trucks, all smartly painted in white with a distinctive green and red logo next to his name. Originally, I’d thought about painting one of our trucks to match so we could just drive the whiskey straight into the yard without anyone noticing. But even with a fresh coat of paint, our rig would have given itself away too easily. You can’t polish a turd, as the old saying goes, and even if you roll it in glitter people can still sniff it out. That’s why I abandoned the idea and sent Harmony off to get one of Crawford’s trucks instead.

  “You want me to break in there and steal one of his trucks?” she’d asked.

  I don’t doubt that she could have done it, but there was no need for her to sneak into the lion’s den. It was much easier to hijack a truck that was on its way to the depot. The hijacked truck would also come with a legitimate manifest and that paperwork would get us waved through the security gate into the yard.

  Sneaking into the lion’s den was my job. Guys with dogs were patrolling inside the chain-link fence. A glint of moonlight on metal gave away the fact that there were armed guards up on the roof of the main building too. There would also be security droids dotted around – there always were. And the place was littered with cameras. It looked like Harmony was right – Crawford had concentrated his army in this one location. Chances were good that Skeet was around here somewhere. All I needed to do now was get inside and find him. Once I knew where he was, I could improvise a plan for getting him out.

  I felt cold metal pressed to my temple. Sometimes Fate likes to show you that all your plans are for nothing.

  “Don’t move, punk.” It would have sounded more menacing if the guard didn’t sound like he was twelve.

  I didn’t resist. I didn’t have the energy. Every part of me still ached from the beating I’d taken. It even hurt when I raised my hands. Besides, I’d wanted to get into the depot building – and here I was being escorted inside. Getting out again was going to be more of a problem.

  I was taken to a disused storage bay. Concrete floor, concrete walls, and concrete pillars holding up a concrete ceiling. It looked like someone had swept it recently. There were no windows, just yellowish overhead lights.

  Skeet was chained to one of the pillars. One side of his face was swollen and blood had leaked from the corner of his mouth. Other than that he looked in better shape than I did. He gave me a half-smile and shrugged. What can you do about it? If he was disappointed to see me enter as a prisoner, he hid it well.

  Clem Crawford was standing in front of a door opposite the one I’d come in through. I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was pleased to see me. He had obviously been expecting me. Preparations had been made.

  A battered metal chair sat in the middle of a pool of light. Next to it was one of those red tool chests on wheels. Some of its drawers were partly open. There was an electric drill sitting on top and it was fitted with a bit for making big holes in things. I think they were planning to do a little DIY torture on yours truly. I wished I’d swallowed a few more of those pain killers before I came in. I didn’t wait to be asked, I went and sat in the chair. I was too tired to stand up while Crawford threatened me.

  “It wasn’t very smart coming here,” Crawford said.

  Looking back over the last couple of weeks – and back even further than that – ‘smart’ wasn’t really my thing. I just shrugged. What can you do about it?

  “Where’s the whiskey?” Crawford asked.

  “I thought you had it,” I said
.

  “It wasn’t in your trailer.”

  “It wasn’t?” I grinned at him.

  “You’re going to tell me where it is,” he said. He walked towards me and picked up the electric drill. From the way he handled it, I got the impression this wasn’t the first time he’d played out this scene. He put the drill bit close to my temple and started it spinning.

  “Where is the whiskey?” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “Where is it?” he said more loudly.

  “What?” I shouted.

  Crawford turned off the drill. His face was redder than it had been. “Where is the whiskey?”

  “It’s probably in the other truck,” I said.

  “There’s another truck?” he asked.

  “At least one more,” I said, nodding. I wasn’t sure at that point whether Harmony had hijacked another one but I did know we had at least three.

  Crawford sighed. Still holding the drill he walked over to the pillar where Skeet was chained. He raised the drill and placed the bit very close to Skeet’s left eyeball. He didn’t turn it on. He didn’t need to. I could see sweat trickle down from Skeet’s temple.

  I’d been expecting something like this from the moment I saw Skeet was in the room. A smart villain never threatens the hero. He threatens someone the hero cares about. I’m no hero – I’d have told Crawford what he wanted to know if he’d threatened me.

  “It’s hidden just off Route Nine,” I said. “Behind a signboard on the side of the road. Skeet can show you where.”

  Skeet didn’t give himself away by expressing surprise. All of his attention was focused on the drill. I wanted to get Skeet out of there. He stood a better chance of escaping if he wasn’t chained up in a concrete room. Once he was out of the way I could concentrate on my own escape.

  “He told us he didn’t know where it was,” Crawford said, suspicious.

  “That’s because he was expecting me to rescue him,” I said.