Paradise Valley

by C. J. Box

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Amanda. Amanda Lee Hackl.”

  “I’m Ron,” he said. “Now Amanda, do you think it’s the Christmas season?”

  “No, why?”

  “Your sweater.”

  “I just wear it to feel happy,” she confessed.

  “Do you cook?”

  “Cook?”

  “I’m sure you know what ‘cook’ means. Do you make meals for your husband Harold?”

  She nodded. Tears flooded her eyes. She didn’t like being on her knees, being seen by him on her knees.

  “Does Harold complain about your cooking?” Ron asked.

  Her voice trembled when she said, “Sometimes.”

  “Often?”

  “Not very often.”

  “Are you one of those fancy cooks or do you make good old-fashioned American food?”

  “You mean like meat loaf?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, I make a good meat loaf,” she said.

  “No arugula or crap like that?”

  “No.”

  “Can you make a peach pie?”

  “Maybe not from scratch, but I can do it.”

  Ron seemed to be studying her. Making up his mind about something. She wanted to get up, but she didn’t dare run.

  Oh, how she hoped there would be a random drive-by from the sheriff’s department. But with all of those sirens down below, it was unlikely any law enforcement would be in the area.

  “Okay, we can give it a shot,” he said. “Amanda, I want you to get up and go get in that tan truck. Get in the passenger-side door and curl up on the floor. I don’t want you looking out the window and I don’t want anyone seeing you in there when we drive away.”

  She closed her eyes tight and cried. Then she felt the vibration on her neck and she recoiled from it.

  “Amanda,” he cautioned, “you know what comes next. Now get up and walk to the truck. We’re going to drive for a couple of hours and you’ll get to meet another woman who is along for the ride. Maybe you two will hit it off, or maybe not.

  “And quit blubbering, will you?”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  FOR THE LIZARD KING that dusk the planet had stopped rotating.

  It was no longer rolling toward him on a ribbon of asphalt where he sat motionless above it all in the high cab of his Peterbilt as he had for decades.

  His mind and body had not adjusted to being stopped and it was jarring. When he closed his eyes he could still feel the motion of the road inside him. It was as if he were slightly drunk or drugged or he was a longtime sailor who was stepping on land for the first time in years.

  The ground beneath his feet felt still and dead as he emerged from the double-wide trailer west of Sanish, North Dakota. From a place that smelled of greasy dirt and spilled alcohol. Weed smoke clung to the curtains, the fabric of the furniture, and the gray-tinged unmade bedsheets in the back bedroom.

  He turned and locked the door behind him with the same set of keys he’d used for the tan Ford. He pulled on the door handle to make sure it was secure. It was.

  Constructing the second explosive collar had gone much smoother than the first. Now he knew how to pack the C-4 into the receiver, and how to place a metal stud through a hole in the strap to secure it on so it couldn’t be unbuckled without a tool.

  He walked around the perimeter of the double-wide making sure all the windows were sealed tight and the back door was locked as well. He was disgusted with the place itself and couldn’t see how a man could actually live there and still look at himself in the mirror in the morning.

  He’d lived in his truck for years with no permanent address and he’d kept it in immaculate shape inside—both the cab and the sleeper. It wasn’t that hard to keep things neat and clean. An organized living space was the sign of an organized mind.

  And vice-versa.

  * * *

  HE STEPPED BACK AND BEHELD the trailer home that was really no better than an isolated shack on five acres of grassland. The location itself was good—no close neighbors, two miles off the state highway, en route to nowhere. The big river flowed quietly through a maze of tangled brush and trees at the edge of the property.

  But the structure itself and the condition in which it had been kept made his stomach churn.

  A dozen tires had been thrown on the roof to keep the sheet metal from blowing away in the wind. The yard, what little there was of it, winked with broken glass. Two motorcycles, neither fixed up to run, occupied the lean-to carport on the side.

  Inside were three filthy bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living area. One of the bedrooms served as a cramped office of sorts. Another was so packed with boxes, auto parts, and trash bags filled with clothing that he couldn’t even step inside. He thought: A hoarder. Just like his mother had been.

  In the front room was a fifty-four-inch HDTV. The set was gaudy and too large for the space and it told anyone stepping inside as much about the former owner as the cheap Indian prints and rugs that covered the walls.

  The Lizard King learned nothing from searching inside the trailer about the man who had owned it—Floyd T. Eckstrom—that he didn’t already know.

  Floyd T. Eckstrom was a wannabe. A wannabe long-haul truck driver, a wannabe monster. Wannabe.

  But he’d been too goddamned stupid and obvious.

  The cardboard box in the bedroom closet was stuffed with newspaper clippings including a USA Today story about the formation within the FBI of a “Highway Serial Killer Task Force” charged with investigating over a thousand cases of missing truck-stop prostitutes across the nation. There were printouts of alleged sightings and a ream of stories about a forty-eight-year-old long-haul driver who’d been arrested in Georgia after being pulled over for malfunctioning running lights. The trooper noticed a severed human foot sticking out of a plastic Walmart bag in the trucker’s cab and immediately arrested him. The trucker later confessed to thirty-nine victims. There were also highway trooper reports of body parts found along the nation’s highway system, a filled-out application for employment at a long-haul trucking firm that had apparently never been sent, and an entire self-published “true crime thriller” written by a man named “Tub” Tubman who was the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County in southern Montana. The thriller described how Tubman’s efforts—and his efforts alone—had broken up a sadomasochistic “gang” that included the man known as the Lizard King. The fact that the Lizard King had escaped custody in the end was laid at the feet of Tubman’s subordinates.

  The search engine on the desktop computer inside on the kitchen table was bookmarked with hardcore snuff pornography sites. And there was a large encrypted file of over four gigabytes that wouldn’t open without a password. He assumed the file was filled with video downloaded from the Internet. There was no point in even trying to open it because it was so obvious what was in there. He’d seen it all before but none of it compared to the cache of home movies he had with him.

  Wannabe, the Lizard King thought.

  Eckstrom had kept a loaded 12-gauge shotgun in the closet of his bedroom, a .30-06 hunting rifle on the wall, and a Colt 1911 .45 in his bedstand. That was it for weapons, and the Lizard King had removed them from the house and stashed them inside a shed and locked it.

  He fished inside his jacket for the transmitter and pressed the button to vibrate.

  There was a closed-ended cry from inside from the fat housewife followed by a muffled curse from the lot lizard from Eau Claire. He’d observed closely when they both saw each other for the first time, when he’d ushered Amanda into the trailer. Would they be happy to be with another person in the same situation?

  The lot lizard had looked up with disgust on her face and said, “Who in the hell is she?”

  “She can cook,” he said.

  “Fuck,” the lot lizard said.

  He leaned close to the closed window and said, “Stay in there and don’t try anything
stupid. Look through those groceries I brought back and make some dinner. I got steaks in there.”

  * * *

  SATISFIED THAT THE TRAILER was secure and no one would try to get out, he walked away from the double-wide toward the bank of the river. Gravel and small pieces of glass crunched under his thick-soled trucker boots. His legs felt strange and weak, and once he had to stop and take his bearings. He wondered how long it would take for the world to stop rotating. And whether he really wanted it to.

  There was too much tangled brush near the water to get to the river’s edge so he chose a massive branch of driftwood and sat down on it and stretched his legs out.

  The sun was ballooning as it slipped toward the flat western horizon and it made the light orange. He could hear the river flow. There was a shriek of a nighthawk. These were things he’d missed for years but not that much.

  He turned and looked at the double-wide over his shoulder. It was quiet although someone had turned on a light in the kitchen. Good.

  * * *

  MOST OF ALL, HE THOUGHT, he was tired.

  So tired.

  He was tired of having no fixed address at fifty-nine years of age and tired of being downtrodden. He was tired of idiots in four-wheelers on the highways and tired of smug and judgmental “citizens” who despised men like him while feasting on the food he’d delivered to their grocery store so they could eat while watching reality television programs about rich amoral celebrities.

  He was tired of the government imposing more and more rules and regulations on him for simply trying to make a living. More and more permits, licenses, random drug tests, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration coming up with “scores” for every driver and constantly threatening to decrease driving hours allowed. The state “authorities” weren’t any better, always looking to shut a truck down for some chickenshit rule, especially in Minnesota, Ohio, California, Oregon, and Washington.

  He was sick of being on high alert every minute of his day while he was calculating mileage, pickups, deliveries, and protocols that changed from state to state. They were trying to make it impossible for an independent trucker to survive.

  He was even tired of lot lizards. They were more tatted up and drugged out than ever. They never learned that making themselves available to people like him by going from truck to truck was stupid and dangerous.

  And they were so quick to scream.

  It was time, he thought, for his next stage of life. He didn’t need to force it to make it happen. Like the countless lot lizards over the years, that next stage was coming to him.

  * * *

  HE’D BEEN ON to the bogus LTL posts on the log boards for months. The wording just wasn’t right and he knew it instinctively. Farmers who posted were cheap but these offers—all coincidentally from the Bakken in North Dakota—were written as if money were a second thought.

  He knew that it had to be that overweight investigator from Montana who had—coincidentally—taken a job in North Dakota. She knew too much about him and she’d seen him in person twice. She was a threat.

  State troopers, assholes in chicken coops, even the feckless FBI task force had lost interest and lost their edge. Time did that. But this woman—she was relentless.

  * * *

  HE’D LEARNED ABOUT C-4 on the Internet after he’d purchased two cases of it from a nervous Mexican trucker in Brownsville, Texas. The Mexican didn’t explain why he was unloading the cases surreptitiously to interested drivers at the truck stop and the Lizard King hadn’t asked. But he knew it might come in handy, as it had.

  The stuff was as safe as a brick of clay until it was ignited by a detonator. It could be jostled and banged around in his trailer and nothing bad would happen.

  As he drove back and forth across the country with the two cases of C-4, an idea came to him prompted by a cryptic message on an Internet trucker forum that read LOOKING FOR LK APPRENTICESHIP. It had a 701 area code. North Dakota.

  The Lizard King didn’t respond at once but he thought the message was too bold for his relentless investigator and too clever by half for the feds.

  There was no way that there would be two simultaneous efforts to lure him to North Dakota by law enforcement, was there? That didn’t make sense. But as he thought about it as he drove, an idea slowly developed.

  First, he had to vet the wannabe and make sure there was no connection with the other effort to lure him in. So he placed a call from a pay phone in West Virginia to the 701 number and was introduced to Floyd T. Eckstrom.

  Eckstrom, a local auto mechanic, was so starstruck by the call from the Lizard King he could barely speak. He offered to ride along for free, to assist with whatever he could, to learn the ropes from a master.

  The Lizard King hung up on him and waited a week to see if the call would be traced back to him somehow. Then, after seeing the latest LTL post requesting a rig in Grimstad for ten pallets of remanufactured oil field parts, he called again and asked Eckstrom if he could drive a truck.

  “Not just drive it, but back it up safely to a loading dock.”

  When Eckstrom eagerly said he could do that, the Lizard King asked him to meet him in four days at a Flying V truck stop on the outskirts of Rawlins, Wyoming.

  “Keep your cell phone on when you get there,” he instructed.

  * * *

  FOUR DAYS LATER, the Lizard King sat in the cab of his truck at the Flying V and watched the scene around him with his truck running. He was parked fifth from the end of the first long row of rigs facing the facility. He watched as dozens of tractor-trailer operators came off I-80 for fuel and food, and dozens left the truck stop to rejoin the mechanized river of commerce of the interstate. Many of those coming in had reached the end of their federally mandated driving shift and they’d carefully pull their rig into an empty space on the lot to get some sleep.

  The truck stop was designed like most of them: big commercial trucks on one side, private passenger cars on the other. On the big rig side there was a driver’s-only lounge with Wi-Fi, showers, and a business center. A restaurant was in the middle of the facility but partitioned off between drivers and civilians. On the civilian side was a large gift shop, fried food and snacks for the road, and gasoline pumps instead of diesel.

  Eckstrom wouldn’t know what kind of truck the Lizard King drove or what he even looked like. Very few people did. And he had no way of contacting his potential mentor when he arrived.

  The first thing the Lizard King determined was that there appeared to be no special surveillance by law enforcement at the Flying V that afternoon. If it was a trap the cops had been much more careful and sophisticated than usual. There were standard video cameras mounted within and outside the facility, but no out-of-place panel vans, no “civilians” standing around on the corners of the building pretending to be busy with something, and no significant conversations between civilians who might actually be undercover cops.

  But that wasn’t enough. He had to be sure.

  He decided that the tall, gawky man wearing a canvas farmer coat and black plastic glasses who had circumnavigated the trucker-side parking lot four times, looking more and more vexed, must be Floyd T. Eckstrom.

  He punched in the number for Eckstrom in a prepaid cell phone he’d picked up in Utah that morning. He watched as the man in the farmer coat suddenly stopped near the side of the building and dug into his pocket for his phone.

  “This’s Floyd.” He sounded, and looked, nervous.

  “Hello, Floyd. It’s me.”

  “I’ve been looking for you. When will you get here?”

  “Oh, I’m here. I’m watching you right now.”

  Eckstrom slowly looked up from where he stood to the line of thirty-five truck grilles out in the parking lot. Scores of other trucks were lined up behind them, and more behind them.

  The Lizard King knew he couldn’t be identified through the smoked glass of his windshield.

  “Which rig are you in?”

  “N
ope. How do I know you’re not a cop?”

  “Shit—do I look like a cop?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Tell me where you are. I’ll prove to you I’m not a cop.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’ll show you my CDL, maybe. I’ll show you my ID. I’m who I say I am.”

  “Those documents are easily made. Especially for an undercover cop.”

  “Man…” He was fidgeting now, shifting his weight from foot to foot. What he wasn’t doing, the Lizard King observed, was trying to catch the eye of anyone on the public side or within the building who might be doing surveillance. He had all the appearances of being alone. But that wasn’t enough, either.

  “You need to prove you’re not a cop or I hang up and I’ll never be in contact with you again.”

  “How in the hell do I prove that?” Eckstrom asked, holding his free hand out as if pleading.

  “Do you have a knife on you?”

  “A what?”

  “A knife.”

  “Well, yeah, I got a Buck knife in my pocket.”

  “Take it out. I want to see it.”

  Eckstrom hesitated a moment, then drew a large folding knife out of his jeans.

  “Open it.”

  “Open it?”

  “Open it.”

  A sigh. “Just a second…”

  It took two hands. Eckstrom clamped his phone between his neck and shoulder while he pulled out the blade. It locked into place.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The Lizard King sat back and scanned the facility until he saw what he was looking for.

  “There’s a red Subaru wagon that just pulled into the gas pumps. It has California plates. Walk to the end of the building and you’ll see it.”

  Eckstrom did. He stopped at the corner and peered around it to the rows of gasoline pumps and dozens of cars that had briefly exited the interstate.

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “The husband just filled up the car and went inside. I want you to walk over to the car and open the passenger door. There’s a woman inside and you need to cut her throat.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”