by Matthew Iden
She scrubbed her face with one hand, willing some of her energy to return. She was going to pay for this later, she knew. Fingers crossed she wouldn’t get that call from the barracks. Because, if she did, she’d be pulling what amounted to seventy-two hours on the job with three hours of sleep. And then it wouldn’t be long before she’d be the one needing roadside assistance.
As if on cue, her phone gave a jangle, making her jump. She fished it out of her pocket and the bottom of her stomach hit the floor. Waterloo Barracks. For a brief, ridiculous moment, she considered not answering the call, then discarded the idea. One did not ignore calls from one’s HQ. She groaned, thinking. What were the chances that it was just Jimmy, impatient and wanting an update on where her “case” was going?
She pushed the little green button. “Haynesworth.”
There was a slight pause, then the voice she dreaded to hear came over the line. “Trooper, where are you, exactly?”
“Lieutenant Kline,” she said, feeling a sensation like cold water rushing over her body. “How are you?”
“I’m doing fine, Trooper. Thank you so much for inquiring,” Kline said. “I’ll ask you again. Where are you?”
She swallowed. “In my cruiser, sir.”
“And where is your cruiser?”
“Thirty-five miles south of Breezewood, Lieutenant.”
“I see,” he said. “And are you southbound?”
She gave a mental sigh. “No, sir. North.”
“Is there any particular reason why you’re pointed towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike at four o’clock in the morning on your day off?”
She was quiet.
“Goddamn it, Sarah,” Kline exploded. “I don’t know what the hell to do with you. You’re a good officer. You’re smart and dedicated and you’ve got tons of potential. But just how stupid do you think I am? Thirty minutes after you left Glenwood, Jay Saunders called me and told me you’d been sniffing around his murder case. Did you think he was going to swallow your story whole? Without checking with me?”
“No, sir. I guess not.”
“I sat here in the dark for damn near two hours, wondering how to handle this,” he said. Sarah said nothing and he sighed. “Tell me everything. Now.”
So she gave him everything she’d put together. She described the extemporaneous interrogation of Handley in the car to her attempt to shake down Tena. He grunted when she mentioned Rhee and Singer—it didn’t seem prudent to leave them out of the narrative—and finished with what they were planning to do in Breezewood.
He swore, then sighed again. “What a mess. Two cops out of their jurisdiction and an armed civilian, all on a crusade. You couldn’t wait for Glenwood PD to chase this down? Report it to the state troopers in PA and let them intercept?”
Sarah took a deep breath. “The girl is in a car heading there right now, sir. Rhee and Singer feel she’s going to be off our radar in a matter of hours. Maybe already is. After what I’ve seen, I agree with them. But it wouldn’t matter if I was in or not—they’d be doing this without me. In any case, this may be a chance to grab the head of this network, the one who put these strings of girls together.”
“And that’s worth it to you?”
“Yes, sir. All the way.”
A sleepy murmur on the other end of the line interrupted them. Kline’s hand muffled the phone, and she heard him say, “Something came up, Mary. Go back to bed. I’ll be there in a second.”
The hand moved away from the phone and Kline’s voice was back, strong and decisive. “All right, Trooper. Here’s the deal. As of twelve-oh-one this morning, you’re on the record as taking one day of personal leave. Anything you do from that point onward in the next twenty-four hours, short of shooting someone, is your business.”
She was quiet.
“But Waterloo and your commanding officer,” he continued, “are not part of what you do on your own time. You do not have sanction. Do something stupid and I’ll hang you out to dry. I will not let your adventuring tarnish the reputation of the Waterloo Barracks or the Maryland State Police. Understood?”
She caught herself nodding up and down. “Yes, sir.”
He paused, as though expecting an argument from her. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re back in the fold in twenty-five hours from midnight tonight. If I catch you working this . . . case while you’re on duty, you’ll be a security guard at Arundel Mills Mall for the rest of your days. If you find evidence of a crime being committed, we’ll follow through on your leads via the proper channels.”
“I understand, sir.”
“And one more thing.”
“Sir?”
“Tell Noles I’m holding him personally responsible for your conduct. There’s no way you would’ve followed through on this without him egging you on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kline hung up without another word, but she kept the phone glued to her ear for another ten seconds just in case, then eventually let her hand sink to her lap. Her heart was actually pounding in her chest. Not because she was afraid of Kline, necessarily, but because it had become very clear, very quickly, that her career had hung in the balance on this one phone call. One wrong word and, in an alternate universe, another Sarah Haynesworth was turning the car around and driving to Waterloo Barracks to clean out her desk. But that’s not how it happened here.
A smile broke across her face. Kline couldn’t fool her. If he’d truly been upset, he would’ve terminated her right over the phone. He couldn’t say so, of course, but in so many words, he’d admitted his own shortsightedness and given her permission to follow the case. In fact, she’d better bring back a trophy or two or he’d be disappointed. She was on a short leash—twenty-four hours—but he’d had every right to tell her to return for a full reprimand. The fact that he hadn’t spoke volumes.
No longer fighting sleep, she slipped the phone in her pocket, put both hands on the steering wheel, and pressed down on the gas until she was almost on top of the Integra. Rhee was going to have to pick it up if they were going to solve this thing in a day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The approach to Breezewood was a long, darkened slope more than a mile long. The only traffic for an hour had been convoys of semitrucks, as many as twelve at once, saving time on their thousand-mile journeys by driving through the middle of the night when there were only a handful of cars on the road. The trucks, when they passed, were like walls, towering over the Mustang. Except these walls were steel and rubber and glass moving at eighty miles an hour on the flats and closer to ninety-five on the downhill side.
The shuddering blare of the air brakes as the truckers tried to rein it in sounded like the end of the world when it happened right next to you. All Eddie could do—with his nerves already ground down to nothing—was grit his teeth, squeeze the wheel, and wait for them to pass. Normally he was a competent, confident driver, but the situation was hardly normal and it wasn’t helped by either the truckers or the snow whipping head-on into his windshield.
Lucy hadn’t said a word since his little tell-all. That suited him fine, though his admission had cut deeper into his own psyche than he’d thought possible. He wasn’t afraid of his past or even ashamed of it, but it was the first time he’d ever even mentioned his parents to anyone, let alone a girl he was getting ready to sell like a cut of meat. It made him wonder what might’ve happened if even one of his parents had been remotely normal. Would he have stayed in school, or gotten married, or turned out just like them? Would he have bought his ticket in some back alley of Baltimore, looking to score just one more hit? Or would he have worked past all that and become one of the good guys, teaching or counseling or writing poetry?
His small laugh brought on by that idea made the fantasy evaporate like smoke. This was why he hardly ever dreamed of something bigger or better. He had never had the chance, so why even wonder? He was
a pimp, a supplier of women to an insatiable and unquestioning public. He had plans, sure, and they didn’t always involve selling girls, but he had no delusions about who he was . . . or what he was good at.
Orange lights blinking with a slow, steady pulse appeared at the bottom of the hill, signaling to drivers to reduce their speed. Rumble strips reinforced the concept for the drivers too headstrong to pay attention to signs, shaking their cars like a jackhammer had been let loose in the trunk. Brake lights winked cherry red as traffic eased to a stop at the light guarding the entrance to Breezewood proper. The line of cars and trucks curved gently to the right as they queued for their opportunity to pass through the town and on to their final destination.
Breezewood, for as long as Eddie had known it, had always been just a strip of fast-food joints, gas stations, and trucker hotels on either side of the road that connected Interstate 70 with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At a little under a mile long, with the southernmost entrance to the turnpike just around the corner, it should’ve taken most travelers a few minutes to get through, but six lights and the intersection of two states’ worth of traffic often meant a half-hour wait to discover the other side of town. But Eddie wasn’t interested in simply passing through.
What he was looking for was the run-down face of the Calloway Motel. The Calloway had been around since the sixties at least, and hadn’t been updated, renovated, or probably cleaned since then. Between the bedbugs, the junkies, and the moldering walls, it was safer to grab a cot at the county jail than spend a night at the Calloway. All of which made it the perfect location for illicit activity of any kind. The same level of isolation and disrepair that kept any sane customer away meant there were few eyes, fewer lights, and no cameras.
Eddie made a careful turn left as the majority of traffic veered right through the strip and on to get a bite to eat or continued up the hill to catch the on-ramp for the turnpike. The beat-down motel wasn’t on the actual strip—the rent was too high and the urban blight had barely existed when the Calloway had been built, anyway. He made a quick turn onto Graceville Road and a minute later the Mustang was pulling into the modest parking lot for the Calloway, a cinder field situated atop a small rise that looked down on the glitz and glamour of sandwich shops and diesel pumps.
Taking his time, he circled the parking lot twice, looking for signs of life, but even for the Calloway, it was dead. Puzzled, he peered at the building, hoping to see a solitary light or closing blind—then the handwritten “OUT OF BUSINESS” sign tacked to the door told the story. He rolled up the window, a sour expression on his face. So that was the end of the Calloway . . . and the end of him using it as a place for his transactions. Then he reminded himself—he wouldn’t need it after tonight. Maybe fate had shut down the old fleabag motel. It had simply jumped the gun by a few days.
Whatever the reason, the Calloway was now the wrong place to do the swap. It was familiar and isolated, but if a cop—and there were as many state police as local pigs in a town intersected by three or four highways—caught the flash of headlights or even the glint off a fender, there’d be a cruiser climbing the hill to investigate a minute later. For all he knew, cops did an hourly drive-by to make sure no one was doing exactly what Eddie was planning. He couldn’t take a chance on either case. He had to find a new place to make the sale.
Easing the Mustang over to the edge of the parking lot, he got a good look down onto the business district of Breezewood. Past the rusted guardrail at the edge of the lot where cans and bags and soda bottles had been marooned, the entire strip spread out below him—parking lots, gas stations, restaurants, convenience stores. In most towns, businesses would still be hours from opening, but people who made their living on the highway didn’t keep nine-to-five schedules and already there was movement around most of the storefronts. The question was, where could they go that wasn’t too busy or too dead to make the exchange?
There. From his vantage point, Eddie could see the entire profile of a truckers’ rest stop, the one they called the On Ramp. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. It was the last major business for drivers heading for the turnpike toll station, so it had a sprawling car and RV parking lot in the front that served a huge two-story complex of fast-food kiosks, bathrooms, and gift shops. To tempt the truckers, however, the back of the business—a huge, multiacre lot—was reserved parking for the big rigs, with pull-through stalls to make it easy on them, and special bathroom and shower facilities reserved for truckers. With most of the cabs having their own sleeping quarters, there wasn’t any reason to have a separate motel, but the long-haulers liked to get a shower and a bite without having to wade through a sea of tourists.
They also liked to get laid, which is how Eddie knew about it. The truckers’ lot of the On Ramp is where he’d pimped out some of his first girls after leaving Carolyn Park. It was as simple as dropping off three or four girls in the back, parking the Mustang in the front, then going inside for coffee. He’d kill three or four hours on his phone or reading the paper, then he’d hop in the Mustang, gather the girls, and drive them to a nearby apartment or trailer before starting all over the next night. He’d left money on the table leaving after only a few hours, but truck stops were also the favorite place for state cops to stage a raid, so it didn’t hurt to get out while he was ahead.
The best part was that the On Ramp’s management knew exactly what was going on, but they also knew it was a service the truckers expected. So there were no cameras covering the rear lot except those pointed at the back door for basic security. And Eddie knew from experience that they did their best to flick the lights or send out a manager to warn them if they’d heard a raiding party was on its way.
As long as he stayed away from the doors and didn’t attract any attention, he could make the swap with Torbett in the middle of the busiest business in Breezewood. As long as his client didn’t freak out at the latest change in plans, this chapter of his life would close before sunrise, and he’d be heading north with a suitcase full of cash, ready to start his life over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Already on edge from the night’s numerous mistakes, Torbett nearly jumped out of his skin when #5 rang. The insistent electronic beeping went off just as he caught sight of the first green highway sign for Breezewood.
“What now?” he asked in greeting. He was past bothering with any of his normal precautions.
“First, nothing is wrong,” Eddie said, his voice tinny as it came over #5’s cheap wiring. “I just want to be cautious.”
“Admirable,” Torbett said dryly.
“The Calloway is closed. They must’ve gone belly-up since the last time we met. Windows are boarded and there’s nobody in the parking lot. Two cars meeting, even for a few minutes, might attract attention.”
“What do you suggest?”
“There’s a truckers’ rest stop, the On Ramp, near the entrance to the turnpike. You’ll see it right after you exit. The front is for tourists, mainly, but the back is truckers only. I’ve been there before and I know there aren’t any cameras.”
“If it’s for trucks only, we’ll stick out worse than if we were in an empty parking lot,” Torbett said, alarmed. “And all it takes is some trucker taking a cell phone video of the exchange and we’ll be screwed.”
“Cars are allowed in the back. They just don’t go here often. I know the lot because I used to supply girls to the truckers there.”
“Fantastic. Then they know your car.”
“I drove a different car then. And truckers don’t take videos for kicks. They’re either too tired, too drunk, or too busy screwing a hooker,” Eddie said, his voice calm. “Look, this is a simple change to the plan, probably safer than meeting at the Calloway, even when it was open. This early in the morning, there’ll be just enough people to give us some cover, but they’ll all be too tired to notice what we’re doing. I’ll be waiting for you. You pull in beside m
e, we make the trade, and we’re both back on the road in thirty seconds. Guaranteed.”
Torbett was dead quiet, driving by reflex and barely aware of the road stretching ahead into the darkness. A nugget of dread was crawling through his gut, an indicator of his own instinct—an instinct that he never ignored. Survival to this point, while indulging in a hobby that was dangerous and monumentally illegal, had been due to caution so extreme that even paranoiacs would think he was crazy. Planning, redundant and overlapping precautions, and attention to detail were ninety-nine percent of it. One percent was gut instinct. And it was that reptilian-brained intuition that was telling him to look for the nearest break in the road so that he could turn around and head right back from where he’d come. Now.
“Look, I—”
“Hold on,” Eddie said, interrupting him. “There’s someone who wants to say hi.”
A scuffling noise followed, the sound of someone lifting the phone away and passing it along. There was some unintelligible murmuring, then the sound of a short breath.
“Hello?”
Torbett closed his eyes, drinking in the sound like water. The voice was velvet-soft and high-pitched. The voice you’d expect to emanate from a doll or a fawn or an angel. A voice he wanted to hear every night, that would talk to him on command. A voice that would be his.
“Hello?” she said again. More murmuring in the background. A questioning uplift in the voice. An answer. Then he heard her mouth close to the phone and she said, “Steve?”
He stifled a groan, picturing her. Eddie’s photo had been of poor quality and just a single image but, coupled with the voice, was enough to cause his heart to bang against his chest.
“Is this Lucy?”
“Yes—”
More scuffling noises. Eddie’s voice came back on the line. “What do you think?”
Torbett swallowed. The muscles in his neck were strained. He shoved down the internal ranting of the reptilian-brained survivalist and accepted the risk—not that he had a choice. Someone else’s hands were on the wheel now, someone else’s brain was making the calculations to Breezewood, someone else’s voice was saying, “Where do you want to meet, again?”