by Matthew Iden
And it was close to the turnpike on-ramp, too. He stifled a titter. Hence the name. On Ramp. Trust the local yokels to pick the most obvious moniker for their businesses. Whatever they called it, it looked to be the perfect place for the exchange. It was going to take him all of five minutes to conclude their business. With, he hoped, zero interference from the few bleary-eyed tourists and truckers at the place.
For the first time since he’d cemented the initial agreement with Eddie, Torbett was feeling relaxed and confident that the deal would go through. He was taciturn and skeptical to begin with, and this arrangement had seemed particularly cursed from the outset. The number of calls and points of contact they’d had to make throughout the night still made him anxious. But, he had to admit, while an obstacle-free exchange was always preferable, wasn’t there something even more satisfying in overcoming challenges to reach the same point?
Torbett signaled conscientiously and made the slow, smooth turn into the On Ramp’s front parking lot. Eddie had said to ignore the lot and head for the back, where the truckers parked their “rigs.”
Yes, there was the driveway—an extension of the parking lot, really, it was so wide—clearly signed for trucks. Torbett followed it around back, looking for cameras on the building’s corners or roof, but either they had none or he couldn’t see them at this angle. The lot was well lit and had maybe twenty triple-length stalls marked off with white paint. Six semitrucks sat like slumbering giants, unmoving and inert. Four were bunched together, while the two others were off at opposite ends of the lot, perhaps looking for some privacy or quiet.
Torbett pulled near the far end of the bunch of four, attempting to shield his car from the On Ramp’s main building, but not so close that the trucker next to him got curious. Then he turned off his lights and began to wait.
It was the last thing he wanted to do. Now that he was so close, the anticipation ran through him like a tiny electric current. A muscle in his cheek ticked and he had an erection that strained against his trousers. He did some deep-breathing exercises in an effort to calm himself, but it only got his circulation pumping, sending more oxygen to his already-hyperactive muscles.
To pass the time, he reached under the seat and pulled out a black zippered case the size of a shaving kit. Inside was a small glass vial and two syringes—low-dose Nembutal in case his gift showed some reluctance in adjusting to her new role on the way home. Two syringes in case the lesson had to be repeated.
A noise to his left made him drop the case to the floor in a panic. A moment later, the passenger’s-side door to the truck next to him opened. Despite the tinted windows, he sank down in his seat as one slim bare leg, then another, swung out the side of the cab. A willowy girl in a miniskirt and patched denim jacket grabbed the chrome help-me-up next to the door, then swung out of the cab. She hopped down to the ground and slammed the door shut, tucking something inside a pocket of the jacket as she did so.
She started in surprise at the sight of the Lexus, seemed to consider something, then began a slow walk to Torbett’s side of the car. He knew the tinting kept her from seeing inside, but he got the feeling that she was staring directly at him anyway. She wasn’t really his type—too tall, too thin—but she had wide blue eyes with a girlish spray of freckles over the pale white skin of her nose and cheeks. Her hair was long and black—probably not natural, but the contrast of it against the swirling white snow had him entranced. His erection swelled painfully and he adjusted himself as she sauntered to the driver’s-side window and drummed her fingernails lightly against the glass.
He rolled the window down halfway. “Yes?”
She ducked her head and looked in with a smile. “Hi there.”
“Hi.” He swallowed.
“I never seen a car like this before.” She was nineteen, maybe, and at this distance he could see the skin wasn’t flawless. Acne and too much makeup took some of the shine away. There was a bruise high on one cheek and the eyes were tired. But she had a cant to her head and a quirk to her mouth that had him squeezing the steering wheel.
“I imagine not,” he said. Dare I eat this peach? It would be so stupid, so against the rules. But he’d been breaking rules all night and it hadn’t mattered. And if one was good, wouldn’t two be better? It was Fate, dropping a pair of nubile girls into his lap in payment for all the hurdles she’d strewn in front of him before. And rules were meant to be broken.
The girl saw something in his eyes and her smile became knowing. She raised an eyebrow.
“Would you like to see how it handles?” he asked.
“I sure would,” she said, moving around the front of the car.
In the time it took her to get to the passenger’s side, he had the first syringe ready and waiting.
The home stretch. The home stretch. The home stretch.
It was all Eddie could think about as he made the turn off the spur from the Calloway and onto the main road. The On Ramp was less than a quarter mile away and surely Torbett was there by now. Having to take care of the cop had put him behind, but with luck the delay had been only enough to get Torbett to Breezewood and not so much that the guy panicked and ran.
Light crept over the hills surrounding the town, although the valley was still dark. It was late enough that cars and trucks were starting to fill the roads, their headlights pushing back both the receding night and the snow that continued to fall in waves. The extra traffic slowed him down at several of the lights, which gave him time to think.
Specifically, it gave him time to worry about what the cop had been doing at the Calloway. He’d had enough presence of mind to recognize the cruiser as a Maryland state trooper’s. Not that weird for Breezewood, probably, since the town wasn’t far from the border. But the cop had seemed to be looking for something specific. Did every trooper get out of their car and scan the countryside with binoculars at five in the morning? And, maybe it was his imagination, but she’d done a double take just as she’d panned across the On Ramp.
“Shit,” he said out loud, making Lucy flinch. They must’ve found Gerry’s body or uncovered something about Lucy’s kidnapping. Maybe Tuck or one of his asshole roomies had blabbed and someone had thought to call the cops. But how’d they manage to trace him to Breezewood in only a few hours?
It didn’t matter. He had to go through with the buy. And maybe he wasn’t in as much trouble as he feared. The cop had been searching, not watching. That meant that they knew a lot, but not everything. They might be looking for him, but they didn’t know about the meet, or if they did, they were still looking for it. If Torbett was there with the money, they could make the exchange and go their separate ways before anyone found the cop, figured out the meet was at the On Ramp, or stopped them.
But it was going to be close. He might have only a matter of minutes before the law descended on the place. And sitting in traffic wasn’t where he wanted to be when that happened. With a quick glance in the mirror, Eddie wheeled around the cars in front of him and into the oncoming turning lane, then floored it. Honking the horn, he shot through the intersection, narrowly missing a flatbed truck making the turn onto I-70, and flew up the slight rise to the On Ramp. He whipped the Mustang across the road and On Ramp’s tourist lot, then slowed down to take the driveway back to the truckers’ lot.
Eddie leaned forward, scanning the large asphalt plain. The lot had been plowed for the truckers’ convenience, but there were only a handful of rigs actually parked. A few diesel pumps sat gathering snow on one side of the lot, empty and waiting for customers. No cops so far, at least none out in the open, which meant they weren’t here, since this wouldn’t be an undercover sting. If they’d been on to him, the parking lot would’ve been lousy with law enforcement, their lights flashing from Breezewood to Baltimore. Still, Eddie made a slow, cautious circuit, finally coming to the far side of a gathering of three or four rigs.
There. Torbett’s Lexu
s parked cheek by jowl next to a semi, as though trying to hide. Figures—he should’ve guessed the most paranoid man he’d ever met would park in as inconspicuous a spot as possible.
Eddie frowned. There was something wrong. The passenger’s door wasn’t fully closed and the car was rocking back and forth. He pulled the Mustang close to the Lexus and hopped out.
A girl with a miniskirt was sitting half in the passenger’s seat with one foot on the ground. She was struggling with Torbett, who was behind the wheel like he was supposed to be, but he had one hand wrapped in the girl’s hair while the other held a . . . needle? The girl was holding the syringe away with both hands but losing the battle. Torbett’s face rippled with emotions—anger, fear, excitement. He seemed to relish the girl’s resistance.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Eddie yelled.
Torbett raised his head, bewildered. He blinked a few times, as if Eddie’s words had snapped him out of a daze. Eddie reached in, grabbed the girl by the arm and pulled her out, then shoved her toward the main building. She took a few steps away, sobbing, then stopped and started screaming half-formed words at them.
“What is wrong with you?” Eddie said, ignoring her. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
“I . . . I wanted another one,” Torbett said, with the face and guile of a five-year-old. “She was right there.”
“Jesus Christ. What do you need with a truck-stop whore? I’ve got what you asked for, right here. Remember? Lucy? The girl you’ve been dreaming about?”
Torbett nodded and blinked, nodded and blinked.
“Okay,” Eddie said, not convinced Torbett was completely there. “You got the money?”
“Yes. In the backseat.”
“All right. Let’s do this, then. The girl for the money.”
Torbett’s eyes slid past him. “You mean that girl?”
Eddie spun around. Hobbled by the duct tape wound around her knees and wrists, Lucy was stumbling awkwardly away from the cars and toward the On Ramp’s outbuildings at the back of the lot. It wouldn’t lead her anywhere—the entire place was surrounded by a chain-link fence—but she didn’t know that.
“Goddamn it,” Eddie swore and took off after her. Lucy was almost to the truckers’ lounge and he was halfway across the lot when, with a roar, a silver Integra with a raised spoiler and gleaming rims shot through the driveway and flew into the lot.
I wasn’t sure what to expect as we rocketed into the On Ramp’s back forty. We’d spent the past eight hours in the dark, not even knowing if we were in the right state. Only Sarah’s breathless phone call gave us any kind of confirmation that we’d been right all along, but even she was playing a hunch when she told us to head for the rest stop by the turnpike entrance, that that’s where the trade had to be going down.
So it was with fingers crossed but still some doubts that we hit the truckers’ area of the On Ramp at seventy miles an hour. Chuck slammed on the brakes and we skidded to a stop, the ice and snow carrying us to within a few scary feet of a row of diesel pumps. I sat forward, scanning the lot, taking in the environment, trying to pull out details. But the scene was crazy enough that we just had to be in the right place.
A pack of trucks was bunched in the middle of the lot. Two had lights on in the cabs and the truckers inside were illuminated like figurines in a shadow box, frowning and looking out their side windows. A deep blue or black Lexus was parked near the far truck, with a black Mustang sitting next to it. The Lexus’s driver’s-side door was open and a tall, chubby man with a comb-over and no winter coat was standing in the crotch of the door and the car, looking toward me and Chuck with a bland expression. He hadn’t started by looking in our direction, though—he’d swung his head around from watching . . .
“Lucy!” Chuck yelled and jumped out of the Integra.
A slim figure was at the far end of the lot, running—or trying to run—in strange, herky-jerky strides toward a small outbuilding that said “SHOWERS.” I squinted and realized her arms were behind her back.
Chasing her was a tall man—Eddie, it had to be him—in a black jacket. He should’ve caught up with her, but he was slipping on the icy asphalt and hadn’t made it even halfway across the lot. Chuck split the difference between them and started running, screaming, “Freeze!”
I popped my door open, jumped out, and started for the Lexus. Chuck’s challenge had reached Eddie and he stopped and turned smoothly in our direction, almost as if he’d been expecting us. A hand dipped inside his coat and pulled out something black and blocky.
“Gun!” I yelled as I threw myself flat. Peripherally, I was aware that Chuck had seen it, too, but he was closer and more exposed, having tried to cross the no-man’s-land of the middle of the lot.
The most vulnerable of all of us, though, was Lucy.
Things slowed down and crystallized like the ice around us, and I watched as Eddie turned and—instead of taking the shot at Chuck or me—trained his sights on Lucy as she hobbled toward the edge of the lot. I raised my head from the mound of snow, feeling a terrible, metallic weight drop through me. If he was going to shoot her, I would be too late. I scrambled to get to one knee so I could try a futile shot to stop him or at least get his attention. Someone screamed a name, a word, an animal sound.
For a split second, Lucy’s life hung in the air, ready to be plucked. But a strange grimace crossed Eddie’s face and he swung his attention—and the gun—back in our direction. I threw myself flat again and, a moment later, a stunning, ratcheting sound filled the air, like the loudest firecracker you’ve ever heard, but evenly spaced and faster by a mile. A mix of fear and animal-level adrenaline washed over me. There’s nothing quite like the sound of automatic gunfire to make your body tap into its deepest instincts and send you diving for cover. The bullets missed, plinking and pinging as they ricocheted off the tanks behind me. The heady stink of diesel gas filled the air a moment later.
I shoved my face into the snow, willing myself as flat as humanly possible. The burst stopped and I stumbled and clawed my way to the shelter of one of the big rigs. My hands burned from the snow and I banged my knee on the ice as I scrambled for safety. Another short burst of gunfire stitched the air, followed by four rapid claps, deeper in tone—Chuck returning fire. I poked my head out. The tall guy was still moving, but this time retreating toward his car, slipping another magazine into his gun as he ran. While his attention was turned toward Chuck, who was lying prone in the snow, I lined up on Eddie, pulled the trigger twice, and missed both shots. Chuck’s gun spat again and Eddie screamed, or I imagined he did, and spun in place, but stayed on his feet and staggered toward his car.
I ducked as he fired another short burst, wild and without aim, then took a step away from the truck to get a clear shot. My feet were placed shoulder-width apart, both hands steady on the gun. I took a deep breath, aimed, and—
There was a small pop behind me, a sizzling sound, then an explosion took me off my feet like I’d been kicked in the pants by an NFL lineman. I landed face-first five or six feet away. Heat rolled over the lot in a wave, with an ugly cloud of fumes chasing it. A second, smaller explosion followed, carrying its own shock wave of heat and petroleum stink.
I was facedown on the ground, with my world tilted six degrees off level. Falling debris hit truck hoods and specked my hands. A lame attempt to stand was unsuccessful and a grotesque snow angel formed under me from the flailing of my arms and legs. Shattered glass mixed with the ice in front of my face, sparkling like pixie dust. My ears were ringing, and I felt rather than heard the purr of a powerful engine pass near me as the Lexus shot out of the lot.
A determined push got me to my hands and knees, then a supreme effort got me to a kneeling position. I wasn’t injured, but bruised, physically exhausted, and probably slightly concussed. Not surprisingly, the combination had me feeling highly unmotivated and only the fact that Chuck and Lucy
might be hurt got me up off the snow. I looked to my left. Two of the three diesel pumps had shot into the sky like flares, taking Chuck’s precious Integra with them. The car that had carried us through the night looked like a smoking war relic from the battlefields of El Alamein or Iraq.
Using the truck fender to get to my feet, I staggered to the middle of the lot. A quick glance to the side showed no sign of Eddie. Chuck was shaking his head and kicking his legs like I’d been doing a moment ago. Where I’d been knocked down by the blast, though, it looked like he’d been conked by a flying piece of his own car. I checked him for the obvious stuff, but he slapped my hands away when I told him to lie still while I went for help.
“Lucy?” he croaked.
Against my better judgment, I helped him to his feet and we stumbled toward the outbuilding she’d been running to. We found her there, cowering in a corner where the bricks of the building met the chain-link fencing. She was covered in duct tape and snow, but cried out when she saw Chuck. The two of them became a mess of tears, cursing, and laughter as he tried to unwind the tape from her wrists and ankles and knees. When she was finally free, they hugged like they were trying to squeeze each other in two.
I wandered away to give them their moment. Truckers were coming out of their cabs, wary and wide-eyed, while a small crowd of fearless, apron-wearing kitchen staff from the On Ramp were gathered at the back entrance, looking at the fuel pumps like it was the aftermath of a Fourth of July.
Gun at the ready, I limped over to the black Mustang, which was stippled from the shrapnel. I shuffled around the front bumper, giving myself plenty of room to hit the ground again if I needed to.
I didn’t. Eddie lay on his back, his face locked in a grin or a grimace. Blood seeped into the snow from several spots on his left side. His gun was lying in the snow ten feet away, but I didn’t lower my gun in case it wasn’t the only heat he’d been packing. It was a needless precaution. Even if he had another weapon, he wasn’t in any shape to use it. His chest heaved in uneven motions and he keened in pain, continuous and low.