The Highway ch-2

by C. J. Box

  The Highway

  ( Cody Hoyt - 2 )

  C. J. Box

  C. J. Box

  The Highway

  Be self-controlled, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

  — I Peter 5:8

  Two highways lay before me, which one will I choose Down one lane I’d find happiness and down the other I would lose

  There is no one that I can trust, I must decide alone My decision is an awful one, which road will take me home

  — Alison Krauss, “Two Highways”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  10:13 P.M., Monday, November 19

  I.

  Lewis and Clark County Montana Sheriff’s Department Investigator Cassandra Dewell winced when a pair of headlights broke over a rise onto a long treeless bench in the foothills of the Big Belt Mountains north of Helena. She was on the worst assignment of her nascent career, and she hoped it would be a failure. If she was successful, her partner-a dark legend, her mentor, named Cody Hoyt-would likely lose his job and go to prison.

  When the headlights appeared she was eating from a small box of chocolate-covered cake donuts, playing that stupid game she played with herself. One every hour, just to “keep her energy up.” It had been three hours and the box of twelve was gone.

  She was parked high on a windswept ridge. Her position gave her a sweeping view of the valley below, and a wide angle on the only two-track that led from the county road to the murder house. On the car seat next to the empty donut box was a departmental camera equipped with a telephoto night vision lens.

  Cassie’s eyes burned with fatigue. She’d not seen her son in twelve hours and her mother was angry with her. But when she recognized the dark outline of the vehicle below as it switched off its lights and continued slowly down the road toward the house, she said, “Goddamn you, Cody.”

  II.

  He drove slowly in the dark, squinting over the wheel of his departmental Ford Expedition, trying to see the two-track road, but he mostly drove by feel. When the front tires began to drift out of the ruts he nudged the wheel and put them back. Although it was cold outside, in the low thirties, he kept his driver’s side window down. He could smell pine and sage and dust from his wheels. The sky was clear, filled with stars, and there was enough of a moon that the twin tracks of the road appeared pale and chalky.

  On the seat next to him was a wrinkled paper sack filled with items that warmed his heart.

  He was working late to plant evidence that, he hoped, would lead to the arrest and conviction of a reprobate named Brantley “B. G.” Myers. Planting evidence required stealth, skill, and planning. Cody was up for the job. In fact, it was one of his specialties.

  The road was in the open on the bench. To his right, the terrain rose up and out of view. To his left it maintained a plateau for a mile or so and then sloped off into a massive swale. There was a small lake reflecting the starlight and moonlight in the basin of the swale. A rim of ice framed the open water along the banks of the lake. Ducks and geese covered the lake like errant punctuation. To the right of a road leading down to the lake was the dark low-slung rectangle of a rambling log home-the crime scene he was about to disturb.

  He crept along, hoping he wouldn’t hit a cow or an elk on the road, hoping he wouldn’t drive right off it and have to use his headlights to get back on.

  Nestled in the trees on the top of the hill to his right, three-quarters of a mile away, were three cabins. Each was at least five hundred yards away from the other. The lights were on at all of them, yellow squares in the dark trees, and the occupants, if they were watching, could clearly see down the slope to the road he was on. He didn’t want them to know he was there. He didn’t want anyone to know he was there. Especially the sapphire miner named B. G. who owned the cabin on the far right and who had a telescope set up on a tripod at his picture window so he could spy on his neighbors below and keep track of vehicles on the remote county road.

  B. G. had always rubbed Cody the wrong way. But more than that, B. G. was a killer. Cody glanced up in the general direction of B. G.’s cabin and sapphire mine, and whispered, “Fuck you, B. G.”

  He slowed and hung his head out the driver’s-side window so he wouldn’t miss the turnoff to the log home down by the lake. He saw it a hundred feet ahead and made the turn without tapping his brakes and therefore flashing his brake lights. The SUV was in low gear and he kept it there, letting the torque of the engine propel him slowly down the slope. Sure, he’d leave tire tracks, but it didn’t concern him. After all, he’d been in and out of the place three times that day. When the home loomed in front of him he swung around it and parked in back out of view of the three mountain cabins.

  * * *

  Cody had taken his usual precautions to go off the grid. As he’d cleared town, he’d reached down under the dashboard and snapped a switch that killed the GPS locator unit the department used to keep track of their detectives, and the digital odometer. He’d installed the kill switch himself, breaking department regulations. And he’d not told Edna, the dispatcher, that he’d taken his vehicle out from his home, which was another breach. As far as she knew, he was relaxing in front of his big-screen or reading one of his books. He had maintained radio silence since he left town.

  Cody had uncombed sandy hair streaked with silver-gray, a square jaw, high cheekbones, a broken nose, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a mouth that wouldn’t smile so much as twist into a smirk. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were clear now and had been for two damned years since he’d stopped drinking. They looked somewhat blank, even to him. Cody wasn’t completely sold on sobriety but he confessed that to no one. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, a loose long-sleeved fishing shirt, and a flocked Carhartt thermal vest. Under his untucked shirt was his.40 Sig Sauer, a set of handcuffs, and the seven-point gold sheriff’s department badge.

  As he got out and dropped down to the frozen ground, he glanced up the slope to see if he could be seen from B. G.’s place. He couldn’t.

  He reached inside the cab for the paper sack and clamped it under his arm.

  B. G. wouldn’t do well at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge, Cody thought. Once word got out among the population what kind of reprobate he was. Which made Cody smile.

  III.

  Everything about Cody Hoyt was exasperating, Cassie thought as she peered through the binoculars. When he was at a crime scene he was methodical, detail-oriented, curious, and thorough. It was like he emerged from a cynical and disheveled shell with strangely clear eyes. But the rest of the time …

  Cassie Dewell was thirty-four years old with short brown hair and large brown eyes. She was twenty pounds overweight and self-conscious about it. She was the kind of woman constantly described as “having a pretty face,” which left the rest to be surmised. She’d been paired with Cody two weeks before after Sheriff “Tub” Tubman fast-tracked her promotion as a response to a series of articles in the Helena Independent Record about the lack of diversity in the department. Cassie was well aware of the circumstances and she would have resented it if she didn’t need the job and increase in salary to support her son, her mother, and herself. That Tubman held the promotion over her was something she’d need to deal with when this assignment was over.

  Cassie was a local Helena girl born and bred. Her late father was a long-haul truck driver and her mother-who described herself as a “free spirit”-was living with Cassie and her son. When Cassie had taken the promotion, Tubman had assured her she’d have plenty of time to be with her family. He’d lied.

  That morning, inside the cabin below, they’d found the body of Roger Tokely, fifty-eight, slouched forward in a straight-back chair, head bent
, as if examining something on the floor between his feet. His beer belly prevented the body from falling forward to the floor. He faced a big-screen television mounted on the eastern wall in front of him. His arms hung on either side of his body, palms out. He wore baggy gray sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. His feet were bare and swelled grotesquely, the thick toes looking like stubby purple Vienna sausages.

  There was a large pool of blood on the floor beneath Tokely’s chair. Cody guessed it was thirty inches across. The outside four inches of the pool was clear and the inside was dark and oval-shaped.

  Next to the pool on the right side of the body was a stainless-steel revolver.

  Cassie thought suicide. Cody thought homicide. Not only that, he said he was pretty sure who’d done it. Someone named B. G.

  He said, “B. G. is a six-foot-five reprobate who lives right up there on the ridge.”

  There was no evidence she could see pointing to anyone.

  “Don’t worry,” Cody had said with an evil grin that chilled her and confirmed her worst fears about her partner, “we’ll prove it.”

  IV.

  Cody didn’t turn on the lights and moved by feel and memory into Roger Tokely’s kitchen. The lounge chair where Tokely’s body had been found was still there in a muted pool of moonlight. The bloodstain had not yet been cleaned up but the murder weapon had been taken for evidence.

  On the side of the kitchen counter was a garbage container. With gloved hands, he opened the lid. The smell of rotted food wafted out. Then he opened the small paper sack he’d brought with him and glanced inside. The contents had been taken from B. G.’s Dumpster. Inside were crumpled fast-food wrappers and a half-eaten McDonald’s cheeseburger that might yield DNA. The scraps would tie B. G. to the scene of the murder.

  He’d try to act surprised when the evidence tech announced the discovery.

  * * *

  As Cody climbed into his Ford he thought he heard the distant sound of a car starting up. He stepped back into the grass and peered toward the bench on top, then scanned the dark treeline. He didn’t see a vehicle, or headlights. Still, it unsettled him.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20

  There’s a killer on the road

  His brain is squirming like a toad

  — Jim Morrison, “The Hitchhiker”

  1

  4:03 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

  He called himself the lizard King. The prostitutes known as lot lizards feared him. More precisely, they feared his legend, the idea of him. None of them who’d ever seen his face up close lived to describe it.

  He was parked in the back row of trucks with his diesel engine idling, his running lights muted, his hair slicked back, and a bundle of tools on the floorboard on the right side of his seat within easy reach. He was hunting but there was no need to go after his prey. The lot lizards would come to him.

  The truck stop was four miles west of Billings, Montana, off I-90. A cold mist hung in the air and moisture beaded on the windows and the paint jobs of more than seventy big trucks. The black asphalt lot shined as if freshly varnished between the rows of semis, reflecting the lighted highway signs and hundreds of streams of horizontal running lights from the parked trucks themselves. The air outside hummed with rumbling engines. Tendrils of steam rose from beneath the engines and combined with the undulating waves of heated exhaust that rose from beneath the big rigs.

  From his high perch in the dry and warm cab, his sight lines were clear. The truck plaza itself was filled with activity and he noted it carefully. Vehicles entered and exited the long banks of fuel pumps in front of the garish low-slung building a hundred yards away. Professional truckers filled 150-gallon aluminum tanks with diesel fuel on one side of the lot, passenger cars and vans filled up with gasoline on the other.

  Inside the truck stop restaurant, waitresses served the $10.95 T-bone special advertised on the marquee near the exit. Drivers lounged in the “trucker’s only” section checking e-mail, comparing road conditions, or drinking coffee. Truck stop employees cooked up fried chicken and potato wedges for the lighted bins at the front counter and manned the cash registers selling salted snacks, energy boosters, beef jerky, and drinks.

  This was the way it was on the open road; islands of lighted activity in a sea of prairie darkness. Cars and families on one side, truckers on the other, but sharing the same facility. Two vastly different worlds that met only at places like this. Inside, truck drivers and citizens barely acknowledged each other and the modern truck stop was designed so there would be little interaction. Sure, the drivers would get on their radios and laugh at the rubes they’d run into inside and mock their looks or stupid conversations, but inside they were segregated between the amateurs and the professionals, the clueless consumers-the civilians, the amateurs-and the cloistered universe of the providers.

  He was on the road so much his outlook on it had changed completely over the years. It no longer seemed like he was moving, for one thing. Now he felt as if he were stationary while the road rolled under him and the scenery flowed by. The world came to him.

  Like the captain of a large ocean vessel, a large swath of the landscape was off-limits to him, as he was confined by the shipping lanes that were interstate highways. When he parked his truck at a rest area or truck stop for the night he couldn’t venture into town because he had no way to get there unless he walked. It was like a captain who had to anchor his boat and take a dinghy to shore.

  Oh, how he resented the smug people in those towns. They thought their food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and electronics simply appeared at stores or on their front doorsteps. They didn’t stop to think that every item they ate or wore or used was likely transported across the nation in the trailer of his truck or those like him, or that the hardworking blue-collar rednecks they avoided in real life and despised on the road were the conduits of their comfort and the pipeline of their wealth.

  * * *

  It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so there was more traffic on the highways than usual. It would be much worse the next day as families moved across the country with a lull on Thanksgiving and another spike on Sunday as people returned home. He was used to it. The rhythms of the road were like rivers that flooded and receded in perpetuity.

  The Beartooth Mountains to the south were light blue with new snow and the lack of stars indicated heavy cloud cover. It was still warm enough on the valley floor that the moisture hadn’t turned to snowflakes, but there was a snap in the air outside and he watched as travelers left their cars and zipped up coats on their way into the truck stop. He snorted at an overweight family of fools wearing T-shirts and shorts who practically ran from their passenger van to the door that led to the restrooms. Fucking idiots. What if they broke down wearing clothes like that? Who would they look for to rescue them? Me, he thought. The invisible, faceless trucker.

  In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout. The truck was flat black, stripped of chrome, and as subtle as a fist. It was a trucker’s truck the way a Harley-Davidson was a biker’s bike. He’d even painted the twin stacks with black chimney paint to eliminate any hint of flash.

  Without looking down, he let his right hand slip down on the side of the seat until he could find the string that held his bundle together. He pulled the cord and the bundle unrolled. His fingertips traced each item. Everything had been wiped clean and sterilized since its last use: the tire thumper, which was a short lead-filled wooden baton used to check the pressure of his eighteen wheels, the pliers and wire cutters, two pairs of handcuffs, four knives-the heavy hunting Buck, the short folding Spyderco, the long thin filet knife, and the stainless-steel hatchet. His lightweight Taurus 738 TCP semiauto in.380 ACP. In an oblong, hard, and hinged box once used for sunglasses was a syringe filled with Rohypnol. And his vintage fourteen-inch long Knapp butcher saw with the aluminum T-grip and both
bone and wood teeth on opposite sides of the blade. It was designed for the rapid field butchering of big game. He ran his thumb gently along the bone teeth.

  Satisfied that everything was in order, he removed the tire thumper and placed it on the dashboard next to his roll of one hundred-mile-an-hour brown Gorilla tape. Both were standard items used by every trucker and they wouldn’t draw a second glance. He bundled the rest of the tools and reached under his seat for the satchel, which contained heavy plastic bags, the wire ties, his folding shovel, the 300,000 volt Stun Master stun gun, and the three-inch-wide roll of duct tape. He put the bundle of tools back into the satchel and zipped it closed.

  If things went well, he wouldn’t even need to reach for the satchel. If things went well …

  * * *

  The Lizard King glanced around the cab to make sure he’d completed all the items on his mental checklist. The carpeted floormats had been pulled and stashed, leaving a bare metal floor. Both seats were fitted with clear plastic covers. All logbooks, maps, and other paperwork-anything that could absorb fluid-had been stashed away. He turned in his seat. The cloth drapes separating the cab from the sleeping cabin had long ago been replaced by clear shower curtains that allowed him to see clearly into the back. On his bunk was a specially adapted cover made from blue tarpaulin, and plastic sheeting lined the walls. The single small window of the sleeper was blacked out.

  He’d forgotten nothing. There was no cloth or porous surface for blood, hair, or fiber to cling to inside, and the cab and cabin could be hosed clean in a few minutes by a power washer.

  He was ready.