Breakout p-21

by Richard Stark

  This was much more than a gas station. There was a cafe attached, and a convenience store. For the longhaul truckers, or anyone else who wanted, showers and cots were available.

  There were two parking areas, separating trucks from cars, and the truck area was more full. Parker drove in among the cars and parked as much in the center of the pack as possible. Before he left the Plymouth, he searched its glove compartment and trunk, finding a shotgun, a Colt automatic, flares, a first-aid kit, handcuffs, a box of Ace bandages, an extra radio. He left it all, with the key in the ignition, and walked away toward the convenience store.

  Money could start to be a problem. He had a few hundred dollars on him, but no credit cards, no way to get quick cash except a minor-league holdup that would bring more trouble than profit. Claire’s two thousand through Brenda hadn’t gotten to him, and wouldn’t. He had no choice but to just keep moving, as fast as possible.

  In the convenience store, he bought half a dozen small cans of tomato juice and a box of crackers. Leaving the store, stowing the food inside his jacket, he turned toward the truck parking area but then veered away again. They had a guard on it.

  A lot of these places had trouble with minor thefts out of the trucks while the truckers ate or slept or showered. Or screwed. So the gas station would hire a guard, just a big dumb guy with a billy club to walk around among the trucks, keep them safe. He was always a guy guaranteed to be bored enough to welcome the rare opportunity to use the club; though he might ask one or two questions while reaching for it.

  Parker had meant to get inside a truck that looked to be headed eastbound, but not if it meant leaving a dead guard outside. So he turned away and walked over to one of the concrete picnic tables nobody ever uses, and waited.

  He knew what he was waiting for. A couple, in their forties or fifties. More and more, the owner-driven big rigs are operated by couples, people whose kids are grown or who never happened to have any. Wife and husband share the driving and take turns sleeping in the cot behind the main bench seat. They own the truck together, so nobody’s an employee. It keeps her out of the house and him out of trouble, and it works out better than two guys going into a partnership.

  He wanted a couple because he needed to be invited aboard. A singleton trucker might not like the look of Parker as a passenger, might be more curious about him than helpful toward him. A male pair wouldn’t want another male in their midst. But for a husband-wife, with nothing but each other and the radio for all those miles and all those days, it would be like inviting somebody onto their porch. A little conversation, a little change of pace.

  He waited twenty minutes, watching people go by, getting a few inquisitive stares. He drank one of the cans of tomato juice and went over to toss the can in the trash basket, then went back to sit and wait some more.

  Then here they came. He knew they were right the instant they walked out of the cafe. Midfifties, both overweight from sitting in the truck all the time, dressed alike in boots and jeans and windbreakers and black cowboy hats, they were obviously comfortable together, happy, telling each other stories. Parker rose and walked toward them, and they stopped, grinning at him, as though they’d expected him.

  They had. ‘I knew it,’ the man said, and said to his wife, ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘Well, it was pretty obvious,’ she said. .

  Parker said, ‘You know I want a lift.’

  The man gestured at the building behind him. ‘We saw you sitting out here, speculated about you.’

  The woman said, ‘We don’t have that much to distract us.’

  ‘You were here too long to be waiting for a partner,’ the man said. ‘Or a wife. So you want a lift. But you let half a dozen fellas go by. I said to Gail here, “He’s looking for a couple, cause he knows we won’t turn him down.”’

  ‘After I saw you throw the tomato can away,’ she said, ‘and not litter, I said, “All right. If he asks, we’ll say yes.”’

  ‘If you’re headed east,’ the man said.

  ‘I am,’ Parker said, and put his hand out. ‘My name’s John.’

  ‘I’m Marty’ the man said, ‘and this is Gail.’

  They started walking, Parker beside them, and Marty said, ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘New Jersey.’

  ‘Well, we’ll get you to Baltimore, and you can work it out from there.’

  ‘I could walkit from Baltimore,’ Parker said.

  16

  Their truck was a blue Sterling Aero Bullet Plus, one of the biggest longhaul tractors on the road, with room enough to stand upright in the sleeper box behind the seat, and a separate door to that area on the right side, behind the regular passenger door. No one would be using the bunk right now; Gail would drive, with Marty in the middle on the wide bench seat, and Parker on the right.

  ‘We’re still on California time,’ Marty said, as Gail started them up, ‘which is why the late lunch. We probably won’t want dinner until late, either.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Parker said.

  The truck nosed out of its place, Gail turning the big wheel, and as they followed the truck lane around behind the station building, headed for the interstate on-ramp, Parker saw a state police car moving slowly along an aisle over in the other parking area, the one for cars. He didn’t turn his head to watch it, and neither Marty nor Gail seemed to notice it.

  It was a different experience, being up here in this high cab, streaming straight eastward toward the night, the remnants of red sun low to the horizon behind streaks of cloud and pollution. You looked down on the tops of cars, across at other truckers, and it felt as though the load in the trailer was pushing the cab rather than the cab providing the power. Gail set the cruise control button on the steering wheel to 77,and they ran smoothly in the river of moderate traffic.

  Once they were up to speed, part of the flow, Gail said, ‘There we are. Anybody want the radio?’

  ‘Not now, Gail,’ Marty said. ‘You get tired of local news.’ To Parker he said, ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Parker said.

  Marty said, ‘You don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem like a man spends much time in parking lots, looking for a ride home.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Parker said. He’d known he’d have to explain himself, and was ready. Everybody on the highway believes the country-and-western songs, so he’d sing them one. ‘I’m embarrassed to tell you,’ he began. ‘Usually excuse this, Gail usually I got good instincts when it comes to women.’

  ‘Ho ho,’ Marty said.

  ‘Well, there I was in Vegas’

  ‘Ha ha!’ Marty said.

  Gail, looking at him past her husband, said, ‘I thought they cleaned Vegas up.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Parker said. ‘But Vegas cleaned me out. I hope you don’t mind, I don’t want to go through the details’

  ‘Not at all,’ Gail said.

  ‘I learned my lesson, this time,’ Parker assured them. ‘Back in Jersey, I got a car, and a house, and a bank account, so I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Good,’ Gail said.

  ‘Just don’t introduce me to anybody between here and there,’ Parker said. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Hah,’ Marty said.

  Jouncing woke Parker out of therapeutic sleep, and when he lifted his head, oriented himself in the dashboard lights, they were leaving the highway, bouncing down a badly maintained off-ramp toward a small country road. Parker had been sleeping against the right door, and Marty was now at the wheel, Gail nowhere in sight, the curtain closed over the sleeper box. Parker swallowed. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, could be delays, up ahead,’ Marty said. ‘Seemed like a good idea, go around it.’

  ‘Go around what?’

  ‘A few fellas coming the other way,’ Marty explained, ‘mentioned on the radio, there’s a roadblock a few miles up ahead.’

  ‘Roadblock?’ Parker shifted in the seat, trying to get more comfortable after sleeping in his clothes. ‘After drunk
drivers?’

  ‘Probably,’ Marty said. ‘They always take the opportunity, long as they’ve got you stopped, check every goddam thing they can think of. Looking for drugs, illegals, overweight. Check your license, your manifest, your log. You can kill an hour, one of those places, just on line, waiting your turn. Better to get off, take one of these slow roads, come back up on the highway a little later.’

  ‘Well,’ Parker said, ‘drunk drivers can be trouble.’

  ‘Sure they can,’ Marty agreed. ‘Get em off the road. But it could be anything, up there. Maybe they’re looking for somebody escaped from prison, that happens sometimes, I even heard it on the local news, somewhere along here, the trip out.’

  ‘They don’t stay out long,’ Parker said.

  ‘You’re right.’ Marty hesitated, wanting to say something, not sure he would, then said, ‘Let me tell you a little story, long as Gail’s asleep back there. And even if she isn’t asleep, she can’t hear us.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Not that she doesn’t knowthe story,’ Marty went on. ‘God knows, she does. Anyway, I was dumb like you about a woman once.’ He nodded his head at the curtain behind them. ‘Before I met Gail.’

  The road they were on now was two-lane asphalt with potholes, and the big truck had to slow-dance along it, Marty steering all the time. He said, ‘But I was even dumber than you, for even longer. Well, I was younger, too. But the fact is, I wound up doing four years well, almost four years in a state pen. Attempted robbery. Seven to ten, got out in the minimum.’

  ‘Four years is a long minimum,’ Parker said. ‘Oh, you know it.’ Marty concentrated on the road awhile, then said, ‘I know there’s fellas belong in there, I know there’s fellas I’d preferwas in there, but after being in there myself I could never put a man in a cage, personally. Never.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Parker said.

  ‘If a man wants to learn from his mistakes, fine,’ Marty said. ‘You look at me. You see the job I gave myself. Coast-to-coast hauling. You can’t get much farther from a four-man cage inside a six-hundred-man cage inside a four-thousand-man cage.’

  ‘Not much farther,’ Parker agreed. He looked out at the road, picked out by the white lights of the truck, with the ghosts passing just outside the light of the occasional farmhouse, gas station, diner, bar, all of them shut and dark. The dashboard clock read 4:27 A.M. He said, ‘What time zone is this?’

  ‘This,’ Marty told him. ‘We change it to keep track. Easier than changing our stomachs.’

  ‘There’s your roadblock,’ Parker said. Far off to their left, at a higher elevation, the cluster of red-white-blue shimmering lights was like a jamboree for machinery.

  Marty looked over there, then back at the road. ‘No sense going through that,’ he said.

  Parker said, ‘Won’t they see all the lights on this rig, over here, come over to see who we are?’

  ‘Not if they’re looking for a runaway,’ Marty said. ‘A runaway won’t be driving something like this.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘They’re not evil geniuses, over there,’ Marty said. ‘They’re just boys doing their job. Go up on the highway, hassle anybody comes through. So that’s what they’re doing. Six o’clock, they’re told, go on back to the barracks, that’s what they’ll do. They aren’t hunters.They’re just boys doing a job.’

  They went through an intersection marked by a yellow blinker, and Marty said, ‘Another fifteen, twenty miles, there’ll be an on-ramp. We’ll be fine from there.’

  17

  Claire rolled over when he walked into the room. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, but she didn’t say anything as she watched him move. Out of his pocket and onto the dresser went the three Patek watches that were the only result of the jewel job. He stripped and got into bed and then, folding into his arms, she said, ‘Gone a long time.’

  ‘It felt like a long time.’

  ‘I knew you’d be back,’ she said.

  ‘This time,’ he said.

  THE PARKER SERIES:

  Point Blank (1962) aka The Hunter

  The Mourner (1963)

  The Outfit (1963)

  The Steel Hit (1963) aka The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Score (1964) aka Killtown

  The Black Ice Score (1965)

  The Jugger (1965)

  The Handle (1966) aka Run Lethal

  The Seventh (1966) aka The Split

  The Green Eagle Score (1967)

  The Rare Coin Score (1967)

  The Sour Lemon Score (1969)

  Deadly Edge (1971)

  Slayground (1971)

  Plunder Squad (1972)

  Butcher’s Moon (1974)

  Comeback (1997)

  Backflash (1998)

  Payback (1999)

  Flashfire (2000)

  Firebreak (2001)

  Breakout (2002)

  Nobody Runs Forever (2004)

  Ask the Parrot (2006)

  ––––––––––––

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  Document ID: 2dbd56b7-2ba4-44bf-816c-dec100e05c55

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 5.8.2011

  Created using: calibre 0.8.10 software

  Document authors :

  Richard Stark

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