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“Hailey’s Hog” – Andrew Draper
Hailey’s H
og
A Novel By
Andrew Draper
© 2009 by Andrew Draper/Lighthouse Communications
All rights reserved.
Part One – So it begins…
Chapter One
The banshee wind screaming a shrill concerto in her ears, Hailey Barrow twisted her right wrist and felt the thrilling pull of gravity in her chest as the speedometer needle quickly raced up the scale.
Diametrically opposed emotions battled for control of her disconcerted mind as she pushed the metallic blue missile forward. The fear stepped up first, struggling to take control. Oh, My God! I can’t believe I did this.
She knew in her mind that she had just violated every moral tenet she believed in with this heinous act. What the hell am I going to do now? How could I do this?
The “what ifs” boomed, cannons in her head, as a bolt of hot panic seized her.
The specter of jail loomed ever-larger as she roared down the interstate. Visions of bars grew like a thunderstorm, the lightning striking wherever and whenever it chose. I’ve got to get out of here before the cops find me. I can’t go to jail. I’d rather die!
Sweating again in the infernal heat, she continued her agitated contemplations as her fears continued to assert themselves. Mom’s going to go apoplectic if she finds out. This will kill her.
She tightened her hold on the handlebars, steadying herself against the increasing wind and heading off the dangerous thoughts before they could take root and crush her in their grip. She briefly thought about her uncle. What would Greg say if he could see me now? Would he be proud…or disgusted?
She rolled that daunting question around in her head for a few miles, not liking any of the feelings it dredged up.
This can’t be happening! I never wanted this, I just wanted the truth. This whole situation so surreal, how the hell did I get myself into this mess?
The nagging fear remained, her constant and unwanted companion, but this time it was different. This time suffocating dread unwillingly shared space in her divided consciousness with the tiniest flicker of hope.
If I can keep moving, I won’t get caught. No one saw me, or him. I just have to be careful…and move fast.
The random thoughts continued pulling at the taut strings of her fragile psyche as she blasted away from the twinkling city light of Tucson into the thick darkness of another sweltering Arizona night.
The ‘do-rag’ covering her head flapped against her neck, matching the intermittent thump of the long brown braid riding the air current, bouncing along her back in a repeating rhythm.
Looking at her after-market fuel gauge, she noticed the bright orange needle hovering around the “E” mark.
Shit! I can’t believe I forgot to get gas! She mentally cuffed herself in the back of the head, cursing her fear-spawned mental oversight. I’ve got to get a grip.
Checking her watch repeatedly, Hailey now saw almost ten minutes had ticked off the clock while she fretted, calculating and recalculating the mileage on the trip meter against the bike’s range. Just as the reality of the cold equation became undeniable, her eyes landed on a sign as it entered the headlight’s sharp beam. 24-hour fuel and food – 5 miles. She read the words and exhaled in relief. Thank God, she thought as she envisioned the impossible task of pushing the 700-pound motorcycle along the highway.
Again her mind shifted gears. I don’t want to stop, but I really have no choice. Considering who might be at this type of a store in the dead of night, she prepared herself for anything, needles of anxiety poking at her stomach. I’ll just get in, get the gas and get out.
She veered for the off-ramp and approached the rundown convenience store, the shabby building sitting alone in a dusty, overgrown field along the busy interstate. Coming to a stop next to the long-obsolete gas pump, she reached under the tank, killed the ignition and flipped out the sidestand, leaning the heavy bike over. She hung her goggles on the left mirror and moved toward the light emanating from inside the station.
Sidestepping several large oil stains on the driveway, she threaded between some dead shrubs in a raised median and the wind-blown trash as she crossed the lot. Getting closer to the door, she took in the rotted planks making up the walls and noted they effectively joined the rust painting the tin roof to give the place an eerie, abandoned feel. She felt cold tentacles of anxiety threatening to return as she reached the door. It’s just a store, she reminded herself as she gripped the tarnished brass handle. People buying gas, beer…just a store. She took a deep breath of the dry air and steeled herself before crossing the threshold.
She immediately felt the eyes land on her as she entered, stepping over the cracked and missing floor tiles into the air conditioning. Internal danger antenna now vibrating incessantly, she continued on, passing a small knot of men surrounding a rack of garish girly magazines standing in the corner beside a dilapidated ice cream freezer.
They halted their animated conversation to stare, watching her as she moved. The soft clunk of her boots echoed off the dingy ceiling, the only sound in the rapidly thickening tension. Her pulse ratcheted up a few notches as she neared the ungainly bunch.
Tall, slender and busty, the attractive twenty year-old shuddered at the undisguised hunger behind the lascivious grins. Oh, God. Here it comes. She prepared herself for the inevitable barrage of crude remarks.
The remaining few patrons, curiously peeking from the aisles, appeared to be locals. She saw them wearing the physical marks of their poverty, the dirty clothes, the missing teeth, like a badge of honor.
Feeling her skin begin to crawl under the men’s lustful stares, she moved to the drink cooler and stuck her head inside the dirt-obscured glass door, grateful for a physical barrier between her and them. Pausing to enjoy the momentary relief from the blistering heat and unwanted attention, she took a few extra seconds to make her selection.
Reaching toward the top shelf to retrieve a bottled water, her leather vest rode up on her waist, exposing the sleek black automatic holstered at her left hip. She noticed the men, seeing the pistol, quickly resumed ogling the woman in print, her presence suddenly not so enticing after all.
Turning around to again face the store, she cracked the bottle’s seal and drank deeply. I scared them! The very idea, foreign as the Yen, fought her mental rejection to settle as truth. Taking a second drink of cool water, she let the realization sink in. She looked at her reflection in the dirty glass of the cooler. They don’t see the terrified me, they see the biker chick, all jeans and leather.
A little shiver of guilty pleasure flashed through her limbs despite the store’s stifling heat. The shiver turned into a wave as a feeling of unbridled power surged through her, tingling with both its novelty and its potency.
“You have to pay for that first.” The clerk said, breaking the stilted silence.
She focused on the man behind the counter before answering. I’ve seen rednecks before, but this guy is almost a stereotype.
Short with a balding head, the man had two missing teeth, his greasy appearance and antagonistic expression left her feeling she needed a bath. She walked to the counter, looking down at him and met his cold stare with a searing gaze of her own.
“I’ll take this,” she said, placing the water bottle on the counter. “A bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold…and twelve dollars on pump two, please.”
“Can I see some I.D.?” he said, his cold eyes burning into hers.
Anxiety biting her skin like ants, she paused. She still had two months to go before she turned 21 and couldn’t wait. She reached into her wallet and pulled out her fake ID, handing it to the clerk. If you act confident, nobo
dy will question you.
He carefully examined the card, turning it to the light. Satisfied, he dropped the laminated card on the counter then hit the keys, making the ancient register clatter to life. “That comes to $32.27,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and eyeing her in contempt.
She smirked at the overweight man, her face a study in dignified distaste. You’re not as smart as you think you are. “I think I can manage that.”
She showed her displeasure at his intentional slight, as well as matching his evident hostility, by dropping a pair of twenty-dollar bills on the counter and waiting in the resumed silence for her change. Pulse settling toward normal, she watched in mild disinterest as he put the bottle of Tequila into a brown paper bag. Picking up her purchases, she turned away from the counter and headed toward the door, now in sight at the end of the aisle.
She moved past the magazine rack, chin held high. She coughed and two men still drooling on the two-dimensional women flinched. Relief washed over her as she finally exited the store, the screen door hitting the frame with a loud bang.
Again standing next to the Hog, she silently reveled in the feeling of power she experienced in the store. That was strange. Cool, but very weird. She let the unexpected electrical charge bounce around her system unchecked as the antiquated pump loudly clicked off her purchase.
Roaring away from the station, the thin film of sweat she’d gathered while standing at the pumps evaporated off her body almost instantly as the bike pushed her through the desert’s super-heated air. Once more a chrome and leather bullet, she leaned into the G-forces and accelerated. The bike shot forward, its 100 horses effortlessly passing 80 mph, chewing up Interstate 10 north of Tucson with the veracious appetite of a rabid Pit Bull.
Heart thudding a fast, steady beat against her ribs, she rolled on through the Sonoran inferno. “God, it’s fucking hot,” she thought aloud, the words ripped away, scattered behind her by the burning wind. As she opened up the gap, the city lights began to shrink in the rearview mirrors as the urban landscape slowly dissolved, giving way to the unyielding desert’s desolate expanse.
Putting her feet up on the chrome-plated highway pegs, Hailey felt the vibrations play over her tight muscles and settled in for the first leg of the four hour trip back to Prescott.
Continuing to punch through heat waves of almost palpable intensity, she again admired the harsh beauty of the desert, a living force that never ceased to amaze her.
I did what I came to do. Now I just have to get back home in one piece.
Her mission to Arizona’s other metro had been a success and she internally acknowledged the multi-armed salutes of tall Saguaro cacti, a green blur passing through her headlight beam.
Did they know? Were they giving me the proverbial ‘High Five’?
The temperature still hovered at 110 degrees and the wind-driven sand buffeted her face as she blasted down the interstate. Tempestuous emotions still running fluid between levels of her consciousness, she wondered if she was up to the challenge of this deadly game of cat and mouse. Well, ready or not, there’s no going back now.
A spine-tingling rush of adrenaline still cruised through her veins as the bone-rattling roar of the v-twin engine drowned out all her fear, all the nagging self-doubts, all the loneliness…well almost all of it.
Startled by the on-coming cacophony, a coyote broke from the cover of the roadside brush as she approached. She watched the emaciated animal stop briefly in the middle of the road. It fixed its glowing eyes on her, frozen in fear of the ground-pounding menace so rapidly closing the distance. Its startled glance settled on the source of the roar for several seconds before the instinct for self-preservation finally took over.
The scavenger shot under some scrub oak next to the gray metal guardrail. Somehow instinctively knowing it was outclassed, the wary predator cowered, peeking from its lair as she continued to close the gap. The yellow eyes watched the thundering steel demon flash past to disappear in a swirling cloud of dust, smoke and noise.
As the miles rolled beneath her, Hailey’s thoughts began to drift, succumbing to the numbing hypnosis of the heat and the highway, Jackson Brown’s “Running on Empty” playing in her mind.
She sought to assemble the random yet intertwined pieces of how she came to be there, at that time, in that place…and how she had changed, both inside and out.
Chapter Two
Six months earlier…
The dark walls of the attorney’s richly paneled office seemed to close in on her as Hailey sat in a grief-induced fog. Tears wet her face as listened to the lawyer drone on. Blah, Blah, Blah, the endless legalese bounced off her tortured mind like a tennis ball, making no sense to her at all.
She hadn’t wanted to attend the reading of her Uncle Greg’s will, but her mother insisted and in her distress she just didn’t have the emotional fortitude to argue with her. Arguments with her mother never ended well. She had acquiesced to her mother’s demand simply to bring an end to her constant nagging.
You just can’t reason with someone who lives in their own private version of reality. She thought regrettably.
The lawyer’s voice receding to a remote din, she squirmed uncomfortably in the expensively upholstered brocade chair as the sudden, embarrassing realization hit her. Oh, God. I have to pee! She was overcome by a rush of emotions as heartache and physical discomfort jockeyed for position in her manic mind. She almost laughed aloud at the total insanity of it all.
The beautiful young woman nervously wrung her hands in her lap and dabbed at her tear-swollen eyes with an intricately embroidered silk hanky, waiting impatiently for the reading to be over. The funeral was bad enough, she thought grimly, now I have to sit through this.
She had looked into the coffin two days before, feeling her heart shatter like dropped crystal at the sight of her beloved uncle’s lifeless countenance. Why did he keep his cancer a secret for so long? I could have been there for him. I should have been there for him.
Now, as if her staggering burden of guilt and loss wasn’t enough, she had to listen to some stranger go on about her uncle’s estate. She had never thought about her uncle’s wealth while he was alive and any inheritance was a subject she, unlike her mother, cared nothing about.
Struggling ineffectively to come to grips with the ache his absence brought, her painful feelings overflowed her efforts at self-control. She sobbed outright for the first of many times that day. The sadness and injustice of it all griped her heart, squeezing it like a vise.
Staring blankly as the tiny teardrops landed one by one on her black satin stilettos, she was suddenly and violently ripped back into the moment by the lawyer’s impatient voice.
“Miss Barrow…Hailey, did you hear me?” he asked in flat, even tones.
Mortified at being caught off-guard, she responded with a mouse-like squeak. “I’m sorry. You were saying?”
“I said,” he cleared his throat for emphasis. “To my niece Hailey; I leave the $250,000 trust account at Wells Fargo Bank. I also leave her my Harley-Davidson motorcycle under the conditions stipulated below.”
The lawyer’s voice faded out as the blood rushed away from Hailey’s brain and the room began to revolve around her in ever-shrinking circles. As the reality of the here and now dissolved, she saw Greg’s face, smiling at her from the seat of the antique motorcycle that was his pride and joy. The vision dissolved as an unrelenting sea of black engulfed her like a wet blanket. Eyes rolling up in her head, her last toe-hold on the present snapped. She tipped sideways in her chair, sliding to the floor, unconscious.
Her eyes fluttered open several minutes later and she looked up into the fear-lined face of her mother. “Hailey dear, can you hear me? Are you alright?” With her mother holding her by the arm, she sat up in stunned silence, struggling to stop the incessant spinning of the room.
As the swirling ring of thick fog finally subsided, she began to string together a few coherent thoughts.
Greg�
��s gift of financial independence she could understand. Makes sense. He was an independent guy. He wanted me to be independent too. Her thoughts ran forward without restraint or direction. But, why would he leave me his motorcycle? And what the hell am I supposed to do with it.
Continuing to examine his possible motives for bestowing such an unusual and extravagant gift, she tried unsuccessfully to ignore the irritating racket intruding from the room’s periphery. She eventually followed the grating noise to its source. Greg’s ex-wife Suzette sat in a chair on the other side of the lawyer’s huge oak desk, pointing a perfectly manicured, accusing finger at the attorney. Hailey’s stomach lurched at the mere sight of her one-time aunt. Selfish witch...Vulture!
“I’ll contest the will!’ the blond waif hissed as the man sat calmly behind the desk, polishing his glasses with a handkerchief. “I was his wife. His estate should be mine.”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders, then picked an imaginary piece of lint from his impeccably tailored charcoal grey suit.
“You do what you feel is right. However, I must remind you, the two of you were divorced…and you were also specifically excluded from the will. I feel quite confident in my ability to defend Miss Barrow’s inheritance against any challenge.”
The rest of Suzette’s tirade didn’t penetrate the grief-induced veil choking Hailey’s unsettled mind. Looking back toward the source of the now-reduced riot of threats, Hailey saw that Suzette’s face was still flushed to a bright pink, although she had finally regained some measure of self-control.
As the reading mercifully ended, Hailey’s mind began to clear and she looked at the final attendee. Seated next to her, Hailey’s mother Joanne had never been close to her brother-in law. As a consequence, Hailey hadn’t seen much of her uncle after her father’s death three years earlier, until he showed up on her mother’s doorstep last April…when he came home to die.
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