Slow Curve on the Coquihalla

by R. E. Donald

  Suzanne poked him in the side. He jumped and made a grab for her hand, missed it, and started to tickle her again. "Wait, wait!" she said, trying to fight him off. "What about the king's job?"

  "The king and queen became the proud proprietors of The Magic Kingdom dude ranch, which became very famous and made pots and pots of money, so the king and queen and their little princesses got to meet lots of new people and had fun playing with their horses every day."

  "I see," said Suzanne, with an uncertain smile. She wondered what had happened to the queen's father, and whether all the queen's memories disappeared along with her fancy gown and the king's old job. "A magic wand, eh?"

  Gary pulled his hand out from under the sheet and waved an imaginary wand above her head. "Whoosh!," he said. "Neat story, huh?"

  Suzanne sighed, not daring to look at him. Gary had a right to dream. It was a dream that she had once collaborated with him on, it seemed so long ago. She didn't want to let herself get caught up in it now. Not now, when Ranverdan had fallen like a sudden weight on her shoulders, a weight that she felt herself staggering under, as she tried to cope with the additional burden of her grief. Not now, when things were going badly at Ranverdan and she felt so very vulnerable. Not now. She whispered it under her breath, not wanting to say it aloud.

  Yes, Gary had a right to dream.

  "Suzy?" He lifted her chin gently and made her look into his eyes. "Sweetheart? Will you go there with me today? Please, Suzy. Come with me, and we can take the girls for a pony ride?"

  She closed her eyes, pressed her lips together. Was there any good reason to say no?

  "It's all I want for Father's Day, hon. Just for you to come up there, take a look around. Okay?"

  She sighed deeply.

  "Okay, baby?"

  She nodded, reluctantly. "Yes, mi'lord," she said, and he hugged her tight.

  CHAPTER 24

  – – – – TWENTY-FOUR

  When Hunter pulled up in front of the Rodgers' house in the Suburban around three o'clock, Suzanne was squatting on the lawn weeding a border of red geraniums that ran the length of the driveway. She looked like a young tomboy, her hair tucked up inside the crown of a fluorescent green baseball cap. As before, he couldn't help but think about how much her father must have loved her. As he got out of the truck, she stood up and stretched her back, her face in an exquisite grimace, and let two oversized, dirt covered gardening gloves drop to the grass at her feet.

  "Gardening, laundry, and carrying kids," Hunter said with a smile. "They're almost as hard on the back as driving a truck."

  She laughed, wiping her hands on what looked like a man's white dress shirt with the sleeves cut off. It came almost to the hem of her faded yellow shorts. "Yeah. Tell me about it! So, how was the Shuswap?"

  "Great! But I spent most of the last twenty four hours eating and drinking." He slapped his stomach. "It should last me for at least a week. You're sure hard at work here. Looks good." He indicated the row of geraniums with a wave of his hand. "Where are the girls?"

  "I gave them ten dollars so that they could take their father to the Dairy Queen for ice cream cones. Father's Day, you know?" Her smile faded, and she looked down at her hands, picked at some dirt under one of her fingernails.

  Hunter nodded. They were both thinking of her father again.

  "Gary took me out to see that ranch," she said. She bent down to pull a weed she'd missed, tossed it into a plastic pail.

  He nodded silently again.

  "It's very nice." She rubbed her jaw with her wrist instead of her fingers, but still managed to get a little smudge of dirt on her face. Hunter fought the impulse to wipe it away. "I guess you don't know anything more yet ... about Dad?"

  "No. I'm working on a couple of leads, but it'll probably be a few days before I get anything new."

  "I can't even think about selling the company," she said, sounding almost angry. "How could I? It meant so much to Dad."

  Hunter smiled gently. "You know what I think means more to your Dad than anything else?"

  She raised her eyes to his, but said nothing.

  "I think that your happiness means more to him than anything."

  "That doesn't make it any easier," she said in a tiny voice, looking down at her hands again. "I don't even know what would make me happy. In fact, sometimes I can't imagine myself ever being truly happy again."

  He reached out and touched her cheek, rubbed gently at the smudge of dirt. "You will be," he said. "I promise you, you will." Then he felt uncomfortable, and looked away.

  She rubbed at the same spot, then said, "I guess you need a ride to your truck?"

  They climbed into the Suburban, Hunter driving, and headed towards the Ranverdan yard. His mind groped for a suitable opening to a question he needed to ask her, but found none. "Suzanne ... ?" He hesitated.

  "Yes?"

  He shrugged. "I just wondered ...” He inhaled, exhaled. "I wondered whether you were ever -- I don't know -- maybe ..." He compressed his lips, looked at her and then back at the road. "... embarrassed that your father was a truck driver -- when you were a teenager."

  She looked stunned.

  "Oh, damn, I'm sorry. It was a stupid question, especially today. It's not about you, really, it's just ...."

  "Ahhh. I see," she said. "It's okay. And yeah, maybe I was – embarrassed, like you say. I usually didn't talk about it, but if anybody asked, I'd tell them my dad was in the transportation industry, or sometimes I'd just say that he had his own company. I don't think I ever came right out and told anybody he was a truck driver. Dumb, huh? At university, a lot of the other girls' fathers were doctors and lawyers and executives in big corporations or whatever, and I didn't want them to look down on me. I was ... ignorant, I guess. Just an ignorant kid."

  "Thanks," he said.

  "I'm sorry. It doesn't mean ..."

  "That's okay." He smiled sadly. "At that age, maybe I would've done the same."

  When Hunter got home that night, there was a message from Sam Manji on his answering machine. The message said that something interesting had developed in regard to Rick Bilodeau, and that Hunter should call the Surrey R.C.M.P. detachment Monday morning. Other than half a dozen hang ups, Manji's was the only recorded call.

  Hunter was tired. He erased the tape and went to bed.

  It was a typical Monday morning at Watson Transportation: phones ringing non-stop, drivers in and out of the door with styrofoam cups of coffee in hand, trucks in and out of the yard, warehouse doors up and down like yo-yos, their metal chains sliding across pulleys with a metallic whirr. El hadn't even realized the Ranverdan tractor-trailer that had been parked in the back lot was gone until she saw it coming back, just before ten o'clock.

  "Who the hell is that?" she muttered, catching a glimpse of the blond driver on the far side of the green cab as it passed her window.

  The phone rang again. A North Vancouver customer wanted to know when his shipment would be delivered, so she had to raise her city driver on the radio to find out where he was. There'd been a rush-hour accident northbound on the Second Narrows bridge that had traffic jammed up for miles on westbound Highway 1. She reported the driver's ETA back to the customer and looked up just in time to catch sight of the unfamiliar blond driver walking past the front of the building on the way to his car.

  "I'll be damned," she said. She squirmed out of her chair and hustled to the door, flung it wide and yelled, "Sorenson! You dip stick! You too good to say hello, or what?" He gave her the finger, several times with both hands, and ambled over. He was wearing a regular shirt, light blue, with buttons and a collar, and his hair came to just below his ears; his moustache was neatly trimmed.

  "What the fuck happened to you?" she asked. "You find God in Edmonton, or what?"

  Sorry grinned. "Fuck off, Fat Broad," he said. "My kids wanted to take me out for dinner yesterday, and my wife made me get cleaned up so we could go somewhere respectable."

  "Yeah? Where'd you go?
"

  "Denny's."

  They both guffawed loudly.

  "I see you got the Ranverdan load delivered in good time this morning," El said, nodding towards the back of the lot where the tractor-trailer was parked.

  "Damn right. I might even keep that job," he said.

  "Any luck with ... you know?"

  He shook his head. "Not yet. It'll come."

  "Yeah. Let's hope so." Her phone was ringing again. "See you around, eh?"

  He waved and turned back towards his car.

  "Watson!" she barked into the receiver.

  "Good morning, El." It was Hunter.

  She told him about Sorry's new look. "If it wasn't for his Harley belt buckle, you wouldn't even suspect he was a biker," she said. "What's his angle, d'you suppose?"

  "Good for him," said Hunter. "He's mellowing with age, I guess."

  She snorted. "As amusing as he is – and I like the guy, don't forget – I wouldn't trust him any farther than I could throw his bike. He's still part of that one percent, as far as I'm concerned."

  "He's got a family now, El. That changes a man."

  "Yeah. Charles Manson had a family, too."

  Hunter's voice signalled a change of subject. "Listen, El, do you know anything about Murphy's schedule this week? I'd really like a chance to sit down with him – as soon as possible – but I don't want it to look contrived, if you know what I mean."

  "I'll probably be talking to Suzanne at some time today – if she's speaking to me – so I'll see what I can do for you. I'll let you know." Another line began to ring. "Hang on a sec."

  She put the new caller on hold.

  "Hunter? You still there?" And yet another line. "Shit!"

  "It's okay, El. I've got to drop by there later this afternoon. I'll talk to you then."

  "Well ... " She'd intended to tell him that one or another of his kids had been phoning yesterday, that they'd reached her at home twice to find out where he was, and that they'd sounded worried. But they would have left a message on his answering machine. "Okay," she said, and he hung up.

  Besides, she thought as she punched the flashing button on her phone, he probably talked to them last night after he got home.

  "Hello, there! How's the highway treating you?"

  Hunter had reached his friend, Sam Manji, at the Surrey R.C.M.P. detachment.

  "I've got something new for you on that Rick Bilodeau character," said Sam. "We picked him up on Saturday for trying to sell stolen property to a female officer working undercover in a bar. He's trying to unload a CD player, still in the box, with serial numbers that match one stolen in an electronics store break-in about four weeks ago. The wee small hours of May 25th, to be exact. The date ring a bell with you?"

  "Yes," said Hunter, nodding to himself. "Randy Danyluk's rig went off the road sometime after midnight on May 25th. So if Bilodeau was involved in that electronics store break-in, I guess I can scratch him off my list of suspects."

  "Hang on. There's more to come. At first Bilodeau gave us some song and dance about it being a birthday present from his Mom." Manji snorted. "He should write fiction. The guys pull up his particulars. His birthday's in October. Try again, pal. Next he says, he found it at a bus stop. Sure thing. So the good officers bring him in for further questioning. The only prints we can lift off the box belong to the birthday boy. So we tell him what we're going to arrest him for, and he gives us an alibi."

  "An alibi?"

  "Right. We verified it to the best of our ability, and it's solid. Bilodeau couldn't have committed the B & E. He and a friend drove to Princeton that night, and stayed there at his friend's brother's house for a couple of days."

  "Princeton? You sure?"

  "Sure as we can be. His friend and his friend's brother have both backed him up. Their stories jive well enough that we had to drop the charges to possession."

  "What time did they arrive? Did you verify that?"

  "Bilodeau's friend said they stopped in Hope for pizza at about midnight, and got to Princeton at about two thirty a.m. According to my calculations, travelling time between Hope and Princeton on Highway 3 is just under two hours. You detour via the Coquihalla, then back down from Merritt on 5A, it's not much more than about half an hour longer."

  Hunter looked blankly at the photo copies of the Waicom computer printouts, which were still spread out across his desk. If Bilodeau was in Princeton at two thirty a.m., he was still just as much a suspect as anybody else in Randy's death. Maybe more so.

  Because wasn't Bilodeau the only one who had threatened Randy, in public, less than thirty hours before?

  Hunter spent what was left of the morning catching up on his mail and doing laundry. He had two pairs of decent blue jeans and after any stretch of time on the road, sometimes going two or three days without a shower, he couldn't forget to wash them or he'd be stuck with dirty jeans for another week or even two.

  His thoughts kept returning to Randy's accident and, with a mounting sense of frustration, to the question of what he, a civilian, could do to determine the identity of whoever had engineered it. He hoped that a discussion with the big Newfoundlander would reveal something about Murphy's suspicious behavior: his warning to Sorry at the Waicom warehouse, why there was no record of him passing the Coquihalla toll booth on the morning after Randy's death, and why Carla had described him as being "pissed" at Randy when they left The Goal Post the night before. As far as Hunter could tell, Murphy wasn't a criminal. If he were, he wouldn't have remained a close friend of "straight as an arrow" Randy for as long as he had. He was probably also not a liar, at least, not a good liar. Hunter hoped he would be able to read Murphy well enough to learn what he had to know.

  Bilodeau was a different matter. Hunter had already had one run in with the tall, skinny dope pusher, and couldn't expect anything but hostility from a face-to-face encounter. He doubted whether talking to Bilodeau would yield any useful information. That meant his only options were to coax some information from Bilodeau's friend, and possible accomplice, or to find a witness. Sam Manji had given him a description of the car, and the names both of Bilodeau's friend and of the friend's brother in Princeton. The friend owned an old five-ton truck and hired himself out to local cartage companies on their busy days, and did private household moves on the weekends. Hunter had his pager number, but had yet to figure out a good pretext to call.

  In the early afternoon, Hunter headed out to the Watson Transportation yard to pick up his rig. The Blue Knight needed some attention, including a wash and an oil change. During his last inspection, he'd noticed a broken reflector that would need to be replaced, and his right-side mirror was loose. With all the running around getting things done, and stopping to talk to the guys at the Freightliner parts dealership, it was almost five o'clock by the time he got back to El's office.

  For once, she wasn't on the phone. She said Murphy was in Kamloops and couldn't legally be back on the road for a couple of days. She'd found out that he was scheduled to bring a load to Vancouver on Wednesday, and then he'd have to lay over until Thursday morning for a load to San Francisco. If Hunter wanted to pass on a more lucrative air-ride run to Winnipeg this week, she could send him to Eugene, Oregon on Tuesday. He could pick up a load in Portland on his way back north, and be in Vancouver in time to connect with Murphy Wednesday afternoon. "How's that sound?" she said, just as she grabbed a ringing phone.

  Hunter agreed. As much as he wanted time to concentrate on solving the mystery of Randy's death, he had to be on the road with The Blue Knight at least enough hours to pay its keep. Early tomorrow morning he'd be back on the road with ten skids of chemicals in drums for an Oregon pulp mill. He'd see Murphy on Wednesday.

  "Shit!" said El into the phone. "You let them load it already? How many? What!? How many? Jesus H. Christ! Put the shipper on, will ya?" The hand that held her pen drummed raggedly on the desktop. "Hello. Who's this? Bee-oh? Oh ... Bill." She rolled her eyes up at Hunter and silently mouthed, "Chinese."<
br />
  "Listen, ‘Bee-yo’," she said, "we're mainly a truckload operation, but we can make arrangements to do the distribution on your load. Have you got a manifest? Man - i - fest. A list of how many cartons get delivered to each store, you know, with all the addresses on it? Good. We'll need a copy as soon as possible. Can you fax it to me, please? I said ...." She had him repeat back the fax number and made sure he understood that she wanted it done right away, then slammed down the phone and sat back, blowing a big breath into the air above her head. "Shit!"

  Hunter raised his eyebrows in question, and she explained. A garment manufacturer in Winnipeg had a load of cartons to be delivered to seventeen different stores in the Vancouver area. According to the driver, the three hundred and seventy-six cartons had been loaded into the trailer loose and in no kind of order at all. That meant the entire forty foot trailer would have to be unloaded, the boxes sorted into seventeen piles on the warehouse floor, and reloaded into smaller trucks for delivery to the separate stores. "I'm gonna have to call in a cartage company. Good thing it'll be a Thursday delivery. Hardly a spare truck for hire in the city on Mondays."

  Hunter grinned. "What are you laughing at?!" El roared.

  "I know just the guy for you to call," he said, pulling a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. "And I'll help him load his truck."

  Half an hour later, Bilodeau's friend phoned in response to the message El left on his pager. He'd never heard of Watson Transportation, but yes, he and his truck were available on Thursday at the rate of thirty-five dollars an hour, and yes, he would be there at eight o'clock sharp. El gave Hunter a thumbs up.

  "And you," she said to him as she hung up the phone, "as part-time warehouse help, are entitled to the princely sum of ten dollars an hour."

  His informal interviews with Murphy and Bilodeau's friend successfully scheduled, Hunter headed back towards North Vancouver with a sense of accomplishment. Stuck in the afternoon traffic leaving Annacis Island, he pulled out his cellular phone and tried to reach Sorry. No answer. He could try again when he got home. On impulse, he turned off the freeway at the Cariboo Road exit and joined the lines of rush hour commuters returning to their homes in residential areas of North Burnaby. He'd stop in and see if the girls were home. El said that they had tried to call him yesterday, several times. Maybe they'd be free for dinner. He was hungry, and the prospect of eating alone tonight didn't excite him.