Slow Curve on the Coquihalla

by R. E. Donald

  "So you liked being in the R.C.M.P. more than you didn't like it, right?"

  Cripes! She had fastened onto that topic like a bulldog. He didn't know what she was fishing for, and wondered if she wanted to make him confess that he'd still rather be a Mountie than a truck driver. He couldn't. It wasn't true. He toyed briefly with the idea of telling her about his investigation into Randy's accident, and was relieved when the waitress appeared with their meals before he'd had a chance to reply.

  "Smells terrific," he said. A robust odor of garlic and seafood wafted up from his plate. "I had some great garlic prawns up at my landlord's cabin on Shuswap Lake." As they both dug in, he told her what a great place it was, about how bright the stars were and the way the sound carried across the water. Reach out to them, Chris had said. At least try, he told himself. It won't be the end of the world if they say no.

  "My landlord invited me to bring you and Jan up there for a weekend this summer. What do you think?" he asked, and was relieved when Lesley, her mouth full of souvlaki, nodded vigorously.

  By the time they left the restaurant, they'd worked out that the second weekend in July would probably be the best weekend for all of them, providing Jan hadn't just made other plans, and he'd even suggested that he take them for a ride in his truck one day soon.

  "That would be nice, Dad, but I don't think you're allowed to drive big trucks up our street," she said. "Except maybe for moving vans, I guess."

  Lesley was quiet on the short drive back to the townhouse. He walked her to the door. Just before she went in, she burst out "Dad, in case you haven't noticed, I'm not a little kid any more. Maybe some day you'll start to talk to me -- I mean, really talk to me -- like I'm an adult." Stunned, he stood there with his mouth open for almost thirty seconds after she closed the door.

  He was still trying to figure out what he should have done differently when he arrived home. There was a message on his answering machine.

  "I'm trying to reach a guy named Hunter. My name is Cal Burmeister. I'm a driver with Norco Transport out of Calgary. I hear you're ... uh ... I just want to tell you I saw Randy Danyluk on the night of May 24th. I'm calling from a restaurant in Gilroy, California and ... um ... I don't have a cell phone so you can't call me back."

  El covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand and laughed out loud when Hunter walked through the door. "Slouch a little more. Your spine's too straight," she said.

  He was wearing his oldest jeans, a pair he kept for painting and yard work, and the only black tee shirt he owned, one with the bulldog crest of Mack Trucks on the front. The shirt was inky dark and new, but badly wrinkled from lying at the bottom of his underwear drawer. A reasonably well-worn jeans jacket and scuffed steel-toed boots completed his uniform. He rubbed his hand self-consciously over the stubble on his chin. "How's my hair?" he asked.

  El squinted at the top of his head and motioned him to turn around. "It's okay. Looks real. What'd you do to it?"

  "I wet it down, put in some hair goop, and combed it with my fingers." He ruffled the top of it with his hand. "I didn't shower."

  El flapped her hand at him. "It'll probably do you good. Most days, you look too damn clean. Anyway, you'll have plenty of time to shower and change before your load for Calgary's ready to pick up this afternoon. I sure as hell don't want you out there fraternizing with Watson's customers looking like a middle aged punk." Although she practically spat out the last word, she couldn't keep the corners of her mouth from turning up.

  Hunter tried to call his sense of humor into play, but he felt wretchedly embarrassed. He didn't remember feeling this uncomfortable doing undercover work on the force, but that was a long time ago. He was younger then, and going undercover added excitement to the game, a game that he and Ken were always confident of winning. Not for the first time since he'd left the house that morning, he wished he hadn't made such a drastic change in his appearance. But recent experience had reminded him that his every day persona still looked and acted too much like a cop. If Bilodeau's friend was anything like Bilodeau himself, he'd either clam up or be openly antagonistic in response to questions coming from any man with an aura of law enforcement around him, no matter how casual he might try to make his conversation sound. As foolish as he felt arriving at El's office in this get up, it would be even more foolish to pretend he could be as effective in obtaining information without it. It had barely worked with Stan Murphy, let alone someone like Steve Mah.

  At eight o'clock when Bilodeau's friend drove up in his battered five ton, Hunter was helping El's warehouseman, Wally, unload and sort out the cartons of garments from the trailer. Wally had opened all of the loading doors to encourage a cross breeze through the warehouse. It was hot work, and the climbing sun wasn't helping. Dust and the heavy smell of motor oil from the forklift mingled with their sweat. Through the open door, Wally signalled the driver to back his truck up to the loading dock, and a minute later El walked into the warehouse with Bilodeau's friend in tow. He was a wiry guy of average height with brown hair, the kinky ends of which poked out from beneath a black baseball cap. He wore a clean white teeshirt and boot-cut Levis that were a little too big for him.

  "Unfortunately, Rob," she was saying to him, "the freight's not quite ready to load. I've gotta send Wally here out to the border to help one of my guys reload his trailer. Goddamn customs pulls his load apart and won't lift a finger to put it back together." It was a lie. El was sending Wally to McDonald's to eat breakfast and read the paper. "At thirty five bucks an hour, I'm sure you won't object to helping Dean here finish unloading."

  Hunter rolled his eyes discreetly. El had insisted on referring to him as Dean James, and had even typed it onto a warehouse time sheet. "Well," she'd said in defense of her inspiration, "the hair and all. Right? You look like James Dean in Giant, except twenty odd years older. Dunked in crude oil, nobody could tell you apart." Hunter had never been too impressed with James Dean, but it wasn't worth arguing about.

  They worked in near silence for almost forty minutes, Hunter pushing stacks of cartons to the back of the trailer and tossing them one by one to Rob, who carried each one from pile to pile looking at the labels until he found its proper place on the warehouse floor. Each of the seventeen piles was destined for a different store. The limited warehouse floor space was so crowded there was barely room to walk between the piles, and as Hunter helped sort the last few cartons, the two men repeatedly got in each other's way. Hunter wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm, then checked his watch. "Time for a break," he said. "Wan' a Coke?"

  Rob followed him to the lunch room. Hunter tossed him a cold Coke from the fridge and opened one for himself. "Too hot for coffee. I'm sweatin' like a pig! I'm not used to this manual labor shit." He emptied half the Coke and burped. El would love to see this performance, he thought. She once told him he talked like a school teacher, and claimed she had never heard him utter a four letter word.

  Hunter told Rob that he used to play in a touring country band, but decided he was too old to hang out in smoky clubs night after night. "Small town bars! Christ! Got so that I could never tell which goddamn town I was in, every bar and every crowd looked just the same. 'Play me and Bobby McGee'," he simpered, and took a hearty slug of Coke.

  Rob laughed. "I been there. I grew up in a small town. Princeton. I can't understand how people can stay there, man. Like, the big city scares 'em, or something. Small towns make me claustrophobic. I scrammed outa there as soon as I was old enough to get a job." He sounded younger than he looked.

  "Never been back since, huh?"

  "Yeah. Sometimes." Rob lit a cigarette. "Wouldn't live there again, though."

  "I passed through there myself, just a few weeks ago." He paused to rub the back of his neck. Didn't James Dean used to do that?

  "I was back there about then, too. Visiting my sister and her husband."

  "Yeah? Just for fun?"

  Rob shrugged. "I took a couple days off, needed a change of sc
ene." He drew on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. He clearly wasn't planning to elaborate.

  Hunter tried another tack. "That friggin' Hope-Princeton highway gives me the creeps. Especially at night." He pretended to shudder.

  Rob's eyes lit up. "Do you remember when that happened? The Hope-Princeton slide, I mean? January 9th, 1965. I'll never forget," he said, shaking his head. "I was still in Princeton – just a kid – so it was really a big deal. Whole side of the fuckin' mountain came down on the highway. Two bodies were never found." He tipped the last of his Coke down his throat. "Mother Nature can be a pretty awesome broad, eh?"

  "You ever take that truck of yours into the interior?" Hunter scratched his chin nonchalantly.

  "Yeah," he said. "I'm not licensed for it, but I've done it a few times. Personal moving jobs. Stuff like that."

  "Recently? You can get that beater up to the Coquihalla summit? I can barely get my car up those long hills."

  "Nah, not up the Coq. I've only ever taken it to Kelowna, which seems to be a pretty popular place to move to these days, so I always take the Hope-Princeton. It's bad enough."

  "A guy'd have to be pretty patient to drive one of them big rigs up the Coq, eh? Can't go very fast uphill, don't dare go fast downhill, I guess. Ever done it?" Hunter watched Rob's eyes closely.

  "Nope." He seemed to be thinking, so Hunter let the silence hang there undisturbed. "It's probably pretty boring, all right."

  "I heard one of them rigs went off the highway a few weeks ago. Didn't even find it for two days. Poor bastard. Imagine if the guy was alive and all busted up and just lyin' there waiting for somebody to come along."

  Rob shrugged. "I never heard. I don't read the papers much." He stubbed out his cigarette. "Guess I should get that truck loaded. Thirty five bucks an hour, eh?" He grinned at Hunter, hitching up his pants and wiggling his eyebrows. "She ain't payin' me to stand around shootin' the shit."

  They loaded everything they could destined for the north side of the river into the box of Rob's truck. While they worked, Hunter expressed his interest in buying a truck of his own, and asked Rob if it was a good business.

  "I'm barely scraping by," the driver admitted. "Something's always breakin' down, the price of gas is stupid, and there's always some dickhead who pays you with a rubber check. I always tell them up front that I only work for cash, but when you've already spent the time and gas to move stuff for a guy, and he doesn't have the money on him, you take whatever you can get. The good thing, though, is you don't have to punch a fuckin' time clock and you're your own boss, eh? That's worth a lot to some guys, like me."

  After he finished the north side deliveries, he would be coming back to load up the south side deliveries so he could end the day in Surrey, and finish delivering anything that was left over the following morning. When Rob had finished getting the paperwork from El for what they had already loaded, Hunter walked him to his truck..

  "Listen, Rob," he said. "I'd like to maybe buy you a beer sometime, hear more about the local delivery business. Where do you hang out?"

  "You know The Goal Post at the Riverside Inn, just south of the Patullo Bridge?"

  "Yeah, I've been there. Say, would you happen to know a guy, hangs out there, named Rick Bilodeau? A friend of mine said to look him up if I ever went there."

  "Yeah, I know him, sort of."

  "Friend of yours?"

  "Hardly." Rob shrugged and made a face. "I've done some business with him, you might say."

  Hunter grinned. "You might say, that's why my friend gave me his name." Hunter looked at the ground, debating whether to pursue this any further. He was pretty much convinced that Rob had nothing to do with Randy's accident. He didn't seem like the type of guy to be in league with Bilodeau, but given his financial struggles, he might well have been persuaded to provide the dealer with a ride to Princeton and an introduction to a few dope users there in exchange for gas money and a percentage of the profits.

  "Sure," said Rob. "Give me a call some time."

  As Rob climbed into his truck, Hunter noticed a Ranverdan rig pulling into the yard. Rob didn't give it a second glance.

  This time, Sorry arrived at the Waicom warehouse in Edmonton well before noon. He hadn't run into any of his brother bikers in Hinton, and he figured it was just as well. He wanted to make a good impression on Frank, to finally clinch his membership on the team. Mah had made it clear that they didn't want him attracting any undue attention when he was carrying the goods, whatever those goods might be.

  The fat guy wasn't chewing on sausage this time, but he reeked of garlic and his hands looked greasy. Frank came tearing down the center aisle of the warehouse on an electric forklift and jumped off before it had fully stopped. He wore black jeans and a black teeshirt that looked like it had been sprayed on. Sorry discreetly sucked in his gut.

  The fat guy muttered something into his chest and shook his jowls.

  "What's that?" asked Sorry, leaning forward and cocking an ear.

  "Speak up, John," said Frank, sauntering over to the counter. "We couldn't hear you."

  The fat guy glared at Frank, eyes livid with hate. "I wasn't talking to you," he muttered.

  "What?"

  "I wasn't talking to you," he repeated. Then louder, "I never said anything," jowls trembling.

  Frank pulled out a swiss army knife, pulled it open. He backed the fat guy into a corner, smiling his lizard smile, and held the knife up between their faces. "Good man, John. I like you better when you don't say anything, remember?"

  The fat guy's mouth hung open. You could almost see him sweat. Frank slowly and deliberately moved the tip of the blade closer to the fat guy's nose, slowly, slowly, let almost an inch of it disappear into the porky nostril, sharp side up. He held it there for fifteen seconds while the fat guy held his breath, eyes screaming silently behind thick lenses as his glasses slid down his sweat-slick nose, then he pulled it away and wiped the blade on the front of the fat guy's shirt. "All clear," Frank announced, then turned to Sorry with a grin. "Booger check," he explained, tucking the knife back in his jeans and walking away.

  "He'll look after you," the fat guy blurted out in Sorry's direction, then waddled, with haste, over to a door that read "Employees Only".

  Fatso probably had to go change his underwear, thought Sorry as he strolled over and met up with Frank at the back of the open trailer. Hands on his narrow hips, Frank was surveying the load. For the first time, it occurred to Sorry that he could have been transporting something for these guys without even knowing it.

  "Looking for something special?" he asked with a tight smile.

  Frank turned slowly and met his stare with hooded eyes. "Oh, John would like that," he said in a low voice. "It'd give him a big fat hard-on to be able to tip off the high mucky mucks in the inner office, and get them to catch me redhanded right here in the warehouse." He turned his attention back to the freight. "No," he said with a sigh, "my interest in this load is purely professional." He pulled out some cardboard dunnage from between the skids. "I hope you don't have to be anywhere in a hurry today, man. I'd like to buy you lunch."

  "No problem," Sorry replied. "I just won't call in until later. The boss can't send me anywhere until I tell her I'm clear, right?"

  Frank said to meet him at noon in the parking lot of the Chinese smorgasbord. "Drive around the block and park your truck on the south side of the street that runs behind the restaurant. It's usually clear during the day. Got that?"

  Yes! thought Sorry, nodding solemnly but doing a little goalpost dance inside his mind. Now we're getting somewhere.

  After his trailer was unloaded at Waicom, Sorry drove directly to the Chinese restaurant and parked in the street behind it, like Frank had told him to. He was twenty minutes early. He locked up the cab and strolled back up the street to a gas station with a convenience store attached, where he bought a fresh pack of Exports. There was a telephone booth in the corner of the gas station's yard, right next to the cement sidew
alk. Sorry lit a cigarette and leaned against the frame of the booth, occasionally glancing inside at the phone. Someone had painted the initials D.G. inside a crooked heart on the stainless steel shelf beneath the phone in what looked like nail polish. Bright fuckin' red.

  Sorry hadn't talked to Hunter since before he'd left Vancouver, but this wasn't a good time to call. He'd wait to hear what Frank had to say, wait to see just how far he could get with this game. Hunter wouldn't approve of what he was doing. Sorry knew that. He tried to tell himself that he didn't care what Hunter would think, but something nagged at him whenever he thought about it. So, don't think about it, he told himself, throwing his cigarette butt into the street. Hell, Hunter knew better than anybody that Sorry had never been a play-by-the-rules kind of guy. When the time comes, I'll tell him, he decided, and not before. He thumped the aluminum frame of the phone booth lightly with his fist before walking away.

  At two minutes after twelve, Sorry watched Frank's Cherokee turn into the restaurant parking lot and nose into one of the empty spaces. Frank then backed the jeep into a space between the building and its dumpster, the kind of place a guy might want to park if he were more concerned about avoiding damage to his paint job than about the smell of the kitchen's trash. He got out of the jeep, and Sorry saw that Frank had put on a loose fitting shirt of a light, charcoal colored fabric over his teeshirt. It looked like fuckin' silk.

  Signalling Sorry to follow him, Frank walked around behind the dumpster, where he opened a gate in the eight foot high fence of weathered wood that surrounded the parking lot. Sorry followed him through. Directly in front of them was the familiar green cab of the Ranverdan tractor. Frank slapped the passenger door with his hand, his sleeve billowing like a parachute and his watchband making a little click against the panel.