Slow Curve on the Coquihalla

by R. E. Donald

  "Jesus! I'm fucked. I'm totally fucked. Tell me, Hunter, what do I do now?"

  "My guess is, if you turn yourself in and agree to testify against Mah and Scarfo and whoever else is involved, you'll get away with a lot less time than if you try to run. It's not just me who knows about it now. I guess you already figured that out."

  "Yeah. Shit! Look, I'm not a fuckin' degenerate. I hate what I did. Life has been hell for me since it happened, since even before you started nosing around. My brakes. I tried to throw you off, but you figured it out, didn't you?" A snort, almost a sob. "Maybe I should've run away, but I couldn't leave Suzanne and the kids. They'd probably be better off if I had."

  "It'll be hard on Suzanne. No getting around that, either way. And confusing for the kids. But Suzanne's a strong woman. And she's a good woman. She won't turn your kids against you." In spite of himself, Hunter felt himself relaxing his guard. He wiped his palms on his jeans.

  The headlights of an approaching truck swept towards them. Gary turned and leaned up against the trailer's burnished wall, his face buried in his folded arms. In the light, Hunter saw Gary's shoulder heave once, and the light was gone.

  "Okay," Gary said. "Okay. Will you come with me, Hunter?"

  "That won't be necessary, Mr. Rodgers." The voice came from near the front wheel of Gary's tractor. "Constable Garth Pullen, Merritt R.C.M.P." A flashlight flicked on behind the officer and its beam splashed across Gary and Hunter like luminescent skim milk. "I'd be happy to escort you to the Merritt R.C.M.P. detachment office. Hunter and his friend, here, can make arrangements to take your truck, but first, I have a warrant to search your vehicle."

  "No," said Gary resolutely. He pulled open the door to his cab, and Hunter saw Garth Pullen tense up and his hand dart to his holster.

  Hunter held up a cautioning hand, and the officer hesitated, hand still poised over his gun.

  Seconds later, Gary backed down out of the truck, hauling a large plastic bag out behind him. He handed it to Garth, and went back into the cab's sleeper for another one.

  "I'm voluntarily surrendering this stuff, okay? It's CD's. Computer CD's. Pirated stuff. The warehouse supervisor at Waicom in Seattle, his buddies in the Orient copy the real thing and smuggle the copies over in Waicom containers, packed in Waicom boxes. Keyboard boxes usually. The warehouse is a free trade zone, so U.S. customs never looks at the stuff. Mah stacks a bunch of these boxes on top of the other keyboards, and shrink wraps them together. Customs at the border never check the count. Sometimes the dogs sniff for drugs, but they never bother counting a shrink wrapped skid of computer keyboards. Keyboards are the cheapest part of the load, so nobody pays any attention."

  Gary put both hands to his head and closed his eyes. "Fuck! I can't believe this is happening!" He turned around and slammed the side of the trailer with an upraised fist. The aluminum wowed and reverberated dully.

  He took a couple of deep breaths and continued in a defeated voice. "Somewhere along the road, at night, I stop and cut off the shrink wrap on the top of the skid. I empty the packages of CD's into these bags. The keyboard boxes I stomp on, and then dispose of them in a few more garbage bags in dumpsters along the road. I meet Frank Scarfo for lunch and pass the CD's on to him. Nobody else in the Waicom warehouse in Edmonton ever sees them. He pays me cash. I've been doing this since last April. What else do you need to know?"

  In the white glow of the flashlight, Gary Rodgers looked pale and very, very tired.

  Hunter called El from Calgary on Thursday morning. "Have you talked to Suzanne?" he asked.

  "She'll be fine, Hunter. She's a trooper, just like her father was. She'll be fine." El said that Suzanne had appreciated having Kitty come by to help her with the kids on Wednesday. "That was a good idea you had. Sounds like it did them both good. Kitty took the kids to the park while Suzanne had a nap. She said she hadn't gotten any sleep at all that night after Gary arrived."

  Hunter nodded mutely into the receiver. In his eyes, Gary had taken at least a step towards redeeming himself by insisting on being the one to tell Suzanne about what he'd done. Garth Pullen had taken him to Kamloops to break the news to her, then delivered him to Bill Earl at the Kamloops R.C.M.P. detachment.

  "Yes, I'm sure she'll be fine," Hunter said. "She's decided to keep Ranverdan?"

  "I don't know," said El. "If she does, she's got my help for as long as she needs it. Her phones have been forwarded to my office again."

  "Did Sorry call in?"

  "Yep. Things are all set for his arrival at Waicom, but it seems he got hung up in Hinton, so he's running a bit late. Said something about spending some time with his brothers there. Did you know he had relatives in Alberta?"

  Hunter smiled. "Sorry has brothers all over the place," he told her. "Like the Teamsters do." Gary had helped set up a sting. The Edmonton R.C.M.P. were going to be there when Sorry met Frank Scarfo for lunch. Sorry had said he was looking forward to being in on the action for a change.

  After El hung up on him, Hunter called Bill Earl. "How's it look, chief?"

  "It's in the hands of the lawyers now, Hunter. Your young friend's cooperating fully so far, I can tell you that. He says he doesn't know anything about this Murphy guy being involved as well. If he was being blackmailed into it again, like you suspect, our only chance of pinning it on him is if the other two roll over."

  "His biggest crime was not revealing their dirty scams years ago." Then all of this would never have happened. If only ...

  "Say," continued Bill, "you going to be around next weekend? It's about time we went fishing, don't you think?"

  "I'll have to take a raincheck on that, Bill. I'm spending next weekend with my girls. We're going to a friend's cabin on the Shuswap. The girls want to do some swimming and waterskiing, soak up some sun. Maybe I'll even get them to come with me to that golf course I've always admired from the highway."

  "Next time you're passing through, then."

  "Next time, for sure," said Hunter.

  The day after Gary's confession, Suzanne moved herself and the two girls into her father's house, leaving everything of Gary's behind in what had been their home, and putting the house up for sale. She stood now, in darkness, at her father's bedroom window, looking out at the night sky. She couldn't sleep. There were moments when she thought she'd go crazy. If her world had been turned upside down by her father's death, now it was being turned inside out, twisted and mangled and torn apart. How could you go from loving a man to hating him in the blink of an eye? You couldn't. At least, she couldn't. How could you continue to love a man who had hurt and betrayed you on such a scale, someone who had lied to you and witnessed your pain and kept on lying?

  Her eyes wandered from star to star to star, tiny pin pricks in the wall of blackness. The sound of a truck gearing down came from the highway half a mile away.

  Funny, she thought. Her living husband had been wrenched from her life more brutally than her dead father. Severed completely, as if by the blow of an axe. With her mom and dad, she could call up treasured memories, and remembering would bring her comfort. But could she ever allow herself fond memories of the man who murdered her father and destroyed her happiness? She didn't think she could forgive him. Ever. But what about Jo and Veri? Gary was their father. He would always be their father, and she couldn't take their father away from them. It would not be simple, sorting out her emotions over the next few months.

  Take it one day at a time, Suzy Q.

  It was almost as if her father's voice were inside her head. Yes. Take it one day at a time. Tomorrow she would switch the phones back to the Ranverdan office and get to work. Now was not the time to make decisions for her future. She would just take it one day at a time.

  Wind rustled the willow branches, and a warm breath of air came through the window screen carrying the scent of her mother's lilac bushes. The long strands of willow bobbed and swayed, colorless in the soft light of half a moon.

  CHAPTER 30

  – �
�� – – THIRTY

  So far, it had been a great day. The girls had made bacon and eggs and pancakes for breakfast, and the three of them sat in the little cabin for an hour over coffee afterwards, watching a million silver shards of light dancing across the surface of the lake. Even though the girls did most of the talking, much of it between themselves, Hunter didn't mind. He got the impression that they were showing off for him, and that they welcomed this chance to be together as much as he did. His face ached from smiling.

  He sat on an upended cinderblock near the base of the dock, picking flat rocks off the beach and skipping them across the water. The sun sneaked through a gap in the trees behind him, and he felt its warm hand on his back. He could hear laughter and muffled thumps coming from the cabin, where Jan and Lesley were getting themselves ready to go swimming. The cabin door slammed, and he looked over his shoulder to see Lesley running down the beach. Without stopping, she dropped a towel and a book at his feet, and ran out onto the dock. She stopped at the edge, kicked off her thongs, and turned back to look at Jan, who was walking down from the cabin with the dignity appropriate to an older sister.

  "Beat ya!" Lesley cried, and cannonballed into the lake. She came up screaming. "Eeeow! It's like ice!" Kicking her legs and rotating her arms, she brought the water around her to a furious boil.

  Hunter picked up the book she'd dropped and turned it over. It was a heavy, grey textbook titled "Canadian Criminal Justice". He held it towards Jan, who had come up beside him to deposit her own towel and a Cosmopolitan magazine. She was gathering her honey-streaked hair into a ponytail. "What's Lesley reading this for?" he asked.

  She shrugged and said, "She's nuts!" as she began walking down towards the dock. "She's already bought half the textbooks she's going to need in September."

  "She's studying criminal justice?"

  "She didn't tell you?" Jan called back over her shoulder as she walked out onto the dock. "At S.F.U. She's taking Criminology. She says it'll help her get into the R.C.M.P." She raised herself lightly on her toes and vaulted neatly into the water.

  Hunter stared at the sleek, wet heads of the two human beings he loved more than anyone else in the world, but who he didn't really know at all. "I'll be damned," he said softly. He was so surprised he couldn't think straight. He found himself blinking furiously, so he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and swallowed hard. "She can't ... She's too ... Damn!" Too what? Too female? Too weak? Don't be stupid, he told himself. He thumped the textbook with his fist. "Damn!"

  His mouth twitched a few times, then his frown broke into a bewildered smile.

  "My little Lesley," he said. "Well, I'll be damned."

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Slow Curve on the Coquihalla has been through several incarnations since the first manuscript was completed in 1995. At the time, as a beginning writer, I received a great deal of support and encouragement from the community of writers on the Compuserve forums, as well as participants on the DorothyL listserv. I’ve lost touch with them in the intervening years, but I particularly appreciated my cyber-friendship with fellow mystery writers Sharon Zukowski, Walter Satterthwait and Kate Grilley

  I also owe Ed Griffin and the Surrey International Writers’ Conference a big thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn from such accomplished fiction authors as Diana Gabaldon, Jack Whyte and more recently, mystery authors Anne Perry and John Lescroart. Attending SIWC panels, as well as those hosted by Bouchercon and Sisters in Crime, helped me not only to improve my writing skills, but to better understand the industry. Thanks also to mystery author Elizabeth George, who helped me take my writing to a new level at a 1998 workshop hosted by The Book Passage in Corte Madera, California.

  Feedback and encouragement (in spite of rejection!) from several literary agents who read my manuscripts, especially Michael Congdon, kept me going, but the biggest boost to my confidence came – and still comes – from the readers who have enjoyed my novels, and say they can hardly wait for the next one. Thank you to Judi Hayward, Yvonne Hillsden, Denise Beaton, Barbara Macartney, Marie O’Neill, Vivian Harder, ‘Nash Black’, Margaret the ‘Literary Chanteuse’, and others who early on read and commented on my books.

  The wonderful covers on my novels are thanks to the team of Chris Hunter and the exceptionally creative Steve Johnsen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  R.E. Donald is the author of the Hunter Rayne highway mystery series. Ruth worked in the transportation industry in various capacities from 1972 until 2001, and draws on her own experiences, as well as those of her late husband, Jim Donald, in creating the characters and situations in her novels.

  Ruth attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., where she studied languages (Russian, French and German) and creative writing to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree. She currently lives on a small farm in Langley, B.C. She and her partner, a French Canadian cowboy named Gilbert Roy, enjoy their Canadian Horses (Le Cheval Canadien) and other animals.

  Also by R.E. Donald in the Hunter Rayne highway mystery series:

  Ice on the Grapevine

  Sea to Sky

  Coming in 2014: Sundown on Top of the World

  Visit proudhorsepublishing.com or redonald.com

  for information on new releases.