by Steve Brewer
"By pepper spray?"
"She held a shotgun to my neck!"
"Ah, a firearm. You hadn't mentioned that part."
"It was my own damned gun. Once I was blinded, she took it and used it against me. Made me climb down out of my rig. I'm standing there, pouring water in my flaming eyeballs, and she drives away, pretty as you please."
"She drove the rig herself?"
"Isn't that what I said?"
"Hmm. You don't see that so much. A woman driving a big rig."
"Where the hell you been?" Nate said. "We're living in the future, son. I see women drivers all the time."
"Yeah, but women still make up only four or five percent of truck drivers nationwide."
"Seems like more than that to me."
"You notice 'em, that's all. They stand out from the guys who look just like you."
Nate glanced around the coffee shop at several other plump, middle-aged white men dressed just as he was – ball cap and plaid shirt and baggy jeans and suspenders. The trucker's uniform.
"How did this woman get up into your cab anyway?"
"Who said she did?"
"She didn't pepper spray you from the ground, did she?"
"Naw," he admitted, "I let her in. Shoulda known better, but she said she was lost and cold. I told her she could warm up for a few minutes."
"Christian charity, huh?"
Nate frowned at him.
"How was this woman dressed?"
"What difference does that make?"
"You said she was cold. Didn't she have a jacket?"
"Yeah, but she was wearing a miniskirt. The wind was whistling out there."
"So she was dressed like a hooker."
"I never said that. I don't judge people. She was cold and it was warm in the truck. That's all I've got to say about it."
"Do you know whether the local police got security video from the truck stop? Maybe you could ID her."
"The APD detectives said the video didn't show anything useful. All the cameras are arranged around the terminal building, and I was parked way over there behind some other trucks."
"Funny that she was walking around over there, if she wasn't a working girl."
Nate kept his mouth shut for a change. Sandoval waited him out for a full minute, then finally said, "So she took your shotgun."
"That's right."
"You carry a long gun in your truck? Not a pistol?"
"It's a shorter version," Nate said carefully. "Sawed it off myself. Eighteen inches. Just within the limits the law allows."
"Uh-huh."
"I've carried it for years. I always figured, if you're getting hijacked, you don't have time to aim and all. A shotgun has that nice spread. You can shoot with your eyes closed and still come out on top."
"Unless someone takes it away from you and sticks it in your neck."
"Yeah," Nate said glumly. "There's that."
Sandoval let him stew for a moment, then said, "You're not planning to leave town right away, are you?"
"Where am I gonna go? That woman took everything I own. I'm hoping to catch a contract ride, but I've been too busy talking to cops to make any phone calls."
"All right," Sandoval said. "We can wrap this up. Let me ask you one more thing: Did the hijacker mention the cigarettes?"
"Say what?"
"Did she say or do anything to indicate she knew what you were hauling?"
"No, but—"
"Nothing on the outside of the truck to show it was full of cigarettes?"
"Hell, no. Plain gray trailer. The factory locks the load, and it doesn't get opened until it reaches its final destination."
"So the question is," Sandoval said, "was she stealing the cigarettes or was she stealing a random truck?"
Nate shook his head.
"You still don't get it. It doesn't matter what she was after. She took the whole damned thing."
Chapter 6
It was just past eight o'clock that night when the white Peterbilt finally rumbled into the parking lot at the Albuquerque Truck Terminal.
Jackie Nolan sat in her Toyota, parked in the shadows near the entrance on the north end of the truck stop. She'd been there for an hour, checking makes and license plates as one truck after another pulled into the parking lot, siphoned off the crossroads where Interstate 40 meets Interstate 25, in a bird's nest of ramps right in the center of town.
Dinner time for the truckers, many of whom would spend the night sleeping in their idling rigs. Dozens of trucks already were lined up in neat clusters, organized around yellow concrete curbs that divided up the parking lot and kept the civilian vehicles out of the way of the professional drivers. Security lights stood on white poles every forty feet or so, looking like exclamation marks in the winter dark.
As she watched, the Peterbilt drove past the line of light poles and pulled into a row of trucks a hundred feet away.
Jackie got out of the car and slung the strap of an Army-green duffel bag over her shoulder. She was dressed in denim and Doc Martens and a down-filled black coat, topped off with a plain black baseball cap. Striding along with her bag slung over her shoulder, she could easily pass for just another driver, calling it a night.
The cold air felt fresh after an hour in the car, but it reeked of diesel and exhaust fumes and the aroma of hot grease wafting from the brightly lit café that faced University Boulevard. The diner's windows were partly steamed over, but she could see the place was jammed. Lots of coming and going at the attached convenience store, too. Jackie stuck to the shadowy perimeter of the parking lot.
The icy wind was partly blocked once she was among the towering trucks, but she still was shivering. She kept her head down, walking quickly.
Two truckers stood by the rear wheels of a refrigerated trailer, one of them whacking at a tire with a "thumper," a hammer with a two-foot-long wooden handle. Most truckers carried such tools for checking tires, and many of them kept them within reach in their cabs. Jackie always checked for thumpers as well as guns when she was sizing up a truck to steal. She didn't want to be blindsided by some fat-ass driver who got lucky. These two didn't even look up as she passed.
She found the Peterbilt just as its driver was climbing down from the cab. Jackie stepped into the shadow of a semi and watched as he ambled toward the bright lights of the Terminal Café. He was a lanky African-American man with a big gray mustache and a fringed leather jacket. Most notably, he wore a ten-gallon cowboy hat made of pearl-gray felt. With the hat and the fancy boots, he was nearly seven feet tall.
Jackie waited until the cowboy clumped out of sight, then she crossed to the Peterbilt and climbed up to the cab. The door was locked, but he'd left the rig idling, so all she needed was to get inside. She unzipped the duffel enough to slip a hand inside. Careful not to touch the trigger of the sawed-off shotgun, she felt around until she came up with her Slim Jim, a twenty-inch-long strip of flat, flexible metal with a hook on one end. She pulled it out and closed the bag. She slid the Slim Jim down the outside of the window and into the driver's door. She felt around until the hook caught the mechanism inside, then she gave a yank and the door unlocked.
Jackie opened the door and tossed the Slim Jim inside, then unslung the duffel bag and lifted it into the cab as well. As she started to duck inside, a voice came from behind her.
"Hey!"
Jackie swung into the cab and closed the door just as the man yelled, "Hey!" again.
She checked the side mirror and saw a beer-bellied trucker in a battered cap and a sheepskin vest trotting alongside the trailer. As he got closer, she recognized his face and let out a moan. It was the trucker from the night before, the one she'd pepper-sprayed. He was shouting his lungs out now, trying to alert the other truckers to a thief in their midst.
Of all the bad luck. What was he even doing here twenty-four hours after losing his rig?
Jackie buckled herself into the driver's seat and shifted the truck into gear and steered away from the yel
ling trucker. A couple of other drivers had appeared between rigs now, craning their necks as that idiot kept shouting.
Engines cranked up nearby, alarming Jackie. The last thing she was wanted was to be chased by a convoy of angry truckers in eighteen-wheelers. No way that could end well.
She barely slowed as she reached the driveway that spilled onto University Boulevard. Going south this time, she caught a red light at Menaul, but it changed before she got completely stopped. She found a gear and blew through the intersection, the heavy trailer bouncing loudly over the uneven pavement.
She checked her mirrors and found two sets of truck headlights running through the intersection, gaining on her. One was pulling a trailer, but the other was a bobtail, a truck with nothing hitched to it. She stood no chance of outrunning a truck with no load, so she'd have to take other action. She unzipped the duffel that sat in the passenger seat.
They hit more green lights as they passed under Interstate 40. The last light, at a frontage road, turned red just as Jackie got there, and she laid on her horn, but didn't slow. Her pursuers ran through the red light, too, other vehicles baying like hounds at the intrusion.
In her mirrors, she could see that the tractor-trailer rig had moved into the right lane behind her. The bobtail was in the fast lane, closing in a hurry.
She couldn't let them box her in.
University curved as it climbed a steep hill past office buildings and a boarded-up strip joint. She fed the Peterbilt more gas, but it was doing all it could on the long, curving climb.
As the bobtail pulled alongside her on the left, she could see it was a Freightliner like the one she'd taken the night before. A giant Tonka toy of a truck with a long hood and a shiny grille taller than a man.
In the light from his dashboard, the driver of the Freightliner appeared to be a bushy beard topped with a plaid flannel hat, the kind with earflaps. The passenger was a young man with a shaved head. His rubbery lips were flapping at her, as if she could hear anything over the roar of the engines and the howl of the wind.
Cold air blasted into the cab as Jackie rolled down her window. She switched hands on the big steering wheel and slipped her right hand into the open duffel.
Baldy was rolling down his window, too, wincing at the wind and yelling at her to pull over.
Jackie lifted the shotgun out of the bag and pointed it at him. His eyes went as wide as hubcaps and he screamed, "Stop! Stop!" to the beard behind the wheel. The Freightliner's tires shrieked as the driver hit the brakes.
She reached the gun out the window and pulled the trigger anyway. The shotgun blast spattered the hood with pellets and sparks. The roar of the sawed-off was deafening, and it kicked so hard, the barrels rapped against the frame at the top of the window. Jackie weaved a little before she got the Peterbilt straightened out again.
Both pursuing trucks fell back, giving her room now that they knew she had a gun. The shotgun couldn't stop a truck, but it could sure fuck up the paint job. The two pursuing trucks drove side by side behind her, their high-beams blinding in her mirrors.
As long as they kept her in sight, she was screwed. They could summon the cops, maybe even get a roadblock set up ahead. She needed to shake her pursuers long enough to stop somewhere and change the license plates on the truck. She had extra plates and a power screwdriver in her duffel bag, but she needed time. She needed to get out of sight.
Topping the hill, they flew past dark office buildings and empty parking lots. Jackie could see that the light up ahead at Indian School Road was red, but a right-turn arrow was green. The intersection was busy with traffic, and she stood a good chance of crashing into somebody, but she had to risk it.
She swerved right onto Indian School at the last second, downshifting and using the engine brake against the heavy rig's momentum. Whatever she was hauling, there was no question the trailer was full. She felt like the weight was pushing the truck harder than she could brake against it.
She got lucky at the intersection. Indian School had emptied of traffic, and she could use the whole wide four-lane road to make her turn. The truck juttered across the potholed pavement, its front bumper just missing the concrete planters surrounding a corner gas station.
Behind her, horns honked and tires shrieked as her pursuers reached the red light. If there were crashes, she couldn't hear them. But no headlights chased her as she zoomed away.
Indian School became Odelia Street as it went west over Interstate 25, then downhill past Albuquerque High School and through the old Martineztown neighborhood. Jackie zoomed down the hill as fast as she dared, checking her mirrors the whole time. She was still clear by the time she reached the warehouse zone where Odelia dead-ends into North Broadway. She drove straight across, into the paved parking lanes that wind among the low brick warehouses. She turned into a space between two buildings and killed the lights.
Jackie waited in the cab a few minutes to make sure she was still in the clear, then she got out into the cold and hurried to the back of the idling truck. Her power screwdriver had a little flashlight built into it, and she made quick work of the screws holding the license-plate bracket. Then she replaced the plates on the truck and the trailer with plates she'd borrowed from a similar semi parked at the salvage yard.
Sirens wailed nearby. How long before a patrol car poked among the warehouses, looking for her? She couldn't stay here.
By the time she was back in the truck, getting warm, she'd made a decision. No need to take the rig all the way to Duke City Truck Salvage this time of night, not while the truckers and the cops were combing the area. She knew a place nearby that would be safe.
Chapter 7
Tex Russell couldn't believe his eyes. The well-lit space where he'd left his rig was empty as a hobo's pockets. A half-dozen truckers stood around the empty spot, hunched in their jackets, their breaths fogging the air as they muttered among themselves.
"Hey, fellas," Tex said evenly, though his heart pounded in his chest. "What's going on?"
The truckers all turned to look at Tex. They were white men, fat and sullen and suspicious, but Tex had learned long ago to look past men's skins. Look at their eyes. Look inside their heads. That's where the bad stuff starts. Tex had encountered a lot of psychos and hot-shits during his three decades serving in the United States Army. The dangerous ones always gave themselves away.
A whiskery man in a sheepskin vest said, "Somebody stole a rig that was parked here."
"White Peterbilt?" Tex drawled.
"That's right."
"Plain gray trailer?"
Nods all around.
"Well, hell, boys." Tex gave them his standard-issue cowboy grin. "That's my truck."
"What?" one exclaimed. Another started jabbering about having seen Tex walk away from the rig in question, now that you mention it; he recognized the cowboy hat. They crowded around Tex, all talking at once.
Now that Tex was one of them, and a victim besides, they were suddenly sympathetic, shaking his hand and pounding him on the back and assuring him that the police were on the way.
The pot-bellied man in the sheepskin vest introduced himself as Nate McCoy and told Tex that he'd been ripped off the night before in this very parking lot.
"Is that right?" Tex said, but his mind was busy with other things, mostly how to escape these well-wishers before the police rolled up and asked him for ID.
"Yup," McCoy said. "Was a woman stole my rig. I think the same bitch took yours."
That got Tex's attention. "Say what, brother?"
"A woman. I was yelling at her the whole time, but she used a Slim Jim on the door and climbed into your rig and drove away. Cool as can be."
"You recognized her?"
"Well, she didn't have the blond wig tonight, but I'm pretty sure it was the same woman."
"I'll be damned," Tex said.
"A couple of trucks went after her. Told us on the CB that she was dressed like a man, but they were sure she was a woman."
&
nbsp; "What happened to them?"
"Aw, hell, they lost her, over toward downtown. They're still looking around over there, but she slipped through their fingers."
"That's too bad." Tex looked down at his lizard-skin boots for a moment, then back up at the other truckers. "Good thing that rig was leased."
That got them to smiling and nodding.
"And I took out the full insurance package," Tex said. "Only loss to me, really, is my time."
"That counts for a lot," said McCoy. "I've been stranded here since last night. The cops and the insurance people screw around, taking their good sweet time. Meanwhile, the clock's ticking, and I'm not making a cent."
"I hear you," Tex said.
"Maybe we'll get the cops' attention now that there's been back-to-back thefts," McCoy said.
"We'll make sure of it," Tex told him. He looked around at the others, then unleashed a heavy sigh. "Well, I'd better go call the dispatcher and tell 'em what happened to their load."
"There's a call nobody ever wants to make," one of the other truckers said.
Another offered his cell phone, but Tex told them he'd go make his calls inside where it was warm. Another round of hand-shaking and sympathizing, then he strode away, the heels of his cowboy boots thudding against the cracked asphalt.
Soon as he reached the front of the line of the trucks, he veered left to get out of their sight and away from the lights of terminal building. He needed to find a place to hide until the police had come and gone. Someplace out of the cold.
"Motherfucker!" he said under his breath as he hurried away. "The colonel's gonna kill me."
Chapter 8
Jackie Nolan drove carefully through downtown Albuquerque, stopping for yellow lights and minding the speed limit. A semi growling around the streets at 10 p.m. might be enough to interest passing cops; she didn't want to give them any reason to stop her.
She only had to go about half a mile, as the crow flies, but because the railroad tracks were in the way, she had to drive south to Mountain Road, then west across the tracks, then north again on First Street, adding another mile or two of exposure.