The Highway (39 page)

She wished he would have kept hugging her, and felt instantly resentful toward Tubman for breaking it up. There was nothing romantic about Pedersen’s intention, but the man was solid and reassuring and those were two things she could never say of Tubman.

“There she is,” Tubman said as he walked up. “There’s my girl.”

“I’m not your girl.”

“You know what I mean,” he said, brushing her comment aside. “I’m just proud of you. You’re a hero.”

She grunted.

“You wouldn’t believe the calls I’m getting—from all over the country. The networks want to interview us, and they’re sending camera crews—it’s mind-boggling. This is the biggest thing to happen in this part of the state in years, and
you’re
the one who got the bad guy. I’m just … so proud.”

Cassie glared at him with contempt. She knew she’d probably guaranteed his reelection. He could continue to preen and collect rent money from drug dealers for another term.

“What?” he asked, genuinely surprised she didn’t share his triumph.

“They found Cody’s body,” she said. “Did you forget?”

“Of course not. I’m sorry. I conveyed my sympathy to Jenny and his son Jarrod.”

“Justin,” she corrected.

“Justin, right.”

“How’d she take it?”

He feigned gravity. “Hard. But it’s not like she didn’t expect something like this, given who he was.”

Cassie stepped back from him and said, “I know what Cody would say to you right now if he was here.”

Tubman arched his eyebrows as if to ask what.

“He’d say, ‘I shot a highway patrolman yesterday and got away with it. Now I’ll try for a sheriff.’”

Tubman looked stricken. “That’s not funny,” he said.

“It wasn’t intended to be,” she said. “If they hadn’t taken my weapon from me this morning for the inquiry, I’d blow your head off.”

He tried to grin but couldn’t. He said, “You can’t talk to me like that.”

“I just did.”

He looked out toward the meadow. “Dewell, I’ll pretend this conversation never took place. I’ll chalk it up to stress, and postcombat fatigue, so to speak. I want you to take a few days off after this. I’ll make sure you get paid for them. I’ll ask the therapist to get in touch with you and set up some grief counseling. Now I think I’ll turn around and get back to my Thanksgiving dinner with my family.”

“You do that,” she said.

“You’re taking this all wrong,” he said. “Instead of letting me praise you for solving a tremendous crime that makes all of us proud, you’re taking out your bitter feelings on me personally. I’ve put up for years with one Cody Hoyt,” he said, “I don’t need another one.”

“Get in your car or I’ll
borrow
a weapon,” she said.

Tubman walked back to his SUV shaking his head. She got a small amount of satisfaction from that.

*   *   *

Before going back into the tent, Cassie called her mother.

“Oh, we’re doing just fine,” her mother said. She sounded winded but exuberant. “The turkey is just about done and I’m finishing up mashed potatoes and green beans. Ben and a couple of guests are watching football.”

Cassie said, “A couple of
guests
?”

“Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you? I invited a couple of friends. They didn’t have any place to go and it’s Thanksgiving, after all.”

“You invited some of your Occupy Helena derelicts to my home?”

“As I said, dear Cassie, they had no place to go. Isn’t that what Thanksgiving should be about?”

“Let me talk to Ben,” Cassie said.

She told her son she’d be home as soon as she could.

*   *   *

After terminating the call with her mother, Cassie called Jenny Hoyt’s home. It was tough to press
SEND
.

Justin answered.

“Justin, this is Cassie Dewell. I want to tell you how sorry I am.”

He obviously didn’t know what to say for a moment, and she felt for him.

She said, “Just always remember that he died in the line of duty. He died trying to save the lives of two innocent girls, and if he hadn’t come down here they’d be hurt or worse by now. We probably wouldn’t have ever found them.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “But it’s tough, you know? It’s really hard.”

“Of course.”

“I’m glad you shot the guy. I wish I could have been there to see it.”

“No, you don’t,” she said.

She could hear voices in the background. One sounded familiar.

“Are Gracie and Danielle there with you?”

“Yeah. Their dad, too. He flew in from Omaha. Their mom is coming up later today.”

“Are they doing okay?”

“I guess. Do you want to talk to them?”

“Let me talk to Gracie, if she’s willing.”

When Gracie came on the line, Cassie identified herself and asked, “How are you doing?”

“Fine, I guess. I want to thank you again for—”

“Never mind that,” Cassie said. “I just want to tell you I admire you. You’re tough. I can’t believe you held it together the way you did for someone your age.”

Cassie hoped Gracie was smiling and blushing. Gracie said softly, “Thank you.”

“How is your sister?”

There was a pause. “There are some counselors here. Danielle’s going to need some help. But she seems to be okay, I think. At least she seems to be in the same room with us, which is good. She’ll be all right. I’m fine.”

“I hope that when this is all over we can get together just to talk. You seem like a girl after my own heart. I’ve got a young son but no daughters. If I had a daughter, I’d want her to be like you.”

There was silence for a moment, then Gracie asked, “Have you found that truck driver yet?”

“No, but we will.”

“You need to
find
him,” she said, her voice cracking.

*   *   *

The Pergram home was still smoldering when they arrived. Cassie recalled seeing the smoke in the distance the day before but she’d attached no significance to it, and apparently no one had called the county fire department.

“There’s nothing left,” she said as Pedersen drove in close. “And like I told you, his truck is gone.”

“Looks like the son of a bitch covered his tracks,” Pedersen said, shaking his head. “I wish those DCI guys would have let us know the girls claim they were abducted by a truck driver. I guess they thought we knew that already.”

The home had burned hot and completely to the ground. The air stunk of burned plastic and burned fuel. An older model car was close enough to the flames that it had burned as well, and blackened skeletons of Russian olive bushes littered the perimeter of the scene.

“I think his mother lived at home,” Pedersen said. “I hope to hell she wasn’t inside.”

They exchanged glances.

“We’ll find him,” the sheriff said, reassuring her. “You can’t hide for very long in an all-black eighteen-wheeler, for Christ sake. We know his license plate number, and his DOT registration, and the description of his truck. The word is out everywhere. Every trooper in the west is looking for him. We’ll get the son of a bitch.”

Cassie nodded dumbly, but it all came crashing in on her. She’d let him escape by not calling it in when she found the package in her car. She knew it, Pedersen knew it, Ronald Pergram knew it.

“He set up Legerski,” she said, “and he used me to pull the trigger.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You did the right thing. You couldn’t have known,” Pedersen said.

“He thinks ahead,” she said, gesturing toward the smoldering ruins. “He plans things out. He probably has a plan of some kind to get away with this.”

She closed her eyes. “Instead of killing the monster I killed the monster’s sidekick. The monster is still out there.”

And Gracie’s voice echoed:
You need to
find
him
.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

There’s a killer on the road

His brain is squirming like a toad

—Jim Morrison, “The Hitchhiker”

Afterward

3:37
A.M.
, Friday, December 7

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
R
ONALD
P
ERGRAM
became Dale Everett Spradley of Oakes, North Dakota, he stood alone under a television monitor at a Love’s truck stop outside Tulsa to check the load board. He’d unloaded thirteen pallets of Washington State frozen salmon at a grocery warehouse at midnight, which left ten skids in his trailer to deliver to Little Rock in the morning. He was looking for a partial load he could pick up in the area to maximize his trip to Arkansas and he found it: ten skids of frozen farm-raised catfish in Inola, Oklahoma, needed to be trucked to Hot Springs, Arkansas. The foray would take him a couple of hours out of his way, but as usual he was ahead of schedule.

He jotted down the telephone number for the dispatch broker, checked his wristwatch, and made the call. It was a nice $4,500 deal and he took it. No reason to run his new truck LTL (less than a load) when he could pick up a partial en route. It was free money.

The truck stop was empty and quiet except for two drivers huddled together drinking coffee in the twenty-hour diner. He nodded at them as he passed and they nodded back. No recognition at all. He smiled to himself. The storm had passed.

He was ready to go hunting again. He
needed
to go hunting again.

*   *   *

The first twenty-four hours after he drove out of Gardiner were the most stressful, even though he’d swapped out his Montana license plates for Oregon plates he’d stolen the year before and stored in his “Oh Shit” box for just such an emergency. It wasn’t difficult to black out the DOT numbers on his driver’s side door with black Krylon spray paint and replace them with stick-on numbers that looked good enough even though they couldn’t be traced to anyone. He’d driven straight south without stopping, using his piss-jar to urinate, and taking back roads through tiny sleeping towns to avoid interstate highways and weigh scales. He’d dyed his hair jet-black in the sink of a remote rest stop, and added a big drooping false mustache that matched his new color. He’d wear it until his own grew out. He’d added thick horned-rim glasses with clear lenses and except for the intensity of his eyes he barely recognized himself in the mirror.

Because his trailer was empty he didn’t have to refuel until he entered New Mexico, where he bought diesel for cash on an Indian reservation notoriously lax for keeping a sales log. He spotted three troopers en route to Brownsville, Texas, but they didn’t look back.

He’d seen his own face on a television tuned to Fox News behind the counter as he paid for fuel. They’d used the one from his driver’s license, and he looked ruddy, washed-out, and jowly. The attendant didn’t look over his shoulder at the screen, and Pergram didn’t look up.

*   *   *

At an infamous used truck outlet in Brownsville next to the Mexico border, he took a loss on his truck and trailer and traded up for a two-year-old bright yellow Peterbilt Model 389 with a Cummins ISX15 engine, an eighteen-speed Eaton-Fuller transmission, a Unibilt Ultracab with a seventy-seven-inch bed, a microwave and refrigerator, blackout curtains, and 190,000 miles on the gauge. The cost with trade-in was $105,000. He added a $70,000 reefer trailer and got the salesman to agree to lose the paperwork in exchange for an all-cash payment that took most of the stash in his “Oh Shit” box. He knew his old truck would be resold south of the border within a few days. Down there, they didn’t care about DOT numbers or plates that didn’t jibe.

While they got his new rig ready, Pergram walked to an Internet café he’d found several years ago. The owner of the place specialized in documents, and sold most of them to coyotes or illegals coming across. But for his last $25,000 in cash, the man produced a new commercial driver’s license (CDL) in the name of Dale E. Spradley as well as a social security card, medical examiner’s report, and a clean CSA scoresheet that showed Spradley was a damned good driver who kept his nose clean and played by the rules. Pergram/Spradley used one of the rental computers to purchase load insurance online, and he was back in business.

*   *   *

A week prior, he’d scored his first big load as an independent owner-operator. He picked up twenty-four pallets of frozen salmon in Washington to deliver among four warehouses coast-to-coast. As he dropped each partial load he used the load boards at truck stops to arrange smaller loads and keep his trailer full and making money.

Because he was working for himself, he wouldn’t ever again have to worry about satellite tracking, or overbearing dispatchers, or Qualcomm units that noted his every move. He’d negotiate his own deals from his prepaid and untraceable cell phone and keep his truck on the road, always moving forward. He’d eat on the road, sleep in his truck, keep his logs clean, and stop at every weigh station to rebuild his track record. It wouldn’t take long.

He thought about what had happened back in Montana but he didn’t dwell on it. He admitted his mistakes—involving others, primarily—and learned from them. Never again would he have a fixed address, a home base, an obsessive mother with a big mouth. There was no need.

Although he was Dale Spradley of North Dakota, he would never have to actually set foot in Oakes.

In a spiral notebook he kept in his console he’d sketched out the reason why he’d never have to rely on a home or somewhere like the Schweitzer place ever again. That’s because he’d carefully designed where he’d weld a false wall inside the nose end of his trailer, cutting the overall load capacity from fifty-three feet to forty-eight feet. Forty-eight feet was a standard load length, and he doubted anyone would ever notice the missing five feet of length inside with a naked eye. Behind that false wall would be an eight-foot-by-five-foot compartment. Big enough for a cot fastened to the floor, sturdy enough for ringbolts in the walls, wired for video and audio, and soundproofed from the outside. He would be able to carry his Schweitzer place with him.

He felt unleashed.

Like a shark, he’d always keep moving. No one could ever pin him down again. He’d pick up a load on one coast and deliver it to a warehouse on the other and never return to a house or a town. The scenery would roll by day after day and he’d keep his eyes out for opportunities.