Road Test

by David Wickenhauser

  The mother then backed out, and blew a kiss to her children, who were being cradled in the arms of her neighbors.

  Hugh’s trailer was unloaded fairly quickly as unloading goes, which Hugh was happy about, as he wished to get to the truck stop early enough to get a good spot. The Tolleson truck stop was one of few in the Phoenix area, and it filled up fairly early.

  He got his delivery papers signed, and he threaded his truck out of the Boeing manufacturing complex and onto the Red Mountain Freeway heading west.

  “We’ll get on the 10 in a bit, and then take it west to Tolleson,” Hugh told Jenny.

  Joe saw the women pull in behind him as he took the on-ramp to Interstate 10 heading west. It was becoming late afternoon, and the sun in the west was beginning to be an aggravation. Give it a little more time, and it would be a full-blown driving hazard.

  He got set up as they had done during the two practices. He immediately spotted a likely target truck belonging to a major carrier.

  “Maybe this one,” Joe announced over the phone.

  The way was clear for him to pull into the truck’s lane, but when he pulled ahead he could see there was no way for the women to come up from the right side, as cars were lined up and slowing down in her lane to take the off-ramp.

  “OK. We’ll try a different one,” he said.

  Hugh and Jenny both pulled down their visors to try to get some relief from the sun that was setting lower by the minute. Jenny was so short the visor didn’t provide much relief from the intense light.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,” Hugh said.

  Traffic was heavy. Expected for this time of day heading westbound on 10 out of the city.

  Joe spotted another possibility. It was a rig from another large trucking firm, with a company trailer being pulled by a white semi.

  “Let’s try this one,” Joe announced to the mother.

  “I’m sorry,” the mother responded, “I’m hemmed in again and can’t get ahead of the truck.”

  By this time, Joe felt they had gone far enough west. He told the mother he was going to take the Litchfield exit, double back, head east on 10 for a bit, then get back on 10 heading west again.

  “Follow me,” he said, and began to maneuver to the right lanes to make the exit.

  Hugh had caught the 10 just before entering the tunnel heading west. The bright setting sun hit them like a physical blow as they exited the dark tunnel.

  “Homestretch,” Hugh told Jenny. “We’ll be there in a little bit.”

  Joe didn’t want to go as far as Interstate 17 to cross over, so he picked the 27th Avenue exit before the 17, made a left and crossed over I-10, then took a left onto the on-ramp to get back onto I-10 heading west.

  With the mother following closely behind him, they entered the freeway at speed, with Joe taking the third lane, and the mother in the slow lane. Traffic was lighter on this particular stretch.

  Right away, Joe spotted a rig with a trailer belonging to WestAm Trucking coming up in the second lane. The truck had a huge following distance, and no cars were obstructing the mother’s planned move.

  “OK. Here we go. This is the one,” Joe told the mother. “We’ll do it past the 35th Avenue off-ramp so you don’t get bogged down with exiting traffic again.” He was nervous, but excited too.

  Hugh had crossed Interstate 17 at the giant spaghetti bowl stack of interchanges between the city’s two major freeways.

  The setting sun was brutal at this point. He slowed down to increase his following distance because visibility ahead was becoming so poor.

  Right after the 35th Avenue exit Hugh saw a car at his left speed up and swerve recklessly into his lane. At the same time, a car on the right sped up and looked like it was going to attempt to swerve into his lane as well.

  “Don’t!” Hugh yelled, startling Jenny.

  The driver of the car on the right, a woman, didn’t hear Hugh, of course, and she tried to cut her car into Hugh’s lane. It looked like she was trying to pull in behind the first car that had come from Hugh’s left and had swerved into his lane.

  “She’s not going to make it,” Hugh said. He slowed down to give her more space.

  Then to Hugh’s horror, before the lady’s car was fully in Hugh’s lane, the driver of the first car jammed on his brakes. Not a tap. It looked like an attempted full-panic stop. Seeing that, the driver of the second car jammed on her brakes to avoid colliding with the first car.

  That sudden braking maneuver of the second car, still not all the way into Hugh’s lane, put her at an angle right in the path of Hugh’s truck, which was now bearing down on her. Collision guaranteed.

  Jenny screamed.

  Hugh shouted, “No!” and then his truck slammed violently into the car being driven by the woman, and caught her vehicle in a high-speed, angled T-bone. The force of the collision lifted the woman’s car off the pavement, and it began a series of side-to-side and end-over-end rollovers. Car parts were thrown from the car all over the highway. Liquid spewed from the car’s trunk, saturating the car and spilling out onto the pavement.

  Hugh hit his four-ways, and brought his truck to a hard-brake stop. The woman’s car finally came to rest upside down on the right shoulder. As Hugh and Jenny watched in horror, the woman’s car burst into flames – virtually an explosion, a huge fireball that engulfed the whole car. It was as bad as anything Hugh had seen in the Middle East.

  “Nobody could have lived through that,” Hugh said.

  Jenny was crying uncontrollably with loud sobs.

  Craning to look ahead, trying to shield his eyes from the sun that was now low and directly in front of them, and also having his view partially blocked by the smoke from the burning car, Hugh could see the first car, apparently unscathed, driving away, disappearing into the setting sun. The driver was obviously unconcerned about the horrible crash he had caused.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “If this dashcam works as advertized I should have a good recording of the crash,” Hugh told the Arizona state trooper. “The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, and it was recording the whole time.”

  Hugh handed his dashcam to the trooper, name of Janssen, with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the state’s name for its highway patrol that Hugh could see on the patrol car’s door decal.

  Emergency vehicles were wall-to-wall and two deep across westbound Interstate 10. Red and blue strobes flashing from every vehicle created a kaleidoscope of bright lights.

  Hugh’s truck had come to rest in a diagonal across the first three lanes, blocking traffic coming west upon the accident scene in those lanes. Traffic had slowed to a crawl on the outer two lanes as “Looky-Lous” craned their heads to get a glimpse of the tragic spectacle. Then, as soon as emergency personnel began to converge on the location, the whole of westbound 10 had been shutdown across all five lanes.

  The trooper and Hugh stood next to Hugh’s truck. Janssen played back the recording to view the accident on the dashcam’s little two-inch screen.

  “Uh-huh. That’s pretty much what the other witnesses described,” the trooper said.

  “Hey, Rodriguez,” the trooper yelled over at a nearby trooper, “Bring your laptop over here, and one of those micro card adapters.”

  Rodriguez handed Trooper Janssen what he had requested, and then recorded on his bodycam Janssen removing the micro card from the dashcam, inserting it into the adapter, inserting the adapter into the laptop’s card reader and copying the recording onto the laptop’s hard drive.

  Janssen then placed the micro card into an evidence baggie, annotated it, signed it and sealed it. Trooper Rodriguez had recorded the whole process.

  “For evidence. I’m afraid we’ll have to keep your chip. Recording this process is for chain-of-custody purposes. We’re not taking any chances with an accident of this magnitude,” Janssen said. “Some mega lawsuits are going to be coming out of this one.”

  The trooper looked at the WestAm Trucking logo
on the door of Hugh’s cab. “And I’m afraid you and your trucking company are going to be ground zero for every shyster lawyer who tries to get a piece of this. Could be as many as four fatalities.”

  The trooper turned so his bodycam was pointing at Hugh, and retrieved a notebook and pen from a pocket of his jacket.

  “OK. It’s evident what happened here, but I need a statement from you in your own words.”

  Hugh related what he had seen. He told the trooper it all happened so fast. He was keeping a good following distance, and then those two cars swerved into his lane all but cutting him off. The driver of the first car had jammed on his brakes.

  “You think it was a him?”

  “That’s my impression from seeing who the driver was who had swerved into my lane from my left side.”

  Hugh went on to say he had slowed down to give the second car a chance to complete her lane change.

  “You think the second car was being driven by a woman?”

  Hugh looked at him. “You couldn’t tell? I could see her clearly as she came in right in front of my truck.”

  “Well, no. The fire destroyed everything and everybody. All identification was burned in the fire. It will take a forensic autopsy to determine who was in that car. We know there was a driver, and we think there was a passenger in the front seat. Male or female, we can’t tell yet about either of them. We suspect from some melted plastic and metal that two child car seats were in the back.”

  The trooper looked up into Hugh’s cab. He could see Jenny sitting in her seat, her hands over her face, still crying.

  “Is your lady OK?” he asked. “I’ll have to get her name and her version of the story too.”

  “She’s really shook up. Can you wait a bit?” Hugh said.

  Then Hugh told the trooper about the first driver who had sped up and disappeared after causing this horrendous accident.

  “With any luck you might be able to pull the license plate, and the make and model of the car from my dashcam footage,” Hugh said.

  “By the way,” Janssen said. “Your name sounds familiar. You wouldn’t happen to be the trucker who took down that hijacking gang, and saved a trooper’s life, would you?”

  Hugh nodded.

  “You’re a big deal, you know,” Janssen said. “We had a briefing over that. I’d say pretty much every state police officer in the Western United States would like to buy you a beer, or a cup of coffee.”

  “Imagine you showing up on my beat, and being in an accident like this,” the trooper said.

  “Yeah, my lucky day. Not exactly how I was expecting to finish up today.”

  “Don’t worry. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there’s no way they are going to be able to pin this on you. Plenty of witnesses have testified what happened, and you’ve got recorded proof.”

  Trooper Janssen asked Jenny to step down from the cab, and he gently asked her to relate her version of what happened. She told the trooper the sun was in her eyes for much of the time, but her story was virtually identical to Hugh’s.

  “It is so sad,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Janssen finished with his note-taking, and handed Hugh his business card. “We’ll be in touch.”

  The highway patrol part of his post-crash duties taken care of, Hugh then had to turn to taking care of the trucking company part of his responsibilities.

  Dispatch was instantly aware something had happened because of the hard-brake alert they had received over Hugh’s Qualcomm system, and the fact the large screen in dispatch showing where every truck in the system was at any given time showed Hugh’s truck stopped in the middle of the I-10 Freeway.

  His dispatcher, Gloria, had called Hugh, who had told her briefly what had happened.

  Hugh had to call his company’s safety officer to start the accident-reporting process, and call road service to get his truck towed to the nearest Freightliner dealer for repairs.

  He also called his carrier’s insurance company to inform them of the accident. He had taken photos of the front end of his truck for the insurance company’s records. But he was sorry to report to them the police had confiscated the dashcam’s micro card chip that would completely exonerate him from culpability for the accident.

  Hugh told the claims associate the information from the dashcam recording would show he slowed down to try to give the woman a chance to get her car into his lane.

  The claims associate told him, “Not a problem,” they will get a copy of the recording when they order the police report of the incident.

  Damage to the front end of his truck was disproportionate to what had happened to the car he had T-boned. He had never seen a car explode in an accident like that; and he had seen a lot of accidents in his fifteen years on the open road.

  It took several more hours for the knot of emergency vehicles to clear out, and for the highway to be cleaned up enough for the tow truck to get in there, and to hook up to Hugh’s truck. A considerable amount of car-part debris was scattered on the highway, as well as spilled gasoline that had spewed out along the highway during the rollover. Cleanup involved guys in hazmat suits.

  Hugh and Jenny gathered together as much as they could from the sleeper of Hugh’s truck for an extended stay in a hotel while his truck was being repaired. They packaged up Hugh’s refrigerated and frozen items as best they could, and planned to make sure they would get a hotel room with a fridge/freezer.

  He wasn’t about to give up his mom’s homemade frozen dinners.

  “What’s one of the best hotels near the Freightliner dealer?” Hugh had asked the tow driver.

  “I’m going to be taking your truck to the dealer in Chandler, and we’ll be going right past the South Mountain Resort and Spa. It’s a bit pricey, but you asked for one of the best hotels, and it’s a five-star.”

  Hugh looked at Jenny, who nodded.

  “Thanks, can you drop us off there?”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “But towing your truck and trailer behind my big rig doesn’t give me much maneuverability. I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the entrance to that hotel. I can call you a cab. It can be here in a few minutes.”

  “Thanks, go ahead and do that please. We’ve had a terrible day, and we just want to get settled in.”

  It was nearing midnight by the time the cab had pulled up to the resort hotel. The immense resort grounds were bathed in soft lights. It was soothing to their eyes after driving into the harsh setting sun that afternoon and evening, and after suffering the dizzying and painful effects of all of the emergency vehicle strobe lights.

  Hugh paid the cab driver, adding a generous tip, and had the cab hold while he arranged with check-in for their room.

  “Do you have a reservation?” the desk clerk asked.

  “No. We were in an accident. It all happened very suddenly,” Hugh said. He was so tired and stressed he didn’t care if he made any sense.

  “We are pretty well booked in everything,” the desk clerk said.

  Hugh and Jenny visibly slumped upon hearing this.

  The clerk peered into her computer monitor screen, and began tapping on the keyboard. “Let me see what we can make available.”

  “OK. We’ve got one available. It was a recent cancellation, a villa. King-size bed. Will that do?”

  “That will be fine,” Hugh said. “We’ll take it.”

  She took his card for payment. Hugh didn’t look at the price, and he didn’t care.

  “Thank you,” she said. “The concierge service will take care of getting your things to your villa. If you will follow Raul he’ll show you where it is.”

  Hugh could sense a palpable relief from Jenny, who had been standing close next to him, holding his arm the whole time he was arranging the room. He was sure she had dreaded as much as he had having to leave there because no rooms were available.

  Arriving at the room, Hugh tipped Raul, and then the person who brought their things from the taxi.<
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  “It’s a good thing I carry a lot of cash,” Hugh said after they had left.

  It was after midnight. Hugh and Jenny were so tired, they didn’t even bother to explore their room … really, rooms, which, at a glance looked to be a large, luxurious apartment.

  While Jenny was in the bathroom getting ready, Hugh entered the master bedroom, turned down the covers on one side of the bed, and did the same thing again on the other side of the bed.

  Jenny came out of the bathroom, and Hugh went right in.

  By the time he had come out from the bathroom, the room lights were off, with only a couple of night lights providing illumination in the bedroom.

  He climbed into bed and got under the covers. He moved over next to Jenny, and held her in his arms.

  She held tightly to Hugh, burying her head in his chest, and cried like she hadn’t done since when she had first arrived at Hugh’s parents’ ranch, a cry she had needed at the time for releasing all the stress of the hijackings.

  She needed that again.

  Eventually, her cries turned to sobs, and then to rhythmic breathing.

  They held each other that way until daybreak.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The morning sun streamed in through the huge glass sliding door that opened out to the balcony, and woke them from their deep sleep.

  Hugh’s left arm had fallen asleep and had turned numb hours ago, but he hadn’t wanted to disturb Jenny to retrieve it from under her.

  Jenny’s left leg was draped over Hugh’s left leg. Her left arm rested on Hugh’s chest. He could feel her stir, and then shake herself awake.

  She looked up at Hugh, her hair all tousled. When she saw him watching her she broke into a huge smile – her broadly smiling mouth with her lidded, only half-opened eyes Hugh found to be irresistibly sensuous. Hugh could feel the warmth of her against his body all the way down to his toes.

  “Oh, God, please help me. You are so beautiful.”