“Yes, you are staying with me … for awhile longer anyway,” he said, seeing her eyes moisten at that.
“I can’t turn you loose now to fend for yourself with those guys on the prowl. For all I know, they will try to get revenge because you failed to help them hijack my truck.”
That comment hit Jenny like a shot. She abruptly stiffened in her seat.
“Yes, I know—or rather, suspect,” he said. “But, you are going to tell me everything. Aren’t you?”
Jenny nodded, although she didn't look to Hugh like she was totally committed to the idea.
There were no loads for him to pick up going from Burley to Salt Lake City, so Hugh was to haul his empty all the way there … going dead head, it’s called.
He mused at the comic situation that it would be if they got hit by the hijackers between here and there, and all they would get for their efforts was an empty trailer.
But there was not much chance of the hijackers doing anything any time soon, he figured. Like the officer said, they’d have to ditch the Buick, and find other transportation. They’d also have to lie low for awhile, especially in the state of Idaho. He could bet that Idaho State Police would want to get their hands on those guys in a bad way. And it certainly would go bad for them if they were caught in that state, knowing that cops take a dim view of thugs assaulting their fellow officers.
Then, too, one of them had a gunshot wound to deal with, and another would have some serious knee issues. Hugh knew that every hospital within two hundred miles would be put on alert to watch for a large man with a gunshot wound, and another with a broken leg. Plus, they had to deal with the body of their dead partner.
No, these guys would not be a problem for awhile.
As the miles droned on over much of the same barren landscape that he had been driving through ever since leaving Victorville what seemed like ages ago, Hugh’s thoughts turned to their attempted hijacking of fifteen years ago.
There were just too many similarities to dismiss, and he didn’t believe in coincidences. But to think that these could be the same four guys stretched reality beyond belief.
But, then again, their body shapes were similar. Their method of attack was startlingly familiar. Hadn’t Hugh taken them down with virtually the same strategy as fifteen years ago?
But what about the fifth guy? What had happened to him? If they really have been together this long, then why wasn’t he still involved with this hijacking ring?
Also, what could Jenny’s involvement in this possibly be? She would have been … what? … seven years old, fifteen years ago?
His thoughts were interrupted by Jenny’s cell phone ringing. He looked over at her. She looked at him, and retrieved the phone—only, it wasn’t the flip phone he had seen her with earlier.
The phone she was holding in her hand was a newer model smart phone.
“Don’t answer that.” Hugh warned.
“No,” she mouthed soundlessly, looking at Hugh, shaking her head. It was as if she dared not speak for fear the caller could hear her through the unanswered phone. She held the phone away from her, afraid to even look at it.
Good girl. That’s progress. Now, if she would only open up and tell me what this is all about.
“Where did you get that phone? That’s not yours,” Hugh asked.
She looked at the phone, then looked at him. “I don’t know. Someone must have slipped it into my pocket back there where your truck was.”
He’d have to look into this new development later when he wasn’t driving, and had more time.
She wanted to turn it off, but had no idea how to do that. So she handed it to Hugh. He examined it as best he could while driving, having to keep at least one eye on the road.
Most smart phones were similar, he knew. They usually had a button on the top or along the side that one had to press once to “wake up” the phone, and then press and hold to turn it off.
He showed her which button to try, and told her what to do. She managed to get a menu to come up, and told Hugh what it said. He told her to tap the “Yes” on the screen for “Do you want to turn off the phone?”
She did that, then put the phone back into her pocket.
Just over the border and into Utah, Hugh remembered they had not eaten since their breakfast cereal.
“You hungry?” he asked Jenny.
“Starving,” she said.
“There’s a truck plaza a little farther ahead at Snowville,” he said. “We’ll stop there and get a bite of real food. You’re probably tired of my cooking by now.”
“Thanks, Hugh, that sounds good.”
He took the exit, turned left onto the overpass, and pulled into the travel plaza on the right-hand side of the road.
They walked into the restaurant together, and split up to go to their restrooms, meeting shortly after at the cashier’s stand to get a table.
Hugh ordered a chicken-fried steak and an iced tea. Jenny ordered a Cobb salad and a soft drink.
“You don’t strike me as the salad type,” Hugh remarked.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said.
That’s definitely true, Hugh thought, hoping to partially rectify that before the day was over.
When their meal came, they ate without talking.
They finished. Hugh paid, and left the tip.
As they climbed back into his truck he told her that was their big meal for the day. Tonight it would be something quick and easy out of his "panry."
A couple hours later, Hugh pulled into his company’s terminal in Salt Lake City. No travel plaza for them tonight.
His load would not be here until early the next morning. It was a relay from back east somewhere being hauled by a night driver who would run out of hours by the time he got here. Hugh would pick up the load, and then it was on to Reno—a straight shot across on the 80.
So, he dropped off his empty trailer and motored over to the bobtail parking at the yard. That’s where drivers parked their tractors when they didn’t have a load yet, or were awaiting repairs, or were taking their thirty-four-hour reset. Then he performed his post-trip, and punched “off-duty” into the Qualcomm.
Hugh had to consider the propriety of bringing a female rider into the terminal. Technically, because he was an owner-operator, he was allowed to have riders without going through the same hoops that company drivers had to. But, he also figured that the less attention he brought to himself and Jenny, the better.
Thus, they would not be spending time in the driver’s lounge, which was fine with Hugh, because they had to talk.
But first: “Jenny, I’ve got to go into Operations and explain why I was late with my load to Burley.”
Jenny shrank back at this, immediately fearful.
“Don’t worry, I don’t have to explain you at all.” Hugh said, thinking he couldn’t right now anyway even if he tried. “It’s just that everything has to have a reason, and I need to wrap up the Burley assignment, and get it off the books.”
Jenny nodded.
“OK. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”
Jenny said nothing—just stared back at him. He guessed she wasn’t in the mood for lame jokes.
Hugh wasn’t gone long. When he returned, it was still too early for dinner, so he sat in his driver’s seat, and flipped the lever to swivel the seat sideways, facing Jenny, who was still sitting in the passenger seat.
She looked like a lost little girl, sitting there, her arms to her side, sitting on her hands. Her head was bowed.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Hugh asked.
Jenny nodded.
“Now?”
She nodded again, saying, “OK. First thing I want to do is apologize.” She started to tear up.
Hugh knew this was going to be difficult for her.
“I didn’t want it to go this far. Back there at the truck stop, during my shower, I decided that I wasn’t going to go along with the hijacking …”
Hugh interrupted, shouting at her, “So that’s it! I knew it! You set me up! All this was planned from the very beginning!”
“Look, Hugh,” she pleaded. “This is going to be hard enough. Please don’t make it any harder on me.”
“OK. I’m sorry. Go on,” Hugh said, immediately sorry he had gotten angry at her. He wanted the whole story, and the last thing he wanted was for her to clam up on him.
“You remember when you were waiting for me outside the travel plaza after dinner, and I was crying?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“They were there waiting for me outside the women’s restroom.”
“Who were?”
“I’m getting to that. So, they were waiting for me. I didn’t even know they were going to be there. I had called him earlier, after I got done with my shower, and before I came back to the truck,” she said.
“Go on.”
“I told him I was through … didn’t want any part of it. I thought it was settled, and that’s why I was so happy when I came back to the truck. But, when he found me outside the restroom he got extremely angry,” she said, reflexively touching her cheek where Hugh had noticed the red spot.
“He hit you, didn’t he?” Hugh demanded.
Jenny nodded.
“Yes, but even worse, he threatened me,” she said.
“With what? Who is he, and what does he have on you?” Hugh asked.
“Hugh, he’s my uncle. He’s crazy in the head. And, he’s got my little brother, and …” she couldn’t finish, sobs welled up in her throat, choking off any further words.
Hugh gave her a few minutes to bring herself under control. It took everything he had to keep himself from reaching over to her and taking her in his arms. He knew to do that would be crossing a threshold in their relationship that he might decide later he wished he hadn’t done.
Finally composing herself, she said, “In the beginning, I went along with my uncle’s plans because of my father. But, when I tried to back out, after seeing how crazy my uncle and his friends were, and after realizing what a decent person you are, he went nuts and threatened to hurt my little brother.”
“Where does your father figure into all this? And why is he letting your uncle do this to you?” Hugh asked.
“My father was killed. Fifteen years ago. It’s why my uncle is crazy. And why he hates truck drivers.”
Whoo boy, Hugh thought. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning, with your father.”
“OK,” Jenny said. “It started fifteen years ago.”
Chapter Eight
Jenny McDonald, a cute, pert, happy little seven-year-old girl, adored her father. Her mother had died just the previous year giving birth to her little brother, Jimmy, who was born when Jenny was six years old. So, now, besides her brother, her father Sam was all she had.
Her father, in turn, loved her and doted on her.
But, one day when she was seven, her father went away, “on business,” and never came back. Her dad’s brother Adam showed up, explaining that her dad had died, and that he was going to take care of her and her brother.
Jenny clearly remembers her uncle that day, because Adam looked like he had been in a fight, and that he had gotten the worst of it.
Through the years, Adam was away a lot, “on business,” so it was left to Jenny to help raise little Jimmy. As time went on, she noticed that her uncle’s periods when he would sink into bad moods were more frequent, and were becoming increasingly worse.
On top of that, he was a heavy drinker, especially when his buddies came over. The Gang of Four, they called themselves. “Used to be our Gang of Five!” he would spit out angrily during the times of his foul moods.
Her uncle had never told her what kept him away from home all those times.
Then one dark day, when Jenny was about fourteen years old, her uncle was in a particularly foul mood, and he told her what had happened to her father.
He admitted to her that the five of them were in the business of hijacking trucks. “We would do three or four a year, but that was all we needed to do, because the payoff was great,” It was relatively easy to do, he told her, because they had a “system.”
“And it worked just fine until the day that your father was murdered!” he shouted, waving his arms around.
He told her they were at a truck stop south of Bakersfield—Wheeler Ridge, actually. They had cornered a driver who they had picked out to be their next victim. “And, everything was going as planned until, from nowhere, somebody else jumped into the fight,” he told her.
Her uncle became extremely agitated at this point, barely able to spit out the words.
“Jenny, this guy was a monster!” she remembers her uncle saying. “A killing-machine monster!”
Adam said he had never seen anything like it. “He just charged into the fight, and beat the shit out of us!”
“All of you?" young Jenny asked. "What about my dad?”
“That’s the worst of it,” her uncle answered. “I was the next to the last to go down, but I stayed conscious long enough to see what happened.”
“Tell me!” Jenny shouted.
“Your dad was the last man standing. This monster and the other guy attacked him—ganged up on him, like cowards, you know!” he exclaimed, the absolute irony of this statement lost on him.
“They took him down, but before he fell, this monster hit him in the face with his bare hand … like this,” he said, demonstrating by striking out at Jenny with the heel of his hand, stopping just short of her face.
“He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The medic said the blow caused a bone fragment from his nose to get shoved up into his brain, killing him.”
Adam told Jenny that he and his buddies all suffered permanent injuries because of this fight, but nothing as bad as her dad did. He told her that the final blow delivered by this “monster” was unnecessary, and amounted to murder.
Jenny took all this in without uttering a word. But her uncle’s story about her father left its mark on her psyche.
Shortly after she turned fifteen, the four got caught, and were sent to prison. Jenny and Jimmy were sent to live in foster homes, so she only infrequently saw the uncle who had raised them. But, she never lost her abiding hatred for the man who had taken her father’s life. In fact, she had a deep hatred for all truck drivers in general.
The years went by, and the hatred for truck drivers that her uncle and his buddies had in themselves also grew even stronger in Jenny like a festering tumor. She never forgot how much she had loved her dad, and how much he had loved her. She resented the loss of her father all these years, and had built up an abiding hatred for the man—the monster—who had done this to her dad, and to her and her brother.
She had nightmares about the man who had killed her dad by piercing his brain with one blow from the heel of his hand.
That’s why, many years later, when she was twenty-two years old, and her uncle and his buddies had been released from prison, she had agreed to help them in their hijacking schemes.
“You see,” she told Hugh, “that Susanville hijacking was them. That was one of their first ones since getting out, and it didn’t work out too well for them. So they decided that they needed a new system. They figured if they could get somebody who could work it from the inside they could be more successful.”
“And that's where you came in,” Hugh said.
“To be honest, I really didn’t want to do it, but my uncle told me the story all over again about how my dad was killed, and I just got madder and madder,” she said.
“But when I tried to get out of it because I saw how crazy my uncle was acting, he threatened to harm Jimmy. That was my uncle holding the gun to my head. He’s the one who got shot. You know the rest.”
Hugh listened to her story with a growing sense of dread as he realized that he, obviously, was the monster of Jenny’s nightmares.
That was so long ago, and t
he details of his and James’ fight with the hijackers had faded into distant memory. But, now that she had recounted for him from the perspective of her uncle what had happened that evening at the truck stop, he did remember the last man standing.
Hugh recalled how he and James had run at him together, and how they had put him down … especially the part about himself delivering the final, killing blow.
He agonized over the consequences of that action, the effect that it had had on Jenny as a little girl, and the long-term effect that has led to consequences even today.
Of course, at the time Hugh and James both felt that they had dealt with their attackers fairly. The five attackers did, after all, gang up on the one lone truck driver. It was only after Hugh had jumped into the fight that the odds turned against them, resulting in things not turning out the way they had planned. Essentially, they had gotten what they deserved.
In hindsight, he questioned now the necessity of the final blow. All he could think in his own defense was that he had been trained in combat to make sure the enemy was down for good.
He decided at this time not to tell Jenny the part of the story that she didn’t know, namely that the truck driver she was talking to right now was the monster of her dreams.
“Why the dirty, disheveled look when I first picked you up?” he asked.
“That was my uncle’s idea. He figured I’d have to really look the part of a vagrant hitchhiker in order to keep anybody from being suspicious about me being part of a hijacking plot,” she answered.
“So, I really did spend a lot of time on the road, sleeping in my clothes, getting good and dirty.”
“You did indeed do that,” Hugh commented.
“Yeah, but I was always in touch by phone, and they kept a close eye on me.”
“And the phone calls?”
“Again, their idea. The first one was simply to let them know that I was picked up, that I didn’t know where you were stopping next, and that I didn’t know yet what your load was,” she said.
“One of my ‘assignments’ was to find out what the truck driver was hauling, so they wouldn’t make the mistake again of trying to hijack a load that wouldn’t be worth anything to them,” she added.
Crimson Highway Page 7
