C. Box: The Highway

Cassie was a local Helena girl born and bred. Her late father was a long-haul truck driver and her mother-who described herself as a “free spirit”-was living with Cassie and her son. When Cassie had taken the promotion, Tubman had assured her she’d have plenty of time to be with her family. He’d lied.

That morning, inside the cabin below, they’d found the body of Roger Tokely, fifty-eight, slouched forward in a straight-back chair, head bent, as if examining something on the floor between his feet. His beer belly prevented the body from falling forward to the floor. He faced a big-screen television mounted on the eastern wall in front of him. His arms hung on either side of his body, palms out. He wore baggy gray sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. His feet were bare and swelled grotesquely, the thick toes looking like stubby purple Vienna sausages.

There was a large pool of blood on the floor beneath Tokely’s chair. Cody guessed it was thirty inches across. The outside four inches of the pool was clear and the inside was dark and oval-shaped.

Next to the pool on the right side of the body was a stainless-steel revolver.

Cassie thought suicide. Cody thought homicide. Not only that, he said he was pretty sure who’d done it. Someone named B. G.

He said, “B. G. is a six-foot-five reprobate who lives right up there on the ridge.”

There was no evidence she could see pointing to anyone.

“Don’t worry,” Cody had said with an evil grin that chilled her and confirmed her worst fears about her partner, “we’ll prove it.”

Cody didn’t turn on the lights and moved by feel and memory into Roger Tokely’s kitchen. The lounge chair where Tokely’s body had been found was still there in a muted pool of moonlight. The bloodstain had not yet been cleaned up but the murder weapon had been taken for evidence.

On the side of the kitchen counter was a garbage container. With gloved hands, he opened the lid. The smell of rotted food wafted out. Then he opened the small paper sack he’d brought with him and glanced inside. The contents had been taken from B. G.’s Dumpster. Inside were crumpled fast-food wrappers and a half-eaten McDonald’s cheeseburger that might yield DNA. The scraps would tie B. G. to the scene of the murder.

He’d try to act surprised when the evidence tech announced the discovery.

* * *

As Cody climbed into his Ford he thought he heard the distant sound of a car starting up. He stepped back into the grass and peered toward the bench on top, then scanned the dark treeline. He didn’t see a vehicle, or headlights. Still, it unsettled him.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20

4:03 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

He called himself the lizard King. The prostitutes known as lot lizards feared him. More precisely, they feared his legend, the idea of him . None of them who’d ever seen his face up close lived to describe it.

He was parked in the back row of trucks with his diesel engine idling, his running lights muted, his hair slicked back, and a bundle of tools on the floorboard on the right side of his seat within easy reach. He was hunting but there was no need to go after his prey. The lot lizards would come to him.

The truck stop was four miles west of Billings, Montana, off I-90. A cold mist hung in the air and moisture beaded on the windows and the paint jobs of more than seventy big trucks. The black asphalt lot shined as if freshly varnished between the rows of semis, reflecting the lighted highway signs and hundreds of streams of horizontal running lights from the parked trucks themselves. The air outside hummed with rumbling engines. Tendrils of steam rose from beneath the engines and combined with the undulating waves of heated exhaust that rose from beneath the big rigs.

From his high perch in the dry and warm cab, his sight lines were clear. The truck plaza itself was filled with activity and he noted it carefully. Vehicles entered and exited the long banks of fuel pumps in front of the garish low-slung building a hundred yards away. Professional truckers filled 150-gallon aluminum tanks with diesel fuel on one side of the lot, passenger cars and vans filled up with gasoline on the other.

Inside the truck stop restaurant, waitresses served the $10.95 T-bone special advertised on the marquee near the exit. Drivers lounged in the “trucker’s only” section checking e-mail, comparing road conditions, or drinking coffee. Truck stop employees cooked up fried chicken and potato wedges for the lighted bins at the front counter and manned the cash registers selling salted snacks, energy boosters, beef jerky, and drinks.

This was the way it was on the open road; islands of lighted activity in a sea of prairie darkness. Cars and families on one side, truckers on the other, but sharing the same facility. Two vastly different worlds that met only at places like this. Inside, truck drivers and citizens barely acknowledged each other and the modern truck stop was designed so there would be little interaction. Sure, the drivers would get on their radios and laugh at the rubes they’d run into inside and mock their looks or stupid conversations, but inside they were segregated between the amateurs and the professionals, the clueless consumers-the civilians, the amateurs-and the cloistered universe of the providers.

He was on the road so much his outlook on it had changed completely over the years. It no longer seemed like he was moving, for one thing. Now he felt as if he were stationary while the road rolled under him and the scenery flowed by. The world came to him .

Like the captain of a large ocean vessel, a large swath of the landscape was off-limits to him, as he was confined by the shipping lanes that were interstate highways. When he parked his truck at a rest area or truck stop for the night he couldn’t venture into town because he had no way to get there unless he walked. It was like a captain who had to anchor his boat and take a dinghy to shore.

Oh, how he resented the smug people in those towns. They thought their food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and electronics simply appeared at stores or on their front doorsteps. They didn’t stop to think that every item they ate or wore or used was likely transported across the nation in the trailer of his truck or those like him, or that the hardworking blue-collar rednecks they avoided in real life and despised on the road were the conduits of their comfort and the pipeline of their wealth.

* * *

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so there was more traffic on the highways than usual. It would be much worse the next day as families moved across the country with a lull on Thanksgiving and another spike on Sunday as people returned home. He was used to it. The rhythms of the road were like rivers that flooded and receded in perpetuity.

The Beartooth Mountains to the south were light blue with new snow and the lack of stars indicated heavy cloud cover. It was still warm enough on the valley floor that the moisture hadn’t turned to snowflakes, but there was a snap in the air outside and he watched as travelers left their cars and zipped up coats on their way into the truck stop. He snorted at an overweight family of fools wearing T-shirts and shorts who practically ran from their passenger van to the door that led to the restrooms. Fucking idiots . What if they broke down wearing clothes like that? Who would they look for to rescue them? Me, he thought. The invisible, faceless trucker.

In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout. The truck was flat black, stripped of chrome, and as subtle as a fist. It was a trucker’s truck the way a Harley-Davidson was a biker’s bike. He’d even painted the twin stacks with black chimney paint to eliminate any hint of flash.