C. Box - The Highway

“Let me know if Cody calls or texts,” Cassie said.

After a beat, Jenny said, “I will.”

“I’ll do the same.”

“Okay.” Then, “Now I’m really getting worried.”

Cassie didn’t respond.

“If he’s on a toot,” Jenny said, “I’ll personally kill him. I will, I swear.”

Cassie nodded. She understood. “I’m getting off the phone in case he calls.”

“Good idea. Me, too.”

Cassie sat back down at the table and glanced at the clock. Too long, she thought. Even if Cody had lost control of himself he would have at least lied to them by now.

* * *

On impulse, Cassie keyed Cody’s cell phone number and pressed SEND. It rang twice and she was surprised by the soft electronic click on the other end. Cody had answered.

“Cody, Cassie Dewell. I haven’t heard back from you-”

The call terminated. She looked at her phone to verify what happened. Cody had answered, but immediately dropped the call. Or was the cell signal on the other send so poor it couldn’t maintain the connection?

She tried again. When it went directly to voice mail, she repeated herself and said, “and neither has Jenny. Obviously, we’re getting concerned. Contact us as soon as possible, even if you don’t have anything to report. If I don’t hear from you in fifteen minutes, I’m going to blow the cover off this. I assume you don’t want that to happen.”

She hesitated, wondering if she should say more, then killed the call.

Then she glanced at the digital clock on the stove and noted the time.

4:21 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

Ronald C. Pergram, the Lizard King, nosed the Case tractor onto the trailer for the second time that night. The cold night air within the cab smelled of diesel fumes and upturned soil. Hard white stars undulated through the spires of exhaust from the engine.

When the tracks and tires were firmly on the platform, he killed the engine and climbed out. His back ached and his neck was stiff from tension and concentrating on the work and he could barely turn it. Because of the harsh white light thrown by the headlamps of the tractor as he dug the second large hole in the floor of the mountain valley, his eyes weren’t yet acclimated to the dark. His ears rang from the percussive rattle of the engine that was now ticking furiously as it cooled. So furiously, he almost didn’t hear the burr of the cell phone in the dark behind him.

So instead of chaining the tractor to the trailer and tightening the turnbuckles, he stepped off the platform onto the soft dirt and cocked his head toward the sound. He saw the phone light up in the gloom about twenty feet away at belt level. Then it rose and illuminated Legerski’s wide face in the light. Pergram saw Legerski press the phone to his ear for a second or two, then lower it and kill the call.

He waited. Legerski just stood there in the dark, saying nothing. Then: “Shit.”

“Who was that?”

“Some woman,” Legerski said. “Trouble, maybe.”

“Meaning what?”

The trooper held the phone out. “She might be the one who’s been sending him stuff all night.”

Pergram was confused for a moment, but the confusion was overtaken by sudden anger. “You kept that deputy’s phone? Why didn’t you throw it in the hole with the truck? What the hell are you thinking?”

* * *

Pergram’s last glimpse of Cody Hoyt’s pickup was as he pushed it into the huge hole with the blade on the front of the tractor. From the height of the cab, he could look down over the bed of the vehicle and see Hoyt’s body doubled over on the passenger seat floorboard. The side and back windows of the vehicle were spattered from the inside with blood and hair and brain matter. Legerski had stood off to the side as if supervising the work, which the Lizard King resented the hell out of. As far as he was concerned, someone who’d never operated heavy equipment had no right waving his arms around or shouting, “Can’t you make the hole deeper?” Nevertheless, he’d dug out a fifteen-foot-deep casket-shaped hole, pushed the truck into it, and carefully backfilled the excavation and run his treads over the top to tamp down the soil. When he was through it looked similar to the excavation he’d done earlier in the night and multiple times before: like a grave for a giant. When the hole was filled, he raked over the mound with the teeth of the backhoe to make it look more natural to the naked eye. After a winter of heavy snow and the spring runoff, they’d seed it with prairie grass seed pinched from the highway department shop that would sprout on the top and reclaim the bare ground. Within a year, it would be difficult to tell the topsoil had ever been disturbed. While he worked, he ignored Legerski in the dark but was aware the trooper was standing there, head down, looking at his phone.

But it turned out it wasn’t his phone. It was Cody Hoyt’s phone. And Legerski still had it.

“We might have a problem,” Legerski said.

“Hell yes we do. I’m working my ass off to erase all the evidence and you’re carrying around the phone of a cop you murdered. Why didn’t you get rid of it? Throw it in there? Wasn’t the hole big enough for you?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Legerski said. His voice was flat.

Pergram shut his mouth.

“Do what you need to do to get that tractor secure,” the trooper said. “We need to talk inside.”

He gestured toward the cab of the one-ton truck they’d used to bring the tractor out. Pergram had driven, keeping tight to the bumper of Hoyt’s pickup, which was driven by Legerski, now in civilian clothes. The trooper had left his uniform in his cruiser and hidden the cruiser behind the First National Bar.

* * *

As Pergram secured the chains from the trailer to the tractor and tightened the turnbuckles, he seethed with resentment. He didn’t like the way Legerski had spoken to him, in that tone, the way he put him off and said he’d wait inside. The way he’d been talking to him all night, ordering him around, giving him commands since the shooting. And the whole time he was holding Hoyt’s phone-a piece of equipment that could tie them directly to the dead cop.

The Lizard King didn’t like to be told what to do. Still, though, he’d done what Legerski had ordered. They really hadn’t talked since the shooting; it had all been one-way.

Pergram paused for a moment before climbing up into the cab of the one-ton. He hadn’t quite processed what had happened or how they’d deal with it. The girls he’d brought in seemed like a vague and distant memory because so much had transpired since. He needed sleep, rest, food, and time to gather his thoughts. The handful of white crosses-known as “trucker speed”-he’d taken earlier would soon wear off. Then he needed the kind of release he dreamed about.

He climbed up into the cab and shut the door. Legerski sat there, staring out the dirty windshield.

“Start it up, will you? I’m freezing to death.”

Pergram started the motor and goosed the heater fan.

“It’ll take a few minutes.”

“Yeah.”

“You shot a fucking cop, ” Pergram said. “That isn’t what I signed up for.”

“And you buried him.”

“But what now? We’re fucked. You know what they do when you shoot one of their own, you of all people.”

Legerski shrugged. “He used to be a cop. Not anymore. He was suspended. And he wasn’t well liked. He had a reputation for going off the reservation.”

“Still…”

“I know,” Legerski said. “I can tell you’re pissed at me. But what did you want me to do? Let him dig until he figured everything out? Is that what you would have done?”

Pergram shook his head, uncertain what the trooper was talking about.