“Jim’s out of town for a few days. Whatcha need?”
“Listen, Waylon, I’m hoping maybe you can do me a big favor. You know the cave we found that body in—Russell’s Cave, I think it’s called?”
“Course. Used to play in it when I was a kid.”
“Is there any way you could take me there? I need another look around, and I don’t want to bother the sheriff or his deputy. If you can’t do it, just say so—I know it’s a long ways off the beaten track. It took us over an hour by ATV just to get up there.”
There was a long pause on the other end, which I figured meant he was groping for an excuse.
“It took you’uns a hour to get there? On ATVs, you say?”
“At least an hour, over a pretty rough trail up the mountain. My legs are still sore; a return trip might just put me in a wheelchair.”
He laughed. “Well, Doc, I might be able to help you out. How ’bout you meet me at the Pilot station at the interstate exit in about a hour?”
“How about an hour and a half? I need to stop by my office and get my camera and a few tools.” He agreed, and I hung up, hoping I wasn’t making a foolish mistake.
I’d expected Waylon to be driving a pickup; what I wasn’t prepared for was the sort of pickup it proved to be. A battered rust bucket, sporting a patchwork of Bondo, gray primer, and multihued body panels scavenged from disparate hillside junkyards: that’s what I’d expected. The vehicle waiting for me at the gas station made my full-size GMC Sierra look shabby and sissified by comparison. A Dodge Ram 3500, it measured at least a foot longer, wider, and taller than my truck. Waylon owned the Arnold Schwarzenegger of pickups. Twin vertical exhausts, which could have been transplants from a Kenworth semi, flanked the rear corners of the cab. Rear fenders flared widely above dual wheels, tricked out with monster tires on sculpted alloy rims. Waylon ambled out of the minimarket and fished a keyless remote beeper out of one of his myriad pockets; when he clicked to unlock the doors, it sounded as if the locking mechanism on a bank vault were ratcheting open. An air horn beneath the vehicle emitted a locomotive-sized blast. Waylon motioned me in. I stepped up—way up—onto a running board and hoisted myself cabward with the help of a vertical handrail just aft of the door. Grunting from the climb, I plopped into my seat—a swiveling captain’s chair, sheathed in buttery glove leather. The dash and overhead console bristled with enough electronics to make a NORAD technician envious: GPS, moving-map display, satellite radio, CB
radio, hands-free cell phone, CD/cassette/AM-FM deck, even a passenger-side DVD screen. A small refrigerator—sized to hold either a case of beer or a haunch of venison—whirred quietly between us.
I swiveled in my seat and surveyed the aft cabin.
“You need something, Doc?”
“No, I was just looking for the hot tub,” I said. “You seem to have everything else in here.”
Waylon rumbled out a laugh. “I might oughta put me one in. Thing is, if I did, I never would get my girlfriend outta here.”
He turned the key, and somewhere beneath us, a sleeping giant of a power plant awakened. “Cummins Turbo Diesel,” I’d read on the side of the hood as I clambered up. The cab quivered gently as the engine idled; the rumble bore more than a passing resemblance to Waylon’s laugh: low-pitched and muffled, but simple and powerful. “Sounds like you’ve got some serious horsepower there,” I said.
“It’ll do. They’s actually a gasoline engine with more horsepower, a 10-liter V10, but it gets shitty mileage. This here’s got more torque, anyhow. Tow twentythree thousand pounds with this rig. Besides, you can’t beat a Cummins. Go three hundred fifty thousand miles ’fore it needs a overhaul.”
Another pipe, topped with wire mesh and a chrome cap, projected above the hood from somewhere on my side of the engine compartment. “What’s that thing sticking up? Looks like a chimney flue.”
“Snorkel intake,” Waylon said. “You can ford a crick six foot deep in this thing. I’ve done it. Helps if you got some weight in the bed, though, especially if they’s some current. She’s one hell of a truck, but once she starts to float, the handling goes all to hell. You don’t want to have the windows down, neither.”
As he roared beneath the interstate and headed up-country, Waylon half-turned to me. “Doc, I got to do a little financial business on our way back from the cave, so I need to make me a quick stop on the way up. If you don’t care to.”
The phrasing gave me pause. Where I’d grown up, in Virginia, “I don’t care to”