Oh, how she hoped there would be a random drive-by from the sheriff’s department. But with all of those sirens down below, it was unlikely any law enforcement would be in the area.
“Okay, we can give it a shot,” he said. “Amanda, I want you to get up and go get in that tan truck. Get in the passenger-side door and curl up on the floor. I don’t want you looking out the window and I don’t want anyone seeing you in there when we drive away.”
She closed her eyes tight and cried. Then she felt the vibration on her neck and she recoiled from it.
“Amanda,” he cautioned, “you know what comes next. Now get up and walk to the truck. We’re going to drive for a couple of hours and you’ll get to meet another woman who is along for the ride. Maybe you two will hit it off, or maybe not.
“And quit blubbering, will you?”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
FOR THE LIZARD KING that dusk the planet had stopped rotating.
It was no longer rolling toward him on a ribbon of asphalt where he sat motionless above it all in the high cab of his Peterbilt as he had for decades.
His mind and body had not adjusted to being stopped and it was jarring. When he closed his eyes he could still feel the motion of the road inside him. It was as if he were slightly drunk or drugged or he was a longtime sailor who was stepping on land for the first time in years.
The ground beneath his feet felt still and dead as he emerged from the double-wide trailer west of Sanish, North Dakota. From a place that smelled of greasy dirt and spilled alcohol. Weed smoke clung to the curtains, the fabric of the furniture, and the gray-tinged unmade bedsheets in the back bedroom.
He turned and locked the door behind him with the same set of keys he’d used for the tan Ford. He pulled on the door handle to make sure it was secure. It was.
Constructing the second explosive collar had gone much smoother than the first. Now he knew how to pack the C-4 into the receiver, and how to place a metal stud through a hole in the strap to secure it on so it couldn’t be unbuckled without a tool.
He walked around the perimeter of the double-wide making sure all the windows were sealed tight and the back door was locked as well. He was disgusted with the place itself and couldn’t see how a man could actually live there and still look at himself in the mirror in the morning.
He’d lived in his truck for years with no permanent address and he’d kept it in immaculate shape inside—both the cab and the sleeper. It wasn’t that hard to keep things neat and clean. An organized living space was the sign of an organized mind.
And vice-versa.
*
HE STEPPED BACK AND BEHELD the trailer home that was really no better than an isolated shack on five acres of grassland. The location itself was good—no close neighbors, two miles off the state highway, en route to nowhere. The big river flowed quietly through a maze of tangled brush and trees at the edge of the property.
But the structure itself and the condition in which it had been kept made his stomach churn.
A dozen tires had been thrown on the roof to keep the sheet metal from blowing away in the wind. The yard, what little there was of it, winked with broken glass. Two motorcycles, neither fixed up to run, occupied the lean-to carport on the side.
Inside were three filthy bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living area. One of the bedrooms served as a cramped office of sorts. Another was so packed with boxes, auto parts, and trash bags filled with clothing that he couldn’t even step inside. He thought: A hoarder. Just like his mother had been.
In the front room was a fifty-four-inch HDTV. The set was gaudy and too large for the space and it told anyone stepping inside as much about the former owner as the cheap Indian prints and rugs that covered the walls.
The Lizard King learned nothing from searching inside the trailer about the man who had owned it—Floyd T. Eckstrom—that he didn’t already know.
Floyd T. Eckstrom was a wannabe. A wannabe long-haul truck driver, a wannabe monster. Wannabe.
But he’d been too goddamned stupid and obvious.
The cardboard box in the bedroom closet was stuffed with newspaper clippings including a USA Today story about the formation within the FBI of a “Highway Serial Killer Task Force” charged with investigating over a thousand cases of missing truck-stop prostitutes across the nation. There were printouts of alleged sightings and a ream of stories about a forty-eight-year-old long-haul driver who’d been arrested in Georgia after being pulled over for malfunctioning running lights. The trooper noticed a severed human foot sticking out of a plastic Walmart bag in the trucker’s cab and immediately arrested him. The trucker later confessed to thirty-nine victims. There were also highway trooper reports of body parts found along the nation’s highway system, a filled-out application for employment at a long-haul trucking firm that had apparently never been sent, and an entire self-published “true crime thriller” written by a man named “Tub” Tubman who was the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County in southern Montana. The thriller described how Tubman’s efforts—and his efforts alone—had broken up a sadomasochistic “gang” that included the man known as the Lizard King. The fact that the Lizard King had escaped custody in the end was laid at the feet of Tubman’s subordinates.
The search engine on the desktop computer inside on the kitchen table was bookmarked with hardcore snuff pornography sites. And there was a large encrypted file of over four gigabytes that wouldn’t open without a password. He assumed the file was filled with video downloaded from the Internet. There was no point in even trying to open it because it was so obvious what was in there. He’d seen it all before but none of it compared to the cache of home movies he had with him.
Wannabe, the Lizard King thought.
Eckstrom had kept a loaded 12-gauge shotgun in the closet of his bedroom, a .30-06 hunting rifle on the wall, and a Colt 1911 .45 in his bedstand. That was it for weapons, and the Lizard King had removed them from the house and stashed them inside a shed and locked it.
He fished inside his jacket for the transmitter and pressed the button to vibrate.
There was a closed-ended cry from inside from the fat housewife followed by a muffled curse from the lot lizard from Eau Claire. He’d observed closely when they both saw each other for the first time, when he’d ushered Amanda into the trailer. Would they be happy to be with another person in the same situation?
The lot lizard had looked up with disgust on her face and said, “Who in the hell is she?”
“She can cook,” he said.
“Fuck,” the lot lizard said.
He leaned close to the closed window and said, “Stay in there and don’t try anything stupid. Look through those groceries I brought back and make some dinner. I got steaks in there.”