*
SATISFIED THAT THE TRAILER was secure and no one would try to get out, he walked away from the double-wide toward the bank of the river. Gravel and small pieces of glass crunched under his thick-soled trucker boots. His legs felt strange and weak, and once he had to stop and take his bearings. He wondered how long it would take for the world to stop rotating. And whether he really wanted it to.
There was too much tangled brush near the water to get to the river’s edge so he chose a massive branch of driftwood and sat down on it and stretched his legs out.
The sun was ballooning as it slipped toward the flat western horizon and it made the light orange. He could hear the river flow. There was a shriek of a nighthawk. These were things he’d missed for years but not that much.
He turned and looked at the double-wide over his shoulder. It was quiet although someone had turned on a light in the kitchen. Good.
*
MOST OF ALL, HE THOUGHT, he was tired.
So tired.
He was tired of having no fixed address at fifty-nine years of age and tired of being downtrodden. He was tired of idiots in four-wheelers on the highways and tired of smug and judgmental “citizens” who despised men like him while feasting on the food he’d delivered to their grocery store so they could eat while watching reality television programs about rich amoral celebrities.
He was tired of the government imposing more and more rules and regulations on him for simply trying to make a living. More and more permits, licenses, random drug tests, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration coming up with “scores” for every driver and constantly threatening to decrease driving hours allowed. The state “authorities” weren’t any better, always looking to shut a truck down for some chickenshit rule, especially in Minnesota, Ohio, California, Oregon, and Washington.
He was sick of being on high alert every minute of his day while he was calculating mileage, pickups, deliveries, and protocols that changed from state to state. They were trying to make it impossible for an independent trucker to survive.
He was even tired of lot lizards. They were more tatted up and drugged out than ever. They never learned that making themselves available to people like him by going from truck to truck was stupid and dangerous.
And they were so quick to scream.
It was time, he thought, for his next stage of life. He didn’t need to force it to make it happen. Like the countless lot lizards over the years, that next stage was coming to him.
*
HE’D BEEN ON to the bogus LTL posts on the log boards for months. The wording just wasn’t right and he knew it instinctively. Farmers who posted were cheap but these offers—all coincidentally from the Bakken in North Dakota—were written as if money were a second thought.
He knew that it had to be that overweight investigator from Montana who had—coincidentally—taken a job in North Dakota. She knew too much about him and she’d seen him in person twice. She was a threat.
State troopers, assholes in chicken coops, even the feckless FBI task force had lost interest and lost their edge. Time did that. But this woman—she was relentless.
*
HE’D LEARNED ABOUT C-4 on the Internet after he’d purchased two cases of it from a nervous Mexican trucker in Brownsville, Texas. The Mexican didn’t explain why he was unloading the cases surreptitiously to interested drivers at the truck stop and the Lizard King hadn’t asked. But he knew it might come in handy, as it had.
The stuff was as safe as a brick of clay until it was ignited by a detonator. It could be jostled and banged around in his trailer and nothing bad would happen.
As he drove back and forth across the country with the two cases of C-4, an idea came to him prompted by a cryptic message on an Internet trucker forum that read LOOKING FOR LK APPRENTICESHIP. It had a 701 area code. North Dakota.
The Lizard King didn’t respond at once but he thought the message was too bold for his relentless investigator and too clever by half for the feds.
There was no way that there would be two simultaneous efforts to lure him to North Dakota by law enforcement, was there? That didn’t make sense. But as he thought about it as he drove, an idea slowly developed.
First, he had to vet the wannabe and make sure there was no connection with the other effort to lure him in. So he placed a call from a pay phone in West Virginia to the 701 number and was introduced to Floyd T. Eckstrom.
Eckstrom, a local auto mechanic, was so starstruck by the call from the Lizard King he could barely speak. He offered to ride along for free, to assist with whatever he could, to learn the ropes from a master.
The Lizard King hung up on him and waited a week to see if the call would be traced back to him somehow. Then, after seeing the latest LTL post requesting a rig in Grimstad for ten pallets of remanufactured oil field parts, he called again and asked Eckstrom if he could drive a truck.
“Not just drive it, but back it up safely to a loading dock.”
When Eckstrom eagerly said he could do that, the Lizard King asked him to meet him in four days at a Flying V truck stop on the outskirts of Rawlins, Wyoming.
“Keep your cell phone on when you get there,” he instructed.
*
FOUR DAYS LATER, the Lizard King sat in the cab of his truck at the Flying V and watched the scene around him with his truck running. He was parked fifth from the end of the first long row of rigs facing the facility. He watched as dozens of tractor-trailer operators came off I-80 for fuel and food, and dozens left the truck stop to rejoin the mechanized river of commerce of the interstate. Many of those coming in had reached the end of their federally mandated driving shift and they’d carefully pull their rig into an empty space on the lot to get some sleep.
The truck stop was designed like most of them: big commercial trucks on one side, private passenger cars on the other. On the big rig side there was a driver’s-only lounge with Wi-Fi, showers, and a business center. A restaurant was in the middle of the facility but partitioned off between drivers and civilians. On the civilian side was a large gift shop, fried food and snacks for the road, and gasoline pumps instead of diesel.
Eckstrom wouldn’t know what kind of truck the Lizard King drove or what he even looked like. Very few people did. And he had no way of contacting his potential mentor when he arrived.
The first thing the Lizard King determined was that there appeared to be no special surveillance by law enforcement at the Flying V that afternoon. If it was a trap the cops had been much more careful and sophisticated than usual. There were standard video cameras mounted within and outside the facility, but no out-of-place panel vans, no “civilians” standing around on the corners of the building pretending to be busy with something, and no significant conversations between civilians who might actually be undercover cops.