Thirty-one
"Don't neither take no drugs."
Roy swung into the corner a bit too fast and gritted
his teeth while eighteen tires of his flatbed rig squalled in protest.
Clumsy, but he was a long way from being his usual self. He hadn't
wanted to go back on the road so quick. He had been up too many hours.
He felt shaky with confusion and panic. He had dropped face down on his
bunk at dawn and had planned on sleeping a thousand years. They had
shaken him awake at noon and had told him it would look bad if Sheriff
Gene Packerson came snooping.
“Not neither crazy,” he muttered.
The roaring truck and its load of logs came up behind
the idiot that had passed him ten miles back. They did it ever time,
passing on an upgrade at seventy and tooling along on the downgrade at
fifty to take in the lovely Pacific. They were the most hated denizens of
the highway for a trucker, cranky old men retired from cushy jobs with
nothing to do but block traffic in their motor homes until their days ran
out.
Roy drove up to the camper's tail and blared his horn
in a fit of anger. A sick little beep answered back.
"Bastard, get out of my way!"
His voice sounded embarrassingly shrill, reminding
him that it was more than slow traffic pumping in the adrenaline. He
needed to figure it out before it drove him crazy. If his sanity had
cracked under the strain once, maybe it would happen again. Maybe at any
moment he would find his own severed dick in his hand again and look
around to see John Hartman sitting beside him with half his head blow
away.
What in God's name had happened? Callavier's head
was up his ass accusing him of cowardice. It had happened after he
had pulled the trigger, not before!
"Get out of my way!"
Roy goosed the accelerator. He didn't mean to
actually strike the camper, and the impact was slight, but the driver
panicked, and the camper fishtailed wildly. The exhaust pipe spurted
blue-gray smoke in a desperate effort to escape the mad trucker on his
tail. Roy rode the camper's ass with a grin, gloating over his petty
victory.
The camper braked too hard for an upcoming curve.
Roy hit his own brake.
The pedal went to the floor.
The semi struck the smaller vehicle hard. The camper
spun out and toppled. At seventy miles an hour, it rolled a time or two,
then began flipping end for end. The camper mounted on the bed of the
pickup came apart like cardboard. Fenders and doors peeled away and
flapped in the wind.
A badly overweight woman cart-wheeled out the passenger's side, her
shoes flying off in an arc as she spun in the air. Roy's eyes and mouth
were wide with horror as he plowed into what remained of the wreckage. He
put his entire two hundred and fifty pounds on the brake to keep from
grinding the driver and what remained of the truck beneath his eighteen
wheels, but the brake pedal was flat against the floorboard. Frozen in
his seat by horror piled upon horror, Roy Rockingham and his truck with
its massive load of redwood logs went off the road, off the cliff, and
airborne high over a pristine Pacific beach.
He had time for a cry of rage.
"Kahl, you bastard!"
There was no functional part of his brain left to
register pain when the logs flattened the cab and its contents on the
beach far below.
