headlights was painted red and black with sparkly silver striping. The black trailer bore no corporate logo or advertising.
As I reached the shopping district, the eighteen-wheeler cruised past me, into the heart of the village, heading north. Without realizing what I was doing, I picked up my pace to a racewalk. When the ProStar+ braked at a stop sign, I almost caught up with it.
As the behemoth accelerated across the intersection, I began to run, which was when I realized that I knew intuitively something about the truck must be evil.
Well, not the ProStar+ itself. I’m not one who believes that a vehicle can be possessed by a demonic spirit and, driverless, speed around town to run down people for the thrill of tasting blood with its tires, any more than I believe that Herbie, the Volkswagen in that series of Disney movies, had a mind of its own with a desire to bring lovers together and to thwart villains. If you believe the former, you have to believe the latter, and the next thing you know, you’ll be taking your Ford, with its sexy GPS voice, to the car wash just to see her naked and soapy.
I fell rapidly behind the truck, but then, near the northern end of the village, it turned left off the street, toward a supermarket. If the driver had been making a delivery, he would have gone behind the building to the loading dock. Instead, he pulled to a stop across several parking spaces at the end of the lot nearest to the street.
By the time I reached the eighteen-wheeler, where it stood in the trembling shade of a row of breeze-stirred eucalyptuses, it was unattended. Catching my breath, I walked slowly around the vehicle, looking it over.
My intuition bristled like the hackles on a dog. Heightened intuition is part of my sixth sense.
The day was mild, the breeze mellow, but the area immediately around the truck was colder than could be explained by eucalyptus shade alone. When I put the palm of one hand against the sidewall of the trailer, it felt as though the driver had pulled off the road to wait out a blinding snow squall at high elevation.
This wasn’t what truckers called a reefer, which hauled frozen food. No refrigeration unit was mounted on the front wall of the trailer, behind the tractor.
I stood on the step beside the fuel tank to peer through a side window of the cab. Leather seats, wood panels and trim, an angled middle console with CD player and GPS, and a roomy sleeping box behind the cockpit provided a cozy environment.
From the overhead citizens-band radio with the drop-down microphone hung a string of red beads onto which were threaded five white skulls the size of plums. They appeared to have been carved by hand, perhaps from bone.
People decorated the driver’s compartments of their vehicles with all manner of items. Miniature skulls no more proved this driver dangerous than a dangling figurine of the Little Mermaid would have proved him to be an innocent dreamer.
Nevertheless, I went around to the back of the rig to study the rear doors of the trailer. Maybe I needed a key, maybe not.
Before I could ascertain how the long latch bolts worked, a low silky voice asked, “Do you like my truck, dirtbag?”
He stood about six feet two, which gave him a few inches on me. Although he looked perhaps thirty-five, his spiky hair was white, as were his eyebrows. He had Nordic features and a melanoma-doesn’t-scare-me tanning-booth glow. His eyes were the precise blue of the water in a toilet bowl equipped with one of those sanitizers—and just as appealing.
Ever hopeful that even a situation that seemed fraught with the potential for violence might turn out to be an occasion for mutual understanding and camaraderie, I pretended not to have heard the dirtbag part.
I said, “Yes, sir, she’s a beauty.”
“You want to know what I’m hauling? Curious, are you?”
“No, sir. Not me. Just an admirer of trucks.”
His teeth were so unnaturally white that I felt in danger of sustaining a radiation burn from his smile.
“Are you a believer?” he asked.
In the circumstances, the question seemed so loaded that any too-specific answer might offend. “Well, sir, I guess we all believe in one thing or another.”
He looked as though he believed in rhinestone-cowboy clothing. His custom, pointy-toed black boots were inlaid with patterns of white snakeskin. Black jeans with scarlet stitching along the hems, inseams, and pockets. Red silk shirt with black stitching. A black bolo tie with what might have been a carved-bone slide in the form of a serpent’s head and matching bone aglets. His black sports coat featured scarlet lapels and collar peppered with sequins.
“If you’re a believer,” he said, “how many steps are there in the stairway to Heaven?”
“Well, sir, I’m no theologian. Just a fry-cook out of work.”
“There are just two steps in the stairway to Heaven, dirtbag. The first step is touching my truck. The second is not explaining yourself to my satisfaction.”
“Sir, the truth is, she’s a beauty and I’ve always wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”
“You never wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”
“I will admit that’s a stretch, but she is a beauty.”
The .45 Sig Sauer with silencer appeared in his hand the way a dove appears in the hand of a good magician, as if it materialized out of thin air. Worse, the pistol was aimed point-blank at my crotch, which wouldn’t have worried me so much if it had been a dove.
“How would you like to be a eunuch, never be troubled again by performance anxiety?”
He fried me with his bright smile, and I was like an over-easy egg on the griddle, waiting for the spatula.
“I wouldn’t much like that, sir.”
The line of eucalyptus trees largely screened us from passing traffic in the street. People came and went from the supermarket parking lot, but they were all much closer to the building than to us. They weren’t interested in a couple of truckers, and the cowboy’s body prevented them from seeing the gun.
“You think I won’t do it right here in the open. But you’d be surprised what people don’t see. They won’t hear the shot. You’ll drop before you get the breath to scream. The instant you drop, I’ll stomp your throat, crush your windpipe. Then I’ll handle you like you were a drunk, prop you against one of those trees, like you’re a hobo sleeping off a bender. Nobody wants to check out a piss-drunk hobo. And I guarantee, no one will remember me. No one will have seen me.”
I recognized sincerity in his toilet-water eyes, and I knew that, as crazy as it sounded, he might flush me out of this world.
Being as I’m a low-key guy and as ordinary-looking as any other unemployed fry-cook, considering also how genuinely terrified I must have looked, he didn’t expect me to seize his wrist in both of my hands. I forced the muzzle of the Sig Sauer away from my dangly things, farther down between my legs.
He squeezed off a shot, which made less noise than did the slug ricocheting off the pavement near my left foot.
Maybe I couldn’t have twisted his wrist hard enough to make him drop the weapon, but something extraordinary happened.
