A Murderous Scheme, A Lone Semi Truck, and an Unforgettable Ride: Freight by Ryan Lowell
Chapter One
Billy Trask stopped short of the border and swung his tractor trailer into the storage facility. He took one last pull off his cigarette, flung it out the window into the slush, and situated his truck so that he was facing the road. It was only then that he pulled his crossword book from the console. He could see his breath. He kept it cold in the cab because the heat made him sleepy. The crossword book was for beginners, but he didn’t have an ego when it came to that stuff—he didn’t like to struggle. His father did the harder ones when he was alive, but his father was smarter and he said the puzzles kept him sharp. Billy got a couple words, and then he checked the time and pulled down his visor and looked at himself and took the gray bandana off and tied it back over his long, mostly gray hair, and he did not talk to himself this time. He pushed the visor back up, and in the distance the Buick was rolling toward him.
Slowly. Too slowly.
He set his crossword book back in the console and said: “Come on, you French fuck.” Even though he himself was half-French. The clouds in the sky said weather was coming, and he wanted to get south and away from it. The road was covered with early-morning frost, but it was not slippery. Behind the wheel of the Buick was his uncle Bernier. Bernier lived on the Canadian side, but he crossed the border often and they wouldn’t bother him. Billy watched the Buick approach, floating over the frost, and he watched as the Buick veered off the road and into the snow and into a telephone pole. Billy shook his head. He knew something was amiss besides the obvious.
He left the truck running and climbed down and stomped through the snow to the driver’s side of the Buick. He opened the door and looked down at his uncle. His eyes were half-open and his mouth was mostly open and his breathing was light but loud.
“The fuck was that stunt?”
Bernier looked up at him. There was pain or fatigue in his eyes, something gone. His breathing had turned shallow and intermittent, and there was spit around his bottom lip. He blinked. There was water pooling in his eyes. He’d been strong before.
“Well, shit.”
Bernier took in a long slow breath and then said: “I’m dying, kid.” “You been expecting a heart attack now for twenty years. Hell of a time for it. Well, what you wanna do?”
Bernier said nothing. His eyes shut. For a few seconds, Billy thought he was dead. His chest wasn’t moving. Then he opened his eyes only slightly and took one last breath and said: “Don’t be a hero. Good right here.”
“All right,” Billy said. Then he spoke to him as though he were still alive: “I get it. Remember when Dad fell and busted his hip? Fucker drank and smoked all his life, and despite all that he was healthy as a goddamn horse at ninety. Then he fell and they took him in and after a couple days in the hospital with no drink and no smoke he just said, ‘Fuck this. I don’t wanna live like this.’ And his body shut down. Lost the will to live, as they say. Or his mind told his body to shut down. I don’t doubt someday I’ll get there, but I ain’t ready yet.”
His uncle did not respond. His eyes were closed again and there was no movement in his chest or anywhere else, and Billy kissed his own two fingers and set them on Bernier’s forehead and drew them down between his eyes the way he’d done with his son when he was young, long before the boy broke through the ice and died. Billy did not pray or think about the past, he just looked at his uncle for a minute and then reached down and pulled the latch that popped the trunk. He went to the rear and opened it with his sleeve and looked inside. He stood and glanced around and back at his tractor trailer, which was panting like an enervated animal, and then he turned and saw a dot appear at the end of the long road and the dot became a car. He pulled the trunk down but not enough for it to latch, and he watched the car approach. He raised a hand in the air and climbed up onto the road. There was a woman behind the wheel, and she didn’t look capable. She came to a stop on the opposite shoulder and put her window down.
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t think so.”
The woman got out. She was petite and pretty and around his age, and if they weren’t in the situation they were in, Billy would have shown interest in her. But that wasn’t the situation they were in. She was wearing a heavy sweater and driving gloves, and she peeled the driving gloves off and dropped them on her seat. “What happened?”
“Looks like he just went off the road on his own,” Billy said. “You see what I saw when I came up on this.”
She moved. “Do you have a phone on you?”
“I do.” He didn’t. He reached into his empty coat pocket for show, even though she wasn’t looking at him, and he followed her down the bank.
“Is he breathing?”
“I couldn’t tell. It’s gonna be a while before any ambulance makes it out here.”
“Do you know CPR?”
“No, ma’am. I’m just a truck driver.”
“Well, I’m just an English teacher. Doesn’t even look like he hit it very hard.”
“No.”
“Maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack. Or he fell asleep and hit his head on impact. He’s up there.”
“Yeah. He’s old.”
“I don’t understand why the airbag didn’t work.” “Me neither.”
“Poor guy. Are you calling?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He watched her lean in, and she checked the wrist and then the neck and then leaned in farther and listened to his chest, and Billy leaned in with his long arm like a hook and wrapped it around her neck, and he put his knee in her back and flexed his arm and came up, and he felt her trying to scream and kick, and he wrapped his other arm around her head and twisted and he heard it snap, and the woman went limp. He turned her around and lifted her up and looked at the Buick and then at her car, and he set her down in the snow and got into her car and U-turned and drove into the snow and pulled the brake and slid it sideways into the Buick. He got out and stuffed her driving gloves into his pocket, and he picked up the woman and put her back in the driver’s seat and propped her head up and let it fall to the side.
He returned to the Buick and used one of her gloves to open the trunk. He lifted out the two buckets filled with plastic bags of pills hidden underneath random hardware, and he set one down on the ground and shut the trunk and then took both buckets and stomped across the snow back to his tractor trailer.
Discover the Book
Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn’t exist.
Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $10 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals.
Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy’s way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake.
In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love—a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.
