The lights and sirens are on, the motor is whining out, I am a small-town Sheriff crossing over a bridge while a train roars underneath, but I am so much more. I am vengeance. I am the voice of the dead. I am a bullet in pursuit of justice. I will not miss. Yeah, it's like that.
I weave in and out of the darkness, string the needle past a cargo van and a Peterbilt, a white Accord scurries to the shoulder. I roll through an intersection, the warn out struts bottoming out. I grind my stubby Swisher Sweet on my molars, a little juice hits the back of my throat. The Truck Inn looks like a crime scene, because it is. Some people see flashing blue lights and they get a bump of fear. I see a half dozen patrol cars encircling an entrance to a casino, where a hostage is being held and I feel comforted, because those are my people, my brothers and sisters, my team. They've got the bear tree'd. I've just got to harvest the pelt.
The dark overpass slides over me and I glide into the parking lot, shut down the motor, unlock the AR-15, put on my white drover cap as I step out of the worn-out cruiser. Sheila my trusted sergeant is standing beneath the facade of a phony western town. Walt Disney broke American architecture with his Frontiertown and all that other happy horseshit. After the rubes went back home, they felt empty, so every small-town architect in the country started remaking their own little jerk waters into rustic old timey places from neverland.
Some fairy tale inspired corporate hack designed this 800-truck parking lot off I-80 thirty miles east of Reno. It's a place to fill up and bunk down after crossing the giant kitty litter box of Northern Nevada. Also, since it's Nevada there's a peppy forty slot casino that you have to walk through before you can get to the bar or the restroom. Of course, the building has a theme. Silhouettes of some Clint Eastwood main street are outlined around the perimeter. Inside it's worse, replicated wagons, a water tower, a livery, a saloon, the set of a showdown without any show, until now.
I'm not here for the badge though. This is personal. My Martha caught a bullet. Went out to water her Blushing Knock Outs, a spinning speck of lead cracked into her cranium, punctured the cerebrum, passed through, lodged in six inches of loam, under the Kentucky blue grass that I helped lay down 23 years ago. Martha's meat computer lay in pieces, floating in pooled blood, mingling with the scattered petals.
Genie must have seen the water running down the gutter on her way home. You notice wasted water in the desert. Just on the skirts of her consciousness the violation would have circled while her main frame pinged on more important things, her semester finals, the alumite she just collected, the way Brian Anderson ran his eyes over her body when she walked through the quad. The lump of meat with its limbs stretched and twisted on the sidewalk probably didn't process at first. I'd like to say Genie didn't know what hit her when she got out of the car. That she just got her string pulled and slumped into nothing without registering. But it wasn't like that, she got one in the gut. The way desperadoes used to do way back when, a sick inhuman act, to punch a hole in the belly of another human, so their fecality washes around, acid stewing up their soft tissue. I've heard it hurts. Genie dragged herself over the hot sidewalk just to lie beside her mother. I don't like thinking that her last act was to seek comfort from a corpse. That's something I can't reconcile. A man will break if he thinks on that for long. I've been fumbling with that coin for some time, for more than I'd like to admit.
Sheila's been pacing, she does that when she's upset, a panther stuck in a cage, only this time the cage is her pledge. She wanted to go in, to handle Tom Streakle herself. I made her stand down. She shows me her phone, she's tied into the lenses inside, the all-knowing eyes that don't mind recording the mundane. Modern trucking isn't like you think, there are still redneck good old boys with confederate flags for mud flaps but there are also Sikhs that rig up their cabs to look like shrines, tough as nails black men and women who talk like Baptist ministers, Filipino's who don't bother to take off their headsets while they jabber to family in the middle of the pacific, while taking a piss. The all-seeing eye records most of it. The comings and goings, the weary and the outrageous. I flip through the displays searching for signs of the quarry. "Where the hell is he?"
