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There was a truck stop adjacent to the depot area. The pumps-over a dozen-were lit by the same high-intensity arcs. Bright white fluorescents spilled out from the right side of the main building; the left side was dark. There was another building, this one U-shaped, to the rear. A scattering of cars and trucks was parked there. The sign out by the road was a huge digital job, loaded with bright red information.
RICHIE’S TOWNSHIP ROAD TRUCK STOP
“YOU DRIVE ’EM, WE FILL ’EM”
With truckers coming and going, fueling up both their rigs and themselves (even with its lights off, Tess could tell that, when open, the restaurant was of the sort where chicken-fried steak, meatloaf, and Mom’s Bread Pudding would always be on the menu), the place would probably be a beehive of activity during the week, but on Sunday night it was a graveyard because there was nothing out here, not even a roadhouse like The Stagger.
There was only a single vehicle parked at the pumps, facing out toward the road with a pump nozzle stuck in its gas hatch. It was an old Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights. It was impossible to read the color in the harsh lighting, but Tess didn’t have to. She had seen that truck close up, and knew the color. The cab was empty.
“You don’t seem surprised, Tess,” Tom said as she slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the road and squinted at the store. She could make out a couple of people in there in spite of the glare from the harsh outside lighting, and she could see that one of them was big. Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.
“I’m not surprised at all,” she said. “He lives out here. Where else would he go to gas up?”
“Maybe he’s getting ready to take a trip.”
“This late on Sunday night? I don’t think so. I think he was at home, watching The Sound of Music. I think he drank up all of his beer and came down here for more. He decided to top off his tank while he was at it.”
“You could be wrong, though. Hadn’t you better pull in behind the store and follow him when he leaves?”
But Tess didn’t want to do that. The front of the truck-stop store was all glass. He might look out and see her when she drove in. Even if the bright lighting above the pump islands made it hard for him to see her face, he might recognize the vehicle. There were lots of Ford SUVs on the road, but after Friday night, Al Strehlke had to be particularly sensitized to black Ford Expeditions. And there was her license plate-surely he would have noticed her Co
There was something else. Something even more important. She got rolling again, putting Richie’s Township Road Truck Stop in the rearview.
“I don’t want to be behind him,” she said. “I want to be ahead of him. I want to be waiting for him.”
“What if he’s married, Tess?” Tom asked. “What if he’s got a wife waiting for him?”
The idea startled her for a moment. Then she smiled, and not just because the only ring he’d been wearing was the one too big to be a ruby. “Guys like him don’t have wives,” she said. “Not ones that stick around, anyway. There was only one woman in Al’s life, and she’s dead.” – 37 -
Unlike Lacemaker Lane, there was nothing suburban about Township Road; it was as country as Travis Tritt. The houses were glimmering islands of electric light beneath the glow of the rising moon.
“Tess, you are approaching your destination,” Tom said in his non-imaginary voice.
She breasted a rise, and there on her left was a mailbox marked STREHLKE and 23. The driveway was long, rising on a curve, paved with asphalt, smooth as black ice. Tess turned in without hesitation, but apprehension dropped over her as soon as Township Road was behind her. She had to fight to keep from jamming on the brakes and backing out again. Because if she kept going, she had no choice. She’d be like a bug in a bottle. And even if he wasn’t married, what if someone else was up there at the house? Brother Les, for instance? What if Big Driver had been at Tommy’s buying beer and snacks not for one but for two?
Tess killed her headlights and drove on by moonlight.
In her keyed-up state, the driveway seemed to go on forever, but it could have been no more than an eighth of a mile before she saw the lights of Strehlke’s house. It was at the top of the hill, a tidy-looking place that was bigger than a cottage but smaller than a farmhouse. Not a house of bricks, but not a humble house of straw, either. In the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, Tess reckoned this would have been the house of sticks.
Parked on the left side of the house was a long trailer-box with RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side. Parked at the end of the driveway, in front of the garage, was the cab-over Pete from the website. It looked haunted in the moonlight. Tess slowed as she approached it, and then she was flooded with a white glare that dazzled her eyes and lit the lawn and the driveway. It was a motion-activated pole light, and if Strehlke came back while it was on, he would be able to see its glow at the foot of his driveway. Maybe even while he was still approaching on Township Road.
She jammed on the brakes, feeling as she had when, as a teenager, she’d dreamed of finding herself in school with no clothes on. She heard a woman groaning. She supposed it was her, but it didn’t sound or feel like her.
“This isn’t good, Tess.”
“Shut up, Tom.”
“He could come back any minute, and you don’t know how long the timer on that thing is. You had trouble with the mother. He’s much bigger than her.”
“I said shut up!”
She tried to think, but that blaring light made it hard. Shadows from the parked cab-over and the long-box to her left seemed to reach for her with sharp black fingers-boogeyman fingers. Goddam pole light! Of course a man like him would have a pole light! She ought to go right now, just turn around on his lawn and drive back down to the road as fast as she could, but she would meet him if she did. She knew it. And with the element of surprise gone, she would die.
Think, Tessa Jean, think!
And oh God, just to make things a little worse, a dog started barking. There was a dog in the house. She imagined a pit bull with a headful of jutting teeth.
“If you’re going to stay, you need to get out of sight,” Tom said… and no, that didn’t sound like her voice. Or not exactly like her voice. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to her deepest self, the survivor. And the killer-her, too. How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was begi
She glanced into her rearview mirror, chewing at her still-swollen lower lip. No approaching headlights yet. But would she even be able to tell, given the combined brilliance of the moon and that Christing pole light?
“It’s on a timer,” Tom said, “but I’d do something before it goes out, Tess. If you move the car after it does, you’ll only trip it again.”