As Angie Kellogg darted through the steamy kitchen, she knew her life hung in the balance. She emerged in the poorly lit back parking lot next to a fetid dumpster. At best, she had only a few minutes’ lead. She was lucky someone hadn’t sent him directly into the dining room after her. Once he located her room, it wouldn’t take him long to guess that she hadn’t left the hotel and was down eating inner. After that it would be only a matter of minutes before he traced her to and through the restaurant. The waitress might not tell him, but someone else would.
Angie searched the parking lot for some avenue of escape. Seeing none, she pounded her way around to the front of the building. The Spanish Trail sat on one side of the T at the end of South Fourth Avenue. It faced a short frontage road bordering the freeway. I-10’s northbound lanes lay beyond a chain-link fence and down a steep embankment. Two locks to the north was South Sixth and an overpass that would take her over the freeway. Angie ran that way.
She started across Fourth. Checking traffic she ran, she noticed a noisily idling eighteen-wheeler parked along the street half a block or so back. In the dim glow of a street light she caught sight of a man out checking one of his tires. With one last panic-stricken glance back over her shoulder toward the hotel and without breaking her stride, Angie turned in that direction. She reached the truck just as he started to swing himself up into the open door of the cab.
“Please, mister,” she shouted over the truck engine’s uncompromising roar. “Give me a lift. My boyfriend’s back there. If he catches me, he’ll kill me.”
Maybe the trucker believed her, maybe he didn’t. After so many years on the road, one line sounds about as good as another, but for a change, the woman doing the asking was a real looker, and Dayton Smith didn’t mind the company. “Sure, lady. Climb in. Which way are you going?”
Without answering, Angie Kellogg scrambled into the cab in front of him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said gasping for breath. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Moving slowly and with maddening deliberation, the driver climbed up into the cab beside her, switched on the lights, released the emergency brake, and eased the truck into gear. Angie watched out the window until the truck’s blue, United Van Lines trailer completely obscured her view of the hotel.
“Do you see anybody back there?” she asked, as the truck rounded the corner.
“Not so far,” the driver returned.
In a moment, Angie, too, could see back to the hotel’s well-lit entrance. No one appeared there before the truck slid out of view completely at the next intersection. “I think we made it,” she breathed in relief, settling back into the truck.
The driver looked at Angie appreciatively in the glow of the streetlights as they waited for the light to change and allow them onto the South Sixth overpass. “You were kidding, right?”
“About what?”
“About him killing you. I mean, people say it all the time, but it’s usually a joke.”
“This is no joke,” Angie answered. “I mean He really would kill me.”
“Well,” the driver said with a shake of his head. “Seems to me, that would be a real shame. My name’s Dayton Smith, by the way, and as of right now, we’re headed toward El Paso.”
As he spoke, the light changed and the truck slid into motion. A few moments later, they were heading down a southbound on ramp. Angie tried to look, but she couldn’t see in the mirror herself. “Is there anybody back re?” she asked nervously.
The driver shook his head. “Nope. Not a soul. Is that all right with you?”
“Is what all right with me?”
“ El Paso. You still didn’t say where you’re going.
“ El Paso ’s fine. As long as Tony’s not around, one place is as good as another.”
“That’s his name, Tony?”
Angie nodded.
“What’d you do that got him so pissed off?”
“I ran away,” she answered. “I knew that when he came home, he was going to beat me up, so I ran away.”
“Did he do that often? Beat you up, I mean.”
“Pretty often.”
The truck driver squirmed in his seat as though the very idea made him uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Startled by the tone of his voice, Angie Kellogg looked at the pudgy, balding man with some surprise. It sounded for all the world as though he meant it. He looked as though he meant it as well.
“Me too,” she agreed. “I’m real sorry.”
They had driven only a few miles when Dayton Smith turned on his directional signal and started down an exit. There were lights on one side of the freeway, but none on the other, Except for the area right at the exit, they seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Angie’s apprehensions rose. She was a city girl, a born street fighter, but alone in the desert, she would be no match for this heavyset man if he ever set out to harm her. Once the truck stopped, if he came after her, she’d have to run hell.
“I hope you don’t mind,” the driver said apogetically. “This is a truck stop. It’s called the Triple T, and it’s the last decent place for a long ways. I usually stop here for a slice of deep-dish apple pie and to get my thermos filled. Care for a cup of coffee?”
Weak with relief, Angie Kellogg burst out laughing. “I’d love a cup of coffee.”
When she climbed down from the cab, the desert air was chilly on her bare arms. She shivered and Dayton Smith noticed. “Don’t have a jacket or sweater?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I left all my clothes back at the hotel.”
Smith climbed back into the cab, rummaged and the seat, and emerged holding a blue nylon jacket with the United Van Lines logo and Dayton Smith’s name emblazoned on the front.
“Here,” he said, “put this on. It may be five sizes too big, but it’ll be warm.”
Inside the truck stop, they were ushered into front section reserved for professional drivers. Several of the other truckers seemed to recognize Dayton Smith. Seeing Angie with him, they greeted him with knowing winks and conspiratorial nods, all of which made Dayton blush to the roots of his receding hair-line.
“Where are you going, really?” he asked.
Angie had been thinking about the map she had looked at in her room hours earlier. The vague outlines of a plan were beginning to take shape in her head.
“How far is Bisbee from here?”
Smith shrugged his shoulders. “A hundred miles, give or take. What’s in Bisbee?”
The waitress brought coffee. Dayton and Angie sat for a few moments, studying each other across the counter top. For her part, Angie was evaluating Dayton Smith according to the only scale she knew-the scale of how to get men to do what she wanted. There was money in her bag, but she never even considered offering to pay him with that. Angie was accustomed to dealing with the world with only one form of currency-her body. Old habits are hard to break.
She figured Dayton Smith would be easy pickings. Men like him were usually duck soup in the hands of a real professional. They usually wanted whores to do the things their uptight wives at home wouldn’t agree to on a bet, and Angie Kellogg didn’t mind kinky up to a point. She knew instinctively, that there was no way Dayton Smith would be as physically mean to her as Tony Vargas had been, but there was always a certain risk with strait-laced, upright men. They could be unpredictable at times. More than one prostitute had had her brains bashed in by fine, upstanding men caught in the throes of unreasoning remorse after happily screwing their brains out.
Then, too, there was always the possibility t Dayton Smith wasn’t at all what he seemed. Maybe he was really a cutthroat in guise, one who would strangle her with his bare hands and disappear with the contents of beach bag.