Having slept only two hours in the past twenty-four, Jimmy Oyer rose from his bunk at the back of the Peterbilt with the sour aftertaste of modafinil in his dry mouth and a raging temper bulging at his temples.
“What the fuck?” he screamed at whoever was banging on the driver’s side window. He cleared his eyes, squinted, and searched for his glasses. When he spotted the silver badge, he mumbled, “Oh, fuck it,” and climbed down and over the front seats to unlock and open the door. Cops!
A fist pounded on the window for a second time.
“Hold your horses…” he mumbled, collecting himself. He tried to think what he’d done wrong, if anything. There was that whore in the trailer park outside of Omaha, but he’d left her with an extra fifty after playing a little rough, and she’d told him that put things right enough. He fought against his clouded head. What kind of badge had that been? He hadn’t gotten a good look at the thing.
An interstate violation?
But hell, he’d stopped at every weigh station as required, and they’d signed off on this load-washers, dryers, dishwashers, and stovetops-so what the hell could the problem be?
He snorted and swallowed to clear his throat, found the lock, and opened the door.
“What is it?”
The guy reached up at him incredibly quickly-his hands like a point guard’s. Jimmy felt a line of heat on his exposed neck and clutched at it, as he found it hard to breathe. He sucked for air but it was his neck doing the breathing, not his nose or mouth. When he exhaled, he sprayed a mist of blood onto the window and door. He’d been cut! Coughing, he tried to call out, but it just sprayed more red rain.
The cop was a little guy with dark skin, a burned face, pinched eyes, and a three-day-old beard. He shoved Jimmy back and into the cab with incredible strength.
Jimmy carried a few extra pounds. His being lifted like this, up and over the seats and back onto the bunk, shocked him. He swung out with his right hand, but the intruder grabbed him by the wrist-with incredible strength-twisted and turned in one sharp motion, and Jimmy heard something snap as he felt more pain than he knew his arm could suffer. Then he was being bent and rolled over, and the little guy hog-tied him with the wire from the CB radio’s microphone.
Lying on his stomach like a rocking horse, in his own cab’s sleeper bed, Jimmy gasped wetly for air as he watched a pool of blood spread onto the bed pillow. His blood, from his neck.
As the guy left the cab, Jimmy’s lights were dimming. He rocked and groaned, but the pool beneath his head only widened with each passing second. Deep green and purple orbs formed at the edges of his eyesight, like holding a camera wrong and putting a finger in front of the lens. Jimmy regretted the whoring, regretted all the mistakes, wanted nothing more than to be home with his wife.
The greenish purple crept in from the edges, now nearly all he saw. He felt the cab door open. He heard the little guy straining with something. For just a flicker of a second Jimmy thought he saw a pretty little girl in the shotgun seat, silver tape around her eyes, a knotted rag in her mouth. But maybe that was just dreaming about his own kids.
Engulfed in sadness, drowning in his own blood, Jimmy Oyer succumbed to the sounds of Vince Gill on the four-hundred-watt stereo he’d paid for himself.