While angie stumbled past the cooks in the kitchen, Tony Vargas stood outside the door to her hotel room. He had come home to an empty house less than an hour after Angie left there. After storming through the place looking for her, he turned to the hall closet and discovered that the money was missing. And the notebook as well.
That incredible bitch! After everything he had done for her, how could she do such a thing? How could she treat him this way? And whatever made her think she could possibly get away with it?
Since there was no soft flesh to pummel with his fists, no target present on which to vent his rage, Tony Vargas controlled it. Stifling his anger, he sat down at his desk and calmly made a few phone calls. For someone with his kind of connections, it was surprisingly easy for him to learn that a cab had come to this particular street if not to this exact address much earlier that afternoon. The driver had picked up a fare and had taken her to the airport. Tony went to the airport as well. With little difficulty he learned that a woman matching Angie’s description had purchased a one-way ticket to Denver.
Denver? Tony Vargas hadn’t made it to the hip of his profession by being stupid. As far as he knew, Angie Kellogg had no connections Denver, none at all, so why would she go there? Further inquiry revealed that she had bolted off the plane moments before its scheduled departure, the tricky little bitch. Vargas congratulated himself on not falling for that old maneuver and busied himself with the hard, shoe-leather work of figuring out where he had gone instead.
It took several hours, but his careful search paid off when he talked to a cab driver who had seen someone who looked like Angie-girls that good-looking were few and far between-get into the Spanish Trail’s hotel van.
He tapped lightly on the door to her room, hoping she wouldn’t be smart enough to look through the peephole before opening it up, but there was no answer, no sound from inside. He knocked again, impatiently this time. He wanted to get to her and teach her a lesson she’d never forget, not necessarily here where other people might listen to the noises and object, but back home where there would be no interruptions.
When there was still no answer to his third knock, he shouldered his way inside. The room was empty. The light was on. The bed had been rumpled but not slept in. A newspaper lay in a heap beside the bed, but Angie wasn’t there, and neither was his money.
Frustrated, he stood in the middle of the room and turned in a complete circle. The desk lamp was switched on. He went over and looked down at the stack of message paper. Sure enough, the faint impression of the number written on the missing top sheet was still visible to the naked eye. Gleefully, he pocketed the paper and rushed from the room. Moving at a fast jog, he headed back down-stairs.
Through luck, determination, and perseverance, he had come this close to catching her. He wasn’t about to give up now. And even if she escaped for the time being, he had that piece of paper in his pocket. He was almost sure that would at least give him a clue about where she was really going.
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.
“Why Bisbee?” he prodded a second time.
Angie fought her way out of her reverie. “I’ve friends there,” she said. “They’d probably me stay with them.”
“Call ‘em up,” Dayton Smith said. “Have ‘em meet us in Benson. That’s on my way and only fifty miles or so from Bisbee.”
“I can’t call,” she lied. “They don’t have a phone.”
“Oh,” he said.
His pie came, topped with a scoop of vanilla cream. He cleaned his plate enthusiastically while the gold band on his wedding ring winked at Angie in the warm fluorescent light. “You’re sure you’re not hungry?” he asked. I’d he glad to buy if you’re short of cash.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “Thanks.” When he finished eating and after the waitress brought his filled thermos, they headed out into the parking lot. There were dozens of other trucks scattered throughout the lot, and Angie realized at once that now was the time to act. If Dayton Smith went bad on her afterward, at least here she’d have a chance to call for help.
He took her hand and helped her up into the tall cab where she settled in the middle of the seat instead of staying on the far side. When Dayton climbed into the cab beside her, she didn’t move away. Instead, she reached out and put one suggestive hand on his upper thigh.
“Would you give me a ride to Bisbee, even if it’s out of your way?” she asked. “I could make it worth your while.”
He reached down and took her hand. Firmly, he removed it from his leg and placed it back in her lap. “Move on over,” he ordered. “You’re in the way of the gearshift.”
For the first time in all the years since she left home, Angie Kellogg felt herself blushing. His turn down had made her feel like the two-bit whore she was.
“You mean you don’t want me?” she asked incredulously. “I’m good. I’m real good.”
Dayton Smith slammed the truck into gear. “I’ll just bet you are,” he muttered.
“Let me out then,” she squawked at him.
“I’ll go back and find someone else, someone who does want me. I’m going to Bisbee, dam-m i t, and I’m going there tonight.”
“Settle down,” he barked. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take you, did I? Hell, girl, you don’t have to fuck me just to get a ride. It’s not that far, only fifty miles or so out of my way.”
Angie Kellogg wasn’t used to openhanded kindness. She blinked in surprise. “You mean you’ll take me for nothing?”
“Not for nothing,” he countered. “I like your company, and you look like you could a little help. I’ve got a daughter of my own who’s about your age. So sit back and relax. Next stop is Bisbee, okay?”
Grateful and mystified both, Angie Kellogg settled back into the seat while the huge truck rumbled swiftly through the starlit desert night.
“What’s your name?” Dayton Smith asked eventually.
“Tammy Sue Ferris,” Angie said without sing a beat.
“Well, Tammy Sue,” Dayton Smith said, set-g back into the driver’s seat. “Tell me where you’re from.”
“ California.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
His face had an otherworldly glow in the greenish reflected light from the dashboard. As Angie answered his question, she felt almost as though he weren’t real, as though she was talking to some kind of ghost.
“And what do you do for a living?”
Somehow she no longer felt like lying. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a whore,” she said unexpectedly, surprising herself. “I have been for ten years.” If she thought her answer would shock him, it didn’t.
“And this Tony character was your pimp?”
“More or less,” she replied. “Tony doesn’t fit into any definite categories.”
“You’re away from him now,” Dayton Smith said forcefully. “Stay that way. Get a job, get married, have children. In other words, have a real life.”
“I don’t know how,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“I wasn’t born driving this truck, honey,” he told her. “I took lessons, got myself a license. That’s what you’re gonna have to do, too. Go back to school and learn typing or shorthand or whatever it is they teach girls nowadays. Maybe even computers, but at twenty-three, you’ve got your whole life to live. Don’t screw it up.”
After that, they didn’t talk much more. At o’clock, Dayton Smith helped Tammy Sue Farris check into the last available room in Bisbee’s Copper Queen Hotel. When she stepped away from the desk, Dayton was standing halfway across the lobby with both hands stuffed in his hip pockets. He smiled at her.
“You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He reached out, took one of her hands in both his, and shook it warmly. “You be careful the people you meet and keep the jacket. You need it worse than I do. If you ever turn in Dallas give me a call. I’m in the book. The wife and I would like to have you over for dinner. She cooks a mean fried chicken.” With that, Dayton Smith turned and shambled out the door, leaving Angie Kellogg alone. Riding up to the third floor in the creaking elevator, she found herself wiping tears her eyes. Dayton Smith was probably the nicest man she had ever met, but she couldn’t uderstand why watching him walk out the door and down the steps had made her cry.