I by Jack Olsen Page A

trouble.

3 Plum Purple-Blue
    When 1992 rolled around, my ex-wife and kids were still living in Spokane, my girlfriend Peggy was at her mother’s house in Portland, and I was living out of truck No. 22 of A&G Trucking. It was a 1989 379-Series Peterbilt conventional tractor with a 244-inch wheelbase, low-profile 24.5 tires, and a fifteen-speed transmission. My four-hundred-ATAC Caterpillar engine pulled a loaded forty-eight-foot reefer like it was a toy wagon—no strain at all. My rig always drew stares—plum-purple-blue metallic paint, dual chrome stacks, polished aluminum wheels and all the extra chrome the company could afford. I had Christmas-tree lights and a Vari-shield to push air over the top of the reefer. I loved that truck. I tried to give both of us a wash every day or two. A truck that fine, it was worth the extra money.
    It wasn’t easy being on the road all the time, missing Peg and my kids, but I made the best of it. I had a forty-eight-inch sleeper with two built-in closets and a mattress seven feet long—six inches longer than me. At night I’d lay in bed and read and listen to the other trucks pulling in and settling down for the night—drivers talking, jacking around, flirting with the lizards. Inside my sleeper I was the king of the road.
    I had a standard Uniden forty-channel sidebander, but I pretty much stayed off the air. I tried to avoid that “breaker breaker” shit, trading inside information and jokes, telling where the Smokies were hiding. Instead I just listened. My high-power Cobra 25 radio brought in signals from forty miles away. I’d hear all the gossip.
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    There was never a shortage of sex for truckers, but I was still a little nervous about being alone with women after taking that blast of pepper spray. Then I got another chance to get into the same kind of trouble, and I was too stupid to say no.

4 Killing Again
    Then when he started killing women, he actually breathed life back into a couple of them, because they lost consciousness too quickly. He said, “I wasn’t going to let myself be robbed of the experience. I wanted to see in her eyes that she knew she was going to die, and that I was going to take her life….”
    â€”Janet Warren, Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry, University of Virginia, discussing a serial killer
    It was a hot summer day in 1992, and I was parked at the brake-check area on I-15 just before it dropped down the hill to San Bernardino, California. I had my coveralls on and I was under the truck, setting my brakes in case the scale-house guard decided to inspect.
    I was just about done when I heard a woman’s voice, “Hey, can I get a ride?”
    I looked around and didn’t see anybody.
    â€œHey, can I get a ride!”
    I peeked around a tire and here’s this girl looking at me—tight bleached-out blue jeans, a loose white top, big tits. She wasn’t beautiful, but pretty enough. I was down-wind and she smelt nice. She asked again and I said, “Yeah, sure! Where you going?”
    She said, “Well, L.A. Or…anywhere we end up.”
    I said, “Who are you and where in hell did you come from?”
    She giggled and said, “Oh, I’m just a throw-away woman. I got a ride with that guy over there.”
    I saw a parked Albertson’s grocery truck. They weren’t allowed to pick up riders. That was why the driver dropped her off before the scale house.
    I said, “Wait a minute.” I crawled out and asked where she really wanted to go. I’d been through this conversation a hundred times.
    She said, “Phoenix.”
    â€œSomebody meeting you?”
    â€œNo. It just sounds like a nice place.”
    I pulled off my dirty old coveralls. It was broad daylight, hot as a welder’s torch in that damn desert town. She waved good-bye to the Albertson trucker and climbed into my cab. I thought, God, this is the one.
    She told me