Flashback

Here it comes, thought Val. Somehow Devereaux was going to offer him some lameshit path to trucking, if he handed x amount of cash over to Gauge Devereaux. The world’s bullshit just keeps on coming.

But no, the driver was talking about something else.

“I’m not talking about the fortune it takes to buy your own rig. That comes years later.”

“How’d you get the money for this cab?” asked Val.

“Luck,” said Devereaux, shifting the toothpick that he was always chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. “And with the way the price of rigs is going up, you’ll need even more luck… and balls… than I had. But I’m just talking about getting started. You know, riding shotgun as relief driver for a good solo long-distance guy those first few years. That’s possible… if…”

Here it comes, thought Val.

“If what?” he said.

“If you got a decent fake National Identity and Credit Card with a passable name and background and a decent fake Teamsters Union holo in it,” said Devereaux. The black man shot a glance sideways at Val. “My guess is that you wouldn’t want to use your own card for personal reasons… right?”

Val hesitated, then nodded.

“So you’ll need the best sort of fake card… the kind that can get you through all the various highway patrol and weigh station and militia roadblocks. But it’ll cost you about two hundred bucks… old bucks.”

“Let me guess,” Val said tiredly. “You can get one for me.”

Devereaux took his eyes off the road for a long moment as he glared at Val. “Fuck you, kid. I’m not saying I can get you shit and it’s not like you have two hundred old bucks. You or that loony professor of a granddad you got riding back there with Perdita and Julio. I’m not offering nothing but advice, and it was going to be for free. But fuck you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Val. And he meant it. “I’m… tired. Sorta worn out. I haven’t been sleeping and… I mean, yeah, I’d love to get a new NICC. But how? Where?”

Devereaux drove in silence for several minutes. Finally, shifting down to get up a rare rising grade in the long descent to flatness, he growled, “There’s a guy in Denver. A lot of new solos use him to get their Teamsters NICC. The last I heard, he charged two hundred old bucks. It’s probably gone up.”

“You’re right,” said Val. “I don’t have the money. Neither does Leonard.”

Devereaux shrugged. “Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“But I’d still like his name,” said Val, sitting up straight and rubbing his face to wake up more. “If I got a Teamsters NICC, could I ride shotgun with you?”

“I’m a real solo,” grunted Devereaux. “I don’t haul no snot-nosed apprentices with me. But there’s a lot of guys who do.”

“Like who?”

“Like Henry Big Horse Begay. He’s got a kid riding and learning from him about half the time. Doesn’t charge them much, either.” Devereaux shot Val another glance. “Henry’s not queer, either. He likes teenage girls and younger, but none of them seem to want to be solo long-distance truckers. So old Begay takes punks like you under his wing.”

“How much of a charge would ‘not much’ be?” asked Val.

Devereaux shrugged again. “Beer money for the old fart. But in terms of learning trucking, riding a few months or a year with Henry Big Horse Begay is like going to Harvard or Princeton or one of those schools for… you know… someone like a young version of your granddad.”

Val licked his chapped, broken lips. “Do you think he’d let me hook up with him east out of Denver?”

The driver shook his head. “This convoy is getting into Denver tomorrow and laying over there about twelve hours, kid. Long enough to deliver our Denver shit, get a new trailer filled with shit headed east, get some sleep, and then we’ll be rolling toward Kansas City on I-Seventy by two a.m. Sunday. That wouldn’t give you enough time to find this fucking guy who does the NICCs. And it takes a while for those cards to get made up—usually about two weeks. That’s assuming you got the cash to pay this guy with up front.”

Fuck, thought Val.

“But I’ll give you the guy’s name and the last address in Denver I had for him,” said Devereaux. “There’s a piss stop coming up in about ten miles. Go ride with Henry for the rest of the night and talk to him about this apprentice shit. He’ll explain to you why it ain’t easy—why so few punks like you actually learn how to become long-distance drivers—but at least you’ll keep the old redskin awake during our drive through the Colorado Rockies ’til dawn.”

“Thanks” was all that Val could manage. His chest hurt for some reason.

Devereaux said nothing for the rest of the ride.

The former interstate rest stop was on a high ridge overlooking a desert valley ten or twelve miles across. Beyond that point I-70 rose into low, rocky mountains again, but Devereaux had shown Val on the truck’s GPS altimeter that it was essentially all downhill into Colorado after this final climb.