Full Dark, No Stars

left side was dark. There was another building, this one U-shaped, to the rear. A scattering of cars and trucks was parked there. The sign out by the road was a huge digital job, loaded with bright red information.

RICHIE’S TOWNSHIP ROAD TRUCK STOP

“YOU DRIVE ’EM, WE FILL ’EM”

REG $2.99 GAL

DIESEL $2.69 GAL

NEWEST LOTTERY TIX ALWAYS AVAILABLE

RESTAURANT CLOSED SUN. NITE

SORRY NO SHOWERS SUN. NITE

STORE & MOTEL “ALWAYS OPEN”

RVS “ALWAYS WELCOME”

And at the bottom, badly spel ed but fervent:

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! WIN IN AFGANDISTAN!

With truckers coming and going, fueling up both their rigs and themselves (even with its lights off, Tess could tel that, when open, the restaurant was of the sort where chicken-fried steak, meatloaf, and Mom’s Bread Pudding would always be on the menu), the place would probably be a beehive of activity during the week, but on Sunday night it was a graveyard because there was nothing out here,

not even a roadhouse like The Stagger.

There was only a single vehicle parked at the pumps, facing out toward the road with a pump nozzle stuck in its gas hatch. It was an old Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights. It was

impossible to read the color in the harsh lighting, but Tess didn’t have to. She had seen that truck close up, and knew the color. The cab was empty.

“You don’t seem surprised, Tess,” Tom said as she slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the road and squinted at the store. She could make out a couple of people in there in spite of the glare from the

harsh outside lighting, and she could see that one of them was big. Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.

“I’m not surprised at al ,” she said. “He lives out here. Where else would he go to gas up?”

“Maybe he’s getting ready to take a trip.”

“This late on Sunday night? I don’t think so. I think he was at home, watching The Sound of Music. I think he drank up al of his beer and came down here for more. He decided to top off his tank while he was at it.”

“You could be wrong, though. Hadn’t you better pul in behind the store and fol ow him when he leaves?”

But Tess didn’t want to do that. The front of the truck-stop store was al glass. He might look out and see her when she drove in. Even if the bright lighting above the pump islands made it hard for him to see her face, he might recognize the vehicle. There were lots of Ford SUVs on the road, but after Friday night, Al Strehlke had to be particularly sensitized to black Ford Expeditions. And there was her license plate—surely he would have noticed her Connecticut license plate on Friday, when he pul ed up beside her in the gone-to-weeds parking lot of the deserted store.

There was something else. Something even more important. She got rol ing again, putting Richie’s Township Road Truck Stop in the rearview.

“I don’t want to be behind him,” she said. “I want to be ahead of him. I want to be waiting for him.”

“What if he’s married, Tess?” Tom asked. “What if he’s got a wife waiting for him?”

The idea startled her for a moment. Then she smiled, and not just because the only ring he’d been wearing was the one too big to be a ruby. “Guys like him don’t have wives,” she said. “Not ones that

stick around, anyway. There was only one woman in Al’s life, and she’s dead.”

- 37 -

Unlike Lacemaker Lane, there was nothing suburban about Township Road; it was as country as Travis Tritt. The houses were glimmering islands of electric light beneath the glow of the rising moon.

“Tess, you are approaching your destination,” Tom said in his non-imaginary voice.

She breasted a rise, and there on her left was a mailbox marked

STREHLKE and 23. The driveway was long, rising on a curve, paved with asphalt, smooth as black ice. Tess turned in without hesitation, but apprehension dropped over her as soon as Township Road

was behind her. She had to fight to keep from jamming on the brakes and backing out again. Because if she kept going, she had no choice. She’d be like a bug in a bottle. And even if he wasn’t married, what if someone else was up there at the house? Brother Les, for instance? What if Big Driver had been at Tommy’s buying beer and snacks not for one but for two?

Tess kil ed her headlights and drove on by moonlight.

In her keyed-up state, the driveway seemed to go on forever, but it could have been no more than an eighth of a mile before she saw the lights of Strehlke’s house. It was at the top of the hil , a tidy-looking place that was bigger than a cottage but smal er than a farmhouse. Not a house of bricks, but not a humble house of straw, either. In the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, Tess reckoned this would have been the house of sticks.

Parked on the left side of the house was a long trailer-box with RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side. Parked at the end of the driveway, in front of the garage, was the cab-over Pete from the website.