Chapter 7 - THE PETERBILT CAB AND THE RAIN ON US-20
Thirty-six hours later, a relentless Pacific storm battered the coast of Oregon, driving sheets of gray rain sideways across the dense Douglas fir forests of Highway 20 as it wound down through the Coast Range toward Newport.
Inside the warm, diesel-scented cab of Harrison Freight’s Unit #002—a meticulously maintained 2016 blue Peterbilt 389 running deadhead without a trailer so it could make passenger-car speed across the plains—Amy Harrison sat wrapped in an oversized Chicago Cubs sweatshirt, her hands cradling a paper cup of peppermint tea.
Her face was pale, with dark shadows beneath her eyes, and the white bandage on her right wrist was frayed at the edges. Yet as the heavy windshield wipers slapped rhythmically against the downpour, her gaze was steady on the winding two-lane mountain highway ahead.
Behind the wheel, sixty-eight-year-old Mick O'Connor shifted down on the Eaton Fuller transmission as they took a sharp curve above the Yaquina River, glancing over at her with deep, paternal worry beneath his bushy gray eyebrows.
"You haven't slept more than two hours since Montana, Amy girl," Mick said gruffly, reaching over to turn up the cab heater near her feet. "And that little one you're carrying needs more than saltines and peppermint water. Say the word and I’ll pull straight into the Samaritan Pacific Hospital in Newport before we go anywhere near that harbor bookstore."
"I’m okay, Mick. Really," Amy said softly, resting her left hand—bare now without the diamond ring she had worn for seven years—over the slight, firm swell beneath her sweatshirt. "The nausea always settles down in the afternoon. We just need to get to the cold-storage spur at South Beach Marina before the five o'clock shift change."
Mick’s jaw tightened as he checked his wide west-coast side mirror. The two-lane highway behind them was empty except for mist rising off the wet asphalt.
"Amy," the old trucker said quietly after a long moment. "I’ve known Danny since he was twenty-four years old, sleeping on a cot in the back of the Newark dispatch shed with grease under his fingernails. He’s been an idiot the last two years. Let the suits in Manhattan and that viper Vanessa turn his head with all that billionaire talk. I won't make a single excuse for him."
Amy looked out the rain-streaked passenger window at the towering evergreens. "You don't have to, Mick. I spent five years making enough excuses for both of us."
"I know you did," Mick nodded slowly. "That’s why when you called my private cell from that payphone in Chicago and told me someone at the company had sent thugs after you at JFK, I turned my rig around in Gary without calling dispatch. Because you asked me to swear on my late wife’s memory that I wouldn't tell Danny you were in my cab."
Amy turned her head slightly. Something in the old Marine’s voice made her pulse quicken.
"Mick..." she said quietly. "You didn't call him, did you?"
Mick kept his eyes fixed on the wet highway as the green mileage sign for NEWPORT — 4 MILES flashed past in the rain.
"I didn't call him, girl. I kept my word," Mick said, his voice dropping an octave. "Because I didn't have to. He called me when we were crossing the Continental Divide in Wyoming yesterday afternoon."
Amy’s cup of peppermint tea tilted in her hands. "What?"
"Wait before you get mad at me, Amy," Mick said gently, reaching up to flip the switch on his satellite fleet radio mounted above the windshield. "He didn't trace my phone. He figured out you were with me because of a napkin you left with a little girl on the train in Chicago. And for the last twelve hundred miles, while you were sleeping in the bunk behind us... that boy hasn't been in New York dancing with anybody."
Mick pointed his thick calloused thumb toward his side mirror.
Through the heavy curtain of coastal Oregon rain, two hundred yards behind the Peterbilt’s mudflaps, the high-intensity headlights of a mud-splattered black GMC Yukon rental SUV cut through the gloom—keeping pace with them around every hairpin turn of the mountain pass, just as it had since they crossed the Idaho state line in the middle of the night.
Amy’s breath caught in her throat. She turned around in the passenger seat, staring through the rear sleeper window at the black SUV following smoothly in their wake.
"That’s... that’s Daniel?" she whispered, her heart slamming against her ribs with a sudden, aching violence that terrified her. "He’s been driving behind us since Idaho?"
"Flew his jet into Boise yesterday evening in the middle of a thunderstorm, rented that four-wheel-drive at the airport, and fell in behind my bumper at midnight," Mick said softly. "When I stopped for fuel in Burns at four in the morning while you were asleep in the sleeper berth, he didn't come knock on the cab door. He just stood out in the freezing rain by the diesel pump in a torn tuxedo shirt and a hardware-store flannel jacket, asking me if you were eating and if your wrist was bleeding."
Tears sprang into Amy’s eyes so fast the highway ahead blurred into gray watercolor. She pressed her hand over her mouth, refusing to let the sob break through.
"Why didn't he try to stop the truck?" she whispered.
"Because he saw the look on your mother-in-law’s face when she handed him your wedding ring," Mick answered simply. "He told me at the fuel island, 'Mick, for three years I’ve barged into every room expecting Amy to adjust to my schedule. She said she wanted peace. I’m just going to keep my headlights between her and Julian Cole’s men until we get to Newport, and I won't come near her unless she opens the door.'"
Amy stared back at the headlights in the rain, every wall she had built around her heart since the ballroom trembling under the weight of those words.
Wait—before she could speak again, the air brakes on Mick’s Peterbilt hissed sharply as they rounded the final bluff overlooking Yaquina Bay Bridge and the sprawling commercial docks of Newport Harbor.
Down on the gravel access road leading to the South Beach cold-storage rail spur—half a mile before the harbor bookstore where Claire had arranged her room—two black Range Rovers with Washington fleet plates were parked sideways across the railroad tracks beside a rusted green forty-foot shipping container stamped with the Brussels customs prefix.
And standing beside the open doors of the container under a black umbrella was a tall, silver-haired man in a camel-hair overcoat—Julian Cole himself, flanked by four armed dock security contractors—watching a forklift operator pried open a lead-lined false bulkhead inside the container wall.
Wait—they weren't offloading drugs or weapons.
As Mick hit the brakes at the top of the gravel incline, Amy squinted through the rain with her spare pair of glasses from her purse. Inside the false bulkhead of the "medical supply" container were wooden crates bearing the stenciled red radiation trefoil of unrecorded cobalt-60 industrial radiotherapy cores—stolen medical waste being illegally dumped through West Coast ports to avoid three million dollars in European decommissioning fees, with every manifest countersigned using a digital forgery of Amy’s archive clearance code.
May you like
"Dear God," Amy gasped, grabbing the dashboard as Mick locked the Peterbilt’s brakes on the wet gravel. "Mick, back up! Vanessa didn't just use the Foundation to smuggle cargo—she used my archive login to put my name on illegal hazardous shipments so if I ever went to the feds, I’d go to prison with them!"
Before Mick could jam the massive transmission into reverse, the second black Range Rover roared up the hidden logging trail behind them, ramming straight into the side of the black GMC Yukon fifty yards back—pinning Daniel’s vehicle against the jagged rock face of the cliff above the bay as two men jumped out with tire irons.
