“Well, not exactly in this truck,” he answered. “I get a new one every few years.”
“Don’t you take any days off?” she inquired, incredulously.
“Sure, I take a home time of a few days every four weeks or so. I usually spend it at a resort, or some other kind of tourist destination type of place,” he said. “Las Vegas is always good. Cheap hotel rooms, great food buffets. A couple of times a year, I visit my parents’ place, to say hi.”
She just stared at him.
“Look, you need to understand,” he said, starting to get heated at her probing questions. “I love to drive. I don’t have a family of my own, and nowhere I feel I need to put down roots. The lifestyle suits me. And, I’m putting up enough savings and investments that I’ll be able to retire at a fairly young age.”
“Then, what will you do?” she asked, continuing to probe.
“I’m going to buy a motor home, and travel full time,” he replied, not even remotely aware of the irony of his answer.
It didn’t escape Jenny’s notice, however. “Travel full time?! You’ve got to be freaking kidding me!” she shouted at him.
And then Hugh burst out laughing when he realized how this must look to her—a truck driver retiring to travel full time. Hugh’s laugh was contagious, and Jenny soon found herself laughing.
“Seriously,” he explained, once the laughter had died down. “I just like to drive. I like to be in different places. I don’t like being tied down.”
“Apparently,” she replied, pouring on the sarcasm.
Their conversation had been so absorbing, and the company—amazingly—so enjoyable, he had driven them right into lunch time.
“We’re coming up on Elko pretty soon,” Hugh said. “Would you be ready for some lunch?”
“Sure.”
Hugh took an exit off the highway, picked one of the popular chain travel plazas, and signaled to turn in. As he did so, he glanced over at Jenny and saw her tense up. Her body language and facial expression were all about fight or flight.
”Look, Jenny. I don’t blame you for being nervous because of what has happened at truck stops before,” Hugh told her. “But, relax. OK? I’m not going to leave you. And I really believe there is little chance your uncle or his buds will be here. But, if they are, I’ll protect you. You do believe I can protect you, don’t you?”
She nodded at him, uncoiling a little bit from her tenseness.
Lunch was uneventful, and Hugh pulled back onto the highway out of Elko, steering the truck due west. The big diesel engine effortlessly ate up the miles as they rolled through the typical eastern Nevada desert topography.
There were only a couple of things of interest on this stretch—one of them being the community of Battle Mountain. Every time Hugh passed through that area, the military base of the same name in the Dale Brown military-techno thriller novels came to mind.
He wondered, absently, how that author came up with the locations for his novels, and if there really was a secret, high-tech, underground military base beneath the little Battle Mountain airport. He could see the airport off to his left as he passed by it, about four miles outside of own.
Given the seemingly unlimited financial resources of the federal government, and the vast, empty desert around him, he could believe that such a thing might exist.
As usual, Jenny was the first to break the silence. She must have been reading Hugh’s mind. “Battle Mountain. That’s an interesting name for a town way out here,” she remarked.
Hugh told her what he had just been thinking about the supposed military establishment there.
“Have you read any of the Dale Brown novels?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t read a whole lot, and especially not those kinds of books,” she said.
Hugh told her that he had the opportunity quite a few years ago to meet Dale Brown. It was at the open house of a large air museum in Central California. The author was there to help promote the air museum because they had on display a fighter-bomber, the FB-111, like the one that Brown had flown in when he was in the Air Force.
Hugh knew that Brown’s Air Force experience was where that author had begun to germinate the ideas that he had for writing his famous series of military novels.
He told Jenny that Brown had autographed a hardback edition of one of his novels for Hugh.
“Come to think of it,” Hugh said, “I have no idea where that book is. I might have donated it to a library or a book sale. Comes with living on the road. You can’t carry very many non-essential things around with you.”
Hugh could tell that Jenny didn’t really want to talk about books, or Dale Brown, or even Battle Mountain.
“What’s on your mind, Jenny?” Hugh asked, thinking that they might as well deal with the elephant in the room before very much more time has passed.
Jenny got right to it. “I was all ready to really hate you, you being a truck driver and all, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that you are a really decent guy. A nice guy, even.”
“Why, thanks, little lady,” Hugh said in a poor impression of John Wayne. It’s hard to swagger in the driver’s seat of a big-rig truck.
“I mean, I really took a chance doing that thing for my uncle. You know?” she said.
“No, what?”
“Well, you know, there was always the chance you could have been like one of the guys who murdered my Dad, and beat up my uncle and his friends. Maybe even one of the actual two guys. It was a slim chance, sure, but it was
