Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [49]
“Trust me, you’re not going to like it,” Cleve said.
“Baby, I’ll take what’s coming to me, and I’ll love you even more. You know that, don’t you, sweetie?”
“Quit calling me sweetie!”
“Get the manifest and the MSDS.”
“I’ll knock you straight to hell.”
“That would be soooo romantic, Cleve. I’ll save the newspaper clippings for my scrapbook. ’Gays Duke It Out at Truck Yard.’ ”
I winked at the others.
Exasperated, Cleve glanced around the room. I had the feeling he ran roughshod over these people and that they were enjoying this. The men at the counter feigned disinterest and glanced away quickly. “What are you looking at?” Cleve barked at the woman.
“Nothing at all . . . sweetie.”
All three men at the end of the counter laughed explosively.
Minutes later I had a Xerox copy of the manifest and the MSDS for the shipment Holly had been carrying last February. Cleve would have given his left nut and his firstborn son to get me out of there.
On the drive back to North Bend, we got trapped in traffic again.
On an impulse, I exited the freeway at 156th Street and drove to a nearby Toyota dealer. These guys had skinned me pretty bad a few years ago when Lorie and I bought the only new car either of us had ever owned.
Just to make the rest of them crazy, I picked the dumbest-looking salesman in the place, spent all of twenty seconds selecting the most expensive vehicle they had in stock, and bought it. If my life was going to fade out in a traffic jam, at least I could do it in air-conditioned comfort. It wasn’t as if I was worried about making the payments. When they pressed me for extra insurance, I bought it all, including the disability insurance that paid off the car in the event I lost the ability to work. They thought they’d found a rube, but I would essentially have free use of the car for the week, and afterward my estate could sell it and put the money in trust for my daughters.
Morgan drove the truck with the Big Gulp container still glued to the roof back to North Bend. Allyson rode with her, while Britney rode in the new Lexus with me.
“Daddy, you always said we couldn’t afford a new car,” Britney said.
“We can afford this.”
“It smells funny. Doesn’t it smell funny?”
“That’s what they call new car smell.”
“We’ve never had a new car, have we?”
“We had one once. Your mother took it.”
“Because she needed it more than we did, right, Daddy?”
“That’s right. You know I love you, don’t you, Britney?”
“You always say that when we start talking about Mommy.”
“I guess I do, don’t I?”
The salesman had thrown in some CDs, and Britney was playing Andy Williams’s Branson City Limits, had taken a liking to “Moon River.”
“I wish things could have turned out differently with your mother.”
“Like you wish she didn’t steal my piggy bank?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“She ’pologized. Told me not to tell you. She said she was going through a rough time when she left.”
“When did this conversation take place?”
“On the phone at Easter. She said she would give anything not to have left us. Said if she had to leave us with anybody in the world, she wanted it to be you.”
“You made that part up.”
“Well, yeah. That last.”
“You scamp,” I said, running my fingers through her hair.
“Daddy. Morgan just fixed it.”
“Looks nice.”
“It would look nicer if it was like Audrey Hepburn’s.” A couple of nights earlier the girls had seen Roman Holiday and, like filmgoers everywhere, had fallen in love with Hepburn, as well as with her gamin hairstyle. I was still trying to decide whether they would regret cutting their hair.
On the drive into town on I-90 we passed the accident site where Stan Beebe lost his life. The only reminder that there’d been a fatality was a swatch of small trees his truck had knocked down. I imagined Marsha would come out and put up a white cross to mark the spot. Or maybe some members of the department would do it. Anyway, I wouldn