Eddie wrote it all down in his notebook while George asked, “Did you see what he was driving?”
“He walked in. He might’ve had a car parked out of the lights, but if he did, I didn’t see it.”
“Okay, we’ll keep an eye out for him. He probably won’t be back, though, at least not tonight.”
Business picked up not long after they left, and I was too busy to worry about the man who had been in earlier. I had quite a few customers in and out until three o’clock, when traffic tapered off. It would be slow now until a little after four, when the early morning workers would start coming in.
It was 3:37 when the man returned. I hadn’t even seen a car drive by outside for over ten minutes, and I knew he wouldn’t have to back out this time. I nodded to him and tried not to look scared as he stepped up to the counter.
“Pack of Camels,” he said shortly. I put the cigarets on the counter between us. “Too late to buy beer?”
“I’m afraid so,” I answered. I could feel sweat breaking out on me, dampening the red and white smock all the clerks wore. Midnight is the latest you can buy it except on Saturdays.
He rocked back on his heels, then forward. His teeth were yellowed and I could see old acne scars on his face. I knew I would never forget the way he looked as he sneered and said, “I guess that’ll do it then.”
I began to work the cash register. When it popped open, he said, “You come out from behind there. There’s a gun in my pocket.”
I knew it was silly, but I couldn’t help asking, “Is this a hold-up?”
“That’s right, jackass. Now you get out from behind that counter like I told you. Move!”
I swallowed the huge lump in my throat and began to do like he told me, moving down around the microwave oven and the popcorn machine. The machines shielded me from his view momentarily, and I don’t think he even saw my hand go behind my back, under the long smock, to the clip-on holster.
I stepped out, bringing the little pistol up and aiming it at the bridge of his nose. Surprise and fear leaped into his eyes.
The same emotions that must have been on my wife Becky’s face when she walked into a little store far away and surprised a man just like this one, a man who had gotten away clean, leaving my world bleeding to death on a dirty tile floor...
I pulled the trigger and shattered the expression on his face. He didn’t even have time to fire his own gun.
I put the gun on the counter and went to the pay phone to call the police. As I did, I thought about where I would go next. No one would be surprised when I quit this job, not after something like this.
That meant a new town, a new name, a new job. I wouldn’t have any trouble finding work.
Like I said, convenience stores are all alike. And I’ve got plenty of experience.
Margaret Maron
(b. 1938)
Truckers, that hardy breed of men (and in recent years, women) who push the big rigs across America’s highways, have been the subject of noir fiction and films for more than a half-century. A. I. Bezzerides’s 1938 novel of wildcat produce carriers in northern California, Long Haul (filmed in 1940 as They Drive by Night, starring Humphrey Bogart), was the first major work with a trucking theme. A second Bezzerides novel, Thieves’ Market (1949), explores the lives of postwar independent freighters and was a near bestseller. In recent years, the CB-radio craze and the enormously successful Burt Reynolds film Smokey and the Bandit (1977) inspired a plethora of big-rig novels; notable among these is Phillip Finch’s Haulin’ (1979).
Two of the best crime shorts about the lives of road jockeys are Robert Reeves’s Black Mask novelette, “Murder in High Gear” (1941), a rollicking action yarn featuring tough “highway detective” Bookie Barnes, and Margaret Maron’s dark fable “Deadhead Coming Down,” which first appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in April 1978.
Maron began writing short fiction in the late 1960s. More than a dozen of her stories appeared between 1968 and 1980 in a variety of digest periodicals, most prominently Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, nine of them under the byline Margaret E. Brown. Her first novel, One Coffee With (1981), began a critically acclaimed series featuring police lieutenant Sigrid Harald. A second series character, attorney Deborah Knott, made her debut in Bootlegger’s Daughter, a haunting tale of old and new crimes in the tobacco country of North Carolina, which received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best novel of 1992.
B. P.
Deadhead Coming Down
(1978)
Funny thing about this CB craze — all these years we trucking men’ve been going along doing our job, just making a living as best we could, and people in cars didn’t pay us much mind after everything got four-laned because they didn’t get caught behind us so much going uphill, so they quit cursing us for being on the roads we was paying taxes for too and sort of ignored us for a few years.
Then those big camper vans started messing around with CB, tuning in on us, and first thing you know even VWs are running up and down the cloverleafs cluttering up the air with garbage and all of a sudden there’s songs about us, calling us culture heroes and knights of the road.
Bull!
There’s not one damn thing romantic about driving an 18-wheeler. Next to standing on a assembly line and screwing Bolt A into Hole C like my no-account brother-in-law, driving a truck’s got to be the dullest way under God’s red sun to make a living. ’Specially if it’s just up and down the eastern seaboard like me.
Maybe it’s different driving cross-country, but I work for this Jerry outfit — Eastline Truckers — and brother, they’re just that. Contract trucking up and down the coastal states. Peaches from Georgia, grapefruit from northern Florida, yams and blueberries from the Carolinas — whatever’s in season, we haul it. I-95 to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, up the Jersey Turnpike, across the river and right over to Hunt’s Point.
Fruit basket going up, deadhead coming down and if you think that’s not boring, think again. Once you’re on I-95, it’s the same road from Florida to New Jersey. You could pick up a mile stretch in Georgia and stick it down somewhere in Maryland and nobody’d even notice the difference — same motels, same gas stations, same billboards.
There’s laws put out by those Keep America Pretty people to try and keep billboards off the interstates, but I’m of two minds about them. You can get awful tired of trees and fields and cows with nothing to break ’em up, but then again, reading the same sign over and over four or five times a week’s a real drag, too.
Even those Burma Shave signs they used to have when I was driving with Lucky. We’d laugh our heads off every time they put up new ones, but you can’t laugh at the same things more’n once or twice, so we’d make up our own poems. Raunchy ones and funnier’n hell some of ’em.
Those were the good old days. Right after the war. I was a hick kid just out of the tobacco fields and Lucky seemed older’n Moses, though I reckon he was only about 35. His real name was Henry Driver, but everybody naturally called him Lucky because he got away with things nobody else ever could. During the blackouts, he once drove a load of TNT across the Great Smokies with no headlights. All them twisty mountain roads and just a three-quarter moon. I’d like to see these bragging hotshots around today try that!