The Enemy Inside (17 page)

“Let’s just say I’m an interested private party.”
 

Colt looked like he couldn’t have cared less what she was interested in.
 

“Okay, how about you talk to me to be helpful? Maybe find their killer? I’d imagine you’re all pretty pissed off at their deaths,” she said, trying to appeal to his better nature.
 

He grunted dismissively, uninterested.
 

“How about this, then?” Berg leaned forward, her voice becoming harder as she did her best
bad cop
. “You tell me what I want to know, and I won’t get a few friends of mine to come up here and start speed trapping your drivers. I may not be a cop, but it doesn’t mean I can’t make your life miserable.”
 

This time she got a slight shrug in response.
 

“Maybe while they’re at it they’ll start looking into your logbooks, running some drug tests, checking your rigs are up to code and your weapons are registered, that kind of thing. Seems a lot of trouble to go to just to avoid a few questions from a purely interested party.”

“What do you wanna know, exactly?” Colt kept eating.

“Did they know each other, outside the job?”

“I guess.”

“Did they hang out? I mean, were they friends?”

“Nope.”
 

This guy makes a Trappist monk look chatty
. “Look.” Berg reluctantly pulled out her most winsome smile, as plainly her
bad cop
hadn’t worked. “It would really help me if you could give me a little more information and not just one-word responses.”

“Why should I?” Colt said with a full mouth.

Berg sighed. Her patience, which was never in plentiful supply, was now at an end. “Look, Colt. I don’t have the time or inclination to dick around with you today. You don’t know me, but I am a woman on the edge.” She stopped, fighting despair for a moment before continuing in a dead voice. “I’m going down, and I’m happy to take you with me.” She paused to let that sink in. “So, you can either help me take a few bad guys with me to hell, or you can be difficult and get caught up in the shit storm. Your choice. But I do warn you, it’s not a great idea to piss me off right now. At this point, I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
 

Despite his cool attitude, Colt looked chilled by the seriousness in her face and voice. “Okay, okay. No need to get heated. I was just trying to get you to pay for lunch.”

Berg took a deep breath and mentally clawed her way out of the darkness. She even managed a slight smile. “Okay. I can do that. You talk to me and I’ll pay for your lunch.”

“Okay.” Colt launched his wasted limbs into action and motioned over the middle-aged waitress. “I’ll have another of these, and a banana split with a beer.”
 

“Anything for you, honey?” the waitress asked Berg with a gravelly voice.
 

“No, thanks. Your coffee burnt away the inside of my mouth. I’ll be lucky to taste anything ever again,” Berg replied.
 

Colt snorted and pushed the plate to the side, studying Berg with a thoughtful expression. The waitress snatched the plate off the table and stalked back to the kitchen.
 

“So,” Berg continued, ignoring her, “were they friends or did they have any friends in common?”

“They had all of us in common, but if you mean outside the haulers, no, I don’t think so. They didn’t hang out, as you put it. They barely knew each other.”

“Danny was Chicago born and bred, and John moved here five years ago?” she asked, checking her facts.

“True enough.”

“Okay. What about enemies? Did either have any that you know of?”

Colt paused for a long while before answering. “Not John, I don’t think so. Danny never mentioned any problems to me, but he liked being on the wrong side of the law, so who knows who he pissed off over the years.”

The waitress interrupted, placing Colt’s second lunch, along with his beer and split, on the table.
 

“What are the chances another hauler did these crimes?” Berg asked after the waitress walked away.

Colt shook his head emphatically. “No chance. We may not always get along, but we are tight. We need each other to tell us the best routes, avoid the speed traps, and weigh stations and the like. I will eat one of my rig’s left front tires if it turns out one of us did this,” he said, mouth full again.
 

Berg thought he probably could eat a tire the way he was demolishing his second lunch. “So who do you think did it?”

Colt looked away, refusing to hold Berg’s gaze. “No idea. Some random highway psycho?” He shrugged.

Berg glared at him, her bullshit meter heading into red territory.
 

“You don’t seem to care they are dead. I thought you were tight?”

Colt stopped eating and stared at Berg coolly. “We care. But they’re dead. Eventually, someone will find out who did it, and when that happens, they’ll get what’s coming to them. People always get what’s coming to them.”
 

Berg let the comment slide and pressed on. “I know John was married, but did Danny have a regular girlfriend or wife?”

“Nah. Not really good for long-term relationships, this kind of life. It’s suited to your more one-night, paid kind of relationships.”

“Maybe they pissed off a pimp, then?”

“I can see that happening to Danny, but John the church boy? Nah.” Colt resumed his munching.
 

Berg wondered where he put all the food he was inhaling as he was so emaciated. “Why Danny?”

“He had certain . . . desires.”

Berg thought of the hooker he raped and beat to death and knew exactly what his desires were. “Meaning?” she asked, feigning ignorance.

“Meaning he liked it rough. He paid off more than a few pimps over the years because of hookers with broken noses and jaws. It seemed he liked to hit them, particularly in the face. Got him off. Used to boast about it when he’d had a few beers. Didn’t seem to care that none of us wanted to hear it.”

Berg would never say so to Colt, but she was glad Taylor was dead. In fact, she would have liked to have killed him herself. “And John wasn’t into anything that could get him killed, like Danny?”

“Nah. John was a good guy. Turned born-again about thirty years back, real devout. In fact, when Danny boasted about his conquests, John would leave the room or switch off the CB,” Colt said.

Berg remembered the condom wrapper found in his rig. “His wife ever join him?”
 

“Sometimes she’d drive with him for a leg if he was in her area, warm up his cab for him.” He smiled at the thought, showing off what looked like his four remaining teeth.
 

Berg had no idea how he had managed to chew through two cheap steaks. She tried to smile back and hoped she at least did a decent impersonation. “Do you know where Danny lived?”

“I think he frequented a trailer park in the Rockford suburbs when he wasn’t on the road. I found him there a few times, Happy Springs or something.”

“Did the pair stop for hitchhikers?”

“Yep. We all do. Gets pretty lonely on the road.”

“Okay, put it this way. Would they stop for large men, men as big as they were?”

“Sure. Most drivers are armed to the teeth. Most of what we haul ain’t fruit, if you know what I mean.”

“So how do you think Danny and John were overpowered?”

Colt stopped to take a breath in between mouthfuls, pondering the question. “I’ve wondered that myself. To take those men down would have been no easy task. The only way I can think of is if they were asleep in their cabs at the time and a guy let himself into the rig. If you’re awake and a big guy gets in your rig, you’re wary. Plenty of times I’ve just shown the guy my Colt nine millimeter soon as he gets in, just so he knows where he stands. Had very few problems over the years.”
 

Berg nodded, the origin of Colt’s nickname now becoming clear. She got up and went to the bar to pay his bill. By the time she came back to the table, Colt had started in on his split. “Thanks for your help.” She went to walk out, but a whistle from Colt stopped her. She turned around, and he beckoned for her to come back to the table.

“You can win, you know,” he said as she walked into earshot.

Berg arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Against the demons. You can win. You’re stronger than they are. I can tell.” He calmly went back to his dessert like he said nothing at all.

Berg hesitated before pressing her lips together and ignoring him. She walked out of the diner, retreating to the quiet of her car, and dialed Jay. “Hey, it’s me. Think you can get a copy of the autopsy report on Melissa Shipper?” She paused. “Great, see you at my place at three.”

She had a couple more stops to make.

Berg drove until she got to the suburb of Rockford. With no particular idea of where she was going, Berg navigated through the streets, doing the rounds of checking out local trailer parks. After fifteen minutes of searching, she found one called Holiday Springs. She figured it was close enough to Colt’s Happy Springs.

The place was run down, and Berg doubted anyone holidayed there. She parked and entered the front office, ringing the bell on the desk.
 

A minute later, a young, blond man ambled out of the tiny office wearing an annoyed expression. “Help you?” he asked, his curt tone indicating he’d rather not.

“Yes, hi. My name is Alicia and I’m looking for my brother, Danny Taylor? He said he stays here sometimes, and I was wondering if he had a permanent trailer?” Berg turned the full wattage of her best smile on him, hoping it looked more convincing on the outside than it felt on the inside. She’d been pretending so long it came naturally.

“You sure you’re his sister?” the clerk asked, checking Berg out through narrowed eyes.

“Can you keep a secret?” Berg leaned in when the clerk nodded. “Danny’s adopted. But we don’t like to make a big deal out of it. He gets upset.”

“Oh,” the clerk said. “Well, he’s not here anyway. Hasn’t been for weeks now.”

“Can I see his trailer? I want to leave him a care package.”

“I guess,” he said, bored, before turning and taking a key off the wall behind him and holding it out to Berg. “Trailer thirty-three. If you see him, tell him he’s only paid through to the end of the month, then he and his shit are outta here.”

“I will.” Berg took the key and walked out of the office.

She turned left and walked up the wide asphalt road separating two rows of trailers. Danny’s was at the end of the row on the right next to the rusty chain fence that surrounded the property. Next to the park was a grassy, vacant lot partially enclosed by a slightly newer fence. Judging by the crushed track marks in the tall grass, Berg was willing to bet Danny’s rig was parked there when he wasn’t on the road.
 

The park itself was neat and clean-ish, even though it had seen better days. The trailers were all identical, placed up on concrete blocks on square patches of grass and bordered by a row of bricks. A few residents had tried to spruce them up with carefully placed potted plants, curtains, and shaded annexes, but the overall effect was still dreary.

Berg climbed up the brick steps, inserted the small key in the trailer door, and opened it. The key was superfluous. The door was so flimsy, an anemic grandma could have forced it open with a sneeze.

Berg stepped inside, assaulted by the smell of dirty laundry confined in an unaired space. The single room was small, with a double bed off to the end of the trailer against the wall, a small closet directly opposite, and a kitchenette, table, and bench at the front end. She was thankful there was no toilet, as the musty smell was bad enough without whatever grossness that might contain. She felt a sudden longing for her clean apartment.

Poking around, she opened the few kitchen cabinets and the closet doors. The closet was almost empty—the majority of Danny’s clothes being on the floor—and only contained work boots, flip-flops, and a pair of old Converse sneakers. Berg pulled up a plastic chair and checked on top of the closet, where she found a .22 rifle and a dusty box of ammunition.