Slow Curve on the Coquihalla Read online

  What readers are saying about

  the Hunter Rayne highway mysteries:

  “A great take to bed read for anyone who loves crime fiction in a traditional fashion.”

  “Those were the best mysteries I've read in a long time! As soon as I finished the first one I bought the second and felt empty when I finished it! The characters were awesome and so there that I somehow think they are in my life …”

  “This is a great read for anyone who likes mystery, intrigue and those that are looking for good reads from up and coming Canadian authors.”

  “Great trucking detail, hardboiled characters, no-nonsense dialogue ….”

  “… this book caught my attention from the very first pages and it only got better. I recommend this book to anyone who has a love for a good mystery.”

  “ … Hunter Rayne would make a great TV detective, driving around the country in his rig visiting different states and helping to solve crimes. He is that interesting of a character.”

  Also by R.E. Donald

  ICE ON THE GRAPEVINE

  SEA TO SKY

  SLOW CURVE

  ON THE

  COQUIHALLA

  a Hunter Rayne highway mystery

  R.E. Donald

  Copyright © 2011 by R.E. Donald

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover © 2011 Hunter Johnsen

  Proud Horse Publishing,

  British Columbia, Canada

  [email protected]

  First digital edition published September 2011

  LICENSE NOTE:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The story is set in 1995.

  To Jim, who started me on this road in 1994,

  and to my father, who kept the wheels turning.

  “I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

  Henry David Thoreau

  CHAPTER 1

  – – – – ONE

  Funny how the last hundred miles always seem like the longest part of a trip home. The nose of Hunter Rayne's big Freightliner pointed west, into the sunset. He had just come out of the mountains southwest of Hope and was travelling the straight, flat stretch of Highway 1 that runs through Sumas Prairie in the lower Fraser Valley. Somewhere between him and the horizon, beneath the scalloped rows of gilt edged clouds, the port city of Vancouver mushroomed along the shores of Burrard Inlet, her sharp edged buildings sprouted against the looming shadows of the Coast mountains.

  Hunter was on the last lap of a four thousand mile trip. He'd hauled a load of baby cribs from Vancouver to L.A., a refrigerated load of cucumbers and tomatoes from L.A. to Edmonton, and now he was returning home with a refrigerated load of Alberta beef. He was impatient to close his own front door behind him so he could exchange the road weary jeans and wrinkled blue shirt, the cleanest he had left after two weeks on the road, for some loose soft sweats. All he wanted to do tonight was to take a long soapy shower, then put up his feet and suck on a beer, maybe do a little channel surfing before he fell asleep at the helm of his remote control.

  As he slowed his rig behind a dusty motor home with California plates, boxed in by a Trailways bus and half a dozen cars tailgating each other in the passing lane, Hunter flipped open his cellular phone and punched the ‘1’ to call his dispatcher. Hunter was an owner operator under contract to Watson Transportation, a load broker and freight forwarder in the Lower Mainland of B.C., run by a former driver named Elspeth Watson.

  "Watson!" El answered impatiently, as she usually did.

  "Yo, El!" He raised his voice towards a small microphone mounted above the windshield. "The Blue Knight's just your side of Aldergrove. Where do you want me to drop the beef?"

  "The yard, Hunter," El said. There was a brittle edge to her voice, and she hung up before he could acknowledge. Must have caught her at a bad time.

  Less than an hour later, Hunter wheeled into an industrial park on Annacis Island, braked the big Freightliner to an easy stop behind a gray cinderblock building, and left his truck idling to cool the engine down. He hadn't expected El to still be there, but the dispatcher's Chevy pickup was parked beside the door to Watson Transportation's office. The building was dark.

  With a crooked frown, he climbed the few steps to the office and tried the door. It was unlocked, and he could hear nothing save a brief spit and crackle from the CB radio inside. His chronic suspicion, occupational disease of police officers and former police officers everywhere, told him that something was wrong. He eased open the door and entered the office, planting his steel toed sneakers with care until he could see around the front counter into the alcove where the dispatcher's desk was located.

  Elspeth Watson was slumped forward in her big captain's chair, her elbows resting on heavy thighs, forehead cradled in her hands. Her broad, rounded back ballooned and deflated with big, slow breaths.

  Hunter backed quietly to the other side of the counter and cleared his throat. El raised her head and looked at him blankly, her skin blotched with red, the bangs of her brown hair flopping limply over her forehead like the comb of a rooster.

  He offered her a tentative smile, which she didn't return. Instead, she dropped her gaze to the frayed armrest of her chair, and began to pick at the dirty foam rubber that bulged out of a tear in the black vinyl. Her fingers looked swollen, and were smudged with ink and carbon. Hunter could hear the soft whirr of El's computer and muted traffic noises from the street.

  Without looking up, she said, "Randy Danyluk’s dead," and closed her eyes.

  Suzanne's bladder was painfully full, and it confused her. How long had she been sitting here? She pulled on a corner of yellow cloth that protruded from under her thigh and realized that she was crushing the clean laundry, putting creases in tiny teeshirts and shorts, the girls' nighties, underwear of Gary's and her own. She'd been folding the laundry and stacking it in piles on the bed, it seemed like a lifetime ago, but she could still hear the news music from the T.V. in the family room, so it was only a while. Twenty minutes, or maybe half an hour. Such a short time that she was sure she could still wind things back to where they were, the way her life was at the start of the evening news.

  She felt another stab of pain in her bladder and rushed to the bathroom. After, washing her hands at the sink, she caught sight of her face in the mirror. It took her by surprise. The girl in the mirror was older, she was not the same Suzanne who'd washed her hands at this sink less than an hour earlier. Oh, it looked like the same face, but she knew it wasn't the same person looking out of the mirror anymore. She watched her reflection with a curious detachment, and felt no affection for it, only a mixture of pity and disgust. She shook her head slowly and turned away.

  The girl in the mirror, she thought, is a person whose father is dead.

  She stood at the entrance to the family room, thinking that there must be something she should do. She should talk to someone who would
know what to do, but the only person she could think of who would know was her father. Or maybe El. But she'd just spoken to El. El had told her about the accident, and then what had she said? Take a stiff drink, El said, and call a friend to come stay with you until Gary gets home.

  Gary. If only Gary were here.

  Suzanne sat down on the couch and picked up the remote control. She pressed the mute button, and stared at the frivolous images on the screen, not knowing or caring who they were or what they were doing or why.

  It wasn't until little Veri padded into the room and tugged on her shirttail that Suzanne stirred. She pulled the toddler onto her lap and wrapped her arms tightly around the sleep-warm body, burying her face in the little girl's hair.

  Veri squirmed. "Mommy. Mommy! Ow!"

  Suzanne loosened her hold, kissed the top of the child's head, and began to rock her gently. "I'm sorry, sweetie. I'm so sorry. Oh, God! I'm so sorry."

  CHAPTER 2

  – – – – TWO

  At eight thirty Friday morning, Hunter was sitting on the lawn behind his basement suite with Gord Young, his landlord, when the phone rang. The grass beneath their feet was cool and still slightly damp, its fresh scent mingled with the smell of the tall cedars that stood guard at the bottom of the retired doctor's sloping North Shore lot. Hunter had supplied fresh coffee, and the landlord had brought down a small carton of Half & Half, a replacement for the cream that had gone sour after three weeks in Hunter's fridge. Gord's Siamese cat, who was stalking robins between the apple tree and the laurel hedges in the back yard, stopped in mid-stride and glared at Hunter when he abandoned his lawn chair to answer the phone inside his suite.

  It was El. "Listen, Hunter, can you get out to the airport by one o'clock? I need you to pick up Gary's truck in Winnipeg and drive it back out here."

  "Uh, well, I ..."

  "I know you were looking forward to a couple of days in town, but Suzy needs him. He's already caught a flight home to Kamloops. You'll get paid for your time, goddammit!"

  "It's not that, El. You just took me by surprise, and I ... "

  "Damn!" A telephone rang loudly in the background. "Hold on," El said, and Tanya Tucker started singing in Hunter's ear.

  While he waited, Hunter rubbed the whiskers on his cheek, then ran his hand through his hair. He was staring thoughtfully at a photograph on his desk when El came back on the line. The two teenaged girls in the picture were standing on Ambleside Beach in West Vancouver with the Lions Gate Bridge behind them, and strands of their long hair, a few shades lighter than his own, had blown across their faces as they squinted into the afternoon sun.

  "Well?" said El. "Can you be there by one?"

  "Almost everything I own is in the washing machine right now, but ... " – he wondered if Randy's daughter looked anything like his own – "I should be able to finish the laundry, get a haircut and pay my bills before noon, I guess," he said.

  "I knew I could count on you. You're a prince!" Another phone started ringing. "Shit! It's flight 182 Air Canada your ticket will be at the counter call me from Winnipeg." And she hung up.

  "No golf for me this afternoon," Hunter said to his landlord as he plunked himself back down into the lawn chair. He took a sip of his coffee, then rested the mug on his thigh while he gazed out past the cedars. The waters of Burrard Inlet stretched like sheet steel between the bare, straight trunks.

  Gord's eyebrows raised above the dark frame of his bifocals. "Back to work already?" he asked. His face was tanned and lined, and although he was in his seventies he had a full head of hair that was still more brown than grey. He was barefoot, and wearing baggy shorts and a tee-shirt with BICYCLE STANLEY PARK stenciled across the chest.

  "That driver I was telling you about? He owned four or five trucks besides the one he was driving. I've got to go pick up his son-in-law's truck in Winnipeg, so he can get home to his wife."

  Gord nodded, his face grave. "I see. That's too bad." He paused, staring into his coffee cup. "So the driver was a close friend?"

  Hunter smiled wanly. "He was a friend. Not that close, but a good friend." He'd lost friends before, colleagues on the force. People die in the line of duty, but you carry on. Most times, you carry on. Sometimes, you don't.

  A robin exploded into the air, landing in the apple tree where it began a loud and frenzied clamour. The Siamese trotted over to Gord's chair and settled primly on its haunches, ignoring the commotion.

  "He and his wife were good friends of El Watson, the woman I work for. She hired his trucks, or he hired hers when they couldn’t handle loads with their own drivers. It's his daughter El’s worried about. Two little kids to look after - she's not much more than a kid herself – and suddenly her father's trucking company lands in her lap."

  Before Hunter left for the airport, wearing a clean and only slightly wrinkled cotton work shirt and carrying a duffle bag with a couple of others, he looked again at the photograph on his desk.

  He'd give anything to keep those girls safe and happy. He wondered if the last thing that went through Randy's mind was that his death would cause his daughter pain, and knew he would have struggled mightily to stay alive for that reason alone.

  "Soon, kids," he said aloud, nodding. He tried to remember when he’d last spent time with his girls. Weeks ago, months maybe. "Yes. Soon."

  Suzanne could hear Jolene scolding little Veronica for spilling the Cheerios and hoped the two of them would settle down quietly with the Muppets. The phone was bound to start ringing again soon, and she still had to retrieve the messages from earlier calls. Drivers would be reporting in. Shippers would be calling to schedule pick ups. She looked down at the coffee mug on her desk. Her fingers were curled around the handle, but she couldn't remember if she'd already taken a sip or not.

  She'd hardly slept at all last night, and whenever she had dozed off during the early hours of morning, she would awake with a suffocating sense of dread before remembering the news about her father. Perhaps it was all a mistake, she thought. Everything around me looks so normal. He'll walk in the door in a minute or two, and he'll tell me it was all a big misunderstanding.

  She had been showered and dressed before either of the kids woke up.

  When she'd first arrived at the office, which was in her father's house less than two blocks away from the house he'd helped her and Gary buy, she went upstairs with Veri in the crook of her arm and Jo trailing behind her. Her father had left a few dishes in the sink, a bottle of multiple vitamins beside a used glass on the counter. A scratch pad beside the phone read coffee filters and popsicles (orange & grape!!). He always kept little treats on hand for the girls. Her father's bed was unmade but looked cold, and several pairs of pants were draped over a chair beside it. It wasn't unusual for her father to be gone for days at a stretch, even though he no longer drove his truck full time. He'd be on the road for a couple of days, then home for a night or two. Why should this time be any different?

  When Veri started to squirm and Jo began to whine, Suzanne had shushed them firmly and they all had stayed still, listening to the silence, feeling the emptiness of the house, waiting almost expectantly, until a shiver of something like fear ran up her spine and she had hurried downstairs. She deposited the girls in the T.V. room adjoining the office, and turned on their morning cartoons.

  The phone buzzed and Suzanne jumped. She felt an unpleasant tingling in her limbs that she supposed came from lack of sleep. The phone buzzed twice more before she could steel herself to pick it up.

  "Ranverdan Transport," she said. "Good morning," she added hastily, but whoever was on the line had already started to talk.

  "... not deliver yet. Where Randy? Where my Seattle freight? Why he not deliver to Edmonton yet?"

  "Please ... who is this, please?" Suzanne's stomach dropped. She knew who it was. The traffic manager at Ranverdan's largest account, a man she had hardly ever talked to because her father always looked after him personally.

  "This Victor Sung at Wa
icom in Vancouver. Why Randy not call? My Edmonton warehouse call this morning, say no deliver Seattle freight yet. Was suppose to be deliver yesterday. Where Randy? Randy not answer cell phone. Let me speak wif Randy."

  Suzanne caught her breath. Could she say, "He's dead. Randy's dead." Or could she say, "Your freight is at the bottom of a cliff and we can't deliver it until ... ." Until when?

  Could she talk to this man at all?

  "Hello? Hello? You talk to me? Hello, miss?"

  "Yes ... yes ... I'm sorry." She clamped her left hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing, took a deep breath. "I'll check and call you right back."

  "I need to know right now. I hold on."

  "No ... I ... I can't do that. I'll call you right back, Mr. Sung." Cutting off his objections, she jabbed at the next line button with her finger and speed dialed Elspeth Watson.

  "Gary, where are you?" she whispered as she waited for El to answer. "I need you with me, Gary. Where are you?"

  Elspeth Watson gritted her teeth. "Yes, Mr. Sung, it was a very serious accident. I'm afraid that Mr. Danyluk – Randy – was killed in the accident." She covered the mouthpiece and added under her breath, So who gives a fuck about your freight, asshole!

  "Oooooh. Randy? Killed?" His voice was suddenly subdued. "How it happen? Randy a very good driver, I know him for a long long time."