The Highway Girls Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE 4

  CHAPTER TWO 6

  CHAPTER THREE 10

  CHAPTER FOUR 15

  CHAPTER FIVE 21

  CHAPTER SIX 30

  CHAPTER SEVEN 33

  CHAPTER EIGHT 39

  CHAPTER NINE 47

  CHAPTER TEN 58

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 61

  CHAPTER TWELVE 68

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 73

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 79

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 84

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 91

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 93

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 101

  CHAPTER NINETEEN 105

  CHAPTER TWENTY 107

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 111

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 113

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 118

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR 120

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places as well as incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, locales, and/or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Highway Girls

  Copyright 2019, by Matt Lockhart

  All rights reserved.

  For Missy,

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ten o'clock at night in summer in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta and the sun hangs in long enough you can still make out the silhouette of black spruce sprawling west toward the North Saskatchewan. Dangerous country lays beyond the gray, rectangular parking lot at the Red Line Motel. There's a ton of forest around this depressed logging town full of kindly oldsters, slovenly cowboy rednecks, desperate, drunk, dope-fiending white trash, and indigenous folks who make their way in from the reserves on errand runs in one or two from a handful of big box stores. Those are the ones, the errand-running natives, who have their shit figured out. Then there's the others from The Rez who find themselves caught up in gangs, illicit drugs, and the crimes and the life that come with. Common sob stories in hard-scrabble western towns where the mega-corporations roll in to soak up every natural resource available and wind up sucking the souls out of the locals across the region right along with them.

  These thoughts occur to Nate Striker while he contemplates life from the top floor balcony at the Red Line. A two-floor strip motel of beige and red. A red neon sign with two letters blacked out. Nine of the sixteen units are permanent residents. Most or all will probably die here, needle-in-arm. Fentanyl's grip hardens as the once-dominant oil industry slips away.

  Young men who'd moved from the east in search of the big pay day, all too readily marched into the oil sands wood chipper. Six figures into your bank account from humping on a rig. A young man's game. Hard working, hard partying. Big trucks, bigger houses. RVs, boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, ATVs. All on credit. Then came the trophy wives and babies and cabins by the lake. Oil went great guns and everybody got their shot. Then bullets turned to blanks. Booms go bust, and oil's no different. The industry slows, the jobs vanish, and the banks still expect their pound of flesh. You're young, you're angry, you're broke, you've got more time than you know what to do with, and you're stuck in a shithole of a town you'd scarcely hit the brakes for nine road trips out of ten. The math is simple.

  Rocky, like many western towns, is violent. It's full of blue-collar know-how that comes part and parcel with emotionally-repressed personalities. Folks who know every inch of a truck's engine, but couldn't find a sentence to express their feelings with both hands. Nate's seen it play out again and again. Simple minds, and nothing but time. People of low to no education with backgrounds replete with cyclical abuse suddenly faced with hours, days, weeks, and months they'd previously never had and nothing to do but to repeat the abhorrent behaviors that were played out on you. Out of work, out of options, an inability to cope with either. Sprinkle in some poverty, the desperation to keep what you have, and take what you don't. The court reports may as well write themselves.

  Behind door number 6, that's two doors from Nate's unit at the Red Line. Someone's hacking up half his lung. Bug, it's the only name he knows him as. What everyone else at the motel calls him. He's 58 and looks thirty years older. Just a matter of time before the ambulance parks in front of the stairs some desolate night, it's red lights flashing silently while the medics carry Bug's drug-addled corpse to the morgue.

  Almost routine at this point.

  The thought caught Nate in a moment of thirst. Cream. It's what he calls the pills. He grabs the bottle from inside, slides two of the yellowish ovals into his palm and walks back outside. He downs them with a swallow of Corona. They were opioids, but he didn't know the drug's name in particular and he didn't want to know. Rico, his dealer, didn't bother to tell him, if he even knew himself. Probably not.

  Cream makes the world fuzzier. Fuzzier is better. Not all the way better, but it delays the yearning to put a bullet in one's head if even for a few hours. Nate eyes the dim trees across the way, catches sight of a woman with long, frizzy hair staring up at him from unit three below. That's not a permanent unit, he reckons, that's a guest. He'd never seen her before. She was older. Bug's age probably.

  Stop fucking staring at me. Not happening, apparently.

  “Can I help you?” Nate bellows into the dusky air, expecting her to skitter off like the other cockroaches infesting this place.

  “Yes,” came her reply, “I believe you can.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eleven days. That's how long it's been since the last time Belinda Smith spoke with her daughter, Raina. Nate's heard of the case. It's national news. Three college girls, Americans, gone missing from the side of Highway 11, the David Thompson Highway. Ran right through the middle of Rocky Mountain House all the way out to Banff National Park. The girls had rented an RV in Calgary for a road trip to celebrate their final summer together before their upcoming final year at Brown. Raina's idea to travel north through Red Deer then west on Highway 11. Another way into Banff. The road less traveled.

  The RCMP had few leads. So said their media spokesperson on the day the girls were officially declared missing. Six days ago. Belinda hadn't heard hide nor hair of her five days beyond that. Not good.

  “I want you to help me,” she said, now standing on the second floor balcony in front of Nate's unit. Unit 8. The pair of them cast in an orange dim glow from the parking lot's lone streetlight.

  Sometimes no one finding his P.I. services ad was better.

  “I'm not sure.”

  “I am,” she said, “and besides that, I can't afford a lot. But, I can afford you.”

  Nate didn't charge a lot for his services. Figured he couldn't. A drug-addicted former Mountie. Down and out. That's how he saw himself. Not much good to anyone.

  “I'm sick,” Belinda said.

  “Sick how?”

  “Cirrhosis.”

  Figures, Nate thought. She was a rough looking ticket. Creases deeper in her face than they should've been for someone her age. The amber streetlight stabbing at them from the darkness camouflages Belinda's jaundiced skin, but Nate knew it was there. Rusted flesh like a human nicotine stain. A tough life, lived raw in West Virginian coal country.

  “I don't have a lot of time,” she said.

  Nate drops more Cream. No use hiding it, he figures. She's already seen.

  “That gonna get you through?” Belinda said.

  “It does what it does.”

  “So long as it helps you find my Raina.”

  “But, you don't think I will.”

  “Not alive, anyway.”

  Most mothers would cling to hope. Most mothers would believe the police when they tell them they're going to find their loved one, alive. Most mothers would cry themselves to sleep cling
ing to a framed photo, convinced their baby was coming back to them. Not Belinda. She learned young. Knew it by eight years of age. The world exists as unkindness in physical form, full of jagged spikes. Mostly men. Crooked beasts protruding outward and asserting themselves onto you. Hard hands and twisted minds ready to grab you up, corrupt you, drag you down into their angry, fearful, confused, disorganized soup.

  Belinda wasn't like the other two mothers. Born of privilege and living under the naive notion that things just have their way of working out, that you can will your way to whatever it is you want in life. Hokum. Belinda was a realist. She knew the world would knock you down and take everything from you in a lightning strike. You could fight and kick and scream all you want, but if you got on the wrong side of a monster, the monster always won.

  “You gonna do it, or what?” She said.

  “How long you known about me?”

  “Was my son that found you. Your site. Five hundred up front, right? Two thousand total?”

  He had an inkling, flickered away nearly as fast as it came to him. I should reduce my fee for this woman. A fellow desperate soul. No, he thinks, you need it. You need it all.

  “Yep,” he said. “You're right. You don't mind my asking, how'd you afford the trip here? You're a long way from home.”

  “Bianca. She took pity on me, I guess.”

  Bianca Myles, one of the other mothers. Zoe's mom. Zoe was the first girl to befriend Raina at Brown. Raina was there because of her grades. Qualified for 100% financial aid. Zoe, her mom being heiress to Drummond Shipping Company, had no such worries. But, Zoe – like Raina – grew up different from her mother. Raina was more urban and refined than Belinda just like Zoe was more empathetic and less materialistic than her mother, Bianca. The girls became fast friends. Bonded over books, and music, and academics. Lived on the same floor. Zoe didn't care about status. The ironic privilege of a kid who'd always had it. She knew Raina grew up without a lot, but Zoe never made it an issue. For three years they grew closer. Took trips. Partied, laughed, cried, studied. Zoe paid for a lot of things, and anytime Raina raised an objection, Zoe waved her off.

  The times Bianca hosted Raina in her palatial home, she liked her enough. Pitied her. Saw her as a sad case. Figured her friendship with her daughter was part of a charitable phase for Zoe. Some form of social outreach her daughter felt she had to carry off in order to be a better person. Whatever that meant. Bianca would roll her eyes thinking about it. She took it as a somewhat acceptable consequence of the social mixing one would expect in a diverse academic setting at a prestigious university. It's to be expected, Bianca would think. And Zoe will get over it. Maturity is accepting who and what you are.

  That's what constitutes the kinder reaction of old money toward the destitute. A condescending smile and a shrug. I accept you, for now.

  When Belinda couldn't reach Raina for more than 24 hours, she called both the other two girls' mothers. Had to leave voicemails with both because, of course, they weren't going to answer a call from her out of nowhere. Not on a first attempt anyway. One doesn't simply make themselves available to just anyone on a first try. It isn't done.

  Regardless, it was Bianca, unsurprisingly, who was first to call Belinda back.

  The other mother, the third girl's mother, Carly's mother, Anastasia Lewis. That was another story. Richer than Bianca as if that were possible. Wealthy by her husband, Hugh. Great, great grandson to a coal magnate. Beyond money, their daughter Carly learned early on looks were currency. Like her mother, she used them to her advantage. While Zoe at least attempted to care about her grades at Brown, Carly was there to be there. So one could say one went to Brown. A degree, a name on a page, a title and an achievement to add to a collection.

  Didn't matter, Carly liked fun, and she fell in quick with the pretty people on campus. Zoe and Raina were there too. Of course, Bianca and Anastasia were thrilled their girls had found each other. And while, Bianca tepidly accepted Raina, Anastasia made her protestations plain. Carly for her part was inconsistent. Sometimes she was a warm confidant to her financially disadvantaged cohort. Other times she took verbal jabs at Raina's social standing and her background. Little comments about growing up with a single mom. Subtle digs about poverty, how it happens, what the poor should do to raise their standing. Small pontifications, largely lacking in intellectual rigor mind you – Raina would note to herself – about morals, virtue, and politics. Raina usually said nothing in return. Zoe sometimes stood up for her.

  Meh.

  Most of the time Carly glossed over any feelings of superiority behind a facade of being a lighthearted free spirit. A party girl of means who just wants to have fun. It was fake, but in a college social group usually everyone got something out of the exchange. Eventually though, Anastasia put a moratorium on visits from Raina to their New Jersey family compound. This, after meeting Belinda once at a school function. Anastasia appraised her and her daughter the way an exterminator eyeballs a termite. Where Bianca saw Raina as her daughter's little charity case, Anastasia believed the most charitable thing one could do for the poor was to put them out of their misery.

  “I fly out tomorrow,” Belinda said. “Don't want to. Got to. Flight's already paid for.”

  She hands Nate a crinkled envelope of five hundred in Canadian cash. Funny colored monopoly money. He pockets it and downs another swish of Corona.

  “Find her,” Belinda said. Her voice like chalk dragged across concrete. “Find her and let me bring her home.” Her deep set eyes bore a hole through him deep as an oil drill. A lifetime of hard-won tears brim at the edge of her eyelashes. This harsh world has played its final coup-de-gras, she knew it. Took the only innocent thing she had left to believe in. She knew it was coming, but it didn't dull the world-breaking levels of pain.

  “I'll find her,” Nate said. The weight of the look on the woman's face fell on him like an anvil from the heavens. This was a case he could not allow himself to fail at and the realization made him weak in the knees. “Believe me,” he said, and his dark eyes met hers just as gravely. “I will do this. I'll make sure she gets home.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Six feet and thick. Been his build since junior year high school. Coarse dark hair with a coarse dark mustache. A five o'clock shadow grown in by three. Definitely looks the part of a cowboy County Mountie. Except he wasn't. Not anymore. Not for three years, give or take a month or two. He'd been a cop for 15 years, all of it in K Division, what the RCMP calls Alberta. Up until his car wreck. Smashed into head-on by a drunk headed southbound in the northbound lanes down near Lethbridge right around midnight. Nate was just about off his vacation time, had his wife and baby girl with him. On their way back to their home in Airdrie coming from Waterton Lakes.

  Nate left it too late. He never let himself forget it. It was too late to leave Waterton to make that long a drive. Never should have done it. The notion's never far from his mind. Eve sang softly in the dark to their two year old, Grace, while he smiled behind the wheel. Pop Goes the Weasel. Lying in the dark at the Red Line, every single night he hears it. All around the mulberry bush. The soft lyricism in her voice. He'd give anything to hear the swish of the words again pass through her lips. Softly there, in the dark. All around the mulberry bush. His baby daughter's gentle smile. An ache no amount of Cream could salve. To go back. If only to go back. He would lay there staring into the black through salty tears. To go back. There has to be a way to go back.

  If he believes in a Heaven, a place where he knows he'd be seeing them again, he'd have ended it already.

  The monkey chased the weasel.

  Nate's phone lit up.

  “You wanted to meet?” Read the message.

  A two-a.m. text from Constable Sam Gray. Not all that surprising. Cops keep all hours. Constable Gray was on the newly formed task force. RCMP and FBI working in tandem to find Carly Lewis, Zoe Myles, and Raina Smith.

  What a clusterfuck that's bound to be, Nate thinks. Both organizat
ions fighting for jurisdiction. He imagines being a fly on that wall. No thanks. A bunch of preening assholes more interested in furthering their careers and not being one-upped by their foreign counterparts than in finding what happened to those girls. Gray fits right in, Nate figures.

  They worked together before the accident, though the time was brief. Nate was the star investigator, Gray was more about Gray than he was about clearing cases. Regardless, they maintained somewhat of a rapport over the years. Gray would throw him a few scraps here and there. He looks down on Nate now, pities him. Nate uses that to his advantage.

  “When/where?” Gray texts again.

  “Tim's,” Nate messages back. “Ten?”

  “Good.”

  Morning on the east side of town, just off Highway 11 at the Tim Hortons, Nate waits behind the wheel of his old Ford Taurus, rain pounds on the roof. An endless torrent of semi-trucks works their way through. Truck drivers park their rigs on the side road, walk over to the cafe to fill up on java. Pour a little Five Hour Energy in with it, the only thing could keep their bleary eyes open for the long hauls across the Alberta landscape.

  Nate glances at his watch. 10:06. Gray figures it was the most monumental of favors meeting with Nate at all. Even deigning to speak with him about anything, let alone this case of the missing girls. Of course, he wasn't going to be on time. A fallen soldier is how Gray looks at Nate. Fallen because he couldn't hack it. Didn't have what it took to hang in. They all thought that, Nate knew. The blue wall, once you're on the other side of it, you're on the other side – the wrong side. You're one of us until you aren't. You weren't good enough, you probably never were. If you're out, you're out.

  Nate knew Gray was likely to feed him bullshit, but he wants the meet anyway. He was twice the cop Sam Gray was, Gray knew it too, and even when Gray thought he was cleverly going out of his way to give him nothing, making it look as though he was a friend, Nate could always glean more from any exchange than Gray would ever realize.