The Doll (26 page)

The truck driver stayed motionless in the space of the open cab door, the dilemma clear on his face: return to the men on the ground who might shoot him if he jumped, or deal with the gun pointed at his head and the stranger who might shoot him when the driving was finished.

Bradford repeated the instruction, a slow and clear demand to get inside and get the rig moving, and when the response in those long, drawn-out seconds was a continued hesitation, he repeated the promise. “Best thing to happen to you all day.”

The driver shifted his focus from the front to the side and turned his head back as if preparing to jump, so Bradford lowered his weapon. Without taking his eyes off the driver, he reached inside his vest for the remote and punched in to trigger the detonation.

The warehouse explosions ripped through the night in a way automatic gunfire never could: shook the ground with enough force that even high up in the cab, Bradford felt the power. Whatever hesitation the driver held, whatever decision he readied to make, was resolved by the bigger noise and the flash from behind. The driver jerked, shoved forward into the cab, and slammed the door behind him faster than Bradford imagined possible for a man of his girth.

Once behind the wheel, the driver released the brake and the truck crawled forward toward the chain-link gate, still closed. The men who’d been shooting were behind the truck. Bradford could see them in the side mirror, crumpled on the ground bracing for another explosion from the warehouse.

“Get the lights on,” Bradford said. “And don’t stop for the gate.”

The driver didn’t say anything, just reached out and powered on the lights, kept moving until the grille of the truck touched the gate, advancing until even from inside the cab Bradford could hear and feel the squeal of metal twisting under pressure, and then the rig was through and the wheels were on the street.

“Head north,” Bradford said, and they swung wide with the impossible-to-hurry kind of slowness only massive trucks could conjure, the type of crawl that made movement feel like slugging through mud pits and created the sensation of sitting on a target in a firing range.

Far up the street came the flash of blue, red, and white—Bradford didn’t hear the sirens, couldn’t even clearly see the patrol cars, but they were coming. Into his mic he said, “Daddy’s on the way. Party’s over.”

The driver turned to stare at him and after a long pause said, “Where to, boss?” And that was the question,
Where to?
The problem with Irving was that the city sat nearly dead center between Dallas and Forth Worth, surrounded by thick civilization on all sides with no fast way out of town in any direction. North was the best bet, but Bradford didn’t want to waste time hauling ass out of the city if Logan wasn’t in the truck.

“Take I-35 toward Denton,” Bradford said. “That’ll do for now.”

The driver nodded, and as the truck picked up speed, switched gears.

Three patrol cars with sirens blaring blew past, and in the mirror Bradford watched the vehicles stop beyond the transport fence and their doors swing open. He had radio silence from Jahan and Walker, and that was a good thing. He’d only hear from them if there was trouble; if they got out clean, next contact would be a phone call.

“What’s in the back of the truck?” Bradford said.

“The manifests are there on that clipboard, if you wan’ ’em.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

The driver glanced at Bradford again, at first blankly and then the fog lifted. “You saying what I’m hauling ain’t what’s on the manifest?”

“Exactly that.”

The driver paused, then said, “What’s it you think I got? Drugs?”

“People.”

The driver let out a half-laugh that came more as an indication of spontaneous relief than humor. “Aw, man, no, not possible,” he said. “We don’t run up from Mexico. Down sometimes, but freight only goes one way.”

“I wasn’t talking about illegals.”

Bradford stopped there because this line of discussion was pointless with an underling. “You know an out-of-the-way place to pull over, somewhere not too far outside the metroplex, somewhere that won’t draw any attention?”

“I might,” the driver said, “but you and that pop toy there make me real nervous. I need some guarantee you ain’t planning to use it.”

“If I was planning to kill people, those guys with the guns back at the depot would have been the first to go.”

The driver switched gears again. “I suppose you have a point,” he said, though his body showed signs of agitation, what Bradford expected in a person amped for fight or flight.

“Where were you headed with this load?” Bradford asked.

“Houston, same as always.”

Bradford repeated the answer. “Same as always?” And then, “That the only place you ever go?”

“I run the smaller trucks all over the country, but with this rig, yeah, always Houston. Though before I come on, before Katrina, it was New Orleans.”

“That doesn’t create questions?”

The man shrugged. “I do my job, I don’t ask whatfor.”

“You have a name?”

“Dave Lockreed.”

“Okay, Dave, listen. All I want right now is to get into the back of this truck. I don’t want to hurt anyone, definitely don’t want to kill anyone, and I’m not planning to steal anything. I’m convinced there’s a person in the back, and I’m only here for that. I want to be done and out as quickly as possible, and all I’m asking is for you
not to make this any harder than it has to be. Can you work with me on that?”

T
HEY WERE JUST
beyond Lewisville when the call from Jahan came in, a brief swap of details that let Bradford know his team was safe and confirmed specifics for the proposed rendezvous point. With that settled, the remainder of the run north from DFW provided an opportunity to poke and prod at the driver’s knowledge in a not-so-subtle attempt to fill informational gaps.

Lockreed, though a slow and cautious speaker, offered far more in his stop-start moments of rambling than Bradford fished for, a nervous stringing of words, talking for the sake of talking. Houston, as it turned out, was where Veers operated a second truck depot, a location that hadn’t turned up in any of the war room’s digging; a smaller office that, as far as Lockreed knew, handled import and export, a location that tied in well with Bradford’s theories about why Veers operated in the way that it did, and because Houston had access to both sea and air, Bradford suspected this smaller, off-the-map arm of the Doll Maker’s network was the primary gateway for moving his merchandise in and out of the country.

The meeting spot was a park just off the interstate beyond Denton: trees and grass, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields with a deserted parking lot in an area both quiet and sparsely populated.

Brakes hissed, then Bradford climbed down from the cab. Rounded to the rear of the truck while Lockreed did the same along the other side. At the truck’s back end they stared at the door and the double bolts padlocked into place. “You got the keys to these things?” Bradford asked.

“Wish I did, normally would. Didn’t get that sorted before the shooting started.”

“Still no idea what’s inside?”

The driver shook his head. “Not but what’s on the manifest.”

“What do you do when you get to Houston?”

“Back the truck in, hand over the papers and keys, get a signature, and leave.”

“To where? In what?”

“Usually, there’s a company car waiting. I put up in a nearby motel for the night, come back in the morning, and make the return trip, sometimes with freight, sometimes empty.”

“But always with this exact trailer?”

Lockreed nodded.

“Nothing strange about that?”

The driver’s posture sagged. “It’s a job,” he said. “Puts food on the table.”

They waited in silence for a few minutes until Walker, in the Trooper, pulled up beside the rig. Jahan followed several car lengths behind.

Lights switched off and engines running, they stepped from the vehicles and stood beside Bradford. He motioned toward the padlocks. “Driver doesn’t have the keys. Anyone have any PETN left?”

Jahan pulled primer cord from his pack. Wrapped and knotted a segment around the hook of each lock and let out a lead. Then all four stepped a few paces away. The explosives cut through the metal, knife to butter, and the pieces fell to either side. Bradford pushed the scraps out of the way, slid the bolts, and pulled the doors outward. With a flashlight beam roaming, they peered together into a darkened container filled with oversize boxes stacked nearly the height of the interior.

Walker sighed. “They couldn’t make this shit any easier, could they?”

Bradford climbed up into the truck and Walker joined him.

Jahan said, “You want me to cuff the civie?”

Bradford said, “Nah, he’s got nowhere to go,” and then after a moment of staring at the boxes, “Hey, Dave, get in here and help us empty this thing.”

Walker said, “There’s got to be some pattern here. Some route to get to whatever is inside—makes no sense to have to load and unload all of this every single time.”

“Maybe,” Bradford said. “Do you see it?”

Walker shook her head.

“Jack?”

“I see a wall of cardboard and have a big target on my back. Can we get moving?”

Bradford reached for a box and shoved it in the driver’s direction. The thing was heavy for being nothing but a prop. “Check out what’s inside,” he said. “Find out if it matches your manifest.”

The document said children’s furniture, and the boxes, heavy
and unwieldy, held wooden pieces sandwiched between packaging material: to all appearances genuine cargo, and possibly truly intended for export. The four worked in sweaty silence, offloading enough of the freight to create space within the interior so that they could shuffle boxes from one place to the next, looking for they knew not what but expecting to recognize the thing when they found it.

Bradford was halfway to the front when the first sound of tapping, faint and nearly imperceptible, caught his attention. He held up a hand to stop movement, and within the silence the others also picked up what he had, though the sound had no obvious source and was faint enough that one might think the taps had been imagined.

The noise—if you could call it that—seemed loudest in the direction of the far front, so Bradford switched focus from moving boxes from one spot to the next to clearing a path straight through until he reached the front, and there he found nothing but the end of the container.

The tapping came again, louder than it had been before, the origin still no clearer than when they’d first heard it. In the narrow path, Jahan squeezed beyond Bradford, knelt, and placed his palm and ear to the wall. Waited for the tapping, and when it came, shook his head: no vibration.

In the disappointing silence, each inhale, each exhale, reverberated loudly enough to drown out the faint link to hope until the tapping returned, this time louder and unmistakably an SOS that came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Finally Lockreed stated the obvious. “That can’t come from one of the boxes,” he said. “None of them is big enough to hold a whole person.”

“False front, false floor, false ceiling,” Walker said. “Those are our only options.” After a moment of pause, without further discussion or consultation, they started moving freight again, faster and less cautiously than before, shoving boxes toward the rear and out the back without regard to how the merchandise fell or if packing burst, spurred on by the confirmation that somewhere in this truck was the score they’d set out to find.

When the container was finally empty and the ground outside littered, Bradford swept the flashlight beam from corner to corner
and seam to seam, while Jahan knocked knuckles against the walls and floor, trying to find a change in pattern that would lead them to a hidden space.

The SOS repeated, and in an automatic response, they each turned to look at the ceiling, the direction from which the sound had seemed to come. “Can’t be up there,” Walker whispered. “It’s gotta be front.”

She begged the flashlight off Bradford, and using the light to guide her fingertips, ran her hand up along the front corner seam from floor to ceiling. Shook her head, backed up, and tried again. Finally she paused and said, “I got something. Jack, give me a hand.” Pointed him to a spot a couple of feet away. “Press there,” she said, and when he applied pressure at the same level she did, the panel clicked, moved inward an inch, and slid a few feet to the side.

The truck went silent, as if a vacuum had emptied the container of air.

Bradford fought the urge to push his way forward. Held back to allow Walker the moment she’d so rightfully earned, watched her face as she shone the light into the opening, and felt the disappointment when what lit up was not a hiding spot but another wall right behind where the first had been, this one with a narrow door. The shell of a self-contained room, installed behind the false wall, kept separate from the actual walls and floor of the semi by several inches of insulating material.

Walker motioned Jahan toward the lock. Said, “Det cord again?” and stepped out of his way. He knotted primer cord around this lock as he’d done on the one outside the truck.

The pieces severed. Halves fell to the floor. Walker reached forward, opened the door, and swung the light inward. The expression on her face told Bradford everything he needed to know and his breath caught in his throat.

Walker moved farther into the room and out of sight. Lockreed maneuvered forward ahead of Jahan, pushed his way in, only to turn on his heels and rush for the back of the truck.

Head out, he heaved and vomited.

Jahan peered in after Walker, threw a wary glance in Bradford’s direction, and stepped aside to allow Bradford to squeeze into the interior of an area the width of the truck but less than three feet deep—a crawl space, if that. Vents led from the top of the space
through to the roof of the trucking container, but even with the mild airflow, the interior was fetid with the smell of rot and decaying body fluid.