1

      Barry was bored just about out of his gourd.

      He was supposed to be out here not only driving a truck, but also fighting crime and injustice and all those other noble causes … doing something besides hauling frozen chicken livers to Denver.

      But that was exactly what he was doing. In a truck that carried enough weapons and explosives in hidden compartments to start a major war.

      Most of it sitting on top of frozen chicken livers.

      After the incident in Kentucky, he had been ordered to cool it. ‘Just keep on trucking, Barry. You and Dog. Haul freight,’ his contact, Jackson, had told him. ‘You’ll run into something.’

      A four-wheeler came shooting out of an exit ramp, not looking one way or the other.

      Barry could do nothing except stand on his brakes and pray to God he didn’t jackknife.

      He couldn’t change lanes. Another four-wheeler had crept up and was staying in his blind spot. But Barry knew the jerk was there.

      He got his rig under control and grabbed for his CB mike, spotting a CB antenna on the offending car’s trunk.

      “You potatohead!” Barry hollered. “Why in hell don’t you watch where you’re going?”

      His Husky, Dog, had been rolled from the bunk and was now sitting in the seat beside Barry, his lip curled up in a snarl. Dog didn’t appreciate being waked up so abruptly.

      “Shove it up your butt, driver!” Barry’s CB crackled. “You don’t own the goddamn road.”

      “That’s right,” Barry radioed back. “But I would like to have just a small piece of it to run on.”

      “I’ll give you a big piece of fist you wanna bring that thing over to the shoulder.”

      “You got it, prick! Name your place.”

      “Next ramp. Turn to the right. I’ll be waiting for you.”

      “You got it.”

      Barry knew the other two drivers in their small convoy they’d just put together were listening.

      Barry’s Cajun temper was boiling over.

      “Might be a setup.” A voice came through the speaker. “You want some company?”

      “I’d appreciate it. I’m called the Dog.”

      “They call me Ready. Like in ready to go.”

      “I’m Frenchy.” Another voice came in. “You boys can deal me in on this, too. I seen it go down. That four-wheeler’s just lookin’ for trouble.”

      Barry saw the car’s turn signals flash on. “Then here we go, boys.”

      “We sure are a long way from nowhere,” Ready radioed. “I ain’t seen nothing but jackrabbits in an hour.”

      The drivers slowed and headed down the ramp. Barry cut to the right, the other rigs following. They drove for several miles. Nothing. Barry grabbed his mike.

      “I think he was all mouth, boys. We’re all alone out here.

      “Let’s find a place to turn around. Damn, this desert is spooky at night.”

      The big rigs moved slowly up the road, Barry leading the way, looking for a place to turn around. He was getting a hard knot of suspicion in the pit of his stomach. He tried to remember just where that car had come from. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

      And the four-wheeler who’d been crowding him on Barry’s blind side—where had it gone?

      The more he thought about it, the more he didn’t like it.

      It smelled of setup.

      But why would anybody go to all that trouble to hijack a load of chicken livers?

      Barry grabbed his mike and said, “Don’t roll down your windows, boys. Lock your doors. I got a bad feeling about this.”

      “I hear that,” Frenchy radioed back. “What you haulin’, Dog?”

      “Frozen chicken livers. You?”

      “Disposable diapers. Ready?”

      “Tools.” He laughed. “I reckon somebody could use the tools to break open the boxes of chicken livers and the diapers for napkins. That pretty well lets out any thought of hijack, don‘t it.”

      “Unless they got us mixed up with somebody else,” Barry radioed.

      “And bear in mind whoever set us up is listenin’ to every damn word we’re sayin’,” Frenchy reminded them.

      “Buildings up ahead,” Barry told his unknown friends. “Probably be a place to turn around.”

      The old road had deteriorated to the point of being nonexistent. The buildings had been long-abandoned; what remained were crumbling ruins, silent reminders of something that had failed.

      “See them tire tracks off to the west?” Frenchy asked. “A lot of them. I don’t like this, boys.”

      “Trucks left those tracks,” Ready said. “A lot of trucks. I think, boys, we got ourselves into something that we don’t want to be in.”

      Barry glanced in his mirrors. He cursed. “Lights coming up fast behind us.”

      “We try to turn around in that sand and we’re gonna be here for the duration,” Ready hollered.

      “You boys are about to see something,” Barry radioed. “And for your sake, you better forget you ever saw it.”

      Barry reached behind him, into a cargo bag, and lifted out an Uzi SMG.

      The three-rig convoy had stopped on the broken and rutted old road.

      “What are you talkin’ about, Dog?” Frenchy called.

      Barry jacked a round into the Uzi and stuck several full clips behind his belt just as the two pickup trucks behind them came to a sliding stop, men pouring out of the cabs.

      The men were all armed with shotguns and pistols.

      “Get out of them trucks and keep your hands in sight!” a man yelled. He held in his hands what looked to Barry to be a 9mm pistol.

      Barry lowered his window and gave the man a short burst from the Uzi. The 9mm slugs knocked the man spinning around in the New Mexico sand. When his macabre death-dance had concluded, he fell sprawling to the sand.

      Still sitting in the cab of his Kenworth, Barry steadied the Uzi and emptied the clip into the line of armed men, knocking most of them sprawling. While he was sliding in a fresh clip, two men ran to a pickup truck and spun away, heading up the broken old road, away from the Interstate.

      Barry climbed down from his cab and cautiously walked over to the staggered row of dead and dying and seriously hurt would-be hijackers.

      Ready and Frenchy climbed down, both of them wearing shocked looks, and joined Barry.

      “Holy bejesus, Dog!” Ready blurted. “You play for keeps don’t you?”

      “Better them than us, wouldn’t you say?” He looked at the man under the full hunter’s moon that illuminated the desert

      “The