Read a Little

Chapter One

            Lance crouched at the edge of the highway chewing on his lower lip, his truck bleeding crimson behind him. Glancing back at the gradually expanding puddle of cherry goo under his truck, he shook his head and thrust his hands in his cargo shorts.

            Not ten minutes before, just on the outskirts of Nevada, he had felt his transmission slip. It had heightened his adolescent-car-buff senses to the point that found him ignoring the posted freeway signs. He made an illegal U-turn on the gravel turnaround normally used by the highway patrol, emergency vehicles and bored teenagers. His initial plan was to limp back to Wendover, and check out his 4Runner, but the sudden loss of engine power indicated otherwise. Pulling hard and to the right, he settled his Runner on the shoulder of I-80.

            The heavy red fluid had drizzled out, leaving a trail down the westbound lane of I-80 as far as the eye could see. Now it just oozed—the last drops signaling the imminent death of a recently installed transmission. A passing good Samaritan had let him use their cell phone to call for help. The tow truck would be another 30 minutes.

            Lance looked north and surveyed the salt encrusted desert before him. He looked south and saw two trains slowly coming toward each other on the other side of the freeway.

            The train from the east looked to be about a mile long and was loaded with auto carriers; the train coming out of Wendover was shorter and looked like an Amtrak.

            Hum, he thought randomly, remembering that series of math questions he hated so much: If a train leaves Salt Lake City heading west at 45 miles per hour and a train leaves Wendover heading east at 35 miles per hour, how long would it take before the tow truck driver showed up to overcharge him on his way back to town? He had always had a tough time with those problems.

            He looked back to the north; the fragile sea of salt shoreline was littered with flotsam from previous breakdowns: brown beer bottles, black tire shards, cigarette butts and a too-fresh-to-inspect disposable diaper. The acrid smell of urine assaulted his nose so he walked out onto the glistening white edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats, the doplered sound of the trains behind him. He didn’t worry about someone stealing his car; at this point, no one but a tow-truck driver could.

            Near the shoreline of this virtual sea, the salt crunched and buckled under his slim, but muscular frame. Twenty feet in, the salt softened due to recent rains and stuck to the bottom of his Sketchers. One hundred feet in, the salt was so soft and malleable he could scoop it up and mold it into soft white saltballs—which he did.

            Lance amused himself for a while with an imaginary saltball fight. As he crouched down, dipping into the soft salt to make another ball, his fingers touched something hard and metallic. He instinctively pulled his hand out. Then, carefully, he pushed his long slender fingers back into the depths of the salt field and felt around for what he had touched. His middle finger bumped it first. His brows met in the center of his face, cornflower blue eyes wandering up and to the right as he pondered what he was feeling. He cautiously wiggled his whole hand around the object. It was tangled in plastic, but even so, he could tell the shape of the gun before he pulled it from its sodium grave.

            Slowly he retrieved the metal object from the salt and muck of the earth. Lifting the weapon gently out, a slim silver chain that was attached pulled up the wet salt in a line that snaked for a short distance. A pair of dog tags popped out of the sand and arched freely upon the end of the chain into the air.

            The plastic baggie covering the gun had a few holes in it. Salt had seeped in, eating away part of the metallic finish, eroding the gun’s outside bluing, though not enough to hide the distinctive shape of a semi-automatic handgun. He wrestled with the thin baggie, and it shredded as it pulled away from the gun. Turning the gun over a few times, he inspected it. Tentatively, he pressed the magazine release and the magazine failed to eject. He grabbed at the magazine and pressed the button again while he pulled at it. It came out under protest. Stamped on the back of the slide was 92F—a Berretta. Cocking the hammer, he gently pulled back the slide and looked in the chamber. Pushing his Oakley’s off the bridge of his nose so he could see better, he squinted from the reflected sun. He searched for the distinctive brass of a round. There was none.

            Fingering the salt encrusted dog tags next, he tried knocking off the dirt and crud to read a name, but the naturally occurring element had crystallized on the silver metal and it would take more than a simple fingernail scratch to reveal the original owner’s identity.

            He pulled up his 6’1” frame and yawned while stretching his sun freckled arms backward and skyward, the chain dangling from the hand that held the gun. Replacing his sunglasses, he considered turning the items in to the police, but slowly shook his head toward the hills above Wendover. He bent down and neatly reburied the plastic bag—his answer to being ecologically concerned. After closing the slide and de-cocking the hammer, he shoved the gun and tags in the side pocket of his cargo shorts and walked back toward his truck.

            Next to his Runner, he stomped his feet to get the sticky salt off his shoes. He left crusty white sneaker prints on the asphalt. As he scraped the last of the salt off his shoes, Tip of the Lake Towing pulled up.

. . .