ONE
LEXIE
The trucker was six-four, two-sixty, and drunk enough that his aim was off by about a foot.
His fist sailed past Billy Hancock's jaw and connected with the napkin dispenser instead, sending it flying off the counter in a burst of chrome and paper. Billy, who'd been coming in every Thursday night for eight years, shoved his stool back and stood up with the slow, deliberate calm of a man who'd been in enough bar fights to know which ones were worth finishing.
"Sit down, Billy."
Both of them looked at me.
I was behind the counter with a coffee pot in one hand, a dishrag over my shoulder, and I weighed about a hundred and forty pounds less than the trucker, which meant I had to make up the difference in tone.
"And you." I pointed the coffee pot at the trucker. "Out."
He swayed. His eyes went from me to the coffee pot and back again. Tried to figure out whether I was a threat or a joke and I could see him settling on joke, like they always did. A woman, smaller than him, what was I going to do about it?
"Lady, I'm not going anywhere until this piece of shit apologizes for..."
"He's not apologizing. You're leaving. You've got about ten seconds before I call the sheriff's office and your CDL becomes a conversation, and I promise you the conversation won't go well."
His mouth opened. I held up a hand.
"Nine."
He left. Slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windows, kicked the gravel getting to his rig, peeled out of the lot with more diesel smoke than dignity. His taillights disappeared down the highway, set the coffee pot down, and started picking up napkins.
"You okay, Billy?"
"Fine." He righted his stool. Sat back down. Grinned at me like he did every time I ran someone off. "You're going to get yourself killed one of these days, Lex."
"Maybe. But not tonight."
He laughed. I poured him a fresh cup and went to call the sheriff to let him know the guy in the rig had too much to drink and needs to be off the road. I then went back to work like nothing had happened.
That was my life. This was Lane's, the truck stop my grandparents built in 1974 on the highway that ran along the far side of Forsaken, Montana. Twenty-four hours, seven days, fifty years of truckers, drifters, families on road trips, and every kind of person the highway brought through. My grandmother taught me how to run a register before I could reach the counter without a stool. My grandfather taught me how to read a room, how to spot the trouble before they got loud, how to talk down a fight without raising my voice. When they died within six months of each other, they left me the building, the business, and a set of skills that had nothing to do with a degree and everything to do with knowing that a woman who runs a truck stop alone has to be harder than anything that walks through her door.
I was twenty-nine and I'd been running Lane's solo for four years. I could change the fryer oil, fix the ice machine, balance the books, and remove a man twice my size from the premises without breaking a sweat or a nail. The regulars knew me. The truckers on the long haul between Billings and the coast knew me. The town knew me, or knew of me, the Lane girl out on the highway, tough as her granddad and twice as stubborn.
I was good at my life. I was proud of it, this building with its chrome stools, its wide windows, and its neon sign that hummed in the dark. The smell of coffee, grease, and cold highway air. The sound of rigs in the lot and the jukebox that only played songs my grandmother had loaded thirty years ago and I didn’t have the heart to change. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't easy, and some nights the loneliness hit so hard I could taste it, but it was mine.
But then the Jackals came.
The first time, I didn't think much of it. Bikers came through all the time. A group of four, leather cuts with a patch I didn't recognize, ordering coffee, eating burgers, paying cash. Polite enough. Loud, as men in groups always were, but nothing I couldn't handle.
The second time, a week later, there were six of them. They took the booth in the back corner. Two of them went outside and stood by the trucks in the lot and something in their posture told me they weren't admiring the view. A man I'd never seen before pulled in driving a pickup with out-of-state plates. He went to the booth, sat down, and left twenty minutes later. No food, no coffee. Just business.
The third time, I understood.
They weren't passing through. They were setting up. My truck stop, with its steady stream of traffic, its location on the far highway, and its single woman behind the counter who wasn't connected to anyone who might push back, was exactlywhat they needed. A waystation. A place to meet, to exchange whatever they were exchanging, to do their business in the open because nothing looked more innocent than a couple of bikes in a truck stop parking lot.
I told them to leave.
I waited until the lot was mostly empty, walked up to the table where three of them were sitting with their boots on my vinyl seats and their coffee gone cold, and I told them I knew what they were doing and I wanted them gone. I said it like I'd said it to a thousand drunks and troublemakers, calm, clear, with the certainty of a woman standing on ground she'd inherited and intended to keep.
The one in the middle looked at me. He was older than the others, thicker, with a beard that had gone gray and eyes that held nothing behind them. No anger, no threat. Just an emptiness that looked through me like I was weather. Like I was a thing that was happening near him and he hadn't decided yet whether to wait it out or move.
He didn't say anything. He finished his coffee, put a twenty on the table, and walked out.