Leaving his steak uneaten, he refilled his coffee thermos, left a twenty on the table to pay his seven-dollar bill, and slipped out quietly, tipping his hat to an older couple who’d just walked in. He walked out accompanied by the signature tap of his walking cane on concrete—a shrapnel wound that had never healed.
He gassed up his truck and paid for his diesel at the register, along with four packs of NoDoz, then went into the restroom and splashed cold water on his face. The police, watching the diner video surveillance some forty-eight hours later, would watch in silence as Jake did twenty jumping jacks and just as many push-ups before he climbed up into his cab. In the last two and a half days, he had driven from Arizona to Texas and finally to Mississippi, where he’d picked up a tanker of fuel en route to Miami. He had tried to make it home for his sixtieth birthday party, but his body just gave out. Each eyelid weighed a thousand pounds. With little more than a hundred miles to go, he’d called to tell Allie that he’d already fallen asleep twice and he was sorry he couldn’t push through.
She had not taken the news well.
He eyed the motel but her echo was still ringing. He knew his absence would sting her.
So amiable Jake Gibson climbed up and put the hammer down. It would be his last time.
Jake made his way south to Highway 98. Hugged the coastline, eventually passing through Mexico Beach en route to Apalachicola.
At Highway 30E he turned west. Seven miles to the cradle of Allie’s arms. He wound up the eighteen-wheeler and shifted through each of the ten gears. Though he’d driven the road hundreds of times, no one really knows why he was going so fast or why he ignored the flashing yellow lights and seven sets of speed ripples across the narrow road. Anyone with his experience knew that a rig going that fast with that much mass and inertia could never make the turn. State highway patrol estimated the tanker was traveling in excess of a hundred and ten when 30E made its hard right heading north. It is here, at the narrowest point of the peninsula, where the road comes closest to the ocean. To separate the two, highway crews had amassed mounds of Volkswagen-sized granite rocks just to the left of the highway. Hundreds of boulders, each weighing several tons, stacked at jagged angles, one on top of another, stood thirty feet wide and some twenty feet high. An impenetrable wall to prevent the Gulf from encroaching on the road and those on the road from venturing into the ocean. “The rocks” was a favorite locale for lovers sipping wine. Hand in hand they’d scale the boulders and perch with the pelicans while the sun dropped off the side of the earth and bled crimson into the Gulf.
The Great Wall of Cape San Blas had survived many a hurricane and hundreds of thousands of tourists walking its beach.
NO ONE REALLY KNOWS when Jake Gibson fell asleep. Only that he did. Just before ten p.m. the Peterbilt T-boned the wall, pile-driving the nose of the rig into the rocks with all the steam and energy of the Titanic. When the rocks ripped open the tanker just a few feet behind Jake, the explosion was heard and felt thirty miles away in Apalachicola, and the flash was seen as far away as Tallahassee—a hundred miles distant. Alarms sounded and fire crews and law enforcement personnel were dispatched, but given the heat they were relegated to shutting down the highway from eight football fields away. No one in or out. All they could do was watch it burn.
Allie was sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall hunkered over a fifth of Jack. Tearstained and tear-strained. From three miles away she saw the flash off the white subway tile wall. When she saw the fireball, she knew.
The several-thousand-degree heat was so intense that Allie—along with all the partygoers—were forced to stand outside the half-mile barrier and helplessly inhale the smell of burning rubber. They did this throughout the night. By early morning the fire had spent its fury, allowing the water trucks to move in. By then not much was left. A few steel beams. One wheel had been blown off and rolled a quarter mile into the marsh. The back end of the tank looked like a soda can ripped in two. At the blast site, the only thing that remained was a scorched spot on the highway.
Closed-circuit television cameras positioned on the flashing light poles a mile before the curve recorded Jake at the wheel. Facial recognition software, as well as Allie’s own viewing of the recording, proved that faithful Jake Gibson with his characteristic oiled ball cap was driving the truck and shifting gears as it ventured north on 30E.
No part of Jake Gibson was ever found.
Not a belt buckle. Not a heel of his boot. Not his titanium watch. Not his platinum wedding ring. Not his teeth. Not the bronzed head of his walking cane. Like much of the truck, Jake had been vaporized. The horrific nature of his death led to a lot of speculating. Theories abounded. The most commonly believed was that Jake fell asleep long before the turn, slumping forward, thereby pressing his bad leg and portly weight forward. This is their only justification for the unjustifiable speed. Second is the suggestion that four days of caffeine overdosing exploded Jake’s heart and he was dead long before the turn—also causing him to slump forward. The least whispered but still quite possible was the notion that Jake had an aneurysm, thereby producing the same result. No one really knows. All they knew with certainty was that he went out with a bang so violent that it registered on military satellites, bringing in the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, who both raised eyebrows at the enormity of the blast area. “Shame.”
With the site surrounded in yellow tape and flashing lights, it was still too hot to approach. Firemen said it’d take a week to cool off the core and allow anyone near the blast site. Onlookers shook their heads, thought of Allie, and muttered in their best backstabbing whisper, “That woman is cursed. Everything she touches dies.”
Rescue and coast guard crews searched the ocean and the shoreline throughout the night. They thought maybe if Jake had been thrown through the windshield at that speed, his body would have shot out across the rocks and into the ocean on the other side, where there’s a known rip tide. If so, he’d have been sucked out to sea.
Like everything else, the search turned up nothing. And like everything else, each failed search reinforced the excruciating notion that Jake died a horrible, painful death.
The weight of this on Allie was crushing. Jake, the affable husband who simply worked hard enough to put food on the table and laughter in his wife’s heart, was not coming back. Ever. The last year or two or even three had not been easy. He had worked more than he’d been at home, staying gone weeks at a time, months even. Allie knew what people thought . . . that she was just tough to live with.
She was left to plan the funeral and decide what to put in the box. But every time she tried to tell his memory that she was sorry, she was met with the haunting and deafening echo that the final three words she spoke to Jake were not “I love you.” Instead, her last words to him had been spoken in a spit-filled tirade of anger.
And for those words, there was no remedy.
2
Five hundred sixty-five miles northeast of Cape San Blas on the shoulders of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, Juan Pedro Perez lit a cigarette. His knuckles were scarred, as was his forehead, and beneath his shirt were twenty more. He had long prized his ability with a knife, but his education came at a cost. Born in Juarez, he’d first walked across the border when he was six, and most of that distance he’d carried his sister. Now thirty, he’d lost count of his crossings. Raised in the fields, and tired of endless hours in the sun and countless unmet expectations, he’d robbed a border farmer, taken his gun, and learned to use it. Soon, he was hiring it out. A drug runner with a guerrilla fighter’s pedigree. Such talent and disregard got him noticed. Those atop the food chain took him under their wing, making him well connected. While hunted, he was also protected. Pretty soon he brokered his own power.