Crimson Highway by David Wickenhauser (i can read with my eyes shut txt) 📕

“My father was killed. Fifteen years ago. It’s why my uncle is crazy. And why he hates truck drivers.”

Whoo boy, Hugh thought. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning, with your father.”

“OK,” Jenny said. “It started fifteen years ago.”

Chapter Eight

Jenny McDonald, a cute, pert, happy little seven-year-old girl, adored her father. Her mother had died just the previous year giving birth to her little brother, Jimmy, who was born when Jenny was six years old. So, now, besides her brother, her father Sam was all she had.

Her father, in turn, loved her and doted on her.

But, one day when she was seven, her father went away, “on business,” and never came back. Her dad’s brother Adam showed up, explaining that her dad had died, and that he was going to take care of her and her brother.

Jenny clearly remembers her uncle that day, because Adam looked like he had been in a fight, and that he had gotten the worst of it.

Through the years, Adam was away a lot, “on business,” so it was left to Jenny to help raise little Jimmy. As time went on, she noticed that her uncle’s periods when he would sink into bad moods were more frequent, and were becoming increasingly worse.

On top of that, he was a heavy drinker, especially when his buddies came over. The Gang of Four, they called themselves. “Used to be our Gang of Five!” he would spit out angrily during the times of his foul moods.

Her uncle had never told her what kept him away from home all those times.

Then one dark day, when Jenny was about fourteen years old, her uncle was in a particularly foul mood, and he told her what had happened to her father.

He admitted to her that the five of them were in the business of hijacking trucks. “We would do three or four a year, but that was all we needed to do, because the payoff was great,” It was relatively easy to do, he told her, because they had a “system.”

“And it worked just fine until the day that your father was murdered!” he shouted, waving his arms around.

He told her they were at a truck stop south of Bakersfield—Wheeler Ridge, actually. They had cornered a driver who they had picked out to be their next victim. “And, everything was going as planned until, from nowhere, somebody else jumped into the fight,” he told her.

Her uncle became extremely agitated at this point, barely able to spit out the words.

“Jenny, this guy was a monster!” she remembers her uncle saying. “A killing-machine monster!”

Adam said he had never seen anything like it. “He just charged into the fight, and beat the shit out of us!”

“All of you?" young Jenny asked. "What about my dad?”

“That’s the worst of it,” her uncle answered. “I was the next to the last to go down, but I stayed conscious long enough to see what happened.”

“Tell me!” Jenny shouted.

“Your dad was the last man standing. This monster and the other guy attacked him—ganged up on him, like cowards, you know!” he exclaimed, the absolute irony of this statement lost on him.

“They took him down, but before he fell, this monster hit him in the face with his bare hand … like this,” he said, demonstrating by striking out at Jenny with the heel of his hand, stopping just short of her face.

“He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The medic said the blow caused a bone fragment from his nose to get shoved up into his brain, killing him.”

Adam told Jenny that he and his buddies all suffered permanent injuries because of this fight, but nothing as bad as her dad did. He told her that the final blow delivered by this “monster” was unnecessary, and amounted to murder.

Jenny took all this in without uttering a word. But her uncle’s story about her father left its mark on her psyche.

Shortly after she turned fifteen, the four got caught, and were sent to prison. Jenny and Jimmy were sent to live in foster homes, so she only infrequently saw the uncle who had raised them. But, she never lost her abiding hatred for the man who had taken her father’s life. In fact, she had a deep hatred for all truck drivers in general.

The years went by, and the hatred for truck drivers that her uncle and his buddies had in themselves also grew even stronger in Jenny like a festering tumor. She never forgot how much she had loved her dad, and how much he had loved her. She resented the loss of her father all these years, and had built up an abiding hatred for the man—the monster—who had done this to her dad, and to her and her brother.

She had nightmares about the man who had killed her dad by piercing his brain with one blow from the heel of his hand.

That’s why, many years later, when she was twenty-two years old, and her uncle and his buddies had been released from prison, she had agreed to help them in their hijacking schemes.

“You see,” she told Hugh, “that Susanville hijacking was them. That was one of their first ones since getting out, and it didn’t work out too well for them. So they decided that they needed a new system. They figured if they could get somebody who could work it from the inside they could be more successful.”

“And that's where you came in,” Hugh said.

“To be honest, I really didn’t want to do it, but my uncle told me the story all over again about how my dad was killed, and I just got madder and madder,” she said.

“But when I tried to get out of it because I saw how crazy my uncle was acting,