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

“I tried doing a search for you on the Internet—you know, Google, Facebook, and such. But, I didn’t find anything that I could identify as you.”

“That’s because I never have gone in for all that social networking stuff,” she said. “I’m pretty low-tech that way.”

 “In retrospect,” Hugh offered by way of trying to defuse the issue, “there was no harm done. Was there?”

“Yes, there was.” Jenny said. “The first time I heard you say, ‘Miss McDonald,’ was at that wild horse truck stop, remember?”

Hugh nodded, remembering regretting his mistake at the time.

“That was a trust thing,” she explained. “You were keeping something from me.”

Hugh nodded again.

“Then, it all came to a head when I overheard you talking to James on your cell phone at that Bakersfield truck stop. You had destroyed any shred of trust there could ever be between us. I hated you, and only wanted to get away from you.”

Hugh appreciated her honesty, and was glad they were finally talking about it. But, her words hurt him deeply.

“Yet, you are here now. You kissed me,” Hugh reminded her.

“Wrong, big boy. You kissed me,” Jenny replied.

“But, you enjoyed it,” Hugh insisted.

“Right you are, and I’d enjoy doing it again,” she said, blushing slightly.

Take it slow, Hugh had to remind himself.

“OK, so all I need to clear up right now is what happened after Bakersfield,” Hugh said. “Let me take a stab at it.”

He told her his thinking that she had gone running back to her uncle because of what she had overheard when he had been talking to James. He said he believed that she hadn’t known what her uncle was doing when he had placed the cell phone in Hugh’s truck as a beacon pointing them right to where Hugh was.

Hugh said he believed now that she had no idea they were going to kill him at that last foiled hijacking, but that she did aid and abet their attempt to hijack his truck.

At that, Jenny nodded guiltily. “I’m really sorry, Hugh.”

Hugh continued. He admitted that cutting him loose had definitely been in her favor, and that there hadn’t been any overt acts against him ever since that time.

“That about cover it?” he asked her.

Jenny nodded.

“One last thing,” Hugh said.

“Yes?” Jenny replied.

“Your father. Are we OK with that? For once, and for all?”

Jenny nodded again. “Yes, Hugh. I realize now that you didn’t have any choice, and that my father was just hanging with the wrong crowd. If it hadn’t been you, it would eventually have been someone else.”

“And, as for my part,” Hugh said. “I am deeply sorry for what I did to your father … and those others, too. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid anything like that happening again.”

“I know, Hugh. It’s all over with. I don’t think we need to worry about it anymore.”

“One last thing. I apologize for what I did, and I am asking you to forgive me,” Hugh said.

“I forgive you, Hugh.”

Hugh and Jenny went upstairs—Jenny to change clothes in her room, and Hugh to do a chore in his bedroom.

He took Jenny’s cell phone off of his nightstand, and turned it on. After it had finished booting up, he located the app that Mary had found earlier. He pressed and held his fingertip down on the icon until a context-sensitive menu popped up.

He wanted to disable that tracking feature so he could leave the phone with Jenny.

He tapped the “uninstall” item on the menu, and watched the hated, tattletale app go away. Too clever by far, Hugh thought, concerning Jenny’s uncle.

He figured he had time to hasten away from the ranch before the uncle could muster his resources and make the drive all the way up from Bakersfield to almost the Canadian border to try to intercept Hugh.

That would take, what? a good eighteen or nineteen hours to do. That’s if the uncle had dropped everything, and had left the minute he got done talking to Hugh. Hugh knew that wasn’t very likely. So Hugh expected to be long gone on the road to Spokane before the uncle could get anywhere near him.

Furthermore, Hugh would leave word with his parents about his plans. If the uncle decided to try coming onto the ranch to make a grab for Jenny he’d find himself tangling with a couple of very angry, Idaho-reared, Hugh-sized protectors.

Unfortunately, Hugh had guessed wrong. Unknown to him, her uncle and his remaining partner in crime had not returned to Bakersfield from the failed Reno hijacking. They had buried their dead partner in the desert, which was ironic because that was the fate that they had planned for Hugh.

Then, they had followed the tracking device as far as Boise, where they had lost the signal when the battery got used up. They had waited there in a cheap motel hoping that someone would find the phone and charge it up.

The wait had been advantageous for them, since it had given them a chance to heal up from their most recent encounter with the hated truck driver. All they had to do was wait for the app to come up, and to pinpoint where Hugh was.

That’s exactly what happened. So even as Hugh was making his plans to leave the next day, Hugh’s uncle and his friend were within a couple of hours of Sandpoint, and would be ready to discretely follow Hugh’s truck whenever it left his parents’ ranch.

Hugh heard a knock at his door.

“Come in,” he yelled to whomever it was.

It was Jenny.

“Mary and I are going to ride. Would you like to join us?” Jenny asked.

“No thank you. Not this time. I’d like to visit with my mom for a bit,” he told her, grateful that she