I’m up at five a.m. after my first good night’s sleep in three days—thank you, Petro truck stop. Mike’s alarm won’t go off for another thirty minutes, so I slink down from my bunk, split the magnetic mesh-curtain closure, and step into the front of the tractor to dress in the dark. Having learned my lesson from the previous early-morning searches for clothes and shoes, I’ve already laid out today’s wardrobe on top of my duffel bag. It’s all part of the choreographed routine when two people occupy a rig.
Mike and I planned last night how we’ll maximize efficiency this morning. It’s my job to get the coffee—there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts inside the food court. Mike isn’t a regular coffee drinker, but he tells me he’ll need the caffeine to make today’s drive. He likes his jolt in the form of a large iced vanilla-flavored concoction—light and sweet. I’m a purist—medium size and black. While I get the coffee, Mike will cook a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs with turkey, peppers, and mushrooms.
It’s frosty in the truck even with the heat on. There’s a light mist of rain spotting the windshield. I layer my hoodie over my flannel shirt, pull on my down vest, and top it off with my black American flag trucker’s cap. Cold drizzle won’t deter me from the two-hundred-yard walk through the rows of slumbering, rumbling semis and into the welcoming warmth of the Petro. This is also my chance to brush my teeth over a real sink, so I shove my toothbrush and toothpaste into my vest pocket. Hot coffee awaits.
When I return, Mike is awake, dressed, and cooking up a skillet full of eggs. It looks delicious and smells magnificent. As I watch, turned sideways in the passenger seat, Mike scoops the steaming-hot scramble onto a paper plate and hands it to me. I’ll wipe down the skillet once it’s cooled and we’re on our way. Mike pours his eggs into a big red Solo cup so he can eat while driving, his left hand on the wheel, his right hand wrapped around the cup.
We roll out of the lot and begin a three-and-a-half-hour jaunt up 41 from Racine to Antigo, Wisconsin. It’s funny how quickly my concept of what a long drive is has changed. Three and a half hours? Meh.
With plenty of time to talk, Mike shares his vision for his future.
“My plan is to buy my own truck, drive it for a couple of years, buy another truck, put somebody in it, buy another one. Maybe own four or five trucks. Make some money, buy some real estate, get married, have kids.”
That order is important to Mike.
“These truckers who have wives and kids—they need to find a different career.”
Dale Weaver didn’t have that kind of insight when he was Mike’s age.
When Dale worked for Daily Express, the freight was up east, and Dale lived in Texas. He wasn’t home much. Dale had been married three times—and never longer than three years.
“Trucking and wives don’t work. Wives want you home, but that truck isn’t making a dime parked in the backyard. I’m a loner—have been all my life. My family was just five separate individuals under one roof—we were not close. It just doesn’t work. Women think they’re going to change you, or they don’t realize how lonely it’s really going to be.”
Dale had a lady friend whom he lived with in his modular home in Glendale. But when Dale retired, she decided to move about a hundred miles away into a house she’d inherited. “We’re both happier that way.”
I’m concerned about Mike’s lack of health insurance. Mike is an independent contractor, so he doesn’t get the kind of benefits a trucker employed by a big company gets. He is required to pay $119 a month through his employer for on-the-job coverage for work-related injuries. As I get to know Mike, my gut tells me that if that OTJ injury coverage weren’t mandated, he wouldn’t have it. I ask Mike what happens if he gets appendicitis or a kidney stone or breaks his ankle back home.
“I’ll just figure it out. I keep money in the bank for such things. And I would probably hit up family members for help, like I did recently when I needed a root canal.”
There’s a CB radio mounted over Mike’s head, and I note that it hasn’t squawked once yet. That’s because it isn’t turned on. Mike uses it mostly in winter for traffic and weather updates from other drivers. It cost him forty dollars—the cheapest one he could find. There’s a built-in antenna in the new Volvo, so the CB is just a plug-and-play unit. Mike turns on his CB for me, but it is either not cooperating or no one out there is talking.
The radio silence is a stark contrast to the near constant chatter of truckers during the mid-1970s through much of the 1980s. By the 1970s, CBs were ubiquitous in truck cabs, but they date back decades prior.1 The armed forces were the first to embrace two-way citizens band radios. Then oil-field hands adopted them, followed by all manner of workers who suddenly just had to have their radios within arm’s reach. Smaller, less expensive CBs became available in the 1960s, and when the price of gasoline spiked and fuel was scarce during the 1973 oil embargo, truckers started squawking over the air when they spotted the rare open gas station or, even rarer, cheap gas. It didn’t hurt that truckers also took great pleasure in tipping each other off about state troopers—Smokeys—up ahead.
The resolution of the oil embargo didn’t stop truckers’ affection for their radios. In fact, the government added even more channels to make room for all the drivers who now knew one another by their handles—nicknames like Snake and Mongoose—and passed the time exchanging road stories, diner reviews, and family updates like members of an interstate coffee klatch.
Today, with apps and social media, digital movies, cell phones, and headsets, it’s hard to discern the sense of a collaborative community of truckers just from listening to the airwaves.
Mike observes that lots of truckers pass the time on long hauls by watching movies while they drive. The next time a big rig sways into my lane, I’ll wonder if the driver is caught up in a horror flick or an action film. Many truckers also listen to satellite radio, some all day.
But Mike chooses to chat on the phone. He stays in almost constant communication with buddies, family members, dispatchers, the boss man, Japanese car-parts sellers—all on his phone headset. During one conversation, I overhear Mike, the former kitchen ace, converse dreamily about the pluses and minuses of pistachios in honey-soaked baklava. On the other end of the culinary call is Mike’s older brother, who lives in Thailand. Mike signs off the call with some brotherly affection: “I love you, man.”
All this time on the phone makes it unlikely that Mike—or another trucker who chats this much—is a killer. His cell phone would constantly ping off the nearest towers and eventually be traced to the crime scene.
I asked old Dale Weaver how he’d passed the time through the years. Since he wasn’t much of a talker, he chose to immerse himself in books on tape to pass the endless hours on the road. I heard his love for books in his voice.
“There’s no way for me to even estimate how many books on tape I’ve listened to over the years. If you get a good book and a great reader, you don’t even want to stop for a piss.”
Now that’s the kind of book review that I want.
I listen as Mike, on the phone, coaches newer drivers who call him with their crises of the moment. While I am with him, Mike fields a call about a near jackknife incident.
Flatbeds don’t handle tight turns or U-turns as well as dry vans do. In fact, they don’t really handle them at all—they jackknife. Flatbeds have split axles, which make those turns tough on the axles and the tires. That why Mike makes extra-wide turns. It strikes me how very wide a radius we need to execute what seems like a relatively easy turn. We use the whole road. That often means waiting agonizingly long times for traffic to clear in all directions, especially in the lanes alongside us, so we don’t take out a car or two when we swing wide right in order to turn left.
Mike takes a call from a newer trucker who needs advice about a log violation. He tells Mike he hadn’t paid attention to his log indicator that displayed the time remaining until a mandatory break. When Mike’s friend exceeded the maximum eight hours of driving without a break, his logbook flashed and alerted him and recorded a violation.
“What do I do? I have a violation now?”
Mike calms his colleague and explains that the violation will remain in his log for only seven days. If there is no other violation of any kind—if he doesn’t get pulled over, inspected, and dinged for anything else—the break-time violation will vaporize. Of course, this means he must ride clean and pristine for the next week—not a scenario for the fainthearted or angst-ridden.
Inspections come in three varieties. Level three is a low-level check—they check your logbook and license. For level two, they look at your tires and your load and take a walk around your rig. Level one is like a proctologist’s probe. The inspectors open your hood, hook up to your computers, and check your fluid levels.
Mike sees this as a teachable moment for the less experienced trucker. He tells him that there are ways to minimize the odds of being written up for something on an inspection and thereby lower the chances of activating the break-time breach that silently lurks in the log. A trucker can pay a mechanic at a truck stop ten bucks to check the air on each tire and air up to the correct PSI. This can avert the disaster of being stopped and cited for improper tire pressure during a DOT inspection. A long-hauler might even pay a mechanic to conduct the equivalent of a level one, two, or three DOT inspection and correct whatever needs to be fixed. This brings you the peace of mind of knowing you would pass if the real thing happened, that you won’t cost your company a ding and some money and get a mark on your own record.
But of course, a preemptive inspection costs not only money but valuable time on the road. There’s always a cost-benefit analysis to the long haul. Your other option is to just cross your fingers and “risk it for the biscuit.”
After spending so much time poring over pages of morbid details of murder and mayhem committed by serial-killer truckers, I find it almost refreshing to listen to a long-hauler anxious about getting in trouble for forgetting to take a break.
Mike gets another call from a buddy who needs a tutorial on the appropriate use of a log entry known as adverse conditions. I listen and learn as Mike explains that this category of log entry is often abused. It’s a way drivers make up for lost time and drive longer than allowed—they claim, falsely, that really bad weather or almost totally stalled traffic caused them to drive much slower.
Hitting the adverse conditions entry subtracts drive time from the daily maximum hours for the duration of the conditions. But an inspector or trooper who sees that log entry can easily refute it. “Hey, there was no rainstorm yesterday.” Or “There was no blizzard this morning.” Or “There was no hour-long traffic jam last night.”
Misusing it is cheating, Mike tells his colleague.
In just the single week I spend with Mike on the road, we experience multiple near misses with other vehicles. From my passenger-seat perch, I watch in alarm as clueless automobile drivers think nothing of quickly cutting in front of us, where they vanish from view somewhere in the black hole below our grille. There are those who, thinking they possess superpowers, attempt to pass us on the right just as they emerge from an entrance ramp, trying desperately to match the full speed we’ve already committed to.
Mike makes use of his horn for various levels of warning. There is the happy horn: a light soprano pitch that says, Go ahead, I’m letting you in the lane, or acknowledges a waving kid in a passing car. Then there’s the heavy horn, a basso profundo that rattles internal organs. That’s the sound reserved for imminent threat to life and limb. It works, at least during our week together. But Mike, like other truckers, has some harrowing scenes permanently residing in his memory. I ask him to share what he can.
Mike has to prepare himself to tell me this story; there’s a deep breath involved.
“I was a brand-new driver. It’s a rural country roadway in Kentucky, tiny homes on either side. It’s after dark and there’s a deluge of rain, almost no visibility. In my rearview mirror, I see a GMC Yukon racing up from behind me. It’s going way too fast. I’m like, ‘Is this guy out of his mind?’”
The “big, stupid SUV”—as Mike calls it—moves to pass Mike on the left. The driver is going to cross a double solid yellow line, and he can’t see what’s about to happen. But Mike sees. Mike knows, and he is helpless to stop it. The Yukon slams head-on, at full speed, into a much smaller oncoming car. It happens in a split second, but to Mike, it plays out as if it’s a slow-motion scene in a horror flick. Before Mike fully registers the tragedy he just witnessed, he is many yards past the accident, and he is a wreck himself. His body shakes as he tries to control his rig. Questions surge into his mind: Should I stop? Could I even stop my truck now in this downpour? How long would it take me? Are there cars on my tail that will hit me if I start applying the brakes? Can those cars stop before they hit me? Would that cause another accident? What help can I offer corpses, which these people now surely are?
Mike checks his rearview and confirms several cars have slowed around the scene. He keeps rolling but his body doesn’t stop shaking for miles.
By week’s end, Mike and I will drive that very same cruel Kentucky road.
There’s another memory that Mike hasn’t yet erased—and might never erase. He spots a car that rolled multiple times and landed on its side, impaled through its windows by a tree. Strangely, it looks like the car has always been wrapped around the tree, like the tree just grew right through the car. The first responders arrive on the scene but show no sense of urgency. They know what Mike already surmised—no one needs to be rescued. It’s too late.
Old man Dale witnessed five decades’ worth of crashes. Dale told me about an accident where four or five people were killed. One car rear-ended another; bodies were all over the road. That happened in Nevada, where there was no speed limit at the time. It was the second deadly accident Dale witnessed in Nevada. The highway signs back then read something like use speed appropriate for conditions.
They should have read use speed appropriate for survival.
As Mike and I roll closer to Antigo, Wisconsin, a vast farming and lumbering region—not to mention a big producer of ammunition casings—we navigate local roads far from any interstate. I’m treated to a close-up, drive-by look at a bygone era. Life moves slower here, and so do we.
I spot more than one unretouched original A and W drive-in restaurant. When I see the first one, I figure the faded old place must be closed, abandoned long ago. I am wrong. People are parked in their cars, placing their lunch orders. I flash back to my childhood, where a Saturday-night special treat meant the whole family piled into the station wagon, pulled up to the drive-through, and ordered hot dogs, onion rings, and the famous icy-cold root beer, all of which were delivered by a carhop waitress on roller skates. Our entire order would be perilously poised on her tray and hooked onto the rolled-down window on the driver’s side of our Cadillac Sedan DeVille. I doubt they still use the roller skates here, but they do still have the original A and Ws.
We snake our way through the quiet country towns, past ancient A and Ws and Dairy Queens, and into Antigo. I always associated long-haul trucks with highways. That’s true, but quite often pickups and off-loads—especially for the manufacturing industry—aren’t right off the exit ramp. I also assumed that all the victims of killer truckers were in the sex trade and therefore the remainder of America could rest easy at night, safe from the threat of murderous truckers. I was wrong about that.
Adam Leroy Lane parked his truck in a working-class neighborhood outside Boston. It was summer 2007, just weeks after Detective Postiglione arrested Sarah Hulbert’s killer, Bruce Mendenhall, at a Nashville truck stop. Lane set off on foot through the dark yards of homes as the nighttime temperatures plummeted about twenty degrees from the day’s high. Perhaps the chill in the air was just the weather, or maybe it was the evil emanating from Lane. Lane tried the door at Kevin and Jeannie McDonough’s house and found it unlocked. The McDonoughs were drifting into sleep when they heard what Jeannie described to the press as “a whimper.” It sounded like it came from their fifteen-year-old daughter’s room.
Mr. and Mrs. McDonough made their way down the hall and discovered a man in a mask pressing a knife to their daughter’s throat. Kevin pounced on the dark figure and wrapped his arm around the man’s throat. The two fell to the floor, and Jeannie yanked the knife away from Lane.
Police reports offer a clue to what Lane intended that night. When they searched him, they found Lane was carrying “three knives, a length of wire, and a martial arts throwing star.” A search of Lane’s truck was even more telling. In his cab, Lane kept a DVD of Hunting Humans—a tale about a serial killer.
“I just want to make sure this guy is on your radar.” That’s the message a Massachusetts state trooper sent to the FBI. Just a few months earlier, the trooper had attended an FBI presentation in Reno about the HSK Initiative. That alert trooper’s concern allowed the FBI to link Lane to unsolved homicides in two more states. Lane’s guilty plea in the McDonough case sent him away for five decades. The HSK Initiative worked.
As I’d expect for a Defense Department ammunition maker, the pickup site is ringed with chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire. Yet, when I take a closer look, I conclude there’s no way they make finished rounds here. There can’t be any gunpowder anywhere—the security isn’t tight enough. If they were completing the rounds here, filling the cartridges with powder, this place would look like Fort Knox. We pull up to a side gate and call the delivery number on the big sign. I want Mike to announce that we’re here with the pizza delivery, but I’m not sure these folks will appreciate the humor.
The gate electronically opens to reveal a big brown expanse of dirt—not a paved lot, just soft dirt. Soft, like maybe it rained here a couple of days ago. We wonder aloud why the sole purveyor of medium-caliber ammo for the United States Department of Defense can’t afford to pave their loading lot so 80,000-pound rigs won’t sink in it.
A middle-aged woman appears out of nowhere and instructs us to prepare for off-load. When Mike asks her if we should call her when we’re done, she says it isn’t necessary.
“I’ll know when you’re ready and come back out for you.”
There aren’t any windows looking out over the back lot, so I figure she’ll know when we’re ready via security cameras. It takes me a while to spot the clever concealments, but eventually I confirm we are being watched. We stage our rig on the edge of the lot, dismount, and start to untarp our load of aluminum.
Sure enough, the same woman soon appears and tells us she’ll open the roll-up bay door and have us back up into the loading dock. This is the tightest spot I’ve seen yet. It requires Mike to pull forward onto the outer corner of the dirt lot—the softest part. Our front wheels sink slowly but surely into the moist soil. I have visions of digging our way out of Antigo, Wisconsin. But carefully, Mike shifts into reverse, angles backward onto terra firma, and doesn’t stop until we are snugly ensconced inside the loading dock. The bay door rolls down in front of our grille as if to say, You’re Uncle Sam’s now—at least until you’re off-loaded.
The woman who let us in, now with a male partner, starts to guide a remote-controlled crane over the top of our trailer and begin a methodical, snail-paced, rod-by-rod off-loading process. Now I have some time to kill inside an ammo-manufacturing defense contractor. I wander toward the edge of the shop floor where skilled technicians stand at workbenches inspecting individual shell casings.
Once I’m back near the truck, I step outside and onto a platform overlooking a large dumpster piled high with metal cylinders—discarded ammo casings—many of them bigger than my hand. Some have spilled onto the ground. Mike steps out too, and I explain exactly what we’re looking at. His eyes widen.
“I’m taking one of those. Before we leave here, I’m taking one of those.”
“You’ll be on camera,” I say, pointing out the concealed lens right behind us.
“Then I’m just going to ask for one.”
Back inside, I watch Mike start chatting with the woman who’s been running the remote crane. People skills. As the off-loading process winds down, Mike makes his move.
“What’s it going to take to maybe get one of those shells from the dumpster?”
The woman tells Mike to wait a minute. Then she disappears into the back of the plant. The lady does us much better than the dirty dumpster discards—she emerges with two shiny, empty casings for each of us. She gives Mike a nod to motion him over to her. Quietly and quickly, she transfers the 30 mm shells to Mike. My guess is that this doesn’t require such secrecy, but it makes Mike feel like he’s won the lottery. The unexpected bounty becomes the subject of excited phone calls to Mike’s friends once we’re back on the road.
Dispatch calls with our next job. If all goes well—and that’s not something I’m betting on—we’re headed to Sagola, Michigan, to pick up a load of OSB—oriented strand board, an engineered wood used in construction. We have a two-and-a-half-hour drive north through timber territory to Michigan’s majestic Upper Peninsula.
We’re not far from where a victim I interviewed grew up. I did not plan this. I had no way of knowing when I asked Mike for a ride-along that I would later meet a trafficking survivor who worked the same Racine, Wisconsin, truck stop I would visit and was from the same part of the region that I’d ride into.
Sagola—population 1,200—is mostly in the Copper Country State Forest. There are trees as far as the eye can see, and farther. There are aspens, birches, and pines, maybe more trees than I have ever seen in one place. The ratio of trees to people seems like a million to one. There’s also row upon row of much younger trees, likely a reforestation effort by the lumber-harvesting companies as an investment in their future.
We pull into the lumber-processing property and are surrounded by mountains of fresh timber still wearing its bark stacked twenty to fifty feet high. Towering cranes lift and swing gargantuan wood poles like they’re pencils. A grown-up version of Lincoln Logs. We pull up to the truck entrance, check in with a guy in a booth, and are told to wait in line. I count eight trucks ahead of us—at least, that’s how many I can see—and none of them are moving. This looks like hours, not minutes, of waiting. I’m already thinking like Mike, calculating that this wait time will have a direct impact on the rest of the day, the night, the week—the payout.
While in the queue, Mike decides we will pull an 8/2 split. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration—part of the DOT—drivers who use a sleeper berth must take at least eight hours in the berth but can split that into two periods, as long as neither period is less than two hours. That means if we don’t want to burn up our maximum allowable work hours, we can label the two hours we wait to load as off duty, combine that with eight hours of sleep later, and still meet our ten hours of mandated off-duty time. I’m impressed by the seemingly constant situational awareness required from a trucker who’s just trying to get it right while still trying to make a buck.
After two hours of inching forward every ten minutes or so, a woman in her forties zips up to our door in a forklift. After checking our paperwork, she instructs us to pull up into the loading area. We are more than happy to oblige. Our turn has come. Another woman, much younger—blond hair poking out below her hard hat—pulls up in a forklift laden with OSB.
Mike wants to watch the loading process from outside, but the forklift operator tells him to stay in the truck. She carefully stacks tall, palletized pyramids, one after another, onto our trailer until it can’t take any more. Finished, she hands us the paperwork that Mike’s company has to forward to the broker to prove we picked up the right load. Her work is done, but ours is just starting as we drive around front to the tarping area to properly secure our load.
The DOT requires two points of securement within the first and last five feet of a load and every ten feet throughout a longer load. That’s no easy task when it requires ascending a mountain of lumber, working atop the summit, and descending back down without falling. The height of these loads guarantees serious injury or worse for anyone unfortunate enough to take an unscheduled trip to the pavement. That’s why this site requires truckers to buckle themselves to a body harness fastened to a soaring overhead beam looming high above the truck. If a trucker falls off while unfurling his tarps across the top of the load, the harness will sense the sharp drop, lock up, and suspend the trucker in midair until he can swim and claw his way back to his cargo.
Mike’s not a big fan of the harness because it constricts his movements. Nonetheless, he inserts his limbs through the arm and leg holes, buckles up, and complies. With the help of a ladder that he keeps on the truck, he clambers up the side of the wood stack. I toss up the hundred-pound rolled tarps, and he drapes them over the top and down the edges. “Not bad for a fat man, right?”
As I watch him work on and around the rig, I think the short and squat Mike might have an advantage. Mike’s center of gravity sits low on his frame and makes him less likely to lose his balance.
What Mike lacks in height he makes up for with smarts. Mike’s mantra, which I hear repeatedly, is “Work smarter, not harder.” For example, he figured out how to make the job easier by pre-positioning his tarp in just the right place on top of his loads so it drapes down just the right length on all sides. It’s like unfurling your fresh bedsheet onto a mattress and getting it perfect every time.
There are trucks waiting for us to vacate the tarping station, so once we’re done, we drive past the stations to tie down our loose tarps with straps and bungees. All around us, truckers are similarly securing their hauls—but one trucker stands out. She’s the only female. (Less than 10 percent of all big-rig drivers are women.) This young woman is in the spot in front of us and already immersed in the laborious process of strapping, tarping, and securing her load.
She’s tall with an athletic frame and her hair is pulled up into two buns. I note that she repeatedly springs high up off the ground as she tries, often in vain, to hook her bungees into the eyelets in the tarps. This makes her look more like a basketball center snagging rebounds under the boards than like a long-hauler. But despite her height, she struggles to insert the hooks into the holes.
This went on and on—jump and miss, jump and miss. But as I watch, I realize it isn’t the physicality of the task that’s challenging her; it’s the complete inefficiency of it. I’ve done this for only a few days, but even I understand what’s wrong. Mike taught me that if you properly plan out the placement of your tarp, the row of holes, where the bungee hooks go, line up just above trailer level. No jumping needed. It might require a reach but certainly not a leap. She is needlessly wearing herself out. She positioned her tarps wrong.
I begin to wonder what her training was like or if she was trained at all. Did she choose flatbeds? Was she given a choice? Did someone deliberately set her up for failure? Before she’s even halfway through, we are done, and Mike wants to start the journey to our drop site in Indiana.
Mike has let it be known, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, that he isn’t convinced women make the best truck drivers. What he’s certain of is that flatbed work is “man’s work.” That’s what he tells me. The lifting of heavy tarps, the dragging of thick, heavy chains, the throwing of straps from ground level over the top of towering loads—he just doesn’t see how they can do it. He’s also quick to point out whenever a female driver, in a car or a truck, cuts us off or is on the phone or is in the wrong lane. “Women,” he announces.
In my FBI career, of course I’ve seen women serve on SWAT teams and crush their male counterparts in speed, shooting, and agility training at the FBI Academy. But Mike seems wedded to his perceptions.
Mike doesn’t express the same sentiments when a male driver puts people at risk, which, by my rough count, they do at least as much, if not more, than the females we encounter. He might curse the guy out, but he won’t invoke gender.
Mike saw only one lot lizard in his year and a half of driving. She approached him and asked if he was accepting passengers. Mike told her, “Absolutely not,” then watched from his truck as she knocked on everyone’s door. Finally, he saw what looked like a seventy-year-old trucker walking to his truck with her.
Even during Dale’s time, the action wasn’t exclusive to the truck stops. He told me that in Bristol, Tennessee, which he frequently passed through, there were a lot of “red-light houses”—brothels. He said the places really had a red light outside. Truckers would drop their trailer at the truck stop and bobtail into town. Dale’s quiet voice got even quieter as he looked down at the table.
“I did partake in some of that—not a lot.”
Mike’s more recent experience seems to confirm the trend of fewer sex workers advertising in person at truck stops and more advertising online. With one exception—Las Vegas. When Mike was training, he and his trainer parked at a truck stop just outside Vegas, a county where prostitution is illegal. Four prostitutes openly approached his truck. Mike described them: “A variety of races and ethnicities—flesh on full display. No one seemed to care.”
No one except maybe a murderer looking for women whom no one seems to care about. Women like Hannah, who, soon enough, will have her own encounters with truckers.