The Guardian Read Free Page A

engineering.  Racked up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.  Money she’d never planned repaying.  Worked at a franchise copy shop and with her mother’s help, purchased her first car, which she traded on the gas guzzling car she sat in now.  A car she couldn’t afford.  A car her mother would soon cringe at the sight of.  Dawn hadn’t listened to much advice since high school, including her father’s.  Especially her father’s.  And now, from someone … something she couldn’t even see.
            And still, she did nothing.
            Dawn was parked at a store front beeper shop, X-Communications, located on the Southside of Houston, Texas at 4PM.  Nearly 300 miles away from the home she shared with her parents and brother.  No one knew her whereabouts except for Amos, Kendrick and Big John.  Amos had the reputation of a drug dealer and Dawn knew that.  But it didn’t stop her from lying to her employer and calling out sick from work.  She’d been promised five hundred dollars to drive to a city just twenty miles west of Beaumont, Texas in search of a disabled vehicle.  Not Houston, but Winnie, Texas. What could possibly be the harm in that?  Three hours there and three hours back.  She’d be home before nine, at least, with five hundred dollars in her pocket.  Making minimum wage as a hotel reservationist just wasn’t paying her car note.  At six dollars and fifty cents an hour, she made fifty dollars a day.  In her naïve mind, five hundred dollars in six hours would give her the boost she needed.  But why so much for such a simple task?  A ride Amos could’ve easily gotten free from someone else.
            Dawn hadn’t questioned that either.
            With each page that came across Amos’ beeper luring him across state lines from Louisiana to Texas, Dawn just knew they were closer to finding the car (or truck) they’d set out to find.  She didn’t know if it was a private passenger vehicle or an eighteen wheeler.   And Amos didn’t care to elaborate.  Nor had he offered.   The only truck she’d seen stranded on the side of the highway was an old Ford pickup truck that appeared to have crashed in the trees alongside the highway.  And by the looks of it, the vacant truck had been there a while.  At least a week or longer.
            Of course, that wasn’t the truck they were looking for.
            She continued to drive.
            Amos sat quietly beside her checking his pager a dozen times.  He mumbled into the handheld car phone inaudibly.  In code.  He’d complimented Dawn’s hair, her face, and her body.  Questioned why she’d never given him a chance.  He could be the man she needed in her life.  The answer to her prayers.   But she wasn’t interested in him that way.  Business was business.  Period.  And five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars.  Who cared where it came from.  Dawn had a big car note and her father surely wasn’t going to pay it.  Days earlier, he’d simply alerted her to a flat tire an hour before she was scheduled to attend class at the local university.  He didn’t offer to fix it nor had he advised where she could get it fixed.  He’d simply climbed into his own car, leaving her to fend for herself.
            The trip to Houston had been uneventful, even as Dawn floored the accelerator climbing to speeds of 110 miles per hour at least four times.  She’d passed several state troopers, both in Louisiana and Texas, but not once did any of those patrolmen brake in an effort to pursue the red sports car blazing down interstate 10.  The cruisers remained parked in the ridden parts of the medians, as if to clear her path.
            Ever since she purchased her first car in 1993, Dawn learned that highway patrol cars often parked just past the clearing of a hill on the highway.  It was a speed