Running With the Night
By: Edd Jennings
Tags: Adventure, Drama, Writing, Fiction, Short Story

Running with the night, running across the high plains of Montana, Hardin’s diesel truck roared down Route 2 east of Glacier. It was good to be back in America.

Had the unlikely happened, and had he been stopped in Canada, an RCMP officer might have looked under the tarp covering the bed of his truck and wanted a look inside the nylon bags he used to carry the rhodium. The officer wouldn’t have an easy way to identify what he found, and if he did, he wouldn’t be able to prove Hardin understood its value.

Neither would the RCMP be able to crack his story that he had only a ruinously impractical idea of where he had found this vein of mineral. People tended to get turned around in the wilderness and navigate by inexact means. Little expertise was expected of American tourists, and he’d play on that.

The problem was the officer’s suspicions might occasion a more thorough search. Canadian law lacked a requirement of probable cause to justify a search, which would have turned up handguns, whose presence could put him away for a long time.

In Montana, his ton of rhodium — in the unlikely event anybody saw it under his tightly packed load and asked — was loose rock of an odd color that appealed to his fancy — that he intended to bring back to a little old lady who had befriended him to line her rock garden. She had a spot of dementia and might not be able to confirm his promise.

Actual delivery amounted to a simple unloading of the nylon bags somewhere in a national forest or off a remote mountain road, never in the same state twice in a row. He used places close to, but just out of immediate sight of a road, always working in the dark of night to carry the forty bags of mineral from his truck to his marked drop off.

He kept in mind that in this CEO’s office, the affable soft man from the hotel veranda in Atlanta, there would be a map on the wall with pins, denoting each place he’d dropped a load. They would be looking for patterns.

Better minds than his would be trying to discover who he was. The sooner he could drop this load the better, but he had to weigh speed against the danger of leaving a trail that marked the route between his strike and home.

As far as he could figure, his method of alerting them to where he left his load — GPS coordinates accurate to within a few feet, and those numbers texted to the CEO from a burner phone used once and discarded — gave them nothing they could use to find him.

The European banks he did business with had nothing from him but an account number. The danger came near the end in his series of transfers when the money went to a holding company associated with his name.

His warning, not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, might have loomed large in their minds. His ability to arrive unannounced in the CEO’s life must have preyed upon the man, but to expect this man not to try to find him was to deny human nature.

He thought of paying the man another visit, but by now he might well have a team of bodyguards, and if nothing else he might carry a tiny concealed camera. Once they had a photograph of him, finding him would be just a matter of time.

He had switched trucks in a shed at the ranch where he crossed the border, leaving the one with the Montana tags. In all probability he could forget what happened on the Mackenzie same as if it never happened. The night swallowed him leaving no record of his passing.

A neon light with a letter missing advertised a diner at the crossroads just up ahead. A few cups of dead black coffee could keep him going into the night.