“Bye, Mom. I won’t. Take care.”
“Yep.” She stepped back. Then she went back to her paper and her cigarette.
Cooper turned and left his mother’s house.
For good.
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~oOo~
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The ride from Tulsato Laughlin was about as straight a shot as it could be: hop on the interstate and head west, stop when you get there. Seeing as he was on his own, with no one else to worry about, Cooper planned to drive straight through. Maybe stop at a truck stop for a meal and catch a nap if he needed it, but more likely just mainline Monsters and blare Rage Against the Machine until he got his ass where he was taking it. That plan had the bonus of not leaving all his shit and his Softail on the lot of some roadside roach motel overnight.
The plan got him to Albuquerque, which was about the two-thirds mark of the trip. He hit the city about an hour past sunset—which came stupidly early on this first day of the Year of Somebody’s Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Two—and the thought briefly occurred to him that, if he wanted to stop for more than just gas and a Hot Pocket, he could find a La Quinta or something else halfway decent here to crash at. But the holiday had the traffic sparse, and it seemed stupid not to capitalize on that and get home before dawn.
Home. Laughlin, Nevada was home now. It already felt more like home than Muscogee, Oklahoma ever had.
Instead of doing a Bugs Bunny and making a left at Albuquerque, Cooper pulled another Monster from the little Igloo on the passenger seat, cued up some Audioslave on Spotify, and pushed a little harder on the U-Haul’s gas pedal.
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~oOo~
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About an hour later, while Cooper was downing his ... seventh? eighth? twelfth? canned caffeine concoction and belting out ‘Show Me How to Live’ with Chris Cornell, red and blue lights flashed in the full dark of the desert night.
“Fuck!” he muttered as he glanced in the side mirror and saw precisely what he expected to see: the source of all that obnoxious fucking light.
From pure, deeply ingrained instinct, his first thought was to floor it and make a chase of it—but that was stupid. First, he was driving a goddamn U-Haul and towing his bike. There was no ‘flooring’ to be done, and any chase would last about two minutes. Also, he hadn’t done anything fucking wrong. His cargo was a cheap leather sofa, an expensive king-size mattress, several boxes of mismatched kitchen shit, and a slightly embarrassingly large collection of blue jeans and black boots. Not Russian guns.
However, he was a medium-brown Latino-Native man with a fuck ton of ink, and that pretty much meant he was assumed to be wrongdoing even when he wasn’t doing wrong. He wasn’t even wearing his kutte; it was draped over the top of the passenger seat. He didn’t wear it when he drove a fucking U-Haul.
There was a gun in the cab, which could be extremely bad—but it was his registered sidearm, it was holstered, and it was not on his person right now. If he got a chance to explain all that.
With no other choice, Cooper pulled onto the shoulder, hit the hazards as soon as he figured out where they were, turned off the music, unbuckled his seatbelt, put down the window, collected the rental agreement paperwork and his driver’s license, and put his hands, holding all that, on the steering wheel where Officer Friendly could see them.
Then he watched in the side mirror. It took the cop—probably a trooper—a while to get out of his cruiser, so he was certainly running the plates of both the U-Haul and the Softail. When he ran the bike, he’d get his name, and shortly thereafter would discover the delicious fact that Cooper Javier Calderon had done twenty-seven months for aggravated assault—the result of a bar fight he had not started but had decisively finished. His stretch had ended more than ten years ago, but that likely wouldn’t matter.
Finally, the cruiser’s door opened. Cooper squinted at the mirror, trying to see through the bright headlights, the flashers, and the cop’s flashlight.
Oh goody. Big fat white dude in a trooper hat. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Bet that motherfucker’s body cam was ‘malfunctioning.’
The trooper stopped about six feet back from the driver’s door.
“Good evening, officer.”
“Cooper Calderon?” He pronounced Cooper’s last name with all short vowels, which seemed weird. You’d think a New Mexico trooper would have encountered a pretty standard Latino name like that many times. But it didn’t matter.
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Trooper Man drew his gun. Of course he did. “I need you to get out of the truck. Slowly. Show me your hands.”
Knowing the drill, Cooper did not ask what the problem was, or what he’d done wrong. Those were white-people questions.
He put his ID and paperwork in one hand, stuck them both out the open window, and opened the door with the outside handle. Then, keeping his hands up at chest level, he stepped down from the truck. He left the door open. This side of the highway was utterly empty, and the shoulder was wide, so the door didn’t create an obstacle.