Freight

by Ryan Lowell

Genres: Literary Fiction; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

As a lone semi-truck makes its snowy way to the US-Canadian border, a series of vivid characters are inexorably drawn into a desperate, comedic, and murderous scheme to steal its precious cargo. 

Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn’t exist.

Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $5 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals.

Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy's way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake.

In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love--a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.

Release date: August 11, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 224

Sample

Billy Trask stopped short of the border and swung his tractor trailer into the storage facility. He took one last pull off his cigarette, flung it out the window into the slush, and situated his truck so that he was facing the road. It was only then that he pulled his crossword book from the console. He could see his breath. He kept it cold in the cab because the heat made him sleepy. The crossword book was for beginners, but he didn’t have an ego when it came to that stuff—he didn’t like to struggle. His father did the harder ones when he was alive, but his father was smarter and he said the puzzles kept him sharp. Billy got a couple words, and then he checked the time and pulled down his visor and looked at himself and took the gray bandana off and tied it back over his long, mostly gray hair, and he did not talk to himself this time. He pushed the visor back up, and in the distance the Buick was rolling toward him.

Slowly. Too slowly.

He set his crossword book back in the console and said: “Come on, you French fuck.” Even though he himself was half-French. The clouds in the sky said weather was coming, and he wanted to get south and away from it. The road was covered with early-morning frost, but it was not slippery. Behind the wheel of the Buick was his uncle Bernier. Bernier lived on the Canadian side, but he crossed the border often and they wouldn’t bother him. Billy watched the Buick approach, floating over the frost, and he watched as the Buick veered off the road and into the snow and into a telephone pole. Billy shook his head. He knew something was amiss besides the obvious.

He left the truck running and climbed down and stomped through the snow to the driver’s side of the Buick. He opened the door and looked down at his uncle. His eyes were half-open and his mouth was mostly open and his breathing was light but loud.

“The fuck was that stunt?”

Bernier looked up at him. There was pain or fatigue in his eyes, something gone. His breathing had turned shallow and intermittent, and there was spit around his bottom lip. He blinked. There was water pooling in his eyes. He’d been strong before.

“Well, shit.”

Bernier took in a long slow breath and then said: “I’m dying, kid.”

“You been expecting a heart attack now for twenty years. Hell of a time for it. Well, what you wanna do?”

Bernier said nothing. His eyes shut. For a few seconds, Billy thought he was dead. His chest wasn’t moving. Then he opened his eyes only slightly and took one last breath and said: “Don’t be a hero. Good right here.”

“All right,” Billy said. Then he spoke to him as though he were still alive: “I get it. Remember when Dad fell and busted his hip? Fucker drank and smoked all his life, and despite all that he was healthy as a goddamn horse at ninety. Then he fell and they took him in and after a couple days in the hospital with no drink and no smoke he just said, ‘Fuck this. I don’t wanna live like this.’ And his body shut down. Lost the will to live, as they say. Or his mind told his body to shut down. I don’t doubt someday I’ll get there, but I ain’t ready yet.”

His uncle did not respond. His eyes were closed again and there was no movement in his chest or anywhere else, and Billy kissed his own two fingers and set them on Bernier’s forehead and drew them down between his eyes the way he’d done with his son when he was young, long before the boy broke through the ice and died. Billy did not pray or think about the past, he just looked at his uncle for a minute and then reached down and pulled the latch that popped the trunk. He went to the rear and opened it with his sleeve and looked inside. He stood and glanced around and back at his tractor trailer, which was panting like an enervated animal, and then he turned and saw a dot appear at the end of the long road and the dot became a car. He pulled the trunk down but not enough for it to latch, and he watched the car approach. He raised a hand in the air and climbed up onto the road. There was a woman behind the wheel, and she didn’t look capable. She came to a stop on the opposite shoulder and put her window down.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

The woman got out. She was petite and pretty and around his age, and if they weren’t in the situation they were in, Billy would have shown interest in her. But that wasn’t the situation they were in. She was wearing a heavy sweater and driving gloves, and she peeled the driving gloves off and dropped them on her seat. “What happened?”

“Looks like he just went off the road on his own,” Billy said. “You see what I saw when I came up on this.”

She moved. “Do you have a phone on you?”

“I do.” He didn’t. He reached into his empty coat pocket for show, even though she wasn’t looking at him, and he followed her down the bank.

“Is he breathing?”

“I couldn’t tell. It’s gonna be a while before any ambulance makes it out here.”

“Do you know CPR?”

“No, ma’am. I’m just a truck driver.”

“Well, I’m just an English teacher. Doesn’t even look like he hit it very hard.”

“No.”

“Maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack. Or he fell asleep and hit his head on impact. He’s up there.”

“Yeah. He’s old.”

“I don’t understand why the airbag didn’t work.”

“Me neither.”

“Poor guy. Are you calling?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He watched her lean in, and she checked the wrist and then the neck and then leaned in farther and listened to his chest, and Billy leaned in with his long arm like a hook and wrapped it around her neck, and he put his knee in her back and flexed his arm and came up, and he felt her trying to scream and kick, and he wrapped his other arm around her head and twisted and he heard it snap, and the woman went limp. He turned her around and lifted her up and looked at the Buick and then at her car, and he set her down in the snow and got into her car and U-turned and drove into the snow and pulled the brake and slid it sideways into the Buick. He got out and stuffed her driving gloves into his pocket, and he picked up the woman and put her back in the driver’s seat and propped her head up and let it fall to the side.

He returned to the Buick and used one of her gloves to open the trunk. He lifted out the two buckets filled with plastic bags of pills hidden underneath random hardware, and he set one down on the ground and shut the trunk and then took both buckets and stomped across the snow back to his tractor trailer.

Early in the morning on the third Friday in February, a cold wind swept through the truck terminal. The trailers were scattered about the yard lacking order. Some of them were empty and some were loaded. The wind picked up dust and Curtis wandered into it looking for a trailer. His hands were buried in his jeans pockets and in one of those hands was a sticky note with the trailer number he was looking for. The sun was up but it was still very cold and Curtis wore no jacket, just a hooded sweatshirt. He thought about how easy it would be for some random person—say an ex-employee—to roll in there in the middle of the night and take a loaded trailer. But you had to know what was in there, because there was a big difference between a load of expensive furniture and a load of Quaker Oats, and there was no way to tell until you broke the seal and looked inside. Curtis found the trailer he was looking for. He pulled the sticky note from his pocket and looked at the number on it and then at the number on the back of the trailer and triple-checked to make sure it was the same number and that his dyslexia wasn’t deceiving him. Because attention to detail was key in the trucking industry, that much he’d learned in his six long, degrading months.

He started back toward the terminal, walking almost sideways so the wind wasn’t in his face, vaguely excited about finishing his shift in less than an hour, though less excited about driving the moped back home. Curtis heard his name. He looked around, didn’t see anyone. But he wasn’t looking all the way around, still refusing to face the frigid wind. He heard his name again, this time louder, and he spun around to see Phil coming his way, his curly gray hair flailing in the wind. Phil said: “You really didn’t have anyone else to cover that load coming up out of Mass?”

“No,” Curtis said. They both stopped. The wind stopped too. During his first day on the job, when they had him train by sitting with dispatchers from the day shift, one of them had asked him if he was any good at lying, as though it was a prerequisite for the position. “No,” Curtis had said, to which one of the other dispatchers had responded: “He’s lying!” Everyone laughed, except Curtis.

Presently he was lying. Of course he had other options, probably half the drivers in the fleet were heading home on Friday, and probably none of them wanted to stop and swap trailers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But Curtis thought he knew Phil and didn’t think he would bitch about his dispatch, he’d do what he was told to do even if he didn’t want to because Phil took pride in his job, in picking up freight and getting it delivered.

“Well, that’s fucking bullshit,” Phil said, “and you know it.”

“What?”

“I know for a fact you had other drivers coming up and they all had plenty of time to do it, but you stuck me with it because you didn’t think I’d pitch a fit. Well, I’m sick and fucking tired of getting it stuck up my ass just because I don’t complain all the time like everyone else.”

“I wasn’t trying to stick it up your ass,” Curtis said, which was true. “And I know you guys all talk, but you don’t always see the bigger picture.”

“Bigger picture my ass. It’s fucking bullshit!”

“Okay,” Curtis said. He was too tired to argue. Phil had started to walk away, but then he turned back. “Maybe I’ll just start complaining like every other driver here, because I guess it works for them. You’re acting just like fucking Ricky. And the thing he don’t realize is that’s how you lose good drivers, that’s why so many of the good drivers are going to work someplace else, because all the good drivers here that do their jobs and don’t say a word just get treated like shit. It’s fucking bullshit!”

Curtis said nothing. He watched Phil walk away, still talking, his huge gray hair moving with the wind. Curtis looped around the yard once more, killing time before the end of his night shift. Then he went back into the office. He emailed his load-tracking sheet to the daytime dispatchers, who were beginning to roll in, and he knew a handful of them would respond to him after he left, bitching about something he’d done wrong, always condescending and yet grammatically awful. Did they not know he’d gone to college? The whole thing was getting old, and he wasn’t sure whether the end would be him walking out on the job—something he had never done before, because people who need money don’t do that—or him getting fired. A month ago his manager told him he was “day to day,” a threat of sorts he never thought he’d hear in any workplace. But now he needed money more than ever. The only saving grace in keeping his job was that nobody else wanted that disgraceful third-shift position. He wrapped a scarf around his face and strapped on his backpack and flicked the chip off his shoulder—if only for a short time—and went outside and mounted his moped.

Theo was irritated because he was off his regular sleep schedule and because he didn’t like Canadians, but he chose to do the Canadian routes because he didn’t have to fight for miles. He’d just turned thirty. He’d spent his birthday on the road all by himself, which was how he preferred things, often referring to himself as an introvert. It sounded more distinguished than the way he heard other truckers call themselves loners, and he liked to distinguish himself from other truck drivers. Maybe he was an introvert, but he was also a pervert, and as he locked the doors and got himself ready to settle down in the sleeper bunk he was thinking about the girl he had sex with before leaving on this trip. Her name was Sarah. She was not his wife. Lauren was his wife, and he’d had sex with her the day before he had sex with Sarah. Lauren wanted to get pregnant. Sarah did not want to get pregnant. At the moment, he did not want either of them to get pregnant.

He closed the curtain and stripped down to a T-shirt and underwear and microwaved a TV dinner. He ate and watched part of a movie on the small flat-screen TV he’d mounted on the wall and then he pissed in a bottle and then he realized that was his last empty bottle and so he told himself not to drink any more liquids before going to bed, which was difficult because he liked to drink soda when he was playing Call of Duty. So he started playing Call of Duty and drank one can of soda and that was it. He played for an hour or so and then he started to get tired and shut off the game and climbed into bed. He leaned over the side and reached under the bed and turned the heat down and then he rolled back over and soon he fell asleep without thinking about either of the two women in his life.

Around four o’clock he woke and had to piss. He turned on the nightlight and reached for an empty bottle, forgetting that there were no empties. He knocked over a full one, but the lid was on tight. He rose and danced through the curtain and clambered over the passenger seat and kicked the door open and climbed down and stood with his bare feet on the freezing pavement and took a leak and watched the steam rise, and he was too cold to shiver until he heard the click behind him. It was a terrible sound to hear, standing outside in his underwear with no key. “Fuck me,” he said, but even then he hadn’t fully wrapped his head around the situation. Because it was not the first time he’d locked himself out of the truck. But the other times it had happened were in the middle of the day in civilized places.

He tiptoed over to one of the other trucks. Obviously another truck driver, even a sleeping one, will understand his situation. He knocked on the window. He put his foot on the first step and knocked again, this time a little harder. Now there was movement in the truck. He took his foot off the step and stepped back. The light came on in the cab and a disheveled and unshaven face materialized. Theo tried his best to put on a sympathetic smile. The door popped open and Theo began, “I’m wicked sorry to bother you but…”

He stopped when he saw the gun poking out through the door. He put his hands up—he would later look back and wonder why he’d acted like he was under arrest—and took another step back. He said quietly, “I’m locked out of my truck, man.”

The other man said something Theo did not understand and slammed the door shut. The light turned off. And he understood the man’s reaction—how would he himself react half-asleep to a half-naked trucker standing outside in the cold knocking on his door? It was difficult to tell. It also did not matter. He walked back to the truck, thinking about what to do. He walked a full loop around his truck and trailer and wound up walking through his own piss puddle. He started looking for a rock but found a little mound of busted pavement instead, and bent and picked up a piece of pavement the shape and size of a pizza slice and backed up and chucked it at the passenger-side window.

Twenty minutes later he was back on the road, unable to hear the radio over the taped plastic window snapping in the wind. There were tiny shards of glass scattered across the passenger-side floor, but he would vacuum the truck once he got back to the terminal. It was the last leg of this trip and he wanted to end the week and get home, and yet he already knew that once he got home he would want to get on the road again and then he might be happy. But right now he was not happy at all. He was pissed off. He’d called dispatch once he got going and explained what happened and asked if the company was going to pay to get his window fixed and the dispatcher had said that was above his pay grade, which to Theo meant it was going to come out of his paycheck and so he thanked his dispatcher for nothing and hung up on him. Theo wasn’t worried about hurting his dispatcher’s feelings. Dispatchers didn’t have feelings. And dispatchers needed drivers more than drivers needed dispatchers. But the flapping plastic window was a constant reminder that he’d fucked up once again, and he couldn’t blame dispatch for that. And so he decided that he was not going to lock his doors anymore. Being from Maine, he’d never locked his car or truck or house doors at all except when he left the state because he was suspicious. But he’d never heard another driver saying his truck had been fucked with at the truck stop. Truck. . .