Wet Drive

By Jay Harez

As a truck driver turned smuggler Charlie lives by one rule: DON'T OPEN THE TRUCK. Now he has a chance at the biggest payday of his life but his mysterious employer - known only as Mr. Phone - has made it clear that the cargo is far more valuable to him than Charlie's life. Charlie must avoid the authorities in Texas, the Mexican Border patrol and the cartels leaving death and destruction in his wake. And with every mile his enemies get closer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Harez
• Release date: Jan 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310549786

Jay Harez

Jay Harez was born in Texas. During his early twenties he traveled extensively throughout Mexico and the United States. The majority of the stories he writes are loosely based on the places he has been and the people he has met along the way. His experiences in Mexico were the most influential and second only to his love of history for source material. Great writers such as J. MIchael Straczynski, Wilbur Smith, Garry Jennings, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, and Aaron Sorkin have had a significant influence on his characters and overall style. Jay is a comic and graphic novel reader from childhood where he was introduced to writers like Warren Ellis, Allen Moore and Frank Miller. Jay lives in Austin, where he enjoys scotch, plays chess and travels whenever opportunity permits.

Book preview

WET DRIVE

BY

JAY HAREZ

Copyright © 2015 by Jay Harez. All rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Wet Drive

Opportunity

Captive

A Friendly Face

Stop Over

Crossing

Epilogue

WET DRIVE

All in all Charlie I see your contributions to this operation as limited at best. Said the Operations Manager.

Charlie, a total fuck-up had dreaded this day.

Charlie owed child support, a great deal of child support. He had left his wife bleeding on the kitchen floor of their two-bedroom doublewide home in Port Arthur, Texas. His four girls watched as he grabbed two shirts and one pair of jeans, put on his boots, walked out the back door and drove away in his pickup.

Are you hearing me boy? Whatever arrangement you had with my predecessor is over! You know what else? I’ve been going through the books here and guess what I found? Not you! Can you explain that? The Operations Manager asked.

The new Operations Manager was settling down now. Less bluster and rage and an almost reptilian coldness emanated from the man. This new Operations Manager had oilfield trash written all over him. A layer of beer-fat covered what was once a muscular frame. He had a nose that had been broken, sunken eyes, and a pig face on a bullet-shaped head sat on over two hundred pounds of attitude and cruelty.

Charlie was already thinking about what to do next. He had been driving off the books for almost a year now. His hotel room was paid up for the next three weeks and he had about six hundred dollars to his name.

When he first got to Laredo he had pawned everything he owned for a few nights lodging and some food. Now this asshole was threatening what he had turned into a livable life.

I didn’t think you could, the Operations Manager continued. So what to do with Charlie?

New in town Charlie had found another broken down truck driver living at the local homeless shelter. Charlie had offered to share some tamales with him in exchange for any leads on places that needed drivers and didn’t require a lot of references.

Those three tamales had led him to Shoreline Shipping, LLC. What it really was, was a three hundred yard long, drive through with sheet metal walls and roof. It was a place where cargo could be loaded and unloaded discreetly as long as it happened after dark. It was a weigh station for anything that could fit in a semi-trailer and didn’t require lots of maintenance in transit. This meant no ‘wets’. But it did mean lots of other cargo. Cargo the Border Patrol didn’t really give a shit about.

All those Washington suits with their ‘immigration reform’ rhetoric kept the American public focused on what was going north of the border. Illegal immigrants, drugs and whatever else could find a market in the US. But not a word was ever mentioned about what was going south. And lots of cargo was going south, more than anyone knew or cared to talk about.

Charlie had signed on originally to run bat guano to nurseries in the states. Believe it or not bat shit was worth as much as marijuana by the kilogram. Every nursery owner and horticulturalist in the southwest could tell you that bat guano or Wayne-soil as it was known could make anything grow anywhere.

As soon as states started legalizing weed the cartels started focusing on making bat guano available in quantity. So Charlie had found work…steady – although risky – work.

Thirty or so yards from the loading/unloading bay was the Pit. It looked like most union halls. Long collapsible tables with metal folding chairs on either side ran in multiple parallel rows. The worst coffee known to man brewed on two industrial coffee makers twenty four hours a day. Charlie had never seen anyone make the coffee.

The broken down trucker that had told Charlie about Shoreline turned out to be a former employee. Charlie knew him as Darryl411 but all of the other drivers called Flipsy when he wasn’t around. He kept the other drivers entertained with his conspiracy theories and plans to get into real estate as soon as he got out of the shelter.

After Charlie had done a dozen or so runs he asked some of the other drivers why Darryl was called Flipsy. It turned out that Darryl had flipped two trucks in as many months. Darryl liked to drink. Those two trucks were not what got him fired; it was the third one that led to his termination. It was laden. Getting caught was one thing. Getting highjacked was one thing. However the one error that could not be forgiven was damage to the vehicle. Each truck and driver was estimated to generate a certain amount of revenue. Drivers came and went but vehicles were treasured and were kept in pristine condition by a team of mechanics that worked twelve-hour shifts six days a week. Darryl had cost the company a truck and a load. There was no coming back from that. Not everyone could be a driver. So Darryl became Darryl411 offering info on jobs that you couldn’t find on the Internet.

This new Operations Manager was going to be a problem for both Charlie and Darryl411. Shoreline needed a name and a Social security number for every driver along with a copy of their Commercial Drivers License. Whose didn’t matter as long as they had one set of documents per truck on the road at any given time. Shoreline kept records on hand in the event the Texas Department of Transportation got curious or if they missed a payment to the Federales.

One night over some refried beans and what passed for beef Darryl had proposed Charlie use his social because Darryl didn’t pay taxes, period. Charlie