1200 AM LIVE
By Brian Knight

10:00 PM

Joe Carter tuned the radio to his favorite station, cursing the dayshift driver’s love of shit-kicker music. They played the shit endlessly at the office. He had to suffer through it whenever he was on hold with dispatch.

“This is Coast to Coast AM, and tonight we’re discussing alien abduction with special guest …”

He turned the volume down and radioed dispatch.

“This is Carter, driver 008, taking vehicle 1011 out on the Railroad Avenue route.”
He grimaced through several seconds of the musical stylings of Toby Keith (the fact that he could now recognize several individual shit-kicker singers dismayed him) before dispatch acknowledged.

He turned the radio back up and drove his patrol car, an ultimately unimpressive little Geo Metro, out of Bailey Security’s auto yard, joining the sparse Friday evening traffic and headed toward what promised to be another uneventful night.

Except for the few wandering crazies who favored the skuzzy industrial district (one in particular whose almost nightly sermons, absolute miracles in vulgarity, entertained Joe to no end) Lewiston’s nightlife was a bit on the tame side. There were the occasional crack-heads, runaways, and bums, but overall they just weren’t very interesting.

Not like Boise at all. Boise was a real city, just as he had been a real cop until the goat-screw at The Doll House.

Within five minutes, during which the late evening traffic seemed almost to vanish, Joe found himself in what he thought of as The Derelict District. He turned down a short access road beside an equipment rental center and then left onto Railroad Avenue.

Railroad Avenue, an Authorized Vehicles Only backstreet, started near the center of town, branching off the levee bypass road, its gated entrance obscured by a growth of willows that fronted the bypass parkway, and ran about a mile between the railroad tracks and Snake River levy, ending east of town at the gate of the pulp mill.

The mill was his biggest fish on the route, and Railroad Avenue’s primary traffic, trucks running to and from the mill, vanished after 5 pm.

Joe’s only scenery along that stretch of paved boredom were the ass ends of a car dealership, the rental center, a pawnshop, a cell tower, and two propane storage tanks the size of semi-trucks. Between the bridge underpass and the mill, there was the 24th Street exit, a yard of criss-crossed tracks and idle railcars, and a whole lot of nothing.

Railroad Avenue’s infrequent foot traffic came from three directions; walkers from the levee bypass parkway who usually made it no farther than the cell tower before realizing they had left the park behind, vagrants who descended the footpath from the bridge, and the druggies and crazies who filtered down from 24th Street.

24th Street was a narrow, crumbling road that jabbed through Lewiston’s nastiest residential area – Crack Town - like a scabbed finger. It started about midway on Railroad Avenue and ended at the point of a high peaked hill that overlooked downtown Lewiston.

Joe had driven the full length of Railroad Avenue twice before anything interesting happened.