Free Murder in the Wind by John D. MacDonald

And cute. And real good with the kids. Always full of all that sloppy emotion that came over the television. Dirty little affairs and yet she was probably all the time calling them romance. Like a kid playing games, not understanding just how serious it was. She even kept her dolls until she was married. And now, caught and exposed, she still acted more like a naughty child than a grown woman, a mother.
    What did you do?
    He wanted the trip over. He wanted to go back and talk to her some more. He could give up the whole thing and leave her. But what would happen to her? He knew he could get custody of the kids. But what would happen to Gloria?
    If he was going to stay with her, he was going to have to get off the road. Dear God, Sparkman could be back there with her. Get off the road somehow and stay off it. But he knew he wasn’t fitted for anything much other than wheeling a big rig. He just knew he had to talk to her. They had to figure this out together. He wondered if he would ever feel like touching her again.
     
    He ran into the rain south of Tallahassee. It was a hard rain. He started the wipers, turned on his running lights and cursed the rain. It would slow him down. But not as much as it would slow down a less experienced driver. He pushed the big rig along, pushed it as fast as he dared. He barreled through the little towns. Capps, Lament, Eridu, Iddo, Secotan, Perry, Pineland, Athena, Salen, Clara, Shamrock, Eugene, Old Town, Hardee Town, Otter Creek—thundering south through the rain, throwing up spume from the big duals, sitting high with his hands clever on the wheel, eyes trying to penetrate the murkiness ahead.
    The thing that caused it was the color of the car. It was a car as gray as the rain, and the tail lights were not on. The car blended, merged with the rain and the road so that Dix Marshall did not see it soon enough. The car was going at a speed of twenty miles an hour through the heavy rain. It had Indiana plates. It was driven by a retired doctor with a mild heart condition.
    The big blue and yellow rig was traveling at fifty-five miles an hour when Dix Marshall saw the faint bulk of the slow-moving gray sedan. Within a fractional part of a second he had known that he could not hope to slow down in time. He had a choice to make almost instantly—to cut to the right and take his chances on the sloppy shoulder—to cut around the sedan to the left and risk a head-on with something coming the other way—to brake as hard as he could and hit the sedan and hope to hit it without enough force to kill.
    Marshall was an expert. His reflexes were good—his experience was wide. His emotions, not his lack of skill, had trapped him into this situation. He had been in other tight places and he had survived. During the three-quarters of a second it took him to make his decision, the big rig traveled nearly sixty feet. He decided to take the chance of a head-on with something that might be coming through the gray opacity of the rain. It was a calculated risk. With the difference in the relative speeds of the two vehicles, he would not be in the left lane for more than two long seconds. The rain would slow down oncoming vehicles.
    He did not hit the brakes. He hit the gas pedal to cut down the duration of the moments of danger. He swung out and he leaned forward further and stared ahead, looking for the twin glow of oncoming dimmers. He passed the gray sedan. He saw something ahead of him, and he snapped the big rig back into the right lane. He snapped it hard and as he did so he saw that the object was the thick concrete railing of the bridge. It was the bridge over the Waccasassa, but he did not know that. He felt the skid of the two sets of duals on the rear of the trailer. He saw the thick rain-wet railing on the right side, saw the rain bouncing from it, haloing it. The trailer kept skidding and he felt it slam against the concrete. It did not seem to be a hard impact. But in the next moment the cab was