Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker) was pretending to be a girl (Candy Cane) on the CB. His brother Fuller Thomas put him up to it. It was a joke gone bad:
The brothers stop at a truck stop near the Wyoming state line, where Fuller buys a CB radio for $40, merely for the purpose of fun and breaking the tension in the car. He chats with the other truckers in a mock hillbilly accent, giving himself and Lewis the handles "Black Sheep" and "Momma's Boy", respectively. One of the truckers gives a brief cryptic speech, and Fuller coaxes Lewis into playing a cruel prank on the mysterious driver, who identifies himself as "Rusty Nail" (Matthew Kimbrough). Lewis pretends to be an attractive young woman named Candy Cane, sets up a meeting with Rusty Nail in the motel where Lewis and Fuller will be spending the night, the Lone Star Motel in Table Rock, Wyoming, and tells him to bring pink champagne. Rusty Nail apparently falls for the joke, genuinely believing Lewis to be female.
Rather than giving Rusty Nail his own room number, room 18, Lewis gives him the number of the room next door, room 17, which is occupied by a largely built, highly irritable and obnoxious businessman by the name of Ronald Ellinghouse (Kenneth White), who had a brief altercation with Fuller earlier that night in the Lone Star reception, for which Fuller wants revenge, while racially abusing the Indian night manager. The joke takes a fatal turn when Rusty Nail visits Ellinghouse's room and is believed to have been attacked. The next morning, the brothers are questioned by the local police and discover that Ellinghouse was the one who was brutally attacked and horrifically mutilated, found alive nearby but in a coma, with his entire jawbone removed.
