Page 27 of Cross Down
I kneel down, give her kisses on her cheeks—now slick with tears—and say, “Love you, Willow.”
“Love you too, Daddy.”
I get up and walk quickly out of the house, going after the bad men.
Alone.
Chapter
29
At a gasstation with a convenience store off the highway just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, I decide it’s time to take a break from a night of driving. I’m about an hour away from Fort Bragg, but my body is weary and my eyelids are heavy, and me nodding off and wrapping my Grand Cherokee around a tall pine tree won’t do anybody any good.
I go into the store. There’s ading-dingas the door opens.
An older man sits on a stool, and a younger man who looks like him—probably his son—stands at a corner rack restocking cigarettes and cigars. The older man slides off the stool and I note the pistol riding high on a waist holster. “Help you?” he asks. His son glares at me, and I spot a pump-action shotgun leaning against the wall next to him.
“I’d like to fill up my car, please,” I say.
The older man says, “All of our pumps have credit card readers.”
I slowly and deliberately take my wallet out. “I’d rather pay cash.”
He nods. “Gonna need a deposit—you can come back in and get your change. Sorry, that’s the way it is. Can’t trust no one, even your neighbors or the government. Bad times.”
Bad times indeed,I think. I open my wallet, slip out three twenty-dollar bills. “This enough of a deposit?”
“Guess so.”
I go out into the late evening—or early morning—and top off my Cherokee, then go back into the store and pick up some bottled water, beef jerky, crackers, a few other snacks. I go to the counter and he rings up my purchases and says, “With what you bought in gas and the money you left, that’s five bucks even.”
I take out my wallet again. “Ask you a question?”
He starts putting my purchases into a white plastic bag. “Questions are free, son. Not sure about the answers.”
I put down a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m looking for a motel nearby. Quiet. Out of the way. Managers who aren’t too nosy and will take cash.”
“Well…”
I place another twenty on the counter. “I’m not looking for any trouble, you understand. Just a clean place to sleep for a few hours.”
He smiles, scoops up the money, hands me the bulging white plastic bag. “The Pine Grove Motel. You leave here, take a right, go down the road a piece, maybe two miles. Take a right onto Youngstown Road. You’ll come to an intersection. It’ll be right there.”
“Thanks,” I say, picking up the bag.
The old man adds, “Fella, from the height and size of you, maybe you’re not looking for trouble, but I got a feeling trouble is looking for you.”
“If it comes here,” I say, “will you send it in the other direction?”
The son in the corner by the shotgun laughs, and I leave.
Not much of a drive to the Pine Grove Motel, but I flip through the stations on the Cherokee’s radio, looking to hear what’s going on out there in talk-show land this early morning in America. In my travels south from DC, I played various jazz stations on satellite radio, but after a while I realized I wasn’t doing my job. I needed to know what was being said out there, from coast to coast. I had to gather intelligence.
It wasn’t pretty.
In my hours of driving, I heard the terrorist attacks—although not officially linked together—blamed on the Jews, the Muslims, gun-owner nuts, gun-control nuts, feminazis, incels (involuntary celibates), vegans, anti-vaxxers, pro-vaxxers, and about a half a dozen other groups.
Every caller, every talk-show host, was sure that he or she was the only one who knew the real truth and had the real solutions. It was always “the others” who should be arrested.
