by Javan Bonds
Jackson raised his head to squarely look at his father, understanding his reasoning but not yet sure if his father had uncovered a giant, nation-changing conspiracy within less than an hour of the occurrence. Again, before Jackson could get a word in, his father began to speak, giving closing statements on his lecture. “They are already takin’ lead bullets away, and this new shit storm will speed them up takin’ guns away. I bet you money that will be the next thing they go for.”
With almost acceptance, Jackson slightly nodded, as if to say, “Probably.”
Everything his dad had just said made sense—most everything he said did—but Jackson would have to do some thinking on his own before he made a final decision. He really didn’t want to get into a discussion about this so early in the morning and was excited about taking a new gun home to practice with, so he quickly changed the subject. Looking over Jeff’s shoulders as if the gun had walked up beside him, he asked, “So, do y’all still have that gun you was tellin’ me about?”
Jeff was watching the ticker running across the bottom of his little TV screen, only half listening. He pointed through Jackson to the opposite wall and said, “That AR15.” He handed Jackson a key to unlock the restraint. “It’s the first rifle on the first rack on the far wall.”
“OK,” Jackson muttered as he turned to find the weapon. “You could have just kept it behind the damn counter; that would have been just as easy,” he almost said as he strode away. He had the feeling he was in a museum every time he was here; this landmark of a building was one of the oldest in Dodge, but these masterpieces of iron and wood left one expecting to see a tour guide. He thought some of the guns that were on display should be in lit, sealed cases, never to be touched, and even bear faceplates. He walked on, breathing in the beauty of the surrounding guns, and noticed an elderly, blue-haired lady—he believed it was Mrs. Scott—searching through a group of bolt-action .22 rifles. And one aisle over was a man he didn’t recognize looking down the sights of a Marlin lever-action .30-30, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, square-toed boots similar to his own but with riding spurs, and a thin layer of dust covering his jeans—definitely the guy who owned the horse outside.
Jackson lifted the carbine from its resting place and turned to head back to the counter. He had not given the gun more than a glance, knowing his father had pointed him to the right one. It was amazing to him that his father automatically knew where everything in the store was, even though Jackson jokingly accused him of having Alzheimer’s and forgetting everything within five minutes.
Upon reaching the bar, he placed a finger on the key pushing it back across the counter to his Dad who then pocketed the key. Jackson reached for his billfold to dig out some bills. No doubt everything cost more than it had a year earlier due to hyperinflation, but Jackson’s welding job paid a decent wage, and his father always gave him a family discount, so the price wouldn’t be much of an increase from what Jeff had paid for it originally. Jackson knew his father wasn’t heartless, but he always seemed to get the used guns dirt cheap.
When Jeff took out the change, he heard a noise that sounded similar to an oncoming freight train, and both instinctively looked to the front window and saw Old Ben craning his neck, looking south down the highway. With so few cars driving this stretch of road, any vehicle sounded louder than normal, not only because sound carried on an open road but also because the violation of the silence forced everyone to focus on the noise of the intruder. Hell, Jackson thought, even a bicycle would sound as loud as an eighteen-wheeler. He knew that everyone in Dodge was watching the highway, waiting to see what was coming, and though it probably wasn’t a traveling carnival coming to town, it was exciting to see any vehicle these days. The sound almost shook the windows as the interloper got closer, and a chorus of “hmm” sounded from the customers as a small, rusty pickup followed by two motorcycles flew down the road.
“Well, I wonder where they’re goin’,” Jeff said to no one in particular, still looking through the window.
Jackson shoved the change into his front pants pocket, shifted the rifle to a parade rest position, and gestured that he was leaving. “Motorcycles save them guys a lot on gas.” Reaching the door, he drew his hand up in a wave and spoke loud enough for Jeff to hear. “Thanks for the rifle, Daddy. I’ll see you at the house later on.” He slipped through the door as Jeff gave a customary “all right,” and he remembered wanting to be ready to say something to Old Ben before he drove away.
He slowed his pace as he exited, hoping to say his good-byes to Old Ben and keep moving, but he knew that would be impossible after seeing the desperate need for attention on the old man’s face. You could always go inside; Daddy loves to talk. Jackson let out a silent sigh, stopping in front of Ben but still facing his truck, sliding the rifle down so the butt rested on the concrete, to hold the barrel in his hand. “What you think, Mr. Kennard? It ain’t loaded. You wanna look at it?” he asked, gesturing with the gun.
“I can see it fine from here, and it appears to be an exceptional machine, young man.”
Jackson hefted the gun off the ground and began to walk as he said, “Well, I gotta get on. I’ll see ya. Have a good un.”
“Oh, I will. Oh, I will, young man. You stay out of trouble.”
Jackson raised his free hand to gesture—yeah, yeah—and turned at the corner, making his way to his truck. It had always struck him funny that Old Ben didn’t seem to have any type of regional accent. He sure as hell didn’t sound as if he was from around here, and he didn’t really have a Midwestern or Yankee accent.
Jackson realized he couldn’t hear the vehicles anymore. He should have been able to hear the roar of the engines for miles, especially those choppers, and they were not going that fast. Perhaps they had stopped at the gas station; it would make sense to fill up before they got into Marton, where it would undoubtedly be a few dollars more per gallon. A sad grin crossed his face as he pulled himself into his truck with one hand and gently placed the rifle on the passenger side of the bench seat. Dollars have become cents now, and it won’t be long until none of it is worth anything. Good thing he was stocking up on the stuff that would be worth something.
He glanced at his passenger-side mirror as he turned the ignition, catching a glimpse of Old Ben babbling, obviously talking to himself or the horse again. He knew that Old Ben believed his own teachings of how America was headed down a slippery slope; he just hoped the old man was prepared, though he didn’t know if Ben even owned a pistol. Reaching the end of the parking lot, he turned on his right blinker, which seemed pretty pointless lately. He chuckled at his current thought: Redstone had said that Old Ben didn’t need a gun; he carried a light saber.
CHAPTER 3
July 5
LACEY RICE HAD been the clerk at the Texaco—the only gas station in Dodge—for a few years now. She had had several part time jobs through high school until getting hired on here. This might be part time too, but at least it was less work than being a dentist’s secretary. She was five nine and slim, and her shoulder-length blond hair had gotten her great tips at Laredo Steak House in Maryton and even better tips at Lefty’s Bar in Cryar while she was working through her failed attempt to get a college education. After giving up on community college, she decided to move back in with her parents until she had a steady job or got married. Lacey was “too high maintenance for guys around here,” according to her mother, and she “just wanted a husband who could do most of the breadwinning.” The way things were going, it didn’t seem likely she would ever find anything steady, and so far no rich men had fallen out of the sky.
Because of the situation with the Middle East and the economy, which was falling faster by the day, the tiny convenience store received so little business that Lacey was surprised she still had a job there. Sitting behind the counter, she had her feet propped up on an empty cigarette rack and her chair balanced on the two back legs as she listened to news radio at a volume that would have been considered extremely l
oud by store policy and probably would have gotten her fired. Sitting like this was against store policy, and so was eating Milk Duds on the job, but there was no one there to complain or bother her. And if someone did drive up, she would hear the vehicle before it even got close. The design of this store had her facing the interior, and her back was almost pressed against the front of the building. The two customer entrances were in the corner to her left, with one door opening in from the front and the other from the side, and they would almost touch if both were simultaneously opened. One small unisex bathroom was at the corner of the coolers on the back wall to her right, and an “employees only” door halved the drink coolers on the back wall. Candy bars, bags of chips, and everything else you would find in a convenience store in a dry county filled the aisles throughout the rest of the interior.
The only natural light came from a short but wide line of windows that stretched across the front of the building and to the back of the store on the south side, the line being broken only by the two glass doors. The windows were set into the wall about six feet from the floor, so standing on her tiptoes, she could just see through.
The radio announcer had been bouncing back and forth among topics such as the most recent school shooting, inflated gas prices, the assassinations in Washington, and reports on roving gangs of gas thieves, with the last obviously making everyone in the country think of The Road Warrior. Several newspaper cartoons and especially one SNL skit involving a man with a Mohawk wearing football pads and assless chaps came to her mind whenever these raiders were mentioned. Alabama surely would not see anything similar for a long time; most of these reports came from Texas and California, and this whole mess would be fixed before it spread much further.
As the news announcer began a story on a gas station holdup in Louisiana, Lacey heard the faint sound of a fast-approaching vehicle and quickly turned the speaker volume to zero, pressed the wrinkles out of her shirt and pants as she stood, and peered out the window, waiting for the vehicle to come into view. It might not even be stopping here—you could blink and realize you had been through Dodge—but as the engine got louder and then slowly wound down as if to turn, she jumped back and turned to stand in her usual place by the register, almost excited that someone would be coming in. She didn’t really know why; Lacey had never been one of those people who felt gratification through serving others. Maybe she was just bored. She heard the vehicle come to a near stop on the highway to make its turn into the Texaco parking lot. The vehicles. There were more than one—at least two; the sound of the engines must have blended together but now became separate. A smile nearly reached her face as she eagerly awaited the newcomers, but the smile faded as quickly as it had come, and a shot of fear ran through her mind as she noticed the small pickup and two large men on motorcycles through the door on the south wall pulling past and parking near the entrance.
She never thought of herself as lucky, but she didn’t think she could be so unlucky as to be involved in a holdup identical to the one she had just heard about on the radio. Perhaps she was jumping the gun. Just because these guys were on motorcycles didn’t mean they were part of a biker gang up to no good. They could have just been worried about saving money. She had heard that some motorcycles achieved seventy miles a gallon, so there was no need to assume anything. She tried to plaster a congenial smile on her face but was sure it did not seem genuine, as anxious as she was. This can’t be happening, God, please don’t let these guys be robbers, and a million other thoughts were flying through her head as they killed the motors and headed into the store. Apparently she had missed the man in the passenger seat of the truck, but it wouldn’t have mattered how many there were; she would have been scared to death even if it had been only one. She had not asked God for anything in a long time, but she knew He was listening as she prayed the men were not what she feared they were. She realized she probably should have called Bobbi Jo and told her to keep an eye out, but it was a little late for that. I’ll figure out who these guys are in a few seconds, she thought.
◆◆◆
Bobbi Jo Mahan sat alone in her small corner office in the town hall, sometimes playing on her federally provided cell phone; sometimes spinning in her rotating office chair, staring at the phone that rang so rarely she thought it might be broken; and hardly ever doing anything productive lately. She had been hired as town clerk and had no problem showing up to work every day, because government employees were always paid, even if everyone else wasn’t. Though she did her best to keep it a mystery from everyone, she knew they knew she was surely in her mid-fifties—her thinning, light-brown hair and the lines on her face were beginning to show it. She would be considered overweight but not obese, and even several diets had not helped kick her craving for the sweets she kept hidden in her desk. She hated her mother for naming her Roberta Josephine and even more for calling her Roberta every time she talked to the old bag. She was glad everyone else called her by her nickname and was thinking about names she would rather have been given at birth when she heard a vehicle coming down the highway. She knew it was coming from the south and didn’t really care to watch for it. No one ever stopped at the town hall, and it was probably going to drive straight through the town anyway.
By the time she had finished her third Milky Way Dark bar and another game of mah-jongg, she realized she could not hear the automobile anymore. The window almost shuddered whenever a vehicle drove by, and she would have noticed that. And there were two windows in her dimly lit corner office, one facing the highway and the buildings on the other side of it, the other facing Polecat Road and the Texaco across from it. She eventually looked through the second to see at least a couple of vehicles in the normally vacant gas station parking lot. “It’s good to see that someone in this town is getting some business. I should probably pick up some Reese’s Cups on my way to work tomorrow.” She had never broken her habit of speaking aloud to herself, but she did her best to never let anyone catch her doing so.
As the men left their vehicles, they headed to the entrance in a single file. She could see, even from this distance, that none of the men had his shirt tucked in. In horrified disbelief she gasped, “Ruffians!” The men looked pretty dirty, as if they had been doing construction work or some other type of manual labor, but Bobbi Jo knew that any respectable man would not be caught dead in public without at least having the mind to make himself somewhat presentable. This group was nothing more than trash in her mind, and she should call Redstone to drive by and make sure these deviants knew they had been noticed.
Squinting, she took a better look. Bobbi Jo could see that at least one of these punks had long hair, a tattoo here, a piercing there—and that was enough for her. She had seen all she wanted to see. These miscreants had picked the wrong lady to be seen by and deserved a flash of blue lights.
“Redstone?” The radio crackled, but Redstone didn’t budge, resting his head on his fist on the arm that was pressed into the armrest of the door. “Redstone!” The radio chirped even louder as Bobbi Jo tried to get his attention. Finally her short fuse had burned all the way down, and she wasn’t going to let him sleep through this call. “Clifford Charles Stone!” Using all three of his names would usually get a young man’s attention and let him know he was in trouble. Before he could even open his eyes, the question “Mama?” exited his mouth. He quickly realized he was alone in his squad car and was embarrassed that he was hearing his mother yell at him in his sleep.
He thought maybe the voice had been coming from the radio, and even if it hadn’t, it would be a good idea to check in, so Bobbi Jo wouldn’t think he had been sleeping on the job again. “Trying to call me, Bobbi Jo? I was occupied and couldn’t get to the radio.”
Redstone normally didn’t wear a shoulder radio, presumably because he didn’t want to be bothered by things like work if he was doing something else, and Bobbi Jo silently blew air between her lips in a sign of disbelief.
Barely concealing her anger at him for bein
g as lazy as every other policeman who had ever worked in this town yet trying to pretend it didn’t bother her, she sardonically countered back over the radio, “If you ain’t too busy, I want you to ride up to the Texaco—”
At that point he interrupted her with his usual sarcasm. “Why? Are you out of candy?”
The speaker on the radio fell silent, and he knew her face was reddening with embarrassment. She tried to keep her chocolate stash a secret, but anyone who worked around her saw the ridiculous number of candy bar wrappers in the trash can beside her desk. She wanted to jump through the radio and strangle Redstone, and her grip tightened around the receiver as she tried to contain her rage. “No! There are some guys in there who look like trouble, and I want you to ride by there and let ’em know the law’s watchin’ ’em.”
Son of a bitch. Now I’ll have to actually do something, Redstone thought as he straightened up his black baseball cap with the word “POLICE” stitched across the front in white, all-capital block letters and sat up in his seat. He placed his left hand on the wheel, preparing to drive. “All right, I think the situation here is wrapping up, so I’ll head that way in a minute. Over and out.”
She almost laughed at that. She knew there was no situation; he had just been sleeping in his car. But he was keeping his part of their silent agreement: he did the few things she asked him to do, and he would not get in trouble for being a lazy bum. And if she didn’t bother him often, he would not publicly embarrass her with her chocolate habit. Their agreement had formed subconsciously, and though neither of them ever spoke of it, they both knew what to do. The fact that he always ended his radio conversations with “over and out” seemed strange to her, because he, like Bobbi Jo, rarely used radio lingo any other time. For a domestic disturbance call, she would simply state, “Jerry hit his girlfriend again. Go over to his house and arrest him.” And when Redstone gave his position, he just said, “I’m at the high-school parking lot, and I’ll probably sleep here all day.”
