Chapter 1 Sweet Stop #2
The older man chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t go spreading nasty rumors now, Jenna. It’s one of those district furlough days, and hell if I’m going all the way into the office to do paperwork without one of your caramel apple bear claws.”
Eric laughed with them. “They’re delicious, aren’t they, sir?” He’d graduated from the same high school, because though he was a city boy, that was only in comparison.
Jenna swept through the partition and rushed ahead so she could pull the bakery door open.
Neville kept telling people he was planning to retire ‘next year,’ and for as long as she’d been back in Misty Glades, she’d been hearing jokes about his inability to leave that job.
Seeing as he was pushing seventy and staying the course, she suspected the gossip was right.
“You be careful out there. The world’s only getting crazier. ”
His cracked lips lifted in a quiet smile. “Oh, I’ll be fine. No one’s interested in old men.” His eyes moved forward, past her, as he spoke. As if he were distracted. Then they went wide and the color drained from his face.
At the same time, the sound of a chair scraping roughly across the industrial vinyl flooring ripped through the air.
Jenna snapped her gaze past her confusingly startled former principal to find Q on his feet, the chair he’d claimed clasped in one hand as if he’d barely caught it from crashing to the floor.
A look of surprise also darkened his face.
“Nice of you to open the door for us, lady.”
What?
Jenna whipped around, realizing belatedly that she was still standing at the edge of the doorway, which she was holding open.
Except instead of helping her former principal through, she seemed to have opened the door for a pair of burglars.
At least, if their fitted, all-black ensemble, ski masks, and visible guns were anything to go by.
Her mouth dropped open. “This is a bakery,” she blurted.
The guy in front tilted his head, dark eyes narrowing. “Yeah, so? Maybe we’re hungry.”
Paper crinkled as Neville held out his purchase. “H-here,” he stammered. “It’s a bear claw. It’s delicious. You can have it.”
The man raised his gun. “You fuckin’ with me, old timer?”
Jenna jumped between them, inadvertently forcing the other burglar to leap forward and catch the door. “Don’t!”
“I can’t believe you’re from middle-of-nowhere Oregon.” Lance chuckled as they walked away from the bus stop. “Hell, I didn’t realize Oregon had a ‘middle-of-nowhere’ for people to be from.”
“Everywhere has their own equivalent,” Jon replied, tighter than his friend deserved.
It’d been a shit month. Four weeks and three days, to be precise, since their sudden honorable discharge from the Marine Corps.
Uncle Sam had been kind enough to spring for the cost of their flights back home, where they’d had one more uncomfortable sit-down with some people so high on the food chain even Jon hadn’t shared a room with their rank before.
And then they’d effectively been kicked to the curb.
They’d spent most of the first week reacclimating to just being inside the borders of the country they’d been working and fighting for the past seventeen years. Well, Jon had spent it reacclimating. Lance had spent most of it drunk.
Once Satan’s Hangover passed, Lance had declared his intent to call home and see if his family had forgiven him yet for joining literally any faction of the military.
He’d insisted Jon sit with him while he made the call, in solidarity.
Jon wasn’t in a position to refuse. Turned out, the Blackburns had changed their number.
And their address. In the wake of that failure, Jon hadn’t had the heart to chase his buddy off.
Even if he barely knew what to do with himself, too.
Going home was the only thing that made sense.
Stepping foot again into Misty Glades, Oregon felt not unlike walking into a minefield.
Except he’d never done the latter intentionally.
But it was that same analogy that had given him a short-term sense of direction, too.
Because if he knew he was in a minefield, and he knew the danger couldn’t be outright avoided, then it was best to disarm the damn thing.
That was what he’d told himself, anyway.
But the notion of actually going back to his parents’ house, after being away from it—and them—for as long as he had lived there to begin with made him literally nauseous.
He blamed that on why his feet turned the wrong direction from the bus depot.
His relationship with his mother was one thing.
They’d gotten along okay, depending on the day, but she’d always chosen the monster over him.
Even as an adult, even well-educated, it was something Jon struggled to understand.
“So, which way we headin’?” Lance asked, his head turning in a slow arch as he spoke. “I bet this town could make a killing on holidays with the right decorations. Does it snow here?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “I haven’t set foot in the state of Oregon in seventeen years, dumbass. My information’s outdated.” He gave his moronic friend a shove. “Yes, it fucking snows. Winters used to be brutal.”
Lance pretended to stumble to the side and took a large step forward, his body swaying as he made to turn.
Jon saw the instant the humor fled and alertness tightened his spine, an echo of the same ricocheting through him.
Lance held out an arm to stop him unnecessarily, his attention locked on a building up ahead. “I’m guessing the crime rate’s gone up. I make two, looks like an unmanned getaway car, at least two handguns and double as many hostages.”
Jon swept his gaze over the scene as Lance confirmed the visual.
It struck Jon, oddly, that he was fairly sure he recognized the building.
The sign on top said Sweet Stop in still-new, colorful lettering, and that was definitely different.
But the building itself was older. A quick glance down the street oriented his memory and verified the lack of an idling vehicle trying to hide out of sight.
It’d once been Misty Glades’s sole video rental store.
He remembered taking his high school girlfriend there a few times to pick up movies together, or just to get out of the house.
Later, maybe, he might be sad to lose another memory. Jenna had been one of the best parts of his time in Misty Glades.
That was irrelevant in the moment.
“Let’s go be good Samaritans,” Jon said.
They moved forward in synch, quietly depositing their bags against a wall and keeping the building at their backs as they approached.
The closer, clearer angle helped them better gauge their targets—a pair of darkly dressed, slim-profiled male figures in ski masks, brandishing pistols.
One held a backpack that hung open, waiting to be stuffed.
Movement beyond the glass drew Jon’s attention.
He noted a person standing further back, as if frozen, before realizing that the hunched older man was holding out a white paper bag.
It was eerily reminiscent of a schoolyard bully receiving some petrified kid’s homemade lunch, except the forwardmost gunman raised his gun instead.
Then the woman whose profile Jon had barely noted—average height, blonde—threw herself in between the two. “Don’t!”
The gunmen were preoccupied as the door swung in on them, so Jon met Lance’s eyes and tipped his head.
“This is your place, right, fat bitch?” the guy with the raised gun asked. “I want everything.”
Lance was behind the second guy as the words hung in the air, arm around his neck and hauling him backward.
Jon swung in before that guy’s gun went skittering down the sidewalk, taking advantage of the remaining burglar’s split-second distraction.
The guy was a crook, and from his obvious reflex to retreat, that was all he was.
He didn’t even try to squeeze the trigger before the gun he’d aimed inside the store was in Jon’s hand, and with his free hand Jon twisted the asshole’s arm behind him.
“Ow! Fuck, lemme go, man!”
Jon walked the punk backward, spun him like a ballerina, and kicked out his knees. He clamped his hand to the asshole’s neck, trapping him on the asphalt, and bent low. “Why? You pointed a gun at a scared old man and a defenseless woman. Why should I let you fucking go?”
“Jesus Christ,” Lance exclaimed. “This kid fainted on me.”
The guy under Jon’s grip began to shake. “W-we just wanted some quick cash, dude….”
Jon flexed his grip. “Shut up.” He looked up, toward the store—and slammed into familiar wide, watery blue eyes he couldn’t have forgotten if he’d tried. “Jenna?”