The Hound of Justice by Claire O'Dell

Author:Claire O'Dell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

14

By late afternoon, I had navigated my rental car away from Atlanta’s airport and onto Route 85 heading southwest. I’d come into my second wind, and I wanted to drive as fast as the speed limit allowed—faster—but I knew better. This was the South, after all, and while the South wasn’t as red as it used to be, all it would take was one bully cop to turn me into a hashtag.

So I kept my foot light on the gas, and put extra distance between me and the car ahead, especially in the choke of traffic that was Atlanta’s rush hour. I faithfully used my turn signal. Even when I exited the beltway for 85S, and left the traffic behind, I never let my speed get above 55 mph.

Twenty miles outside the city limits, only a few signs remained of the decades since I’d last visited. The crumbling townships—built from cinder block and false expectations in the late 2010s—were no more. The strip malls and cheap office complexes had managed to survive longer, but with the coming of the New Civil War, these, too, had finally given up. It was like the corridor between DC and Baltimore, the farms and green fields replaced by acres of concrete in that mad rush to build and build. That, too, had turned into a desert of weeds and trash.

I was glad when I finally left the ruins behind for the rural counties beyond. Just outside Molena, I stopped to refill my gas tank and buy a Diet Coke from the station’s convenience store. The attendant, an elderly white man, shook his head at my credit card. I stopped myself from sighing just in time and handed over two twenties as a deposit while I filled my own tank. The old man rounded up the charge to the next dollar, then glared at me as if daring me to argue. At least he didn’t spit until the screen door closed behind me.

Twenty miles more, thirty. I could almost imagine myself back with my sister and parents, during that long, long ride up north, with our father driving as cautiously as I did now. I drove on while the sun sank into a glorious explosion of color and twilight settled over the land. Every now and then, I consulted the directions from my aunt.

109 to 74. That’s Crest Highway. Go down east a couple or so miles, just past Mallory Road, to a dirt road heading east. If you get to Jeff Davis Road, you gone too far.

I nearly missed Mallory Road but saw the rusted street sign just in time. A couple hundred yards past Mallory, I eased my car onto the almost invisible dirt road that wound east and south through cotton fields with their buds just sprouting green. Memories teased at me with snips and snaps of images that almost—but not quite—matched the scene before me. Or maybe this was only the expectation of memory. The brain could be funny like that.

My aunt’s directions told me five miles to the next intersection.

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