Zero Hour: Where are our Children (A Serial Novel) Episode 5 of 9

by Gary Sapp

yet you walked over here this time of the night to speak to me. I think you used that time to think long and hard about what you wanted to say to me. I’m here, Scotty. You have my attention. What do you want?”

  “I want what I always want, Old Man?”

  “I’m not in the mood to solve one of your puzzles, Scotty, not tonight. Spit it out.”

  “Alright,” He rested his arms on his knees. “I loved your father like the brother that I never had. You know that I chose never to marry. There won’t be any little Scotties running around the streets of Atlanta anytime soon. You and your brother Xavier are all the family that I know, all the family that I will ever know.” He looked to the ceiling and then found Chris’ eyes once again. “The love that I had for your father produced a pack that I hoped I have honored. I gave him my word that if anything ever happened to him that I would watch over the two things that he cherished more than anything in the world.”

  “I imagined that either one of us have made that an easy promise to keep.”

  “You imagine correctly, Old Man.” If Scotty’s smile was a summer day, then his laugh was the thunderstorm on a summer’s evening. And then just as suddenly his look went deadly serious. “A storm’s coming.” He said and on cue the wind howled outside of Chris’ front window. “This storm is going to threaten to sweep both you and Xavier in its wake. And look at me…I’m an old man now, I don’t know how much longer that I will be able to keep my word to your father.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Chris pointed at the panel continuing to offer muted words on his television. “And you are wrong about one thing, my friend, the storm is already here.”

  Scotty stood up, straightened his jacket out, and pointed at the screen. “You think that I’m talking to you about these tall tales and fables that have been perpetrated against you by a second tier reporter on a modern day which hunt?” He circled the room and came back to he was originally standing. “That was an illusion of truth, Christopher. I am talking about real truth; the type of earthshaking truth that Thomas Pepper claims that follows him around. You are on the cusp of learning a truth so wondrous…and yet, so very tragic, that you will never look at the opposite sides of the same coin the same ever again.”

  Scotty took two long strides, stepped over some more debris and opened the front door.

  “Why won’t you tell me?” Chris asked his father’s dear friend. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  Scotty held the door handle but offered no explanation and no other movement for a very long time. He finally opened the door and the stench of burning brush rushed into Chris’ living room. “Because I gave my word, Christopher,” Scotty offered as if his explanation made all of the sense in the world. “Pepper aided somewhat in answering the three questions that every Person of Color in this country wanted to know…I will tell you that the one question that you’ve asked yourself your entire life is soon to be answered.” He walked outside of the door and looked in Chris direction one final time. “All of your adult life you’ve dreaded the lies about your past would come back to destroy you…when it has been the truth all along that may be the most damning. You will need to be strong.”

  And Benjamin Scott walked away and took Chris’ truth with him.

  Roxanne

  She slapped Chris across his cheek.

  He said: “What are you doing, Roxanne?”

  What was she doing? “I’ll ask the questions here. Who are you Chris Prince?” She threw a series of blows that he fended off with relative ease. “What kind of man are you? What kind of man?”

  She unleashed another volley of rabbit punches, slaps and when those failed to connect she clawed at his face with her fingernails. In the end she could not have said how many punches landed. She could not say if she’d wounded anything more than the man’s pride.

  Roxanne only knew that she was only faintly aware of the half a dozen or so patrons seated in Walter’s Bar and Tavern where she had found Chris about four blocks from his home.

  Chris finally caught hold to one of her wrist and pulled her close enough to him for her to smell his breath. Smartly, he guarded his family jewels and pushed aside one girlish trick after the other as if it were child’s play.

  His mouth was near her ear. “One of the local papers dug up Erica’s phony accusations against me. That’s all they were, Roxanne…accusations. The FBI was aware of them, investigated, cleared me of all wrong doing and dismissed it.” He got real close and sneered in her ear. “I think that you should do the same.”

  Roxanne tried one final sucker punch when he released her…but he blocked it, reversed their positions in an instant and pinned her against the bar’s counter. The bar’s owner looked half amused half nervous about what he was seeing, but hadn’t acted as if he were going to call the law, yet.

  “I should have known something shady was going on,” Roxanne said, trying to work her arms and torso from Chris ‘clutches. So this is how we spend our first date, Chris. I know that you are somewhere below the border laughing at me, Victor. She felt her arms…all of her tiring. “When I first saw you in the park and told you that your step daughter had gone missing…you acted the part of a cold fish.”

  “Well, now you know why. And anyway, Erica had always been trouble. I wasn’t surprised that the possibility existed that she’d put herself in a position to get herself killed.”

  Chris released her with a warning glance that said: No more, Roxanne. He turned back to whatever he was drinking and slid the miniature glass down to the bartender for a refill.

  Roxanne said: “Are you saying that the young woman that you helped raise deserved to die? Are you telling me that she had earned that bullet lodged in her brain after nearly being strangled?”

  “No…of course not, Roxanne,” Chris sat down. “But I refuse to be one of those parents who get in front of the TV cameras after my child is killed denying any knowledge of their child’s despicable activities. Erica lived a reckless lifestyle. She pissed on and pissed off a lot of the wrong people. It was bound to eventually catch up with her.”

  “She was young, Chris. People her age make mistakes.”

  “They do. Erica was vindictive and manipulative…and not without a hell of a lot of effort trying.” The bartender slid the brown colored alcoholic drink back towards his customer. It took two swallows for Chris to get it down. And the frown etched on his face, immediately told Roxanne that had little to no experience with alcohol. Men and their vices, She had such high hopes that he was above such trivialities.

  “I didn’t know that you were a drinker.”

  “I didn’t either,” He spun around in his chair to face her. “I promised myself to never touch this stuff. I made it all the way until tonight before I finally broke that promise. My whole life has been about maintaining control. I’ve watched Xavier teeter on the edge of losing it because of it. But I didn’t pester him. I let him find his own way. We both needed to after what happened to the old man. You see, Roxanne, the great and reviled Isaac Prince was taken from his beloved sons by a drunk driver. The man who killed him was three times over the legal limit when his car crashed into my dad’s. He had scotch and soda…ginger ale in his system at the detox.”

  “So that’s why you all ways drink the ginger ale. It was your way of honoring you father’s memory, yet never forgetting that alcohol had forced someone else to lose their control.”

  Chris nodded but held his finger up summoning another drink all the same.

  He said: “And where in the hell do you come off judging me anyway. I found out about the questionable methods you used to find your way to Carver. You threatened people. You assaulted two others specifically. Councilwoman Vanessa Davis is far from a saint, but the woman deserved better than to be nearly tortured by you in her own home.”

  In her mind’s eye, Roxanne could see how that entire episode played out. But who dared argue her results was either a liar or a fool. She hoped that Chris Prince was neither. “I did what
I had to do…no matter the ills that Erica Lovings was involved in while she lived; she deserved to be treated with some respect and dignity after she died. From the moment Denise hired me…I knew that she was dead. I can’t tell you how, but I knew. It didn’t change the fact that I wanted her found as if she were going to walk through your ex-wife’s door with me. So if I took a few liberties to gain information to her possible whereabouts, so be it.”

  “So because you don’t wear a badge and don’t have to answer to any authority figures, you feel that you don’t have to show…restraint.”

  “I did what I had to do, Chris.”

  “You crossed the line, Roxanne.”

  “You’re insane, Chris.” She said. “And what’s worse is that you are clueless. You’re a member of that Mickey Mouse Club called the FBI and you think that know everything about law enforcement and investigation. And don’t try to tell me again about how I should handle my business. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t having a fucking clue what I’ve been though.”

  The bar grew very quiet after Roxanne had finished her tirade at last. Roxanne felt her temples throbbing and she could feel her pulse racing in her ears.

  “I understand a lot more than you might think.” Chris said.

  Roxanne didn’t want to understand. In the deepest depths of her mind