Free The Road to You by Marilyn Brant

The clerk shrugged. “Okay, yeah. So, what do you want?”
    Donovan sidled up to the register, put the bread and the jar of peanut butter on the counter and glanced (a bit too obviously, in my opinion) around the store, as if sweeping for eavesdroppers.
    “I didn’t wanna say anything while the little old lady was in here, but we just came into town last night to visit some friends, and they told us about you.” Donovan paused. Leaned forward. “Said you had, you know, extra provisions …” He let the thought trail off and smiled knowingly at the clerk.
    This was a big gamble on Donovan’s part. I tried to look relaxed and natural, but the edges of worry cut lines of anxiety into my gut. It was a dangerous game, playing on a hunch like that. Not only implying that Ronny was some kind of dealer, but that we knew intimately anyone at all in Crescent Cove, a town not much larger than some extended families.
    My fears grew deeper when Ronny asked, “Which friends are those?”
    I studied the clerk’s face for tells. Caught the way his glance shifted for a split second toward the backroom. The way he flinched then forced his features into an approximation of a smile. The way his hands hovered just above the counter and trembled ever so slightly from the effort it took to keep from grabbing something—a weapon, maybe—from below the register.
    “Kim and Cindy at the bar,” Donovan said easily, pointing vaguely in the direction of the place we were at last night. “And we got to talking to Mike, too. You know, the bartender?” He fiddled with a stick of beef jerky on the counter. “They said you could, uh…help us out.”
    I forced myself not to hold my breath. It would take Ronny only one conversation with any of the people Donovan had just name-dropped to unveil the truth. Donovan had just put a ticking clock on our stay in Crescent Cove.
    Ronny’s eyes narrowed. “Where’re you from?”
    “St. Paul,” Donovan said, his now-standard response.
    A smirk graced the clerk’s face that gave me the most uneasy feeling imaginable. “How much money you people got?” he asked.
    “How much stuff is in a bag?” Donovan shot back, still grinning languidly.
    “Little bag, ten bucks. Big bag, twenty. Cash only.”
    Donovan plucked a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and passed it to Ronny.
    The clerk licked his lips, scanned the doors and windows for peeping eyes, snatched the bill and pocketed it. “Hang on,” he said, as he walked into the backroom and emerged in under fifteen seconds with a largish, unmarked, brown-paper sack with the top rolled shut. “Careful with this. You don’t want to shake it too much. And keep it dry.”
    Donovan unrolled the top and peered inside. His expression betrayed nothing, but the stillness of his body told me he hadn’t gotten what he’d expected.
    “Thanks, man,” he said to Ronny in that same pseudo-relaxed voice. The two guys nodded to each other before Donovan nudged me out the door with an urgency that was surprising.
    “What’s in there?” I whispered when we were on the sidewalk, several yards away from the store and near enough to the Trans Am to make a quick escape. “That’s an awfully large bag for drugs.”
    “Get in the car,” he said grimly, “and I’ll show you.”
    When we were inside, he slowly opened the bag and let me look. It wasn’t drugs. No, it was fireworks. Unlabeled. Not uniform in size or shape. Without any typical commercial packaging. In other words, the illegal kind.
    “Oh,” I said. “Do you think that’s all he sells?”
    Donovan shook his head. “I wouldn’t put drugs or firearms past him, but this is bad enough. Possession of this kind of stash could land him in almost as much trouble.” He looked warily at the brown-paper sack. “Us, too, if we get caught holding this.”
    “Wonderful.”
    “Yeah.” He set the bag gently on the backseat and put the car into gear. “I want to take a closer look at these. Somewhere