Free 3 Nowhere to Go and All Day to Get There by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

Police Department back in California, and sometimes he forgets that his badge is gone and his authority to fight crime wherever and whenever he sees it is gone with it. I have to constantly remind him that, big and muscle-bound as he is, he can't talk his way out of a gunfight the way he once could. Without the uniform, his intimidation factor just isn't the same.
    I looked up at him and shook my head. Don't you even think about it, my eyes said.
    "Oh, my God!" the woman standing directly behind us exclaimed, starting to cry hysterically. I'd been wondering when somebody was going to do that.
    Her wailing was all the cashier needed to hear. Suddenly energized, she popped the cash drawer open and began emptying it, her hands shaking so bad it pained me to watch them.
    Ryback turned to the woman standing beside him, the short, freckle-faced butterbean holding the sleeping baby, and said, "Go get some food. Much as you can carry."
    Like the cashier before her, she stood there like she hadn't heard him speak. She didn't look much more than nineteen or twenty years old, and she carried the same pall of melancholy weariness that Ryback himself did. "Honey, please," she said, her baby-girl voice just above a whisper.
    "We don't have time to argue, Cee," Ryback said, firmly but without much anger. "Now go on. Get everything you can carry and let's go, we got to hurry."
    The woman remained motionless for a second longer, mulling over her options, then she shuffled off to do as she'd been told.
    Right about then, a Texas state trooper pulled up in the parking lot outside.
    Ryback saw him right away. We all did. The front of the mini-mart was all glass, and our view of the parking lot and gas pumps beyond was almost completely unobstructed.
    "Shit!" Ryback said.
    "Oh, thank God," the woman behind Joe and me said, wiping her face dry with the palms of both hands. She thought it was okay to stop crying now; the cavalry had arrived. I think she was the only one in the building who didn't expect what happened next.
    The trooper got out of his car and headed toward us, too busy adjusting his hat to notice what kind of trouble lay ahead until he'd practically stepped right into it. By the time he looked up to see what was happening, Ryback was already barking orders at him.
    "Stop right where you are, mister! You step through that door, boy, I'm gonna start some serious shootin' in here!"
    The trooper reached for the gun at his side instinctively, then froze. Just as he had to everyone on our side of the mini-mart's glass facade, Ryback sounded to him like a man who meant every word he said.
    "Now, just hold on—" the trooper said, searching desperately for the right thing to say.
    "No, you hold on! Get the hell away from that door! Right now, goddamnit!"
    "Son, you've got to give this up," Big Joe said, talking to Ryback the way I'd heard him talk to his own sons a thousand times before—with quiet calm and aged wisdom. "It's all over. Put that gun down before somebody gets hurt, okay?"
    He'd held his tongue for more than ten minutes now and he was all through playing the silent observer. He isn't the stand-back-and-let's-see-what-develops kind of guy, my husband. He takes a hand in things. No matter how close that sometimes brings me to full cardiac arrest. I tell him just because he's insured, that doesn't mean he has the right to make me a widow anytime he pleases.
    "Shut your mouth, old man!" Ryback told him, his eyes still on the state trooper outside.
    "I second that motion," I said, tugging on Big Joe's arm.
    The woman behind us was crying hysterically again.
    "And you! I told you to get the hell away from that door!" Ryback snapped at the trooper, who was still standing just on the other side of the mini-mart's glass doors, as frozen to the spot as an abandoned mannequin. Ryback actually tapped the cashier on the top of her head with the nose of his gun, just to make her cringe for the trooper's benefit, and said, "You want me to