“Murder?” Excerpt 2 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” a novel by Jeff Posey
Chapter 1, Part 2, from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.
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He directed the driver to a different bank in downtown Dallas where he kept a safety deposit box secured with a password, no key. From it, he took everything left from his original life: birth certificate, a few photos, a folder stuffed with legal documents.
He hailed a different taxi to a bustling truck stop on Interstate 20, paid the driver, tipped him a twenty.
Inside, he went into the men’s locker room, full of steam from showering truckers, and shed himself of the last vestiges of Tom Oley. In a stall, he used the clippers to cut his hair as close to the scalp as he could, saving the clippings in a plastic bag, along with his identification cut into tiny bits with a nail snip. They wouldn’t know he’d cut his hair and they would never find the hair clippings or his ID remnants, pitched out along whatever route he was about to take. He counted his cash: $373. That would get him there, wherever there turned out to be. He opened his birth certificate. The paper seemed faded and brittle, but it opened without cracking. Jedediah Aberdene Baxter. JAB. That’s me.
Born in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in the old family house on Hermosa Street. He’d never known his mother. And his father only those two last miserable years in that house. But he remembered his grandfather. Also JAB. All the way back to his great-great-grandfather. A line of JABs with the same ludicrous first and middle names. What did that make him? The fifth? His mind drifted back to the house. Before his grandfather died and his father arrived. Before things became unbearable.
He remembered a room. With unfinished walls. Must have been the attic. And a leather book with JAB burned black into the cover. His grandfather, smiling to him, showing him where it stayed hidden behind a board that looked like every other board. As a child he searched for it but never found it. His grandfather said it contained a family secret, a treasure he called it, but the clues made no sense and he couldn’t figure it out. No one in the family had been able to figure it out.
Maybe it’s time to go back, he thought. Put his old skin back on. Look for that leather journal. Figure out the riddle. Maybe it would tell him who he really was. Maybe it would save him and hide him until the death of Tom Oley’s wife blew over. But before he could disappear into his own abandoned past, he had to clear the seventy-two grand.
He bought shaving cream and disposable blades at the truck stop store and lathered his face and head in front of a mirror. He wanted to be cleanly shaven. It amazed him how unlike himself it made him look. His scalp pale against his tanned face. Like a chemotherapy patient.
A burly fellow with a towel around his waist joined him to shave.
“Missed your eyebrows,” the man said.
Baxter grinned. “I leave that kind of detailed work to the girlie men.”
The man scowled. “You’re not one of those, are you?”
“I don’t think they let heteros into the club. Unless they hold you down.”
“They better not try that with me.”
“Where you headed?”
“Cincinnati. Straight shot, not stopping.”
“Conversation keep you awake or put you to sleep?”
In the mirror, the burly man looked him in the eyes. “What’re you running from?”
“My wife.”
The driver laughed. Dragged his razor over the rough stubble on his cheeks. “I’m not supposed to. But yeah, if you want to go to Cincinnati and you’ll help keep me awake.” He extended a moist hand. “Packer,” he said.
“Fitzsimmons,” said Baxter, shaking the hand. “Fitz to most.” He smiled at his joke. He liked making those who pursued him have fits.
Packer did most of the talking, and they parted like old friends. In Cincinnati Baxter took a series of taxicabs to twenty banks and cashed twenty checks. It took him all day. He bought a red-eye bus ticket to Atlanta, where he cashed thirty-three checks the next day. Another overnight bus to New York, where he converted the rest and bought a nice, well-fitting money belt. More vest than belt, it literally surrounded him with cash. He took another low-rent overnight bus to Detroit. There he saw the fragment of a TV news item: “Millionaire’s Daughter Murdered.” A picture of Pam and her father, Trevor Williams, followed by a picture of Baxter with the caption: “Wanted.” It almost unnerved him. He walked twice around the block, then zigzagged through town until he stopped at a diner, exhausted. Amazingly, he met a man willing to give him a ride to St. Louis.
Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….
Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.
