He felt the urge to run, to flee. Adrenaline. He broke into a sweat.
“Get packed up,” he said to his wife. “Your meds, some clothes. Some food. Nothing else. We’re leaving.”
“But where are we going?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. We can’t stay here. They’ve been rioting in Baltimore all week. They rioted at the supermarket yesterday. Power is off, phones are off, internet is off. When the inner-city thugs come to the suburbs to loot and burn and rape, we had better be gone.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Dear wife, we don’t even have a gun, because you wouldn’t have one in your house.” That’s when Lincoln B. Greenwood lost it. “I don’t give a shit what you want!” he roared to his shocked wife. “I am not going to sit here waiting to be murdered or die of starvation. Now get upstairs and pack what you want to take.”
Greenwood ran upstairs and threw three pairs of jeans and some shirts into a bag. Some underwear and socks. He added his blood pressure medicine and his prostate pills to the bag, his toothbrush and toothpaste, his razor and shaving cream, plus some laxatives and a bottle of aspirin.
Then he went to a safe in his closet, opened it, and got out the strips of gold he had invested in when the economy was going to hell in 2008 and 2009. A few Krugerrands. It was damn little, but paper dollars weren’t going to be the coin of the realm and credit cards were worthless. Not that it mattered. He had maybe fifty dollars in his wallet and, since the power was out, no prospect of getting more from his bank, even if the ATMs worked or the bank was open and willing to convert every dollar in his savings and checking accounts to cash, which they wouldn’t be.
He stuffed the gold into his pocket and zipped up his bag. Carried it downstairs. Anne was still upstairs packing.
A car pulled up in the driveway and he went to the window. His daughter, Suzanne. He opened the door for her. “We’re leaving, Dad. Going to Gerald’s parents’ place in Front Royal. We’re going to ride it out there.”
“Good idea. We’re getting ready to leave too. I got some Similac and baby food for you. I’ll put it in a bag while you go upstairs and say goodbye to Mom.”
When Suzanne left, Lincoln Greenwood went upstairs to check on his wife. She was sitting on a stool in her bathroom crying.
“Are you packed?”
“Oh, Lincoln. I feel as if I am saying good-bye to my life. What is to become of us?”
“If you don’t get a move on, woman, we’re going to be dead.” He could feel the evil out there in the night. “Pack your meds and a few clothes and let’s get in the car and go while there is still time.”
She sobbed, trying to pull herself together. And nodded. “You’re right. Another few minutes.”
So he went downstairs and put his bag in the car, which was in the garage. He would pull the handle that disconnected the door and raise it to get the car out. But not until they were ready to go.
Five long minutes later, as he threw all the dry and canned food they had in garbage bags and stuffed them in the car, he heard engine noises.
He ran to the living room window and looked out. A police car and a late-model pickup were examining the houses in the cul-de-sac. Lincoln Greenwood went back to the kitchen and helped himself to a carving knife from the block on the counter. He put it up his left sleeve, leaving only a bit of the handle sticking out.
Then he went back to the window. Four young black men were coming up the walk, and all four had pistols in their hands.
One of them pounded on the door. “Open up in there or we’ll kill all of you and burn this goddamn thing down around your bodies.”
Greenwood unlocked the door and they rushed in. One of them pointed a pistol in his face. “Hello, asshole. Who else is here?”
“My wife is upstairs.”
He jerked his head at his compatriots and they went charging up the stairs.
“You and me are goin’ to the kitchen, motha-fuck. We want the food. All of it. And anything else you got.”
Greenwood led the way.
The man immediately began opening cupboards and rooting through the pantry. He turned on Greenwood and pointed the pistol in his face. “Where is the grub, honkey? Don’t tell me you people ain’t got no grub in the house. Cause if you do, I’ll just shoot you now and be done with it.”
“In the car in the garage. We were just about to leave.”
“So we got here just in the nick of time. Ain’t that sweet? You lead. Get it out.”
He went into the garage and began emptying the garbage bags of spaghetti noodles and cans onto the floor.
“Pick it up. Take it to the front door.”
Greenwood hoisted a bag in each hand and led off. The thug picked up another and followed him, gun in hand.
When the bags were at the front door, the man said, “Let’s go get the rest of it. Seems like you oughta be carryin’,” and he laughed.
Another trip cleaned out the car. The men who went upstairs were rooting around and shouting to each other, as if they were on an Easter egg hunt.
In the kitchen, the punk with Greenwood said, “You got any guns?”
“No.”
“You better not be lying, ’cause we’re gonna look. If I find you lied, I’ll just shoot you like a dog and that will be that.”
“I’m not lying.” Lincoln Greenwood was scared and his voice was an octave high and quavered.
“Pills. We want all the pills you got, motha-fuck. And your grass and powder and smack.”
“Pills are upstairs.” That was a mistake, Greenwood realized. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet in his bathroom, and if the man looked, there would be hell to pay. “We don’t have any dope,” he added.
“Like shit! You lyin’ asshole. All you white motha-fucks got shit to get high on. You buy it in Baltimore from the guys in the ’hood. Us niggers ain’t got the money for nothin’ but pot. It’s white trash like you that buy the high-dollar shit and then convict the poor dudes sellin’ it who ain’t got no other way to make a livin’.”
The man, who was perhaps twenty or twenty-one, looked around, surveying the crystal and kick-knacks in the kitchen. He pointed his pistol at the counter television that Anne watched every morning when she made breakfast and pulled the trigger. The shot sounded like a cannon. The front of the television showered glass on the counter.
Then the gunman turned his back on Lincoln B. Greenwood. Greenwood pulled the knife from his left sleeve and rammed it between the man’s ribs on his right side up to the hilt. Gave it a savage twist and jerked the knife out. Blood squirted out, under pressure.
The young gunman turned with a funny look on his face, tried to bring the pistol around. Greenwood pushed his arm up and rammed the knife into his solar plexus, then jerked it loose. The gunman collapsed on the floor, bleeding copiously.
“Hey, Joey!” A shout from upstairs. “You havin’ fun, man?”
Lincoln B. Greenwood removed the pistol from his victim’s grasp and went to the hallway, with the stairs on his left. He crouched against the wall so anyone coming down the stairs wouldn’t see him. He waited. When they came down each had an armload of stuff. After the first two got down the stairs and went through the front door, he shot the third one in the back from a distance of three feet. At that range he couldn’t miss.
The man fell the rest of the way down the stairs and piled up on the floor. Greenwood shot him again.
He ran to the door of the house and tried to align the sights of the pistol, a black thing without a cylinder. Greenwood had just fired the first two shots of his life, and now the problem of hitting anything or anyone who wasn’t five feet away became a bit much. He pulled the trigger and the gun kicked and to his amazement the closest man fell flat on his face.