This is a short but poignant snippet of my latest novel, White Fox, which continues chapter four.
Renardo
frowned. He looked away from the mounts
and grabbed a blue leash hanging from a nail in the wall. The moment Sancho saw the leash, he barked
and began to run laps around the front yard.
Renardo laughed at him and patted his thighs, and Sancho instantly
dashed over to him. After some struggle
of hooking the leash onto the joyful dog’s collar, they left the property
together and took a northwestern route down D Street. Renardo purposely took his time, savoring the
crisp air and time away from his mournful home.
Trees lined the sidewalks, their trunks dwarfed many times over by their
lengthy branches which, loaded with the colors of autumn, extended yards above
the road in the rough shape of an arch.
Houses in this part of Sacramento generally lacked driveways, so cars
were parked in gutters in the most compact manner possible, almost as cluttered
as (and far less beautiful than) the leaves dotting the street. There were no voices to be heard at this
time, but the eternal din of racing vehicles in the busy city reached Renardo’s
ears.
Before long, the
road curved southwest. Sancho was
insistent on sniffing every pole, mailbox, fire hydrant, and arbitrary
inanimate object that came across his path.
Renardo looked up, beyond the bountiful trees overshadowing the road,
and gazed at the endless, cloudless sky above.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and his thoughts turned to his inevitable
flight to Philadelphia. After four days
of mulling over the situation, he knew that the journey could only help his case; if he caught Professor
Wiles at the opportune time, he could extract every morsel of information from
him. It had occurred to him that he
could simply send an email regarding the intelligence; after all, his last trip
to the university had ended favorably, and the professor had no cause to
mistrust him. However, if Wiles was, as
he presumed, more tangled in Malvin’s plots than he had let on—and (unsettling
as the idea was) aware that Renardo was probing into the crime lord’s
activities—then he knew that an email would not suffice. Fortunately, he had discovered earlier in the
morning that the professor’s contact information was still listed in the
university’s faculty directory. Unless
their website was outdated, his trip to Philadelphia would be fruitful.
The few days
away from Nate (and, save Corinne, every other person on earth) had given him
clarity of thought and renewed purpose.
He recalled sitting in his small but comfortable Texas cottage five
years earlier, watching as breaking news unfolded before him on his poor excuse
for a TV. The news was focused on
Sacramento, California. Beginning at
8:00 a.m., a bank robbery took place every hour for thirteen hours. After the fourth bank was robbed, law
enforcement fanned out to other banks in the city and managed to prevent
multiple robberies; however, for each prevented robbery, another occurred
elsewhere. Furthermore, though the bank
robberies received the greatest publicity, several other break-ins and murders
arose in many of the city’s upscale homes.
Not a single common thread was discovered in the items stolen from these
houses, and the victims of homicide were seemingly targeted at random. Tears surfaced in Renardo’s eyes as he
remembered a reporter standing some yards before a crime scene, explaining the
situation at hand, when two officers guided a young child from the house to the
sidewalk. Her face was not visible, but
she walked with a labored gait, and her body was hunched over as one in great
emotional distress. The scene had rent
his heart, and his pain was exacerbated when he later discovered that seven
children had lost at least one parent that day.
Malvin had
arranged and instigated these crimes, but to this day, Renardo still did not
know his motive. He shook his head and
muttered to himself, staring blankly at the road ahead of him. As long as this crime lord was loose, there
was always the possibility that Sacramento would one day face greater danger.
“I have to stop
him, Sancho,” Renardo mumbled to his dog, who remained unresponsive. “I have no choice in the matter. He needs to be stopped, and soon.”
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