Going Nowhere Fast by Gar Anthony Haywood

us, his bushy head down and his eyes fixed on the earth ahead, moving like a man with a purpose.
    Joe and I each found a tree to hide behind and watched as Dog followed the side road leading to the village proper. We let him build a decent lead, then followed slowly after him, moving up just a few steps at a time to keep the distance between us constant. There was a cafeteria, gift shop, bank, post office, and general store in the village square, but Dog gave us no clue as to which of the five was his destination until he hit the parking lot and began angling over to the post office. To say that that confused me would be an understatement. Here the boy hadn't written his mother a decent letter in over ten years, and the first chance in three days he had to be alone, he was sneaking off to visit a post office.
    Or was he?
    He was up on the post office's porch, seemingly ready to go inside, when he suddenly veered right and started for the little bank next door instead.
    "Now, what does that boy want with a bank?" Joe asked as Dog disappeared inside, more thinking out loud than conversing with me.
    "I don't know," I said, starting to feel a little lightheaded. "But all he's been talking about since he came here is money. Money, money, money." I paused, almost afraid to go on. "Joe, you don't suppose—"
    "No," my husband said quickly, shaking his head back and forth to defuse my unfinished thought. "He's not that crazy. I took his gun away, remember? A man can't rob a bank without a gun."
    That wasn't true, and he knew it, but he was trying to dispel his own fears as well as my own, and I imagined he couldn't think of anything more reassuring to say.
    "Well? Are you going in there after him, or am I?" I asked after a while.
    "I'll go," he said. "You stay right here."
    "Where? Out here in the middle of the parking lot?"
    "No. Go over there by the gift shop." He pointed to show me the way. "And stay there unless I signal you to duck inside. Like this." He made a little bye-bye wave with his right hand.
    I nodded to show him I understood, and then he was gone.
    I took my designated position in front of the gift shop and turned back around to watch as Joe trotted over to the bank, narrowly avoiding a collision with a station wagon as overloaded with kids as it was piled high with luggage. The overweight driver behind the wheel shouted something ugly out at Joe, and Joe returned the favor, but that was as far as their altercation went. He didn't know it, but the driver was lucky; any other time, Joe would have taken a few minutes to show the loudmouth just how far one of the sleeping bags tied to the station wagon's roof could be forced into a man's left ear. Or down his throat. Or…
    I think you get the idea.
    Anyway, Big Joe reached the bank's double doors, but did not go inside. He just stood outside and to the right of them to peer through their glass panels into the tiny bungalow's interior. It occurred to me eventually that that was all he could do; the building was so small, it would have been impossible to enter it without being seen by everyone inside, Bad Dog included. I had no idea what kind of view he had of Dog from where he stood, but I assumed it was good because he never moved an inch to improve it.
    A long ten minutes passed. I didn't like the waiting, but at the same time, I was relieved by it. Whatever else our son was doing inside that bank, I realized, he wasn't trying to rob it. Joe would have rushed in to stop him by now if he were.
    I had taken all the standing around I could take when Joe finally and abruptly backed away from the bank's doors to alert me that Dog was coming. But he never gave me his time-to-get-out-of-sight wave. He just retreated far enough from the bank's entrance to avoid being spotted when Dog appeared; then he slipped up behind our son as he started back across the parking lot in my direction. Dog was ripping open a medium-size manila envelope as he walked, showing all the patience of a