Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

And the hell of it was, he had never intended to run that damn convenience store. It had belonged to his father, and he had worked plenty of afternoons and weekends — giving up school activities like track or band or the school newspaper, and especially dances and proms — to help out the family and make some pocket change. Sacrifices, Dad had said. To get ahead you need to make sacrifices. But once he had gone to college and nailed his Business Administration degree, he was ready to shake off Porter and raise some hell and make some money, and forget about sacrifices for a while.

But Dad had gotten a rare blood disease that seemed to eat him from the inside out, and since he was their only boy — his three older sisters had already found husbands and had children by then — Dad had pleaded with him not to sell the store. Francis Farms had opened in Porter in 1902, with Craig’s great-grandfather, and Dad didn’t want the store and the name to die with him.

Fine. A promise to a dying man and he had given it, knowing he had other plans, other ideas, and yet...

The trap had been set.

He had taken over the store and within a week knew that the reverse was true: The store had taken over him. Each day was a rolling morass of problems to be solved, problems to be addressed, problems to be ignored. Employees who didn’t show up or who showed up late. Delivery trucks blocking the parking lot for the customers. Health inspectors. Youngsters with fake IDs trying to buy beer. Liquor inspectors. Employees who stole, customers who stole, people wandering by the front of the store who stole. Water bill, tax bill, oil bill, electricity bill... Mother of God, the amount of money spent each month on electricity (for the freezers and coolers and lights and everything else) was as much as he spent on renting an apartment while going to college! Sweeping up and cleaning up after some three-year-old girl who, racing through, knocked over a display of grape-jelly jars. People coming in looking to put up posters in the window, people looking to sell raffle tickets, people looking for donations to this charity or that charity and don’t you know, it’s the duty of business owners to support the neighborhood?

Trapped. Within a week, it felt as if the chains of responsibility had been gently but firmly clasped around his ankles.

Oh, he could have given up after a month or so, but there was that streak of stubbornness in him, combined with the promise he had made to Dad, dear old Dad, to keep the damn place running.

Sacrifices.

And so he had remained, in a life of work and not enough sleep and never any real days off, until the day Stacy came by next-door, to open a hair salon.

And then it had all changed.

One of the police officers — who had a thick moustache and was wearing a bright orange vest with TRAINING stenciled in black, fore and aft — stepped out into the middle of the crowd and said, “Listen up, people, listen up. It’s time to get started.”

The cop went on about how the SWAT team would split up into different groups and work through different scenarios during the day. Two of the old bunkers would be used during the training session. Some years ago, the cop explained, Navy SEAL members had come to this very place and had constructed in the bunkers rooms made of wooden doors and plywood walls. Craig thought about that, and as the cop went on and on in great detail about the training that was going to take place, he wandered over to the closest bunker. The metal door — rusting at the hinges — had been propped open, and he stepped inside, the interior cool and damp. The floor and the walls and curved ceiling were concrete, and there was faded paint on the concrete, marking some sort of grid. Before him, just a few yards in from the entrance, was a wooden warren of rooms and corridors. He slowly walked through them in the dim light, wondering how it felt to race through here, even in a training session, knowing that something bad was waiting for you.

He paused and touched the walls and a nearby door. He shivered, remembering what the training officer had said. Navy SEALs — elite warriors — had been in this same room, had built these rooms to help themselves train, and now, well, where were they? Afghanistan? Iraq? Yemen? So far from home. He wondered if they ever thought about the training they had done at this old air base in New Hampshire, and he wondered what they would think about what he had planned for the training session today.

He had a feeling most of them would understand.

Craig turned and went back outside.