Alexa's Intrigue

Alexa always liked to slide the shifter into neutral as she drove down Hill Road. The challenge was to time it so the pickup truck coasted to a stop right at the highway without touching the brakes. But today she braked about a half a block from the stop sign and rolled into the Old A&W parking lot.

It hadn’t been an A&W since before Alexa was born, but everyone still called it the Old A&W. Her great-uncle had told her that they came into town a few weeks ago but they left after no realtors would do business with them. By then, they made it known they were in the market for a new place to call home. Who the hell drapes a Nazi flag over their driver’s seat? These guys, Alexa thought.

Her college boyfriend was from Coeur d’Alene. He said the locals considered them a laughingstock. Only about eighty nutjobs showed up for their national convention. That must have been disappointing. But probably not as disappointing as when they lost their compound at a bankruptcy auction a while back. After they got kicked out of the Idaho Panhandle, most of them went back to Ohio or Texas or whatever rock they crawled out from under. The blue pickup had California plates. That alone is usually enough for someone in the Pacific Northwest to cringe. But the Nazi flag was something else.

Alexa waited about ten minutes. The radio was in the middle of a Willie Nelson song as two men came out of the Old A&W and approached the blue pickup. As much as she loved Pancho and Lefty, she turned the dial down.

“Hey, I heard you’re looking for property,” she called. The tall man looked at the other man and they started walking toward Alexa’s truck. “Word is you have cash.”

“For the right piece of ground,” the tall man responded.

“I might have a place for you,” Alexa said. They agreed to meet back at the Old A&W parking lot in an hour.

Alexa dropped by her great-uncle’s house for a while, then swung through the Dairy Queen drive-through. The Old A&W didn’t serve burgers anymore. The two men in the blue pickup were waiting. Alexa just rolled through the parking lot and they follower her up Hill Road. About four miles out of town she pulled off to the left and got out to open the gate. She yelled at the blue truck, “Close it behind you! Don’t let the cows out!” No one saw a cow.

They parked over the crest of the hill and all got out to survey the spread. As they walked around the half-fallen-down barn and the old cabin, Alexa explained that her great-uncle had died a few months back and left her a hundred and sixty acres. Her cousins were pissed that she inherited the land. She hoped to unload it and move to Portland.

Alexa and the tall man leaned up against the old corral as she pointed to a power line at the edge of the property. The other man tipped a round of firewood up for a seat. The tall man and the other man talked it over and agreed it would be a perfect place to build a new compound. They would give Alexa twenty thousand dollars earnest money – to be paid in cash that evening at the Old A&W. She’d sign a sale contract and would have an attorney in Spokane draw up a deed. They would close the deal in a week or so.

Alexa and the tall man shook hands. As the other man stood up to extend his hand, Alexa noticed that a small black notebook had fallen out of his back pocket. She kicked it into a dandelion patch as they walked back to their pickup trucks.

A few hours later, they all met back at the Old A&W. “Where do I sign?” Alexa asked.

The tall man laid a piece of paper on his pickup hood and handed her a pen.

“You can count it, if you want,” the other man said, as he handed her the envelope.

Alexa just smiled. “I trust you.”

She gave him her phone number. They would call when they had the rest of the money in hand.

About a week later, the call came. “We’re ready to close the deal,” the tall man said. He did not sound tall over the phone.

“Who is this?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Paul.”

“Paul who?”

“Paul, the guy who’s buying your land.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “You have the wrong number.”

About that time, a little black book in a large manila envelope with no return address landed on a desk at the FBI’s Seattle Field Office.

She only rolled through her mother’s hometown a couple times a year on her way to and from college. She had no idea who owned that old cabin with the half-fallen-down barn that she would pass as she drove out to the pioneer cemetery to visit her grandparents’ graves.

Her name wasn’t even Alexa.