Chapter 2: Potatoes and PastaApril
John hid in the pasta aisle. The fluorescent lamps above did nothing to make the huge man blocking the path to the checkout appear any smaller.
There was a reason John did his grocery shopping on Friday evenings, and that man was ruining it. The shop was supposed to be empty, and yet, there he was. A mountain of a man—one of the sort who could pin John down with no effort at all.
He hadn’t seen John. He simply stood there, reading on his phone with a bag of potatoes in his hand and a bottle of ketchup under a heavily muscled arm, as if there wasn’t a problem in the world. And John guessed, for him, there wasn’t.
How would he get out? He couldn’t walk past him; it was too risky. And even if he made it past him without trouble, the man would come up beh
