Midnight: A Foxvalley Thriller (First Draft)✔

Chapter III: Police Tape

May 27, 16:28
Location unknown

The blazing sun shined onto the asphalt. A black Ford Taurus roared passed a wooden state sign. It read in bold white letters, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado." Budsworth had traveled on the road for three days now, going on almost non-stop. Of course, he stopped a few times to go through the drive-thru of some cheap fast food restaurant and to sleep in cheap junkie motels. He started his drive after he awoke three days ago. It was the day after he went to the Hunt Town Bar with his boss, Assistant Director Schneider. That night he returned back home and packed a few things for the 1,800-mile trip. Which turned out to be only clothes for him to wear for a few weeks. Schneider did want him to take a vacation after all. He figured that he might as well finish this case then take his well-deserved vacation.

He stopped, first off, in Pennsylvania to stay the night in a crappy small Budget Inn outside the small town of Frankfort. It had a pitiful population of 800 people. The residents claimed the welcomed sign was false, and the town population was lower, around 500 residents. It surprised Budsworth to find a little crap hotel on the edges of Pennsylvania. According to the hotel owner, they were always getting customers who stepped in wondering why it was in the middle of nowhere. Even though the town was tiny it sat alongside a popular road. So it even had a few things to offer most other small towns didn't have, such as a School and a theater.

On the outskirts of the small town stood a casino that got booming business. Even though it was closer to Frankfort, another small town in the nearby state of Ohio got all the business from it. That small town was Millington, Ohio. It was bigger than Frankfort, but not as peaceful. Most who stayed in Millington stayed to gamble. That explained the reason it contained a much bigger police force than some larger towns in the surrounding area.

After a few hundred more miles, Budsworth made a stop in another anonymous small town. Since he lived in the big city Budsworth never got the see the quiet side of towns. He also wanted to get used to how these small communities would be. Foxvalley was a very small mountain town in Colorado with a population around 1,500 citizens.

He stopped in Illinois, in a small town on the edge of the wide Mississippi River. It stood about a mile wide. Well, at least looked like a mile. He knew it wasn't, of course. Sometimes he wished he brought a camera along with him for the ride. He spent a few hours sitting on a bench alongside the river. Listening to the cool rushing waters as they slapped the cliffs of the shore. A 

great bridge stood overhead, coated in dull and rusty white paint.

He stayed the night in that town. A nearby busy road still kept him from too much sleep. His apartment back at home stood at a high level, so the noise of traffic on the road below remained audible, but not as deafening. The next morning he made his next great escape into the wild. The greenness of the grass began to dissipate. Turning from a bright green to a golden yellow. The ground began to take a shape as Budsworth passed into the land of Kansas. The cornfields looked different from those he's seen elsewhere. Tall grass-covered hills that rolled over miles of high land.

The land became blanketed with mounts of incredible size. Some scratched the sky with Rocky tips. Budsworth passed the Colorado sign about seven o'clock the latest night. He settled on a hotel in an eastern Colorado town. This one, unlike the others, wasn't all that special. It was to the side of a popular interstate highway. The highway led only a few more hundred miles into Denver, Colorado. He was a five-hour drive from Foxvalley. maybe more, maybe less. That night he decided to go to a bowling alley there in town. If Budsworth were to stay within the same town for the night, he figured he might as well do something about it. That night he passed out on his bed around 1:25 in the morning.