The Crossroads [antikvár]

ONEJUST BEFORE DAWN there was a subtle increase in the traflac, more of a pulsing insistence in the oncoming whin-ings and diminishing drones. Charles Drovek, president of the Crossroads Corporation, lay wakeful and restless in the bedroom of his home three hundred yards behind the showplace of the corporation, the Crossroads Motor Hotel, a ninety-unit Georgian structure with wide drives, landscaped terraces, a large swimming pool.Except for the time in the army, he had spent all of his forty-one years within range of the sound of this junction of major routes. During the day he was not aware of the droning whispering roaring flow. It was money flowing by. A predictable percentage of it would be left in the hands of the Crossroads Corporation.Too many times he had heard the long sickening shriek of rubber followed by the curiously prolonged, crumpling, jangling thud that meant blood and death.Seldom did he have a chance merely to listen to it. He knew that the flow was picking up because of the early ones, the travelers who rise before dawn to trust reflexes still sodden with sleep. It was a still night. He could identify the direction from the sound. Now on this Friday morning near the end of June, the tourists from the Midwest, the last stragglers who had wmtered in Florida, were grinding north, up Route 71. Six hundred yards from where he lay, they were passing under the big bridge that lifted the east-west Route 82 gracefully over Route 71. Ten miles north of the cloverleaf mterchange, traffic on 71 entered the city limits of Walterburg. Route 82 was5