W Dale Justice

Crossroads W Dale Justice

There is a plague sweeping America: mass opioid addiction. How did this happen? How was this allowed to happen? It began with the creation of opiate based pain killers into pill form by pharmaceutical companies. OxyContin changed our world. It was marketed as the new wonder drug. In 2016 alone, licensed physicians wrote enough legal oxy prescriptions to provide every adult in America with their own bottle of 32 pills. Today, heroin is rapidly replacing licit opioid pills as a cheaper substitute. But unscrupulous drug dealers, eager to create more addiction, are manipulating heroin by adding synthetic fentanyl and even carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Sixty percent of the nation's population and gross national product occur within a 600-mile radius of Cincinnati, Ohio, where I-75 stretches from Miami, Florida to Detroit, Michigan and the cities along the Great Lakes, I-71 leads to Columbus and Cleveland in the north, and to Louisville on to St. Louis heading south west. The Ohio River connects Pittsburgh in the northeast, to New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. It is here, the Queen City, where these corridors all meet at a single bridge over the Ohio River, the crossroads. This is the test market from which a plague has been released upon a nation. Civilians, coast guard officers, and law enforcement officials come together, almost by happenstance to wage war on those who profit from addiction, and to stem the tide of death illicit drugs entering the city cause. The combined forces of two county police agencies conduct a nighttime sting operation on the Ohio River, only to come up with smuggled bath salts instead of the targeted heroin. Two Coast Guard personnel sent to repair a navigation buoy that same night are discovered missing when their abandoned patrol craft drifts sixteen miles downstream to Cincinnati. Admiral Steve Phillips, United States Coast Guard, by chance on leave visiting family in Cincinnati, takes charge to learn the fate of the missing sailors, and calls upon his fiancé, Kate O'Neal, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, Jimmy Falcone, a smarmy investigative reporter, Thuy Piseth a, retired engineer and Cambodian refugee who can solve any puzzle, and disgraced ex-Mexican Special Forces Sergeant Hector Gonzales, a half Yaqui Indian from the desert mountains able to track any man or beast. Together, they are thrust into a nightmare of intrigue, murder, and corporate cover-up not all will survive.