Chapter 14

Connor was crossing the bridge back to Folly when his phone rang. The screen said it was Caitlin Thomas, so he hit the Bluetooth speaker to talk hands-free.

“How’s it coming with that info on Lomax Industries?” he asked.

“Well, howdy and a good day to you,” she replied.

“Sorry…my bad. Preoccupied. How’s your day been?”

“Busier than I expected, and I’ve really enjoyed doing all this legwork for you.”

“I know, and thanks,” he said, ignoring her sarcasm. Or at least he hoped that’s what it was. “I can’t access property records from home, and I’m sure I’d make a mess of it.”

“Probably,” Caitlin agreed. “Anyway, seems like your guy Lomax is undertaking a bit of corporate expansion up around Andrews.”

Connor felt a tingle in his scalp; if he’d had hair, it would have been standing on end. “What’d you find?”

“The short story is, over the last two years Lomax Industries—or one of a half dozen subsidiaries and shell companies controlled by it—has made twelve purchases of land along the northern border of the national forest. All of them located on an upper estuary of the Santee River known as Wittee Branch, and all of them contiguous plots.”

“How much land are we talking about?” he asked.

“They’re all decent-sized parcels, and if you add them all up, it comes to sixty-five hundred acres or so. Just a little over ten square miles.”

A few years back Connor had worked a case that had involved the acquisition of a number of contiguous properties as part of a covert development plan. It had involved nowhere near as much land as in this case, however, and he doubted Lomax was looking at putting in a high-end golf course or exclusive retreat. “That’s one hell of a large chicken farm,” he said.

“One would think,” Caitlin agreed. “But I did a little more digging, and found that DNR—that’s the Department of Natural Resources—has already designated most of that area as protected wetlands. No development, no cultivation, no agriculture of any kind allowed. That means no chickens, no turkeys. No houses. I’ll email you the files when we hang up.”

Connor thought on this for a second, then said, “Any indication if Lomax’s turning it into a nature preserve of some sort, maybe some sort of tax deal?”

“Anything’s possible,” she allowed. “But DNR already pretty much did that, so the birds and raccoons and deer already have a pretty sweet deal. Anyway, hope this all helps in whatever you’re doing.”

“More than you know,” he replied. “But before you go, can I ask you to look into one more thing?”

“Why did I know you were going to ask that?”

“Because you’re the best at what you do.”

“Flattery has no bounds. Out with it.”

Connor explained about the phone number that supposedly belonged to a woman named Liz Morgan, but every attempt to track her down had failed. “She doesn’t seem to exist, at least not in any human form,” he said.

“The phone has to belong to a real person.”

“And if anyone can trace it, it’s you.”

“I’m on it,” she assured him, and hung up.

After being cooped up in the shade of the drinking deck for most of the afternoon, Clooney was desperate to answer the call of nature. Connor clipped a leash to the old boy’s collar and they set out for a trek, winding their way through the streets of the beachfront town best described as shabby chic. Multi-million-dollar estates coexisted side-by-side with dilapidated structures that long ago lost the battle to black mold and dry rot. In the winter it was a sleepy coastal hangout far enough from civilization to seem remote, but close enough to shop at Costco and drive to a movie or doctor up in Charleston.

Summer was a different story, when thousands of tourists showed up, clogged the sidewalks and caused lines at almost every local restaurant and bar. All of it was great for the sales of fish tacos, T-shirts, and beer, but a little claustrophobic for a former veteran like Connor who continued to have issues with crowds, and the gripping social anxiety that often came with them. The daily pounding and buzzing of hammers and power saws from near-constant renovations all over town didn’t help matters much.

Man and dog made it all the way to the end of the rebuilt pier and back just as Connor’s foot and ankle started to seize up. The pain started with low stabbing jolts in his metatarsals as he wandered along the uneven sand, then built to hammering spasms as if Annie Wilkes was hobbling him in that Stephen King movie Misery. When they arrived back at The Sandbar, they both took the wheelchair ramp up to the first level, where Clooney wolfed down an early dinner while Connor opened up the bar for the night and started stocking the coolers.

It was Julie’s evening off, which meant he had to manage both ends of the counter, but Wednesdays tended to be subdued and the place usually quieted down around ten. He gave last call a little after that, and thought he might be able to close up no later than eleven, when he heard a low growl behind him. He turned around and found Jimmy Brinks seated on a stool, both hands placed flat on the bar, eyes that always seemed to be as gray as a storm surge burning into him.

Turned out the growl had come from Clooney, just another one of the many souls in Folly that had no reason to trust the former felon who years ago had been part of a gang that had robbed an armored car in Phoenix. He’d fled to Belize, where local policia and a pair of U.S. Marshals found him hiding in a bungalow on the sand, sipping boat drinks and listening to “Margaritaville” on an iPod. He served twelve years in a federal prison, then finished out his parole before he found Folly. Or Folly found him. Rumor had it that his share of the stolen loot had never been found, but it was not a subject anyone had cause—or the nerve—to ask him about.

“Double Jack,” the ex-con ordered, his voice coming out in a snarl because—as it also was rumored—one of the marshals who had dragged him off the deck of his beachfront cottage had whacked him in the throat with a length of PVC. “In my glass, not one of them cheap plastic cups.”

Connor poured a healthy measure of Jack Daniels into the special tumbler he kept under the counter. Brinks knocked half of it back in one gulp—as was his custom—then pounded the rest. “One more,” he said

Even though the man had to be nearing sixty he appeared to have a lot of fight in him, although it rarely manifested itself in any physical form. He seemed to get off on playing the mean dude, but he hadn’t engaged in a real scuffle since a dust-up with a drunk tourist at a gas station a couple years back. The judge bought Brinks’ self-defense plea, and since then he’d kept his nose out of trouble. In any event, Connor knew the guy was like a dry old-growth forest just waiting for a bolt of dry lightning to strike.

“What brings you out on such a quiet night?” he asked as he splashed another round of sour mash into Brinks’ glass.

“Awww…did I spoil your plans to close up early?”

“I always look forward to taking your hard-earned money.”

Brinks grunted at that, as if wondering whether Connor was hinting at the provenance of the wad of bills he always had in his pocket. “Heard you got yourself shot again,” he said.

Connor had no hard evidence to confirm this, but he strongly believed he owed his life to the guy. Guns had been fired, and a man had died. The matter had come up just once in a short exchange last autumn, Brinks sitting on the same stool as he occupied tonight, but both men had spoken only in innuendo and allusion. Nothing denied, nothing confirmed.

“A habit I’m looking to break,” he replied.

“You ask me, you ought to try harder.”

“Thanks for the kind advice.”

“You should take it this time.”

Brinks knocked back the contents of his glass, smacked his lips as he slapped it down on the wooden counter. Then he dug a few bills from his pocket and tossed them on the bar as he rose from his stool. “What I hear is, they’re not done with you,” he said as he made his way to the exit. “Not by a long shot.”

“Wait a sec—” Connor called out after him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing you don’t already know,” Brinks replied as he started down the stairs, leading with the leg that hadn’t been shattered by two federal-issue 9 mm slugs.

Connor locked the bar down just a few minutes after eleven. After stashing the cash and credit card receipts in the floor safe in his apartment, he grabbed a beer and his laptop and sat down on his top-step landing.

He spent the next fifteen minutes feeding the numbers from the license plates of the three trucks parked behind the gun range into the DMV database. The first pick-up—the F-150 King Ranch—belonged to Anthony Young, who lived in an upscale neighborhood called Snee Farm in Mt. Pleasant. A quick look at street view told him the house was an expansive brick colonial, white with black shutters and a couple of flowering pear trees out front. The fact that the truck was parked behind Top Shots suggested the man had been on the premises, as Connor suspected, although it was possible he’d gone to lunch in someone else’s vehicle.

The Silverado with the missing tailgate was registered to a Gil Garrison. Same name as the guy Connor had spoken with, twice. He lived on James Island in a single-level ranch, with a one-car garage that appeared too small for the truck to fit. The Google image Connor pulled up on the screen actually showed the truck parked in the driveway, with the plate blurred out.

The F-250 4X4 was owned by a DBA called Mercer’s Bay Outfitters LLC, based an hour up the coast outside Georgetown. A quick business search told him the company sold farm equipment and sporting goods out of a warehouse on Highway 17, a few miles south of town. Lester McIlvain, who lived in a wooded neighborhood near the Belle Isle Marina, was listed as the sole proprietor. The presence of his truck at Top Shot wasn’t entirely out of place, since many gun owners by nature were wilderness enthusiasts, especially when hunting season rolled around. Maybe McIlvain had an ongoing business relationship with Tony Young, and had traveled down from the Georgetown area as part of that affiliation. Nothing suspicious, nothing nefarious.

At least for now, Connor thought as he closed his laptop and set it on the step beside him. He raised the bottle to his lips and let his gaze fall on the ribbons of moonlight shimmering on the water out beyond the sand. Thinking about how everyone on this side of the world was under the same spell of the same light from the same moon, each viewing it his or her own way. Billions of personal interpretations and experiences stitched into their private tapestry of life, one that belonged to them, and them alone.

But mostly he was thinking about Danielle, wondering if she was looking at it that very moment, too.

A little after one Connor was jolted awake by the sound of something landing on the drinking deck directly below his front door.

Clooney sprang up from where he was sleeping at the foot of the bed, confirming the noise had not just been a fragment of a fading dream. At the same time a synapse fired in Connor’s memory, triggering a thought that it sounded a lot like the thud of a brick, or a grenade being hurled into a building in a burned-out neighborhood in the middle of a war.

Either way, The Sandbar was either about to blow up, or burn down.

He was on his feet in less than a second, Clooney right on his heels. He expected to see a whoosh of flames as he charged down the wooden stairs, but instead he was hit with the familiar odor of benzene, rising up from the puddle of gasoline dripping through the composite planking to the ground below. The remains of a shattered vodka bottle lay in pieces in the middle of it, and several feet away he found a charred piece of cloth he figured had been used as a makeshift fuse.

No fire, no explosion.

Connor picked the scrap of fabric up cautiously in case a few fringe threads might be smoldering, but it appeared not to have only burned briefly before sputtering out. In the distance he heard a car door slam and an engine roar to life with a throaty rumble. No flash of headlights, which was not surprising. Then the noise disappeared into the distance, and all he could hear was the blood pulsing in his brain.

“Looks like we had visitors, big guy,” he said to Clooney.

Unlike the other night when he’d chased a prowler out of the bar, this time he grabbed his phone and dialed nine-one-one. Ten minutes later Sergeant Gary Booth was standing on the top step outside the drinking deck, the blue strobes of his car pulsing in the night down on the street.

“Evening, sir,” the officer said, peering into the bar. “You called about a disturbance?”

Connor let him through the gate, showed him the remains of the firebomb. “Looks like someone tossed an explosive device up into the bar,” he explained.

Sgt. Booth took a good look at the mess, then bent down and examined the broken liquor bottle. “Any idea who would’ve done this?” he asked.

“I think it’s pretty clear someone’s sending me a message,” Connor replied, not a doubt in his mind. “Molotov cocktails aren’t on our drink menu.”

“Well, fortunately this one looks like it got extinguished before it had a chance to do any damage,” the sergeant said. “Could have burned the whole place down, just like last year.”

He was referring to the mysterious fire that had engulfed the place last summer and left nothing but a heap of smoldering embers, and the charred corpse of a suspected local drug runner.

“You think you can lift any prints from the bottle?”

“You never know,” Booth replied. “We’ll do everything we can to catch the bastards behind this.”

“You think there’s more than one?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Could be someone just out to play a prank, or someone’s got a beef with you. Like whoever took a pop at you on Sunday came back to finish you off.”

Those same words Connor had heard at the site of the ambush kept echoing in his head: We’ll deal with that when the time is right. “Tying up loose ends,” Connor agreed with a shrug, leaving out the part about the previous night’s intruder who had fled into the darkness.

“Does that thing work?” Booth asked, gesturing toward a video camera set high up on a wall under the spinnaker roof.

“It should,” Connor said. “I’ve got it synched to my phone so I can keep an eye on things from anywhere.”

“Mind if we take a look?”

Connor opened the app and waited for the wifi to connect, then accessed the video from the cloud server. He thumbed through the footage until a shadowy figure appeared at the gate and hurled an object over the deck railing into the bar. It shattered at the edge of the frame, spewing liquid on the floor while the man—woman?—waited a minute, then disappeared down the stairway to the ground. A couple seconds later Connor appeared in the image, and the would-be bomber was gone.

They watched the video several more times, and at no time was the suspect’s face visible to the lens. Wrong angle, and not enough light.

“Don’t know if that’ll help much, but can you send it to me?” the sergeant asked.

“On its way,” Connor said.

Booth asked a few more questions and scribbled some notes, then gathered up the broken glass and sealed the pieces in an evidence bag. When he was finished, he took out his cell phone and busied himself taking photographs of the puddle of gasoline and the partially burned wick. Eventually he gave Connor the go-ahead to clean the mess up, said an official report would be ready by afternoon in case he needed it for insurance reasons.

“You really think you might be able to find whoever did this?” Connor asked.

“That’s the public line, so I’ve gotta say it,” the sergeant said. “But don’t get your hopes up. This guy meant business, but I suspect he’s in the wind.”

“Unless he comes back and tries it again.”

“Right. And if that happens, you might want to start sleeping with one ear open.”

Connor managed little sleep the rest of the night. The firebomb—and the implication behind it—had frayed his nerves, tugging him back to those first few weeks after he’d been released from the hospital in Kuwait. He’d returned to his FOB, where he endured cold sweats and jack-hammer tremors, as every noise—every slight gust of wind—became the enemy and replayed the suicide attack fresh in his mind, again and again. The anxiety only multiplied the longer he was in-country, but he was man enough not to mention it to another soul. That sort of thing got you booted home, with a mark in your file that lasted way longer than did your ties with the Army.

But nowhere near as long as the dark dreams and night terrors.