Chapter 27

The Yukon had barely come to a rest in the trees when a pair of lights pulled off on the grassy shoulder back up at the road. Blue halogens, just like the F-150 Connor had seen lurking outside Sea Island Rehab last night.

But there was no time to determine if it was the same truck. Not with Burdette hanging upside down from his seat belt, his face looking like a side of beef that had just gone ten rounds with Rocky in a meat locker. Air bags sometimes were worse than the accident itself.

A flicker in his eyes indicated he was alive, and so was Connor, although he felt as if his shoulder had been dislocated and his nose pulverized. But he pushed aside the pain, since they were like ducks on a pond for anyone with a gun. And that included whoever was in the vehicle that had pulled off the road behind them.

Just like last time.

“Help me out of this,” Burdette groaned, meaning his seat belt. Connor fumbled with the plastic release and, when it unlatched, he tumbled down onto the upturned ceiling of the Yukon. Then he said, “Glovebox.”

Connor had seen him stash his gun in there when they left the Williamsburg Sheriff’s headquarters, and he worked the latch until the door popped open. Since the vehicle was upside down it didn’t flop down, and he had to snake his hand up inside until he felt the metal barrel.

“Give it to me,” Burdette said.

There were two more quick shots outside, and Connor realized they weren’t coming from a mere pistol. Something more on the order of an AR-15, sounding just like the type of weapon that was used to kill Ronson and critically injure Cherine Dupree.

“They’re coming to finish us off,” he whispered to Burdette.

“You think?”

Whoever was driving the truck left the headlights on, the final streaks of sunset now completely folded into night. Connor estimated the Yukon had careened about thirty yards off the road, leaving a path of splintered trees and uprooted creepers in its wake. It would be slow going, but eventually the gunmen—he assumed there were at least two of them—would be on them.

“Can you squeeze through there?” Burdette asked.

He was referring to the passenger window that had shattered during the crash. It hung like a warped sheet of diamonds from the steel frame, and Connor kicked at it with his heel. Lots of pain, and he realized he’d either broken or badly re-sprained his ankle.

The pulverized glass fell away, leaving an opening just barely large enough for Connor to slide his feet through. He peered through the rear of the Yukon and saw two elongated shadows backlit by the halogen headlamps, now about twenty yards distant. Approaching on Burdette’s side, at an angle where they wouldn’t see Connor if he slithered out.

“They’re coming up on your left,” he said.

“Thanks. Now get out.”

“But—”

“That’s an order.”

Connor saw he was serious, realized there was nothing he could do if he remained inside the upturned Yukon. As he began to wriggle legs-first through the jagged window, he detected the odor of gasoline. The fuel tank must have been punctured during the crash, and there was a good chance it could blow any second. He hated leaving Burdette behind, but the SLED cop had a gun and Connor didn’t.

“Blow ‘em to fuckin’ hell,” a voice called from the other side of the Yukon, now just fifteen yards away.

“Quiet…there’s a house back there on the road,” was the response. It sounded like it was coming through a gob of chewing tobacco. “We got to be discreet.”

“Like last time?”

“We didn’t know that bitch was with him. Be patient.”

That bitch he was referring to was Cherine Dupree, and Connor felt his blood begin to boil. These had to be the same bastards who had forced him off the road and had killed Willis Ronson. If he’d had a gun, he would have taken them both out right then. Or so he tried to convince himself, as he slipped the rest of the way through the window.

He couldn’t see what Burdette was doing inside the Yukon. He clearly was in a worse position than Connor was, hunkered down on the ceiling, his vision obscured by airbags that had inflated and then gone soft. He was bleeding and probably suffering from internal injuries, maybe some broken bones. Connor couldn’t shake the idea that this was all his fault, that the SLED investigator might die because of reckless impulses he had difficulty controlling.

He pulled himself into a low crouch, making himself as small as possible as he tried to figure out his next move. The two shooters were gaining ground, one cautious step at a time, and he managed to peer over the up-turned wreckage to get a fix on where they were. Closing quickly on Burdette’s flank maybe ten yards away. Guns drawn, aimed forward.

“Hold your fire,” cautioned the one who again seemed to be in charge.

“This time we shoot on sight.”

“When I say so.”

If Connor could hear what they were saying, he figured Burdette heard them, as well. He was probably prepping himself inside, getting ready for a firefight, while Connor was out in the trees doing nothing. They were seconds away from acting, and he felt he had to do something.

He raised his head just enough to peek over the mangled wreckage of the up-turned wheel well. As he did, his hand touched something hard, a little smaller than a baseball. A rock, maybe a chunk of crumbled asphalt that had been dragged through the trees. He didn’t have time to study it, just enough to grip it and hurl it into the brush on the other side of the Yukon.

“Fuck…what was that?” the trigger-happy gunman said as he squeezed off several random shots into the woods, beyond the glow of the headlights.

“I said, hold your fire,” the leader snapped.

“Someone’s out there—”

“Distraction, you dumb shit—”

His words were met with yet another blast, this one more muffled than the others. A smaller gun, accompanied by a flash inside the SUV. Burdette must have lined up a shot from inside the cab.

“Goddamn—” Trigger yelped as he dropped to the forest floor.

“Shit…guy in the car’s got a gun,” Leader cursed, then released a burst of fire on the Yukon like a summer hailstorm.

Connor hated to think what Burdette was going through in there, knew he had to do something. He felt around for another rock, instead found a length of sapling that had snapped off as the vehicle had come to a rest in the trees. About the length and weight of his Louisville Slugger back at the bar. Without thinking, he rose to his feet and unleashed a wild sidewinder over the upside-down SUV.

The man with the gun didn’t see it coming. The spinning club whacked him in the side of his head with full blunt force. The impact compressed his jaw and cheek and crushed his nose, flinging a spray of blood in the glow of the headlights.

It wasn’t enough to kill him but, as he spun around, Burdette took care of that with two quick shots to the chest.

Connor waited a few seconds to make sure no more gunfire was coming. Then he crouched down to the shattered window and said, “You okay in there?”

“I’m hit,” was Burdette’s reply.

“Where’s your phone?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Trusting that the two shooters were permanently down, Connor crawled back into the Yukon and searched for the device. It took a while, but he finally found it wedged against the folded-up sun visor. Burdette was moaning in pain, blood seeping from an open wound in his arm.

Connor activated the phone, found it was protected with fingerprint security.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

Burdette had to shift his body a bit to extend his gun hand, his index finger still wrapped across the trigger of his Glock. Connor managed to touch his thumb to the screen, and it unlocked. He dialed 911, and a few seconds later the call connected to a dispatch center somewhere. In as few words as possible Connor managed to explain what was going on, told them a SLED officer was down and two suspects were wounded, maybe killed.

He was still wearing the shirt he’d slipped on the night before when Claire had called him in a panic. Now he pulled it off, gave it a massive rip, and tightened it around Burdette’s arm above where it was bleeding.

“Where else are you hit?” he asked when he was done.

“Ear, I think.” Burdette managed to pivot his neck just enough for Connor to see where a bullet had taken off a chunk of cartilage. Nothing too deep, just a trickle of blood.

“Not life-threatening, but it’s gonna leave one helluva a scar.”

Connor sat with him until the first flashes of blue appeared through the trees. The scene of the crash was easy to find, since the gunmen had left their truck up on the shoulder with their headlights on. Within seconds the first state trooper was hurriedly clawing his way through the trail of snapped trees and mangled briars.

“In here,” Connor called out to him.

“Keep it down,” Burdette said. “My head’s ringing like a sonofabitch.”

EMTs treated his injuries at the scene, then loaded him into the back of an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital in Georgetown. Connor remained at the crash site while the sheriff and a posse of deputies scoured the perimeter. An hour after that two of Burdette’s SLED partners showed up to assume control of the investigation, and to get his story. They already knew he’d obstructed an inter-agency op and thus was responsible for what had happened, and they treated him like a suspect. Which was on the order of dirt, and something he figured he deserved.

They hammered him with questions and accusations about the ambush on the road, and the events that occurred in the woods. Connor answered them truthfully, explaining that Burdette had acted heroically in taking down both suspects and saving their lives. Sure, Connor had unleashed the likes of a baseball bat at one of them, but Burdette had finished him off with the kill shot. Connor was just along for the ride.

It was after midnight before he finally was told he could go home. No cuffs, no ride back to the interrogation room. No jail cell. When Connor explained that his car had been torched and Burdette had been driving him home, he was told, “Figure it out.”

Burdette’s phone had ridden with him in the ambulance, and no one seemed very quick to lend him one. Not after the events of the day, and Connor’s complicity in all of it. By now Julie would have locked up the bar and gone home, once again figuring his word was no good or he was spiraling into another post-traumatic meltdown. Wouldn’t be the first time. He had no close buddies to call, definitely no girlfriend who would come and fetch him in the middle of the night. There was always Jordan James, but he’d probably be either three sheets to the wind, or sleeping off a major bender.

At one point he managed to get close enough to the suspects’ truck to see a red plastic gas can in the bed, along with an empty vodka bottle of the same cheap brand that Connor had found in pieces on the drinking deck a few nights back. Along with a ripped T-shirt, same color and texture as the wick that had been lit, but fizzled out before it had a chance to ignite the propellant and burn The Sandbar down.

He glanced around for a forensic tech who might listen to him, check out the potential evidence in the back of the pick-up. Everyone was too busy to give him the time of day, however, and he gave up just around the same moment a bright yellow BMW convertible sports coupe came racing up in the northbound lane. It made a quick U-turn across the roadway and lurched to a halt on the grassy shoulder, heading the other way.

A moment later a woman wearing a baseball cap over her ginger hair opened the door and unfolded from the front seat. She glanced around the accident site, wandered over to where Burdette’s Yukon had been winched out of the trees, and was waiting on the side of the road for a truck vehicle to haul it away. Probably to the same evidence barn where Connor’s burned-out Ford had been taken earlier in the day.

Eventually the woman spotted Connor in the glare of a fire truck’s headlights. She flexed her shoulders and sauntered over as if she had not a care in the world. Then a big smile formed on her lips and she said, “Hey, Magic Man…don’t suppose you’d do that killer lime trick for me, would you?”

Sonofabitch. What in Holy Hell was Jessica Snow doing here? Lisa King. Whatever.

He looked deep into her green eyes and said, “Is this where you tell me you were just in the neighborhood, thought you’d drop in?”

“What in God’s name happened here?” she wanted to know, ignoring his question as she stared at the mangled SUV. “Whose car is that?”

“Investigator Burdette’s,” Connor told her. An EMT had wrapped a blanket around him because he’d used his shirt to tie off Burdette’s arm, and he was shivering.

“He’d be the SLED guy, right?”

“You know him?”

Jessica Snow shook her head as she gazed about at the shredded trees, the tire tracks, and the gouged earth. Then she glanced back at Connor and noticed the bandages on his forehead and chin, courtesy of the med techs who had worked on Burdette and eventually carted him off.

“Jesus…you’re bleeding—”

“Scratches, mostly. And I re-sprained my ankle.”

“Were you in…that?” she asked, indicating the wrecked Yukon.

Connor nodded, said, “Airbags come at you fast.”

“Follow me,” she said, taking his hand in hers.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home.”

They walked back to the yellow two-seater, a dozen questions spinning through Connor’s mind. When they got to her car, she unlatched the front door and opened it for him. “I heard you found Brenda Buckner,” she said.

“Otherwise known as Liz Morgan. Seems all you fed types have more than one name, Ms. King.”

She didn’t respond to that, just added, “I also heard you saved her life.”

“It wasn’t quite that dramatic,” he replied.

“Well, get in the car. You can tell me what the fuck happened on the way back.”

He felt too wiped out to talk, too exhausted to protest. Too drained to do anything but go along with what she was saying. Sixty seconds later they were back on the road, the Bavarian three-liter engine whining as she opened it up along the straight stretches and leaned into tight turns through the trees. The waning moon was rising in the east, its brilliant luminescence casting arthritic shadows of pine and oak limbs across the pavement.

“I assume you know her?” he asked, once they were well on their way. “Brenda Buckner.”

“We took a couple training classes together,” Jessica said. “Georgia and New Mexico.”

“But you’re a U.S. Marshal and she’s ATF—”

“All under the same DOJ umbrella,” she explained.

“It can’t be coincidence you were just driving along, happened to stop to give me a ride home.”

Even in the dark Connor saw Jessica wink at him. “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” she said.

“Is that why you’re here? Because of her?”

She thought on that a moment, then said, “You know the other night, we talked about Willis Ronson?”

“We talked about a lot of things, but yeah, I remember,” Connor replied. “You said you were protecting him.”

“That was the plan,” she confirmed. “Brenda had contacted me a few weeks earlier, said she had a C.I. who was going to blow the lid off something big. She needed me to get him into the witness program.”

“And then things went off the rails,” he reminded her.

She fell silent for a bit after that, fiddled with the car stereo for a few seconds as a distraction, but eventually turned it off. Then she said, “Big time.”

Neither of them said anything for a while after that, not until after they were well into the darkness of the Francis Marion Forest. Occasionally a racoon or a skunk waddled across the path of her headlights; otherwise, everything was silent and black. Eventually she gave him a sideways glance and said, “The other evening, I wasn’t sure whether I could trust you.”

He let her words sink in a moment before he said, “Wait a second…you thought I had something to do with Ronson’s death?”

“I don’t know what I thought. But he was the second witness who had come into contact with you and got killed while I was trying to bring him in.”

“And both times I could have been killed, too.”

“You’re still stuck on that thing from last summer?”

“Your plan put everyone in my bar at risk,” he reminded her.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about the other evening, before you fell asleep.”

“I was tired, and you were gone when I woke up,” he reminded her.

“I promise not to make a habit of it. And that’s what I wanted to talk about.”

“Habits or promises?” he asked her.

A deer bounded across the roadway a hundred yards up the road, and she eased off the gas until it disappeared into the trees. Where there was one, there might be more. Then she said, “Have you ever been to Fairbanks?”

“As in Alaska?”

“Only Fairbanks I know,” she replied. He glanced at her, kept his eyes on her dim silhouette but said nothing. Eventually she got the hint and said, “It’s where I’m going, day after tomorrow.”

“I hear it’s nice this time of year,” Connor observed, not quite sure where she was going with this. “All day, no night.”

“It’s the other way around that’s got me worried. Winter’s going to be a bitch. No limes…and, I hear, not a whole lot of magic.”

“If you’re trying to tell me something, you’re doing a horrible job at it.”

“What I’m trying to tell you is…well, I’ve been given a long-term assignment.”

“You’re hiding witnesses all the way up in Fairbanks?”

“More like they’re hiding me,” she said.

He stared at her while he made sense of what she was telling him. Then: “You’re being transferred? Because of Willis Ronson?”

“That and a few other supposed transgressions they found in my file.”

“Can they do that?”

“Of course they can. They’re the government.”

She dropped him off a little before two. They’d made small talk the rest of the way, when they’d talked at all. She stopped the car in the gravel lot below the drinking deck and leaned over, gave him a peck on the cheek. She didn’t ask to come up, and he didn’t extend the invitation. Long day, exhaustion, dehydration. All of it. He felt his heart tighten as he got out, and gently closed the door behind him.

“Enjoy the northern lights,” he told her.

“I’m told they put on quite a show. And by the way, of all the gin joints in all the world, you’ll never know how much I enjoyed walking into yours.”

Clooney was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. He seemed anxious and wired about something, and Connor let him out for a much-needed nature break. While he was waiting for the old guy to return, he found the note Julie had left for him.

“We need to talk,” was all it said.

The phrase habits and promises ran through his mind as he trudged up the stairs to his attic apartment. He needed to address both concepts, along with trust, or he was going to lose the best employee he’d ever had. And a true friend.

Clooney followed right behind, tentative and uncertain, the way he was whenever Jimmy Brinks showed up and ordered a double Jack. When they got to the top landing Connor started to insert his key into the deadbolt, but found the door unlocked. In fact, it was open a crack, and when he gave it a gentle nudge it swung inward on silent hinges.

Not all the way, but enough for him to see a man seated in a chair in his living room, a gun aimed directly at his chest.