Chapter 1

Lengthening shadows of slash pines and swamp chestnuts reached across the blacktop, as if grasping at the last filaments of daylight Willis Ronson would see before returning to his cell at the county jail.

There would be no bond this time. No leniency from the judge who first time around had set bail at twenty grand and then released him into the custody of his fuming wife. No more oyster roasts or shrimp boils, no whisky and billiards at the corner tavern. No slap-and-tickle with said wife on Sunday mornings before she headed off to church, or on Tuesday afternoons if her boss gave her a few hours off from her job adjusting the hems of other women’s dresses.

The sinking knowledge of this fast-approaching deprivation was etched deep in his face as he stared at the sunbaked road stretching out before him. Sitting upright in the back seat, one hand cuffed to the steel support of the head rest in front of him. Not saying a damned word, at the advice of his court-appointed public defender, who had insisted on coming along for the ride and was positioned directly in front of him. Not something she did for all her bond-skippers, but she didn’t trust Ronson to keep his mouth shut.

Nor Jack Connor’s pledge not to try to get him talking on the ride home.

“It’s going to be a good, long time before you get to see any of this again,” was how Connor put it, talking over his shoulder to his prisoner. Or, in the eyes of the state of South Carolina, his apprehended ward. “You have anything to say for yourself before we get you checked into Leeds?”

Leeds being the colloquial term for the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center, located on Leeds Avenue in North Charleston.

“Don’t listen to him,” the lawyer warned Ronson, not for the first time. Her name was Cherine Dupree, no more than three years out of law school. Black skin that spoke to her coastal Gullah heritage, wire-rim glasses and double gold posts in the lobe of each ear. An angel’s face, fresh and naïve and searching for the good in everybody, no matter what he or she had done.

Allegedly.

“I’m just keepin’ to myself and enjoyin’ the peace and quiet of nature,” Willis Ronson lied. No expression on his pale white face, barely blinking his red eyes that were puffy from a long liaison with a bottle the night before, even though he’d insisted it was just a bout of the flu that was causing him to spit up bile. “Soaking in all the green and blue out there.”

“Cuz you know what it’s like in there,” Connor reminded him.

He knew Ronson had done two stretches before, and now here he was again, looking at five to ten for attempted theft of copper wire from a power company transformer station. Came this close to getting the life shocked out of him, after taking a massive set of bolt cutters to cables that could have been carrying thousands of live volts. Typical Carolina redneck whose brain stem got separated from common sense at an early age, and who had rapidly descended into high crimes and misdemeanors from that moment onward.

“Why do you think I done what I done, and split?

Ronson’s attorney glanced at her client over her shoulder, said, “Willis, please…I told you not to—”

She never got to finish her words. At that moment a bullet tore through the rear window of the Jeep Cherokee, shattering it in a cascade of diamonds before it bit into the windshield just below the rear-view mirror. A web of cracks spread instantly across the glass, leaving a hole the size of a wolf spider in the center.

Half a second later bullet number two entered the vehicle through the opening created by the first. It struck Ronson in the back of the neck, taking out his cerebellum and altering the trajectory of the slug just enough for it to become embedded in the side support pillar between the front and rear door. If that shot hadn’t killed him, the next surely did, as it penetrated his skull and rattled around the cranium a short while before exiting through his left eye and coming to stop in the head rest in front of him. Death had been instantaneous and his body had been blown forward and down, so rounds four and five missed him completely.

Instead, Cherine Dupree screamed as the first of those next two rounds plunged directly into her shoulder. The next one slammed through her seat back, its path diverted only slightly by a metallic lumbar support that redirected it into her lower torso. The bullet came to rest precariously close to her L5 vertebrae, which later would cause her team of surgeons considerable worry and grief.

The average human reaction time from the moment of stimulus to the transmission of a signal through the spinal cord to the muscles—resulting in spontaneous nerve contraction—is less than a quarter of a second. Connor’s was a bit faster than average, but not quick enough to cause him to do anything but spin the wheel reflexively to the right just after the windshield was cratered. He’d barely seen the vehicle racing up behind him, only a blur of motion in his side-view mirror a fraction of a second before the shooting erupted and his sensory system kicked in.

This action came far too late to save the life of Willis Ronson, whose range of motion was limited by the high-tensile steel chain of the handcuffs. By the time the fifth bullet had penetrated Cherine’s back, Connor had wrenched the wheel back again to the left. Too fast and too far, because at that point the Cherokee was riding on two tires, and a moment later it was rolling side-over-side into a deep run-off ditch that paralleled the narrow county road. Each fragmented second that came next seemed to be marked by more gunshots, although no one but the man holding the weapon in the pick-up twenty yards back was keeping count.

One of those subsequent rounds struck Ronson a third time, a wasted chunk of lead since he was already bleeding out. The final shot managed to graze the back of Connor’s right hand, carving a furrow in the compass rose that had been tattooed there a few years back. The impact caused him to release his grip on the wheel, and a moment later his arms and legs were flailing around inside the vehicle like the limbs of an untethered crash test dummy.

At some point every airbag in the vehicle deployed. At least half of the fourteen bones in Cherine Dupree’s face were fractured by the sudden blast, while Connor endured a similar assault to his mandible and maxilla, as well as a roundhouse punch to his left ear. Because Willis Ronson was riding in the backseat, he was spared any such injuries which, because he was already deceased, would have been postmortem and therefore inconsequential.

The SUV continued in a forward, yawing motion for a few more seconds before it came to rest upside down in a trickle of brackish water left over from a flash thunderstorm the evening before. The trunk of a blackjack oak absorbed most of the impact, the force of which drove the six-cylinder engine rearward through the firewall and into young attorney’s legs, snapping them like saplings. Her injuries, combined with the blood loss from her gunshot wounds, caused her to slip into hypovolemic shock and black out.

So did Connor, momentarily, until he blinked his eyes open and tried to regain his bearings. First thing he realized was he was hanging from his three-point seatbelt which, along with the water trickling through the shattered side window across the ripped headliner, told him the car was upside down. His head throbbed from what sure as hell felt like a skull fracture of great magnitude, probably a concussion. His jaw and nose seemed as if they’d just gone ten rounds in the ring, his ribcage punched as if he’d been gored by a bull running through the streets of Pamplona. His hand stung like a sonofabitch where the bullet had slashed his skin, and his ankle screamed from momentarily being twisted backwards.

His mind reflexively jumped back to the desert outside Kirkuk, that blistering day when a burning sun was hanging in a dusty sky as white as linen, sand biting at his parched lips like mites. He was at the wheel of a Humvee, bouncing over crumbled bricks and stone in a blown-out neighborhood northwest of the city, when a suicidal zealot cuffed to the wheel of a van packed with explosives came racing out from behind a mound of rubble that at one time had been a market. The blast had blown Connor up and outward, causing him to cartwheel through the air before he came to rest in a field of rocks, wondering if he was dead or still in the living hell known as war.

He’d lost a good friend that day, a young Texas all-state quarterback named Danny Benson who had been riding shotgun in the passenger seat next to him when the bomb detonated. Poor kid never had a chance. Several others had lost toes and fingers, and one took a piece of hot shrapnel in an eye that would never again see the beauty of a new morning, or the rosy hue of his girlfriend’s shy blush.

Eddie James, who had drawn gunner duty, was blown into the air, his arm severed at the elbow by the force of the initial blast. He came to rest on what was left of the front passenger door that had done nothing to protect Private Benson, and opened a bloody fissure in the side of his head. It was a miracle he was alive.

All this swept through Connor’s brain in a microsecond, caused him to glance over at Cherine Dupree, who also was hanging upside down. Either dead or unconscious, he couldn’t be sure. Blood was everywhere, no way to know if it belonged to him, or her, or Willis Ronson in the backseat. Who likewise was hanging from his three-point restraint and the handcuffs, although he most definitely was no longer among the living.

A faint moan bubbled from Cherine’s lips, indicating that she was breathing—but for how long? There was nothing Connor could do to help her unless he freed himself from his own safety belt, so he wriggled his feet around until he was able to brace them against the steering wheel. He then used his good hand to probe for the latch between his seat and the center console. He pressed the button and immediately dropped to the mangled ceiling, which was sticky with blood and covered with fragments of tempered glass. His ribs cursed with pain—although nothing like that day in Kirkuk—but he knew Cherine Dupree was in far worse condition.

He managed to position himself partly beneath her, pushing up on the shoulder that wasn’t bleeding to give her just enough slack so he could click her belt latch. When he did, she tumbled down on top of him, momentarily pinning him against the roof. He felt, rather than heard, a low gasp seep from her lungs and, for a second, he wondered if it might have been her last. He felt her wrist for a pulse, found something that seemed no more than a quiver.

Alive, but losing a lot of blood.

It was then that he heard a voice. Or was it his own mind starting to grow numb, a deceased relative calling to him from across the great divide? No, that would hardly be possible, since most of his known family was a full time zone away, and none of them—not even the dead—wanted anything to do with him. Plus, he was quite sure he was only bleeding from superficial wounds and, at least in his mind, he hadn’t really been shot.

A second later Connor heard the voice again. Muffled and tentative, and a little guttural. It also meant there had to be at least two voices, because human conversation generally required more than one person. Logic that was spot on, because he then heard a response that was a bit louder, more decisive. In charge.

“Hold your fire.”

It sure didn’t sound like some good Samaritan who had witnessed the crash and pulled to the side of the road to check for casualties and assist the injured.

Hold your fire. Which meant guns, and fingers on triggers.

All of which Connor took to mean these were the same bastards who had raced up behind them and laid siege on his Jeep, killed Willis Ronson, and critically wounded Cherine Dupree. And in the process had run them all off the road.

Now it seemed they were moving through the brackish run-off ditch, coming to finish them off.