Chapter 31

On the drive back to the bar, U.S. Attorney Susan Kim called to let Connor know that a team of federal marshals had tracked Colton Lomax to a private airfield outside Spartanburg in the upstate. Agents from Homeland and ATF surprised him on the tarmac as he was trying to board a Citation he’d leased through a shell corporation, a tax arrangement he’d probably believed was far below the feds’ radar.

His bodyguard had acted impulsively and pulled a weapon, a reactive move that resulted in an exchange of gunfire that did not go well for either the Chickenman or his armed wingman. Connor wondered if the guy might have been the same toady who had confronted him in his attic apartment a few nights before. No matter, the guy was shot multiple times and died at the scene.

During the shootout Lomax had tried to flee across the taxiway. He’d apparently made it about fifty yards before at least one bullet brought him down, and EMTs pronounced him dead on the way to the hospital. Interestingly, four passports and an unspecified amount of cash was found in his luggage.

Kim also explained that state and federal examiners had excavated the underground dungeon in which Connor and Brenda Buckner had been held captive. Replicating the efforts of a Canadian survivalist, Lomax had ordered the woods to be bulldozed to create the maze of buses, then backfilled the entire complex with concrete and dirt. Viewed from a plane, drone, or any passing satellite it just looked like a fenced field with a few gentle rises in the middle of it.

One more detail: Judge Charles Huger, the magistrate overseeing Willis Ronson’s attempted theft case, had been apprehended that same morning in his chambers at the courthouse in downtown Charleston. Turned out the feds had been watching him, too, mostly for the legal assistance he’d provided for his employees who had been apprehend for their part in the insurrection at the Capitol. The fact that there appeared to be no record of payment—or taxes—for those services suggested an arrangement that violated the law, one that also caused Huger to look the other way when Brenda Buckner notified him that Willis Ronson was involved in a government op. And then contacted the Second Amendment Militia to have him ambushed.

That night The Sandbar had an inexplicable run on painkillers. Not the sort dispensed from bottles with child-proof caps, but the liquid kind concocted from five types of specialty rum, pineapple and coconut, and a dusting of nutmeg. A favorite down in the islands, mon, but only two other joints in Folly served them—and nothing came close to what Connor served up at The Sandbar. They were smooth, creamy, and just as tropical as a smear of cocoa butter.

The downside was, they could knock your socks off. Great quantities of rum had that effect on most folks, something most rookies discovered too late. Order one, you were putting yourself at risk. Ask for another and the world might start spinning. Top that off with a third, and the road became a hazard for others—which easily could turn into a liability issue for Jordan James, since his name was on the business license.

The result was always the same: unhappy customers who believed their rights were being trampled on when Connor cut them off. When that happened, slurred voices grew loud as the offended party protested the violation of his or her due process, and a god-given right to party. A gentle reminder that the police were just a phone call away usually returned order to the moment.

A little after seven o’clock the cocktail du jour switched to salty dogs at his end of the bar, while white Russians were favored in Julie’s corner. Go figure. By nine most of the tourists had wandered back to their hotels and VRBOs, and the locals began to drift in. The popcorn machine went into high gear, while the jukebox shifted from oldies to classic rock and started competing with the clubs a couple blocks over on the main drag. Connor ran through two rounds of stupid bar tricks, almost cutting up the wrong credit card in the process. The bar ran through two kegs of draught beer in short order, and the third was running on empty by the time Connor was able to duck downstairs to the locked store room and load a new cask of IPA into the dumbwaiter.

It landed in the steel lift with a loud clang, just as he felt something hard press against his neck, at the base of his skull.

This time he knew it wasn’t wild horses. No mist, no nickers. No nuzzling.

“On your knees, fuck face,” a voice snarled behind him. Low and breathy, with the odor of Slim Jims.

“What the hell—?”

“Shut up and do it,” the voice said again, and in that moment, Connor was able to place it.

“Lyle Hicks,” he said.

“I said, shut the fuck up. Get on your knees.”

Connor raised his hands up and outward, to show he meant no harm. No sudden moves. He bent his knees and began to do as he was told. Knowing as soon as he was down, this asshole with the gun wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger.

“You don’t have to do this—”

“You messed with the wrong man, dipshit.”

“A real man doesn’t beat up his wife,” Connor said.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Hicks replied with a snarl. “This is the end of the line.”

“There’s eyes everywhere. Upstairs, across the road—”

“Fuck if I care. In the dirt. Now.”

Connor lowered himself further, the next moment coming in small fragments as his mind ran through a sizzle reel of his life: Jumping his bike over a ditch when he was eight, hitting his first jump shot in a junior high round robin. His niece getting shot, a carton of moose tracks ice cream clutched in her hands. Pumping a round into the young kid in the grocery store in Kirkuk, and the suicide van that took off Eddie James’ arm. Danielle almost dying, and then running into her just a week ago in a veil of fog. Finding Clooney at the side of the road in the hurricane a couple years back…

Hicks pressed the barrel of the gun harder into his neck, and Connor sensed his finger tightening on the trigger. This was it, the moment his clock ran out. His time to die. To the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Out Of Time” playing on the old Seeburg one floor up.

Then two things happened that created a wrinkle in the fabric of time, or at least his little fragment of it.

A dark, shadowy mass lunged from the darkness and jolted Lyle Hicks, just as a round exploded from his gun. Later, Connor would swear he heard the chunk of lead whiz by his ear, but that was probably just his imagination due to the music, the yelp, and Clooney’s vicious snarl as he sank his teeth into Hicks’ bare ankle.

At the same time, another blast erupted from further away. A few yards, to Connor’s left, from the darkness between the wooden pilings on the other side of the storeroom. A fraction of a second later he felt something warm and wet spray the side of his face, and Hicks crumpled to the ground.

The forward motion drove Connor into the dirt. He caught a mouthful of gravel that tasted of motor oil and salt. And blood, which he now realized was the stuff he’d felt spatter him just a second or two before. Not his own, since he was feeling no pain except for where he’d bitten his tongue when he made contact with the earth.

“Connor,” a voice called out, from the same direction of the second gunshot. Followed by a mad scrambling sound that included a car door being flung open. “You hit?”

At that point he felt something completely different, like a piece of flank steak being drawn repeatedly across the side of his face. It was Clooney, lapping his massive tongue at Lyle Hicks’ blood. Connor rolled to one side and brought himself up into a crouch, gently nudging the old chocolate lab away.

“That you, Burdette?” he called out.

“Yeah, and almost too late,” the SLED cop replied. “They pulled my patrol guys off you, so I figured I’d make a drive-by to make sure you were okay.”

“Sonofabitch,” was all Connor could say.

The arrival of police for some reason chased all but the die-hards away. No one was a witness to Lyle Hicks’ shooting, but most customers paid up and shuffled off toward the exit as fast as their flip-flops would carry them. Before long there were just a few old souls propped up at the bar, and Julie volunteered to take care of them while Connor dealt with the authorities. That included Burdette, two local officers, and a small squadron of investigators from the sheriff’s office. Plus, a forensics team that stayed on-site until well past closing, taking photos and collecting casings and making casts of shoe prints in the dirt.

Burdette was in no condition to be out, much less behind the wheel. Or firing a gun. But he’d heard a report on the radio that Hicks had been sighted outside his ex-wife’s house, possibly armed and dangerous. A neighbor had called nine-one-one, but the fugitive had sped off before anyone arrived on the scene. That’s when Burdette had learned that no one was assigned to watch The Sandbar, and he’d taken it upon himself to haul his ass all the way down to Folly Beach to check in. Sub-rosa, of course. Off the books.

“You did that for me?” Connor asked him.

“If you’d died, that would have been it,” Burdette explained. A third of his head was wrapped in gauze, and he had difficulty speaking because of the hairline fracture in his jaw. “I wasn’t going to let you off the hook that easy.”