Chapter 2

As a state-licensed bond-runner, Connor had considerable latitude when tracking down bail skips. One perk of his job was the pistol he kept in his glove compartment, which he’d made sure was loaded before setting out in pursuit of Willis Ronson. While he didn’t care much for guns, they’d been a fact of life and death from the moment he’d hit boot camp, and had saved his life on more than one occasion. Even so, following his discharge from the army, he’d done his best to distance himself from them as best he could. Too many of his brothers in arms had turned their weapons against their wives or girlfriends, or themselves. The seduction of the trigger was incredibly strong, and the result so incredibly permanent.

As someone once said, the problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance.

Today, however, he needed the SIG Sauer P365 he’d picked up several months ago at Pawn-O-Rama in North Charleston. Problem was, the entire dashboard on the passenger side had been driven inward from the impact with the tree, coming dangerously close to crushing Cherine Dupree’s chest. Connor knew the glove box was there, somewhere, tangled in the deflated airbag, and after a few desperate seconds his probing fingers eventually managed to pry it loose. All while the voices outside the car inched closer and closer.

The micro-compact 9mm pistol dropped to the ceiling and Connor grabbed it, the quick motion sending a spear of pain through the bones of his right hand. He winced, then twisted his body back to where he could get a good look—and a clean shot—at whoever was approaching.

“You think that’s him, hanging there?” the first voice asked. Tentative and anxious, close enough to see inside the vehicle. Just a few yards away now, on Connor’s side of the Jeep.

“Looks like,” the leader replied. “Take it slow and easy.”

“What about the others?”

“Can’t see ‘em.”

“I know I had to’ve hit ‘em—”

“I said, hold your fire.”

Just then another voice called out, this one louder but at a much greater distance. Most likely up on the shoulder of the road. “Everyone all right down there?”

“Fuck,” the leader cursed. Hushed and pissed at the same time, close enough for Connor to hear the phlegm in his lungs. Then he ordered, “Stand down.”

“But—”

“Be cool. No shooting.”

Connor heard a grunt of discontent; then the leader called out, “Looks real bad. Can you call nine-one-one?”

“Ten-four,” the guy up at the road responded.

There was a short silence, no more than a few seconds. Then the closer, more tentative voice whispered, “What now?”

“Now we get the fuck out of here.”

“But—”

“Move out. Back to the truck. And hide the fucking gun.”

“But the others…they may be alive—”

“We’ll deal with them later,” the leader said. “Let’s go.”

The two men then seemed to move back toward the road, their retreating voices replaced by the steady rhythm of blood pulsing through Connor’s brain.

Connor refused medical help. Despite the pounding in his skull and the stabbing pain in his joints and chest, he insisted he was fine.

The cops and EMTs on the scene overruled him. Possible concussion and broken ribs, bruises and contusions just about everywhere. Signs of mental confusion and disorientation. Forty minutes later the ER doctor at the hospital in Kingstree concurred, and ordered him to spend the night for observation. More than a simple precaution, considering the magnitude of the accident and the condition of the other two passengers in the vehicle. One dead, one critical.

Connor argued that he felt better than fine, and Clooney—his chocolate lab rescue who right now was patiently waiting for him in his corner of the bar—needed to be fed and walked. Not necessarily in that order.

“Call someone,” the humorless doctor said, handing him a phone.

His skull felt as if it had been used as a soccer ball and his memory was cloudy. Without access to his digitized contacts, it took him a few minutes to remember the number for Julie, his ace bartender who had agreed to single-handedly navigate the Sunday crowd at the bar. She gave him a load of shit for not showing up on time, until Connor explained that he was in the hospital out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere.

“What the hell happened—?”

“Accident,” he explained, not wanting to get into it. “I’ll fill you in whenever they let me out of here.”

“You sure do know how to step in shit, Jack,” she said. “You want me to keep Clooney for the night?”

“If you could, I’d owe you big time,” he replied.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Julie told him.

Connor handed the phone back, and the doctor and attending nurse left him alone in the ER examining room. His thoughts bounced around, from Iraq to the shoot-out to his weeks in rehab, then back to Iraq. Eventually his mind drifted to The Sandbar down in Folly, just a few steps from the beach at The Edge of America, as the locals called it. His home now for almost two years, slinging drinks never being something he’d pictured himself doing and now couldn’t see himself doing anything else but. The bounty hunting thing was just a side hack he did a couple days a month, to shake things up a bit and because he was good at it. Right now, he couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be than behind the counter, mixing a gin and tonic or showing off the stupid magic tricks he’d learned at the VA rehab joint in Georgia.

He glanced around at his confines, listened for noises out in the hallway. Quiet for a weeknight in Kingstree, which was widely known as the slick underbelly of meth in this part of the state, and all the petty crime that went with it. Connor wondered if that’s what Willis Ronson had gotten himself into, why his body was now lying in a cold, steel drawer somewhere nearby. He’d had no idea why the dumbass had skipped out, just that he didn’t show for his preliminary hearing and Citadel Security Bail Bonds was out twenty grand if his ass wasn’t hauled back to Leeds. A dozen phone calls and some mental triangulation had led him to Ronson’s hideout, a cheap motel room that was littered with tequila bottles and fast-food containers.

What really irritated him was that no one would tell him a damned thing about Cherine Dupree. He’d seen the EMTs wheel her into the back of an ambulance, strapped securely onto a gurney with her face exposed. He figured that meant she was alive, at least at that point. But that was hours ago, and all anyone was telling him now was squat. Notification of family, HIPPA laws, patient privacy—the whole package of bureaucratic BS.

Twice he’d felt like walking out against medical advice, but there were multiple problems with that ill-conceived notion. First, the clothes he’d been wearing had been soaked with blood and noxious run-off sludge, and the very efficient nurse who had tended to him in the emergency room had removed and bagged them. Before he’d landed behind the counter at The Sandbar, mixing pina coladas and daiquiris, he’d cleaned death and decomp scenes for a company called Palmetto BioClean. It was a gig that caused him to be familiar with all the hazards that coursed through human veins and arteries, such things as HIV, herpes, hepatitis, hantavirus. All the H factors, plus dozens more.

Besides, he wouldn’t make it ten yards down the hallway with the last shred of his dignity hanging out the back of the cheap cotton gown he was wearing.

Assuming he was able to run the gauntlet and engineer a clean getaway, he would have to pass through the lobby to the parking lot. What then? His car had been pulverized, and he’d solemnly watched as it had been winched out of the runoff ditch and loaded onto the bed of a flatbed. He didn’t know where his phone and wallet were, and he couldn’t exactly summon an Uber to a hospital parking lot at one in the morning to drive his bare ass back to Charleston.

The third hurdle to his escape plan—and notably, the most difficult—was the cop who had shown up about three minutes ago and had taken up residence at his bedside. Against the doctor’s recommendation, but Nelson Burdette—special investigator for the State Law Enforcement Division, aka SLED—did not appear to believe in the word “no.” Getting ahead of the gunmen who had unloaded an unknown number of rounds into a vehicle traveling on a county road in the state of South Carolina was of the utmost importance.

“Emphasis on ‘ut,’” he explained to the ER doc, clearly finding no humor in his words.

Burdette was a large man, maybe two-twenty and an inch or so over six feet. Salt-and-pepper hair, ruddy skin, weary eyes—details Connor attributed to the wear and tear of a cop job, which he figured could suck the life out of just about anyone.

“There’s a killer out there, maybe more than one, and every passing second means someone else could get hurt,” the SLED cop further explained, emphasizing the immediacy of the moment.

His plea prompted more discussion, and more discord. Eventually Burdette got his way, as experience most likely dictated he would. “Just your patient and me,” he told the doctor and a nurse, who had joined forces in protest of his demands.

They left, not without a lot of grumbling and mumbling, and once they were gone, the investigator placed a digital recording device on the overbed table. He punched a red button, recited his and Connor’s name, and gave the date and time. Then he scooted his chair forward until his knees were almost touching the bed railing, and said, “I want to talk about what happened out there, if you’re up for it.”

Connor was propped up in his bed, a white sheet loosely tucked under his chin. A length of sterile gauze was wrapped around his skull, and an IV of saline solution was dripping into a port in his arm. A monitor clamped to his finger indicated that his blood oxygen and heart rate were within normal range for someone who had just survived a fatal accident. Same with the pressure cuff squeezing his arm.

“Out where?” he asked.

“Where you were shot at and run off the road,” Burdette replied. “Indigo Road.”

“I need to get home to my dog,” Connor said. “He’s hungry and he hasn’t had a chance to do his stuff since I left.” Figuring the SLED cop wouldn’t have any way of knowing that he’d already lined up Julie to help out.

“I’ll try to keep my questions brief,” Investigator Burdette said. “But it doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere tonight.”

“His name is Clooney.”

“What?”

“My dog. That’s his name.”

“As in the actor?”

Connor dipped his head in a nod, and he had to admit—only to himself—that the movement hurt. A lot. “I picked him up at the side of the road during the hurricane,” he explained. “Poor thing was drenched to the bone, had his name on his collar along with a note asking whoever found him to take care of him.”

“People,” Burdette replied, shaking his head, as if that one word said it all. “Now, let’s start from the top, beginning with why you were out there on that barren stretch of highway with that punk loser cuffed to the headrest.”

“Just doing my job,” Connor said. “I’m a bond runner.”

“You have a license to do that?”

“In my wallet, wherever that is.”

“And you carry a gun?” Burdette pressed him.

“A SIG P365. But I’m sure you already know that, too.”

The SLED investigator nodded once. “You have any problem if we test your hands for GSR, Mr. Connor?”

“They already did that at the scene.” Connor had little patience for police, not since they had gotten the death of his niece so fucking wrong way back when. Almost ten years ago now. “You really think I shot Ronson and his lawyer?”

“In fact, I don’t,” Burdette said. “I just need to rule things out, for the record.”

Connor lifted his good shoulder in a slight shrug. “Test away,” he replied, drawing his hands out from under the sheet and holding them out in front of him. One of them was bandaged to the first knuckle, and he wiggled his fingertips.

“No need, if it was already done. And don’t be a wise ass. You came just a few inches from dying out on that stretch of road, and I’m hoping you can help me figure out who was responsible. And why.”

Connor took a deep breath, realized Burdette was right: he needed to lose the attitude. He knew he could be a bit of a hothead, and this state cop was just trying to do his job. Which he probably was damned efficient at, since it looked as if he’d been doing it his entire adult life.

He raised his good hand, palm outward in a peace gesture, said, “Guess I’m still rattled, maybe in a bit of shock. You have any word on Miss Dupree? Nobody’s telling me squat.”

“All I can tell you is she’s in surgery,” Burdette told him. “Critical multiple injuries.”

“At least she’s alive.”

“Hope she stays that way, too. I need to talk to her.”

“You’re all heart,” Connor said. He stared at the white dry-erase board affixed to the wall beyond the foot of his bed, covered with black and red ink scribbled by the nurses. “She shouldn’t have been there, you know? I tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted on coming along.”

“She was the punk’s lawyer, right?” the SLED cop asked. “Ronson.”

Willis Ronson may have been just as Burdette said, but he was a dead punk. Not even cold yet. And while the guy didn’t deserve any respect for his crimes, alleged or not, if Iraq had taught Connor one thing, it was that death was neither black nor white, male nor female. Rich nor poor. The living, breathing soul of a human being took on many shades, many forms, and he’d come to learn that a life was a life no matter what side of the line it was on. His platoon’s mission had been to root out the vicious insurgents who hadn’t gotten the message to greet the American soldiers with armloads of flowers and open arms. Connor had jumped into the fight with all the fervor and zeal that the recruitment posters intended, but the moment he’d shot a young kid in a blown-out grocery store—saw the look of agony and fear on the boy’s face as Connor waited for his heart to stop beating—he was reminded that all that separated the two of them was fate. Fate that had placed him at the business end of an M4, in the middle of a battle of disconsonant faiths that had been ensnared in conflict for eons.

All of which caused him to think then, and now: who really were the insurgents in that wasted neighborhood in the scorched Iraqi desert?

Truth is what you make it.

“Court-appointed attorney,” Connor said, blinking himself back to the here and now.

“And she was just along for the ride?”

“She felt responsible for her client. Something about keeping Ronson from saying anything that could and would be used against him in the courtroom.”

Burdette nodded and stared at the red light on the recording device. Was he considering his next question, or just framing his thoughts? After a few seconds of silence he finally asked, “How do you think Ronson felt about her being black?”

“I wouldn’t know, and it’s too late to ask him,” Connor said. “And I don’t see what it has to do with whoever opened fire on us out there.”

“We live in a mighty screwed-up world right now, and people are losing their minds over the smallest things. Someone could have seen a black woman riding in a car with two white men. Or maybe Ronson flipped someone off when you weren’t looking, or you cut in front of another vehicle.”

Connor felt his blood begin to simmer, just as he had years ago in Lansing when the knee-jerk cops investigating his niece’s death took a sudden and quick detour toward the usual local suspects, and ignored the facts. “This wasn’t a case of road rage,” he said. “Nor a hate crime. It was deliberate and premeditated.”

“We’ll get to that,” Burdette replied. “Right now, let’s go back to the beginning.”

“Which is where?”

“Wherever you picked him up.”

Finally: a question that made some sort of investigative sense, rather than a total waste of Connor’s time. “The Sunrise Motel, outskirts of Andrews,” he said.

“Did you find that odd?”

“I find it odd any time a grown man jumps bail when he knows he’s probably going to get caught. But yeah, that motel didn’t quite fit what I expected. Fifteen, maybe twenty units facing a gravel parking lot, old farts sitting in plastic Walmart chairs drinking beers and smoking, dropping dead butts into coffee cans. I’m sure you know the kind of place.”

Burdette nodded; he knew. “How’d you know he was there?”

“Something his wife told me.”

“She ratted out her own husband?”

“Not directly,” Connor replied. “She said he’d used his credit card at a Waffle House and a Walgreens up there. And a Circle K. I checked ‘em out on Google maps, found a motel right in the middle of them.”

“Smart thinking,” Burdette conceded. “So, walk me through how his lawyer ended up in the car with you.”

“I called her to let her know I had a solid lead on her client’s whereabouts, and I should have him back in jail by dinnertime.”

“Do you do that with all your jumpers?” Burdette wanted to know. “Give their lawyers a courtesy call?”

The ER examining room felt just as confining as an official interrogation room, the only real difference being the absence of a one-way mirror. “She’d been helpful during my search, without violating any attorney-client stuff. I felt she deserved a heads-up.”

“Instead, she asked to go along.” It was a statement, not a question.

Connor winced from a sudden, sharp spasm in his chest, and tried to reposition himself to make it go away. Eventually it did. “A little more forceful than that, and I had no reason to refuse,” he said. “As I’m sure you know, Ronson was an ex-felon, so he couldn’t own a gun. And the crime he was wanted for was non-violent. There was no reason to believe he would put up a fight, and he didn’t.”

Since receiving his license, Connor had tracked down and returned a couple dozen bail skips to jail. Only one of them had given him any trouble, a wife-beater named Lyle Hicks who had greeted him from the entrance flap of his survivalist tent in the mountains, with a gun and a promise to kill him and the goddamned bitch. It was the only time he’d ever had to call for police back-up, and things had not gone well for the guy.

“And Ronson didn’t put up a struggle?”

“Drink yourself stupid with tequila, you don’t have much fight in you,” Connor said. “The guy was totally crocked.”

“And then you cuffed him and put him in your car?”

Connor talked Burdette through the motions, from locking Ronson’s wrist to the passenger seat headrest, to making sure he was thoroughly hydrated, to assuring Cherine Dupree that he wouldn’t ask her client any questions. Even though he did anyway.

“After that we pulled out of the lot and headed back toward Charleston,” he concluded with a weary sigh.

“And at no point did you encounter another vehicle, or interact with anyone in such a manner that would have caused them to pull a gun?” the SLED cop pressed.

“No road rage, like I already said,” Connor replied. “Whoever it was came up from behind real fast—no warning at all—and just started unloading.”

The questioning went on another fifteen minutes. How the shooting unfolded, the vehicle rollover, the voices he’d heard. The commands to “stand down” and “hold your fire” and “put away the fucking gun.”

Connor’s stamina and the ER doc’s patience wore out about the same time. “Time for my patient to get some rest,” the doctor said when he finally pushed his way back inside the room.

“A man was killed in cold blood, and his lawyer is undergoing life-threatening surgery,” Burdette reminded him. “Mr. Connor’s memory is my best chance at nailing these bastards before the trail grows cold. That’s my job.”

“And mine is to keep him alive,” the doctor replied. “Right now, that means making sure he gets the rest he needs. Visiting hours ended long ago. No more questions tonight.”

The seasoned SLED investigator knew enough to choose his battles wisely, burn no bridges on the field of conflict. Every one of his questions—and Connor’s answers—had led to more questions, but the longer he stayed here asking them, the less time he had to process the facts, pound the pavement. And get some much-needed rest of his own.

“All right…I have enough for now,” he conceded as he clicked the power button off and slipped the recorder back into his pocket. He rose from his chair and turned to leave, then pivoted back to Connor. “Get some rest,” he told him. “Like the man said, I’ll be back.”

“I can hardly wait,” he replied, already picturing Clooney waiting for him in his corner of the darkened bar, while Julie closed up and prepared to head home for the night.