Chapter 5

Connor had worked as an ad hoc private investigator from the moment Jordan James had hired him to track down a valuable painting several years back. That case had led him to do an undercover job for the former governor of South Carolina, leading to a progression of events that eventually resulted in his takedown of one of the largest drug dealers in the southeastern US.

When he finally agreed—after considerable hesitation—to work freelance gigs for James’ bail bonds company, he applied for his beginner PI ticket. The governing body in South Carolina for such things is the State Law Enforcement Division, which now was looking into Willis Ronson’s murder, and was the number one reason why Connor wanted to avoid a direct collision with Nelson Burdette. Full cooperation with every aspect of the investigation was in his own best interest, meaning it was critical for him to fly as low under the radar as possible. Ground-level low. Interfering with the legitimate function of any state agency was grounds for review and potential reprimand, a rebuke that would carry serious penalties if it in any way involved the obstruction of SLED activities.

The ER doc in Kingstree had offered Connor a prescription for pain meds, which he declined out of principle. He’d personally witnessed the speed with which they dragged a person under their destructive spell, offering temptation for a quick and easy release from a full spectrum of physical and psychological miseries. Connor had lost a number of buddies, either accidentally or intentionally, to the mind-numbing deliverance and escape they provided. And then were mercilessly snatched away in an instant.

Instead, he popped a couple of doctor-recommended extra-strength Acetaminophen, then retreated to the top step of the stairs outside his door, overlooking the dunes and the beach and the glimmering ocean beyond. His watch told him he had about a half hour before Julie arrived and the evening’s work began, so he didn’t have much time. He inhaled a wisp of sea breeze, then opened the flap of a manila envelope he’d plucked off his kitchen table, and pulled out a dozen sheets of paper fastened by a paper clip.

Several of them were Willis Ronson’s arrest record; the rest were his own scribbled notes from his attempt to narrow down the bail skip’s whereabouts. When Ronson had not shown up for his initial court appearance, the bailiff had notified Bucky Foster who, in turn, had called Connor. Unless and until the jumper was hauled in, Citadel Security Bail Bonds was on the hook for the full twenty grand that the judge had set.

He reviewed the rap sheet first. Ronson—age thirty-six—had been arrested five times, beginning at eighteen when he’d boosted a neighbor’s car so he could drive to a music festival in Tennessee. An hour later an alert trooper on the interstate caught him doing ninety, and a judge handed down a sentence of two years’ probation. He was arrested again a year later for breaking and entering, got two years mandatory in Bennettsville because of his probation violation. Sentence reduced to fourteen months upon the recommendation of the parole board and several unspecified outside parties. He’d managed to remain clean for a couple years after that, then was arrested for public intoxication, which earned him another conviction and a sentence of time served.

Arrest number four brought him one-to-three years for breaking into a pawn shop and attempting to retrieve a ring he had hawked there a couple weeks earlier. A ring that actually belonged to his wife Donna who, upon finding it missing, extracted a tearful confession from him as to its whereabouts. She’d promised him in no uncertain terms that he’d land in deep shit if the coveted piece of jewelry didn’t show up back in her box by the next morning, and his bungled attempt to comply with her demand had landed him at Tyger River, a medium security facility outside the town of Enoree.

His fifth and final brush with the law had come just six weeks ago, when a patrol officer in North Charleston spotted what he thought was suspicious activity inside a secure electric transformer station. A white man, early thirties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt was using a pair of bolt-cutters to slice through a tangle of heavy gauge copper wires, some of which he had already piled in a heap near a freshly cut hole in the fencing. The cop had called for back-up, then continued to film the activity with his body cam until help arrived. Ronson had made a run for it, got as far as the razor wire coiled along the top when he realized the drawn guns meant business.

Via a video hook-up at the county jail, the judge had set bail at twenty grand, ten percent of which Donna Ronson had posted that same afternoon in order to bond her husband out. He was out in time for dinner, which he was forced to eat at a local fast-food joint because his wife had locked the doors and said she never wanted to see his sorry ass again.

Connor felt just as puzzled by this last arrest as he was the first time he’d read the report. Of all the crimes that could be committed across Charleston County, why risk your life stealing copper wire from an electrical complex? Coming in contact with the thousands of volts surging through those lines was enough to knock the life out of anyone, which suggested Ronson either had a guardian angel looking out for him that morning, or he’d received advanced notice of a power reduction and had taken advantage of it.

Or he was just one lucky, but seriously stupid, sonofabitch

However it had gone down, the attempt to steal copper was perplexing. Sure, it was a valuable commodity, but it wasn’t exactly a rare element. Mines churned out plenty of the stuff every year, and there was no shortage on the market. Even with the price at a near-record high—Connor had checked—it amounted to just a fraction of what a few ounces of gold or platinum would fetch. Willis Ronson would have had to fill the bed of a pick-up truck with wire in order to get the same return as when he’d pawned his wife’s ring. Why bother?

He set the rap sheet aside and focused on his notes. When Bucky Foster had assigned him the task of hauling Ronson’s ass back to jail, he’d conducted a thorough search through all the databases available to the public, plus some to which access was highly restricted. Connor had tackled the simple stuff first, found the guy was born in Lancaster, not far from the North Carolina line. Graduated from high school, no indication of athletics or anything else that made him stand out. Got a steady job at a paint store and then, for reasons unspecified, he’d tried to steal the neighbor’s car.

After his stint in Bennettsville he moved to Florence, where he found gainful employment with a landscaping business that was willing to hire a former inmate. He mowed lawns and groomed hedges for a few years, then fell in with a loosely knit biker group composed of self-proclaimed road warriors whose collective goal was to rule all the blacktop in the county. It was during this time that he’d met his future wife Donna, who had worked as a seamstress and had sewn the Thunder Dogs’ patches on their denim jackets. The alcohol-induced altercation mentioned in his record happened at a bar just a few miles down the road in Timmonsville, during which Ronson tipped over a row of a rival gang’s motorcycles. His actions put an end to any leadership aspirations he might have had, and he was forced to abide by the judge’s order that he leave the area and never ride with more than one other biker at a time.

Willis and Donna moved to Charleston soon thereafter and got married. She found work in a custom tailoring shop, and he got a job as a line chef for a catering company. The money was poor, and at the end of one particularly meager month he pilfered her ring from the hand-carved jewelry box on her dresser and hawked it. After getting caught trying to get it back, his attorney convinced him to plead down to an unspecified lesser charge, a decision that landed him his residential stint at Tyger River. The sentence subsequently was reduced to six months because of overcrowding and good behavior.

By that time their marriage was beyond strained. Donna Ronson hadn’t acknowledged any marital issues when Connor had spoken with her the week before, but he suspected she had not been entirely faithful during the time of her husband’s incarceration. She hadn’t exactly come out and said “a woman has needs,” but it was close.

In any event, they had been unofficially separated for a couple weeks when Willis was pulled down from the razor wire surrounding the high-voltage transformer compound. “We’d been trying to work things out, but, well you know,” was how she’d described it.

Mrs. Ronson had gone on to explain that at the time of his arrest he’d been bunking in temporarily with a guy named Joey Barber. Nicknamed Scissors, because of his last name. When Connor had started his search he’d paid the guy a visit, but Barber insisted he didn’t know a damned thing about where Ronson might be. Connor didn’t believe him, strictly on principle, and now that the bail skip was dead, it was time for another chat.

Same thing with two other known associates who had turned up in the non-public databases. One was a house painter named Scott Strickland who lived in North Charleston, and apparently had graduated from high school in the same class as Ronson up in Lancaster. Connor assumed their paths also might have crossed at the store where Willis had worked years ago, but he had no proof of this. And Strickland had denied any contact with him the first—and only—time they’d spoken on the phone.

The other acquaintance was the leader of a weekly post-prison reform group Ronson had been mandated to attend as a condition of his parole from Tyger River. Ed Wheeler had been a hard-time recidivist halfway through a sentence of ten-to-twenty at Broadview when he’d proclaimed his discovery of Jesus Christ the Almighty. Seemed the good Lord had forgiven him all his sins, including his most recent felony conviction for involuntary manslaughter, and his sudden and unequivocal rebirth had convinced a parole board that he had found guidance through the Heavenly Father. Satisfied that he was a changed man with a profound message to share, they recommended his release into the community, with ten years’ supervision by the correctional system. He would be allowed to remain free as long as he kept himself squeaky-clean, and pledged to fulfill a purpose-driven life by enlightening his fellow felons about the blinding light of God.

Wheeler was number three on Connor’s list of things to do in the morning.

He also needed to reach out to Donna Ronson, an exercise he figured probably bordered on futility, considering their conversation of yesterday. He couldn’t tell if she’d called him when she was under the influence of grief and anger, or maybe whacked out on booze or pills. Maybe even something stronger. Even though she and her husband had been sleeping under separate roofs for the past few weeks, she had stepped forward and bonded him out following his alleged copper theft. Was that move borne out of sincere hope to rekindle their crumbling marriage, or a calculated gesture to use in family court when they finally appeared before a judge?

Connor set the last page of notes aside and spent a minute watching a volleyball game unfolding on the beach. High-altitude contrails appeared like jedi light sabers in the sky, jets heading northward to Philly and New York, south to Miami or maybe the islands beyond. Closer in, a sailing yacht was inching its way along the line of the horizon, maybe heading up to the Chesapeake for the summer, possibly as far as the Vineyard or Nantucket.

His ribs groaned as he pushed himself up from his postage-stamp landing. Tylenol had its limitations, and his injuries were pressing the outer periphery. He rotated his shoulders to flex away what aches he could, noticed that a smear of blood had seeped through the bandage on his hand. He’d picked up a box of gauze and a spool of tape at the pharmacy on his way home from the DMV and could deal with it later, if needed.

At that moment a vintage red VW Beetle swerved into the parking lot beneath and squeezed into a space below, dodging the ground level pilings. He recognized he car as belonging to Julie, and sure enough—a few seconds later—he heard her car door slam, followed by the scampering of paws racing up the wheelchair ramp. Clooney veered around the last switchback and lunged toward the gate, Connor getting there at the exact same moment as his best friend.

“Hey, big guy…how you doin’ today?” he said, crouching down to look at him nose-to-nose, at the same time rubbing the aging lab’s ears.

“That you, Jack?” The question came from Julie, who had decided to take the stairs.

“Home from the trenches,” he replied. “Thanks for taking the old boy for the night.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” she said as she trudged into view. “You didn’t tell me how much he snores.”

“That’s not all he does when he’s sleeping,” he told her, getting to his feet.

“Yeah, you didn’t mention that, either.” Wrinkling her nose as she said it.

“That would be bad marketing. Anyway, I can’t thank you enough for taking care of him last night.”

“Fact is, the old boy’s a real gem. And you look like you went through a meat grinder.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Connor assured her.

“Looked pretty damned awful to me,” Julie said as she set her backpack down next to the bar. “It was all over the news today. You didn’t tell me your perp died.”

“Not part of the plan,” he replied. “I never saw those guys coming.”

“The news said the Jeep was pretty much tin-canned,” she went on. “Hard to believe you actually walked away from it.”

“I’m still waiting for something to snap or pop. Come on…we can’t just stand here all night. We have a bar to run.”

“Slave driver.”

They had just unlocked the plywood bar cover and stashed it in closet when a black GMS Yukon pulled to an angle in the lot down below and lurched to a stop. Connor and Julie exchanged wary glances, and then the SLED investigator from last night climbed out. He flexed his shoulders and slowly surveyed the small patch of gravel, then nudged the door closed with his hip. Nelson Burdette, Connor remembered now as the guy shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up at the drinking deck.

“That you up there, Connor?” he called out.

“You found me.”

“Permission to come aboard?”

“Permission granted.”

Julie leaned close to his ear and said, “Cops?”

“State, not local.”

“Christ…not this shit again.”

She was referring to a time last summer when a customer had been shot in the bar, right over there where a slight stain of blood had stubbornly refused to be cleaned out. Jordan James had talked about replacing a few composite planks, but the blemish had become part of local legend, which translated to profits. At the time of the killing, the police had made the place their second home until the case eventually came to a grisly close.

Burdette chose the stairs, and when he came into view, he had already soaked his long-sleeved cotton shirt. A fresh one, blue with thin white stripes, collar unbuttoned at the neck. Wire-rimmed shades hid his eyes from the glaring sun slipping toward the trees in the west.

“Quite a spot you’ve got here,” he said as he entered the bar. “Now I see why they call it the Edge of America.”

“Welcome to The Sandbar,” Connor greeted him. He picked up Clooney’s empty water dish, ducked through an opening under the long wood counter, and filled it up. Clooney waited until he ducked back out and set it down, then eagerly attacked it with a tongue that looked like a side of pastrami.

“I saw your vehicle downstairs, figured you’d be up here.”

Julie cocked her eyes and made a motion with her head, indicating she was going to leave the two of them alone. Find something else to do, like slice mangoes or limes. Anything other than deal with the police.

“I’ve only had it for a few hours,” Connor said. “How’d you know it was mine?”

“Two plus two. Anyway, I just came here to return a few items from yesterday.” The SLED investigator set the leather case on the counter and reached into it. Out came Connor’s wallet, followed by his cell phone, the thin glass screen shattered beyond repair.

“Looks about the way I feel,” he said.

“You can always donate it for parts.” Burdette’s hand went back into the valise, emerged with Connor’s micro-compact SIG Sauer P365. “Found this on the floor—excuse me, the ceiling—of your Jeep,” he said. “Fully loaded.”

“And licensed,” Connor assured him. “My line of work carries a few risks.”

“I know. I checked.” The SLED cop paused, as if thinking back to their conversation last night. “Were you seriously considering shooting it out with those fuckers?”

“Whatever I had to do. But then the other guy showed up, called nine-one-one before I had to take action. You going to give it back to me, or is this just show and tell?”

“On account of it wasn’t fired and wasn’t used in the commission of a crime, it’s not evidence,” Burdette said as he set the gun on the bar beside the wallet.

“Greatly appreciated,” Connor thanked him. “Is that all you stopped by for?”

“Pretty much. Except I also wanted to let you know I just came from MUSC, where Ms. Dupree was transported last night for emergency surgery.”

MUSC was the Medical University of South Carolina, just about the best hospital in the state for patients dealing with severe trauma. “How’s she doing?” Connor asked.

“As good as could be expected,” Burdette told him. “Critical but stable after multiple procedures to repair all sorts of damage. Doctors can’t say when I’ll be able to talk to her, but they’re guardedly optimistic.”

Connor’s mind had kept flashing back to the young public defender dangling upside-down from her seatbelt, blood trickling from her mouth and an almost lifeless look in her eyes. He did a quick fast-forward to when he’d released her buckle and she had tumbled down on top of him with what he’d feared was her last breath. Just before he’d heard the voices approaching out in the runoff ditch, talking about finishing them all off.

And at that moment a mental conversation began in his head, one he sincerely hoped Burdette didn’t sense and couldn’t hear. A one-sided dialogue that went something like, I’m coming for you, you sonsofbitches. If it’s the last thing I do.

Not realizing for a moment just how close to the truth that line of thinking might take him.