Chapter 11
His fingertips struck something foreign.
A rectangular box, no larger than a deck of cards, held against the chassis by two powerful neodymium magnets.
Evan wrenched it free with a sharp tug.
He brought it into the dim glow of the side mirror.
It was an industrial magnetic GPS beacon—a heavy-duty FleetPulse commercial tracker, ruggedized in black milled aluminum, its tiny green LED pulsing in sync with the chirp.
Evan turned the unit over in his palm.
Stuck to the bottom plate with a strip of clear packing tape was a small, torn square of yellow legal paper.
Written on the paper in neat, faded blue ballpoint ink was a single line:
*Mile Marker 14. The floodway gate is unlocked.*
Mile Marker 14.
Evan’s jaw set so hard a muscle twitched violently along his cheekbone.
Mile Marker 14 was the old maintenance road that branched off Route 9 into the Black Fork flood basin—a five-mile stretch of seasonal wetlands and drowned timber where the county had bought out flood-damaged fishing properties twenty years ago.
There was only one structure out there that hadn't been bulldozed by the Army Corps of Engineers: an isolated, elevated cypress-log hunting lodge sitting on the edge of the swollen reservoir, surrounded by four feet of backwater every autumn.
The blackmailer hadn't put this tracker on the Mercedes to follow Evan.
He had put it there because he knew Evan’s obsessive paranoia would drive him to search the chassis. He had left the coordinates like breadcrumbs for a wolf.
Evan opened the driver's door, climbed inside, and jammed the keyless ignition button. The Mercedes roared to life, the high-intensity LED headlamps slicing through the downpour, illuminating the blood spattered across the windshield.
Beside him, Seth was shivering uncontrollably, his head tilted against the passenger window, a thin line of grey saliva leaking from the corner of his lips.
"Where are we going?" Seth whispered, his voice barely a breath. "Evan... I can't feel my fingers... my hand is cold..."
"We’re going to end it," Evan said.
***
The Black Fork flood basin was a world submerged in black water and rotting timber.
The access road past Mile Marker 14 wasn't paved; it was a narrow berm of crushed shale running between towering stands of bald cypress, their swollen trunks rising from the swamp like elephant legs. The water on both sides of the road was up to the gravel shoulder, grey-brown and churning with floating debris as the autumn flood crest pushed downstream.
A mile past the rusted yellow gate—which had been swung wide open, its chain cut clean with a bolt cutter—Evan killed the Mercedes’s engine.
Ahead, sitting thirty yards off the berm on a spit of elevated mud, was an old cedar-shake bait shed, its roof caved in on one side, surrounded by waist-high switchgrass.
Fifty yards beyond the shed, connected to the road by a sagging, half-submerged wooden footbridge, sat the hunting lodge.
It was a dark, hulking silhouette of peeled hemlock logs resting on heavy creosote pilings. Floodwater lapped against the lower framing timbers, swirling through the open crawlspace beneath the floorboards.
Through the salt-crusted glass of the lodge's front bay window, a single light burned: the cold, buzzing, blue-white glare of an industrial halogen desk lamp.
Evan turned to Seth.
The athletic director was barely conscious, his eyes half-closed, his face grey as granite. The tourniquet on his arm had held, but the shock of the compound fracture had dragged his body temperature down into lethal territory.
"Listen to me," Evan said, gripping Seth’s uninjured shoulder. "I’m putting you in the bait shed. You stay down. You don't move. You don't make a sound. If you hear shooting, you stay on the floor until I come back for you."
Seth didn't answer. He just blinked slowly, a shudder running through his heavy frame as Evan hauled him out of the SUV and dragged him through the tall grass into the decaying shed.
Evan laid him on a dry pile of rotted burlap sacks in the corner, pulling an old canvas boat cover over his chest.
"Evan..." Seth gasped, his hand weakly catching Evan’s wet coat sleeve. "The high school... the shop class... Julian told someone... ten years ago... someone listened..."
Evan pulled his sleeve free without a word, turned his back, and pushed the rusted tin door of the shed shut.
He walked to the rear of the Mercedes.
He opened the tailgate, reached into the recessed cargo compartment beneath the false floor, and pulled out his primary weapon: a Benelli M4 tactical 12-gauge shotgun. He racked the bolt, chambering a three-inch magnum shell of 00 buckshot with a heavy, lethal *clack-clack*. Six more heavy brass shells filled the extended magazine tube.
Evan didn't wear gloves anymore. His bare hands were freezing, wet, the skin numb, but his grip on the checkered polymer stock was iron.
He stepped onto the footbridge.
The wooden planks groaned under his loafers, submerged two inches beneath the murky, rushing floodwater. The rain hammered against his bare head, plastered his thinning dark hair to his skull, ran down his neck inside his ruined cashmere coat.
He didn't care about the rain. He didn't care about the mud.
He had four hundred million dollars in commercial real estate assets, three municipal council seats in his pocket, and an army of corporate attorneys waiting on his payroll in Columbus. None of it existed out here. Out here, there was only the concrete hopper, the boy in the culvert, and the ghost sitting behind that window.
He reached the end of the footbridge.
The hunting lodge’s screened porch was dark, the screen door hanging off its top hinge, swinging lazily in the cold wind with a rhythmic, squeaking groan.
*Creak. Slap. Creak. Slap.*
Evan crept onto the porch decking.
He kept his back pressed against the peeled log siding, moving with the slow, gliding steps of a hunter stalking a buck through heavy cover. He raised the shotgun, resting the barrel across his left forearm, the bead sight aligned with the interior door.
Through the uncurtained front window, twenty feet away, the scene inside the lodge was illuminated in sharp, clinical relief by the buzzing halogen lamp.
The lodge was stripped bare. No furniture except for a single battered metal folding table sitting in the center of the wide plank floor.
A man was sitting at the table.
He had his back turned to the window. He was a broad, heavy-set silhouette wearing a faded brown oilskin field jacket, his grey hair cut close to the scalp.
He wasn't moving. He wasn't looking over his shoulder. He sat calmly beneath the buzzing light, his hands resting flat on the metal tabletop, staring at the empty log wall ahead of him as though he had been waiting in that exact chair for ten years.
Evan’s burner phone vibrated in his breast pocket.
A single, violent pulse against his ribs.
Evan didn't take the gun off the glass. Keeping the Benelli leveled with his right hand, he slipped his left into his coat, drawing the burner out and raising it to his eye line.
A text message glowed on the cracked screen, sent from the number that belonged to Leo Wright:
