He Thought She Was Dead—Then the Mafia Boss Saw Her Seven Months Pregnant

The rain came back at four in the afternoon.

It was not the polite, misty drizzle of the morning; it was a coastal gale that had come up from the Bahamas in six hours, turning the sky the color of a bruised liver and driving the Atlantic three feet over the high-water mark at Fort Pulaski. The live oaks along Route 17 leaned toward the west, their Spanish moss streaming out like gray horsehair in the sixty-mile-an-hour gusts.

In the back of the heavy, four-wheel-drive International utility truck that Grant used for hauling marine gear, Jolene lay on a mattress of folded wool blankets.

Her eyes were shut. Her face was gray-white, the sweat on her forehead cold as well water. Her right arm was taped to a wooden splint, an IV line running from a plastic bag of lactated Ringer’s hung from a wire coat-hook on the truck’s ribbed ceiling.

Sarah Ramos knelt beside her, one hand on the girl’s radial pulse, the other holding the rubber bulb of a blood pressure cuff.

"One hundred over sixty," Ramos shouted over the roar of the diesel engine and the drumming of the rain on the steel roof. "The fever’s up to one hundred and three. Holloway, she’s slipping into septic shock. We don't have forty minutes."

Grant drove.

He didn't use the headlights. The two-lane blacktop was covered in three inches of standing marsh water that parted before the heavy commercial tires in two thirty-foot wings of brown foam. Trent sat in the passenger seat, an old military radio between his boots, his ear pressed to a large black plastic headphone.

"The bridge is closed," Trent said, looking up from the dial. "Chatham County Sheriff has two cruisers across the north span. They’re claiming the storm surge made the approach unstable."

"Julian’s men?" Grant asked.

"Julian’s money," Trent said. "The Sheriff’s brother has the concrete contract for the Langford terminal. They aren't letting anything with four wheels cross into the city."

Grant didn't slow down.

The speedometer was stuck at sixty-two. The truck hit a pool of salt water that lifted the front wheels for half a second before the three-ton chassis settled back into the asphalt with a bone-jarring shudder.

"Trent," Grant said.

"Yeah?"

"Get the marine frequency. Call the *Pride*."

"The *Pride* is at the bulkhead—"

"Tell Miller to put the bow against the central pier of the north span," Grant said. His hands on the steering wheel were relaxed, his thumbs hooked over the spokes, his eyes fixed on the gray line of the road through the sweeping arc of the heavy wipers. "Tell him if the bridge isn't open when my tires hit the approach, he pushes the concrete footing forty feet into the channel."

Trent looked at him for two seconds. He saw the cold, gray slate in Grant’s eyes, the total absence of doubt that had characterized the Holloway family since they hung their first pirate from the wharf crane in 1840.

Trent clicked the microphone. "Miller. Stand by on the main engines."

Through the storm ahead, the iron superstructure of the Route 17 bridge appeared like the rib cage of a dead whale against the purple clouds.

On the south approach, two white Ford Crown Victorias were parked nose-to-nose, their red and blue strobe lights flashing through the rain with blinding, hypnotic rhythm. Three men in yellow rain slickers stood behind the cruisers, holding orange traffic wands and short-barreled pump shotguns.

The International truck didn't tap the brakes.

Grant shifted into third gear. The engine screamed, the turbocharger whistling like a mortar shell coming down.

Fifty yards.

The three men in yellow slickers suddenly realized that the eight-thousand-pound steel utility truck with the reinforced front winch-bumper had no intention of stopping for a county badge. One of them threw his traffic wand into the ditch and ran for the marsh grass; the other two dove over the guardrail just as Grant’s bumper took the front fender of the first cruiser.

The sound was like an iron safe falling from a fourth-story window.

The Crown Victoria spun ninety degrees, its suspension shearing off with a scream of torn metal, and slammed into the second car. Grant didn't let off the throttle. He pushed both cruisers three feet across the wet asphalt, cleared the gap with a shower of glass and radiator steam that smelled of sweet glycol, and hit the iron grating of the main span at forty-five miles an hour.

The tires screamed on the wet iron mesh.

Below them, thirty feet down in the boiling gray water of the channel, the *Holloway Pride* sat with its twin diesels churning the river into brown chowder, its heavy steel snout resting three inches from the central concrete pier, its massive halogen searchlights pointing straight up into the rain like two spears of white fire.

Miller was on the roof of the wheelhouse, wearing an oilskin sou'wester, waving a green navigation flare into the gale.