Chapter 76 - The Ambush at Factor's Walk
We didn't wait for morning.
By three o'clock, the fog in the squares had turned into a torrential downpour, the southern storm lashing the brick facades and turning the cobblestone gutters into rushing brown torrents.
Thomas loaded the ledgers into a waterproof tactical case and secured it in the trunk of our sedan. Clara stood beneath the iron portico of the Jones Street house, her coat buttoned to the chin, watching us with the still, detached gaze of a statue.
"Take the back road through Augusta," she instructed, her voice cutting through the drumming rain. "The interstate corridor will have state troopers waiting for a stolen plate alert that Arthur’s friends in Richmond will have manufactured by dawn."
"Come with us, Clara," I urged, standing in the downpour. "You don't have to hide in this swamp anymore. Arthur is dead. Julian is finished."
"Arthur was a symptom, June," she replied, her eyes cold and distant. "The men who financed him are still sitting in corner offices on East Main Street in Richmond. They don't care about Arthur's memory. They care about the silence. Go. Finish what you started in that hospital room."
She turned and retreated into the dark hallway, closing the heavy cypress door without another word. The brass deadbolt snapped into place with finality.
We backed out of the driveway and navigated through the flooded grid of Savannah, heading toward Highway 17. The city was a ghost town under the deluge, the streetlights reflecting off the black sheets of water covering the pavement.
We were five miles north of the city limits, where the highway narrowed to a two-lane blacktop flanked by endless stretches of cypress swamp and black water, when the headlights appeared.
Not behind us. In front of us.
Two heavy black utility trucks swung out from an abandoned weigh station, their high-beam light bars igniting simultaneously, blinding us in a wall of pure white glare.
"Brace!" Thomas shouted.
He jammed the brakes and wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The sedan skidded violently across the flooded asphalt, the tires screaming against the standing water before slamming sideways into the gravel shoulder.
A hail of high-caliber rifle rounds punched through the windshield on the passenger side, blowing safety glass into the cabin like diamond hail.
"Out! Get out!" Thomas roared, drawing his Colt and firing three rounds through his open window toward the headlights.
I dropped to the floorboards, clutching the strap of the tactical case containing the ledgers. The sound of gunfire was deafening, the rounds tearing through the sheet metal of the car with the hollow, terrifying sound of a hammer striking empty cans.
Thomas kicked his door open and rolled into the flooded ditch beside the road, returning fire with deliberate, rhythmic double-taps.
"June! Crawl! Get into the treeline!"
I didn't hesitate. I kicked my door open and dragged the twenty-pound case into the mud. The water in the ditch was knee-deep, freezing and foul with diesel fuel. I scrambled on hands and knees, the sharp roots of cypress trees cutting into my palms, the scars on my neck throbbing with a dull, burning heat.
Behind us, one of the black trucks accelerated, its heavy steel bumper crushing the front end of our sedan with a sickening crunch of tearing steel and exploding radiator steam.
Two men in dark wet-weather gear advanced down the ditch, their tactical lights slicing through the storm, their weapons held at low-ready.
"Holloway!" one shouted over the rain. "Drop the case and you walk! The old woman’s deal is dead! We only want the paper!"
I didn't answer. I reached the base of an ancient, hollowed cypress tree twenty yards into the swamp. The mud pulled at my boots like suction cups, but I hauled myself up onto the tangled root ball, shielded by the massive trunk.
Thomas fired again from fifty feet to my left, his shot striking the lead shooter in the thigh. The man collapsed into the ditch with a scream, splashing violently as his partner ducked behind the wreckage of our car, returning full-auto fire into the brush.
The muzzle flashes illuminated the swamp in stuttering, strobe-like pulses of orange.
I looked down at the tactical case in my hands.
Clara had told me the ledgers were our shield. But out here, in the black water of the Georgia lowcountry, they were an anchor dragging us straight to the bottom.
I clicked open the latches of the case.
May you like
Inside lay the three leather volumes, alongside a small, sealed paraffin tin Clara had placed between them before we left. I picked up the tin. Painted on the lid in faded red stenciling was a single word: *THERMITE.*
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