Chapter 77 - The Broken Bilge
Clara Vance Holloway had never intended to let those books enter a courtroom if things went wrong. She had spent fifty years learning that lawyers can be bought, judges can be replaced, and ledgers can vanish from federal evidence lockers.
She had given me a weapon, not an inheritance.
"June!" Thomas’s voice cut through the gunfire, tighter now, strained. He was pinned behind a concrete drainage culvert. I saw the slide of his Colt lock back. Empty.
He dropped the magazine, reaching for his spare, but the second shooter was already advancing, his rifle leveled at Thomas's position.
"I have the case!" I screamed into the storm, stepping out from behind the cypress trunk into the blinding glare of the truck lights.
The shooter froze, his rifle swinging immediately toward my chest. Rain poured down his ballistic helmet, obscuring his face behind dark protective goggles.
"Drop it!" he yelled.
"You want Arthur’s estate?" I shouted, my voice rising over the thunder and the drumming rain. "You want the Vance patents? Here they are!"
I ripped the ignition cord on the paraffin tin.
A sudden, blinding white flare ignited with a ferocious hiss that instantly boiled the rainwater falling on it. The heat was immense, blistering the skin of my fingers as I hurled the canister directly into the open tactical case resting at the foot of the cypress tree.
In less than three seconds, the four-thousand-degree chemical reaction ate through the steel latches, through the antique paper, through sixty years of dirty contracts, bribes, and treasonous leases. The fire didn't produce smoke; it produced an incandescent torch that lit the swamp for a hundred yards, turning the black water into a mirror of liquid fire.
"No! You stupid bitch!" the shooter screamed, completely forgetting Thomas. He lunged forward through the water, his arms outstretched as if he could smother a thermite fire with his bare hands.
He never reached it.
From the dark highway behind the trucks, the deep, mechanical rumble of a commercial diesel engine tore through the storm.
A massive, flat-nosed logging rig, its steel push-bar caked in red Georgia clay, slammed into the back of the second tactical truck at fifty miles per hour. The sound of the impact was like a cannon shot. The black truck folded like an accordion, spinning into the ditch and pinning the second gunman beneath its crushed axle.
The logging truck ground to a halt, its air brakes hissing violently in the deluge.
The driver’s door swung open. A man stepped out into the rain, wearing a heavy canvas chore coat and carrying a short-barreled Remington twelve-gauge shotgun.
It wasn't a mercenary. It was an old man with white hair, weathered hands, and the unmistakable stoop of a Virginia timber cutter.
"June Holloway?" he shouted over the dying hiss of the thermite fire.
I stood there in the mud, my hands empty, the ashes of Arthur Holloway’s empire sinking into the black swamp water around my feet.
"Yes," I called out, my breath ragged.
"Clara sent me," the old man said, leveling the shotgun at the remaining wounded shooter in the ditch. "Get your man out of the water. We have an eight-hour haul to get you to the federal building in Richmond before the morning docket opens."
Thomas climbed out of the ditch, his face bleeding from glass cuts, his uniform soaked in swamp mud, but his eyes blazing with adrenaline. He looked at the smoldering puddle of slag where the ledgers had been.
"You burned them," he whispered.
"I burned the bait," I said, reaching into my inner coat pocket and pulling out the single, thin microfiche cartridge Clara had pressed into my palm while Thomas was loading the car in Savannah.
Clara hadn't kept the ledgers for evidence. She kept them for the syndicate to chase.
May you like
"The real ledger was duplicated thirty years ago," I said, showing him the spool of film. "Let's go home."
***
