Prologue
The diner was neither good nor bad. It was a place for humans to refuel, nothing more, nothing less. A server with a life-can’t-kick-me-any-further-down attitude was bussing tables and there was an assortment of customers.
Off to one side a large man was munching on a burger and drinking endless cups of coffee. In the booth opposite them a man in a sharp suit was eyeing the menu with suspicion. Over by the door a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes was reaching into her purse.
The only blue-eyed blonde in the diner who mattered to Brad was the one sitting opposite him. Three weeks had passed since Lila had said yes and he was still amazed at his luck. She was beautiful in every way; her inner and outer beauty radiated from her. She was good-looking enough to turn heads, but for Brad, Lila’s best quality was her heart. Lila put others first at all times, raised money for charity and never once gave a second thought to herself when others needed her help. She saw the best in people rather than the worst, and even when confronted by the least pleasant examples of the human race, she fought to find a redeeming quality about them.
Lila was beautiful, sexy and caring, but right now none of those qualities were showing because she was pissed. Not at Brad, but at herself for the wistful it’ll-be-fun-to-get-off-the-interstate-for-a-few-miles impulse she’d had. Brad had cautioned that, as spontaneous as the idea was, they were traveling through Georgia, so there was a strong possibility that they would see nothing but trees and road.
Six hours of driving had proven him right and Lila wrong. They’d chatted as they’d driven and sung along with the tunes blasting from Lila’s iPod, but the long empty roads provided little stimulus and even less entertainment. Even the act of pulling over to refuel both car and passengers had been a non-event.
Daversville was a carbon copy of any small town in the States. The local industry may vary from town to town and the names above the mom-and-pop stores would be different, but essentially these towns were all the same.
A wide main street, often lined by stores, sometimes a police station, a doctor’s office or town hall. One or more of the roads intersecting the main street might house services such as attorneys, realtors and dentists. Somewhere in the town would be a school and always a couple of bars.
A lot of the places they had driven through had boasted a gas station or a roadside motel. Daversville had neither; and from what Brad had observed, there was little need for a hotel in the town.
Brad chomped on his burger as Lila used a fork to clear the salad garnish from his plate. She was a fraction his size and had what Brad judged to be a quarter of his appetite. Their friends teased them about their likeness to Beauty and the Beast, due to Lila’s good looks and Brad’s size.
Back in college Brad had been the football team’s wide receiver despite being big enough to play as a linebacker. It wasn’t so much that he was fast, he was just so big he took a lot of stopping once he got going.
Lila placed the fork on the table and used a napkin to dab at the corners of her mouth. “Back in a minute.”
Brad nodded and reached for another handful of fries. Lila was going outside for a cigarette. Smoking was her one bad habit. But she didn’t smoke in the house or the car, so, he reasoned, if she chose to go out and have a cigarette a few times a day that was her business.
The last of the fries were cooling when Brad shoveled them into his mouth and stood ready to follow Lila out. As he dropped a few bills on the table to pay for the meal he noticed the server was watching him. It wasn’t just the look of someone calculating the size of the tip, it was deeper than that, almost as if there was a hidden agenda.
He shook the idea off and stretched his frame back and forth until he felt some circulation returning to his muscles.
As he was lifting his phone from the table, the server came over, her eyes looking anywhere but at Brad. Her head was tilted so far forward her chin brushed her collarbone. There was no form to her body; her shoulders slumped with dejection, and her sneaker-clad feet scuffed the tiled floor at every step.
Brad flashed a pleasant look her way as he eased his bulk from where it was wedged between the table and the booth’s seats.
“Your girl is in danger. Get out of town right now and don’t come back. Don’t speak to me, don’t ask me no questions. Just go now before it’s too late.”
To Brad the server’s warning was a piece of fantastical nonsense. Being a city boy he passed the server’s comment off as nothing more than a closed-off small-town mentality. He nodded a polite thank-you and went outside to join Lila. She’d laugh her head off when he told her what the server said.
Except when he left the diner, Lila wasn’t anywhere to be seen…
Chapter One
Six days later
The area of scorched asphalt was right where Brad had said it would be. In light of this, Fletcher made sure the sedan he’d rented at Hartsfield-Jackson was parked in a spot that would let him leave the parking lot in a hurry should anyone start tossing Molotov cocktails his way.
Fletcher had taken a call from an old forces buddy—Don Ogilvie, ex-US Marine; they met in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Fletcher was with the Royal Marines. For all the natural inter-service rivalry, Fletcher had become friends with the second-generation Irish-American in a short time, and when Don suffered life-changing injuries saving Fletcher’s life, their friendship had been cemented forever.
It had been an average day on patrol. Hot sun, heavy pack and an ever-present threat. Don had been watching the north side of the street and Fletcher the south. Before Fletcher knew what was happening Don tackled him, and they fell into an alleyway. The rocket launcher Don had spotted being shouldered spat forth its deadly load and the shell exploded six feet from their position. Don’s legs protruded from the alley, and the blast had peppered them with shrapnel, leaving him wheelchair-bound. Had Don not tackled Fletcher, he would have made it safely into the alley with time to spare, but it wasn’t in Don’s character to put himself before anyone else. It was an act of selflessness Fletcher could never repay, so when Don had told him about Lila going missing, he’d not hesitated to respond to Don’s request that he travel to Daversville to look for Lila. In fact, if Don hadn’t asked, he would have offered.
Don’s daughter, Lila, and her fiancé, Brad, had been on their way north from Florida when they’d stopped at the diner in Daversville. Lila had gone out for a smoke while Brad paid the check. By the time he’d gone out to join her, she’d vanished. He’d looked around for her and got no help from any of the locals when he asked if they’d seen her. Some twenty minutes after her disappearance, a pickup loaded with young men had turned up. They’d told him they didn’t like the questions he was asking or his insistence someone must know something. They’d told him his girl must have left him and he should leave town as none of them could help him. A Molotov cocktail had then arced through the air and landed close enough to Brad for him to leap in his car and flee Daversville.
As soon as he was out of town and could get a reliable cell signal, Brad had called the police and then Don. But when Brad went to the Macon police station, as he’d been requested to, the cops had grilled him for hours before releasing him. Upon his return home, Brad had found himself getting arrested, as the local cop who’d been sent to investigate Lila’s disappearance had found no trace of her having ever visited Daversville.